Konstantin

by Tom Bullough

  ‘Good girl!’

  Konstantin watched her stride away along the tracks of the troika, shrinking between the one-storey wooden houses whose tin fire-insurance badges were the only indication that this haven of Old Believers existed in the age of steamers and railways. She veered to one side when a dog erupted from its kennel to the limit of its rope, and she paused to curtsey to a woman carrying a few scraps of straw to her cow, but at length she crossed the junction with Myshkovskaya Street, stopped and turned: a piece of punctuation beneath the wild, grey-white clouds.

  Konstantin indicated to Nikolai to lift the medicine ball, then peered towards the pea in the invisible hand of the barely visible girl.

  ‘And there you have it!’ he declared, with satisfaction. ‘If this is the Sun and that is the Earth, then there is the distance between the two of them. One hundred and forty million versts! A good long way, is it not?’

  Shortly after two o’clock, Konstantin returned to the classroom, having forgotten his satchel, and set out once more down the slope towards the Protva – following a path between snow-drowned houses with bellying walls. He stopped on the bank among the thrashing willows, leant against a fence to strap his skates over his old leather boots and pushed himself on to the ice. By throwing his weight from one foot to the other, he gathered speed quickly, and as he passed a fisherman hunched above a hole and a struggling chub, he opened his umbrella and felt the wind swell inside the taut black fabric – bending his knees, leaning backwards to maintain his balance. Beyond the shelter of the bank, a gale tore out of the small town, across the narrow river and the snowy water meadows, and it was a matter of seconds before he swung his umbrella to the left, angling his skates so that the blades bit the ice, and steered a course towards the meander – his short beard shivering, his neat hair fluttering between the collar of his greatcoat and his homburg hat.

  He bounded up the path towards Chistyakovskaya Street, reversing his own faint footprints, greeting an old woman who was dropping rocks into her well and watched him so warily that he might have been a Selenite. Near the grubby little Church of the Protection of the Blessed Virgin, he came to an angular wooden house, two storeys tall, which wore a blanket of snow on its pitched plank roof and openwork carving on its eaves and its windows. Kicking his boots against a derelict sledge, he hurried into the warm air of the hallway, where, beneath a mirror framed in white and peeling gilt, he found a crate with his name and address written neatly on the lid.

  Konstantin’s apartment sat directly above his landlord’s kitchen: a pair of airy rooms whose three large windows looked down the hill towards the frozen river and the fringes of the pine forest that gave the town its name. Dropping his hat, coat and scarf on an armchair with silky red upholstery, he set the crate carefully among the jumble of papers, chemicals and scientific equipment on his desk. He prised off the lid, scattering sawdust, just as he noticed three logs burning in the open fire, and, turning towards his bedroom, nearly collided with his landlord’s daughter: a firmly built girl two months his junior, her dense black hair pulled back from a pale, square face, her grey eyes sweeping the neatly swept floorboards.

  He started, rummaged for his ear trumpet.

  ‘Varvara Yevgrafovna …’ he faltered.

  ‘Konstantin Eduardovich … I … didn’t think you would be back so soon.’

  ‘I hurried … You lit my fire. Thank you.’ His thoughts returned to the crate. ‘Perhaps … Perhaps you would like to see my purchase?’

  ‘Yes … Very much.’

  Busily, Konstantin assembled his optical microscope. He slotted the lens and the eyepiece into the objective turret, attached them to the stand and fitted a mirror into the bracket beneath the stage. He set the instrument on the windowsill, and for once had reason to resent the girl’s astonishing cleanliness as he searched the cracks of the floor for the body of an insect. It was several moments before he found a long-dead honeybee, which he blew clean of dust, lay on a slide and pushed into place. He sat his spectacles on his head, adjusted the knobs and exclaimed as he saw a pair of goggling compound eyes staring back at him from a forest of hairs – white with the light of winter.

  ‘There!’ he said, excitedly. ‘Look at that! Look!’

  He watched the girl bend forwards, her skirts describing the arch of her hips, her single plait falling past the shoulder of her crisp white blouse. For a second or two, she peered into the eyepiece, then she gasped, drew her head back sharply and crossed herself with two fingers.

  ‘Dear Lord!’ she managed. ‘It’s …’

  ‘Beautiful!’ said Konstantin. ‘Isn’t it? Beautiful!’

  ‘You see, Konstantin Eduardovich,’ said Yevgraf Nikolaievich Sokolov, as the two men sat together that evening in the companionable warmth of the dining-room fire. He poured himself another brandy. ‘Boyarina Morozova was an influential woman. She was a lady-in-waiting to Tsarina Maria Ilyinichna and the sister-in-law of Boris Ivanovich Morozov, Lord Protector to Tsar Alexei and the second-wealthiest Russian of his day. But she was also a penitent of Avvakum Petrov, Protopope of the Kazan Cathedral on Red Square. You know it, no doubt? Avvakum was one of the fiercest opponents to the reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon in 1652. That is to say, certain amendments to the wording of the creed and the spelling of the word “Jesus”, the use of three fingers rather than two in the Sign of the Cross … Well, it is a lengthy list, and may seem pedantic to a scientific man like yourself, but if you consider that these things constitute not merely the medium of worship but the very matter of the Divine then you will understand that they are a subject of the gravest importance.’

  Yevgraf Nikolaievich applied himself to the poker. A small, ragged man in late-middle age, he had cheeks scarred with ruptured blood vessels and a still-red moustache, whose tips erupted like flames from the body of his long grey beard. As a priest in the Yedinoveriye Church, the mildest of compromises between the Orthodox Church and the Old Believers, he was, in the eyes of most of the town’s population, as much a heretic as Konstantin himself.

  ‘So, you see,’ he continued, as the fire boiled and flared in the draught from the chimney, ‘Boyarina Morozova became one of the most prominent members of the Old Believers’ movement. She even took monastic vows. Well, at first, Tsar Alexei attempted to persuade her of her error, but when, in 1671, she failed to attend his wedding to Natalya Kirillovna on the pretext of illness, he had her arrested, and she began the first of a series of imprisonments, which culminated in a cellar of the St Paphnutius Monastery, here in Borovsk, where she starved to death in 1675. To her followers, of course, she became a martyr, which explains the town’s significance to the Old Belief.’

  ‘And what became of Avvakum?’ asked Konstantin.

  ‘And you a teacher, Konstantin Eduardovich!’ Yevgraf Nikolaievich laughed, drained his glass, reached for his bottle. ‘It is as well that you are not a teacher of history! Well, Avvakum visited the cellars of St Paphnutius himself in the 1660s – although he managed to survive until 1682, when he was burnt at the stake in a town named Pustozyorsk in the Arctic Circle. Death by fire was not, alas, an unusual fate. Avvakum himself maintained that self-immolators flew to the light like moths. In those days it was not uncommon for entire communities of Old Believers to lock themselves in their churches and burn them to the ground. Of course, they believed that the Kingdom of Evil was upon them, as many of them still do – hence their refusal to recognize any innovations subsequent to the reforms, from the eating of potatoes to the smoking of tobacco. To their minds, they were imminently to be resurrected, as the patristic writings tell us, neither old nor young, neither male nor female, but in a state of humanity free of the sexual impulse, as we were before the Fall.’

  Soft as a shadow, Varvara Yevgrafovna entered the room from the kitchen. She collected the plates and the soup bowls, folded the tablecloth and placed them together on the old-fashioned mahogany sideboard. She blew up the samovar and refreshed the sweet black tea in Konstantin’s c
hipped china cup.

  ‘Thank you, Varvara Yevgrafovna,’ said Konstantin.

  With a bow, the girl retired to the corner, where she removed the cat from her chair, opened her sewing box and resumed work on an antimacassar, which she was embroidering with a horseman, a monastery and a wealth of brightly coloured birds.

  ‘An excellent girl!’ observed Yevgraf Nikolaievich, who appeared to believe that she had left the room. His words were beginning to run together. ‘What I would do without her I cannot imagine. Since the death of her mother, she has kept this house single-handedly. Single-handedly, mind! If I had money for a servant … If I had money … She deserves better, Konstantin Eduardovich. She is an excellent girl, good and dutiful, and healthy! On my word, she has not suffered a day’s illness in her life. And she’s clever too! She plays the harp beautifully and her knowledge of the gospel rivals my own!’

  March 1880

  Konstantin sat in the red armchair from his apartment, spread his shoulders, felt the hard springs beneath his thighs. He tucked his scarf into the collar of his greatcoat, then tugged on the halyard so that the sail flapped and fluttered in the first good wind to come to Borovsk in several days. A strong white triangle sewn by Varvara Yevgrafovna out of scraps from Protopov’s factory on Podvysokovskaya Street, it shone in the late-winter sunshine, and when it reached the masthead he pushed the boom firmly to his right and watched the runners from Yevgraf Nikolaievich’s old sledge turn in the fine, thin snow.

  Around the Protva, the fields, roofs and gardens of Borovsk were lunar in their beauty. The sunlight glanced between the windows of the houses and the domes of the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin, the threadbare contours of the armchair and the luminous banks where the long shadows of the birch trees lay as faint as ghosts. At first, Konstantin eased out the sheet, spilling wind to test the strength of the mast and the sail, turning the bar at his feet so that the ice-skate rudder carved a sweeping line behind him, but he was barely halfway across the river before he swung the rudder firmly to the left and saw ahead of him the clear, straight kilometre of ice that stretched north-east out of the town.

  By the time the last houses of Borisoglebskaya Street had dwindled on the north bank, the armchair was travelling as fast as a locomotive. Konstantin flew past a peasant on a cantering horse. He took his first meander with the well-spread runners slithering, steering south so that the sail jibed and the end of the boom just missed his nose, and he left the muffled roofs and the glinting cupolas of the village of Roshcha at a broad reach, chuckling with pleasure, tucking his hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders to conceal his ears from the fierce, Arctic air. As he sped between the open fields, he tried to calculate how long it would take him to weave his way back up the river, which was nowhere more than fifty metres wide, but with every upturned fishing boat, every fisherman’s hut buried neck-deep on a long, thin island, every crowd of willows whose churning branches appeared to roar, urgent with existence, he longed to see more, and even as he described a torturous zigzag beneath St Paphnutius Monastery, its teetering bell towers and medieval walls rising improbably from the forest, he could scarcely wait for the next turn to the south.

  At last, the river turned so purposefully south that the return journey seemed almost insuperable, and Konstantin lowered the sail and slowed to a halt at the mouth of a stream. As far as he could see there was nothing but the river, the ice-white Sun, the pathless forest. Pushing himself to his feet, he tasted the cold, clean air, flapped his arms to restore their circulation. He examined the skate at the end of the left runner, the tiller lines that ran either side of the roped-down armchair, then he looked again at the walls of the pines, here as tall as the river was wide, the snowflakes, alight, ephemeral, tumbling from the tips of their thin black branches.

  With his first steps on to the stream, Konstantin felt the wind die almost completely. He saw the shadows melt, reveal contortions of snow, drifts of incalculable construction unseen before by human eyes. He stepped over roots, the twin impressions of his heel and sole extending behind him. He scaled a sculpture of a waterfall, glittering in the last light from the river. As he pushed into the forest he saw a few dim scraps of colour among the great pillar trunks, and he emerged in a little clearing where the stream met its source and the low, snow-bowed branches were decorated with fragments of material.

  Konstantin watched the water gasping through a small round hole in the ice – dilating on the surface as if the Earth had been pierced in its frozen integrity, as if the pulse of the planet was exposed. Crouching down, he waited for the water and filled his hands, and as he drank he felt a shock simultaneously in all part of his body, as if he had grasped the terminals of an electrical machine. Involuntarily, he sucked in air. He gasped. He arched his back and turned the discs of his spectacles from the ground’s breathless silence to the fine green treetops, where the lines of sunlight danced like the absent birds.

  April 1880

  ‘Let us imagine that this room is on the Moon,’ said Konstantin to Varvara Yevgrafovna, who had that evening brought her antimacassar to the fireside. ‘Let us say that you have fallen asleep, and wake suddenly. What do you see? Well, at first, nothing might strike you as unusual. It would take you some moments to notice that the clock’s pendulum is swinging at a sixth of its normal velocity, as if it has grown six times in length. Intrigued, you rise to your feet, and it is only then you realize that all is very far from normal. Pushing your hands against the arms of the chair, you all but fly across the floor and stand uncertainly some arshins distant, wondering perhaps whether you are still dreaming. Of course, all this is to imagine that the house has somehow been hermetically sealed, since there is almost certainly no atmosphere on the Moon …’

  Beside them, Yevgraf Nikolaievich snored distinctly, sank another centimetre in his sagging armchair, but the girl did not so much as glance in his direction. In the faint light from the unshuttered window, her eyes were as silver as the cross around her neck.

  ‘Go on,’ she prompted.

  ‘Well, perhaps in your befuddlement you take hold of the dresser. Good Lord, you have the strength of Hercules! You meant simply to steady yourself, but you find that you can lift it easily – though it is a full fifty poods in weight! You see, the Moon has a very much smaller volume than the Earth, so its gravitational force is proportionately slight. By retrieving the spring balance from the kitchen, you discover soon enough that your strength is really no greater than normal, that you can deliver the same five-pood force as you would on Earth, but still what wonders, what feats are not now within your powers! You are able to move lightly, unencumbered, your body possessing a mere sixth of its previous weight –’

  ‘A little like swimming?’ suggested Varvara Yevgrafovna.

  ‘Indeed!’ said Konstantin, keenly. ‘The lightness must be a little like being immersed in water – although, of course, there would be no resistant medium. I am unable to swim myself, I’m afraid, so I don’t speak as much of an authority.’

  ‘You never learnt to swim, Konstantin Eduardovich?’

  ‘Alas, no …’

  The girl tutted, smiled. ‘So, what would I see if I looked out of the window?’

  Lowering the long, shining shaft of his ear trumpet, he offered his hand, and so she set down her sewing and rose to her feet, her own hand small and strong. He led the way across the floorboards, past the sideboard and the large, oval table, and they stood together between the curtains, observing the hillside sunk beneath the year’s last snow, pink in the day’s dying light: the snow-trimmed alder and willow trees on the riverbanks, the smoke rising straight from the chimneys on Nizhnaya Street to dissipate high in the freezing air.

  Above the forest, the Moon alone was perfectly white.

  ‘Outside,’ said Konstantin, ‘you would encounter a scene of absolute silence. Without an atmosphere, the stars would not scintillate as they do here on Earth. They would appear more like the stars on the dome of a church
, or silver nails hammered into the heavens, and they would move almost imperceptibly since the axial rotation of the Moon is twenty-eight times slower than the axial rotation of the Earth. Compared to the Moon, the Sahara Desert is a paradise! In the Sahara, there are date palms, oases of life. On the Moon, there is nothing: no wind, no clouds, no snow, no lakes, no water of any kind. There are no subtleties of colour, simply mountains of bare, jagged rock, their lines unsoftened by ice or waves. Indeed, the only colour would belong to the Earth itself.’

  Varvara Yevgrafovna shivered in the cold air pouring from the big panes, pulled her shawl around her shoulders.

  ‘Tell me about the Earth,’ she said, stretching to his ear.

  ‘The Earth! The Earth would be magnificent! Well, by day it would seem something like a milk-white cloud in the funereal sky, but at night it would be three or four times larger than the Moon appears to us and some fifty times brighter – quite bright enough to read by. The seas and continents would appear like a picture behind the pale blue glass of the ether. At once, you would see the entirety of Africa, Europe, the Indian Ocean, the expanses of Asia – even the Gobi Desert. You would see great swathes of cloud, the shining caps of the Arctic and Antarctic, the snowy peaks of the Alps, the Himalayas and the Caucasus Mountains. Terrestrial eclipses would be frequent and majestic. On such occasions, the stars would appear in an abundance beyond our imaginings, while the Earth would seem a great, dark circle in the deep red corona of its atmosphere – the colour infusing the rocks all around us!’

  ‘And if we went outside?’

  ‘Outside …’ Konstantin echoed. He continued to stare through their faint, pale reflections. ‘Yes. It would be possible to venture outside, but only if we were dressed in some kind of suit, like a membrane enclosing the body, protecting us from the lack of atmospheric pressure and the excesses of heat and cold, equipped with vessels to supply us with oxygen and food – although with the relative weakness of lunar gravity these need not be particularly burdensome. But if we were to go outside, well! What couldn’t we do! At first, to gain momentum, we would have to lean forwards, like a pair of horses pulling a heavy cart, but then there would be no need even to walk. We could simply travel by enormous leaps, like a frog or a grasshopper! We could vault crevasses and bound up the flanks of mountains! With a little practice, we would be able to perform somersaults with ease! And if we were to run, well, we would run as fast as a racehorse! Since one lunar day lasts as long as fifteen terrestrial days we would need only to move at fourteen and a half versts per hour and we would be able to remain abreast of the Sun, so that the lunar night need never fall! If we had a rifle, we would be able to fire a bullet a full seventy versts vertically upwards, almost into space! Just imagine that, Varvara Yevgrafovna! How easy space travel would be for a Selenite!’