The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson

Author:Charlotte Hobson [Charlotte Hobson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571327409
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Within days a total of forty-two people had arrived at the doors of Gagarinsky Lane dragging cartloads of belongings and pouncing on every inch of space. Our little Kolenka pounced with them, securing for himself the official papers to a small storeroom off the kitchen. Volodya, Vera and I stayed at home for the whole day in order to fight our corner, but nonetheless we ended up with only three rooms between the thirteen of us – the study, Slavkin’s workshop and the old ladies’ bedroom. This caused some friction, as Nikita was adamant that his workshop must not be used for any purpose other than the Socialisation Capsule, while the rest of us resisted the idea that we should make do with just two rooms for all the other activities of the commune.

‘Nikita,’ Marina snapped, ‘where are we to do the Model T, now it is almost winter? Where are we to eat communally? Have you gone mad? We are abolishing the private, and you are trying to keep to your ivory tower? I simply don’t understand.’

‘I know this work of yours is important,’ said Fyodor, ‘but surely even you can agree that the commune needs more than two rooms.’

‘The advance of Science must take precedence,’ Slavkin dismissed us.

A metalworker and his family moved into the dining room, seven of them. They told terrifying stories of life in the Volga region under the boots of one, then another army occupation, while they lay in a dugout with the trapdoor closed over their heads and ate beechnuts. At last the Whites were driven out and the local Bolshevik commander gave him a travel pass to Moscow as a worker with a skill useful to the Revolution. His children looked like five tiny old people, eyes shrunken in their yellow faces. Without consulting the others, Vera and I gave them dried apples and pickles from our stores.

Upstairs seven families of factory workers moved in. Servile and monosyllabic to our faces, they were aggressive filchers of any morsel of firewood, any utensil, any scrap of clothing behind our backs. The sign saying ‘Institute for Revolutionary Transformation’ was taken down by the cadres, and our decorations in the hall – ‘Come On, Live Communally!’, and the portraits of Marx and Engels in red paint – were covered over with decrees from the Soviet. We fixed locks and chains to our doors, but that didn’t stop someone from forcing open the window and stealing our cooking pots and soap. Volodya, Fyodor and I marched into the bedrooms and took back everything of ours that we could identify, although one woman – a dark, mustachioed termagant with arms like Christmas hams – had the gall to cling on to one of our mixing bowls, howling so loudly that she was being robbed, that we left her to it.

The main bedrooms at the front of the house were taken over by a group of ex-soldiers who made all our lives a misery with their constant drinking, fighting and ripping up pieces of the house to burn in their fireplace.

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