Watson, Ian - Novel 11 (22 page)

 
          
Ilya
Sidorov was to lose his little fingers and two toes of his right foot to
frostbite; while Anton was to lie ill all winter long in Countess Lydia’s
house, suffering from haemorrhages and vile gastric upsets due to eating
half-cooked horseflesh.

 
          
However,
in the Spring of 1891 Nikolai Vershinin and Lydia Zelenina would be married;
and the Baron would bear her off—with her two daughters and even with the
governess—to his new posting at Blagoveschensk on the River Amur just across
the water from China. Here he was to command a company of Cossacks—with whom he
would be transferred eight years later to
Peking
to garrison the foreign concession there,
just in time for the Boxer Uprising, of which
Lydia
took some remarkable and heroic photographs
during the siege . . .

 
          
And
in the
Spring
of ’91, too, after being best man at
their wedding, Anton would return through the mud and floods of the Siberian
plain, in the same springless rattletrap in which he had arrived in
Krasnoyarsk
almost a year earlier. At
Perm
, before boarding a steamer down the
Kama
to the
Volga
, he would manage to sell the
carriage—though for a mere sixty roubles, an iniquitous loss . . .

 
          
Beyond the windows
of the Retreat, the
sky was clear. Only wispy scarves of cloud still clung to the necks of the
mountains. The snowy valley, with its blue blobs of dachas wearing white hats,
was sharp and bright again. A snow plough sped along the twisting highway,
whisking billows aside. For the fog had quite suddenly evaporated. It was
Monday morning.

 
          
Victor
Kirilenko and Sonya Suslova were both due back at the Psychiatric Institute in
the afternoon; but meanwhile Sonya was ensconced in the small library beyond
the dining room, with Mikhail. Felix presumed that the two young folk were
making intimate arrangements for the future . . . Kirilenko himself was lost in
thought, and Sergey was scribbling away, resentfully, at a new scenario to
culminate in the awful trek back to Kezhma... or perhaps in the sleigh ride
back to Krasnoyarsk ... or even in Chekhov’s return to Russia—though all of
these options seemed sadly anti-climactic. Mikhail’s concluding ‘insights’,
into Mme Lydia Vershinina as photo-journalist of the year 1900 in Peking -—at
about which time the white fog had suddenly begun to lift and the outside world
to re-emerge, like a photo floating in developing fluid—might well be
climactic, but they were quite irrelevant to
Chekhov's Journey
, either old or new, in Felix’s opinion . . .
Still, something startling could be made of it all! Really, the new-style
Journey
had quite endeared itself to
him—and even Sergey only grumbled mildly as he dashed off notes.

 
          
Felix
was considering popping out for a brisk stroll when Mikhail appeared in the
doorway, holding an open book. His hands were shaking.

           
“I just noticed this on the shelf .
. .
Four Plays
, by Anton Chekhov.
Want to hear which ones?”

 
          
Sergey
raised a weary eyebrow. “That’s the 1987
People’s
Edition
you’ve got there, Mike. So what’s the big deal? Think I don’t know
it?”

 
          
“Sergey’s a bit busy at the moment.”
Felix fretted in case
Sergey took this as an excuse to throw his pen down.

 
          
“Go
on: humour me. Guess.”

 
          
“Ivanov”
said Sergey dismissively.

 
          
“Right,
that’s here . .
.
Full marks!
Next
one?”

 
          
“Piss
off.”

 
          
“No,
he never wrote that.
Ivanov's
followed by
The Apple Orchard
.”

 
          
“Eh?
You stupid joker!”

 
          
“Here,
look for yourself!
Apple
Orchard
,
Uncle Ivan
—and
Three Cousins.
Plus
Ivanov
, that
we
know and love.” Mikhail headed towards Sergey, but Felix intercepted him and
snatched the book away. He began turning the pages feverishly.

 
          
“But.
But,” he said in a lame voice.

 
          
“Now
you don’t suppose that I just printed the book for a giggle, in a couple of
spare minutes through there? So what happened to
The Cherry Orchard!
And to
Uncle Vanya
?
And
Three Sisters
?
They’re all gone!” Mikhail stabbed a finger
towards the window.
“Gone into the fog!
And it’s taken
them off with it! It looks like a whole new world out there, returned from
nowhere, eh? Believe me, it
is
a new
world. These are the plays that old Anton wrote instead. Instead, damn it!”

 
          
The
caretaker stood in the doorway.
“Same old mountains, same
dachas.
So what’s all the fuss about?”

 
          
“The
fuss, my dear Ossy, is because Mr Chekhov now appears to have written a play
entitled
The Apple Orchard.
And
kindly don’t tell me that apples are as good as cherries any day. Or I’ll bash
your brains in with the whole ruddy
Soviet
Encyclopaedia
!”

 
          
For
now, behind Osip, Sonya was hesitating in the hallway, scanning with a sickly look
a heavy volume of that opus . . .

           
“The plays themselves are still
pretty much the same, though!” insisted Felix, tearing the edges of pages in
his haste. “Look, Ranyevskaya’s still in
The
Apple Orchard.
And here’s Lopakhin, and Yepikhodov. Dialogue looks
identical ... Oh dear, I don’t seem to recognize this bit. Anyhow, it’s
much
the same—it’s hard to tell,
offhand.”

 
          
Sergey
started up, dropping pen and notebook. “See whether Vershinin, Fedotik and Rode
are still in
Three Sisters.
I mean in
Three Cousins
, damn it!”

 
          
“Half
a tick . . .”

 
          
Kirilenko
stared at the three men clustered round the book. “But there are much wider
implications—!”

 
          
“There’s
no sign of them,” said Felix. “Different names entirely.”

 
          
“That’s
as you’d expect, if he based that trio on real life.” “The opening’s similar.
First scene.
Here, this bit’s exactly the same . . . Um, not
here . . .”

 
          
“But
these are minutiae!” Kirilenko exclaimed.

 
          
Felix
looked round angrily. “The world’s made up of minutiae, Victor Alexeyevich! If
too many minutiae are different, just how the hell are we going to
fit
inV
’

 
          
“Ah,
you do realize . . . My apologies.”

 
          
It
was then that Sonya came forward and began to read out in a shaky voice from
the biography of A. P. Chekhov in the
Soviet
Encyclopaedia .
. .

 
          
So
A. P. Chekhov had returned to
Moscow
in 1891 as something of a hero, whereas he
had merely been a celebrity before he left the city. True, some radical critics
still continued to carp at him, this time attacking what they described as his
‘opportunism’. Nevertheless, Chekhov’s report on the Tunguska Expedition—his
longest published work, illustrated with photographs by L.F. Zelenina, with
technical appendices by J. Mirek and K.E. Tsiolkovsky—was certainly
instrumental in stimulating the haphazard exploitation of Siberian wealth in
the years preceding the

           
Revolution, an exploitation which
was only guided along socially productive lines subsequently . . .

 
          
Meanwhile,
the sudden rise to prominence of the young scientist K.E. Tsiolkovsky, resulting
in support for his theoretical work on cosmic flight, could be said to have
paved the way for the Soviet Moon landing in 1989; while the scientist Ya. B.
Morisov was stimulated by Tsiolkovsky’s speculations to describe the general
principles of nuclear physics, anticipating the work of Rutherford
et al
. . .

 
          
A.
P. Chekhov had thus paid his dues to his ‘first mistress’, Science. The
following years were to see his maturity as a dramatist, in
The Snow Goose
,
The
Apple Orchard and
other plays. But his constitution was undermined
by the rigours of the Tunguska Expedition. He soon sold the little estate at
Melikhovo, to which he had moved from
Moscow
with his mother and sister. Poor health
forced him to take up permanent residence in
Yalta
. And he married Olga Knipper; and he died
in 1904.

 
          
His
mother survived him by fourteen years; and his sister Mariya died in 1957,
having served his memory faithfully for decades as curator of the
Chekhov
Museum
which had been their home in
Yalta
; Mariya herself never married . . .

 
          
They
digested the information in silence. By now Osip had caught on to the
implications.

 
          
He
scratched his head. “Obviously the Communist Party’s the same. Your book
mentions the Revolution. So we’ll all fit in—if we keep our wits about us.
We’re Russians, after all.’’

 
          
“Imagine,’’
said Kirilenko, “a stone thrown into a pond. The ripples die down after a
little while. So Chekhov still goes to
Yalta
and weds Knipper and dies in 1904. By the
time of the Revolution the ripples are too small to change things much. And by
now, well, everything should be much the same. After all, we
did \and
on the Moon last year.’’

 
          
“How
about this nuclear physicist, Morisov?’’ asked Sergey.

 
          
“Doesn’t
the
Encyclopaedia
always go on like
that? We Russians invented the aeroplane before the Wright Brothers took off.
We invented the helicopter. Lord knows what else.”

 
          
Osip
said huffily, “That’s all perfectly true. Pioneer work was done.”

 
          
“These
plays are probably just as good as the other ones,” said Felix, his mind
working overtime. “I mean, he’s still Chekhov, whatever else happened! And we
can still make the film—about
Tunguska
,
because it’ll be absolutely
true.
Oh
but
hell, that
means we can’t use the Anton Astrov
future stuff... It wouldn’t have any point. . .
unless
we were to make a film in the ’88 framework about him
heading for Tunguska, and the timeship crashing—and so he finds he’s
en route
for Sakhalin instead! No, wait
a minute, he was
en route
for
Sakhalin
anyway, when he met that wretched Sidorov
and heard about the explosion! It was Sidorov that started him off. But this
would just be
cinema verite
—compared
to our wonderful new conception!”

 
          
“I
never thought it was all that wonderful,” grumbled Sergey. “I just went along
with the new idea to keep you happy. It was agreed we’d revert to my original
scenario, if the other one crapped out. Seems to me
that’s
all we’re doing.”

 
          
“Oh, but what a
loss
,
dear boy!”

 
          
Kirilenko
was amazed. “But surely you aren’t still seriously contemplating making the film?”

 
          
“Why not?
Look here, Victor: we have to cling to something
to keep our sanity. We’re shipwrecked—we’re timewrecked. It’s the only lifeboat
we have, the film.”

 
          
Mikhail
giggled. “So take this down, Sergey old son: ‘It came from outer space, into
Siberia
, felling a billion trees—whatever it was!
Today, thanks to Anton Chekhov’s investigations, Space will soon become the new
Siberia
, of prosperity and happiness’!” A tear
appeared in Mikhail’s eye. “It knocked the bloody Cherry Orchard down, it did!”

 
          
“There,
there,” said Felix. “We’ll still make a super film, even if it
is
realistic.”

 
          
“But
actually ... it was
all
our
fault.
We
knocked the Cherry Orchard
down! In this building, this weekend . . . We shot the Seagull—and turned it
into a Snow Goose!”

 
          
“Let’s
face it, Mike: wasn’t Christ changed out of all recognition by those who
celebrated him? Weren’t his very words rewritten, even the episodes of his
life?
And Joan of Arc, too?
And
Trotsky?”
“Mr Levin!” cautioned Osip, shocked.