‘Guilty? For what?’
‘For not listening to our hearts. Everyone possesses precognition, don’t you think? It’s just that we refuse to accept what we see.’
‘The future?’
‘In a tea-cup or on our palms. In the cards, or in a cloud.’
‘I am not superstitious. I regret I’m an unmitigated rationalist.’
‘Ha! And you’re alive, while Kolya’s dead.’ He called over to a group of mechanics who lay on the grass at the water’s edge. ‘We’ll be wanting the Oertz started up.’ Then his attention seemed drawn to some distant willows.
‘We’re going now?’ I asked.
He grimaced. ‘Why not?’ He was abstracted. I thought he was unstable. ‘There’s something I want to do. For the future.’ I assumed he was thinking about death and meant to write a will.
‘You want to give it to me?’
‘What? If you like.’ He rubbed under his left eye with a gloved finger. He grinned, ‘If you like. You can’t see the future, then? And you a scientist!’
He had picked up some fragments of fashionable mysticism at the Mikhishevski ménage, perhaps from his sister Lolly, that ‘Natasha’ of happier days. ‘Come.’
I returned with him to the mansion and a small ground-floor room evidently shared by several people and which had formerly been a pantry. It still smelled of bread and mice. From under his mattress he drew an unopened bottle of French cognac. ‘You like this?’
‘I did once.’
‘Good. We’ll drink it. For Kolya.’
‘I cannot refuse.’
We sat on the ledge of the little window. There was an untidy kitchen garden outside. Two privates were trying to make something of it. They were working expertly, like peasants. Petroff uncorked the bottle and handed it to me. I drank sparingly, with relish. He took it from me impatiently and tilted his head back to drink nearly half the old brandy in a single swallow. War had evidently coarsened his palate. He gave me the bottle. I drank deep but there was still a fair amount left. He laughed that irritating laugh of his. I remembered it from Petersburg: universal irony tinged with tension and resentment. He finished the stuff off, but for a few drops, ‘It’s how airmen drink. We need it. Did you hear about those silly bastards who dragged their own planes on sleds for hundreds of versts to get to fight for Deniken? They were keen, eh?’
‘The drink doesn’t impair your control over the plane?’
‘It improves it. I’m the last member of the entire squadron.’
‘I know what it is,’ I was by now a trifle drunk, ‘to crash.’
‘You do?’ He smiled.
‘I designed several experimental planes. One went out of control while I was testing it. In Kiev.’
He drained the bottle. ‘That’s to the Wright brothers. Damn them to hell. And all inventors. Faust deserved no redemption.’
‘Shouldn’t you rest?’ I suggested. I could make neither head nor tail of his references.
‘Very soon, doctor.’ He searched under his mattress, ‘I’m sorry. That was the final bottle. Let’s go aloft now.’
Less nervous than if I had been sober, I followed him back to the lake where the Oertz was ready. Her propeller was spinning and she was pointing out at the long stretch of water. Mechanics, grateful for the breeze, held her by her tailplane and huge rear wings, as Cossacks might hold ropes on a fierce, unbroken stallion. The smell of oil was sweet. ‘You go forward,’ said Petroff. ‘Get in the front cockpit. You’ll find a harness. Strap in. There’s goggles and stuff, too. All you’ll need.’ He was tucking a bulky object, wrapped in a piece of calico, into his jacket. I wondered if it were a bomb. I was rather uncertain of my chances of reaching the cockpit. The fuselage was only wood and fabric. But I climbed through the struts on the rocking aircraft until I managed to lower myself into the small observer’s cockpit with its bucket seat and spring brackets where, in the other cockpit, the controls would be. There were binoculars fastened to the inside edge; a pistol in a holster, a map-case and a clipboard, some pencils and a pair of goggles whose rubber was frayed and hardened. Still in my kaftan, with my own Cossack pistols pressing to my hip’s, I settled myself and buckled on my harness, putting the goggles over my eyes. Petroff was behind me, now, signalling. The engine and propeller were, of course, making too much noise for him to bother trying to talk.
The machine suddenly moved forward at a rapid, almost maniacal, speed. It was like a bucking horse, an erratic sleigh-ride, at once exhilarating and alarming. Foul spray flew into my face. I almost drowned in it. The lake was stagnant.
