by Tom Bullough
Matvei Ilyich nodded his assent.
‘But … But, sir, surely if a series of barrels are connected to one another, and they stretch both in and out of the water, then effectively they become a single object. And, if that is the case, then surely there is no difference in pressure between the upper and lower surfaces?’
‘What are you trying to say?’ asked the foreman, his smile beginning to fracture.
‘Well, sir … If there is no difference in pressure then surely the machine would not move?’
The reaction machine was coming to the boil. As the first steam spewed from the tubulure, it began to lumber across the floorboards.
‘Konstantin,’ said his father, in a low, icy voice. ‘Matvei Ilyich is a member of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society. His machine has not only been approved by his peers, it has been acclaimed by the press in the capital itself.’ He indicated the newspaper cutting on the wall. ‘I believe that you owe him an apology.’
‘Well, Father, I do not wish to cause any offence …’
‘An apology, if you please.’
‘But, Father –’
‘Konstantin! Stop this!’
Reaching the bookcase, the reaction machine wobbled, turned, met the adjacent wall at a shallower angle and resumed its journey back towards the desk – its jet of steam growing in length and force, the lantern reflected in its cylindrical boiler.
Wincing, Eduard Ignatyevich pushed himself to his feet, and so Konstantin did the same. The two of them faced one another in the dingy light, and suddenly Konstantin realized that he was taller than his father. Behind the cloud of his cigarette smoke and the cloud-like scratches on the lenses of his spectacles, Eduard Ignatyevich fought to stand upright. He stared at his son with open fury, but his eyes were small between their heavy lids and the long white beard on his wizened cheeks, and his shoulders remained the stooping, suffering shoulders of an old man.
June 1873
And so he saw the tall grass in the endless fields, moving in chorus with the evening breeze. He saw the haymakers who followed the contours, swinging their scythes in martial rhythm. He saw the sky-blue notes of the cornflowers, the dandelions clamouring on the banks. He saw the light that rang from the surface of the river – beneath the three tight folds of his belly, his naked feet, the prow of the sleepily revolving praam. As the shadows extended from the willows and the birches, he felt a tiny, stinging sensation on his back, and he turned to find the captain, Vasily Vasilyevich, sitting astride the pitched plank roof, his brightly coloured Circassian overcoat spilling around his bare brown chest. Removing the stem of his tobacco pipe from his lips, Vasily Vasilyevich grinned at the precision of his aim. He leant backwards to mime a fanfare, and so Konstantin rose and handed him his ear trumpet – which he used to play a three-note summons to dinner.
Konstantin crossed the bales of linen – claret, mauve and indigo, still faintly acrid from the dye-works – and descended the ladder into the cabin at the stern. Already the crew were sitting in a circle around the big wooden bowl: a dozen wiry, sunburnt figures, travelling to the Volga to work as fishermen, barge haulers or stokers on the steamboats. Like them, he removed his cap, washed his hands and crossed himself ten times. He took his bread and salt, and waited for the captain’s daughter, Katya, to pour the soup from the iron pot that hung from the beam above the little fire. He ate, and, since even with his ear trumpet he could never hear anything when he was eating, he studied each of the men in turn, following their laughter, their wild gesticulations suggestive of an enormous fish or fluvial monster. That way, he was able to look briefly, without embarrassment, at Katya: a small, neat girl of about fifteen, one eye asquint beneath her long, dark lashes, her single plait escaping from a bright green headscarf, a gap showing between her front teeth when she smiled.
The best thing about these long, light evenings was that Konstantin could read until eleven or even later without so much as tiring his eyes. On his perch on the prow, he looked once more through The Heavens, which he had found in his bag with his blanket, his passport, his sheepskin, his spare socks from Anna and his letter of introduction to a man named Professor Brachmann at the Imperial Technical School in Moscow. He read that Sirius possessed a diameter of 17 million versts, twelve times greater than the Sun. He read that, excepting the Sun, the nearest star was Alpha Centauri, at the ‘fearful distance’ of 29 trillion versts, and that the naked eye could perceive, at most, about five thousand stars, but that with the twenty-fut reflector telescope built in England by Sir William Herschel it was possible to see more than 20 million. Already Konstantin knew most of these figures by heart, but still he liked to read them over again, and then, as if digesting, to watch some scene on the ever-changing river. In this way, he saw nightjars wrinkling the water. He saw columns of mosquitoes among the willows and the alders. He saw boys splashing beneath clusters of diagonally patterned houses, and peasants paddling from their villages to the hay fields, where, despite fourteen hours of mowing, raking and binding, they sang and danced against the fire-coloured sky.
When, at last, some impression of darkness fell over the Vyatka, Konstantin scaled the roof where Vasily Vasilyevich continued his vigil, and he lay down on the ridgepole, his head towards the prow, his arms and his legs spilling to either side of him, watching the stars turn as slowly as the praam. To the south, he saw Orion, his belt protruding from the dark, shining river, and as he followed its line he came to Aldebaran, the eye of the Bull, and since he had nothing else whatsoever to do he narrowed his eyes to bring it into focus and simply watched its scintillations: a sequence of colours more rapid than he could begin to apprehend, their root note red, like lust or fury.
‘Aldebaran …’ he breathed.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and reached for his ear trumpet.
‘What did you say?’ asked the captain.
‘Aldebaran!’ Konstantin repeated, in the same, marvelling voice.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a red star of the first magnitude.’ He had still not moved his eyes. ‘It lies at a distance of sixty-eight light years from the Earth, which is to say … about 700 trillion versts. If you were to travel there by express train it would take … something in the region of 22 million years.’
Vasily Vasilyevich laughed a low, friendly laugh, his breath hot with spirit. ‘You talk just like a book, you do,’ he said. ‘Anyone ever tell you that?’
Konstantin was almost asleep when he felt a tremor in the boards and the long, heavy stirring of the great boat ceased. He opened his eyes to see Vasily Vasilyevich already on his feet, calling to somebody in the darkness, beckoning to him urgently before he vanished off the end of the roof.
On the deck, most of the bargemen were already scrambling on to the ladder, into the shallow water where the current was visible in the stars, in the launch hanging downstream at the length of its rope, in the filament shadows of the fishing lines. Konstantin removed his shirt and his ear trumpet and lowered himself past the massive hull until he felt the fine sand between his toes. Around him, he saw identical skies between dark, symmetrical banks. The bargemen were black beneath the looming barge, charting the sandbank, and soon they congregated near the prow where the water came barely to their knees, turned to one another, pointed and shook their heads so that their shaggy hair snaked across their shoulders.
Konstantin set his hands to the great, corrugated wall, gripped the iron rivets between his fingers, closed his eyes, smelt the meat-like oakum in the cracks, the engrained stench of the men pressed around him. He felt the minnows nibbling at the hairs of his ankles. He pushed until there were colours in his eyelids, and when he looked again he realized that Katya had arrived in the space beside him, her smell exquisite, alien as the water, and so he pushed until he was shouting with the effort, and when at last the stern caught the current so the Vyatka became itself once more and he fell forwards, his head emerging from the heavens like a god’s.
At the conflue
nce of the Kama and the Volga, the steamboats crawled across the iron-grey water, trailing smoke as black as the clouds and pairs of waves on which fishermen rolled and tossed. Sitting on the roof, Vasily Vasilyevich raised flags of greeting and negotiation to willow-lashed rafts and other barges heavy with rye and barley, soap and glass, potash and gun carriages, and in time a steamboat with a bright red funnel appeared alongside them – a man in a fluttering coat lifting his low, peaked cap among the piles of birch logs. He called to the helmsman and as the twin wheels span and the tug approached the prow a deckhand threw a well-coiled rope across the intervening foam – attached to a second rope as thick as his leg.
The rope rose, snapped tight, jerked the praam forwards, fell, slapped the water.
‘I tell you, boy,’ said Vasily Vasilyevich, appearing beneath the roof. The first fat raindrops exploded on the open deck. ‘I tell you, you young ones don’t know how easy you’ve got it. Back when I was a boy, well, that was thirty years ago now. These days there’s five hundred steamers on the Volga, give or take, but back then you could count them on your hands … See them woods?’ He gestured past the churning paddle wheels at a wilderness of tree stumps and limestone cliffs. ‘It wasn’t just the hauling, which was no kind of fun, I can tell you. Still isn’t, I shouldn’t wonder. Back then, the woods come right down to the water, and the woods, they was chock-full of bandits! Chock-full! You never knew when they was going to come leaping out on you!’
Among the tangled clouds, there was a perceptible shimmering, and the captain counted out versts on his fingers.
‘You see, I was working for Demidov in them days. The iron foundry, north of Nizhny Tagil? Well, you know how they get the iron out of there? Old Demidov, he put up the biggest dams you ever saw. Lakes thirty versts end to end! Ten from side to side! As God’s my witness … All through the winter we was building him praams on the riverbed, filling them with pipes, sheets, nails, spades, trays, anything you could make out of iron, and then, come the thaw, we’d say our prayers and, bam! Up come the floodgates! Two hundred versts on a wave we’d go! Over rapids! Round bends like horseshoes! That’s the thin end of the wedge, that is. There weren’t a trick we didn’t learn …’
Again, the bleeding roof shone white.
‘Because if we got stuck, that was it, you see? If you met a bank or a rock, you’d got to get off him that bloody moment or that praam weren’t going nowhere till next year. You see, you need to know the tricks if you’re going to get to Nizhny. You can’t beat experience. And on the Volga, well, if you don’t know the steamboat captains they’ll hold you to ransom. If you don’t pay they’ll leave you to the mercies of Old Man Caspian!’ He smiled amicably, fine lines fanning from his eyes. ‘Be sure and mention that to your uncle, won’t you? If you should happen to be writing …’
Two days later, Konstantin looked past the Tatars making their afternoon obeisances on the paddle-boxes of the tugboat at the whitewashed towers of Nizhny Novgorod, at a chaos of masts, rafts, ornate barges and ones as plain as their own, of two-storey passenger ships where ladies with parasols shielded their pale skin from the feverish Sun, and steamboats in such numbers that the skein of their smoke seemed to truss up the sky. As the crew tied up on the Siberian Wharf, which stretched three versts along the north bank of the Makaryev Fair, a ragged army of labourers descended on the praam, shouting for work, showing their strength by tearing planks from the roof. The captain sprang on to the dock in a pink cravat and a waistcoat with bright copper buttons, while Konstantin spent unnecessary minutes pulling on his boots, checking the contents of his bag, tucking his hair beneath his cap.
‘Vasily Vasilyevich?’ he asked finally, as he scaled the rope ladder. He looked warily at the teeming traffic. ‘Vasily Vasilyevich? Could you direct me to the station, please?’
‘Lord, you are in a hurry!’ The captain laughed, turned to the labourers, glanced at the dust-smothered Sun. ‘Well, this lot reckon you might have about forty minutes. You might just about make it, but we’ve still got the better part of a roof over our heads. There’ll be another train first thing in the morning. Why not wait the night?’
‘I … I think I ought to get to Moscow.’
The captain nodded and put a friendly arm round his shoulder. He peered across the linen bales towards the cabin at the stern, where his daughter was cleaning the pots. She smiled, curtsied, appeared to look at both of them at once.
Konstantin followed Katya among carts laden with grain and watermelons, past mountains of cotton in which their own cargo would have been swallowed in a moment, and empty praams where men were working with saws and axes. On the end of the peninsula, the half-built cathedral had acquired red paint and black roofs in the five years that he had been away. Sometimes the two of them walked side by side and Konstantin inspected a slender island, which had appeared in the Oka – bristling with barges, piled with iron in every imaginable form. Sometimes Katya led the way and he watched the lilt of her hips beneath her long green skirt, the dance of her neat leather boots, the long dark plait whose tip flicked like a tail beneath her silver belt.
Together they wormed their way among men with brown skin and black beards, along a boulevard of bearskins, fox skins, wolfskins, bundles of paper, stinking sterlet, grindstones, wineskins, skittering rats and seething flies.
‘Sir?’ called Katya, as they arrived in a square of shops with pointed roofs and curious, molten corners. Her voice was shrill, with the easy confidence of her father. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, how are you going to be a student if you can’t hear properly? I mean, students have teachers and lessons and things, don’t they? Like in a school?’
‘Well … Well, Yekaterina Vasilyevna,’ said Konstantin, hesitantly. Their eyes met momentarily round the bell of his ear trumpet. ‘I have a letter for a professor who used to teach my father at the Forestry Institute in Petersburg. I hope that he might help me. Or else, I believe that there is a free library in Moscow. I might be able to go there …’
‘You never been to Moscow before, then?’
Konstantin shook his head. ‘I’ve never even been on a train. Well … When I was a boy we used to live in Ryazan and sometimes we used to run and hang on the back, but that’s all. It doesn’t really count …’
Katya laughed, glanced towards a crescent-crowned mosque, which loomed out of the dust cloud. He guessed that she had heard the fifteen-minute whistle.
‘You’re brave, you are,’ she said, simply.
Crossing a bridge above a canal apparently used to drain the latrines, they left the cobbles and joined the tides of merchants in a swamp-like street, fighting their way among ox-carts, itinerant vendors of tea and rabbit skins, beggars with suppurating sores. Plainly, the fair spread for many versts beyond its central shops. They passed two men fighting in a circle, an enclosure of plunging horses, a tireless succession of stalls selling rags, jugs of kerosene, boxes of tea, and Konstantin was just beginning to hope that he would miss the train, after all, when they emerged in the courtyard of a large white mansion.
On the muddy wooden platform, the five-minute whistle seemed already to have gone. There were mobs around the steps to the third-class carriages. Women were weeping and waving pocket handkerchiefs. Even the four cavalry officers Konstantin noticed through a first-class window appeared to be throwing down their cards with particular animation. Beneath a two-headed eagle at the mouth of the station, the locomotive, its two leading wheels, four driving wheels and conical funnel, were almost invisible for the steam erupting from its long, black pistons.
Suddenly, Katya stretched, closed her eyes and kissed him with soft, strong lips. He heard the clack of her teeth against his own. He tasted the tang of her saliva, felt the pressure of her small, neat nose, but by the time he realized what was happening the train was moving and she was dancing back into the anonymity of the fair.
July 1873
The following morning, the July sunlight bore down on Moscow. It threw heat from the cobbl
es, from bleached stone walls whose every crack and blemish it exposed, from green iron roofs that must hardly have cooled down during the night. Outside Yaroslavsky Station, Konstantin emerged from the hordes of izvozchiki, who ignored him to a man, and arrived on a broad street empty except for a two-storey tramcar, blinds on the sunny side, moving as ponderously as its white-hooded horses. He went to sit on the scalded grass in the shade of a birch tree, untied his bag and took out The Heavens, a hunk of black bread, a bottle of water, his sheepskin, his blanket, his socks and his passport.
The letter was gone.
Konstantin turned the bag upside down. He shook the blanket, leafed through the book, rifled in the pockets of his coat, even checked the purse in his waistband. Dazed with sleeplessness, he looked at the people in the square beneath the tall white station, and at this distance, like some terrible joke, every one of them seemed to be somebody he knew. A stiff little man was the Latin master, Alexei Ilyich Rednikov. A spherical gentleman in a calèche was Stanislaw Ignatyevich. A young woman in a bonnet was his sister Anna.
He must have fallen asleep in the end, since he discovered suddenly that he was sitting in the brutal sunlight, and that a string of carts was hauling iron out of the square, their cargo shimmering, their wheels thunderous even to him. He looked over his shoulder at the clock on the turret of Ryazansky Station, which told him it was early afternoon. He took out his bottle, drank several mouthfuls, splashed some water on his burning face. He remembered his letter and pored once again through his bag and his pockets. He stared at a pond where fishermen lay among the trees, watching their floats through half-closed eyes, then, since he could think of no other course of action, he decided to follow the directions that he had been given by the ticket inspector. He got to his feet and turned south on to Krasnoselsky Street – crossing the tracks of which he had dreamt a thousand times, which followed the telegraph wires back through Kolomna, Voskresensk and Lyubertsy, all the way home to Ryazan.