Konstantin
Page 6
Amid the crying animals and the ululating pilgrims, they climbed the hill towards Velikoretsky Monastery, its blue-gold campanile poking from the biblical dust cloud. Faintly, Kostya heard the clamour of its madly swinging bells. He saw women proffering kopecks, calling out the names of their dead to the boys who sat on every gravestone, writing prayers with pen and ink. He saw an avenue of cripples lining the path to the tall white arch of the monastery gate: a legless man on a ragged little sledge, his arms carved with muscle, his hands like old leather shoes, a girl with no arms at all, just hands that flapped grotesquely from her shoulder blades. At the gate itself, he saw a man with a face so eaten by some hideous disease that his jawbone and blackened teeth lay open to the air, saliva hanging from his chin to a pale smear on the breast of his filthy shirt, and still he shook the copper coins in his tin bowl.
In the courtyard, it suddenly started to hail. An impression of silence came over the army of people pressing towards the Cathedral of the Transfiguration to meet the miracle-working icon, and to escape the big, stinging stones Kostya and his mother covered their heads with their cloaks and gave themselves up to the currents of the crowd. The courtyard was reduced to moments – a pair of shoeless feet, a calf struggling against its halter, an hysterical woman – and when the storm passed as abruptly as it had arrived Kostya found himself at the edge of a clearing beneath the cathedral’s seven broad steps, his mother’s arm tightening round his shoulders.
With the industry of woodcutters, a team of men was slaughtering the animals. Their long hair flew with the turn of their heads. Their linen shirts wore a patina of blood. In a continual stream, the victims were led to a place where the ice had already turned crimson, their rear legs seized and dragged backwards until their front legs splayed, and even in that moment they would look with interest or confusion at the crowd, who were crossing themselves as if subject to a fit, or else reach for some blade of grass protruding from the bloody slush. Sometimes the axe would fail to pass cleanly through an animal’s windpipe, and its head would flap wildly from the blood-spouting tatters of its throat. Once the neck was severed both the body and the head would continue to move for a minute or more so that, in one monstrous pile, the decapitated corpses of lambs, sheep and calves appeared to be trying to run away, while in another their goggling, blood-sodden heads champed and thrashed their jaws, and, since it was Kostya’s affliction to be able to hear animals, to him they screamed in diabolical chorus.
October 1869
In the gloom of dawn, an autumn wind poured down Kopanskaya Street, around the lime trees and the sputtering gas lamps, between the banks of the still-dark houses. Kostya and Ignat clung to their caps as they followed the wall around Vladimirskaya Church. Finding the gate, they joined a muddy path, but it was only when they came to the broken door of the south chapel that they saw the other three boys from their class at the gymnasium, huddled in the blackness in their wadded winter coats.
‘Oh, great!’ said Tomasz, sarcastically. He put his mouth to Kostya’s ear. ‘Just what we need! A bloody girl!’
‘A girl, am I?’ Kostya retorted. ‘Well, at least I haven’t got breasts!’
‘If you … If you cause any trouble, I swear to God! We said we’d climb till we can see into the prison yard and that’s it. Got it? You follow me, and you do what I say!’
The five of them crept among the chapel’s vaulted pillars, through pools of water whose ripples made long grey arches across the floor. They crossed the cavernous nave, where the sticks of jackdaws’ nests broke beneath their feet and the wind from the tall, empty windows tossed the cobweb tails of the chandeliers. On one high, lime-streaked wall, Kostya made out a picture of God on His golden throne, indicating to His left and His right. He saw men in their hundreds, naked, beseeching, and he was not the only one to hesitate in the torrent of air at the foot of the tower.
The steps spiralled upwards into absolute darkness. Twice, Kostya collided with his cousin. Once, he felt himself being shoved backwards so fiercely that it was only the ragged handrail that saved him from falling. With unseen fingers, he felt the streams on the blind, turning wall. He climbed until he had lost count of the steps, and when at last they emerged in the lower bell loft he was astonished by their height, by the strength of the wind, by the blood-coloured sky behind the droplet domes of Trifonov Monastery.
Crowding into the eastern aperture, the boys looked down at the threshing trees of Zasorny ravine, the red-tinged walls of the gymnasium, the sliver of yard just visible behind the shining glass on the walls of the city prison. In the half-light, Kostya could understand little that the others were saying, but he smiled when they smiled, echoed their expressions, stretched like them to try to see more, and when Tomasz turned to scale the few remaining steps that led to the upper loft he followed him at once.
Slowly, the remaining quarters of the little city were beginning to take shape. The treetops took on the colour of the sky. The houses to the west revealed the slopes of their roofs, the shadows of doors and windows, the sparse smoke torn from their chimneys. Peering past heads and shoulders, Kostya searched above the prison walls for any indication of a gallows, but still he could see nothing, and so he pushed through the trembling saplings that sprouted from the rotten floorboards, ducked beneath the mould-tangled bell ropes and squeezed past the westerly bell, on to the ledge, where a series of rusty, wire-thin rungs stretched over the eaves towards the summit of the tower.
Five storeys beneath him, the streetlamps made circles in the mud of Kopanskaya Street.
‘Come on!’ he called. ‘It’s sunrise in a minute!’
‘Kostya!’ Ignat hurried towards him. ‘Come on, Kostya, don’t be stupid!’
‘What do you mean, “stupid”? Do you want to see the hanging or don’t you?’
‘They don’t even climb up there at Easter!’
The other boys were gathering around him, their words becoming discernible with the daylight.
‘Kostya, come on! We’ve got to go!’
‘Kostya, someone will see you!’
‘Look, you show-off!’ Tomasz forced his way around the bell, his fat face livid between his fur hat and collar. ‘I warned you! Didn’t I warn you?’
‘Who’s the girl now?’ said Kostya, laughing.
‘Get in here, and I’ll show you who’s a girl!’
‘Too heavy for it, are you?’
‘Look, you bloody cripple!’ His cousin was shouting now. ‘Everybody hates a show-off, and everybody hates you! The only reason we put up with you is because you’re deaf! You haven’t got the guts to climb up there, anyway, so why don’t you just get back in here before you get all of us into trouble!’
Kostya hardly knew how he came to be standing on top of the tower. A sensation came over him such as he had never experienced in his life. It was like the moment in spring when the ice broke on the river, when the cracks ran long and jagged between the banks and the water that had lain cold and docile beneath the surface all winter came boiling into the waiting air. Suddenly, he was looking down on the whole of Vyatka, the circle of the forest, the fingers of the church towers cut out of the sunrise. He was screaming, kicking the parapet with his soft felt boots until, without a sound, a section as big as himself disappeared. Like a treetop, the tower was swaying in the gale. Staggering, almost falling, he seized the gilded cross and tried to wrench it from its setting, and as the last star stole from the morning sky he raged against the boys in the bell loft, and he raged against this miserable city, and he raged against the Earth itself, which pinned him to its surface, wretched as a worm.
When Kostya emerged from the bottom of the tower, he felt no more substantial than his skin. The other boys had long since scattered. Only Ignat walked with him, back through the derelict church, the fragments of plaster, the puddles, the gems of broken glass – outside into a mob of women, children and even a privy councillor in white, mud-spattered trousers. His eyes on the birch leaves drowning in the muddy gro
und, Kostya felt himself grabbed, pushed and shaken. He looked up only when he heard his mother’s voice and saw, with distant interest, a misshapen scar on the wall of the church, a pair of holes in the roof around the tower’s first floor, a large piece of masonry jutting from the lank grass of the churchyard.
He put up no resistance as she towed him back up Vladimirskaya Street, between the squat, bored houses, the barren limes, the children who continued to canter around them. On Preobrazhenskaya Street, a team of carters was trying to move a heavy wagon through the clinging mud. They were whipping their oxen, heaving at the wheels, but all of them stopped to watch this dancing crowd, the slight, gasping woman who dragged her son through the gate at number 19, between the bedraggled lines of her winter cabbages.
‘Well?’ Maria Ivanovna turned on Kostya wildly. ‘Everybody tells me you climbed the tower and threw bricks off the top. Are you going to deny it?’
Lifting his head from the kitchen floor, Kostya saw lights in his mind and lights in the apartment downstairs. At the table, unmoving, Anna, Fekla, Masha and Yekaterina were watching him over their porridge. He saw his mother stumble to the chamber pot in the corner and kneel on the floorboards, her shoulders shaking. He saw her return, heard her voice, clear as it ever had been, but somehow he noticed only the streak of white on her old grey dress, the tiny down of her moustache, the bunching lines around her eyes, the fine new lines that radiated from her lips.
‘Konstantin, what on Earth did you think you were doing? For the love of God! You might have killed someone!’
Kostya looked back at his mother in silence. He felt concerned to see her distressed, but still he felt himself apart from this scene – as if he were watching her across some vast, unbridgeable divide. Looking round the room, he saw his baby brother Stanislaw, crying, propped against the wall beside the stove. He saw Ignat standing miserably just inside the door, his thin arms knotted on his chest. Through the pain in his feet, Kostya felt the warm air rising from the apartment downstairs, and with it came a sensation of calm, even languor, and as his mother began once more to speak he realized how much easier it would be for him simply to close his eyes.
It was another four days before Kostya returned from the gymnasium to find almost every door and window in the apartment thrown open – although a Siberian wind tore west across Vyatka and the year’s first snow concealed the rust of the roofs and the ruts in the streets. Standing at the top of the stairs, in the doorway of the kitchen, he saw little snow figures dancing inside as they would outside, the windows beating against the shutters, the family photographs shivering on the cold brick wall.
‘Mama?’ he called. ‘Anna?’
To his right, the drawing-room door alone was closed. Kostya tried the handle, but it seemed to have been bolted. He knocked, cupped his ear, but he could hear no voices and feel no movement in the floorboards, and so he went into his bedroom, sat down on the bed, wrapped the counterpane round his shoulders and opened The History of the Steam Engine – one of the most interesting-looking books that he had found recently in his father’s small library. He turned to the first chapter, which concerned the ‘elasticity’ and ‘expansibility’ of steam, but neither of these words meant anything to him and he found himself unable even to concentrate on a diagram of an American locomotive with outside cylinders and an unusually conical funnel.
The whole house seemed to tremble when Eduard Ignatyevich arrived at the bottom of their staircase. He was climbing quickly, two steps at a time, the sensation soon complicated by Anna’s lighter patter, and as Kostya arrived back in the kitchen he saw his father reach the drawing-room door in three strides – his face pale and wild between his low black hat and his long grey beard.
‘Maria!’ he shouted.
He fought with the handle, then took a step backwards and levelled his shoulder at a point above the lock.
Kostya watched in astonishment as his father reappeared, holding by the collar the midwife who had delivered little Stanislaw the previous summer. Never in his life had he seen his father raise a hand against anyone in anger, but when the midwife tried to escape his grip he threw her against the wall beneath the coat hooks with such violence that her scarlet headscarf slipped over her eyes and the contents of her bag exploded across the floor.
With a gesture, Eduard Ignatyevich sent Anna back the way that they had come. He vanished once again into the drawing room, while Kostya remained frozen and the midwife scrabbled across the floorboards, collecting her possessions – a pair of scissors, a bar of soap, a blood-soaked handkerchief, some variety of needle – and hobbled off on to the stairs, her crabbed hands covering her face.
‘Father?’ called Kostya, uncertainly. ‘Father, can I do something to help?’
He stood in silence, then, at last, he picked up a water vase, which was turning circles in a puddle near the table, and restored it to its shelf. He picked up a bundle of herbs and returned it to its hook beside the stove. He closed the front door, the outer windows and the winter windows, collected the broom and swept up the snow. He carried four birch logs from the woodpile to the grate, blew on the embers to rouse the flames and then, treading lightly on his still-painful feet, he went to the drawing-room door, which hung ajar, cupped his ear and peered inside.
Beneath the three large panes and the one small pane of the window, Maria Ivanovna was lying among the leaking horsehair of the green velvet couch. Her hair was loose, black at the ends and silver at the roots. Her face was as white as the roofs and the sky. She was covered by an old grey blanket, which rose falteringly with her chest, and under the blanket the upholstery was stained almost black.
Beside her, Eduard Ignatyevich was kneeling with his back to the door, the soles of his boots solid with snow. His head was hanging forwards so that only a trace of his hair was visible above his heavy, black-clad shoulders. Although the window had been closed, around him the room was in chaos. The one-legged table had fallen over, scattering soil and geranium leaves across the narrow, striped carpet, shattering the pot, while his work of philosophy had been carried from the desk to the floor, where its pages described the spiralling path of the wind.
Had Kostya not known his father he might have thought that he was praying.
On the table in the icon corner, Maria Ivanovna wore her old black dress with the white lace collar. Two copper coins concealed her eyes. On her chest, she held a cross with a long silver chain, which, as the priest lowered the lid of the coffin, escaped suddenly from her fingers and spilled down her chest in a quick, soft rush. In another life, Kostya might have thrown himself forwards, grasped her hands and found them to be warm, but in this one he remained in line against the blank kitchen wall, beneath the shrouded mirror, in his least-darned trousers and his best linen shirt, and his eyes were hot and his vision indistinct as the priest laid out the pall – as if putting an infant to bed.
He followed his father, his uncle and the two other bearers out of the apartment, down the stairs, into Preobrazhenskaya Street. Through the raging snow, he saw the man from number 22, who was beating his wife with the buckle of his belt – although he stopped when he saw the funeral procession, and the two of them rose, removed their hats and crossed themselves with three fingers. At the Assembly of Nobles, a handful of revellers was emerging from a night-long ball – garrison officers in tight white trousers, ladies in silk now that crinoline had fallen out of favour, their bosoms bare to the aching cold – and since the Tsiolkovsky family were nobles themselves they acknowledged the coffin with a dip of their heads before they climbed into a fur-lined troika.
Beyond the priest, his lilac cope and grubby sledge, Kostya made out izvozchiki turning down side streets as if realizing suddenly that they were going the wrong way. On Preobrazhenskaya Street, they met no vehicles or pedestrians at all, and when the procession steered north on to Vladimirskaya Street so they turned into the wind and even the alternating skeletons of the lime trees and the gas lamps vanished into the blizzard.
January 1873
‘The very large numbers, which are so often met with in Astronomy,’ wrote Amédée Guillemin in The Heavens, ‘leave for the most part only a very vague impression on the mind. It is difficult for the imagination to figure the objects that they represent; and where it is a question even of moderate distances, it is only by the aid of comparisons that we can arrive at any precise idea. If these distances are greater than those which we can actually see on a terrestrial horizon, say than 40 or 70 versts, the image properly so called vanishes, and we are compelled to have recourse to other means of representation; for example, we ask how much time a locomotive, going at a known rate, will require to traverse the given distance. The idea of duration comes then in aid of space to complete and perfect it.