Konstantin

by Tom Bullough

  As Kostya passed the warehouses and the big hotel, he watched the men on the beach across the river at Dymkovo, crossing themselves as they launched shallow boats with heavy gunwales and, when any gap presented itself, paddled frantically for the Easter festivities. Sometimes the boats would get trapped in the floes and vanish north around Simonovsky Island. Sometimes they would reach one of the wharfs, where the barges and the city’s two resident steamboats still wore skirts of ice, and their passengers would jump ashore, gesticulate wildly to the little figures they had left behind and hurry away into Razderikhinsky ravine.

  ‘Steamboats are nowhere near as good as steam engines,’ declared Kostya, striding along the path, a step ahead of his brother and cousin. ‘In England there’s a train that goes at 123 versts per hour! A 4-2-4. A hundred and twenty-three versts! Imagine! You could leave Vyatka and reach Moscow in seven hours. I’d like to see a steamboat travel as fast as that!’

  He paused, decided that Tomasz would probably raise the subject of engine power, and waited, as if listening.

  ‘Well,’ he conceded, ‘it’s true that steamships do have much larger engines. Back in Ryazan, we would see some monster steamships, but that’s because the river there is so much bigger than it is here.’ He glanced at the Vyatka, which was, conservatively, the width of the Oka at Nizhny Novgorod. ‘I read a book about steamships, so I know all about them. Did you know that the SS Great Eastern has engines that make 8,300 horsepower? It has ten whole boilers and a hundred furnaces!’

  It was not until they reached the goods sheds next to the steamboat Kama that Kostya was able to turn to face the others. To his relief, he found that neither of them was speaking, and so, cursing his father for forcing them to bring their cousin, he tugged down the hem of his old coat and went to sit on the steep muddy bank, looking past his boots at the eddying icebergs.

  ‘I said,’ said Tomasz, putting his perfumed lips to Kostya’s ear, ‘do you know what we do?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We go jumping on the ice. I bet you don’t do that in Ryazan!’

  Kostya smiled tolerantly. ‘Jumping on the ice? Of course we do.’

  ‘No need to shout, mon cousin!’ said Tomasz. He laughed, the soft flesh quivering between his chin and his black bow tie.

  ‘What?’ Kostya demanded. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Oh, I was just imagining you crossing the ice!’ He laughed again. ‘You with your mother, holding your hand! “Come on, Kostya, darling. Big leap now! That’s it!” ’

  Kostya stared at him in amazement. He opened his mouth, running back through the words that he was sure he had understood, but still he could come to no other meaning. Furiously, he jumped to his feet and glared into his cousin’s pleased pink face, then he slid straight down the slippery clay and hopped on to the nearest iceberg.

  ‘Come on, then!’ he screamed. ‘I’d like to see you try it!’

  Tomasz looked down the slope and his cheeks lost colour. Beside him, Ignat was waving and shouting, but Kostya turned deliberately and jumped across the next stretch of brown, slushy water. To demonstrate his contempt, he didn’t even look to see if his cousin was following him and instead made a couple more well-timed leaps to a spot where he could consider the twin decks, the white paddle wheels and the black-ringed funnel of the Kama – a fisherman on the prow, smashing the head of a perch against a railing.

  ‘Oh! Careful!’ Kostya turned to see Tomasz step uncertainly on to a berg near the bank, his eyes on his well-spread, patent-leather boots. ‘I think you might be a bit too heavy for that one!’

  Tomasz shouted something.

  ‘You’ll have to catch me first!’

  Again Kostya ignored Ignat’s gestures. He took another leap and came to the edge of the eddy, where the bergs were revolving slowly, and when he stood still he found himself presented in turn with the gilded cupolas of Feodorovskaya Church, the leafless woods around the Alexandrovsky Gardens, the needle spires and bellying domes of Pyatnitsky Church and Holy Trinity Cathedral, which rose above the tall, bare bank. Kostya held his arms out at either side. He knew that Tomasz could arrive at any moment, but still he watched the ice to the south become the still-snowy meadows, the hull-sliced beach at Dymkovo and the sawmill near Simonovsky Island, where the gulls fell like snowflakes and a boatload of would-be revellers was scrambling wearily ashore.

  When the iceberg turned full circle, Kostya could see no trace of his cousin. He looked back at the river to check if he had been outflanked, then up at the path, and finally at his brother, who was skidding down the bank, gesturing more frantically than ever. Beneath him, suddenly, Tomasz came yawning to the surface, his tongue red, his pale hair slick across his eyes. He seemed to scream as he sank, his white gloves waving from a white-fringed wave, and Kostya began to jump across the ice towards him. Arriving on the nearest berg, he fell to his knees. He saw Tomasz rise again in the dark water and managed to grab his collar, but then his cousin found the broken edge of the ice and tried to heave himself upwards, and although Kostya threw himself backwards the ice was wet and sinking, and he was no match for the weight of that coat.

  Like most of his friends in Ryazan, Kostya had never learnt to swim. The water was shallow by the beach on the Trubezh, and even on those hot days in July and August when the Oka was crowded with diving, splashing boys he had never ventured out of his depth. Plunging head first into the Vyatka, missing his cousin by a tochka, he could find no trace of either the surface or the bottom. The water was so cold that his skull seemed to be contracting on his brain. He gasped and his mouth filled with water. He flailed his limbs, but it was as if he were suspended by some invisible peg, unable to move in any direction. Through the terrible blackness, he saw a dim, grey pattern, like a window in the winter, and as he tried to pull himself towards it so he met the slippery underside of the ice. Desperately, he scrabbled for a finger hold. He felt an arm graze his face, and a hand, but then a pain like a needle thrust deep into his belly and he sank back into the blackness – the stars coming out around him, as they would on any clear evening.

  When Ignat dragged him back on to the iceberg, Kostya hardly shivered for the cold. Distantly, he could hear himself coughing. He could see his brother’s face, flushed and averted beneath his red woollen hat, the sleeves of his sheepskin sodden to the shoulders. He could see Tomasz crawling back up the bank with neither coat nor hat, dripping, stumbling away along the path, and although he had no strength to speak, still, in little gasps, he vomited egg, sausage, bacon, beef pie, tea, cottage cheese and Easter bread – which found the grooves of runners in the shelving ice and made a molten island on the dirty water.

  May 1868

  The city that emerged from beneath the snow was small and dilapidated: a city only in name. Six months of soot caked the walls and roofs of the gymnasium, the library, the prison, the F. Veretennikov bank, the P. Klobukov department store, the dye-works belonging to Stanislaw Ignatyevich, the college of technology and agriculture where Eduard Ignatyevich taught mathematics and natural history. The rutted streets reeked with the excrement of humans, dogs and horses, so that even the peasants walked with rags held to their Sun-pink faces. Hooves and wheels threw waves of slime against the wooden houses that framed the city centre, and in these bleak northerly regions where the farming season lasted barely four and a half months few people found time to clean their gables and windows, which may privately have been red, green, blue, yellow, intricate and attractive.

  Only the churches rose above the squalor. As he followed his mother through the holiday crowds, Kostya passed Tsarevo-Konstantinovskaya Church, Pokrovsky Church, Pyatnitsky Church, the Church of the Holy Transfiguration – their pale towers faint through the thin May rain. He passed Spassky Cathedral, Holy Resurrection Cathedral and, greatest of all, Holy Trinity Cathedral, whose dome appeared to echo the sky. It was here, so his mother had told him, that the priests kept the miracle-working icon of St Nikolai – revealed by God in the villag
e of Velikoretsky, far to the north, where it was returned every year in a procession famous throughout Russia. The two of them paused beneath its snow-white walls, its airy windows and stucco fans. They crossed themselves before they turned towards the river.

  On the floating bridge across the Vyatka, the rain shone from the rippling boards, the wandering handrails, the beards, the cloaks, the staffs, the packs, the haltered calves and sheep whose cries rose like commands above the joyous, inchoate voices. It released smells of smoke, sweat and, faintly, the frankincense from the cathedral. It made the procession seem indivisible: a single, grey-brown body that fed from the city, over the river, on to the broad floodplain.

  In Dymkovo, Kostya looked past the cascading leaves of the birch trees at the openwork carving of the one-room houses, perched above stables where an occasional horse was hiding from the bluebottles. He saw a top-heavy windmill with a long pole protruding from one side, so that the miller could turn the blades to face the wind. He saw fields divided into strips, a third of them bristling with the short green spears of rye and flax, a third of them fallow, blue with cornflowers and yellow with tansy, a third of them naked clay, where those few peasants not in the procession were guiding ploughshares scarcely longer than their fingers – the ribs of their horses straining against their taut, wet hides.

  In the forest, men struggled to free their crutches from the hungry mud. Old women shuffled beneath hunched backs, stepping ponderously over the black distorted roots that rose from the trodden ground and the trees that lay flat where the path was wide and divided like a river around the birch saplings and the willow bushes that had sprung up in the uncommon light. Where the path was narrow, the fallen trees leant between the dark walls of the forest so that only one person could pass at a time and the waiting crowds suffered the descent of midges and mosquitoes in numbers even greater than their own.

  They had just left the village of Kisela when Maria Ivanovna stepped off the path and sank on to the thin grass beneath a crooked ash, grimacing, wrapping her arms around her waist. She gestured at Kostya with a downwards motion of her flattened right hand, which, in the language of signals that had developed between them over the past few months, could either mean ‘sit down’, ‘slow down’ or, sometimes, ‘no’. Beneath her red-and-gold kerchief, Maria Ivanovna was breathing rapidly – her eyes closed, her face pulled so tight that the bones might have been chiselled from her colourless cheeks. Between the folds of her rubber cloak, there was a dark grey line on her grey woollen dress, which branched across the ledge of her belly. She had to gesture again before Kostya made a tent from his own cloak, covered their heads and squeezed beneath her arm.

  He felt her breathing slow, slowly, saw the determination return to her face, but still several minutes passed before she opened her eyes, removed his boots, wrung out his lumpy woollen socks and swapped them between his feet to help with the rubbing. Summoning her strength, she set her hands on the ground, and Kostya followed her gaze through the curtain of water, past the white, mud-patterned clothes of a group of native Finns, towards a woman in a dun-coloured headscarf who was pulling a man with withered legs on a small wooden wagon – threads of steam rising faintly from the axle.

  In Bobino that evening, Kostya was tired and cold and hungry and hobbling on feet that had been wet all day. It was his turn to carry the pack and he tramped two steps behind his mother, who herself walked with her head drooping and her arms round her belly, which was discernible only in the weight of her steps. He paid no attention to the huts that lined the central track, whose windows seemed to hide in shame beneath their shaggy roofs. Some of the other pilgrims had dragged branches with them from the forest, and the chill air carried wafts of porridge, eggs, cabbage and resinous smoke. Among the long, tangled shadows of an orchard, they found a patch of grass in the multitude eating, talking and sleeping, kicked aside a few sheep droppings and spread a cloak on the damp ground.

  ‘Kostya?’ said Maria Ivanovna, finally.

  Kostya sat down beside her, but he looked at the apple trees, their trunks black and contorted against the low Sun, their flowers the same translucent pink as the sky.

  ‘Kostya?’ his mother repeated. She was speaking directly into his ear. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but I’m fine! Really, I am! And I know what your father said, but he’s wrong, Kostya! I love him very much, but he’s a terrible old cynic and much good it does him! Look at all these people! Look at them! They say that 20,000 of us are going to Velikoretsky this year. That’s like the entire population of Ryazan! That’s three times more people than even live in Vyatka, so just think how far they must have come to be here! How can they all be wrong, Kostya? How? Go in faith and in sincerity and God will help you! You’ll see!’

  Kostya turned his eyes to the procession still toiling through the village: side-lit figures of endless variety, weary and muddy as themselves. He watched one old man, his feet bare, his sheepskin covered with rough-stitched patches, and for the first time in his life he found himself wondering what he himself might be like in five years, fifteen years, fifty years’ time.

  ‘I know you don’t like me worrying over you,’ his mother continued, ‘but I can’t help it, Little Bird! I’m your mother and you’re my son and I’ll do anything to help you. Anything!’

  Later, in the luminous darkness when the Sun had dropped behind the jagged forest and the sky turned golden as the great domed ceiling in Holy Trinity Cathedral, the temperature fell sharply and Kostya’s breath floated in the air. A scattering of stars peeped through the patterns of the clouds, and the villagers, who had earlier dispensed pancakes, sugar, carrots and spirit to the crowds, now descended on the orchard with arms full of brushwood, erected bonfires and waved sheets of birch bark to spread the smoke and protect the delicate blossom from the frost. On the hard ground, where the ice gleamed on the well-chewed grass, Kostya lay inside his mother’s coat, the baby stirring faintly against his back, and as they curled closer in the gathering cold, it was difficult to tell which of them was comforting the other.

  ‘The Sun, Little Bird,’ said Maria Ivanovna, as they lay together on the grass of Monastyrskoe the following night, ‘is thirty times bigger than he appears to you and I. He looks so small simply because he is such a long way above the Earth. The Sun is a big, grand character, very fat and very important. He has a crown and a long mink cloak that would be the pride of the tsar himself. Every morning the Lord sends His angels to dress him for the day in golden breeches, a golden jacket and a golden shirt with frills at the neck. Every evening they return to dress him in his nightshirt and his paper nightcap, ready for his bed. The Sun is so fine and so glorious that, by night, the Lord charges His archangels, Gabriel, Michael and Raphael, to stay with him and cover him with their wings. When he rises in the morning, the Sun is flanked by flaming phoenixes and birds of paradise who have first dived into the ocean so that their feathers are wet and they are not scorched by his rays …’

  Through tremulous eyelids, Kostya watched a girl asleep beside them, a lamb in her arms. He looked through the smoke rising from hundreds of little fires, condensing in a plume above the village’s low hill, its gardens full of cabbage and cucumber, the tower of its church black against the fiery sky. He watched the red Sun perched on the dark forest. He felt his mother’s lips, warm and soft against his ear, the muscles burning in his legs, and he moved his bare, still-bleeding feet against the cool grass since the night was scarcely less hot than the day.

  ‘There are those,’ Maria Ivanovna went on, softly, ‘who call the cock a prophet. It is he who wakes, flutters his wings and announces to the world a new day. Every morning he crows three times. Once, to say that the Sun will be resurrected, like Our Lord Jesus Christ was resurrected, like we shall all be resurrected on the Day of Days, as Paul the Apostle has told us. Twice, to ask Our Lord Jesus Christ to grant the Sun his passage through the sky. Three times, to sing that Christ is the Life, that He achieves all.

  ‘And th
is is the story of the Sun, and how he was made by the Lord. Amen.’

  The crowd that stood by the Great River at Velikoretsky to greet the icon of St Nikolai was larger than Kostya could ever have imagined, and even when he pulled himself on to the branch of a convenient birch tree still he could see no limit to this church whose walls were the woods, whose roof was the black-bottomed clouds. Among the numberless Slavs looking south towards the diagonal of smoke beyond the arch of the river, he saw Finns, Mari and Votyaks, and Tatars, men with round fur caps and the features of Mongols, women with headdresses glistening with coins, people who were pagans, Muslims, not Christians at all, but still stood here with their families, their calves and their sheep, and watched the steamboat of the Governor of Vyatka emerge from the sky-stretching pines, its paddle wheels seething, its white sides draped with scarlet cloth.

  In its wake came every vessel on the Vyatka River. There was the Vyatka itself, its twin decks thick with merchants, officials, visiting grandees and nobles returned for the summer from Moscow and St Petersburg. There was the Kama. There were sails white in the uneasy sunshine, teams of long, even oars, the dayboats of shopkeepers and the tubs of fishermen, and even before they reached the spring and the birch tree where the icon had been revealed 485 years earlier many of the passengers hurled themselves into the water, scrambling up the bank, crossing themselves and opening their arms to the heavens.