by Tom Bullough
‘Konstantin Eduardovich,’ said the librarian, calmly. ‘As Chief Cataloguer of the Chertkovsky Library –’
‘Nikolai –’
‘As Chief Cataloguer of the Chertkovsky Library,’ he insisted, ‘I receive an annual income of 498 roubles, of which I require approximately one third. The rest of it is of no consequence to me whatsoever. However, I have a coat which keeps me warm, and I have not spilt reagents on my trousers.’
Discreetly, the assistant disappeared.
‘But, Nikolai –’
‘My dear fellow,’ he interrupted. ‘Good things happen sometimes, as well as bad things. You must accept the one, and it only makes sense to accept the other. I admit that I am not the foremost authority on matters of the heart, but I have heard enough from your landlady and that wretched student Vladimir Mikhailovich, to whom the army is entirely welcome, to learn that fate has not been kind to you of late. So, within the mysterious schematics of the Universe, consider the coat as some fractional redress, and if you wish to show your gratitude to me then do no more than consider my advice, since I am not entirely without experience of the world. Indeed, as a teacher in Borovsk, I was even engaged to be married.’
The librarian stood tall, serious, heavy-browed, the blue veins tangled on the white expanse of his forehead.
‘Yes, Nikolai Fedorovich …’ said Konstantin, eventually.
‘I should make it clear,’ Nikolai Fedorovich continued, ‘that I am opposed neither to marriage nor reproduction. Without them, mankind would suffer extinction before it had managed to achieve its purpose, which would be an incomparable disaster. I do, however, believe that urban culture has fallen into a cult of femininity, a worship of the sexual instinct, which is profoundly humiliating to the human intellect. You have only to look around this department store to see how industry and technology have come into its thrall, elevating luxury goods to a status contending with, even supplanting, religion, and reducing man, who was made in the image of God, to the level of a prettified animal. Now, I appreciate that to resist this splendour of putrefaction is no small matter in itself, but for those of us engaged in a life of chastity, whether by accident or design, there is a still-more important choice to make: the choice between negative chastity and positive chastity. The former is merely abstinence. The latter is the redirection of sexual energy towards knowledge and action!’
The night did not seem quite so fearsome in the heavy greatcoat, which kept out the air and even, to some measure, the darkness, and as Konstantin followed the librarian beneath the fire-cut walls of the Kremlin he looked with some little interest at the figures working in the immensity of Red Square – smashing with iron bars the great ice mountains of Butter Week, their sledges of ice and graceful, facing slopes, piling into pyramids the ships and the limbs of the swings, the gilded horses of the roundabouts, the ruins of the booths that had lately sold tortoises, carpets, sweets, toy monkeys, the galleries, pillars and balconies of the palatial wooden theatres that stood in places still half intact.
In the runner-torn snow of Alexander Garden, Pashkov House rose above them like a cathedral: five colossal levels of columns and balustrades, windows beyond counting, wings which alone were the size of any mansion in Vyatka. Konstantin and Nikolai Fedorovich crossed a courtyard and entered a door as tall as that of a stable. They climbed a flight of marble steps between portraits of barefaced generals and guitar-strumming maidens, and arrived in a room where a two-storey house might have been erected without any inconvenience to the men in overalls who were hanging wallpaper from tall, slender ladders. Ahead of them, Konstantin saw halls with chessboard floors, golden chandeliers and shelves of books in their hundreds of thousands. Together, they walked among glass cases of Old Slavonic manuscripts, letters, diaries, into reading rooms with galleries and desks in private alcoves, through long, well-lit chambers where Konstantin saw a bull with wings and a human head, a tenth-century mosaic of the Saviour, a golden cross from Byzantium, a rare chromate of lead from Siberia, a gigantic quartz crystal from Yekaterinburg, the entire skeleton of a mammoth.
‘Tell me,’ called Nikolai Fedorovich, as they emerged in a narrow stairwell. He waited for the ear trumpet. ‘Did you have any further thoughts about harnessing the planet’s centrifugal force?’
‘I … I did, Nikolai Fedorovich,’ Konstantin admitted. ‘But … I’m afraid it was an elementary mistake.’
The librarian took a candle from one of the bright brass brackets. ‘No matter.’ He smiled. ‘We shall use the conventional means of ascent.’
The staircase led to a small, octagonal room on the very summit of the palace, where the heat of the combined words and relics of the ancestors kept eight tall, arched windows free of ice, and Konstantin turned from the five shrinking levels of a church in the west, to the two frozen arches of the Moskva in the south, to the muscular spires and louring palaces of the Kremlin in the east.
‘In the West,’ Nikolai Fedorovich told him, as he inspected the wind-scattered smoke of the hidden fires in Red Square, ‘the celebration of Easter, the great feast and the great deed, has almost disappeared. It is only in Russia that it retains its importance, that Christ, the prototype of all mankind, suffering and risen again, is granted his true and rightful position …’
Konstantin found his eyes straying north across the barren trees and the half-seen roofs. He felt the weakness in his limbs, peered into the distance – as if the filament bulbs on Gavrikovsky Lane might have been visible even from here.
‘Yet even in Russia,’ the librarian continued, in the same reflective tone, ‘we face the threat of a pornocratic future. That is to say, in our age of unthought there is every danger that men will abandon the theological beliefs of their fathers and come to see themselves purely from a zoological perspective, and that, by seeing themselves as animals, they will become animals, forgetting their history, living in the present, like cattle. In such a future, religion would come to be seen as no more than an infantile superstition, an unnecessary appendage belonging to an earlier period of mankind’s existence.’
Through the warm air, Konstantin felt the freezing fingers of the gale reaching into the cracks around the windows, heard its distant scream as it clutched and tore at the snow-hunched roofs, the arrogant façades of the great city.
‘God made man in His own image!’ declared Nikolai Fedorovich suddenly, turning to him, the candle burning in his eyes. ‘Did He make man passive, supine, horizontal? No! He made him active, creative, vertical! Had man only recognized this fact in the very beginning then he need never have left paradise! Had he exercised his potential, controlled Nature as God controlled Nature, as God Himself enjoined him, then the world would have remained perfect. But he abused his freedom, he forgot his sacred duty, and in his Fall he lost his position as Nature’s master and instead he became Nature’s slave!
‘There is, Konstantin Eduardovich,’ he continued, ‘only one true course for humanity! We must join together to turn the blind and unfree forces of Nature, acting both within and without us, into the tools of our own liberation – for what is Nature but the organ of death, the organ of our own destruction? Of course, we must learn to defeat storms and droughts, disease and insect infestation, but our task will not be complete until we have defeated the very essence of Nature, which is death itself – until we have assembled the particles of every ancestor who has ever lived and resuscitated each one in his turn, back to the very father of our species, that all might become whole and perfect and immortal, as the scriptures describe! Perhaps this idea seems startling to you? Perhaps the challenge seems so great as to be insurmountable? But, I repeat, man was made in the image of God! The only limit to his ability is the limit of his own imagination! You may tell me that the resources of the Earth cannot hope to provide for such a multitude of immortal beings, but I reply that the human imagination can overcome any obstacle. The Earth does not exist in isolation! It is open in every direction! We have only to find the means to transcend
the limits of our globe, and we will be able to colonize other planets as we would colonize the lands across any ocean – adapting ourselves through the wonders of technology until we are able to inhabit even the most inhospitable environments! It is our duty, Konstantin Eduardovich, to rise above this cradle of our infancy, to become a heavenly force, masters of every world in the vastness of the Universe!’
August 1878
Konstantin rolled his cartwheel north beneath the full-bodied poplars of Zatinnaya Street, his ear trumpet swinging from his shoulders, two long-legged chickens in a pair of wicker cages on his back. At the junction with Voznesenskaya Street, a woman holding a broom watched him with amusement, becoming laughter, but he paid her no more attention than he paid the mumbling carts in their haloes of dust, the stunted tower of the Church of St Yekaterina, the short-sighted windows of the old, familiar houses. Even in the heavy August heat, Ryazan seemed pitiful, contaminated: a naked asteroid, trapped in the orbit of Moscow. Had any of his friends remained in the city, he might have made some effort to moderate his appearance, trimmed the lank brown hair that fell across his shoulders, worn his spectacles the right way up in public – even if the arms were too long and he had to push them continually back up his beak of a nose. But in the four months since he had returned from Vyatka he alone had avoided military conscription – having demonstrated his ability to blow air out of his ears – and anybody else had long since been siphoned away by the unstoppable advance of the railway.
Scaling the embankment, Konstantin followed the tracks above the fringes of the city, the listing huts with their meagre plots of cabbage and cucumber, the tangled wormwood and the red-hipped dog roses on the waste ground. His wheel bumped rhythmically over the sleepers. As he passed the single, uncovered platform of the station, he felt the eyes of the sweltering travellers, the peasant women selling milk, kvass, cold chicken and boiled eggs. He saw the smoke of the morning train at Lagerny, felt its weight, its movement in the rails. But he knew that three kilometres separated the two stations, and that the train never exceeded fifty kilometres per hour, and he was descending a path among the scrubby trees on the far side of the little Pokrovka River by the time that a 2-4-0 came rumbling past in a storm of steam – the fireman heaving birch logs into the firebox, the driver leaning round the backless cab, distantly sounding his whistle.
At the tall, log-built watermill, Konstantin inserted the cartwheel’s broken length of axle into a brick-lined hole in the dusty yard. He tied the cages to either side of the wheel’s upper face and gave it a spin to check that they were level. Lean, sun-brown, a carter in a sheepskin emerged from the mill’s grumbling darkness, leant against the door frame and lit a tree-root pipe. Behind him came the miller himself: a big, bald-headed, flour-stained man whose son Konstantin taught mathematics two hours a week in exchange for his use of the mill for his experiments.
‘Morning, Chairman!’ the miller barked, his long beard grazing his ear.
‘Good morning, Ilya Valeryevich,’ said Konstantin. He retrieved his ear trumpet.
‘How much for a ride?’
‘Would … you like to volunteer?’
The miller laughed and clapped him on the back.
‘Fifteen minutes do you?’ he asked. ‘We’ve got a few sacks to be getting along with.’
As Ilya Valeryevich went to close the sluice in the mill race, Konstantin pushed his way through the nettles round the pond, swept aside the scum and the goose feathers and filled his hands with water to pour over the axle. He took a rope from a hook on the meal floor, and when the cogs and the stones had fallen silent he slung it round the broad vertical shaft between the spur wheel and the wallower, fed it into a groove in the underside of the hub and pulled it tight.
Konstantin took from his pocket the watch left to him by his brother Ignat, who had succumbed to typhus in Vyatka two years earlier. He watched as the breastshot waterwheel began once more to turn – beads of sunlight flinging from its radiant blades. He watched the rope bite, and as the cartwheel gained angular velocity he observed the behaviour of the chickens, who looked around them sharply, claws scrabbling as they slithered towards the outside walls of their cages and soon lay upright, passing the same point within a single second – their combs horizontal, their feathers frantic, their yellow beaks open in alarm.
‘Eighty-one revolutions per minute!’ Konstantin exclaimed. He grinned and the carter, already shaking with laughter, turned to slap the miller’s hand. ‘Eighty-one! With a radius of rotation of 75 centimetres, that means they are experiencing a fivefold increase in weight, and look at them! They’re fine! They’re absolutely fine!’
February 1880
‘Now,’ said Konstantin. He wiped from the blackboard a jumble of fractions and decimals, and a picture of a cake divided into slices. ‘For the rest of the morning, we are going to consider the Solar System. So, what is the Solar System? Can anyone tell me?’
He turned on his platform and looked across the classroom, where twenty-four children looked back at him from their eight long desks – poised on puberty in grey skirts and trousers, linen shirts tied at the waist and headscarves tied around the chin.
‘Pyotr?’
One boy lowered his hand, approached the front in grubby felt boots.
‘Is it … the Sun and the planets, sir?’ he asked loudly, as the teacher cupped his ear.
‘The Sun and the planets!’ Konstantin agreed. He smelt the boy’s must of pigs and sheep. ‘Just so! Yes, as you all know, we live on the Earth, which is a ball of rock spinning around the fiery inferno of the Sun. But the Earth is not alone. Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, the Sun is surrounded by at least 119 other rocks, of which eight are large enough to be considered planets …
‘So. Who can tell me the names of any of the planets?’
He turned, wrote ‘THE PLANETS’ at the top of the blackboard, felt four pairs of feet in the classroom’s worn, sagging floorboards.
‘Mars?’ said Sonia.
‘Venus,’ said Marta.
‘Jupiter!’ said Pyotr.
‘Saturn?’ asked Ilya.
‘Excellent!’ Konstantin straightened up, added the names of the planets in order to the board. ‘Which gives us five, including the Earth, and I’m sure that you will recognize the others when I tell you. Nearest to the Sun we have Mercury, the smallest planet in the Solar System, a mere one-seventeenth the size of the Earth. You see? Fractions get everywhere! Beyond Saturn, we have cold, faraway Uranus, which is eighty-two times larger than our own planet, and then, way out on the edge of interstellar space, we have even colder, even further-away Neptune, which lies at an average distance of 4,320 million versts from the Sun and was discovered as recently as 1846 …’
He removed his new, correctly oriented spectacles, polished them on his handkerchief, replaced them on his nose and went to stand at the window near the stove – watching the west wind steal the smoke from the chimneys of Borovsk, stirring up storms on its huddled roofs. He clicked his tongue and removed from a bag beneath his chair a large black medicine ball, two wizened apples, two pickled cherries, a dried pea and a rye grain, which he arranged along the edge of his desk.
‘So,’ he continued, considering the classroom. ‘As I’m always telling you, there is little point in learning facts and figures unless you understand what they mean, but to understand the Sun and the planets is no easy matter since they are so very much larger than anything we know in our day-to-day lives. In due course, we will talk about each of the planets in more detail, but first I would like you to think about the relative sizes of the Sun and the Earth. The Earth is big, as you know. Indeed, if you were to tie a belt around the Earth’s middle, that belt would be 42,750 versts long! But if the Earth is big, then the Sun is enormous! Enormous! If you wanted to tie a belt around the Sun it would need to be a staggering 4,658,500 versts long! That’s 109 times longer! For the moment, then, I would like you to think of the Sun as this medicine ball. Here it is! The Sun!
If this is the Sun, then what is the Earth? Not an apple. That would be Jupiter. Not a cherry. That would be Uranus or Neptune. No, our own great, glorious Earth would be … a pea!’
Konstantin paused, smiling at the laughter that spread around the room.
‘A pea!’ he repeated, enthusiastically. ‘While the Moon, Diana, Queen of the Night, would be a miserable rye grain! And if you think that it’s difficult to imagine the sizes of the planets, then consider the distances between them!’
There were the usual drunkards around the tavern on the far side of Rozhdestvensky Street: bearded men, red-cheeked women in kaftans, long skirts and sleeveless dresses that would have been two hundred years out of fashion even in Nikolai Fedorovich’s day. They were shouting, laughing, a couple of them punching one another repeatedly in the face, but they paused to watch the young teacher of mathematics, science and geometry narrow his eyes against the wind, wait for a troika parading the dowry of some rich family – a feather bed, a dining table, a dozen geese, a set of brass lanterns – and take up a position in the middle of the open street.
‘Volunteers!’ said Konstantin, when the children were assembled in front of him.
Several gloves rose among the scarves, pink faces and sheepskin coats.
‘Nikolai?’ He handed the medicine ball to a boy in a red woollen cap, which reminded him distantly of Ignat. ‘And one more, if you please?’
This time he chose a quiet girl with deep-set eyes, who was standing near the back of the group and raised her glove only when most of the others had done the same.
‘Isidora?’ He handed her the pea. ‘Now, your job is particularly important. That is the Earth you have there, after all. What I would like you to do is to take 180 good long steps in the direction of the marketplace, then turn towards us and lift the pea right up in the air so that we can all see it. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, almost inaudibly.