The Vengeance of Rome (98 page)

I am not sure if anyone could imagine the intensity of my response. Because of events in Kiev since I'd left, I had been forced to conclude that my mother was probably dead. Naturally I had made considerable efforts to contact her from time to time, especially through my cousin Shura. Eventually I despaired of restoring those links and privately mourned her. Indeed, I mourned her every day.

By 1969 when I received Esmé's letter, I had become a successful businessman. No longer did I get oil under my fingernails. No longer was I reduced to repairing motorbikes and lawnmowers for Carpenters', the big hardware store in Portobello Road. Some years earlier, with the help of Mrs Cornelius, I had opened my own premises just a few doors down from Carpenters' themselves. In those days you had no trouble getting a lease. The rent was reasonable, and my goods were popular. Tourists came from all over the world. I was selling fine-quality furs and second-hand evening wear, also Guards' and Marines' dress uniforms which I bought very cheaply through the War Ministry. The collapse of the old empire, I must admit, put many fine costumes my way. Frank Cornelius's idea was to call the place ‘The Spirit of St Petersburg'. That romantic and misleading epic
Doctor Zhivago
was soon to make Russian nostalgia very commercial.

From the beginning I specialised in furs. Foxes, stoles, bolero jackets, winter coats, hats. Thanks to television serials the girls were rediscovering the elegance of the previous century. I expanded as the fashion demanded. I sold not used clothes, but historic apparel. Heaven forbid I should end my days as an old-clothes man! This was a business requiring taste and a keen sense of the past. Film and TV companies came to rent from me. I did not buy every piece of tat which came my way. I attended auctions. I went to theatres which were closing down. To film studios. In my shop I was soon able to offer costumes from
The Wicked Lady
and
Beau Brummell
, from
The
Four Feathers
,
The Drum
and
Great Expectations
. I continue to do good business with the music community.

Reading Esmé's letter surrounded by so much history was a powerful sensation. At that time I even had some Cossack and Hussar uniforms, though they too were theatrical, part of a consignment from a touring production of
The Merry Widow
which ran out of money in Swindon. The manager had appealed for help to Mrs Cornelius, then playing one of the matrons, and I had stepped in with an unrefusable offer that paid for the cast's bus back to London. The uniforms and gowns were of very good quality and needed only a little modification to give them a thoroughly authentic appearance. The majority of them sold within a week. They provided the holiday I took with Mrs Cornelius to Hastings that year.

We stayed in some style at the Grand Hotel. By sheer luck I was able to make yet another ‘killing' with some costumes from an ambitious pantomime which had not done as well as expected the previous Christmas. The ‘big heads' were genuine Victorian, great vividly painted grinning things. I sold many of the Pierrot, Columbine and Harlequin costumes on to the Rambert Company who were still active in Notting Hill Gate. Several found their way into the Victoria and Albert Museum. Those were very good years for business and the arts, if not for science. But all that changed with decimalisation of the currency, a confidence trick on us all.

Esmé spent several pages explaining what had happened to her since we had last met in Makhno's camp during the Civil War. (
I was fucked so much I had calluses on my cunt.
) Reading her beautiful writing, I began to experience genuine shame for judging her so harshly. What a puritanical fellow I had been! I had been young, deeply in love with her and highly idealistic. But in my disgust, I had been insensitive. She had seemed so hard and cynical. Of course, she had been trying to disguise her shame and outrage. What I had mistaken for aggression was nothing but a protective shell. The letter made all that so clear. Esmé spent only a few sentences explaining how she had escaped the anarchists and returned eventually to Kiev where she had become a schoolteacher. She had seen several of our old friends regularly. Her father had died during the first siege of Kiev, and poor Herr and Frau Lustgarten had been shot as alleged German collaborators during Hrihorieff's brief occupation of the city. My mother continued to work as a laundress and a seamstress, Esmé said. They met about once a week. I, of course, was always their preferred subject of conversation. They were convinced I had escaped to England or America and made a great success as a scientist. ‘
Never once did your mama believe you to be anything but alive and flourishing.
'

I had written to my mother a number of times since leaving Odessa, but the letters had never been answered. Eventually I came to accept that she was dead, no doubt a victim of Stalin's planned famines. Esmé herself had lost touch with my mother when she became the representative for a Georgian wine company in Odessa during the period of the New Economic Policy. Soon after Lenin's death she realised things were not going to improve in Russia and while in the Middle East met and married a Palestinian Christian, Edouard Vallir, himself a successful wine merchant. Esmé had never gone home. She and her husband established themselves in Haifa and were very successful. Only after the State of Israel was declared did they find it necessary to move, first to Tunisia and later to Marseilles. Monsieur Vallir died a year after they received their French citizenship.

In 1955 Esmé Vallir sold the business and retired, but she continued to travel. During a visit to Jaffa she spilled some coffee on her blouse and ran into my mother working at a nearby dry-cleaner's! ‘
I knew her at once. She has hardly changed. Her face is as sweet and noble as it always was and she is still strong as an ox. She, of course, didn't like to tell me her age, but I knew you had been born when she was seventeen, when that wicked father of yours ran off
.' Understandably, this was more than my mother had ever told me! In those days one did not speak of such things in front of one's own children. My mother always sought to protect me from the cruelties of the world. Though she had hinted at it, my father's relationship to a famous noble family would still have constituted a death warrant in those days.

My mother worked at the cleaner's part-time. ‘
You know how she always preferred to occupy herself … She had some terrible experiences, Maxim. She almost died in the famine. Then the Germans sent her to Babi Yar. She escaped with two other women. They caught her again in Poland. They sent her to Auschwitz in 1944, and she would have been killed except she spoke several languages and was useful as an interpreter in one of the offices. She had been selected to die just before the Allies came. Luckier than most, eh? After over two years in a DP camp, she immigrated to Jaffa in 1948. She was extraordinarily fit, all things considered; you would think her ten or twenty years younger. No doubt her good health also saved her from the “selections”.'

The thought of my poor, brave mother, who had sacrificed everything for me, being humiliated and terrorised in one of those camps disgusted and infuriated me. The experience was bad enough when it happened to me, but I was young and male. Everything was so much worse for women, especially dignified older women of her breeding. If she had not escaped from Babi Yar, she would no doubt have died there. The Nazis had a chance to wipe out
most traces of that camp. The Russians filled it in then forgot about it. Babi Yar was the same gorge I flew over when, to impress Esmé, I took my first aircraft into the sky. By the time the Allies arrived in Poland and Germany, it was too late to do much. In Auschwitz my mother spent four days hiding under a hut, with nothing to eat, waiting for liberation. When it came, said Esmé, my mother's first thought was to ask after her son. She had always imagined me leading an army unit to her rescue! As I read I was moved to tears. Why did I feel I had let her down by not being there?

Knowing the name I had used in Russia, Esmé developed a habit of searching for it through the phone books of every city she visited. She usually found more than one Pyatnitski or Piatniski, but she doggedly asked the same questions. Only she, of course, knew certain things about us. Esmé particularly remembered that incident of the aeroplane.
You flew down into the Babi Gorge and almost killed yourself!
None of the others had been able to answer her on that issue.

In London years earlier Esmé came across my name in an old book, but I had moved. Not until she was on holiday in London again last year did she pick up a tourist magazine which published details of the Spirit of St Petersburg along with a photograph with my name, describing me as an ‘old Cossack aviator who fought against Stalin'. I remember the piece. It was fanciful, written by one of Mrs Cornelius's sons. At the time I had been a little nervous at the amount of detail. Moorcock was involved in the magazine (
London Spirit
) during its brief existence. The 1960s threw up dozens of such publications.

Esmé had tried to contact me then. She was due to catch her flight back to St Malo, where she now lived. The magazine had not published my full address, but she dropped me a postcard anyway, she said. Though she had written in English, it might not have reached me. As soon as she was able, she got in touch with my mother suggesting the two of them visit London the following year and try to contact me again. They had planned to surprise me in the shop. Then they realised it might be too much of a shock. Esmé joked how she didn't know how strong my heart was. My mother had an old friend from Kiev living at Princelet Street, Spitalfields, a private house. It might be a good idea for us to meet there. We would have time to settle, to talk, and, if things became too emotional, we could be left alone for a while. If, however, I preferred them to come to Portobello Road, or somewhere else, she would be happy to bring my mother.

Esmé's delicacy of understanding impressed me. Merely knowing that my mother was alive and in England was enough to strike me dumb. I could
hardly breathe as I sat reading behind my till, fanning myself with the pages, so distracted that I almost let one of those Czech hussies steal a green feather boa from the rack. Those girls are whores. They are skilled thieves. This is what communism has taught them.

Few can imagine how Esmé's news affected me. Both the beloved women from my past, whom I had worshipped above life, whom I had given up for dead, were only miles away on the other side of the city.

Spitalfields was an unfamiliar and not altogether savoury part of London. I had been there once or twice to buy stock in Petticoat Lane when first starting my shop, but now auctions, theatres and armies supplied me with what I needed. It seemed another minor miracle that a friend of my mother's had been over there without my knowledge.

I felt, I will admit, somewhat guilty. Perhaps over the years I really had not made sufficient effort to find my mother. God knew I had done a great deal. Even when convinced she was dead I had sent enquiries to the Soviet government and received no reply. I had not known what name she was living under. I could not tell the Reds too much. Brodmann's shadow continually cast itself over my fate. One slip and I would be the victim of an assassin's poison bullet. Anyone close to me was in equal danger. The thought of my mother being targeted for assassination terrified me. Esmé had foreseen this. She had lost none of her intelligence. She had been right to send a letter first. It occurred to me that I did not know if my mother was using an alias. Pyatnitski, while it had become familiar to everyone who knew me, was not our original name. That would be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the history of the Romanoffs! Another reason why I had been so cautious about communicating with her.

Esmé had included the number of the hotel where they were staying. As soon as I felt strong enough, I went round the corner to the phone boxes. To use my own phone would be foolish. I dialled the number and asked for Esmé's room. After some time, the telephone was picked up. A tentative voice said, ‘Yes?'

I asked if that were Mrs Vallir.

A pause. ‘No.'

I risked a few words in Russian. ‘Will she be back soon?'

The woman answered more confidently. ‘Oh, yes. She has gone to pick up some theatre tickets. Another half-hour at most.'

My heart was beating horribly. Instead of replacing the receiver, I asked breathlessly, ‘I am sorry, I am not sure of your name. Would you tell her that Maxim phoned?'

‘Maxim?'

I was almost in tears. ‘Mother?'

‘Oh, Maxim, my boy. So it is you.'

I tried to make a joke, but I knew my lips were trembling. ‘No one else, Mother. I'm sorry I could not get back to Kiev as I promised. You had to travel all the way to London to see me.'

She was weeping and even less capable of speech than I. Her words ran together, becoming hard to understand. She had missed me so much. Knowing that we would one day be reunited had kept her alive. Everything was now worth it. Esmé was a saint. Was I married? Did I have any children?

Knowing the phone might still be tapped, I paused to collect myself. I said I would ring the hotel in an hour. If it was convenient, I would meet her at her friend's house in Spitalfields. It would save her another journey and would probably be more convenient for everyone. She began to give me the address, but I told her I already had it. ‘Even in London, it is best to assume the walls have ears.'

We were still both weeping when I put the phone down. I had to take control of my emotions before I left the phone booth. I could not afford to let those little ruffians see me in a weakened condition. An hour later I returned to the row of boxes. During the time I was gone someone had used the vacant one as a urinal. I tried the box next to it. Vandalised. Some child had attempted to get the money out of it. Another short walk brought me to Westbourne Grove and a phone good enough to use. By then I was in better control of myself thanks to the exercise.