by Tom Bullough
‘Would you be able to deliver it?’
The washerwoman stopped. Her smile subsided. ‘All … All right,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘I’m only doing it this once, mind. And keep it to yourself! You don’t want her father finding out. He ain’t exactly noted for his good nature.’
That night, Konstantin lay on his cot, composing his reply to the millionaire’s daughter. Beyond the partition and the lines of the Tsindels’ linen, the old soldier’s hammer had fallen quiet and only Vera Valentinova’s cough interrupted the silence. Through the subsiding steam, he could see the flame of a single candle reflected in the rotting plaster of the ceiling, and as he considered how to present himself in his best, most intellectual light, he could picture her sitting on her stool beside the stove, attending at last to clothes of her own, holding her needle between a thumb and two fingers, drawing the thread towards her with long, tired movements.
January 1874
One Saturday, Konstantin arrived at his desk to find a slim green book concealed among his normal textbooks. Its cover showed a train of cylindrical carriages pulled by a steam engine shaped like a bullet. At the top were the words From the Earth to the Moon, and at the bottom was the name ‘Jules Verne’. Konstantin looked past Volodya, who was immersed in a political tract at the next-door desk, to the librarian’s counter where Nikolai Fedorovich was entering the new acquisitions into the catalogue, writing intently, his lowered head reflecting a nearby chandelier. He watched him for several moments before he decided that the book must contain information relevant to his course, turned to the first chapter and started to read.
The book was, he assumed, some kind of fantasy, since if it were fact then even he would surely have heard of the enterprise before. It concerned an American organization called the Gun Club, which was devoted to the development of ever-greater pieces of artillery. With the end of the American Civil War, so the author explained, the purpose of the Gun Club had been called into question, and so its president, Impey Barbicane, had devised a new project to build a cannon big enough to hit the Moon. The idea alone was staggering in its audacity. The cannonball would need to achieve an initial velocity of 12,000 yards per second – fifteen times greater than the initial velocity of the greatest cannon currently in existence. The cannon Barbican proposed was 900 feet in length, nine feet in bore and six feet in thickness. This cyclopean machine would be located in Florida, on the Washington meridian, and it would be aimed in the exact direction of the Moon at its zenith.
Konstantin read with delight an account of the creation of the Solar System, when centrifugal forces triumphed over centripetal forces and the matter of the planets flew outwards from the Sun to assume their places in orbit, spinning themselves to create satellites. He laughed aloud at the casting of the cannon, when 68,000 tons of molten iron poured at once from 1,200 trapezoidal firebrick furnaces into a mould the size of a hollowed-out mountain, and when a Frenchman named Michel Ardan declared his intention to replace the cannonball with an aluminium shell fifteen feet tall in which he would travel as a passenger Konstantin felt an excitement so deep, so pervasive, that his hands began to shake and he had to weigh down the pages with a textbook to read on.
At last, observed by 5 million spectators from every quarter of the planet, a crowd that made even the Makaryev Fair seem like a family gathering, 400,000 pounds of gun cotton was detonated by electrical signal. A tower of fire rose half a mile into the air. The Earth trembled like an animal. A cyclone spread from the mouth of the cannon, felling the crowd like rye in the field, uprooting trees, sinking ships, disturbing the atmosphere so severely that the sky was swallowed by clouds. On the far shores of Africa, a sound like thunder was reported by the coloured natives of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and at his desk in the Chertkovsky Library Konstantin seemed to see the projectile streak out of the atmosphere, into the void: a speck of black against the Moon’s dappled face.
The library, he realized suddenly, was empty. Even Volodya had vanished. He was sitting alone in the pool of light cast by his kerosene lamp, which was itself smoking, its fuel almost gone. Above the outlines of the desks and the hard, soundless floor, only two chandeliers continued to burn. He grabbed his cap, his exercise book and his pencil, and rose to his feet. He looked at the door, which appeared to be bolted, and turned to see Nikolai Fedorovich emerge from the shadows of the shelves, pushing a flight of steps, which he climbed to wind down another wick – the darkness rising from the narrow aisles, taking possession of the gold-traced ceiling.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Konstantin. ‘I …’
‘Would you be good enough to help me?’ the librarian asked, pleasantly.
‘Yes … Yes, of course.’
They carried the wooden construction to the last chandelier, and when its flame was snuffed, a single lantern lit the gaping hall. Nikolai Fedorovich looked across the desks for any other trace of a spark, then he turned to a pillar of books, which threw a wavering shadow through the strata of smoke, across the walls and the sealed white shutters.
‘Come!’ he said, handing Konstantin several volumes.
He led the way down the nearest aisle, wings of shadow opening from the shelves, the lantern’s light skidding across the red and green spines, through a small door, on to a staircase in which Konstantin could feel the librarian’s slow, measured steps and at once fell into his rhythm. Here, the air was sharp and clean, the hidden winter pouring from the walls, the shadows of the stairs folding beneath them as they climbed. They arrived in a corridor, where the light glanced across crates full of journals and manuscripts, probed into rooms where the shelves were packed so tightly it seemed hardly possible that anyone could have squeezed between them. They climbed a second, tighter staircase, and came at last to a bare room bent beneath the pitching roof, where a kerosene lamp lit an icon of the Crucifixion. Nikolai Fedorovich added a birch log to a small iron stove and a couple of pine cones to the samovar, which seemed already to be simmering.
‘So.’ He sat down behind a desk piled wildly with papers and bookmarked books, lit a candle and gestured to a chair. ‘What did you think?’
‘About … the book?’
‘About the book.’
‘I thought … I thought it was prodigious, Nikolai Fedorovich.’
The librarian nodded, the shadows of his eyebrows quivering on his forehead. He poured thick brown tea into a pair of brown-stained cups and added sugar and boiling water.
‘Just imagine!’ he said abruptly, leaning towards the ear trumpet. ‘Just imagine if the armies of the world were to come together in common purpose, to adapt their machinery to the conquest of gravity, the control and defeat of the blind forces of Nature! Just imagine if they were to turn their cannon from the horizontal to the vertical! After all, what is horizontality but the position of the animal, the position of the corpse, the position of submission to Nature? It is verticality that distinguishes man from his environment. When a child stands, is that not his first unnatural action, his first striving towards God? And think of the effect of this cannon! At once the sky floods with clouds, the barometer plummets and there is a rainstorm! I have read many accounts of how the use of artillery during the American Civil War was seen to provoke the clouds, just as people always said that the explosion of the Kremlin in 1812 brought rain. Can you imagine if the armies of the world were to aim their cannon not at the chests of peasants but at the clouds that mean their life and death? Well, then hunger would be no more!’ The librarian drank, his forehead carved with concentration. ‘There would be no further cause for conflict!’
Konstantin took his first sip of tea in six months, his thoughts stampeding.
‘Tell me, Konstantin Eduardovich,’ Nikolai Fedorovich went on, measured once again. ‘What faults did you find in the Gun Club’s project?’
‘Well, Nikolai Fedorovich. I … Well, I do believe that such a project would be possible …’
‘And why is that?’
‘Well, accordin
g to Isaac Newton, it would be possible for a cannonball travelling at 11.2 kilometres per second to leave the Earth’s gravitational field, which, I believe, equates to 12,000 yards per second, and there seems no reason why it would be impossible to create a large enough cannon. Whether the Gun Club’s dimensions are correct, I really don’t know. I would need to try and perform some calculations. But … As for any faults … Well, yes, I’m afraid I do think there is a problem with the concept of passengers. The Frenchman, Michel Ardan, is planning to make his home on the Moon, but it has long been established that there is no refraction of the stars at the edges of the Moon, which means that it has no gaseous envelope, and therefore that it probably has no water either since water would produce clouds of vapour, and besides … Well … I know that Impey Barbicane invents a series of wooden levels, which would collapse inside the projectile and help to absorb the shock of the explosion, but still the passengers would be struck by a wall of metal travelling at 40,000 kilometres per hour. I am afraid that they would simply be … flattened by their own weight.’
Across the desk, Nikolai Fedorovich was watching him closely, his eyes like lamps in the light of the candle.
‘That is well spoken, Konstantin Eduardovich. Tell me. Do you have any ideas that might resolve this problem?’
‘I … I’m afraid that I don’t, Nikolai Fedorovich.’
‘Anything might be helpful.’
‘Well …’ he said, after a moment. ‘Well, I do wonder … I mean, if the Earth threw off the molecules of the Moon in the first place, and the Sun threw off the molecules of the planets, then perhaps there would be some way to … to follow their example? I mean, perhaps there might be some way to harness the Earth’s centrifugal force?’
Konstantin emerged from a side door of the Chertkovsky Library, vital with tea, as alert and alive as the night itself. With payday in the factories, Myasnitskaya Street was a torrent of clean coats, polished boots and jackets shining with glass beads. For a moment he stood at the end of Furkasovsky Alley, peering at the stars behind the gas lamps, then he pushed his hands into the pockets of his sheepskin and set off south down Zlatoustinsky Lane, left on to Maroseyka Street, where the houses were taller and grander, and troikas flew at thirty kilometres per hour among the sledges and the revellers – the cockades of the coachmen fluttering, the hooves of the horses grinding sparks from the cobblestones. Behind their windows, he saw ladies in heavy cloaks, their coiffures splendid with jewels. In the doorways, where a little warmth leaked into the night, he saw men with torn shirts, shivering convulsively, their feet swaddled in strips of filthy linen. In his mind, he saw Moscow as a point on the planet, rotating through space at 960 kilometres per hour, and he imagined a craft thrown at such a velocity – out of this freezing darkness.
On the corner of Starosadsky Lane, Konstantin came to one of the three shops belonging to Emil Ivanovich Tsindel that he had found in central Moscow, and he looked past his scruffy, long-haired reflection in the window, past a wooden model of a full-breasted woman in a long black velvet dress, into a wealth of satin, silk and cotton – teeming with green leaves, pink flowers and shapes in swirling silver. He felt the heat from the glass through the acid-burnt holes in his thin trousers. He would, he knew, have a fresh letter from Clarissa Emilovna waiting for him at home, but still he took his exercise book from his pocket and read once again his letter from the previous evening, chuckling at her description of a starchy, snuff-taking aunt, smiling as she inquired in the mildest of terms if a normal mirror were not a more reliable addition to a telescope than a vessel full of mercury rotated around a vertical axis at a constant velocity to achieve a reflective paraboloid.
‘Clarissa Emilovna!’
There was a moment before Konstantin realized that Volodya was peering over his shoulder, a thick scarf wrapped around his neck and a fox-fur hat spilling over his spectacles. Konstantin span, saw three other young men behind him on the pavement, hid the letter in his pocket.
‘You devil, Konstantin!’ Volodya laughed into his ear. ‘And there was me thinking you were as pure as Nikolai Fedorovich!’
Konstantin looked past him, but he could see no means of flight. Reluctantly, he lifted his ear trumpet.
‘That address …’ Volodya repeated to himself, thoughtfully. He frowned, took a step backwards and looked with incredulity at the sign above the windows. ‘No! Konstantin, tell me honestly now, is that a letter from Clarissa Emilovna Tsindela you have there? Honestly now!’
‘No –’
‘It is!’ Volodya stared at him with open amazement. ‘Mon ami! With all respect to your charms, could you please explain how you have managed to attract the attention of one of the richest and most beautiful young women in Moscow? I mean, there are princes at court who attend the Tsindels’ balls just to have a look at her!’
Konstantin slid his old felt boots on the frozen pine.
‘Please, don’t …’ he murmured.
‘Very well, very well …’ Volodya put an emollient arm round his shoulders. His breath was rich with food and spirit. ‘I’m sure it’s from some other woman called Clarissa Emilovna, those most common of Russian names. It’s gone! The thought is gone! However, it remains Tatyana’s Day!’ He turned to his friends, who replied with a faraway roar. ‘It’s the start of the student holidays, and you, my friend, are coming up to Truba, where we shall carouse and escape from our thoughts for some little time. My treat! After all, I will soon turn twenty and Milyutin has had his reforms! There’ll be conscription for the lot of us! We must take our freedom while we have it!’
The night air seemed to fall several degrees as the sledge poured down Pokrovka Street, cutting through the holes in Konstantin’s trousers, the loose weave of his homemade socks, the pockets of his sheepskin where his hands lay bare and freezing. Beside him, Volodya kept up an excitable dialogue with the izvozchik, waved to the skaters on Chisty Pond as if to personal friends. At regular intervals, he produced a tin flask from the lining of his coat, which he upended over his mouth and handed to Konstantin, who saw no choice but to do the same – gagging on the fierce, medicinal liquid.
‘Where do you live!?’ screamed the student at one point.
‘Sunnikov House …’ said Konstantin.
Volodya didn’t seem to know where this was.
On their arrival in Trubnaya Square, Volodya tipped a few coins into the frozen claw of the driver’s glove and fell into the snow outside a restaurant named The Hermitage, which Konstantin had seen many times during his tours of the city – although tonight it was barely recognizable, its silk furnishings gone, its lavish carpets replaced with sodden sawdust and hordes of young, red-faced men. When a second sledge came ploughing towards them, the student greeted his companions as if he had not seen them in months. He took Konstantin’s arm and, without warning, pulled him running across the icy square – heading north on to Tsvetnoy Boulevard, into a side street lined with izvozchiki, where, in spite of the cold, the doors to several shops and houses stood open in welcome.
Beneath a sign reading ‘Fashion Shop’, the five of them passed a scrawny man in a shabby black coat who was dozing on a sofa and, with more or less difficulty, climbed a staircase with a plush white carpet to a parlour hung with mirrors and countless lamps, arrayed with figurines in flamboyant poses. Near a marble fireplace sat a beardless boy with a violin and a bony old man at an upright piano. Across the parquet floor, soldiers and men in black bow ties were waltzing with ladies in yellow silk and dark blue velvet gowns – their faces painted, their bosoms so exposed that it was difficult to know where to look.
Possessed by a mood of unusual carelessness, Konstantin took a sweetmeat from a porcelain bowl on the sideboard. He watched the students remove their coats, hats and gloves, and disperse among the dancing couples, then he worked his way around the room to the musicians and set his hand on the lid of the piano, listening, feeling the music in the wood. As ever, it was the lower register that he could hear most clearly,
but still he could just about follow the pianist’s melody, his long, descending runs and moments of pause, which put Konstantin in mind of those ridges in the undulating Moscow streets where you would find yourself gazing across the rooftops, the treetops, the domes and the spires.
Konstantin saw the woman emerge from the crowd, her dark hair coiled with flowers, a smile imprinted on her handsome face. He watched her approach, tall, poised, not quite young, and when she arrived in front of him he fumbled for his ear trumpet, trying not to look down the plunging neck of her deep red gown.
‘Oh!’ she said, sharply. ‘Are you one of the musicians?’
‘Me?’ asked Konstantin.
For a moment, the woman’s forehead wore a quizzical frown, but then she seemed to remember herself and leant towards him, and he glanced involuntarily into the chasm between her fat pink breasts.
‘Would you buy me a glass of porter?’ she asked.
‘Pardon?’
‘A glass of porter?’
Konstantin looked at the woman in confusion. She had a voice he found impossible to place – aristocratic, but somehow lacking the insouciance of his aunt or his cousins – and although he knew that it was normal for wealthy women to paint their faces still he found it hard to see her eyes for their dark accentuation, and her lips seemed to bloom unnaturally, like a flower out of season.
‘Your friend asked me to come and speak to you,’ she explained.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you want to speak to me?’
Looking around the room, he saw Volodya vanish through a door in the corner in the company of a woman with bright orange hair. He fought battles in his mind, trying to understand why a woman of obvious prosperity should want someone to buy her a glass of beer, unless it was some aspect of social decorum, of which, of course, he knew nothing – although still he could hardly imagine Clarissa Emilovna asking him such a question, even if he had never actually met Clarissa Emilovna and knew her only through the confidences of her letters. For all he knew, in the privacy of their palaces all aristocrats behaved in this extraordinary manner.