The Lost Souls of Angelkov (44 page)

If he did go out, it was up to Tima to keep him safe. Tima was angered at being forced into looking after his little brother. “Hurry, Kolya. Can’t you go any faster?” he’d badger the smaller boy, who trotted behind him as he walked with long steps to keep up with his friends. “Put your hands in your pockets if they’re cold—stop bothering me.”

When Kolya tripped and scraped his knees, and cried to go home, Tima shook his head. “You have to be braver, Kolya. You can’t always run home to Mama when something happens,” he said, and then, looking over his shoulder to make sure the other boys didn’t see, used his sleeve to wipe Kolya’s running nose. “Don’t cry to Mama about this,” he said, pointing at Kolya’s knees, “or I’ll get in trouble for not watching you carefully enough. Promise,” he said, and Kolya, sniffling, nodded at his big brother.

Aleksandr and Ula gave all their attention to Kolya, because Kolya needed it. Timofey was resourceful from an early age. By the time he was twelve, he was working alongside his father. Temujin had died earlier in the year, and Aleksandr had taken over the older man’s job of creating wooden barrel hoops. Aleksandr brought Tima into the cooperage and instructed him on the intricacies of stave making, just as Temujin had instructed him years earlier: riving the pieces of wood to taper the staves at the ends while making sure they were left wide in the middle, allowing for the creation of the cylindrical bulge in the barrel.

It required a keen eye, not only for judging the taper but to spot weak grains or knots in the wood. Tima caught on immediately. Aleksandr then introduced Tima to the tools of the trade: the adze, drawknife, scorp, mallet and a variety of chisels, and Tima learned to plane the outside of each stave for smoothness, and slightly cup the inside. The staves were then soaked so they could be curved properly. Once the hoops were secured around the barrels, Tima sealed the staves with pitch.

Aleksandr hired another man, Antip, as the business prospered and he and Tima could no longer keep up with the orders. His barrels were used for storage not only in Chita but by many of the surrounding villages and hamlets.

When Tima had finished for the day—his father let him leave two hours earlier than himself and Antip—he then had to watch his brother. This was to give his mother time for her errands without the boy clinging to her. Timofey was instructed to take Kolya outside for fresh air in the good weather, and to make sure the younger boy didn’t get bullied or hurt himself. But after he’d put in a man’s day of work, Tima wanted to go off with his friends for a few hours, not look after his little brother. While he did feel protective, he grew more annoyed the longer he was forced to play the protector—as Kolya got older and yet no tougher.

One afternoon, while Tima knelt on the hard dirt playing a gambling game of stones with three of his friends, he heard Kolya’s cries from down the road—though he’d told him to stay put until he was done.

“Tima! Tima, help me!”

Tima glanced over his shoulder. A boy, older and much bigger than Kolya, was pushing him along, holding on to
Kolya’s hair. “Are you a girl or a boy, with all these curls?” the boy taunted, yanking and laughing.

“Tima!” Kolya howled.

Tima tried to keep playing, but Kolya’s cries escalated until finally—silence.

One of his friends nudged him. “Look at your brother.”

He dropped his stone and looked behind him. Kolya lay motionless on the ground. Tima jumped to his feet and ran to him. “Kolya,” he said, shaking the boy’s shoulder. “Kolya, wake up.”

After a moment, Kolya opened his eyes. “He pushed me down, Tima.” He took deep breaths, holding in his sobs. “Don’t worry, Tima, I won’t tell Mama.”

Tima hauled him up by his jacket. There was a thin trickle of blood on Kolya’s cheek where he’d fallen on a sharp stone. “You’re all right.” He spit on his fingers and wiped the blood from Kolya’s cheek. It was only a small cut.

“I called you, Tima. You didn’t come.” Kolya was staring at him, his expression sad. “You didn’t come.”

Timofey shrugged. “It’s time to go home. And remember, don’t tell Mama or Papa.”

Kolya tried to take Tima’s hand, but Tima pulled free and walked home in front of his brother.

In years to come, he never forgot that look on Kolya’s face, nor the sound of Kolya’s voice, nor how he’d jerked his hand away from his little brother.

Although he came to accept the solid, uneventful life for himself in Chita, Aleksandr Kasakov wished he could give his sons more. He knew what the future held for them in the isolated
Siberian town, and often envisioned the career Timofey could have in the army or imagined Nikolai as a musician, playing in an orchestra for appreciative audiences in St. Petersburg or Moscow. He also knew they were only dreams.

When Tima was fourteen and Kolya seven, Aleksandr had been chilled by the first spots of blood coughed into his handkerchief. He hid it from his wife and sons as long as he could. Eventually the deep, endless coughing, followed by a sudden small hemorrhage, terrified his wife and frightened him into action.

Aleksandr expected Timofey to take over the business. From the first day he had put a strip of wood into his son’s hands and demonstrated what to do, the boy had tackled the work with skill and dexterity. On top of that, he was good with figures—quicker, Aleksandr had realized for the last year, than he himself at writing out the orders and making sure the rubles were collected.

“I am proud to have a son to carry on the business,” he often told Timofey. “You’ll never go hungry, because people will always need barrels. And when it’s time to marry and have your own family, you’ll be able to offer them a good life. As for your brother … well, he’s lucky that you’ll always be here to look after him. He’ll need you, Tima. Once your mother and I are no longer alive, you will be his only family.” Still, he worried whether Tima would really take his duty to his brother seriously. In the boy he recognized a sense of adventure, a dislike of being told what to do. Aleksandr felt his older son’s restlessness, and yet he assumed that Timofey was pleased to be heir to the family business.

Timofey did not appreciate his father’s descriptions of his future. The stories of Aleksandr’s former grand life in both
Russia and Europe had awakened in Timofey a desire for exploration and challenges. Tima gave little thought to the issue of serfdom, in spite of his father’s explanations. The land here was as unforgiving and brutal as a cruel master. There was little hope of furthering oneself in the isolated steppes and wintry taigas of Asiatic Russia.

“You’ve never asked whether I like the work,” Timofey said to him. “You expect me to be satisfied with the monotony of planing for the rest of my life?” Tima hated the endless slivers embedded in his palms, the smell of the black pitch and the way it looked under his fingernails. “I don’t want to be a cooper forever.” His voice was bold.

Aleksandr sat silently while Tima paced in front of him, then asked, “What is it you would like to do, then?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t want to stay here.”

Timofey visualized a far more exciting future for himself, possibly in Irkutsk. It was much more civilized than Chita and, Tima had heard, quite a splendid town with its own theatre, a museum, municipal gardens where orchestras played concerts on warm evenings, and walkways made of wood over the mud streets. Although he had never been outside Chita, Timofey knew the village wasn’t enough for him.

When Timofey at last understood that his father was desperately ill, and that he was expected to not only take over the business but be responsible for the rest of his life—in Chita—for his younger brother, a huge, dark cloud descended on him.

Timofey did not want to be held back. He began to think further than Irkutsk, of the world outside Siberia, perhaps in one of the capital cities of Russia. If he was forced to follow the map his father had drawn for him, he felt his life would stall before it had even started.

But Aleksandr heard Tima’s rebellious words as simply the posturing of a headstrong young man. He felt that he had set him up for life. Nikolai—little Kolya—was his concern.

And Aleksandr, tasting the metallic tang of his own blood in his throat, sent out all the prayers he could, begging for a sign as to what to do about his younger son. Shouldn’t something be made of the boy’s musical ability? Shouldn’t there be a better life for him than sitting in a village, creating astoundingly beautiful music on his violin?

He told Ula of his deep concern, but she refused to believe that her husband would soon die. And even if he did, well, she imagined she would be around for many, many years to look after her younger son and make his life as happy as possible. She knew little about the world beyond Chita, and had no interest in it. Nevertheless, when Aleksandr asked her to pray, she obligingly took out her prayer wheels and visited the
datsan
twice daily, lighting incense and chanting to the small replicas of stupas, tying strips of blue cloth—prayer flags—to the good luck trees that framed the Buddhist temple.

Then something happened which made Aleksandr believe that the combination of Orthodox and Buddhist prayers had brought the longed-for sign.

I
t was announced, in May 1842, that for the first time in Chita there would be a recital put on by a small group of musicians from Irkutsk. They would play in the tiny town hall for four evenings. Aleksandr sent his wife and sons to the first concert. When they returned, Kolya’s eyes were shining; he told his father that it was the most beautiful music he had ever heard. He was only eight, and yet he spoke with adult passion.

And then Kolya took out his violin and played some of the melodies of the repertoire he had just heard, his eyes closed. He moved as though possessed by a spirit, his body swaying as he passed the bow over the strings, and Aleksandr was both overwhelmed by the depth of his son’s abilities and frightened at the prospect of what would become of him in a place like Chita.

When Ula and his sons had gone to bed, Aleksandr wrote a
letter. The next morning he gave it to Timofey to deliver to the maestro of the orchestra. It was an invitation for the maestro to come to their home for dinner. Aleksandr had written that he, Senior Officer Colonel Aleksandr Danilovich Kasakov, knew how far and long the maestro and his orchestra had travelled from Irkutsk, and now wanted to offer him his best Russian hospitality in a village so primitive and uncultured.

While Aleksandr knew that the maestro would be fully aware that a former member of the Russian army in Irkutsk had to be a political exile, he hoped he wouldn’t hold it against him. Fortunately for him, the maestro was down on his luck; he had incurred debts and couldn’t find enough steady work in Irkutsk to pay them off. He had been forced to travel for months throughout eastern Siberia, playing in towns and villages. He hated the uncomfortable travel, the musically ignorant audiences and the poor wages he was paid for his talent. He was flattered to be invited to the home of a Russian former colonel. He didn’t care what the man—this
polkovnik
—had done in a former life; all he knew was that he would welcome a good meal and a brief respite from the drafty rooms over the miserable hall where he and his musicians were billeted.

He wrote back that he would be happy to come the following evening, and gave the note to the young man who stood waiting for an answer.

When the maestro arrived the next night, Aleksandr rose carefully to greet his guest. He didn’t want to set off a bout of coughing. He was pleased at the maestro’s comments on the pleasantness of his home and the appetizing smells of the meal his wife was preparing. Aleksandr introduced himself—
please, call me Sasha
, implying an immediate friendship with the maestro—and his wife and sons.

Ula was an excellent cook, and the rich, tasty food, combined with an endless supply of the finest vodka Chita could offer, kept the conversation lively. After Ula had cleared the table, Aleksandr instructed little Kolya to perform.

“What shall I play, Papa?” the boy asked as he readied his violin.

“One of your own compositions, Kolya,” Aleksandr instructed him, glancing at the maestro. He watched the man’s face as his son played. When the child finished, the maestro slowly nodded. Aleksandr sent Kolya to the bedroom to put away his violin, and told Tima he could leave to meet his friends. Then he asked his wife to go to the kitchen to prepare the samovar and bring tea and cakes.