by Tom Bullough
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Yes, Ivan Ivanovich?’
‘Are you going to stay in your bed?’
‘Yes, Ivan Ivanovich,’ said Kostya, meekly.
‘Yes, Ivan Ivanovich.’ The doctor paused then smiled, his clear pink lips revealing unruly teeth. ‘So, how is the headache?’
‘It’s not as bad as it was, Ivan Ivanovich.’
‘But your throat’s still sore, I’ll bet?’
Kostya nodded, following his grey, shrouded eyes.
‘And your ears are still bad, are they?’
‘Yes, Ivan Ivanovich.’
The doctor leant forwards, and Kostya heard him muttering to himself as he inspected the hot, stinging skin where the fluid had passed.
‘Ivan Ivanovich?’ he asked. ‘When is my mama coming to see me?’
‘You’re a brave boy, Konstantin.’ Ivan Ivanovich sat back in the chair, twisting the horns of his moustache. He frowned. ‘Well … Your mother comes here every morning. She brings you a letter and she asks how you are. You know that, don’t you? The trouble is, scarlet fever is a very nasty illness and if she comes into your room then she might catch it too.’
‘Then … how come you can come and see me?’
‘I had it when I was a boy, old chap. You can only have it once, you see.’
‘Then when is my father coming to see me?’
‘Your father’s gone to Vyatka.’
Kostya felt his head weigh on to the pillow. His thoughts were so muddled that he began to feel dizzy.
‘So … When can my mama come and see me, then?’
‘It will be a little while yet, I’m afraid. It would be very dangerous for her, just at the moment … But if you’re good and you keep yourself warm then your brothers and sisters might be able to come and see you a bit sooner. Your mother says that you and your brother Ignat are best friends. Is that right?’
Kostya nodded. He ached with disappointment.
‘It’s a very serious thing that’s happened to you, old fellow …’ said the doctor, after a moment. ‘You’ve got a lot to cope with. I’ll help you as much as I can …’
‘Ivan Ivanovich?’ asked Kostya.
‘Yes?’
‘Is it New Year’s Day?’
‘No, old chap.’ He smiled, briefly. ‘New Year was four days ago now.’
When the watchman opened the shutters the following morning, Kostya already had his twenty kopecks sitting on his tongue. All night long he had stayed warm, like he was told, and he wrapped himself meticulously in his blanket before climbing on to his knees and addressing himself to the catch of the inside window, which today was patterned with ferns and flowers of its own. The ice on the outside window was so thick that Kostya had to heat the coin twice before the imperial insignia appeared on the glass and he was able to peep out into the yard and the street, where the Sun filled the faces of the fine stone houses – their walls pink, yellow and the same pale blue as the sky.
With his second hole in place, Kostya began his vigil, his elbows on the sill, alert for any movement in the corridor. He ducked instinctively when he saw Ivan Ivanovich returning from some early assignment, tall and proud in his wolfskin coat and hat, but otherwise he simply watched the brilliant people who passed in Myasnitskaya Street, smothered in so many layers of fur and fleece that they were barely recognizable as people at all. There was a one-legged man in rags he must have been collecting over years – adding each in turn to his outfit. There was a blind man in red velvet trousers, lifting his hat at the prompting of an infant who led him with a stick. There were horses towing bundles of birch trees, like enormous brooms, and ox-carts piled with hay, and then, just as Kostya’s neck was beginning to ache, there was a small, slim woman who turned off the street into the chimney-lined shadow in the hospital yard.
Maria Ivanovna wore her best black dress and her mother’s bell-shaped cloak. She had a scarf, which encircled her neck and covered the back of her hair. As she passed through the gates, the shadow rose from her boots to her gloves, but her face remained in the startling sunlight, her skin as pale as her high lace collar. A line marred her forehead, but her poise was as perfect as her complexion. Never in his life had Kostya seen so much as a blemish on his mother’s smooth, carved cheeks.
‘Mama!’ He broke the silence, hammering his fists against the window frame, scratching at the fresh ice forming in his eyeholes. ‘Mama! Mama!’
Out in the yard, Maria Ivanovna paused, peering through the light, and a second line appeared on her forehead. She looked from the upstairs floor of the hospital to the front door, and then, with a visible intake of breath, she noticed Kostya’s two little circles.
‘Kostya!’ she exclaimed.
Kostya watched as she hurried through the snow, attracting the glances of a couple of peasants who were hauling firewood through a side door. She arrived beneath the window, but she could reach the holes only with her fingertips, and so she fell back a couple of paces – her scarf slipping off her hair, a wash of pink possessing her face.
‘Kostya, can you hear me?’
Behind the ice, Kostya was maddened with excitement, dazzled by the sunlight, deafened by the sound of his own voice. He attacked the outside window, but even when he hung from the handle still he couldn’t force the catch open, and so he returned to his eyeholes, pressing his face against the glass, and once again he heard her high, bright voice.
‘Kostya!’
‘Mama!’
‘Kostya, I’m so sorry! You’re going to get better! We’ll make you better, I promise!’
‘Mama, I’m better now! Mama! I want to come home!’
It was five more days before Ignat sidled into the room, his hair brushed and oiled, his red woollen cap in his hands, his eyes moving from Kostya on his pillow, to the ice-thick window, to the naked, emaciated figure of Saint Vasily on the wall above the bed. To Kostya, who had been visited only by the doctor in the past ten days, his brother looked like a member of some strange, dwarfish species. In Kostya’s own old coat and boots, he shuffled across the floorboards and climbed on to the chair – dangling his legs, inspecting his hat.
‘Hello, Ignat,’ said Kostya, finally.
Ignat glanced up at him, but said nothing.
Words came pouring from Kostya’s mouth. ‘Oh, Ignat, you wouldn’t believe how boring it is here! There’s nothing to do, and no one to talk to, and Ivan Ivanovich has even taken my twenty kopecks because I was using it to melt the ice to see outside, and he says I’ll catch cold and get ill again, and now I can’t even look out of the window!’
‘Well …’ said Ignat. ‘That’s not fair!’
‘That’s what I said!’
‘What?’
‘That’s what I said. It’s not fair …’
Ignat frowned and narrowed his blue eyes. He spoke slowly, hesitantly. ‘Well. You have had a very bad illness, Kostya. Anna says that Doctor Lesovsky told Mama that one night he thought you were actually going to die!’
‘Really?’ asked Kostya.
‘Really!’
‘So, how is Mama?’ Kostya continued. ‘Where have you been staying? Has Papa got to Vyatka yet? Has he sent us a telegram?’
‘Kostya?’ said Ignat.
‘Yes?’
‘Is it true you saw a wolf?’
‘What?’
‘You told me you saw a wolf. In the night. Just before you got ill …’
Kostya looked down at the bedspread, the scattered letters from his mother, the grubby pages of Afanasyev’s Tales.
Ignat prodded him on the arm. ‘Oy!’ he said. ‘Wake up, you!’
‘Sorry,’ said Kostya. ‘I …’
‘Well?’
‘Well?’
‘I asked you if you made it up.’
‘No! No, it’s true!’
Ignat frowned. He looked at Kostya suspiciously, then he began to rub his chin and his mouth with his hands, as if covering a yawn.
‘It is!’ Kostya i
nsisted.
Ignat removed his hands. ‘How come it didn’t eat you, then?’
‘I thought it would! It was standing right in the middle of the track, but it had just caught a hare so I … I …’
Once again Ignat covered his mouth, but this time he appeared to be eating, uttering a series of low, guttural notes. Around them, it seemed, the hospital had been abandoned. Its patients, its servants, its feldshers, all had descended into silence.
‘What?’ said Kostya, his voice rising with alarm. ‘What are you doing?’
Ignat put his hands on his lap, blinking uncertainly.
‘You really can’t hear me, Kostya, can you?’ he asked, at last.
February 1868
They had already changed horses once, at Boriskovo, when the first light seeped into the February sky. Beneath the leather apron and the thick blankets of the kibitka, Kostya lay with his head on his mother’s shoulder and watched the birch trees outside the hood, sweeping the clouds with their fine black branches. To either side of them, his three brothers and four sisters were squeezed together on the fresh straw, their smell warm and familiar above the hot, dirty stink of the horses. The big sledge was rolling, shuddering over ruts and rough log bridges, and Kostya clung tightly to his mother’s cloak-cushioned hip and her hard, slightly rounded belly – his ear pressed to the delicate skin beneath her chin, where he could hear her voice without even looking at her face.
‘Did you see the little red squirrel, Fekla? … That’s it. Right up there … You know the story about the fox, the hare and the squirrel, don’t you? … Yes, you do!’
They stopped for breakfast at a hut so deep in the forest that it ought to have had chicken’s legs. Extracting himself from the blankets, Kostya watched his mother climb down to the ground, straighten her grey fox-fur hat, retrieve the ‘order for horses’ from a pocket in her skirts and knock on the door. He looked down a track pristine from the previous night’s fall, framed by birches feathered in white, and as a breeze fled among the treetops he saw avalanches spilling from the branches, each one feeding the next until the trees appeared to be shivering. He heard the soft, rushing sound of the snow. He turned to find a dog spinning across the yard, and when he saw its champing jaw he heard its bark, and when he saw its flapping tail the bark became a greeting.
In the hot, filthy kitchen of the post-house, Maria Ivanovna and her children sat in a line along a bench and the shelf on the side of the stove. At the table, the Jewish postmaster in his long striped coat was smoking a clay pipe, arguing vigorously with a bear-shaped driver with a mass of curling black hair. The smoke in the room stung Kostya’s eyes. At the stove, a bundle of shawls concealed an old woman who was coughing convulsively as she shuffled between an empty saucepan and a pot of cabbage soup. Without a glance, she received their slab of frozen porridge, lopped off a lump with the hatchet from the woodpile, dropped it into a saucepan and turned her attention to the samovar.
On the wall beside the door, there was a tariff of the meals that the old woman was apparently willing to prepare.
‘ “Veal cutlets”,’ read Kostya, slowly. ‘ “Sturgeon patties with sour cream. Roast grouse with salted cucumbers. Chicken à la Pojarsky …” ’ He turned to his mother. ‘Mama, what’s a cutlet?’
‘It’s a piece of meat,’ said Maria Ivanovna. Looking him straight in the face, her voice was light and clear above the room’s churning murmur.
‘And what’s a veal?’
It was only those people Kostya had known before he was ill who still possessed their normal voices. To understand new people, he either had to put his ear close to their mouth or else watch their lips and their eyes and decipher their meaning that way, which was tricky. Animals were different. They made their noises very much as ever, although even with them he was aware that he helped somehow to conjure them into existence. He could stand in front of a bellowing cow, close his eyes and consign it at once to a distant meadow. With his eyes closed, there was little to complicate the silence. Here in the post-house, there was the clack of his teeth as he chewed his bread. There was the gurgle as his tea drained through the sugar lump in his cheek. There were voices, but they were vague, meaningful only in moments. He might have been sitting outside in the forest, listening to these people through the muffling snow, the breeze and the thick wooden walls.
Maria Ivanovna made no objection when, after breakfast, Kostya left his family to clamber back into the kibitka and himself climbed up on to the bench beside the bear-shaped driver, who sat a small, crumpled hat on his head, gathered the six reins of the three fresh horses, struck the central mare with his short whip and set out north-east at the gallop of a cavalry officer under fire. Ten minutes earlier, a peasant with an ox-cart had come plodding past the post-house, but the driver overtook him in a matter of moments, shouting in a thunderclap voice that even Kostya could make out. When the horses hit the untouched snow, he felt the excitement of Vrangel in the Arctic. He clung to his seat and squinted against the flying snow and the freezing wind, while the horses poured steam like a locomotive and the bell in the arch between the shafts danced and told the forest, the long straight track and any other peasants unwise enough not to have collected sufficient firewood back in the autumn that this was a post-sledge and would be travelling at speed.
‘Fast enough?’ yelled the driver, his breath a gale of garlic.
‘No!’ said Kostya.
‘No?!’ The driver’s eyes goggled above cheeks scored with little blood vessels. He set about the peripheral horses with his whip. ‘Come on, my little doves! Faster! Faster!’
The team was running now ventre à terre, the muscles flickering beneath their thick winter coats. On his bench, the driver sat as easily as he had sat on his chair in the post-house, and he continued to talk – although Kostya caught only an occasional word. The boy let his eyes run across the rippling silver of the birch forest. There were patches of blue in the narrow sky above the track. The light was growing, diluting the shadows. He saw thin trunks bowed into arches by the weight of the snow, snakes of snow that hung from the branches to the ground and fat snow piles that looked so much like cows or old women it seemed inconceivable that somebody hadn’t come out here to sculpt them.
‘Hi!’ The driver prodded his shoulder, leant towards him, spoke again.
Kostya started. ‘Sorry … It’s my hearing.’
‘Ah! I thought …’ The driver tapped his head significantly and continued in a great bass roar. ‘Can you hear me now?’
Kostya nodded. Such was the stench that, even at this speed, he had to look away to breathe.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Vyatka,’ said Kostya.
‘The devil! Why do you want to go there?’
‘It’s where my uncle lives. My father’s gone there to work.’
The driver looked at him as if he were a lunatic. ‘Vyatka’s the ends of the Earth! They send criminals there as a punishment!’
‘I know …’
‘Where are you staying tonight, then?’
‘Mama says she wants to go straight to Nizhny Novgorod.’
‘Nizhegorod, ho!’ The driver gave a war cry, and attended to his whip.
Without warning, the horses burst from the forest into a clearing that straddled an Oka two or three times wider than Kostya had seen on any excursion from Ryazan. Beneath the mottled sky, between the blue-tinged shores of the standing trees, the snow rolled and surged across the wreckage of felling – revealing in places bushes, stumps and branches like the arms of drowning men. Above the pointed ears and whirling manes of the horses, the track vanished over the bank and, a moment later, the kibitka plummeted and arrived on the ice, where the scars of feet, hooves, paws and sledges converged to the north. A misshapen thatched hut watched them from a prominence, straw plugging the broken panes in its windows, smoke struggling from a black hole in its white roof. The children who had emerged at the sound of the whip and the bell were beaming and waving fro
m the door – their hands concealed in the sleeves of their too-big coats.
For the last two hours of the afternoon, the Sun wheeled through the trees around the track: a bloodshot eye following their progress, now staring straight down the long pink ruts behind them, now sliding among the pines and the birches so that their branches sparkled orange, violet, gold. They passed through villages of low, dishevelled houses and fat wooden churches whose three-barred crosses leant towards the north. They passed through Melenki, Selino and, as the Sun set entirely, they passed through Murom – its crenellations and hourglass cupolas picked black out of the crimson sky.
In the night, Kostya lay against the cold wooden wall of the kibitka. Beside him, the voices and faces of the others were lost to the darkness, and so, little by little, he pulled himself around the corner of the apron, out of the hood, and curled between the overlapping planks and Ignat’s bony legs, his hat pulled down over his eyebrows and the blankets covering his nose.
Silent, unmoving above the shivering sledge, the stars hung untroubled by clouds or even the moisture that flooded the air on those summers’ nights when he might sleep outside on the grass. Kostya followed the track that lay above their own, conscribed by the treetops. He imagined that the stars were the atoms of some monumental being, perhaps of God Himself. He imagined that he was flying through the ether, pulled not by horses but by a skein of swans, and that soon he would arrive on other planets circling other stars, where he would be hailed tsar by creatures who communicated not, he thought, by sound but by means of pictures mounted on their chests, which they would use to send messages even faster than the telegraph.
They were some versts north of Novoselki when Kostya felt a change in the movement of the horses. Lifting his head, he saw the driver’s pistol ignite the bare, louring trees – accompanied by the first proper sound that he had heard since sunset. He saw in the light of the stars and a rising slice of Moon the horses fighting against their traces, the bell between the shafts thrashing as if possessed. On his bench, the driver appeared to be shouting. In silhouette, he aimed again and a plume of fire exploded into the darkness, where, as he blinked away the lights, Kostya saw a shadow flitting across the snow, weightless as mist. It was impossible to tell the size of the wolf. It could have been four arshins away, or twenty, but as the driver fired a third time he saw that there were others – some of them weaving effortlessly through the trees around them, some so close that they seemed to be dodging the horses’ hoofs.