Chekhov’s Journey

by Ian Watson

  “That’s … preposterous.”

  “I thought you’d say so. And meanwhile, tempus fugit for us too …” Anton switched on his chin-mike. “Commander Astrov to All Crew: hear this …!”

  “No!” Yuri whispered urgently. “Maybe you’re right about the geological eras. Maybe nobody else ever put two and two together—”

  “Shut up, Yuri …

  “… We have met unexpected difficulties, Comrades. We have failed to leave Earthspace. We are currently proceeding backwards through time at a rate of approximately three years per ship minute. However, we are also closing in on the planet Earth at considerable speed. You will have noticed our evasive manoeuvres. These proved unsuccessful. Chief Engineer Aksakova is reprogramming our flight pattern to bring us out of flux prematurely, before we impact with the atmosphere. I shall keep you informed. Be brave, Comrades.”

  The K. E. Tsiolkovsky continued plummeting through time, back towards its world of origin …

  Twenty-two

  Trading Post of Kezhma

  September 24th

  My wonderful Masha, beloved Mama,

  and everyone else at home,

  Goodness only knows when (or from where) this letter will ever be posted! Perhaps it isn’t really a letter at all, but a journal? Destined for your own sweet eyes, dear Sister, when I return home again…

  If so, I haven’t the foggiest how to proceed! For whom does one address in this kind of ‘diary of the heart’? One’s own heart, perhaps?

  All I know about my own heart is that it keeps on beating steadily—thump, thump—despite the awful struggles of the last week and more.

  I suppose you really address the future in such a piece of scribbling as a ‘private journal’. You’re full of egotistical hopes that this vague entity, Futurity, will disinter all your carefully orchestrated secrets from the desk drawer where you’ve hidden them—leaving the key in the lock, of course! Whereupon eager Futurity will at once declare what a fascinating chap this Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was. And it’ll all be a big bluff.

  How can I sum up the sequence of days since we quit the Yenisey for our long tramp, 350 versts eastwards, along the banks of the Angara?

  Well, there was already enough light snow cover this far north for us to use the sledges, as we’d counted on doing. And that meant fighting our way through branches quite a lot of the time. (I have scratches and cuts all over my mug, as if I’ve been whipped by invisible forest spirits wielding tiny lashes.) And sometimes we were forced to take to the shallows of the river to haul the sledges upstream some way, which involved a lot of skidding and stumbling and getting dunked in icy water. We have shivered around camp fires—about which I can assure you there’s nothing romantic. Wild ducks and geese have avoided our guns with great dexterity, save for a couple of scraggy specimens potted by Countess Lydia. Sidorov managed to net one salmon-trout, but otherwise I’d hardly describe the Angara as an angler’s paradise—the fish didn’t seem to know what the game was about. So all in all this has amounted to a disturbing lack of victuals from the land. No hares, no bears or giant rats. Not even any tigers.

  Just trees. Trees, trees, was the long and the short of it: an infinity of snow-dusted spruce, frosted larch and silver fir. And every day more snow fell, gently and persistently, muffling the world—till it seemed as though our colour vision was failing through disuse, and the whole planet had turned white. Often even the air was white with freezing fog.

  We passed through a few little human settlements, but on the whole there wasn’t a living thing to be seen. Apart from the motion of the river—flowing in the wrong direction—it appeared that life had shut up shop for ever. Oh the silence—it haunts you! The taiga steals away every sound, till you fear you’ve gone deaf as well as blind. And so you mumble to yourself …

  Bah, the idiotic joy we felt when we sighted the scurvy huts of Zaimskove a few days back. You’d think we’d arrived outside the walls of Babylon, or seen Monsieur Eiffel’s modern wonder looming on the horizon. Oh to renew acquaintance with a bedbug! Oh to meet a cockroach on a wall! The experience was positively metropolitan.

  And now at last we’re in Kezhma, where the Tungusi from the north trade their furs in the spring. Almost all the roofs of this fine city are made of sods. Of streets there are exactly two and a half, and these peter out very quickly.

  But on the subject of Tungusi, we have been lucky enough to hire a guide …

  This fellow, Tolya by name, has apparently been hanging around Kezhma for the past five or six months, doing odd jobs on what pass for farms in the vicinity instead of tramping off smartly back to his family tents deep in the wilderness. Perhaps he has been trying to become an example of Urban Man? But he looks like an Eskimo, and speaks Russian accordingly.

  Ach, I suppose it’s all a question of degree! If this Tungusi specimen is Russianized, just so are we Russians … Europeanized! We all remain slovenly Asiatics at heart …

  We’ll certainly be glad of his local knowledge on the next stretch of the journey. For here at Kezhma is where we strike off overland through the virgin taiga, heading for the trading post of Vanavara a hundred versts away on the southerly branch of the Stony Tunguska.

  Tonight the snow flakes are drifting down again. And I think I must be crazy to be stuck out in this back of beyond when I could already be home, near to you, dear Masha, with all my research on Sakhalin over and done with!

  Am I crazy? It’s easy to take leave of one’s senses in these parts. I’ve mentioned how people mumble to themselves: often it’s the same word or phrase repeated over and over a thousand times, as if this is the key to the meaning of life. You get a bee in your bonnet, and it buzzes round all day till its humming is the only sound you can hear in the whole world.

  My own particular foible, as I found out after five or six days of sledging and tramping, was to perceive every tree I passed—as a book, bound in bark! For what else are books, but trees in another form? I became quite obsessed with the idea. Here was I, travelling through all my past and future works, set out in a uniform edition. And as regards originality, no book differed by a jot from any other! This one might be called The Spruce and the one after, The Stone Pine—and the one after that, The Larch. But they would all amount to the same thing: another damn tree! Instead of, say, a skylark—or an elephant. Or a dragon. Oh, the ennui of it!

  Old Grigorovich told me to write a novel… But, dear me, the characters I dreamed up are all moribund. The fine women I envisaged are wrinkled and senile by now: their skins as coarse and rutted as the bark of these wretched trees …

  But here’s the real nightmare: supposing this trek into the wilderness was a novel in its own right? What persons do I have in it? Why, exactly the sort of people whom I faithfully promised myself never to write about! There’s Countess Lydia—a ‘new’ type of woman. There’s a ‘superfluous man’—old Sidorov (reinvigorated but still, I fear, condemned). And there’s a het-up, pedantic visionary: Konstantin Eduardovich, no less …

  Of course, I do Tsiolkovsky an injustice! But really, when I hear him going on about the ecstasy of escaping the bondage of gravity and flitting about in free space, my ears detect such a strident metaphor for our own social conditions in Russia. I can already hear all the intellectual lackeys taking up this refrain in a chorus—and completely ignoring what life is really like. They’ll get up a subscription to build Tsiolkovsky a rocket, which might blow him to pieces, and meanwhile they’ll ignore an outbreak of cholera in their own back yard …

  Oh, these pilgrimages that we Russians devote our lives to! Is this one any different? Off we march to the holy scientific icon of Tunguska, to unswaddle our souls, and prostrate ourselves before a mystery!

  Masha, I must pull myself together. I’m sure we haven’t any real hope of solving the mystery awaiting us. We’d be hotheads to try to! The evidence is what matters. We must gather a portfolio of evidence—then I can escape from all this, and get on boring the public with The Sto
ne Pine or whatever. (I don’t think I’ll write a comedy about ‘The Exiled Baron and the World Soul’! But that’s another story …)

  Of course, if I did put my literary scruples aside and wrote a novel of adventure, well, I could have a gruff but romantic Baron, a dashing Countess conducting an adulterous liaison in her tent—we’ll overlook the fact that she’s already a widow, shall we? And then there’s our home-bred Russian Hamlet, Sidorov, equipped with a bold quest to take his mind off suicide… We mustn’t forget our noble savage, Tolya, either—how does he fit in? Will he give his life for us, fighting off a hungry bear? (And I don’t mean Baron Vershinin!)

  Ah, if it were a novel, what trash it would be! And what a popular success! I can see the reviews already. ‘A real change of pace for Mr Chekhov: Bravo!’ ‘On the other hand, fellow connoisseurs, isn’t it just a shade vulgar?’

  I coughed a fleck of blood from my left lung yesterday. But it was only one fleck; and that isn’t serious. There’s nothing basically wrong with my bellows. I blame the cold more than anything: it sticks daggers in a fellow’s chest…

  Twenty-three

  MIKHAIL WOKE WITH a hangover. It didn’t take the form of a headache, so much as of a certain sweatiness coupled with a strong desire to remain horizontal.

  A table lamp, silk shade baked brown by the years, had been left on as though he were a child, subject to bad dreams. He squinted at it. The bulb seemed preternaturally bright, as if it had been sneakily increasing its luminosity all night long. Uttering a faint groan, he groped for the switch—which was damned stiff, and set far too high up the neck of the lamp. Always a battle switching off one of these things! Usually it ended with the lamp lying on the floor, blazing away stubbornly.

  A pair of vinegar-brown bloomers caught his attention. These, and an elasticated bra, were tangled up with his own black acetate shorts on the floor. On closer, bleary inspection he detected a heap of woollen chainmail lying underneath, beside his trousers.

  Turning over, he found to his surprise that what was crushing his spine was not a displaced bolster, but Dr Sonya Suslova …

  He propped himself stiffly on one arm. Unpeeling the sheet, he inspected her breasts. They lay sluggishly parchmented by sleep, the nipples softly dissolved so that they had almost sunken into pits.

  Sonya woke and blinked. Hastily she pulled the sheet right up to her chin. “Oh!” she said, her blue eyes widening.

  “Good morning! God, I feel I’ve been through a mangle … I guess we must have made love last night?” This was not, he realized, a very tactful way of juxtaposing his hangover, and her.

  She yawned, granting him a vision of the pink cave of her mouth and throat, uvula pressing against arched tongue like a large clitoris. Her mouth snapped shut. “Can’t you remember?”

  “Er … Afraid it’s all a bit hazy. Well, did we?”

  “It seems highly likely we did, since we’re lying in bed together!” She giggled.

  Mikhail leaned over her. “Perhaps we ought to jog our memories?”

  However, Sonya popped out of bed, hauling the sheet around her. “What’s the time?”

  Mikhail saw his watch lying under the lamp. “Seven. Bit after.” Automatically he scooped up the watch and began winding it.

  What a dumb thing, to fuss on with a watch when there’s a naked woman in the bedroom! But actually, the clockwork watch was a vital link with reality. A watch was the only means left to them to measure time, when darkness and daylight had both melted into the same amorphous pearly mist …

  Rolling off the bed, naked, he stood up with an effort and made for the window. Parting the chintz curtains, he inspected the luminous fog; it looked just as empty of content as yesterday. By the time he turned away—and this wasn’t long—Sonya somehow had managed to dress herself at top speed. Already she was buttoning up her calico blouse. Thus, from being a hopeful lover, he was transformed into a patient standing starkers in a surgery—so that the Doctor could diagnose knobbly knees, or something. Stubbornly he sat down, still naked, and crossed his legs. Something was nagging at him.

  Restored to her chain-mail, Sonya grinned and perched on the bottom of the bed.

  “That was what I call a party! All friends together, now. Even Sergey. Passed out on the sofa, he did—how theatrical!” She laughed, since she knew for a fact that all artists habitually drank themselves senseless, given half the chance, and succumbed in odd corners, careless of clothes and comfort. “Osip won’t have much to say about it, either! Do you remember how he was dancing with Felix, singing those rude songs?”

  “Vaguely.” What was nagging at him?

  A hazy memory emerged of Sonya clinging on for grim death to the banisters … Oh yes, they had been a Soviet mountaineering duo, and the stairs had been the Caucasus. They had crawled upstairs on their hands and knees—hence these bruises on his knees! This involved a good deal of giggly clutching to prevent either person from sliding into crevasses … And once they had scaled the cornice of the landing, he had spotted Osip weaving about below and given warning of the sighting of an Almost, the wild man of the mountains. Huddled on the floor together, they had peeped through the rails, terrified of falling down the precipice into his clutches … Camp Six, the Summit, had been his bedroom.

  All this larking about seemed a long time ago. Much more recently than that, he’d … well, he’d been sound asleep.

  And dreaming! The K. E. Tsiolkovsky had been falling through time, down towards Siberia! And Anton Pavlovich had been trekking relentlessly up the Angara River …

  These things had happened while he lay in a drunken fugue in bed, with Sonya blotto beside him …

  Suddenly events collapsed into the right order, and he trembled and clenched his teeth. He was possessed, and he knew he couldn’t shake free—not by way of vodka, nor by fucking, nor even by sleep. The momentum of events was independent of him now, just as it was independent of Victor the Master Hypnotist.

  “You should get dressed,” Sonya said. “You’re shivering.”

  “Not with cold, I ain’t. Sonya, the whole thing’s been ploughing on regardless! I remember now: after we fell asleep I was back in the time-ship—and I was up the Angara too. It wasn’t any ordinary dream. Even when I’m unconscious, it’s all carrying on. I can’t stop it—none of us can. Are we all drugged? Is that it, Doctor Suslov? Is this an experiment to disorient people? Are technicians sitting in some basement underneath this building, listening in through microphones and smirking? Are they pumping out that filthy fog? What is it: clouds of mind-gas?”

  “It certainly isn’t my experiment! It isn’t Victor’s, either, or he wouldn’t have got so drunk. No, of course it isn’t an experiment!”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Time has come adrift. Because… because it has, that’s what.” Sonya looked torn between bursting into tears, and coming to mother him. “We’re trapped in a time-bubble—like a soap-bubble. That’s why we couldn’t leave this place yesterday. We just walked around the inside of a bubble. Outside of the bubble it’s … 1890, or 2090, I don’t know.”

  “And this bubble will pop—when I reach Tunguska?”

  “It has to, Mike. The world will spring back.” She smiled wryly. “And meanwhile, we’re still alive. You, in particular, we’re very lively.”

  “Thanks for telling me!”

  “You’d better get some clothes on—I’m starving” Sonya squirmed. “Actually I’ll go and get washed first.”

  “Are we really alive, like other people?”

  She made an uncertain gesture, and fled from his bedroom.

  Twenty-four

  OSIP, UNSHAVEN AND the worse for wear, nevertheless had managed to produce hot coffee, and ham and eggs, by what everyone agreed to call nine o’clock. He sat down at the dining table with the others. That cottony fog was still rubbing itself up against all the windows of the building—and he needed company. He dared not miss a word which might explain this crazy, supernatural situation
.

  Not that he was a secretly religious man—that sort of thing was all stuff and nonsense. Still, he wouldn’t have minded having an icon about the place just at the moment. Purely for decoration.

  He stared at the window every now and then, fearful that the fog might be seeping inside. If so, then you could walk upstairs—and find yourself back down at the bottom again! He shuffled his chair closer to Victor Kirilenko, seeking protection. ‘Knowledge is Power’, after all …

  Kirilenko mopped fat off his plate with a slice of bread, thumped a slice of cheese down on top, and chewed.

  “Um,” he said. “Good thing we’ve got enough food to last a siege. Um, now Mike you’re saying that this mental journey of yours just ploughs on at its own pace—whether we like it or not? Even if we hold no more sessions, it’ll just continue?”

  “Relentlessly. Like an avalanche.”

  “Um, interesting. I wonder—ah—suppose there really is a time-ship? And suppose your mind is strongly in key with it—so that this affects the present in a paranormal way…” Kirilenko waved his greasy crust at Mikhail. “Of course, there’s one big discrepancy.”

  “What’s that, then?” asked Osip.

  Kirilenko explained patiently, “A discrepancy is an inconsistency—something which doesn’t add up.”

  “I know that! I in’t uneducated. I mean, what sort of discrep… discrep … What is if?”

  “Ah. Well, the good ship K. E. Tsiolkovsky is supposed to crash in the Tunguska region in the year 1908, right? Thus accounting for the well documented and exactly dated enigma, with which we are all familiar. Yet Anton Chekhov is heading towards the same place in the year 1890—to investigate precisely the same event, which occurred in 1888! There’s your discrepancy: twenty years of it.”

  “But how can the same thing happen at two different times, Professor?”