Watson, Ian - Novel 11 (6 page)

 
          
Felix could no
longer contain himself.
“Dear boy, what are you
saying
? Bring
him out of the trance!”

 
          
A
worried Dr Kirilenko complied. The tape recorder was switched off and notepads
were laid aside.

 
          
For
a moment or two Mikhail blinked in bewilderment, newly restored to
himself
. As he took in the room and its frumpy furnishings
with contemporary eyes, he grinned. But a puzzled look crossed his face as he
registered the expressions of the others in the room, and began to recall . . .

 
          
“It’s
like waking up from a dream,” he muttered.
“A dream that
tries to fade away.
If you concentrate, you can remember.” “You’ll soon
establish perfect control,” said Sonya soothingly. “You’ll soon have a sense of
conscious continuity between yourself—and your other self.”

 
          
“I
was in that joint just off
Karl-Marx Street
! I’m sure it’s the same place . . . This
room was the inn. And before—no, afterwards, I’m getting mixed up—I was in a
hotel room. Now what was I doing? Got it! I was penning a letter to Olga
Kundasova

 
          
“And
there it is.” Sonya indicated the notepad lying open on the sofa beside him;
the pages were covered with scrawly handwriting.

 
          
Sergey
launched himself across the room to snatch up the pad. “It’s a bloody
melange
, that’s what this is! These
officer fellows are straight out of
Three
Sisters
—names and all. Okay, so Chekhov did travel part of the way with an
army doctor and a couple of soldiers. But all this nonsense about the comet! Little
did I suspect, Petrov, when you made that crack about Jules Verne—!” He tossed
the notepad down.

           
Felix also stood up, so as not to be
dominated by Sergey. “Let’s get our facts straight.
Something
exploded over
Tunguska
in
the middle of
Siberia
in 1910, right?”

 
          
“Wrong,”
said Sergey. “It was 1908.1 once wrote an article on the
Tunguska
mystery.”

 
          
“I
stand corrected. Anyway, Anton Chekhov was safely in his grave by then. It
certainly didn’t happen in 1888, dear boy!” Kirilenko stood up too. “Excuse me,
Felix Moseivich, but I am safe in presuming that Mikhail is fully
au courant
with the actual life of
Chekhov?”

 
          
“Absolutely.
Must we all keep breaking out in French? We’re
Soviet artists, not nineteenth century Russians.”

 
          
“If
there are
no
gaps in Mikhail’s
knowledge of the facts, then he couldn’t possibly invent something to fill
those gaps.”

 
          
“He
could hardly fill gaps, if there aren’t any.”

 
          
“So
he’s fantasizing,” Sergey said.

 
          
“But
he can’t be. Oh, admittedly he fantasizes that he’s Chekhov—in the
psychological sense. But he has to do so
accurately
,
just as I instructed him to. He can only invent around the known facts. He
doesn’t have free rein to make up whatever he chooses. I must say, nothing like
this has happened before in my experience. It’s an important and fascinating
new development.” However, Kirilenko hardly sounded very happy about it.
Actually, what had happened was confoundedly embarrassing. . .

 
          
“Maybe
Petrov’s insane?” suggested Sergey. “You know: cuckoo?
Round
the twist?”

 
          
“Thanks,”
said Mikhail.

 
          
“We
have to get to the bottom of this,” said Kirilenko. “I shall reinforce my
instructions—then we’ll skip forward a few weeks. Probably that’ll put us back
on the right track . . .”

 
          
Just
then the double doors opened and Osip wandered into the room without having
troubled to knock—attracted by their voices raised in dispute?

 
          
“Damn
it, man!” snapped Felix. Was the caretaker keeping watch on them, as well as on
the building?

           
“Would you lot like something to
eat?” asked Osip.
“Some refreshments?”

 
          
Felix
Fixed
him with a hard stare for several moments,
before allowing, “Maybe we should break for lunch.”

 
          
“It
couldn’t have been a comet, could it?” Sonya said.
“The
Tunguska
thing?
I thought it had all the characteristics of
a nuclear explosion in mid-air?
The heat flash.
Radiation scabs on the reindeer. The pattern of tree-fall, the growth spurt in
the trees afterwards . . .”

 
          
“Oh
yes,” agreed Sergey sarcastically. “Naturally I came to that conclusion in my
article.
A nuclear explosion in 1908—nothing more obvious,
when you come to think of it.”

 
          
Felix
noted how Osip had pricked up his ears. “Be off with you,” he told the
caretaker. “Get on with it—we’re hungry.”

 
          
Slowly
Osip slouched from the room.

 
          
“There’s
no other explanation, is there, that fits all the facts?” said Sonya.

 
          
“Soviet
scientists are working hard on the
Tunguska
problem every year,” Sergey explained. “They use helicopters and geiger
counters.”

 
          
“And
still nobody knows for sure,” said Felix. “From all I’ve heard it’s . . . damn
it,
it’s
downright Chekhovian! Who knows what
happened? Who’ll ever know?”

 
          
“It
was
you
who dragged outer space into
all this, in the first place!” Sergey shouted accusingly.

 
          
Outside,
the sun shone down dazzlingly upon the snowscape, though a curtain of cloud was
in the offing . . .

 
          
Anton gazed ACROSS
a grim river, the
colour of slate. Barges drifted by with dozens of boatmen lining their
gunwales, clutching poles like medieval soldiers armed with pikes. It was
hellishly cold.

 
          
If
he could only get over to the other side! But the bargees only pulled rude
faces at him and shouted abuse.

 
          
He
fled from the riverbank, pursued by their taunts, and immediately came upon a
cemetery. The stone gate posts were crumbling, as were the tombs within; yet a
funeral procession had just arrived, and filed inside. The mourners seemed to
comprise everyone he had ever known. Suvorin was there. So was Pleshcheyev.
Olga Kundasova, too—and Nikolai Leikin.
Modest Tchaikovsky
stood next to Maria Kiseleva. Levitan, Evgenia, Masha . . . And without
exception everyone was weeping un- consolably.

 
          
Anton
rushed into the cemetery to try to explain that the coffin was full of stones.
But the mocking laughter of the bargees still rang in his ears, confusing him. Those
evil fellows were still watching him from somewhere—openly and contemptuously
like police spies . . .

 
          
He
woke up with a start—and the majestic Yenisey lay before him, in full flood,
rather than that
Styx
of his dreams. A stalwart ferry was
ploughing against the fierce current, ever nearer to the shore, to bear him
back to
Krasnoyarsk
. Horses stamped fretfully; harness jingled.

 
          
“Ever
thought you were being watched, Ilya?” he asked Sidorov, who was holding the
reins. “You know the feeling? The old animal sense, as if something’s boring
between your shoulder blades?”

 
          
“Uh.”
Sidorov made a feeble attempt to shake himself out of
his stupor.

 
          
“I
ought to be in
Sakhalin
now, taking a census. And something’s
driving me down a different road—like a bayonet sticking in my back. I must be
sick in my mind.
A psychopath, eh?”

 
          
“Uh.”

 
          
And
there it was! Not insanity, but
fatigue.
Exhaustion was the cause of his dream and source of his mental confusion.
Neurasthenia reached unique new depths on any Siberian journey—but especially
on a trip through the endless forests of the taiga. Time stopped entirely.
One’s brain clogged up.

 
          
“Uh huh.”
Sidorov’s face was so grimy that he might have
been masquerading as a Negro, smeared with boot polish.

 
          
Anton
rubbed his own face. His knuckles came away black as a lamp wick. Whenever
Summer lightning struck the forests, fires dragged sooty palls across the Road.
Which was worse: the floods and gluey mud before—or this dry dusty smoking
heat? Both were vile . . . And no matter how many trees were burned to a
cinder, it never seemed to diminish by one jot the endless ranks of pines
reeking of resin, of larches and firs, and those gloomy birches which were
darker than the birches of
Russia
, less sentimental in hue . . .

 
          
“My
God, if a jaunt of three hundred versts to Kansk and back knocks a fellow up
like this—that’s on a road, mind you!—Heaven help us once we’re off the beaten
track!”

 
          
“Don’t
worry, Anton Pavlovich.” Sidorov had come alive again. “Wherever Man exists,
there are tracks. The Tungusi know where the paths are . . . One day, I swear
to you, this forest will be driven back—oh, maybe as far as Kansk itself!
You’ll see fields of cabbages and potatoes. And the one thing which will bring
that day closer is to call attention to
Siberia
!”

 
          
“You
know, back in
Russia
I used to think the crash of an axe was such a cruel sound . . .”

 
          
“We’re
all of us lost in a dark wood, blundering around. We need to let a little light
in. Don’t we?’’

 
          
“Yes.’’

 
          
“Really,
our problem’s just one of timing—as our surveyor friend says. We could hop in a
boat right away. The Yenisey would carry us off to the North without us lifting
a finger.
But as soon as we left the river . . .’’

 
          
“‘Ay,
there’s the rub,’ as Vasily Fedotik would say.’’

 
          
“This
taiga’s evil, Anton Pavlovich. The mosquitoes can eat you alive. Horses can
drown in the devilish bogs.’’

 
          
“So
we wait till it freezes—then the
Winter
swallows us.
It’s madness. Besides, have you considered the cost?’’

 
          
How
slowly yet valiantly the ferry moved ... A group of peasants shared the jetty
with them, perching on baskets of spring onions. A circuit judge sat pompously
upon his carriage. Anton’s thoughts drifted back over the strange chain of
events of the past few weeks . . .

 
          
Commencing
with his visit to the offices of the
Krasnoyarets
newspaper on the morning after he had first heard Sidorov tell his tale . .
. The editor insisted on holding a reception in Anton’s honour at his own home
that very evening. Present at that soiree had been a fairly fatuous company of
ladies, drummed up in haste, who oo-ed and ah-ed over him and tinkled pianos
and recited Pushkin—and the not-so-fatuous Countess Lydia Zelenina who was
playing it up as a ‘romantic exile . . .’

 
          
There
Anton had also met a Czech surveyor, Jaroslav Mirek by name, who had something
to do with a scheme for building a railway, but who was kicking his heels in
Krasnoyarsk
.

 
          
One
thing had led to another, which had led in turn to a third, till a fortnight
later Anton was still becalmed in
Krasnoyarsk
—as were Vershinin, Rode and Fedotik. It now
transpired that the three musketeers were in reality stuck for funds, having
extravagantly run through their allowances of two thousand roubles apiece. But
by then Vershinin was talking brashly of persuading the Governor to second him
from his assignment on the Amur, ‘for a real adventure’, while Ilya Sidorov who
had stopped behaving quite so superfluously, was all for hauling Anton off to
Kansk on a fact-finding investigation—a trip from which they were only now
returning . . .

 
          
Fate,
it seemed, had conspired. Yet what of the convicts and their women and children
still
languishing
all this while in
Sakhalin
? Could it be that there was more than one
way to pay one’s dues to Science?

 
          
Presently
the ferry grounded against the jetty. Ropes were tossed ashore, and the judge’s
driver flicked his whip, catching a peasant across the rump.

 
          
Dismounting,
Anton and Sidorov hauled their own team and carriage out upon this mighty
warrior of rivers.

 
          
Once
he was back in the hotel on Blagoryeshtchenskaya Anton promptly drank five
glasses of tea in a row till his face glowed as red as a beetroot—and sorted
through his accumulated correspondence. Those troikas of the Imperial Postal
Service might run you down without a second thought, but they did deliver the
goods at wonderful speed.

 
          
His
article about the Tunguska Mystery’ was already in print in
New Times
; already it had caused a bit
of a sensation in the newspapers, so Suvorin reported—there was even talk of
raising a fund.

 
          
Apart
from Suvorin’s epistle there were letters from sister Mariya—blessedly
accompanying a packet of decent tobacco, to spare him from the Siberian variety
which resembled pounded hay—and from mother Evgenia, also from Pleshcheyev.
Then there was a long reply to his own appeal for scientific advice, from Olga
Kundasova; and finally there was a bulky letter from some complete stranger who
lived in Borovsk, fourscore versts to the south of
Moscow
.

 
          
He
read the family news first while guzzling the fourth and fifth cups of tea and
enjoying a real Ukrainian smoke; then opened the lady astronomer’s letter.

 
          
This
was full of astronomical speculations about comets and meteors and meteorites
and bolides and the craters on the Moon. From it he gathered that
th
~*e ought to be a huge crater hidden somewhere out in the
taiga, with a fortune in iron and nickel and platinum buried underneath. A
fortune, that is, for any passing reindeer or Tungusi tribesman enterprising
enough to build a mine and smelting works and a railway line . . .

 
          
Anton
was beginning to itch all over as the heat from the tea tried to sweat its way
out through his blocked pores. Putting aside the letter from Borovsk till
later, he hurried out to pay a call on the public bath house. On the way he
fell in with Jaroslav Mirek, heading for the same destination, though the Czech
was hardly one tenth as filthy as Anton.

 
          
To
Anton’s embarrassment the water turned first to brown then to inky black, as
the two men soaped and scrubbed and ducked. To take their attention off the
dirt, Anton went into Kundasova’s notions of meteoric wealth in lavish detail.

 
          
“Hmm,”
said Mirek. He was a short, hairy, muscular man with keen blue eyes. “If that’s
so, it’s just what this part of the world needs. Yet what incredible
difficulties ... It might be fifty years before we could even contemplate
utilisation.”

 
          
‘Utilisation’
was one of Mirek’s favourite words. He habitually saw the trees of the taiga as
nothing more than so many railway sleepers planted upright in the ground,
waiting to be pushed over and trimmed.

 
          
“Maybe
it needs a change in the system of government, too,” he added quietly. “But
that’s no business of mine.”

 
          
They
repaired to the steam room together, where they thrashed each other with birch
besoms; after which Anton felt ravenous.

 
          
He
dined alone back at the hotel, in the restaurant, on boiled eggs with cream
followed by flabby boiled chicken and cabbage. Afterwards he went up to his
room and poured himself a generous glass of spirits; then he opened the letter
from Borovsk . . .

 
          
Most Truly Honoured Sir,

 
          
Permit
me to introduce myself. My name is Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, and
currently I am employed as a teacher of arithmetic and geometry at the
elementary school here in Borovsk . . .

 
          
‘What’s
this, then?
An application for a job?’
Quickly Anton
skimmed through the long letter, various passages catching his eye.

 
          
...
my
sincere hope is that next year may see the
publication of my paper on
How to Protect
Fragile & Delicate Objects from Jolts & Shocks
—with special
reference to gravitational acceleration due to interplanetary travel . . .

 
          
...
my own humble, and as yet unpublished essay in the art of fiction—of a species
which might perhaps best be described as ‘Science Fantasy’—entitled
On the Moon
. . .

 
          
‘Science
Fantasy, eh? What’s that?’ wondered Anton.
‘A new school of
literature?
A sort of Odoyevsky and Jules Verne thing?
Aha, now I see, this fellow wants me to recommend him to a publisher!’