He was sympathetic. A little reluctantly, he drew something from his waistcoat pocket. Throwing his scarf back over his shoulder he opened a fold of newspaper and held it out towards me. ‘Don’t breathe too heavily, Max. You’ll blow a lot of money away.’
I looked down at the small quantity of white powder which lay in the newspaper. It was like the stuff one took for dyspepsia or headaches. ‘What is it? For a hangover?’
‘Exactly.’ Shura went to my dressing table and put the fold of paper carefully down. Then he took a rouble note from his wallet and rolled it until it made a tight little tube. I was mystified, amused. ‘What on earth’s all this ritual?’
He brought the packet back, with the rolled rouble. ‘Do you know how to take it?’
‘I don’t.’
‘You sniff it into your nose.’
‘But what is it?’
‘It’s cocaine. You use it to pick you up. Everyone does.’
‘Like you get in hospital?’
‘Exactly.’
In those days there was little association in the popular imagination with cocaine and addiction. It was not illegal to use it or to sell it, but it was expensive and therefore tended to be the prerogative of the wealthy. As I inexpertly drew the first crystals into my sinus I felt not that I was doing anything particularly wicked but that I was party to yet another luxury hitherto reserved for my betters. At first there was nothing but a little numbness in my nostrils and I was disappointed. I told Shura that either I was immune to the effects or that I needed more. He continued to leaf through my books. Slowly a feeling of ecstatic well-being filled me. Good cocaine does not merely give a sense of one’s whole body coming alive, there is at the same time an aesthetic delight, a love for the drug itself, a love for the world which can produce it, a love for oneself and for every other human being, a supreme confidence, an exquisite sensitivity, a profound understanding of the tensions and forces controlling society. An habitual cocaine-user (whether he injects or sniffs) should learn to distinguish the reality and the fantasy, to marshall the energies released by the drug, but at that time I was as much in its power as I had been in Shura’s. Of course, I felt utterly my own man. ‘It works very well,’ I said. ‘I feel a hundred times better.’
‘I knew you would. Coming to Arcadia?’
I thought of the pretty girls I would see there, of the fine impression I would make. I thought of the foreigners I could meet and speak to, the inventions I could create, just lying on the sands. I dressed myself in Vanya’s best (along with one or two extra items which I had purchased for myself). ‘What’s the time?’
Shura shook his head and laughed aloud. ‘Oh dear, Max, you’re certainly a joy to know. It’s about noon. We’ll have lunch at Esau’s first.’
We never reached Arcadia. Instead we spent most of the afternoon in Esau’s and I talked of all the things I knew, in all the languages I could speak; of all the things I was going to do; and my most attentive audience was little Katya, a year or two younger than myself but already a well-liked whore, who led me, still in a daze of cocaine-dust, by her tiny warm hand, out of Esau’s and along an alley and up into a sunny attic room with a window looking towards the smoky heights of Moldovanka and Vorontzovka, inland towards the ancient steppe, and here she took away all my clothes and exposed my body and admired it and stroked it and removed her own little silks and cottons and lay upon her white bed and taught me the trembling joys of manhood so that to this day the pleasure of cocaine-taking and copulation are mingled together in my mind. I have been a regular user of the drug all my life and apart from some mild trouble with my sinuses I have suffered no ill-effects. While I frown upon reefer-smoking and opium-taking, because they dull the wits and the will to
