by Tom Bullough
It was only with the driver’s fourth shot that one of the shadows tripped and tumbled, suddenly substantial, and at once the others disappeared. Frantically, the driver threw his whip out over the horses’ backs, fumbling in his pockets for more bullets. Kostya looked among the Moon-coloured trunks of the birch trees. He leant over the side of the kibitka and, beyond the hood where his mother was waving and beckoning to him, he saw the wolves swarming on the body of their fallen comrade – the first of them already returning to the chase, gaining on them steadily, a bore of black against the snow.
As he looked back towards the driver, Kostya saw the left horse stumble. It recovered at once, throwing its head against the harness, but plainly the wolves had not missed the movement. When the driver fired again, not one of them fell back for the body. Instead they closed on the tiring mare, condensing as a pack, lunging at her Moon-cut ribs like the waves against the sides of a steamboat, while Kostya wondered what would happen if the horse were to fall and meet the kibitka at this furious speed, how it would feel to be catapulted through the air, to be torn apart by those long, arching teeth.
It was late the following morning when Nizhny Novgorod appeared above the east bank of the Oka, its walls and domes alight in the low winter sunshine, white and gold as the celestial city in the stories. Buried among her children, Maria Ivanovna pointed past the edge of the hood, past the grand expanse of ice, the tracks of the sledges, the fires and the fishermen – her other arm tight around Kostya’s waist, her lips set almost to his ear.
‘There!’ Her eyes widened. ‘You see that clutch of pine trees in the forest, poking above the firs and birches? The black ones, Kostya, do you see? They call those Savelov’s Mane.’ Mysteriously, she laughed and her jaw seemed to quiver. ‘The woods here all belong to Count Shuvalov. He’s Chief of the Tsar’s Gendarmes these days, but even back then he was always in Petersburg, being important, so in the autumn my cousins and I would come down here with axes and ropes. We collected all the firewood like that, and old Count Shuvalov none the wiser!’
She turned to look at Ignat.
‘Well …’ She bit her lip a little guiltily. ‘It was only dead wood, Ignat. He didn’t want it. And everyone else in Kunavino got their firewood in just the same way.’
‘What else did you do in Nizhny, Mama?’ asked Kostya.
‘Well, Little Bird, I attended the gymnasium for a whole year, so I did lots of things – although mostly I studied Latin and mathematics, and learnt the catechism, which was very, very boring …’
‘How old were you?’
‘In ’47, I was … fifteen years old.’ The sledge turned and the sunlight hit her full in the face, her silver hairs shining like the snow. There was a darkness beneath her eyes that might have been drawn there with ink. ‘Good Lord, it was twenty-one years ago! I was younger than you, Alyosha! And you, Mitya! Except for a couple of visits to Ryazan, it was the first time I’d ever been further than Pronsk. I remember …’ She looked at the fields beneath Count Shuvalov’s wood. ‘I remember, in the spring, in the mornings before school we would come running down that hill to pick mushrooms. Oh, it was magic! There were daisies and buttercups and primroses and forget-me-nots, and dew on the grass, and the mist on the river, and the Sun just rising over the Dyatlov Hills!’
The post-house in Nizhny Novgorod was two streets from the docks, the size of a warehouse, maintained at the temperature of an oven by an ingenious system of iron pipes. In the corridors and the stairwell, men, women and families as sprawling as their own pressed between the rooms and the street. Girls carried precarious pans of boiling water and misshapen loaves of black bread whose sour smell filled the stuffy air. The place looked noisy. Everyone Kostya saw seemed to be shouting to someone on the far side of the crowd, and even when he, his mother, his three brothers and four sisters found their own room and set down their trunk he could still feel the movement on the floorboards above them and outside the door: a constant vibration, as though the building were an enormous musical instrument.
The room was small, filthy and lit by one high window, which revealed a few straggling clouds. It contained a table, a jug of hot water, a pockmarked mirror, an icon of St John the Baptist, two bare beds and an inordinate number of cockroaches rifling in the dust with their fishing-rod antennae. Next to the door hung the same meaningless menu that they had seen in the post-house the previous morning, together with a notice indicating that it was 351 versts to Ryazan, 454 versts to Vyatka, 431 versts to Moscow, 958 versts to St Petersburg and 6,430 versts to Vladivostok – a journey, Kostya calculated, that would take them very nearly a month.
‘Food’s ready, Kostya,’ said Maria Ivanovna, crouching in front of him. ‘Are you hungry?’
Kostya noticed the smell of thawing porridge.
‘Six thousand four hundred and thirty versts away!’ he replied, in amazement.
‘What is?’
‘Vladivostok!’
‘It’s a long old way.’
‘It would take us twenty-seven days to get there. Unless we travelled all night as well.’
His mother smiled and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Well, Mr Explorer, if I can drag you from your sums we are going to have some lunch, then we are going to climb the hill to the kremlin.’
The street behind the post-house was deep and grey, the snow so worn by wheels and runners that the cobblestones were almost bare. Among the traffic, twenty or more young men and boys in thin grey uniforms, eyes lowered, rode on a pair of big sledges. They had been shaved of half of their beards and hair, so that their exposed heads resembled skulls. They wore chains on their ankles and held their arms tight around their narrow chests. The iron-clad runners threw sparks from the stones. The family wove between steam-snorting horses, past a shop whose windows displayed every colour of cloth you could imagine: orange, pink, turquoise, dandelion yellow. Anna had to tuck Masha beneath her arm to make her come away. Leaving an alleyway spattered with the dirty ice of washerwomen, they arrived in a ravine, its sides striped with compost where lean dogs nosed disconsolately. Above them, there were lime trees furry with lichen and a house so grand and pale that it might have been made out of marzipan.
In a square halfway up the hill, Kostya sat down on a packing case and watched his mother shepherd the others among the bales of wool, the sheepskins, hemp ropes, felt boots and harnesses piled outside the shops. His thin legs shivered. Beside him, a couple of merchants were smoking, spitting into the snow, talking indecipherably.
‘Tired, are you, Kostyusha?’ Anna appeared in front of him, smiling with his own dark eyes and the domed forehead of their father.
‘No!’
‘Yes, you are!’
She took him by the shoulders and swung him on to her back, and when he happened to touch his sister’s throat he found that he could hear her fairly well. He let his head hang forwards and the street smells of pies, birch smoke and hempseed oil met the juniper smell in her long black hair.
‘Anya?’ he asked. ‘Who were the men in the sledges?’
‘The prisoners?’ said Anna. ‘Poles, little brother. Off to Vyatka, just like us!’
‘Why?’
‘Well, maybe they’re going to Siberia, I don’t know …’
They were climbing through an arcade of shoe shops and tailors, strewn with straw and splinters of wood, thick with crowds and sledges.
‘Why, though?’
‘Oh!’ Kostya felt his sister’s voice box jump beneath his fingers and she turned half-circle so that he could see the open door of a workshop where men were building furniture with an arsenal of tools, their ceiling hung with special glass balls that filled the room with daylight. ‘Just imagine the things you could make with that lot, hey?’
Although Kostya had heard plenty of stories from his mother about crystal mountains and cloud-veiled Circassian peaks, he had never before seen anything like the hill in Nizhny Novgorod. It was taller than the pines of Savelov’s Mane, taller by far than Uspen
sky Cathedral and the bank of the Trubezh put together, and as its crown it wore a kremlin so magnificent that it was surely the finest in the world.
When Anna set Kostya back on the ground, he stood beneath a giant, whitewashed tower with a roof like a sorcerer’s hat and looked down a tobogganing slope of suicidal steepness towards a church of golden domes, the snowy warehouses and entombed barges that lay along the docks. Beyond them, the Volga was a frozen infinity where men and horses moved in miniature beneath the enormous, cloud-scratched sky. To the left, the little Oka arrived like some poor cousin from the south, dividing the city from the squares, the enclosures, the fire-breaks, fire-towers, churches and canals of the Makaryev Fair – in summer, the most important event in all Russia. On the head of the peninsula rose the half-completed roofs of a cathedral. Among the distant fields ran a tiny pair of parallel lines, and even as Kostya watched the Moscow train was leaving the station: the easternmost terminus of the entire railway system.
Kostya moved to the brink of the slope. He strained his ears, peered through the tumult of smoke and steam.
‘Ignat?’ he asked at last, turning to his brother. ‘What kind of engine was it? Could you hear the whistle?’
March 1868
Even in the hour before dawn, the lanterns continued to burn on Tsarevo-Konstantinovskaya Church and Holy Trinity Cathedral: tiny, tentative lights, tracing baroque shapes against the black sky. From the kitchen window of the new apartment, Kostya could see their contours clearly above the snow-rounded roofs across the street. The cathedral stood on one of Vyatka’s seven low hills, and although a few of the lanterns had died during the night there still were the eaves and the roofline of the refectory, and the ledges of the bell tower, and even the tip of the spire. Tsarevo-Konstantinovskaya Church was closer, and its tower stood plainly on the western side of Tsarevskaya Street. Its parapets hung like marshalled stars. It was astonishing that, on his tour of the city, the mayor had managed to assemble so much tallow. It was astonishing that anyone could have scaled those walls and straddled those ridges.
A volley of firecrackers greeted the first impression of dawn. A rocket arched above the roofs and left a burning trail, which Kostya could still see inside his eyelids several minutes later. Slowly, like a drawing of Orion or the Centaur, the cathedral materialized within its constellation. Its spire shaded in the blackness beneath the crowning light. The east wall of the pillar-carved tower came apart from its silhouette. To the south, one of the two dark apertures in the tower of Tsarevo-Konstantinovskaya Church began to blink – grey, grey, grey – until at last Kostya was able to see the swinging bells among the failing lanterns and the peeling whitewash, and behind them the bell-ringers, working their ropes with hands and feet, their movement a music in itself.
It was still scarcely daylight when Kostya felt footsteps on the stairs, and his mother, Anna, Alexei and Dmitri erupted into the kitchen in a gale of night-time air, red cheeks, long coats and woolly hats. They were singing so raucously that he could tell their song at once:
Easter eggs! Easter eggs!
Give them to the man who begs!
For Christ is risen from the dead …
‘Christ is risen!’ exclaimed Maria Ivanovna.
‘Truly He is risen!’ Kostya replied, hurrying across the room from the open shutter.
His mother bent down and kissed him three times with great formality.
‘Little Bird,’ she said. ‘What are you doing awake at this hour?’
‘I was hungry, Mama!’
‘Hungry?’ Her eyes shone. ‘Well, I think we can do something about that!’
One by one, Kostya stretched to kiss the others – his brothers’ faces prickling his cheeks – then, as they sat down to remove their boots, apparently bemoaning the lack of chairs in church, he went to fetch the jug of pussy-willow branches that he and Ignat had gathered the previous afternoon. He set it carefully in the middle of the table, among the eggs that they had all dyed red on Holy Thursday, the frosted Easter bread and the pyramid of pascha whose sweet cheese smell had woken him in the first place.
All of the children were gathered round the table, ogling the Easter breakfast and presenting themselves to one another to be kissed, when Eduard Ignatyevich appeared in the door of the bedroom that he now shared with his four sons. Broad and dark in his heavy black jacket, he hooked his spectacles over his ears and went to the window to survey the crowds of worshippers still returning from church, their lanterns blazing in the half-light. A Catholic in name, born into the numerous nobility of eastern Poland, Eduard Ignatyevich had never been seen to enter a church of any kind. He took his cigarette case from his pocket and struck a match, and as he coughed and steadied himself against the yellowing wallpaper he inspected a bead of water which was dangling from an icicle on the eaves – sparkling with a hundred tiny lanterns.
Finally, he fastened the top button of his shirt and went to sit at the head of the table, opposite his wife, who was waiting to bless the meal. He spoke, but his lips and face were concealed by his black moustache and his grey-patterned beard and Kostya could understand not a word.
The family kept to the pavement as they walked the few hundred arshins to Sobornaya Square, where women drove ox-carts festooned with every scrap of colour that they possessed, and men in golden caps and bell-bottom trousers crossed themselves as yet another procession carried its icon between jubilant households. Among the stalls, the air was ripe with honey-cake and roasted nuts. Kostya saw glass eggs containing miniature wax roses and angels. He saw flurries of colour as siskins and goldfinches were released from their winter cages and rose to join the sparrows and starlings in the pallid sky. On Kazanskaya Street, he ran his fingers along the cast-iron railings that led to the stucco gatehouse of the Alexandrovsky Gardens, where sledge-drivers were guarding their upholstery from the sticky hands of inquisitive children, and he noticed the sledge of his Uncle Stanislaw: a sleek, red-trimmed vehicle, its two black horses adorned with scarlet ribbons, harnessed in single file in the manner peculiar to Vyatka.
Kostya heard the band before he saw them. He stopped in the path and frowned, listening to some lumbering, low-pitched instrument.
‘Mama!’ he exclaimed. ‘Music!’
Despite her best black dress, which she could still just fasten around her belly, Maria Ivanovna crouched down in the wet sand and threw her arms around his neck. She planted so many kisses on his lips and cheeks that he had to wipe his face on the sleeve of his sheepskin.
‘You see!’ She beamed at him. ‘What did I tell you? I don’t care what the doctors say. You’re going to get better! You are!’
She grasped his hand and as they passed along the tall, wooded bank, where a brass band was playing in neat, frogged uniforms, through a luminous mist Kostya saw that the Vyatka River had dissolved into a multitude of icebergs.
‘Mama!’ He tugged on her arm. ‘Can I go down and see the ice? Please, Mama! Please!’
‘Little Bird!’ Maria Ivanovna smiled, patiently. ‘We are going to see your cousins. We’re going on the swings! You want to go on the swings, don’t you?’
Kostya admitted that he did.
‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘I’m sure the ice will still be there this afternoon.’
On the central lawns, every manner of person was assembled. There were bare-cheeked gentlemen and ladies in crinoline and ankle-length cloaks. There were peasants with bound legs, bast shoes and bottles of spirit. There were children cutting the year’s first mudslides. There were couples on the courting swings: a series of planks suspended from a single pole, which they propelled by standing one at each end, thrusting themselves backwards and forwards as they attempted to ‘go around the top’. And above them all rose the Easter swings, erected back in early February for the extravagances of Butter Week – their covers removed, their gaily painted boats sailing in the warm spring air.
‘Can you hear the song, Kostya?’ asked Maria Ivanovna, keenly. ‘Can you hear what the
y’re singing?’
Kostya shook his head.
His mother hesitated, obviously disappointed, then she put her lips to his ear and sang in her high, hymnal voice:
Our swing is swinging
From its seven straight poles.
We sit in our cradle
And we sing out our souls.
And the higher we swing,
Or so I have been told,
The higher our flax
Pushes out of the mould!
Stanislaw Ignatyevich Tsiolkovsky was a man so fat that he could sit with his hands on top of his belly, like a woman expecting a baby. He had a beard dyed black, a suit with waistcoat and watch-chain, and a raccoon-skin coat the size of a tent. Squeezed beside him on the wrought-iron bench, his sturdy wife and daughters wore ruffles of pink, and his fair-haired, ten-year-old son, Tomasz, wore clothes identical to his own in every particular – down to the white chamois gloves.
Kostya felt his mother remove her hand as she and his father went to exchange the Easter kiss with his aunt and uncle. He saw his sister Anna produce the bundle of pascha and Easter bread that they had left over from breakfast, while his uncle’s maid spread a rubber sheet across the ground and opened a hamper to reveal bacon, cheese, milk, bread, wine, brightly painted eggs, and pies still steaming from the oven. In his sheepskin jacket and his darned linen trousers, Kostya felt the colour coming to his face and he turned away quickly towards the six mighty swings – the men leaning backwards to heave on their ropes, the women clinging to their Easter bonnets, the children holding their arms like wings.
It must have been warm in the hills to the south of Vyatka. By the time that Kostya, Ignat and Tomasz came slithering down the path to the river that afternoon the water had swallowed the islands beneath Trifonov Monastery. Icebergs were pouring towards the north, carrying bushes, hayricks and whole trees. On one, a dog was sitting upright, like an interested passenger. It was usual on these late March days for the temperature to rise above freezing in the morning and to fall again sharply in the afternoon, but today the clouds were low and thick. The breeze possessed none of its customary bite. It brought gulls in crowds, diving with folded wings, barely able to reach the banks for the weight of the fish in their beaks.