Konstantin

by Tom Bullough

  Moscow was nothing like Konstantin had imagined. Unlike the neat grid of Vyatka, its streets seemed to meander wildly in any direction they chose: dusty and unpaved, as if the city were not the consummation of civilization, after all, but merely a gargantuan village. He passed triangle-topped mansions and monumental churches, but more often than not he walked through a riot of little wooden houses, red, green, white and yellow, windmills with sleeping sails, yards where a cow or two stood tethered in a circle of dry, shorn grass or a group of peasants was drinking in the shade.

  For perhaps half an hour, he stood beneath a lime tree on Nemetskaya Street, gazing across an arching drive and hemispherical garden at the tawny palace of the Imperial Moscow Technical School – imagining in every window libraries, lecture theatres, laboratories equipped with every air pump, compound microscope and voltaic pile available to technology. He watched young men in bow ties come bounding down the steps into the sunlight, recoil comically and tip their caps over their eyes. He watched them climb into droshkies, or retire beneath the dense, strange trees – words darting between them like light. Several times he steeled himself to enter the gates, to find the professor and explain to him that he would like to become one of his students – although he had no letter, and he would be unable to hear his lectures, and his ragged clothes were stained with rust, dust, sweat and dye.

  It was late afternoon when Konstantin decided that he would have to find somewhere to wash and sleep before he made any attempt to enter the university, and so, his empty water bottle dangling from his hand, he returned slowly back up Nemetskaya Street, keeping to the shadows on the left-hand side, peering through eyes struggling to focus at the notices of rooms to let. He found one pink house covered in plaster impressions of naked children where an attic was available for twenty roubles a month. He found rooms or sleeping places in several of the wooden houses for six roubles, even five, and once he summoned up the confidence to knock and attempt to negotiate, but by the time he reached a small Old Believers’ Church at a bend in the road and saw ahead of him the junction with Olkhovskaya Street he was so thirsty and exhausted that he was ready to collapse in the churchyard.

  Across the street, a washerwoman was hoisting a rope from a well, her spotted dress spotted further with dust, soap and water, her lips turned down with the effort. As she set the earthenware pot on the ground, the muscles showed long and hard in her thin, bare arms. She waited while her daughter – a skinny creature with one leg shorter than the other – tied its handle to a yoke, then she paused to cough, her face pale and drawn in the tiring sunlight.

  ‘Excuse me, madam?’ Konstantin approached the pair cautiously. ‘I am sorry to intrude, but might you be able to spare me a drink of water, please?’

  The washerwoman looked up, crossed herself sharply.

  ‘It … It’s not …’ he stammered. ‘It’s not … It just helps me to hear, madam. I would just like some water, if I may?’

  She looked at him again, then nodded guardedly and watched as he filled up his bottle and drank in gulps, which turned instantly to sweat on his dust-covered face.

  ‘Thank you, madam,’ he said.

  ‘What’s all this “madam” business? You ain’t blind as well, are you?’

  ‘No, madam.’

  ‘Just come off the train, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes …’

  The washerwoman sighed, and her face slackened. She had grey-green eyes, which caught the low Sun as she pushed a few strands of dark greasy hair back from her forehead. ‘Where you from?’

  ‘I … I come from Ryazan.’

  ‘Well, you’re in the right place, anyway.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Ryazansky Station’s just round the corner, ain’t it? Everybody round here’s from Ryazan.’

  ‘Are you from Ryazan yourself?’

  ‘Pronsk.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Konstantin. ‘My mother came from Pronsk!’

  ‘Who’s that, then?’

  ‘Her … Well, her maiden name was Yumasheva. Maria Ivanovna Yumasheva. Her parents had a workshop in Dolgoye, making barrels and –’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Lord, you have come down in the world.’ She hesitated, watching him. ‘Rooms too much for you, are they? I seen you looking at the notices.’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘Well, there’s no shortage of space. Harvest, ain’t it? Everyone’s got the hell out of here, and I can’t say I blame them. Trouble is, no offence, but most people come off the train don’t know their foot from their face. You can’t blame people for trying their luck, can you?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘How much you got, then?’

  ‘Three roubles, madam.’

  ‘Run to four?’

  Konstantin followed the washerwoman past an empty slaughterhouse and a tavern where a few drinkers were emerging into the waning heat, scratching at their sweat-soaked sheepskins, slapping at the mosquitoes. They passed through a gateway, formerly whitewashed, into a courtyard where there stood a wooden latrine – although this seemed to indicate a general area rather than anything specific, since it sat within a circle of morbid mould, innumerable flies and no fewer turds in various stages of decomposition, their stench so violent that Konstantin felt the tears coming to his eyes. On its far side, there stood a big dirty house, draped with lines of brightly coloured clothes, as if in perverse celebration. They crossed a type of causeway and arrived in a basement divided by whitewashed partitions, where the air was harsh with tobacco smoke and boiling cabbage, and a multitude of wasted, half-dressed people appeared from the crowded doorways – shouting, apparently to see if he could hear them.

  Vera Valentinova lived in a room ten arshins long and five arshins wide. It had a high square window, sleeping boards around the walls and a stove shared with the neighbours, which was burning so fiercely that it could scarcely have been cooler in the oven. Above the fire, a pot of water was coming to the boil and condensation fell from the cracked, mould-smeared ceiling on to piles of stinking linen, a trough full of soapy water, a small bony girl, a naked toddler and an old soldier fashioning keys with hammer and anvil. In a corner cordoned off with further boards, Konstantin pulled off his shirt and his trousers and sank on to a thin straw mattress – the fleas bursting beneath him as he fell immediately asleep.

  It was noon the following day when Konstantin entered a tall, arched door in the Chertkovsky Palace, and his nostrils filled with the rich, organic swell of books. After the torrid sunshine on Myasnitskaya Street, it took him several seconds before he was able to distinguish the library’s deep-set windows, the ranks of shelves nearly twice his height, the desks where figures sat hunched over mysterious volumes, their faces stained green by the shades of kerosene lamps. Slipping past a mob of men around the librarian’s counter, he found a ledger the size of a newspaper, which appeared to detail every book in the entire collection. He turned the pages slowly, reverently, his eyes travelling across titles on chemistry, history and mathematics, theology, philosophy and philology – all inscribed in the same firm hand. He took a scrap of paper from his pocket, multiplied the entries on one page by the total number of pages and came to the figure 27,950.

  ‘Thirty-two thousand six hundred and twelve,’ said a low, learned voice. ‘Including the manuscripts.’

  Looking up sharply, Konstantin found a librarian craning towards him, his long, bony fingers spread across the surface of the counter, his short grey beard almost brushing Konstantin’s ear.

  ‘I saw the ear trumpet,’ he explained. ‘May I offer any help?’

  Cautiously, Konstantin took the instrument from his back.

  ‘I …’ he said. ‘I’m looking for certain books about science, sir.’

  ‘Are you a university student?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘It is, of course, much better to study in a library.’

  ‘Do … you think so?’

  ‘Certainly!’ The librarian smiled, as if this were
, after all, not a view to be taken too seriously. ‘The university, alas, is an obsolete institution, a slave to industry, whose toys and trifles it considers to be mankind’s highest imaginable achievement. It recognizes no authority, sets itself in judgement over our ancestors, over the prophets, even over God Himself!

  ‘Of course, at present the library remains immature. It is unaware of its closeness to the Church and its inherent opposition to industry – and, yes, the university – but its day is approaching. The future lies in integration. When we have brought the words of the ancestors and the relics of the ancestors together beneath one roof, then we shall have made a crucial first step, and indeed, even now we are making preparations to move this entire library into the Rumyantsev Museum!’

  Konstantin stared at the librarian in astonishment. He was a tall, ragged figure, his shirt plainly visible through a ruptured seam in his brown, shapeless jacket. Beneath his bald, vein-patterned head and black, thrusting eyebrows, he looked back at Konstantin with eyes as bright and ironic as a boy’s.

  ‘So,’ he continued. ‘Which books did you have in mind?’

  ‘Well, sir … Please, do you have The Principles of Chemistry by Dmitri Mendeleev?’

  ‘All four volumes.’

  ‘And Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men by François Arago?’

  ‘All … eight volumes.’ He glanced at the clock on the wall behind him. ‘Unfortunately, we are obliged to close the library at three o’clock – an absurd rule – but if you would be good enough to appoint yourself a desk and make a list of your requests I shall assemble as many of your books as I can this afternoon, and any others will be waiting for you when we open in the morning.’

  On his third morning in Moscow, at ten minutes to ten, Konstantin arrived at the Chertkovsky Library to commence a primary course in physics and mathematics. He sat on the step between the two bare-chested, cross-looking statues that projected from the sky-coloured wall and looked across the street at the cheerful signs of the grocers, fishmongers and readymade clothiers that lined the opposite pavement. Smoking in their doorways, the shopkeepers were universally plumper than their counterparts in Vyatka – their faces pink, the napes of their necks clean-shaven. Above them, the city reached with confidence into the deepening sky: the domes of the churches exultant gold, the dense, lobed oak trees in the gardens of the mansions throwing softly stirring shadows across the trundling tramcars, the merchants’ wives in their pearls and gaily coloured headscarves, the teams of hawkers selling ice cream, woodcock, dusters.

  In the open street, three sunburnt peasants were kneeling in the hot sand, hammering cobbles with strong, discernible blows.

  ‘Volodya,’ announced a young man, loudly. He sat down beside Konstantin, extended an unclean hand and waited for him to lift his ear trumpet. ‘I saw you yesterday, talking to Nikolai Fedorovich.’

  ‘The … librarian?’ asked Konstantin.

  ‘Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov is the Chief Cataloguer.’

  ‘Oh …’

  ‘I’m a student,’ Volodya told him, ‘which tends to elicit Nikolai Fedorovich’s disapproval, but not all students are alike, are they?’

  ‘I … I’m afraid I’ve never met a student before …’

  ‘Not all students are alike,’ Volodya confirmed. He took a cigarette from a pocket of his grubby, well-cut jacket, struck a match and considered Konstantin through his pince-nez.

  ‘Nikolai Fedorovich … seems like a remarkable man,’ said Konstantin, feeling that he ought to say something.

  ‘You can have no idea how remarkable. He is the one man in Moscow to have called Tolstoy a fool to his face!’

  ‘Tolstoy?’ asked Konstantin, uncertainly.

  ‘The count is a frequent visitor to the Chertkovsky Library. On a recent occasion, he found a book containing a list of every major in the Russian army and he told Nikolai Fedorovich that, were he the Chief Cataloguer, he would dispose of the entire collection save two dozen volumes. Well! Nikolai Fedorovich was not pleased. He informed him that every book contains the reminiscences of the ancestors, and that he was the greatest fool he had ever met!’

  ‘Where … does Nikolai Fedorovich come from?’

  ‘Well …’ A queue of scholars and students was forming around them on the pavement, and Volodya seemed to appreciate the audience. He exhaled smoke into the sunlight. ‘Some say that he was once a teacher in a town named Borovsk, in the district of Kaluga, and that he walked barefoot all the way to Moscow. Others say that he is the illegitimate son of Prince Gagarin, which would mean that he grew up in the district of Tambov, but if this is true he has certainly received no money from that direction. Nikolai Fedorovich has no possessions besides a trunk for a bed, a book for a pillow and a newspaper for a blanket. He lives in a room costing six roubles a month, if you can believe such a thing. He accepts a salary of only 498 roubles, since if he were to earn 500 roubles or more he would be obliged to perform jury service and he believes that no man has the right to pass judgement on any other!’

  Volodya turned as the panelled doors of the library swung open.

  ‘Come!’ He stretched and rose. ‘There is a spare desk next to my own!’

  November 1873

  ‘I’ve got a letter for you, madam,’ said Vera Valentinova mysteriously, as Konstantin arrived at the well in the freezing gloom of an early-winter evening.

  Around them, lights burnt in the tavern and the Church of St Yekaterina. A lantern swung from the box-seat of a big sledge grinding through the snow on Nemetskaya Street, its driver muffled to the eyes. Such was the heat in their room that the washerwoman rarely bothered to throw more than a shawl about her shoulders when she went to the well – although already she was shivering, and as she heaved her second pot to the hard ground she began to cough uncontrollably, the red blood blooming in her cheeks.

  Slinging his ear trumpet across his back, Konstantin put the heavy yoke over his shoulders. He waited for Vera Valentinova to recover, then set out for the courtyard, where a couple of hefty, red-eyed men were dragging frozen carcasses from the slaughterhouse to a waiting sledge, among the yellow domes of urine that rose above the bullet turds in the dirty snow.

  In the corridor, he seemed to smell the stench of wintering animals. He squeezed past drunkards in too-large boots, a mother and daughter assembling cigarettes out of paper cartridges and loose tobacco, a tailor squatting over an ancient greatcoat, the broad, short-legged women who seemed never to have anything better to do than smoke and paint their faces. Entering the room, he set the pots down gratefully near the stove. With a nod he greeted Sofia, the washerwoman’s daughter, who was hanging clothes in tight, bright rows, and retired to his corner – wondering who could possibly have written to him here since he collected the monthly dispatches from his family at the post office near the library on Myasnitskaya Street.

  His corner had been transformed during the past four months. By spending only ninety kopecks a month on bread, he had been able to save anything from five to ten roubles of his allowance, depending on his father’s generosity, and his sliver of floor had been brought almost to the level of the cot by the tattered books he had bought in the Sukharev Market. On the partition, there hung a copy of the periodic table, which had cost him an extortionate rouble, while on the narrow shelf there stood several candle stumps, a kerosene burner, a tripod, a distorted retort stand, three blackened flasks and two ranks of bottles containing mercury, ethanol, iron filings, cobalt, magnesium and sundry other chemicals.

  Speaking inaudibly, Vera Valentinova appeared above the eight groups of elements, a letter in her still-trembling hand.

  The envelope was expensive, Konstantin could see that at once. It was pink and soft, and despite the stink of the steam and the linen he could smell its perfume, which told of carpets and silk-lined coats. Pushing his hair out of his eyes, he broke the seal and removed a short note written in a voluptuous hand, an address engraved along the top. He read it twice, and when he lo
oked up he found that Vera Valentinova remained on the far side of the partition, framed by a lace-fringed tablecloth – her eyes narrow with interest.

  ‘I ain’t read it!’ she insisted, as he lifted his ear trumpet.

  ‘I … know,’ said Konstantin.

  ‘Even if my reading was any good, which it ain’t, it ain’t none of my business, is it?’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Clarissa Emilovna?’ The washerwoman frowned.

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘She’s the daughter of Emil Ivanovich Tsindel.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Honestly, madam!’ She rolled her eyes. ‘The whole world just passes you by, don’t it? Who do you think I do all my washing for, eh? Who do you think owns this bloody house? Emil Ivanovich Tsindel! The Emil Tsindel Factory? You’ve heard of that, surely?’

  Konstantin shook his head.

  ‘Emil Ivanovich Tsindel is the biggest manufacturer in Moscow! He’s the Calico King! Christ alive, madam, Clarissa Emilovna’s one of the richest heiresses in the whole bloody country!’ She paused, expectantly. ‘Come on! We’re all of us waiting! Tell us! What does she want?’

  ‘She … just wants to know who I am.’

  ‘Why, then?’

  ‘Well … She says that … She says that she’s heard her servants talking about you and how you’ve got … Well, she says they say you’ve got a young alchemist living in your … house, and she wants to know if I can really make gold.’

  ‘An alchemist!’ Vera Valentinova exclaimed. She clapped her hands. ‘Oh, that’s priceless! Do you hear that, Viktor? An alchemist! Oh, that’s made my day, that has!’

  ‘Should … Should I write back to her, then?’

  ‘Well, of course you should!’