‘Why the ‘ell should I? Every one a bloody pearl and sound as a bell. ‘Ow old d’yer fink I am?’
I spoke directly to the bobbing receptionist in slow, clear Russian. ‘This lady is related to his excellency, the dentist. Her name is Mademoiselle Cornelius. She is, I believe, his cousin.’
The receptionist was relieved. She smiled and escorted the English lady into another, even more luxurious room. With a ‘Ta very much, Ivan,’ to me, Mrs Cornelius vanished. I was to learn from her much later that the dentist was not in fact a relation at all. She had come across his name in Baedeker’s at a nearby bookshop and had decided to visit him. She had been travelling with a Persian aristocrat, a well-known playboy of those years, when they had had a difference of opinion in their hotel (the Central). He had left on an early steamer, having paid the bill only up to that morning. She was unable to speak a word of Russian but even then she was making the best of things. She had been very grateful to me, it appeared, because she had almost been at the end of her tether. This was how she recognised me when we came to meet again. She had given up hope of finding an English-speaker anywhere in Odessa and I was ‘a godsend’, even if, in her words, I ‘talked like a bleedin’ book’.
After she had gone, and Wanda and I were seated, the English lady’s perfume (crushed rose-petals) was all that remained of her. I was called into the surgery. Wanda still accompanied me. She was curious, I think, to see the inside of a dentist’s workshop. A handsome middle-aged man, murmuring in what I supposed to be Dutch, peered into my mouth, clucked his tongue, put a mask over my face and made his receptionist turn the tap on a nearby cylinder. A strange smell replaced the scent of roses. I was gassed. A peculiar humming began in my ears -
I remember leaving with an emptier jaw and a fuller, throbbing head. When I asked what had happened to Mademoiselle Cornelius Wanda giggled. ‘Her cousin seemed only too pleased to be of assistance.’ I was reassured.
With regular supplies of cocaine from Shura and from other sources, I was able to continue with my studies and with my new, adventurous life. I developed a firm, regular friendship with Katya. Eventually, I fell in love with her almost as deeply as I had with Zoyea. The holiday seemed to be without end. Uncle Semya had assured me that I was welcome to stay until my place at the Polytechnic was ‘firmly arranged’. There was no certainty when this would be. I was awake sometimes twenty hours in the twenty-four. Sometimes I did not go to bed at all. My letters to my mother were regular and optimistic. Nor was my whole life given over to adventure. Uncle Semya and I regularly visited the theatre and Opera (usually just the two of us). He proved an astonishingly tolerant host.
Aunt Genia was inclined to fret over me, feeling that, quite rightly, I was overdoing things. But at dinner Uncle Semya would laugh and say: ‘Wild oats must be sown, Genia.’ This in spite of his standing in the community (high-ranking officials would often take dinner with us and on these occasions it was usual for Wanda and myself to eat in the kitchen with the cook).
Of course life with the pleasure-loving bohemians of the Odessa taverns was not without its problems. There were fights - or threatened fights - almost every day. In the main I was able to escape trouble, either by assuming a friendly or neutral stance (something which became second nature to me) or by talking myself clear. But I was not always able to avoid the revolutionaries my mother had warned me against.
