Konstantin

by Tom Bullough

  The woman offered a soft, cool hand and led him past an officer in top boots and tight white trousers whose sword knocked against the inside of his knees and nearly made him fall. She set his arms around the back of her corset and put her own arms around his neck so that her breasts bulged against the lace of her chemise and the space between them vanished altogether. Konstantin smelt her harmonious fragrance. He felt a giddiness growing in his mind, and when she began to dance with sinuous movements of her hips he responded with movements of his own.

  At length, there came a break in the rumbling of the piano and the couples parted, laughed, bowed to one another and turned to applaud the musicians. The woman ran her fingers down Konstantin’s arm. With a secretive smile, she turned, tripped slightly on the hem of her dress and set out for the door in the corner – her bare neck white among the glaring lamps and mirrors, the velvet cascading in folds from her waist, sweeping the floor behind her.

  Following dumbly, Konstantin arrived in a corridor of numerous doors and crimson wallpaper, where he was surprised to see a schoolgirl in uniform skip past him and vanish up a darkened staircase. He stepped aside for an ageing butler with a silver tray, then realized that he was delivering his bottle of spirit to the woman in the red dress, who was standing in the doorway of a room to the left.

  The room was small, scented, lit by a lantern in a pink paper shade, which hung by a chain from the ceiling. Above a big feather bed, a tapestry depicted a bearded man in a spherical turban, pointed windows in the Tatar style and various women in startling states of undress. Konstantin watched as the woman set the tray on a bureau covered with a scarf, several visiting cards and an empty bonbonièrre, poured two glasses, perched on the pink piqué counterpane and patted the space beside her.

  ‘Your friend is very generous,’ she observed as he sat down. She emptied her glass and waited for him to do the same.

  ‘Is … Is he?’ asked Konstantin.

  The woman laughed abruptly, reached for the bottle, drained a second glass and heaved herself on to his knee.

  Despite the layers of her dresses, Konstantin could feel her warm flesh spreading over the bones of his legs. He felt her weight, a confusing, fascinating heat that seemed to blend with the fire in his stomach until it enveloped his entire body.

  ‘How old are you?’ she asked huskily, her lips to his ear.

  ‘Sixteen …’

  ‘I’m sixteen too.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked at her doubtfully.

  ‘Do you like to have the light on?’ she continued.

  ‘I … wouldn’t be able to see without the light on,’ said Konstantin.

  With the lightest pressure of her ring-clad fingers, the woman pushed him backwards on to the bed. He saw the flame in the lantern above him. He felt her tug at the waistband of his trousers, leaving him naked to his spot-patterned thighs. Frozen with astonishment, he saw her seek her balance, then lift her long red gown and several levels of flounced petticoats to reveal pointed shoes, a pair of lace-trimmed stockings with scarlet garters, an angle of hair between broad, white, naked hips.

  He looked at the lantern as she straddled him. He did not dare to look at her – although he felt her every movement with a fearful intensity, and soon even the flame seemed to be shivering to her rhythm, sending pulses of pink across the pink-stained ceiling. He watched the flame’s reflection in the polished copper tank. He watched the air that shimmered at the mouth of the glass chimney, where water vapour mingled with carbon dioxide.

  In time, the woman doubled forwards and began to move more vigorously. Her face loomed above him, smothered in shadow. The ribs of her corset were sharp against his stomach. Her breasts grazed the straggling hairs on his neck and his chin, his grubby shirt, the fleshless contours of his collarbone. Beyond her sealed eyes and her swinging earrings, her hair was surrounded by a halo of light.

  Her flowers, he saw, were not flowers after all, but fashioned out of sheets of coloured paper.

  Konstantin stumbled back along the side street, past gaping doors and shivering drivers who cast him indifferent glances. On the corner with Tsvetnoy Boulevard, he turned to see the man in the black coat standing on the pavement, smoking, calling to a woman who leant from the upstairs window of one of the houses opposite. He skirted the crowds outside a raucous tavern and, his soft boots slithering on the slippery street, set out north on the central promenade where the lonely gas lamps burnt above benches lost beneath the snow.

  On the bleak expanse of the Garden Ring, the houses vanished behind gaunt trees, leafless shrubberies, tall iron gates. Konstantin thought of Clarissa Emilovna in her lace-trimmed nightdress and her clean white sheets. He longed to be lying beside her, his ear to her lips, listening to her tales of nurses, German tutors, French governesses, poets and fancy-dress balls, explaining to her once again that he would one day become a great man, as great as any man who had ever lived. Crossing the wide, empty thoroughfares of Samotechnaya Street, he found himself in a deserted park. He passed beneath a snow-draped goddess, a garland of roses pressed to her bare stone bosom, and he only stopped, breathing irregularly, when he was standing in the middle of a skate-scratched pond – the houses and the streetlamps lost among the treetops behind him.

  The craft arrived unbidden in Konstantin’s mind. There was, he realized suddenly, no need to try to harness the centrifugal force of the Earth. He could simply create a centrifugal force of his own. With each passing instant, he perceived more of the brilliance of his idea. If he were to revolve a pendulum with sufficient velocity, he would be able to propel a vessel independent of all other forces. If he were to revolve a pair of pendulums, he would be able to moderate their respective velocities and use them to travel in any direction he chose, while by means of gradual acceleration he would achieve the painless ascent that would elude a cannonball of any variety. He stood on the ice, his head turned backwards, his eyes on the averted face of the sliver Moon, and even now he seemed to feel the weight lifting from his feet. He seemed to see through portholes in a thick iron hull the fires of Moscow receding beneath him, the stars approaching like falling snow, the Sun emerging from the vault of the planet – its heat like rapture, spreading through his emaciated limbs, the bones of his ribcage, the moonlit angles of his face.

  In the dirty snow of Petrovsky Boulevard, the dirty light of dawn, Konstantin passed the bolted face of a fourth shop belonging to Emil Ivanovich Tsindel and emerged once again beneath the muted gas lamps and the snow-lined oak trees of Trubnaya Square. Outside The Hermitage, a few haggard waiters were piling the broken furniture and vomit-caked sawdust of the previous evening on a bonfire on the exposed cobbles where a handful of vagrants held shivering hands towards the stifled flames. Tottering on feet in which he had lost all sensation, Konstantin joined their meagre circle. He felt the fire’s heat through the scrubby hair on his cheeks.

  ‘Th … Thank you,’ he stammered, as an old man in a pair of tattered galoshes picked the broken glass from a strip of beef and handed it to him.

  With the gathering light, the carts of the Sunday bird market were creeping up Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, their drivers motionless, their horses climbing with slowly swinging heads. One by one, the traders found their places in a line along the western side of the square. They brought smells of hay and recent warmth. They assembled themselves before walls of homemade cages full of cocks and ducks, mangy chickens and lean, hungry pigeons, siskins and skylarks, blue tits and blackbirds, thrushes and goldfinches that flickered their impotent wings.

  The first collectors were frowning and haggling, warming their hands on steaming cups of tea, by the time that Konstantin was able once more to use his fingers. Squatting on the stones beside the dwindling bonfire, he took a pencil from his pocket. He lay his exercise book on his knees and began the letter that he had been composing all night.

  He told Clarissa Emilovna all about his spacecraft. He told her that it would, in an instant, remove her from Moscow, from the iron rout
ines of which she wrote to him daily, and transport her at velocities unimaginable even to the most visionary manufacturers of air balloons and steam locomotives to any part of the Universe that she might care to visit. It could, he told her, take them together. It could take them to the spas of the Black Sea, or the palaces of England where the queen would receive them with amazement and delight. It could take them to the Moon. It could take them on a tour around the Sun.

  February 1874

  It was the third day of Butter Week when Vera Valentinova collapsed as she entered their room, dropped her heavy wicker basket and remained where she fell, her shoulders shaking, her red hands pressed to her narrow face. Kneeling on his mattress, Konstantin watched as the old soldier, Viktor, lifted her carefully and sat her on the stool beside the stove. He glanced down to see his mixture of copper oxide and sulphuric acid resolve itself into a deep blue copper sulphate solution – as The Principles of Chemistry had predicted. With a breath, he extinguished the kerosene burner and hurried into the room.

  ‘Vera?’ he asked. ‘Vera, are you all right?’

  Hobbling to the window, Sofia took a handful of snow from the sill and stirred it into a cup of water.

  ‘Do I … ?’ The washerwoman turned on him with blood-tangled eyes, the colour burning in her cheeks. ‘Do I look like I’ve got a bloody letter? Eh? Do I? Do I look like a messenger to you? Or a bloody post-boy?’

  ‘No,’ said Konstantin, quickly. ‘No, I came to see if you were all right –’

  ‘By all that’s holy! What did I do to deserve you? Or your Mademoiselle Clarissa Emilovna, and her stuck-up bloody maid, who looks at me like I’m so much dirt on her shiny little shoe! You ain’t going to get no more letters! Got it? She ain’t sending them and I ain’t bringing them and there’s a bloody end to it!’

  Konstantin felt the strength failing in his legs.

  ‘Wh … What do you mean?’

  ‘Her bloody father’s found out about it, ain’t he? Someone’s gone and told him there’s some strange man writing secret letters to his precious daughter and he ain’t pleased about it. He really ain’t pleased about it! And when Emil Ivanovich Tsindel ain’t pleased about something –’

  Beyond the bell of his ear trumpet, Konstantin saw her face contort with another wave of coughing. He moved aside so that Sofia could hold the cup to her lips. On the floor beside them, the laundry basket lay broken open, revealing the gown of a tall young woman – its silver pleated skirts tapering to a waist so narrow that he might have enclosed it with his hands, its bust small and elegant between neat sleeves of brightly coloured jewels.

  ‘I’m … I’m sorry, madam …’ Vera Valentinova put her hands to her eyes, her thin lips trembling, pale and taut. ‘I can’t believe that I could have been so stupid. I ought to have stopped it. Here’s … Here’s me with a husband in the army, and three children to feed, and not a kopeck I don’t make out of slaving myself half to death. The only people knew anything about them letters was her and her maid and the people in this room, and that’s it, and however you look at it, it comes back to me, don’t it? Me and my children, and no one to look after us … I don’t even know why they gave me any laundry! I’m just waiting for someone to tell me I ain’t got no work no more and I can clear out of here while I’m about it, and I’m trying to think what the hell I’m going to do, and the choices ain’t very pleasant I can tell you!’ She reached into the pocket of her skirt and produced the folded, wax-sealed sheet of coarse-grained paper that he had given her that afternoon. ‘He’s sending her to Petersburg, madam. It’s all been arranged. You just got to forget all about her!’

  Ten minutes later, Konstantin arrived outside in the courtyard, but for once, instead of turning right towards the slaughterhouse, he turned left between the mounds of frozen urine and entered a lesser-used alleyway where a distant gas lamp told the wooden walls from the trampled ground. He passed a yard piled with snow-capped birch logs, framed by cattle pens, chicken coops and a giant house made entirely of glass – its roof bare and arching, its smells of unnatural growth colouring the winter air.

  It was snowing, gently. On Gavrikovsky Lane, Konstantin saw a three-storey mansion, its unshuttered windows dazzling with filament bulbs such as Alexander Nikolaievich Lodygin had demonstrated in St Petersburg the previous year. The light poured across the icy street, eclipsing the gas lamps, slicing a pyramid from the weaving snow. On the steps, as if in daylight, he saw no fewer than thirty footmen, dressed alternately in livery of silver and gold. Inside, it seemed, some manner of ball was underway. Through the nearest window, he saw men and women in masks of glorious colour. He saw flowers in bushes and arbours. He saw wines, soups, pies, cheeses, cakes and, borne on the shoulders of four large servants, what appeared to be an entire pig encased in pastry.

  Konstantin shivered in his wretched sheepskin. From the north, a black, jewel-spangled equipage arrived with its four black horses, and a lady in a tiara and a long black cape ascended the steps to exchange kisses with a full-bearded man who appeared from among the revellers to greet her. Behind them, momentarily, Konstantin thought he saw a tall young woman in a crimson gown, a flash of pale shoulders, a flood of golden hair. Alone on the pavement, he heard the faint impression of an orchestra. He stood with his letter in his hand and watched the Sun-defying light of the great house distort and refract, its angles appear to open, its walls appear to bow.

  Konstantin lay as he had lain for the past five days, curled with her letters in the hollow of his cot, his knees to his chest, conscious dimly that someone was hammering on the boards of the partition. It took a crippling effort to open his eyes and pull himself upright, to dip a corner of his blanket in the cup of water on the shelf and wipe at the hair that clung like mould to his chin, his lip and his cheeks. It was normal these days for him to suffer nosebleeds. They were just another thing that he had had to learn to tolerate, like his black-bread diet, like his hair, which now fell almost to his mouth, like the holes in his trousers and the lice perusing tirelessly through his underwear, feeding on his spot-blemished limbs.

  Beyond the bright, indifferent lines of the laundry, Nikolai Fedorovich was sitting on the stool at the mouth of the stove. As if out of nowhere, he produced a slab of chocolate in golden paper, which he proceeded to divide – handing a piece to Vera Valentinova, to her son and two daughters, even to Viktor, who ate cautiously with his few yellow teeth, like he had never tasted chocolate in his life. The librarian turned to stir a tin flask in the embers at the edge of the fire, then received from the boy a little wooden soldier, which he held to the candlelight, admiring its rifle, its peeling paint of white, red and blue.

  ‘Konstantin Eduardovich!’ he said warmly, looking up. ‘I was afraid that you were ill.’

  Konstantin stood bent over his ear trumpet, his eyes on the dark, wet floor.

  ‘Your presence has been missed in the library.’

  ‘I’ve … not been well,’ he murmured.

  ‘Well, I hope you will not think me presumptuous, but it happened that one of the students brought me some soup. It looks rather good. Cabbage and potato. Like you, I incline towards cold food as a rule, but I thought that you might care to share it?’

  Covering his hand with the sleeve of his well-patched coat, Nikolai Fedorovich collected the flask from the fire and emptied it into Vera Valentinova’s wooden bowl, which he set on the table beside the trough – beads of hemp oil trembling on its yellow-green surface. He waited for Konstantin to sit down, crossed himself and indicated for him to take the first spoonful.

  ‘No butter,’ he apologized. ‘Such is Lent.’

  Konstantin ate mechanically, the hot soup fierce and unfamiliar in his shrunken stomach.

  ‘Thank you, Nikolai Fedorovich,’ he said, at last.

  ‘It is a pleasure, Konstantin Eduardovich. Tell me, are you feeling strong enough to face the outside air?’

  ‘I … Well …’

  ‘There is something I would very much lik
e to show you.’

  Konstantin followed the librarian into the terrible night, where the fires of the city burnt in the low clouds and a north wind fled down Nemetskaya Street, carrying snow which bit his face, discovered the holes in his trousers and his sheepskin so that even before they crossed the frozen ocean around the Red Gate he was shivering uncontrollably. Nikolai Fedorovich walked with a loping gait, his old leather boots beating time on the pavements, his shoulders hunched forwards so that he had to lift his chin, and with every streetlamp his eyes disappeared into the shadows of his forehead. From time to time, he looked down at Konstantin, tramping beside him, his arms enclosing his narrow belly, and they had almost reached the Chertkovsky Palace when he stopped abruptly at one of the big department stores, pushed through a door into a glass-covered passage, removed his hat and ushered Konstantin into a small shop framed by a pair of spherical gas lamps.

  Konstantin smelt the refined smells of leather, starch and linen. He felt the heat in the carpet through the thin soles of his felt boots. He saw an assistant in a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles bow to each of them in turn, and vanish through a door between a pair of glass-fronted cabinets to return a moment later holding a long brown greatcoat.

  ‘Try that,’ the librarian instructed, bending to his ear.

  Removing his ear trumpet, Konstantin did as he was told. He pushed his arms into the sleeves and found the coat comfortable even over his sheepskin – the warmth of the shop in its wadding, its double seams and calico lining.

  ‘Does it fit?’

  Konstantin frowned.

  Nikolai Fedorovich removed a bundle of paper roubles from a trouser pocket, counted out several and handed them to the assistant.

  ‘Nikolai Fedorovich!’ Konstantin protested, recovering his ear trumpet.