Charlotte Hobson - The Vanishing Futurist

‘Nikita, are you here?’

The door of his workshop stood ajar. In the dim light it was hard to make sense of what I saw – smashed and broken equipment, a lamp leaning drunkenly. The Socialisation Capsules were gone. Their stands lay overturned in the centre of the room.

A quavering voice in the hall: ‘ Gospodi pomilui – Lord have mercy—’

‘Anna Vladimirovna.’ I hurried to her. ‘You’re so cold, come and sit down.’

‘It’s all too unpleasant.’ In the study she sat and glared at me, trembling.

‘What is?’ I sank to my knees before her and took a deep breath. ‘What happened?’

‘I was looking for you, where have you been? I was frozen, I wanted that boy to light the stove, so I looked into his room. I just peeped in, I didn’t mean any harm by it, but he caught sight of me and started shouting to leave him alone – he raised his voice to me! So I left, I fell in the hall and bruised myself—’ She sniffed, furiously. ‘I dragged myself in here and hid, and he carried on shouting. I thought he was coming to murder me! And then I heard him start up his engine, and he left…’

‘Oh dear.’ I tucked a blanket around her; my hands were shaking. ‘ Bednyashka , poor dear, I’m sorry. We’ll try to get warm now. I’ll put the kettle on, we’ll drink tea. How did you know that Slavkin had left?’

‘It all went quiet and when I came out to see, he’d gone.’

‘What did the engine sound like?’

‘ Bozhe moi , it just sounded normal, noisy – then it faded into the distance.’ She paused for a moment and added peevishly, ‘I’ve never liked him, such an odd boy. It wasn’t very kind of you to leave me with him…’

I stood up. ‘Let me make the tea now.’

As I stepped out into the yard to fetch water, I gazed up at the dark sky, spread dustily with stars from one horizon to the other, galaxy upon galaxy – universe upon universe. For one cloudless, happy night, I knew exactly where Nikita had gone.

Then the fog rolled in, a swirl of conflicting accounts that continued for decades. Pravda ran an article on the 23rd:

The inventor, Nikita Gavrilovich Slavkin, was reported missing last night from the commune that he founded, known as the Institute of Revolutionary Transformation. Fellow members of the Institute have not seen him for several days and attest that the inventions he was working on are missing from his workshop. The probability is that he, like many of the Avant-Garde, has left for the capitalist West. Slavkin has already been reprimanded for the fanciful turn that his researches have been taking; there is a distinctly pessimistic element to his theories. It would be typical of this strain of false Communism that Slavkin should abandon his duties to the Soviet motherland and leave for some dusty, nostalgia-soaked café in Berlin or Paris. We expect to hear reports soon of his posturing for the benefit of the French and German bourgeoisie.

Sonya, I am glad to say, never read this piece of official venom. Towards the end she seemed to think Nikita was with her. She fell into a coma on the 22nd, and died on 24 January in the isolation ward of the Golitsyn Hospital. So quickly – that was how typhus took you. She was buried the same day in the temporary cemetery near the hospital; Pasha hoped that once the Civil War was over, he’d be able to transfer her remains to Mikhailovka, where his grandparents and great-grandparents were buried. The whole commune was at her funeral, apart from Nikita. Vera and Volodya had heard the news from Marina, and had tracked Fyodor down at work. The day was bitterly cold and windy, we had to haggle for a coffin with a vile fellow outside the hospital, and I couldn’t believe the girl that I had known and lived with for almost six years was being laid in the ground. I didn’t feel like crying. I was in a breathless panic at the thought that her smile was gone, her vain little way of pouting out her lips, her breathy laughter when Pasha teased her, the look of adoration she used to turn on Nikita that enraged me – all gone. Her poor, weak pleading right at the end.

Poor Pasha was distraught. ‘She should have gone abroad with Mama and Papa. I persuaded her to come back.’

All I could say to comfort him was that it was her choice. ‘We shouldn’t deny her that.’ She was brave, I thought. She was more honest with herself than any of us.

Afterwards we all went back to Gagarinsky Lane, where Volodya produced a copy of Pravda . We read the piece once, twice, three times.

‘So has he? Has Slavkin gone abroad?’ said Volodya at last.

‘No—’ Both Pasha and I answered together; then he bit his lip and looked away.

‘No,’ I repeated. ‘He would never have left us like that, without telling us.’

‘Surely he wouldn’t have left Sonya in hospital,’ murmured Marina.

There was a silence in the room.

‘Apparently there’s some sort of grant they are handing out to academics in Czechoslovakia,’ said Fyodor. ‘Quite a few Russians are receiving it. Perhaps he’s gone to save the work – we know how close he felt he was.’

‘Why would he not have told us?’

‘Perhaps he couldn’t bear to,’ said Vera softly. ‘He had to save himself, and his inventions—’

‘Where did he go after the lecture?’ Pasha asked Fyodor. ‘Do you know where your colleagues took him?’

‘No. They congratulated him, said how impressed they were, which I must say surprised me because I thought his talk very confused, didn’t you? But they apparently approved of it, and they said that they wanted him to work for them. And Nikita got more and more excited, you know how he did, gabbling away, and they suggested they go to the Polytechnic café to discuss it further. I left them to it.’

‘They were Russian, were they?’

‘Yes, Russian, normal people – kulturniye , cultured.’ This was always Fedya’s highest praise.

‘They could have planned his journey this week,’ put in Vera.

‘They’d be hard pushed to organise it in one week,’ I objected. ‘It takes people a month at least to get a passport, let alone a visa.’

‘He could have been thinking about it for a while.’ Volodya’s voice was hard. ‘After all, didn’t he tell you? He said he wouldn’t be here when you got back.’

‘But he didn’t mean a journey abroad, a train journey,’ I whispered.

‘What did he mean then?’ Fyodor, matter of fact.

‘He meant… I thought he meant… Pasha, you knew more about it than me. He said something like this might happen, didn’t he?’

‘You mean his idea that his Capsule might transport people into another dimension? I didn’t know how seriously he meant that. It was a theoretical possibility, but… I said, “Nikita, are you telling me you’ve invented a Time Machine?” He loved that, he couldn’t stop laughing about it. “That’s very well said,” he kept repeating. “A Time Machine.” He came back to the idea a couple of times. “Of course my Time Machine is an improvement on most, because it uses so little fuel, and it’s so simple to make the return journey – one merely needs to set the Capsule back to the original frequencies.” “Yes, H. G. Wells would be jealous,” I told him, and we laughed together… He was in high spirits those days before the lecture, wasn’t he? I was just pleased to see him so cheerful.’

‘Sonya believed it,’ I said slowly. ‘That’s why he built two Capsules, so that they could go together. But what I don’t understand, in that case, is why would he go without her?’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ snapped Volodya, getting up. ‘You people will believe anything! What, you think his machine whisked him away to a better place? With Father Christmas and the Snow Maiden? Leaving behind his girlfriend dying in hospital and, so I hear, a baby on the way. Congratulations, Miss Gerty,’ he added spitefully. ‘How does it feel to be in Vera’s shoes? Except you’re not, are you – the father seems to have run away. The sooner you realise that the only thought that man ever had was for himself, the better.’