Charlotte Hobson - The Vanishing Futurist

Pelyagin jumped up. ‘What are you doing?’

‘You seem unconvinced. So I’m calling the guard up from the hall to tell him about our lessons. All the information I’ve gathered from your office. All right?’

‘No!’ He was ashen. ‘Wait—’

The young guard was coming up the stairs. ‘Did you need me?’

I raised my eyebrows at Pelyagin. ‘Do we?’

‘No, no – I’ll tell you what I know. For God’s sake—’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to bother you, comrade. We don’t need you after all. Thank you so much.’

‘Oh,’ said the guard, a little disconcerted. ‘All right then.’ His footsteps turned and receded down the stairs again.

‘You’d better be quick,’ I said to Pelyagin. ‘If I have to keep calling him up and down the stairs he’ll be in an even worse mood to hear what I’ve got to say.’

He swallowed. ‘All right. I don’t know much – only that our boys arrested him that night. He knew they were coming. They’d been questioning him that day, then they let him go, idiots. They were sent more or less straight back to pick him up. He was taken first to the Lubyanka. But after a few days they transferred him. He went to a special place, a laboratory…’

‘Lab 37.’

Pelyagin looked amazed. ‘You knew?’

‘Where is it?’

‘It’s…’ He gulped. ‘It’s in the Church of the Ascension at Kolomenskoye.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I – I—’

‘You put together a case against him, didn’t you?’ I said slowly. Hatred boiled in me. ‘You said – let me think – that his experiments were counter-Revolutionary? That he was plotting against the State? Why?’ With my huge belly, standing before him, I suddenly felt my rage was invincible. ‘ Why? Was it because he humiliated you, that time at the Futurist performance? Or was it because you were offended I didn’t want to go out for a drive with you?’

Pelyagin frowned. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Yes, it was, it was some little pettiness like that, wasn’t it?’

He looked at me oddly. ‘No, that wasn’t it,’ he said quietly. He sat up. ‘Of course his line about “Communism can’t exist in this version of the universe” was enough to get him thrown into jail alone. But have you forgotten that you denounced him yourself?’

Ice down my spine. ‘I told you – I said I was mistaken, don’t take it seriously, I said.’

‘It was too late by then. Why did you think I came to the house that day? I had the warrant in my pocket.’ He had recovered his sangfroid. ‘By then you’d all denounced him, one after the other. We could have arrested him ten times over. Marina Getler spoke to an agent of ours at the hospital; Volodya Yakov shopped him to the Cheka; Fyodor Kuzmin came to us not long afterwards to tell us that Slavkin was making anti-Soviet statements; it seems as though it was one of the few things that commune of yours managed to agree on—’

‘ Stop. ’

Pelyagin stopped with his mouth still open.

I began to improvise. ‘How many hours have I spent here, in this room? You’ve left me here on my own several times, do you remember? When I fell asleep, for example? A spy doesn’t fall asleep like that. I’ve got so much good information from you, Pelyagin. The British Foreign Office are very happy with you.’

‘What information?’

‘Numbers in Cheka prisons, methods of interrogation, conditions in prisons, arbitrary arrests… It’ll cause quite a scandal, you know.’

He sat down. ‘What do you want?’

‘I just… I just want you to leave me alone. All right? I’ll leave now, and you won’t send anyone after me. You won’t mention this conversation to anyone, you’ll forget it entirely. Otherwise you’ll soon be at the mercy of those Cheka officers of yours.’

He stared at me for a moment, and then he nodded. ‘All right.’

‘I’ll need your ID card, and those spectacles, too.’

He gave them to me reluctantly.

‘Just one last thing. When you first asked me to come and give you lessons, was Slavkin already under investigation?’

He smirked. ‘You were a useful source from our first lesson.’

I slipped out of his office and down the back staircase. I could barely feel my feet on the floor. With shaking hands I pulled my shawl over my head and walked the long way around the building to the Aleksandrovsky Gardens.

‘Here, dyevushka – girl, over here!’

From the other side of the gardens a gnomish figure was gesturing to me. Behind him stood a cart pulled by an ancient donkey. As I drew closer I saw Pasha in the back.

‘Where to, then?’ sang out the old fellow.

‘Where to? My God, Pasha, what on earth are you doing?’ I hissed. ‘We need to get to Kolomenskoye! Dobbins here won’t get there before nightfall!’

I calculated that Kolomenskoye was eight or nine miles from the centre of Moscow. At a walk that would take us three hours…

‘Kolomenskoye? Chort vosmi , I thought we wouldn’t be going so far… but this is all there is, and the old man tells me she trots. She might do it in a couple of hours.’ Pasha pulled me in. ‘ Poekhali, golubchik! Let’s go, whip her up, as fast as she can go!’

‘We might not have a couple of hours!’ I snapped at him, but he fastened up the back of the cart and we set off, the old man whispering a commentary to the donkey. ‘Yes-s-s, that’s a good leg, and the other one’s good, and that back one, pick it up nice and smart, yes, my beauty! Oh, you’re a fine old lady, twenty years and you trot like a schoolgirl…’

The tension twisted my insides as I watched the National slowly, slowly dwindling behind us.

‘Perhaps we’ll be able to catch a lift on a lorry if we see one,’ murmured Pasha. ‘And we’re resting here. If we have to get out and run, we’ll be faster than if we’d already walked five miles.’

We were at least inconspicuous on the cart. Huddled down and covered with a blanket, it looked as though the old fellow was simply returning home with an empty load.

In whispers under the blanket I told Pasha all of it – almost all of it, all that I could bear. At the end he was silent for a moment.

‘Don’t think you are going into the church alone,’ he remarked.

‘No, I need you with me. You’re going to use Pelyagin’s papers.’

‘What, me, impersonate that evil slug?’

‘Don’t be so vain.’

Pasha laughed and fell quiet again. ‘So Nikita had spent a day being interrogated when we saw him.’

‘Yes.’

‘He wanted us all to go to the hospital with Sonya, didn’t he?’

‘I think he did. He wanted to be alone when they came. That’s why he shouted at Anna Vladimirovna, and maybe why he didn’t want me to stay behind.’

‘They would have arrested all of us, I presume. Why didn’t they come back for us?’

‘Perhaps we’ll find out now.’

The last time we had seen him was over two months ago – when Sonya was still alive, when the IRT still existed. I had thought about him every hour, every minute since, obsessively going over the possible reasons for his disappearance. Every other feeling, I realised, had been pushed aside in order to concentrate on my hunt for Slavkin. With a grimace I remembered poor Sonya crying helplessly in the hospital, her thin, pale hands plucking at the blanket. ‘Where is he, where is he?’ Even while she was dying I burned with jealousy. Pasha was sobbing, trying to make her drink water, until Marina stopped him gently. ‘It’s no use, Pasha, the little bird has flown away.’

I had watched it all as if from a distance, and slipped away to find him. I had been determined to be the one to tell him she was so ill. I had wanted to see his pain, and then, no doubt, to comfort him myself, the loyal Gerty who can always be counted on, strong, capable – so different from the flighty little bird. Who needs a little bird in a Revolution!