Konstantin Read online

  Even in the ice-softened daylight, Maria Ivanovna looked exhausted. There were lines between her arching eyebrows, around her tapering eyes, her high Tatar cheekbones. Her grey woollen dress was clean and pressed, but it hung unfilled beneath her milk-heavy breasts, and as she packed into an iron-bound trunk the work of philosophy that her husband wrote for an hour every evening, the strands of silver shone in her thick black hair.

  ‘Mama?’ said Kostya, eventually. ‘Mama, I’m thirsty.’

  His mother straightened up, one arm supporting her chest. ‘Have you done your sums yet, Kostya?’

  ‘Not … Not yet, Mama.’

  ‘Then you can have a drink when you finish your sums.’

  ‘But, Mama …’

  Out by the frozen well, Masha and Fekla were singing a song that their mother had taught them on one of their countless long winter’s evenings – the story of a prince and a beautiful changeling peasant girl. There was always more noise about the house when Eduard Ignatyevich was at work. Often Maria Ivanovna would sing herself, and when Kostya wasn’t faced with such problems as 136 ÷ 8 and 157 × 5 he would join in too, rattling between his various projects: the puppets and the model trains that he would make out of glue and cardboard, the cockroaches he would catch with Ignat and race along a floorboard framed by particularly wide cracks.

  Today, however, the song was simply fuel to the pain in his head.

  ‘Konstantin!’ Maria Ivanovna was standing behind him, staring down at her own neat, rounded numbers and the line that had spat from his chalk. ‘What on Earth have you done?’

  ‘Mama,’ he said, in a pitiful voice. ‘I don’t feel well.’

  ‘You’ve crossed out my sums!’

  ‘No, Mama! I didn’t mean to!’

  ‘By all that’s holy, Konstantin!’

  On the ledge above the stove, the baby started to cry.

  Maria Ivanovna put her hands to her face, breathing heavily. ‘Yesterday … You’ve no idea … Konstantin, I’ve told you endlessly not to go into the forest, haven’t I? I’ve told you all about the dangers, and the risk of getting lost, and the robbers, and the Baba Yaga, and what do you do? You go off into the forest, on your own, right in the middle of winter!’

  ‘But, Mama –’

  ‘And now I ask you to do ten sums easily within your ability, and not only do you not even try to do them, for some reason you actually cross them out!’

  ‘Mama, I don’t feel well –’

  ‘And what did I tell you when you left the house this morning? What did I specifically tell you?!’

  ‘Not to catch cold, Mama,’ said Kostya, miserably.

  ‘Not to catch cold,’ said his mother. ‘And so, of course, you catch cold!’

  Beside him, Ignat sat in silence, his finger on the page, his eyes turned furtively towards them. In the summer room, the girls came marching back among the barrels of pickled cabbage and cucumber, the model trains and houses that Eduard Ignatyevich had made himself when the older boys were small and he still had time for such diversions – their boots loud on the hollow floor, their voices shrill and penetrating.

  ‘Honestly, Kostya, what on Earth am I supposed to do with you? Do you not realize what a difficult time this is for us? Your father no longer has work here! Do you understand what that means? In five days he will be leaving for Vyatka. We are going to have to pack everything up and say goodbye to all of our friends, and travel all the way across the country, and …’ She hesitated, her cracked red hands in fists against her belly. ‘Well, your father may not approve of beating, but I was raised on it and, I swear, if you continue with this behaviour I will take your trousers down, bend you over and beat the life out of you!’

  ‘I saw a wolf!’ Kostya whispered.

  Beside him, Ignat stirred in the broad straw bed. His eyelids quivered, his eyes fiery in the wind-raised light from the big stove.

  ‘What … ?’ he said, sleepily.

  ‘I saw a wolf, in the forest!’

  Kostya felt light, alert, as if he were dreaming. The pain in his head and his throat was gone. There was a distant discomfort in the bones of his limbs, but they seemed somehow to be the limbs of somebody else. He himself was perfectly composed. He was warm and safe in this strong little house with its fire and its food – apart from the blizzard that howled and clawed at the shutters, trying to force its way inside.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I was scared.’

  ‘If you’re telling me one of your stories …’

  ‘I’m not! It’s true!’ Kostya’s whisper broke into speech.

  ‘Ssh!’

  Behind Ignat’s anxious, flame-painted face, Maria Ivanovna sighed with every breath – her head turned right, towards her guardian angel, and Anna, Fekla and Masha, and the fire-lit canopy that divided the kitchen every night. Faint through the thin linen, Eduard Ignatyevich lay between Alexei and Dmitri, muttering in Polish. Beneath the kerosene lamp, St Nikolai the Miracle Worker, St Ioann the Divine, the Weeping Virgin and Christ Pantocrator appeared to be suspended in the air – their faces lined equally with wisdom and suffering.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Ignat. ‘How come it didn’t eat you?’

  But a weakness and a weariness had come over Kostya, quick as a cloud’s shadow, and even as he opened his mouth to reply he felt himself sliding back into sleep.

  Ivan Ivanovich Lesovsky was a kind old man, a Pole, a friend of Eduard Ignatyevich, but as he approached Kostya in the fluttering candlelight on that second evening he looked terrible, diabolic. Tall and stout, he had snow on his shoulders, shadow-filled craters beneath his eyes and a fine moustache that emerged from his beardless cheeks like little horns. He stood above the bed, his face carved from darkness, while Kostya shrank beneath the blanket until he could barely see over its edge.

  ‘Hello, old chap.’ He had a deep voice, almost subterranean. ‘Can you tell me what’s wrong? Have you got a sore throat?’

  ‘Kostya, you know Dr Lesovsky.’ Maria Ivanovna sat beside him, stroking the wet hair back from his forehead. She set a candle on a chair beside the bed and the shadows shrunk in the doctor’s face. The light glittered on the ice in his moustache. Suddenly his expression was one of concern, so Kostya allowed his mother to pull the blanket back beneath his chin.

  ‘Have you got a sore throat, Little Bird?’

  Kostya nodded, and coughed up a thick, glue-like substance.

  The doctor smiled. He placed a hand on Kostya’s forehead, then produced a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket and set two long hairy fingers on the inside of his wrist. He hummed a tune and watched the second hand make its circle of the face.

  ‘One forty,’ he pronounced. ‘And I’d put the temperature at forty, forty and a half. You’re not at all well, are you, poor old chap?’ He turned to Maria Ivanovna. ‘How long has he been like this?’

  ‘He started complaining … yesterday, Ivan Ivanovich.’

  ‘You didn’t think to call me then?’

  ‘Well …’ She stroked Kostya’s hair more urgently. ‘You see, Ivan Ivanovich, he’d been playing in the snow. I thought he’d just caught a chill …’

  The doctor took the candle and inspected Kostya’s mouth and cheeks. The shadows moved through the pouches of his face and the tiny holes that pitted his large red nose.

  ‘Well, old boy,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to have a look down your throat, so we’re going to have to get you out of bed. It won’t hurt, don’t worry. Do you think you can manage that?’

  Thin and feeble in his long white shirt, Kostya pushed his legs over the edge of the mattress. He got to his feet with the help of his mother, while the doctor wrapped him in the blanket and lifted him on to her lap.

  ‘Well done, Kostya,’ she murmured. ‘Well done, Little Bird …’

  When Ivan Ivanovich put his fingers to the sides of Kostya’s neck, the boy howled and thrashed against the blanket, but his arms were pinioned and his mother, even his mother,
was holding his head so that he couldn’t pull away. The doctor bent over him, the candle in one hand, and when he pushed a cold metal spoon between his lips it was as if his tongue were being sliced with razors. Mucus boiled in his throat, fetid and clinging. In the gale of his breath, the candlelight panicked. The doctor’s face seemed to convulse, whipped up like the Oka in the fierce autumn winds, a flame in each eye and each dribbling icicle that hung from his moustache, and, realizing that he had been deceived, Kostya shook and fought and wailed in terror.

  Later, when he was free to move again, Kostya lay limply across the big bed. His head lolled to the right, as his mother had left it. His eyes were closed, shivering faintly beneath their lids. He was tiny, translucent, a daub of violent colour on each cheek like a peasant girl at Easter.

  ‘Maria Ivanovna,’ said the doctor, patiently. ‘You must understand that in your condition you cannot risk staying with him. You can’t stay with him, he can’t stay with the other children and none of you can stay in this house until it has been cleaned. The floors must be scrubbed, the walls whitewashed and your clothes and sheets washed and baked. I will send the watchman from the hospital with potassium permanganate, which should be dissolved in four buckets of water and left in the corners of the house for a week at least …’

  ‘Would you like some more tea, Ivan?’ asked Eduard Ignatyevich in a low, tight voice.

  Behind his eyelids, Kostya dozed, woke, dozed, skimmed the surface of sleep. His fingers twitched beneath the blanket. His breath croaked from his open mouth, while saliva trickled down his cheek and formed a dark circle on the white linen.

  ‘Pan doktor, I’ve lost six children! Six! I cannot bear to lose another!’

  Kostya did not feel his father dress him in trousers, boots, woollen hat and sheepskin jacket, and wrap him in the blanket. He woke only with the fearsome cold outside in the street, where great white flakes fell from the vastness of space, shining from a light cut to the shape of his mother, from the lantern that hung from a sledge whose driver had snow in piles on his hat and coat, whose horse stood shivering in the arch between the shafts. Eduard Ignatyevich’s breath was hot and odourless. His beard was coarse against the tender skin of Kostya’s face. His arms were knots of strength beneath his son’s back and legs. As the whip flew out above the horse’s back, Kostya heard himself groan and saw the snowflakes weaving from the blackness, like the stars falling from their homes.

  Full well the Virgin trod the road

  That led her to Ryazan!

  Beside the tavern were figures with huge distorted faces, dancing in the snow with accordions and wheeling arms.

  The church bells made a pulsing, shimmering roar.

  ‘Nearly there, Kostya,’ said his father, in a soft, unfamiliar voice. ‘Nearly there now.’

  The big stone houses formed a ravine, a cleft in the Earth where the snowflakes swarmed around the gas lamps. It was at its deepest point that Ivan Ivanovich’s sledge passed between the lanterns on the gateposts of the hospital and stopped beside three steps, a pair of doors and a wall of light-leaking shutters. From inside, there came the familiar screams, and Kostya began to struggle feebly in his father’s arms.

  As they passed through the door, they met a torrent of noise and heat. Ivan Ivanovich shouted and gesticulated. The waiting room seethed and pressed towards him, peasants bowing and crossing themselves, long hair swinging across their raw, bearded faces. On the floor, one man lay in a puddle of blood, his legs impressed with the runners of a sledge, held together only by his trousers. On a bench a heavily pregnant woman was groaning, ignored. On another, a drunkard snored insensibly.

  ‘I do appreciate your assistance, Eduard,’ said Ivan Ivanovich, distantly. ‘The feldshers are overwhelmed … We have a case of scarlatina, therefore the first thing to do is to reduce the swelling in the lymphatic glands. I will begin by decongesting the nostrils, and then relieve the throat by means of the principle of opposition.’

  In a bare white room, Kostya lay naked on an oilcloth. Above him, a pressure lamp gave out such light and heat that his father and the doctor seemed unreal, angelic. His father’s spectacles were lamps in themselves. Someone was sponging his body with warm water, moving across his legs and his abdomen, which were red and prickly like goose flesh. The doctor held some kind of pump – a glass cylinder with notches on the side – and when he set its mouth to Kostya’s nose the boy felt an explosion of pain. Mucus and soapy water burst from the other nostril and spattered over his chin. He coughed and retched. He flapped like a fish on the slippery bed. In a moment, he saw his father’s eyes, small and blue behind their lenses. Through the roar of the flame, he heard him speaking incomprehensibly, as if asking continual questions. He could smell again now – soap, kerosene and, to his surprise, potato – and when the doctor next appeared he was holding a bulging handkerchief. In the depths of his mind, Kostya remembered a trick that his sister Anna had once shown him, when she placed a ball inside a bottle, sealed the bottle, and then revealed it to be empty. In the flickering light, the doctor squeezed the handkerchief so that hot potato oozed between his fingers, and he pressed it to the agonized side of Kostya’s neck, while ladling snow into his mouth.

  January 1868

  Kostya’s room was tall but narrow. It contained a small black stove, a pile of logs, an icon of Vasily the Blessed, naked and supplicating, a bed with a golden dome at each corner and a chair where Ivan Ivanovich would appear periodically to frown, feed him water or push a wood-framed instrument into his armpit, which he would later return to consult. The room had a window with shutters that were sometimes closed and sometimes open. Once, Kostya managed to pull himself upright. With the heat from the stove the inside window was clear of ice, but even in the sunlight that made the ‘T’ out of ‘ KOSTYA’ on the wall beside the door still the outside window remained opaque – the horses and patients who arrived in the yard the spectral inhabitants of a separate world.

  There were worms in Kostya’s head, which made him scream and attack the iron bed-end like he was fighting the bars of a cage. Some of them were curled like maggots in his throat, so that he struggled for every long, gargling breath and would wake from dreams in which he was being strangled. Others burrowed upwards into the bone and the matter of his brain until they came to his ears, where, pale, eyeless, sharp with spines, they gnawed at his flesh with little teeth. One night, when the shutters were closed and only the faint glow of the fire lit the room, Kostya pushed his fingers deep into his ears. He reached for the worms, and in the darkness felt a slick, slimy fluid dribbling from his earholes, down his neck, into the collar of his hospital shirt.

  At one point that night, Kostya dozed and woke to find a faint slice of yellow light hanging in the air above him. He was calm, cool, for once without pain. His head lay on the pillow, but where formerly he had had shoulders and a ribcage now he had a tiny pair of arms thrown backwards and a pair of legs that curled above his belly to end in miniature feet. Kostya could feel every hair, every pore of his new skin in perfect detail. He knew that he was a baby, that he could neither stand nor speak. He lay helplessly, his fat hands open to the slice of yellow light, and so he remained for some unfathomable period of time, until the slice brightened into daylight and a memory of his previous body came back to him from a distant corner of the bed.

  That afternoon, Kostya managed to drag himself to the chair beside the bed, and retrieved his twenty kopecks from the pocket of his sheepskin. The yellow-red sunlight cut into the room almost horizontally, colouring the smoke that leaked from the stove, leaving a yellow-red image of the window on the bare white wall beside the door. Kostya put the small cool coin on his swollen tongue and heard the silver click against his teeth. He swung open the inside window and inspected the yellow-red fronds of the ice on the outer pane. In the freezing air that poured across the bed, he wrapped his blanket round his shoulders, removed the coin from his mouth and, holding its edges with his fingernails, pressed it to the glass.r />
  A perfect circle appeared in the light on the wall, containing a crown with a cross, a double-headed eagle with orb and sceptre, and a minute image of St George killing the dragon. When Kostya repeated the process with the other side of the coin, he made a second crown, a laurel wreath, the words ‘20 kopecks’ and the date ‘1862’.

  Kostya put his eyes to the two little circles and looked outside into the hospital yard. Between the gateposts and the silhouettes of the grand houses across the street, the Sun hung low and fierce above the shallow roofs of Ryazan. The snow was pink, like some expensive confection in the French shop on Novobazarnaya Square. The sunlight reduced the people in the runner-striped street to black, active shapes, like jackdaws. At the hospital steps, three men were loading a lifeless body on to a sledge – the horse spluttering, belching luminous clouds, stamping its feet on the hidden cobbles – and it was only when he heard the horse’s noise that Kostya realized the hospital was silent. He frowned and listened again. Perhaps, he thought, it was New Year’s Day. Perhaps all of the other patients had gone home to eat dumplings and porridge with jam.

  Kostya pulled the blanket over his head like a shawl. After a time, there were footsteps on the hollow wooden floorboards in the corridor, but they did not stop at his door, and so to combat his loneliness he sang the song about the prince and the changeling girl. His voice was loud and muffled. With his blocked-up nose he had to stop to breathe at the end of every line. He scraped at the ice as it formed in his eyeholes, scanning the jackdaw figures for anyone he knew, and he became so involved in this world of shadows that he only noticed that the doctor had arrived when he felt him tap on his shoulder.

  ‘Now then,’ said Ivan Ivanovich, sternly. ‘What do you think you’re up to? You’re ill, if you remember? It’s minus ten degrees outside. That means, stay in your bed!’

  He watched Kostya lie back on his pillow, then turned and sat down on the chair.