As groups of students, we visited factories. These were in the nature of ’field trips’. We saw foundries, with their scarlet crucibles of steel, their rivers of liquid metal, their sweating, dark-skinned workers. We went to locomotive plants. We saw how weaving machines and printing presses were made. Only the armaments plants were restricted to us. We went to see motor-cars reassembled. Most of these trips were of little interest to me. I had learned far more with my Armenian boss two years before than I learned here. In Kiev I had been expected to do the work, not watch it from a distance while scowling men made comments about ‘gentlemen workers’. By the students of the military academies, who regarded themselves as the elite of St Petersburg’s youth, we were known simply as ‘blue meat’. We were not, in their eyes, gentlemen at all. We knew better than to clash with these cadets. Not only could they rally greater numbers, but they were better favoured by police and soldiers who would always take their part. Every one of the cadets was well-connected. They were often already Princes and Counts.
I returned to Kiev for the Christmas holiday and found Esmé older-seeming, while my mother had made a good recovery.
She was still something of an invalid and had continued to hire her interest in the laundry to a friend. Esmé now worked at the nearby grocery shop. She had hoped I would have stories to tell her of Petrograd as I had had stories of Odessa, but I had to admit I led a dull life, with my books, and that, with Dr Matzneff’s help, I was getting on well. She said she was pleased.
She had become very womanly. I asked her, as a joke, if she had a boyfriend as yet. She blushed, saying she was waiting for someone. I wished her good luck in her hunting.
The holiday was quickly over. I returned to Petrograd in a second-class carriage shared with one other student and several junior officers, all ex-cadets who had received their first commissions and were planning how to win the War. They were elated because we had recently made one or two victories in Poland. It seemed the German invader was on the run. The news from France was bad. Hundreds of thousands of people were being killed. It appeared to my fellow student (he was at University and rather superior about it) that the world would go on fighting forever until it was one vast battlefield and the world’s population was eventually dead in a trench of gas or shrapnel-wounds. I was not interested in defeatist talk and joined the junior officers in condemning him for his cynicism. He came quite close to being punched. For a little while I left the compartment and tried to get served in the restaurant, but the food was already exhausted. I had to go into the lavatory and eat the sausage and potatoes my mother had given me.
Because of the difficulties of travelling, I had been forced to leave Kiev on my birthday. Thus I celebrated it sitting on a wooden lavatory seat in a cold, slow train which jolted over every sleeper, eating a piece of inferior salami and half-frozen potato. Needless to say, I would not be the only Russian looking back on the winter of 1916 as something of a Golden Era!
Arriving at my lodgings I was greeted by a weeping landlady and two grinning daughters. They had made their conquests and were officially engaged to their beaux: the elder, Olga, to a corn-chandler called Pavloff, the younger, Vera, to a travelling salesman representing the Gritski Soft Drink and Mineral Water Company. Thus, within a year, they had given up dreams of Eugene Onyegin and had settled for a couple of wage-earners with a potential future. What both these husbands did after 1917 I do not know. Presumably, if he was good, one would remain a manager in the State Corn Division (with an appropriately ugly name like Statcorndiv) and continue to short-weight his customers whenever there was corn to sell (which would not be often). The other might represent the Statminsoftdrink Bureau in Leningrad and the Novgorod district, colouring all beverages red. Since he would not have to sell the stuff because it would be the only drink available he would enter the Statminsoftdrink Information Bureau where he would praise the virtues of Communist pop over the decadent Capitalist kind. He would have no real work, a better bread ration, and would risk being shot by the Cheka if the Party Line on soft drinks changed and he was discovered to have praised the virtues of cherryade over raspberryade when it should have been the other way round.
