I spent some of my first day taking a walk with Esmé. I retailed a censored version of my adventures. She was impressed. I elaborated some anecdotes: going aboard the English tramp, for instance, and encountering Greeks and laskars. In the main it was enough to tell her about all the wonders: the pleasure resorts of Fountain and Arcadia, the sideshows at the fair, more impressive than any we ever saw at the Contract Fair in Kiev, the myriad ships and races. She took my arm as we wandered through the muffled white streets into the grounds of St Kyril’s, where it was deserted save for an old snow-clearer, swathed in felt, who seemed to be there for our convenience alone. We stood looking down over the grey and yellow world and I spoke of the turquoise Odessa seas, the luminous days, the warm-hearted, quick-witted people. Esmé clutched my arm so tightly and listened so attentively that I began to suspect she had designs on me. But that was a terrible thought. Esmé was pure; above such desires. At least, she was unaware of any desires and her gestures were innocent. I pulled away from her. We continued to walk. Kiev seemed small and provincial compared with Odessa, for all that this was our major city. I missed the sea, the sense of the world beyond the water waiting to be visited. I told this to Esmé when she asked if I were glad to be home.
‘I want the opportunity for escape,’ I said. ‘My soul has the scent of foreign parts. I want to travel. I want to build machines in which we shall all be able to sail through the air. Remember when I flew, Esmé?’
‘I remember.’
‘We shall both fly. I shall go to Petersburg and get my diplomas. Then I shall possess the authority I need to convince the sceptics. Then I shall go to Kharkov and get finance. Then I shall build all kinds of flying machines: passenger liners, individual planes, everything. And gyro-carriages. And sailing-dirigibles which can land on water or fly, depending on the whim and needs of the pilot.’
‘You will be famous,’ she said. ‘Kiev will honour you. You will have your name in the newspapers every day, like Sikorski.’
Sikorski was in St Petersburg already. Having abandoned the ideas he had borrowed wholly from Leonardo da Vinci, he was no longer experimenting with helicopters. I had dropped a similar line of research as being impractical. Another idea, involving the use of a cyclist powering his own propeller, was taken up some fifty or sixty years later. Sikorski never replied to my letter offering him fifty per cent of the profits if he helped me develop the invention. His plans had become more grandiose. He was virtually the inventor of that terrible weapon, the bombing aeroplane. Too late, however, to give Russia the air-supremacy she needed. We could have transferred the theatre of operations into the upper atmosphere. We should no longer have had to depend on unreliable, untrained peasants whose empty heads were fitting repositories for Red propaganda. Stalin, ‘the Man of Steel’, has been blamed for a great deal. But Stalin, like Ivan the Terrible before him, realised the worth of encouraging Russians to rely on purely Russian brains and skill. Sikorski, in disgust, soon went to America to earn a fortune and an exaggerated reputation. Other Russians simply never got the credit they deserved. Stalin knew what Russian aeronautic expertise was worth. We needed someone of his ilk at the time of the First War. Then, ironically, we should not have found ourselves saddled with him later.
Of course, I said little of this to Esmé as we walked through the St Kyril gardens, in the last week of 1914. I had a certain gift for predicting the development of engineering ideas, but I was no Cagliostro!
During the week I was at home I was pleased to see my mother improving. Soon she was able to move about the flat. Uncle Semyon, it seemed, had granted her a pension. ‘He wants a gentleman in the family.’ My mother flourished his letter. ‘He will do anything to see you succeed.’
‘Will you give up the laundry?’ I asked. It was now a source of distress to me that my mother earned such an undignified living.
‘I am drawing a small rent on it,’ she said. ‘At present I am too ill to do much.’
‘You’ll make yourself worse by returning over-soon,’ Esmé agreed.
‘You should go to Odessa in the spring,’ I suggested. ‘It is wonderful there. The sunshine will make a new woman of you.’
This amused her. ‘You’re not happy with the old one?’
‘Not in her present condition. Stay at Uncle Semya’s.’
‘And be shot by Turks? This is the worst time to be visiting the seaside, Maxim.’ She was almost accusatory, as if I had suggested she put herself into danger. ‘We’ll wait, eh? Until after the War.’
‘It will be over by spring. See what a Russian winter will do to our enemies. We’ll thrive on it. They’ll die in millions in Galicia. The corn will be nourished on enemy blood.’
