Konstantin Read online

  TOM BULLOUGH

  Konstantin

  VIKING

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Little Bird

  December 1867

  January 1868

  February 1868

  March 1868

  May 1868

  October 1869

  Konstantin

  January 1873

  March 1873

  April 1873

  June 1873

  July 1873

  November 1873

  January 1874

  February 1874

  Lyubov

  August 1878

  February 1880

  March 1880

  April 1880

  May 1880

  August 1880

  August 1881

  September 1881

  October 1881

  Celestial Mechanics

  March 1965

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  For Edwyn

  The greater man’s progress, the more he replaces the natural by what is artificial

  Konstantin Tsiolkovsky,

  Dreams of Earth and Sky (1895)

  December 1867

  Kostya hurried down the bank towards the frozen Oka, fine and light in his heavy sheepskin coat as a sparrow in its winter plumage. On the river, the tracks of the woodsmen cut north through the even snow, steering a line towards the pine logs strewn along the shore beneath the forest. Kostya ran and slid on the exposed ice. From the darkness of the birch trees he emerged in the December sunlight, one arm extended for balance, the soup can blazing between his shirt and his coat, and nowhere beneath the ice-blue sky could he see any movement beside his own long, wavering shadow.

  The snow on the north bank had formed a crust since it was last trampled by horses and men in bast shoes, and the boy moved quickly and easily up the slope. He climbed among white-capped logs in their hundreds, which would, in the spring, be carried east with the broken ice, seething and roaring the 350 versts to the sawmills at Nizhny Novgorod, but for now were as frozen as the forest behind them. Their tracks in the deep snow were broad, hard and sparkling, cutting between the bare, scrubby lilacs and the gangling ash trees – converging on a door in the wall of the pines.

  That winter, as everyone in Ryazan knew, felling had been prohibited within five versts of the river. Even for a grown-up it was an hour’s walk to the woodcutters’ clearing, and Kostya arrived in the forest almost at a trot, following the plumes of his breath. In the gloom of the great, snow-laden trees, the cold was sharper than ever against his pink, rounded cheeks, his determined, down-turning mouth, the black Tatar eyes that had come to him from his mother. He held the soup can firmly to his skinny stomach, and he looked up only once, when the Sun cut a line through the tangled branches and turned their snow into a torrent of light.

  It was perhaps a verst, perhaps two, before Kostya came to a bright red streak in the track in front of him. He stopped, touched it with his old felt boot and found that it was sticky. The streak was startling against the uniform whiteness. It stretched and wove away from him, complicated by clods of fur, arching in the prints of the horses, and as Kostya lifted his head he found himself facing a tall, scruffy dog – its thick coat glinting with icicles, its colour such that it need only to have retreated a few paces to have vanished among the white-grey trunks.

  On the narrow track beneath the shadow-hung trees, Kostya heard the tremor of his heart, the gasp of his breathing, the hush as a cascade of snow slipped from the treetops, but beneath these fragile noises he heard nothing: the great, indifferent silence of the forest. Distantly, he wondered why this dog had strayed so far from Korostovo, the village where it surely lived. Through the smell of cabbage soup, he smelt its hard, animal stink. He saw the half-eaten hare beneath its wide, webbed claws. He saw its pyramid ears, its muscular shoulders, the knife-like teeth between its thin black lips.

  He saw the silence in its fire-coloured eyes.

  The swathe cut by the men from Korostovo lay parallel with the Oka: a great, gaping space of broken trees and open sky where women in headscarves and children in well-patched rags were gathering branches beneath the few deformed or unwanted pines, the limes and rowans that stood exposed in the winter sunlight. The smoke rose straight from the woodsmen’s fires, like the ghosts of the trees they had felled. In the mouth of the track, Kostya stood small and shivering, the peak of his blue woollen cap low above his eyes. To the south, the men were working steadily, the cold air loud with their axes. He watched them cut a notch above the root of each tree, and a higher notch on the opposite side. He watched them hammer in the wedge as the treetop started to waver, and as the branches met the ground in a screaming, splintering crash he saw them fall upon the trunk – working with brisk, practised movements, slicing the bark along its length, skinning it like an animal.

  Several minutes passed and several women paused in their work to point and call to Kostya before the foreman came striding from the shallow shadow to the south. Eduard Ignatyevich was a broad, dark figure with a black-grey beard, a long black coat and a black felt cap that covered his cropped black hair. Even with a bracking hammer swinging from his big, gloved hand he looked as much like a priest as a forester.

  ‘Konstantin?’ He took his spectacles from his pocket and hooked the arms over his ears. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Kostya produced the soup can from his coat. He held it up to him with trembling hands, the steam coiling faintly from the lid.

  ‘Konstantin,’ his father repeated. His eyelids flickered, but his voice remained low, methodically Polish. ‘Let me explain to you something very important, which I have explained to you in the past but you have clearly failed to understand. In the town, a man is a mind. That is to say, in the town he is an intellectual being. With a house, a fire and a reliable source of food, he is able to rise above his surroundings, to forget his physical self and devote himself to mental pursuits. Without the town, we would have no books, no telegraph, no railway. Because in the forest, a man is simply an animal with neither fur nor claws. Alone in the forest in the winter, he may consider himself to be in terrible danger. Do I make myself clear?’

  Eduard Ignatyevich opened his tin cigarette case, lit a match and released a cloud of smoke, which shone in the light of the low Sun prowling through the southerly treetops. Kostya blinked to stop himself crying. He gave a little nod and his father put a hand to his back and propelled him towards a nearby bonfire where a pine tree stood like a visiting mourner – a rotten lip near the top of its trunk where it had once been struck by lightning.

  ‘As you know,’ he continued, ‘the zemstvo has decided that there will be no more felling in Ryazan after the end of this week. As a result, I have a great deal of work to do. So, I would like you please to make a bed of embers and warm up your soup can, and then when it is hot I would like you to drink it.’

  ‘But –’ said Kostya.

  ‘No buts.’

  ‘But, Father, I brought it for you!’

  ‘Konstantin,’ said Eduard Ignatyevich, and his voice acquired the faintest edge. ‘Do you take me for an idiot? Do you think that I come to the forest every day with inadequate food?’

  ‘But … But, Mama said she was worried that you would have to work until after dark again. She said it’s the most coldest winter she can remember, and she said you would get hungry!’

  His father turned at a shout from one of the woodsmen.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘whatever your mother might have told you, I am quite sure that she had no intention that you should come all the way out here. Indeed, if she knows about it, I imagine she is losing her mind with worry. The situation is quite simple. You are shiver
ing, which indicates that you are trying to remain warm. It is important that you do not catch a chill, therefore you are to drink the soup, stay by the fire and wait for me to return.’

  Even with the heat from the bonfire, a skin of ice had already covered the small oval lenses of his spectacles.

  It snowed again that night, and in the cold grey morning Voznesenskaya Street was clean and white beneath the low clouds, the shock-headed willows and the reds, blues and greens of the little houses. Once again the shutters were open. Women in shawls and aprons were clearing the paths to their doors, breathing visibly, remarking to one another on the twenty-five-degree frost, the ring that someone had seen around the Moon, the mouse that someone else had found in her shoe. Everyone, it seemed, had some portent of doom to report – although to Kostya, standing at the foot of the steps with his toboggan, the city looked very much the same as it had every other winter he could remember.

  Kostya lived in a wooden house with vivid blue walls, three rectangular windows framed by a lacework of carving, and eaves that emerged from beneath the iron roof like the petticoats of some expensive lady. In the snow beside the door, there lay the remains of a thresher once invented by Eduard Ignatyevich, which had never successfully worked. From the squat brick chimney, a line of bluish smoke trailed west towards the embankment of the railway, which had come to Ryazan two and a half years earlier and would, said Kostya’s mother, one day reach such places of the imagination as Voronezh and Rostov-on-Don: the very shores of the Black Sea!

  ‘Ignat!’ Kostya shouted.

  The front door opened and his brother came skidding out of the small dark kitchen where the ten members of the Tsiolkovsky family spent every night from October to April.

  ‘You two mind that you don’t catch cold!’ their mother called after him.

  ‘Yes, Mama!’

  Ignat was a couple of vershoks shorter than Kostya, a skinny specimen, nine years old, with large blue eyes and a shadow in his mouth where he had recently lost his front teeth. With barely a year between them, the two boys had long been inseparable, and they turned without a word along the tracks of a troika, which happened to have passed that morning. They raised their woollen hats to a neighbour who was loading hay through his barn’s stable door, a couple of chickens pecking imaginary morsels at his feet, and as they passed the brightly painted houses they summoned their friends with deafening whistles:

  ‘Andrei!’

  ‘Viktor!’

  ‘Nikolai!’

  ‘Come tobogganing!’

  Myasnitskaya Street led north towards the centre of the city, and it wasn’t long before the two boys reached the limits of the Fire of 1837, where the houses became tall, brick and stone, muted shades of yellow and pink. One was the merchants’ club, where a group of men in bearskin coats were huddled in discussion. Another was the hospital, where, faintly, Kostya could make out the screams of some unfortunate patient. Beyond the creaking sledge and steaming horse of an izvozchik, they passed a team of peasants sweeping the wooden pavements in the snow-smothered gardens of Novobazarnaya Square and they steered as close as they could to a man selling meat pies – the smell so sumptuous that it was almost worth the visit in itself.

  ‘Just imagine …’ Kostya began.

  ‘Kostya!’

  ‘I know, I know. But I haven’t got a kopeck.’

  ‘You’ve got a twenty-kopeck coin! I know you have!’

  ‘Well, you’re not having that!’

  ‘Then I’m not listening.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Ignat!’

  ‘You said you’d give me a kopeck every time I had to listen to one of your stories.’

  For a moment they walked in silence.

  ‘I’ll tow you as far as Sobornaya Square,’ said Kostya. ‘How about that?’

  Ignat sat down on the toboggan and pulled his knees up to his chest.

  ‘Giddy up, horse!’ he said.

  ‘Right.’ Kostya hauled on the string. ‘Imagine if everything in Ryazan was the same size as us. If everything was really small, that would make us really big, wouldn’t it? Then all the other people wouldn’t even be able to see over our boots, but we could see right out over the rooftops. We’d be able to look straight into the fire-towers, and wouldn’t the lookouts get a shock when they saw us!’ He laughed delightedly. ‘And they would have to be nice to us too, because we would be very, very strong and we could just pick up the whole tower if we wanted and plonk it in the river!’

  ‘Faster!’ Ignat tossed a snowball against his brother’s back, and Kostya began to run – the big, stucco houses sliding steadily past them. From the north, the fifteen-minute whistle of the morning train cut through the freezing air.

  ‘In my world, anyway, there wouldn’t be any gravity, so it would be easy to pick up anything we liked. In my world, I would be able to jump versts through the air. I would be able to jump through the clouds and right out into the ether. If I wanted to go to Moscow, I would just have to run and jump and I could fly there, easy. The people in the train would see me zooming past like a cannonball! I would bring back a new dress for Mama, and a smart new fountain pen for Father, and a whole cow for us all to eat –’

  ‘What would you bring me?’ asked Ignat.

  ‘I would bring you a toboggan as big as a kibitka, with red velvet seats and a bell on the front so that everyone would know you were coming!’

  At Sobornaya Square, where an official in cloak and brass buttons was hurrying between the government offices, Kostya stopped beneath a lamp post. All morning he had felt as though something was caught in his throat, and as he coughed and tried to clear the obstacle he felt a sudden wash of giddiness and had to sit down on a bench – facing the avenue that converged on the golden campanile of the kremlin.

  The best tobogganing slope in the whole of Ryazan was the bank of the Trubezh River, near Uspensky Cathedral, whose five deep blue, star-spotted cupolas were like the night sky seen from the outside. The river itself was derisory, a trickle compared to the great winding Oka, but to its south there rose a virtual cliff where, on any winter’s day, you could find a mob of boys flying downhill on shovels and old doors, shrieking and spinning across the ice.

  ‘Kostya!’ called one. ‘Is it true you went to the Korostovo fellings yesterday?’

  ‘He did!’ said Ignat.

  ‘What, on his own?’

  ‘Did you get a beating?’

  ‘Their father never beats them, lucky buggers …’

  ‘Oh! I would have caught it!’

  ‘Poles!’

  It was a matter of pride to Kostya that he possessed an actual toboggan. He had made it himself, and although it amounted to little more than two planks trimmed into curves and a third plank for a seat, he had nailed four wedges to the inside corners for strength, waxed the runners and decorated the sides with bits of coloured glass that he had found in the icon-makers’ yard. As he strode through the crowd, he greeted his friends and took pleasure in their complimentary comments. Arriving at the slope, he considered the scars and footprints in the fresh snow. He sat down, dug his heels into the ground, waited for Ignat to squeeze between his legs, then walked them to the edge, leant forwards and lifted his feet.

  Although both boys had come sledging here numberless times, still the first run of the day was enough to stop the breath in your throat. The ground dropped away so sharply that you might have been falling. Kostya clung to the string, his brother and the sides of the toboggan. He screwed up his eyes against the bitter wind and the flying snow, and as they hit the lip between the bank and the river he felt them lift clean into the air.

  They landed, by chance, on both runners and sped away across the ice – past the quay where the steamboats docked in the summer, past the fishermen crouched over their holes with saw, line and bottle, past the shying horse of a cursing peasant and the final tracks of the other boys – and they hit the far bank with just enough speed to climb half an arshin up the slope.

  Shakin
g with laughter, Kostya lay with his feet in the air and his head on the ice, his face burning, his cap, his linen trousers and his sheepskin coat all caked evenly in snow. Beyond the cross-topped domes of the kremlin and the skeletal beech trees that reached like roots into the clouds, a scrawl of black smoke stretched above the city. After a moment, the train’s five-minute whistle sounded long and mournful, and just as other boys could tell a bird by its song so Kostya could tell that its engine was an 0-6-0: a wood-burning freight locomotive with six drive wheels and no guiding axle – unstable at speed, but useful in these wintry conditions. The ice was forming on his collar, but still he gazed at the smoke in the sky, that signature of power. He thought of the roaring pistons and the steam that fled down the flanks of the carriages. He imagined himself travelling north, fast as a galloping horse – following the telegraph wires through Kolomna, Voskresensk and Lyubertsy, all the way to Moscow itself.

  That afternoon, Kostya sat at the table in the kitchen and stared into the icon corner, where the logs of the walls met like fingers. As a rule, he enjoyed mathematics. He loved its music, the way that the answers would pop unbidden into his head. It was only today that the numbers seemed dark and evasive, shadowy through the ache in his throat and the pain in his head, and when his two younger sisters arrived from the yard with arms full of icicles he shivered so violently in the cold air from the open door that his chalk went skidding across the slate.

  ‘ “The stepmother knew very well …” ’ read Ignat, who was sitting beside him, running a finger across Afanasyev’s Tales.

  ‘Yes?’ their mother prompted.

  Ignat sucked air through the space in his teeth. ‘ “The stepmother knew very well that … deep in the forest there was a … wr … a …” ’

  ‘Spell it out now.’

  ‘W, R, E, T, C, H, E, D.’

  ‘And what does that spell?’

  ‘Wre … ? Wretched!’

  ‘Very good!’

  ‘ “A wretched little hut with the legs of a hen. And … in that little hut, there lived a horrible old witch called Baba Yaga!” ’