The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  “At least,” Unalaq blows the end of a strand of copper hair from her nostril, “the Anchorites can’t exploit your overconfidence.”

  HOLLY’S ASLEEP, ŌSHIMA’S watching The Godfather Part II, Unalaq’s preparing a salad, and Inez has invited me to play her Steinway upright, as the piano tuner came yesterday. There’s a fine view of Waverly Place from the piano’s attic, and the small room is scented with the oranges and limes that Inez’s mother sends in crates from Florida. A photograph of Inez and Unalaq sits atop the Steinway. They’re posing in skiwear on a snowy peak, like intrepid explorers. Unalaq won’t have discussed the Second Mission with her partner, but Inez is no fool and must sense that something major is afoot. Being a Temporal who loves an Atemporal is surely as thorny a fate as being an Atemporal who loves a Temporal. It’s not just Horology’s future that my decisions this week will shape, but the lives of loved ones, colleagues, and patients who will get scarred if my companions and I never come back, just as Holly’s life was scarred by Xi Lo–in–Jacko’s death on the First Mission. If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others.

  So I leaf through Inez’s sheet music and choose Shostakovich’s puckish Preludes and Fugues. It’s fiendish but rewarding. Then I perform William Byrd’s Hughe Ashton’s Ground as a palate cleanser, and a handful of Jan Johannson’s Swedish folk songs, just because. From memory I play Scarlatti’s K32, K212, and K9. The Italian’s sonatas are an Ariadne’s thread that connects Iris Marinus-Fenby, Yu Leon Marinus, Jamini Marinus Choudary, Pablo Antay Marinus, Klara Marinus Koskov, and Lucas Marinus, the first among my selves to discover Scarlatti, back in his Japanese days. I traded the sheet music off de Zoet, I recall, and was playing K9 just hours before my death in July 1811. I’d felt my death approaching for several weeks, and had put my affairs in order, as they used to say. My friend Eelattu cut me adrift with a phial of morphine I’d reserved for the occasion. I felt my soul sinking up from the Light of Day, up onto the High Ridge, and wondered where I’d be resurrected. In a wigwam or a palace or an igloo, in a jungle or tundra or a four-poster bed, in the body of a princess or a hangman’s daughter or a scullery maid, forty-nine spins of the earth later …

  … in a nest of rags and rotten straw, in the body of a girl burning with fever. Mosquitoes fed on her, she was crawling with lice, and weakened by an intestinal parasite. Measles had dispatched the soul of Klara, my new body’s previous inhabitant, and it was three days before I could psychoheal myself sufficiently to take proper stock of my surroundings. Klara was the eight-year-old property of Kiril Andreyevich Berenovsky, an absentee landlord whose estate was bounded by a pendulous loop in the Kama River, Oborino County, Perm Province, the Russian Empire. Berenovsky returned to his ancestral lands only once a year to bully the local officials, hunt, bed virgins, and exhort his bailiff to bleed the estate even whiter than last year. Happiness did not enter feudal childhoods, and Klara’s was miserable even by the standards of the day. Her father had been killed by a bull, and her mother was crushed by a life of childbearing, farmwork, and a peasant moonshine known as rvota, or “puke.” Klara was the last and least of nine siblings. Three of her sisters had died in infancy, two others had gone to a factory in Ekaterinburg to settle a debt of Berenovsky’s, and her three brothers had been sent to the Imperial Army just in time to be butchered at the Battle of Eylau. Klara’s recovery from death was greeted with joyless fatalism. It was a long fall indeed from Lucas Marinus’s life as a surgeonscholar to Klara’s dog-eat-dog squalor, and it was going to be a long, fitful, fretful climb back up the social ladder, especially in a female body in the early nineteenth century. I did not yet possess any psychosoteric methods to speed this ascent. All Klara had was the Russian Orthodox Church.

  Father Dmitry Nikolayevich Koskov was a native of Saint Petersburg who baptized, preached to, wed, and buried the four hundred serfs on the Berenovksy estate, as well as the three dozen freeborn workers who lived and worked there. Dmitry and his wife, Vasilisa, lived in a rickety cottage overlooking the river. The Koskovs had arrived in Oborino County ten years before, full of youth and a philanthropic zeal to improve the lives of the rural peasantry. Long before I-in-Klara entered their lives, that zeal had been killed by the drudgery and bestiality of life in the Wild East. Vasilisa Koskov suffered from severe depression and a conviction that the world was laughing at her childlessness behind her back. Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen. Dmitry Koskov’s ennui matched his wife’s and he cursed himself, daily if not hourly, for having forfeited the prospects of clerical life in Saint Petersburg, where his wife and his career could have blossomed. His yearly petitions to the church authorities for a pulpit closer to civilization proved fruitless. He was, as we’d say now, seriously Out of the Loop. Dmitry had God, but why God had condemned him and Vasilisa to sink in a bog of superstition and spite and sin like Oborino County for a landlord like Berenovsky, who showed more concern for his hounds than his serfs, the Almighty did not share.

  To me-in-Klara, the Koskovs were perfect.

  ONE OF KLARA’S chores, as soon as she was well again, was to deliver eggs to the bailiff, the blacksmith, and the priest. One morning in 1812, as I handed Vasilisa Koskov her basket of eggs at the kitchen door, I asked her shyly if it was really true I’d meet my dead sisters in heaven. The priest’s wife was taken aback, both that the near-mute serf girl had spoken, and that I’d asked such a rudimentary question. Didn’t I listen to Father Koskov in church every Sunday? I explained that the boys pinched my arm and tugged my hair to stop me listening to God’s Word, so although I wanted to hear about Jesus, I couldn’t. Yes, I was mawkishly, hawkishly manipulating a lonely woman for my own gain, but the alternative was a life of bovine labor, piggish servitude, and bile-freezing winters. Vasilisa brought me into her kitchen, sat me down, and taught me how Jesus Christ had come to earth in the body of a man to allow us sinners to go to heaven after we died, so long as we said our prayers and behaved as good Christians.

  I nodded gravely, thanked her, then asked if it was true the Koskovs were from Petersburg. Soon Vasilisa was reminiscing about the operas, the Anichkov Theater, the balls at this archduke’s name day, the fireworks at that countess’s ball. I told her I had to go, because my mother would beat me for taking too long, but the next time I delivered the eggs, Vasilisa served me real tea from her samovar sweetened with a spoonful of apricot jam. Nectar! Soon the melancholic priest’s melancholic wife found herself discussing her private disappointments. The little serf listened with wisdom far beyond her eight years. One fine day, I took a gamble and told Vasilisa about a dream I’d had. There was a lady with a blue veil, milky skin, and a kind smile. She had appeared in the hut I shared with my mother, and told me to learn to read and write, so that I could take her son’s message to serfs. Stranger still, the kind lady had spoken strange words in a language I didn’t understand, but they had stayed glowing in my memory, just the same.

  What could it possibly mean, Mrs. Vasilisa Koskov?

  PLEASED AS VASILISA’S husband was by the improvement in his wife’s nerves, Dmitry Nikolay was anxious about her being suckered yet again by yet another wily peasant. So the cleric interviewed me in the empty church. I wore a shy bewilderment at being noticed, let alone spoken to, by so august a figure, even as I nudged Dmitry towards a belief that here was a child destined for a higher purpose, a purpose that he, Father Dmitry Koskov, had been chosen to oversee. He asked me about my dream. Could I describe the lady I had seen? I could. She had dark brown hair, a lovely smile, a blue veil, no, not white, not red, but blue, blue like the sky in summer. Father Dmitry asked me to repeat the “strange words” the lady had told me. Little Klara frowned, and very shyly confessed that the words didn’t sound like Russian words. Yes, yes, said Father Dmitry, his wife had said as much; but what were these words? Could I remember any? Klara shut her eyes and quoted, in Greek, Matthew 19:14: But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: f
or such is of the kingdom of heaven.

  The priest’s eyes and mouth opened and stayed open.

  Trembling, I said I hoped the words meant nothing bad.

  My conscience was clean. I was an epiphyte, not a parasite.

  A few days later, Father Dmitry approached Sigorsky, the estate bailiff, to propose that Klara be allowed to live in their house, in order for his wife to train the girl as a servant for the Berenovksy house and give her a rudimentary schooling. Sigorsky granted this unusual request as pro bono payment for Father Dmitry averting his priestly gaze from the bailiff’s assorted scams. I had no goods to bring with me to the Koskovs’ cottage but a sackcloth dress, clogs, and a filthy sheepskin coat. That night Vasilisa gave me the first hot bath I’d enjoyed since my death in Japan, a clean frock, and a woolen blanket. Progress. While I was bathing, Klara’s mother appeared, demanding a rouble “for compensation.” Dmitry paid, on the understanding that she would never ask for another. I saw her around the estate, but she never acknowledged me, and the following winter, she fell drunk into a frozen ditch at night and never woke up.

  Even a benign Atemporal cannot save everyone.

  THE CLAIM IS immodest, but as a de facto if not a de jure daughter, I’d brought purpose and love back into the Koskovs’ life. Vasilisa set up a class in the church to teach the peasant children their ABBs, basic numeracy, and scripture, and found time in the evening to teach me French. Lucas Marinus had spoken the language in my previous life, so I made a gratifyingly quick-learning student. Five years passed, I grew tall and strong, but every summer when Berenovksy visited, I dreaded his noticing me in church, and asking why his serf was being given airs above her natural station. In order to protect my gains and carry on climbing, my benefactors needed a benefactor.

  Dmitry’s uncle, Pyotr Ivanovich Chernenko, was the obvious, indeed the only, candidate. Nowadays he would be fêted as a self-made entrepreneur, with a gossip-magazine private life, but as a young man in nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg he had caused a scandal by eloping with and, even worse, marrying an actress five years his senior. Dissipation and disgrace had been gleefully predicted, but Pyotr Ivanovich instead had made first one fortune by trading with the British against the continental blockade, and was now making another by introducing Prussian smelters to foundries throughout the Urals. His love marriage had stayed strong, and the two Chernenko sons were students in Gothenburg. I persuaded Vasilisa that Uncle Pyotr must be invited to our cottage to inspect her estate school when he was next in Perm on business.

  He arrived one morning in autumn. I ensured I shone. Uncle Pyotr and I spoke for an hour on metallurgy alone. Pyotr Ivanovich Chernenko was a shrewd man who had seen and learned a lot from his five decades of life, but he was beguiled by a serf girl who was so conversant on such manly concerns as commerce and smelting. Vasilisa said that the angels must whisper things in my ears as I slept. How else could I have acquired German and French so quickly, or known how to set a broken bone, or have grasped the principles of algebra? I blushed and mumbled about books and my elders and betters.

  That night as I lay in bed I heard Uncle Pyotr Ivanovich tell Dmitry, “One bad-tempered whim of that ass Berenovksy, nephew, is all it needs to condemn the poor girl to a life of planting turnips in frozen mud and the spousal bed of a tusked hog. Something must be done! Something shall be done!” Uncle Pyotr left the next day in never-ending rain-spring and autumn alike are muddy hell in Russia-telling Dmitry that we had rotted away in this backwater for far too long already …

  • • •

  THE WINTER OF 1816 was pitiless. Dmitry buried about fifteen peasants in the iron-hard sod, the Kama River froze, the wolves grew bold, and even priests and their families went hungry. Spring refused to show until the middle of April, and the mail coach from Perm didn’t resume its regular visits to Oborino County until May 3. Klara Marinus’s journal marks this as the date when two official-looking letters were delivered to the Koskovs’ cottage. They stayed on the mantelpiece until Dmitry returned in the late afternoon from administering last rites to a woodcutter’s son, who had died of pleurisy several miles away. Dmitry opened the first letter with his paper knife and his face reflected the momentousness of its news. He puffed out his cheeks, said, “This affects you, Klara, my dear,” and read it aloud: “ ‘Kiril Andreyvich Berenovsky, Master of the Berenovksy Estate in the Province of Perm, hereby grants to the female serf Klara, daughter of the deceased serf Gota, full and unconditional liberty as a subject of the Emperor, in perpetuity.’ ” In my memory, cuckoos are calling across the river and sunshine floods the Koskovs’ little parlor. I asked Dmitry and Vasilisa if they would consider adopting me. Vasilisa smothered me in a tearful hug while Dmitry coughed, examined his fingers, and said, “I dare say we could manage that, Klara.” We knew that only Pyotr Ivanovich could have brought about this administrative miracle, but some months would pass before we learned exactly how. My freedom had been granted in exchange for Uncle Pyotr settling my owner’s account with his vintner.

  In our excitement, we’d forgotten the second envelope. This contained a summons from the Episcopal Office of the Bishop of Saint Petersburg, requesting Father Dmitry Koskov to take up his new post as priest at the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin on Primorsky Prospect, Saint Petersburg, on or before July 1 of that year. Vasilisa asked, quite seriously, if we were dreaming. Dmitry handed her the letter. As Vasilisa read it, she grew ten years younger before our eyes. Dmitry said he shuddered to think what Uncle Pyotr had paid for such a plum post. The answer was a consignment of Sienna marble to a pet monastery of the patriarch’s but, again, we didn’t hear this from Pyotr Ivanovich’s lips. Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.

  NOT SINCE THE late 1780s had I lived in a sophisticated European capital, so once we were installed in our new house by Dmitry’s church in Saint Petersburg, I engorged myself on music, theater, and conversation, as best a thirteen-year-old freed serf girl could. While I was expecting my lowly origins to be an obstacle in society, they ended up enhancing my status as an event of the season on the novelty-hungry Petersburg salon circuit. Before I knew it, “Miss Koskov the Polymath of Perm” was being examined in several languages on many disciplines. I gave my foster mother due credit for my “corpus of knowledge,” explaining that once she had taught me to read I could harvest at will the fruits of the Bible, dictionaries, almanacs, pamphlets, suitable poetry, and improving literature. Emancipationists cited Klara Koskov to argue that serfs and their owners differed only by accident of birth, while skeptics called me a goose bred for foie gras, stuffed with data I merely regurgitated without understanding.

  One day in October a coach pulled by four white thoroughbreds pulled up on Primorsky Prospect, and the equerry of Tsarina Elizabeth delivered to my family a summons to the Winter Palace for an audience with the Tsarina. Neither Dmitry nor Vasilisa slept a wink and were awed by the succession of sumptuous chambers we passed through on our journey to the Tsarina’s apartment. My metalife had inoculated me against pomp centuries ago. Of Tsarina Elizabeth, I best recall her sad bass clarinet of a voice. My foster parents and I were seated on a long settle by a fire, while Elizabeth favored a high-backed chair. She asked questions in Russian about my life as a serf, then switched to French to probe my grasp of a variety of subjects. In her native German, she supposed that my round of engagements must be rather tiresome? I said that while an audience with a tsarina could never be tiresome, I would not be sorry when I was yesterday’s news. Elizabeth replied that I now knew how an empress feels. She had the newest pianoforte from Hamburg and asked if I cared to try it out. So I played a Japanese lullaby I’d learned in Nagasaki, and it moved her. Apropos of I’m not sure what, Elizabeth asked me what sort of husband I dreamed of. “Our daughter is still a child, Your Highness,” Dmitry found his tongue, “with a headful of girlish nonsense.”

  “I was wedded by my fifteenth birthday.” The Tsarina turned to me and Dmitry lost his
tongue again.

  Matrimony, I remarked, was not a realm I yearned to enter.

  “Cupid’s aim is unerring,” Elizabeth said. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”

  After a thousand years, dear Tsarina, I did not retort, his arrows tend to bounce off me. I agreed that no doubt Her Highness spoke the truth. She knew a fudged answer when she heard it, and suggested that I preferred books to husbands. I agreed that books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them. Dmitry and Vasilisa shifted in their borrowed finery. The jaded queen of a court in which adultery was a form of entertainment looked through me, the gold of the fire toying with the gold of her hair. “What an old sentence,” she said, “from such youthful lips.”

  OUR VISIT TO the royal court triggered a new wave of gossip about Klara Koskov’s true paternity that caused embarrassment for my foster father, so we brought my brief career as a salon curiosity to a timely close. Our decision coincided with Uncle Pyotr’s return from a half year in Stockholm, and the Chernenko residence on Dzerzhinsky Street became a second home for us. Pyotr’s ex-actress wife, Yuliya Grigorevna, became a loyal friend and held dinners where I met a broader cross section of Petersburgers than I had in the higher stratum of the salons. Bankers, chemists, and poets rubbed shoulders with theater managers, clerks, and sea captains. I continued to read voraciously, and wrote to many authors, signing myself “K. Koskov” to conceal my age and gender. Horology’s archives still contain letters to K. Koskov from the physician René Laënnec, the inventor Humphrey Davy, and the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi. University was not yet a possibility for women, but as the years passed, many of the liberal-leaning Petersburg intelligentsia visited the Chernenkos to discuss their papers with the cerebral bluestocking. In time, I even received a few marriage proposals, but neither Dmitry nor Vasilisa Koskov was eager to lose me, and I had no desire to become a man’s legal property for a second time.