Konstantin

by Tom Bullough

  Beside him, the girl was watching him intently, her face soft and young, her eyes open, Moon-coloured.

  ‘Do you think, then, that there might be people on the Moon?’ she asked.

  Her smell was warm and fresh and alive.

  Konstantin smiled and looked back at the Moon’s brightening arch, the gathering stars. ‘I must admit, Varvara Yevgrafovna, it is a matter to which I have given a good deal of thought. After all, do we not see life on our own planet in all manner of conditions? In salt water and fresh, in the air, in the soil, on the tops of the mountains and deep in the ocean where the pressure is a hundred times greater than the pressure on its surface. Life is miraculous, endlessly inventive, so how can I consider life on the Moon to be impossible? What does an organism actually need to survive? Well, it needs heat. It needs oxygen, but from a scientific point of view it is not impossible that oxygen could be provided by special internal organs, able to photosynthesize like the green parts of plants here on the Earth. It is, I believe, possible that a creature could exist on the Moon if it combined the characteristics of plant and animal in a single, wonderful whole. Consider the radiolarian, a unicellular animal that lives on the surface of the ocean and contains chlorophyll besides its other, amoeboid characteristics. Since it is established that land animals have adapted from animals that emerged from the sea, is it not possible that a lunar animal might have adapted from an organism like a radiolarian? Might there not exist an entity effectively independent, reprocessing its own oxygen and waste materials by means of photosynthesis and requiring only sunlight for survival? Take our own planet by way of comparison. The Earth is isolated in space. Nothing enters our atmosphere of any significance besides the heat of the Sun, and yet life, through the harmony of its multitudinous organisms, uses the same materials endlessly, over and over again. If you can imagine in miniature what on the Earth we see in the large, then perhaps you have imagined a Selenite: a creature with a skin impermeable to every kind of fluid and gas, a creature with no external orifices, perhaps possessing beautiful emerald wings able to turn automatically to the Sun, through which carbon dioxide would pass absorbed in the blood to be enriched with oxygen, hydrocarbons and certain nitrogenous compounds. For such a creature, these wings would be an orchard, a garden, a field, a cattle-shed! They would mean that he need never experience thirst, or hunger, or indigestion! Consider those trees on Earth that can survive a thousand years in the face of winds, parasites – all of the massed and hostile forces of Nature! Then consider a creature perfect in his isolation! If a tree can survive a thousand years, then a creature of this kind could survive almost indefinitely! Effectively, he would be an immortal!’

  He turned to Varvara Yevgrafovna, who continued to watch him, her arms around her shoulders, her fine lips gathered in a distant laughter.

  ‘And tell me, Konstantin Eduardovich,’ she asked, once more rising on her toes. ‘Would you be happy like that?’

  May 1880

  The entire population of Borovsk seemed to come outside with the warm spring evenings, when even the Sun showed no inclination to sleep until it was nearly ten o’clock and lingered above the westerly forest like a child trying not to be dispatched to bed. Along Medinskaya Street, the old people dragged benches from the dark, stinking holes of their kitchens and sat among the buttercups, the wandering chickens and the shadows of the small-leaved lime trees, talking with eerie expressions which suggested tales of goblins, evil spirits and the nightly departure of the dead from their graves. Their hands on their sticks, they watched Konstantin and Varvara Yevgrafovna emerge from their tall, crooked house. They followed them with yellow eyes – shaking their heads at the shamelessness of the younger generations.

  Above the flat fields in the valley, the blossom of the apple trees, the plums and cherries cloaked the hillside in pink and white. Their scent made its harmony with the deep, damp song of the soil. Konstantin and Varvara Yevgrafovna descended Krutitskaya Street between hedges purple with flowering lilac. They joined the track beside the high, brown river, where a pair of horses was dragging a sledge of dung through the liquid mud. Among the trees at the edge of a flax field, a circle of women was dancing to the music of a young man with an accordion – orbiting a birch tree as if it were the Sun. The women wore intricately patterned dresses, red-and-white headscarves, garlands of bellflowers and wild pinks. Around them, a crowd was passing bottles, clapping to the accelerating metre. The women danced with twinkling steps, turning counterclockwise, and as they span faster so their dresses revealed their old-fashioned linen petticoats, their slim white ankles. One woman’s headscarf came off altogether so that her long bronze plait flew horizontally outwards, her large eyes laughing, her big breasts lifting with each step, pressing against her loose white blouse, and Konstantin watched with growing fascination until he felt a tug on the sleeve of his jacket.

  Beneath the thin, unfolding leaves of a willow tree, they pushed a grubby punt down the bank into the churning Protva. Konstantin looked with concern at a crack in one side, but Varvara Yevgrafovna mimed urgent paddling, and so he held out his hand to help her aboard, and once she was settled in the prow he positioned himself in the stern. He pushed them uncertainly up the channel between the bank and an island impenetrable with rising reeds and tangled driftwood, bent almost double, feeling with the pole for the solid bed beneath the soft mud, and when they came to the central current he angled the boat towards the opposite bank and allowed them to drift the length of a wooded peninsula before, at a signal from the girl, he swung them awkwardly into its eddy, the water already slopping round their feet – guiding them north until all trace of the town, the smoking tanneries and the sunlit domes of the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin, had disappeared.

  On a pale, muddy beach, Konstantin turned the punt over. He sat on the hull, swatting mosquitoes, admiring the pink and yellow flowers of the rosebay and the St John’s wort, which covered the ground beneath the flood-ringed trees.

  ‘This is nice,’ he admitted, after a minute.

  ‘I used to come down here with my mother.’ Varvara Yevgrafovna looked with pleasure at the gently moving water. ‘I really wasn’t sure if it would still be here. The willows are pretty thick on the peninsula, I suppose, but some years the banks and the islands change completely. Sometimes the river floods so badly you can only see the treetops poking from the water, waving like rushes. If it weren’t for the trees you wouldn’t even know where it was! I remember, one year, the river rose all the way up to Nizhnaya Street. I used to have some friends who lived there, and to stay above the water they had to pull up the floorboards and balance them on the furniture. They spent the whole night sitting in a line, with the water still rising and the icebergs battering the shutters!’

  ‘Your mother wouldn’t swim, though, surely?’ said Konstantin.

  ‘Oh, yes … The thing about this place is that it’s perfectly secret. The woods are thick all the way back up to the fields, and the peninsula gets more and more covered with brambles as the summer goes on. No one can see you unless they paddle up that channel from the river. I suppose people must row up here sometimes to go fishing or blackberrying, but I’ve never seen them. My mother lived in Likhvin when she was a girl. She used to swim in the Oka all through the summer, and she didn’t really see why she should stop just because she was a grown-up.’

  ‘What did your father think?’

  ‘I don’t suppose he ever knew.’

  ‘So …’ He hesitated. ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Well, this is a good place to learn,’ said Varvara Yevgrafovna, brightly. ‘There’s no real current, and you shouldn’t get much out of your depth. Swimming’s all about confidence. Anyone can stay afloat if they think they can stay afloat, but if you want to swim properly you should start by cupping your hands and drawing them out to either side. Like this.’ She demonstrated. ‘And as you pull your hands backwards, kick out your legs like a frog, so the soles of your feet push against the wate
r. You see?’ She smiled and gestured at the pool. ‘Don’t worry. You just need to get started, and then do lots of practice.’

  ‘We … I might need to find another boat if I’m going to do that.’

  ‘You’re prevaricating,’ she said, firmly.

  His back to the girl, Konstantin stood on a patch of dry grass, removed his spectacles, his ear trumpet, his jacket, his boots, his socks, his trousers and finally his shirt, which he draped together over a branch. Pale and ungainly in his long white drawers, he trod through the mud and sank his feet in the bitter water. He winced, and were he not being observed he would certainly have retreated to the bank to wait for some sunny afternoon in July, but even though his feet were numb and aching he continued to wade forwards until his waist was framed by the dark, turning water, the trembling reflections of the drooping leaves and the cirrus clouds. For a moment, he waited, breathing through his teeth, his arms round his bony chest, but he knew that if he remained there he would probably catch a chill, and so he bent his knees, crossed himself and slipped into the river.

  Konstantin swallowed water, thrashed his arms as if drowning. He kicked out wildly, but when he touched the bottom he felt his own lightness and, remembering the girl’s instructions, he began clumsily to pull himself forwards, splashing but remaining afloat until he encountered the mud of the opposite bank.

  Turning in triumph, Konstantin could see no trace of Varvara Yevgrafovna. In a wash of panic, he pushed his wet hair out of his eyes, looked from the punt to the matted trees and flowers, into the intervening water. Several moments passed before he noticed that a skirt and blouse were hanging from the branch beside his own clothes, and he looked up the river to see the girl swimming calmly with the eddy – her black hair tapering to a trailing plait, her shoulders rising rhythmically, pale and naked.

  August 1880

  It took three assaults on the door of a high log house, cream-painted, curiously devoid of windows, before the priest of the Orthodox Church of the Nativity of the Virgin emerged in his snuff-coloured cassock, his cheeks riven with wrinkles, his eyelids fluttering. Behind him, among the levels of tobacco smoke, the empty bottles and the still-burning candles, an auburn-headed boy lay face down in a game of ‘fools’. The priest looked from Konstantin in his fresh, pressed suit, his steel-rimmed spectacles and homburg hat to Varvara Yevgrafovna in her long black skirt and lace-edged blouse, her twin plaits making one another’s acquaintance on her shoulder. Blinking with pain and confusion, he peered at the brilliant trunks of the birch trees that surrounded the little village of Roshcha – their pointed leaves stirring and turning in the early-morning sunlight.

  ‘What … time is it?’ he asked, at last.

  ‘It is seven o’clock, Sergei Mikhailovich,’ said Konstantin.

  ‘Seven o’clock!’ The priest put his hands to his grizzled temples. ‘What do you want, Konstantin Eduardovich? Are you here to torment me?’

  ‘We should like to be married.’

  ‘At seven o’clock in the morning! Who gets married at seven o’clock in the morning? Tell me that! Who gets married in the summer, even? Nobody! It is contrary to the laws of God and Nature!’ He turned to the bride, who stood silently beside Konstantin. ‘Varya, you are here under duress, are you not?’

  Varvara Yevgrafovna shook her head.

  ‘Then …’ He looked down the hill towards the Protva and the shadow-striped fields, across the low stone wall into the cemetery, where a few calves and sheep were grazing steadily. ‘Then where, pray, is your congregation? Where is your father, Varya? Where is your best man, Konstantin Eduardovich? You cannot marry without a best man! It’s unheard of!’

  Konstantin lowered his ear trumpet and took a sheaf of roubles from the pocket of his trousers.

  ‘We would just like to marry quietly, Sergei Mikhailovich. I … wonder if perhaps your friend would be good enough to help?’

  In the great, empty nave, Konstantin and Varvara Yevgrafovna stood before the five moulded storeys of the iconostasis, where the saints in their flamboyant raiments bowed their heads to the Virgin and Child. The couple held candles white and blazing in their left hands, so close to one another that Konstantin could feel the intimate pressure of the girl’s shoulder in the muscle of his arm. Behind them, the boy had composed himself sufficiently to sit a pair of gilt, velvet-brimmed crowns on their heads. Above them, the sallow, bearded face of Christ looked down from a sky of motionless stars. Konstantin watched the priest in his stole and his crimson, gold-embroidered phelonion, his breathing laboured as he read from a battered black Bible. The previous summer he had been obliged to study Old Slavonic for his teaching examination, and at one point he identified a passage from John – the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine – but such was the solemnity of the occasion that it seemed inappropriate to use his ear trumpet, and for the most part he heard nothing but a series of grunts and moans.

  Konstantin sat in the armchair in his apartment, his eyes on the window, his head on the completed antimacassar, which comprised his entire dowry. In the light of the low evening Sun, he felt himself elevated, suspended by unknown forces above the shallow valley, the dusty roofs, the blazing fields of yellow rye. For long, unmoving minutes, he watched the mist condense over the Protva: a luminous ribbon, which ran among the willows as if the spirit of the river, its animus, had been revealed by some mysterious process of refraction.

  At length, Konstantin removed his spectacles and placed them on the desk. In the timbers of the house, he felt the drunken celebrations of Yevgraf Nikolaievich and his scant congregation. He crossed the floorboards to the door of the bedroom, where the shutters were closed and, in the little light from the icon lamp, he could see no more than the shape of his wife: the ingress of her waist, the swell of her hips, the sudden division of her legs. She was standing near the curtains, untying her hair, which retained a certain kink as it fell across her shoulders, her upper arms, her naked breasts, which he discerned more clearly as the seconds passed: pale, erect, dark towards the tips. Had he been able to hear her reply, he might have complimented her on her appearance or made some joke to relieve his tension, but instead he stood motionless in the doorway, separated from her by the corner of the iron-framed bed. He watched as if hypnotized as she turned towards him her tapering back and the dark globes of her buttocks, reached for the icon of Vasily the Blessed and turned the saint to face the wall.

  August 1881

  A year elapsed.

  On the first Monday morning of the autumn term, Konstantin arrived in his classroom to find those few children in attendance standing at their desks, smiling and clapping their hands. After two sleepless nights, he seemed to have acquired a preternatural sensitivity. At the back of the room, the big, colourful map of Russia and Little Russia possessed a fresh depth, a brilliance. Between the windows and the whitewashed walls, the elongated impressions of the window frames were dazzling with sparks. Even the applause sounded bright, precise, almost loud.

  He went to the window and inspected the tawny schoolyard, the late-summer splendour of the limes and the birch trees, the intricate golden clouds. He set down his satchel on his desk at the front of the room, and from his shoulder he removed a white silken bundle whose microscopic stitching appeared to shine with a light of its own.

  ‘It’s a nice day,’ said Konstantin, finally. ‘Isn’t it a nice day?’

  The children nodded.

  ‘Thank you for your congratulations … I … You must excuse me, I … I have had rather an unusual weekend … The timing of the school year has, perhaps, not been ideal.’ He considered these seven of his pupils not required by their parents to gather firewood or lead their horses to pasture, then realized that he was staring at the low-topped boots of the boy at the nearest desk. ‘Well … It doesn’t seem right to begin the school programme with so few of you present … I think, perhaps … Shall … Shall we go outside?’

  In the shade of an apple tree said to have been plant
ed by an inmate of the prison that had stood there fifty years earlier, the three girls and four boys assembled a square of benches. They huddled together so that he would be able to hear them, eyed the handful of apples that remained among the downy, serrated leaves.

  ‘I thought,’ Konstantin started, ‘that I would tell you about buoyancy … You have all seen buoyancy in action, haven’t you? You’ve all seen logs drifting down the river, or smoke floating in the air. Buoyancy can be described as a vertical, upwards pressure. Essentially, the rule is that if a body is heavier than its surrounding medium – that is to say, air or water – then it will sink, because its weight is greater than its buoyancy. If a body is exactly as heavy as its surrounding medium then it will float where it is, because its weight counterbalances its buoyancy. And if a body is lighter than its surrounding medium then the buoyancy will prevail, which is the reason why a boat will float or an air balloon will rise. You see?’