Chekhov's Journey

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

In 1890 the Russian author Chekhov undertook an historic journey across Siberia to the convict island of Sakhalin. A hundred years later, in an isolated artist's retreat, a Soviet film unit prepares to commemorate his journey by using a technique that will cause their chosen actor to not only play the role of the playwright, but to believe that he is Chekhov. But the situations Mikhail acts out diverge wildly from known biographical facts when Chekhov hears of an explosion in the Tunguska region of Siberia. Yet the real Tunguska explosion occurred in 1908 - so how could Chekhov have possible heard of it in 1890?

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 183

Sample

ANTON HUDDLED IN his sheepskin jacket and military-style leather raincoat. As the buggy jolted him along through the Siberian night, numbly he watched last year’s grass burning off the frosted fields.

Tongues of flame laced the earth with flickering red and gold, which faintly illuminated occasional groves of birch trees. Yet the night immediately stole any warmth away. The Road was frozen, hard as iron. Driving along was more like lurching over an endless series of suits of armour laid side by side.

How long had they been travelling? Was it five hours, or eight? The horses were tramping like brainless machines, and driver Volodya had long since gone into a trance. But Anton hadn’t yet learned the trick of sleeping through this sort of punishment.

Maybe Volodya had died, a few hours ago? Imagine being driven for tens of versts by a dead body without even realizing it!

Soon the sun would rise. By the afternoon the Road would become a churned-up quagmire. Where it broadened, on its way through villages, it would be a river of mud with houses on both banks…

Abruptly thunder drummed from the darkness ahead. Hooves, wheels!

Within seconds a troika of the Imperial Postal Service came dashing out of the night—three horses abreast, and no intention of yielding to anything on the road.

Even as Anton cried a warning, Volodya was jerking on the reins. The old codger wasn’t dead, after all. He hauled the team and buggy over to the right, just as the troika thundered past, missing them by a hand’s span.

As Volodya and Anton swung round to curse the troika on its way, they spied—bearing down from the darkness behind—a second juggernaut, returning full tilt towards Tomsk. This second troika careered past the first, heading directly towards them. And worse! Behind it, a third troika charged in pursuit.

Volodya lashed his team with the reins. “God save us!” he howled.

With their usual nervy stupidity, the horses swung the buggy the wrong way; and it blocked the Road entirely.

What had been till a moment earlier an empty void was suddenly filled with a chaos of crashing wood and whinnying, rearing horseflesh. Briefly their own buggy stood up on end. A moment later Anton found that he wasn’t sitting in it at all, but was lying sprawled on the ground, bombarded by his luggage.

Scrambling up, he raced aside. “Stop, damn you, stop!” he screamed down the road.

But the third troika hurtled towards them, pell-mell. Its driver was a dark lump, probably fast asleep. A few seconds later it too crashed into the tangle. Again, horses reared, shafts cracked and harness snapped. Yokes tumbled to the ground over trampled baggage.

Then, for a few moments, everything was so still that Anton believed he had gone deaf. In the east, ever so faintly, dawn was beginning to glow.

At least two of the drivers must have been tumbled out of their dreams into this nightmare of bruises and cold. Though the occurrence could hardly be unique, it took them a short while to work out what had happened. But then they and Volodya squared up to each other in the gloom—and the driver of the first troika ran up to add his own contribution.

“You were asleep, you buggering fool!”

“You lying clip-prick, I was awake. The other two fuckers weren’t!”

“You couldn’t drive a team of rabbits, Grandpa!”

Crazed by the invective being bellowed on all sides, the horses milled and collided hysterically. Idiot creatures that they were, they reared and kicked and tried to bite holes in each other’s necks. Their hooves pummelled broken shafts and jumbled luggage. And nobody made the slightest effort to calm the beasts, or drag the damaged vehicles apart, or clear their spilled contents aside. Obsessed with abuse, the four drivers merely swore at each other endlessly, blaming and blaspheming and accusing each other of being Jews and sodomists and lunatics.

Anton stood by in fear and fury; he wondered if he ought to pull out his revolver and discharge it over their heads to restore order. And cold flames crackled in the fields, as anaemic daylight spilled slowly from the horizon …

Only when the drivers were quite hoarse did they deign to back off and begin tidying up. Volodya had to commandeer the straps from Anton’s trunk to tie up their own shafts and harness. Eventually, after what seemed like two hours, their buggy crept on its way …

The next post station was versts away, and half-a-dozen times they had to stop to refasten the shafts or harness which easily broke loose again. The Road was already becoming slightly soggy in the mocking sunshine, though ice still crusted the puddles.

Fights of ducks beat their way overhead, provoking Anton’s belly to a rage of hunger. To stop his own tripes consuming themselves, he bit off a chunk of the sausage he’d been fool enough to buy a hundred versts back; and instantly regretted it. The meat smelled of peasant feet unwrapped after six months, and tasted like a dog’s tail dipped in tar and shit. Hastily he spat out the vile mouthful and flushed his tastebuds with vodka, which was pretty foul too—sharp and oily. Thousands of crumbs had worked their way down into his underpants, but he couldn’t find a single whole crust of bread in any of his pockets.

True, a bottle of finest cognac reposed in his baggage. Kuvshinnikov, the complaisant cuckold, had presented this to him with a fine flourish, to be quaffed on the shores of the Pacific. He wouldn’t be surprised if the bottle had been smashed during the collision. Well, at least his gun hadn’t gone off and shot him in the stomach …

Longing for the barren oasis of the next village, Anton stared ahead.

Curiously, he didn’t feel at all unwell. He was starving, and exhausted to the point of hallucination. But his head no longer ached with migraines, and his piles had cleared up since Ekaterinburg. Even his cough was better. As for gastritis, bye-bye to that.

A good Christian might have said that all his routine ailments were really devils—but lately the going had got too rough for them; so they had all decamped …

Salvation was in sight at last!

Wooden cabins, straggling along both sides of the Road far ahead. An onion dome sitting on a little wooden church …

Buoyed up, Anton became aware of the jingle of their own harness bells. Was it a merry note? No, it was just a noise … He began to daydream lustfully of sturgeon bouillabaisse. Ah yes, flavoured with sorrel and mushrooms …

Fat chance of that!

“IN THE YEAR 1890, as yet, there was no Trans-Siberian Railway to ride on. Chained convicts still trudged for months through seas of mud and bitter frosts—into eternal exile!”

Sergey Gorodsky looked up from his notebook to see how his words were coming over.

“We’ll use a montage of still photos,” he added. Sergey was a stocky man, with a crusty loaf of a head. A peak of close-cropped stubbly golden hair, rising above a pocked and sallow face, made it seem as if his crust had split in the baking.

The sudden dark silhouette of some hungry bird beat against the great, drape-clad windows of the Artists’ Retreat, then darted away; and Sergey stared out down the hill, as though a line of raggy prisoners might suddenly materialise from amidst the snowy larch trees. However, the steep valley remained unpeopled. The blue wooden faces of the various dachas were all shuttered tight, and no vehicle moved along the road, though it had been snow-ploughed.

What the hell had become of Dr Kirilenko? He ought to have been here ages ago.

“Hang on,” said Felix Levin. “It won’t do.”

Presiding genius of the Stanislavsky Film Unit of Krasnoyarsk, Felix was as personable as Sergey was ill-favoured. He could have been an ageing gigolo, only slightly run to seed. His dark wavy hair, worn rather long, was streaked with silver. He kept a French battery-razor in the pocket of his Italian suit at all times, and used it thrice a day. Once something of a coxcomb with the girls, for the past ten years he had been busy sublimating personal style into committed art. Sergey, in his dingier and more envious moments, pegged him as someone who had gone to bed with so many young women that they had all melted together eventually into one collective, sexless Muse which whispered, now, political endearments. Put one way, he had matured. Put another, he had run out of his former supply of juice—and a good thing too.

Felix slapped the side of the saggy armchair in which he was sprawling elegantly; the blow raised a puff of dust and fibre. Most of the furniture was equally ancient.

“Sorry, won’t do at all! That suggests the railway was built to get rid of people. Not to open up Siberia as a positive step. You must watch your nuances.” Not so many years ago, as they all knew, there had been many large labour camps in the vicinity of Krasnoyarsk …

“Well, we can hardly say that the Czar’s government went in for nation building!”

“Oh, agreed. But you’re still equating Siberia with exile. Look, an underlying theme of the film has to be how Siberia spelled space for development. Though this didn’t occur in a properly planned way till later on … And as a sub-theme, there could well be a hint that the Siberia of tomorrow’s world will literally be space. Outer space—the asteroid belt, the moons of Jupiter! Where a socialist attitude’s the only possible one; everyone pitching in, or else it’s lethal. We mustn’t associate space with punishment.”

In exasperation Sergey threw down his notebook on the disintegrating leather sofa, which he shared with Mikhail Petrov the actor.

“I fail to see how we can dispense with the convicts! Damn it all, they’re the reason why Chekhov crossed Siberia—”

“It’s just the balance of words and images.”

“—to visit the convict colony on Sakhalin!”

“You’re the writer, Sergey. Surely you can see that?”

“But our film isn’t about colonising the bloody asteroids! It’s about the writer Chekhov—to commemorate the anniversary of his journey, right? It’s about a watershed in one artist’s life—”

“A watershed brought about by an act of social commitment. Plus: the experience of launching himself out across untold space, far from the hothouse of Moscow literary life. Metaphor, see? But we mustn’t be ‘arty’, however beautiful our intentions are. This is a scientific film—first, because of the sort of person Chekhov was, and secondly because we’ll be using Dr Kirilenko’s hypnosis technique. Science is a sub-text of the film.”

Actor Mikhail tossed back his head, as though to indicate that all this had nothing to do with him. A faint smile puckered the corner of his mouth; idly he inspected the shabby elegance of the room.

It had once been a reception room, for prior to becoming a rural appendix of the People’s Palace of Culture in Krasnoyarsk, decades earlier, this Retreat had been the Summer home of some aristocratic exile who had been allowed to take his wealth to Siberia. The room had little connexion with a present time which included the likelihood of colonising space. A threadbare oriental carpet covered most of the floor. An antique mahogany table was draped in oilskin. Aspidistras sprouted from glazed terracotta pots. And the light bulbs hummed constantly, as if electricity were just newly discovered and the secret consisted in imprisoning hot little devils in glass bottles. Lampshades, of tasselled sallow-silk, were stained by age and the heat of the bulbs. The room could easily have been a stage set for some last-century drama. How very appropriate.

Mikhail straightened the right side of his moustache with his index finger. It was a good mannerism.

“Really, fellows, all this business about a watershed! I mean, those hills out there are watersheds—for a fact. But old Antosha was such a secretive chap. I ain’t got the foggiest why he set off across Siberia.”

“Come off it,” said Sergey. “We know a whole host of reasons.”

“Well, that’s just it, ain’t it? Which was the one that tipped the balance?”

“There doesn’t have to be a single reason, shining like a beacon. There wouldn’t be in one of his plays.”

“Sure. The main business of all the plays is sheer dither. Oh, what’s to be done? Oh, if only we could… But we can’t. There’ll be paradise on Earth in another hundred years. Perhaps. But as for now, oh dear me, what’s the point?”

“It is a hundred years later,” Felix reminded Mikhail sharply.

Mikhail tipped his head still further back; softly he laughed.

Despite himself Felix nodded in approval. The Film Unit had discovered Mikhail through a nation-wide Chekhov Look-Alike Contest. Mikhail had been in repertory in Gorki, and he was endearingly second-rate. Which was ideal …

“Drivel!” cried Sergey. “Nina runs off to go on the stage, in The Seagull, doesn’t she? Duels get fought. Revolvers pop off. People do predict an earthly paradise of work and honesty and good will—and they mean it. People make wild declarations of passion.”

“Which all come to nothing. And oh, those blessed revolvers! After our Anton got back from Sakhalin, he always loaded them with blanks.”

“Blanks? What do you mean?”

“Just look how he revised The Wood Demon. Second time round, Vanya just misses—at point-blank range. So what exactly did wind our darling Antosha up to that final notch so that he flew thousands of kilometres—oops, pardon me, thousands of versts—clear across Siberia? Maybe he did it to purge himself of hysteria? The same hysteria that screws up his Ivanov, and makes the play Ivanov a pretty rotten one.”

“Ivanov’s energies weren’t being put to constructive use,” said Felix mildly.

“As yours are?” enquired Sergey.

Felix was about to squash this sally; but his aggrieved look changed to one of disbelief—for Mikhail had pulled a pistol out of his jacket pocket. He pointed it at the window,

“Bang,” he said.

“For God’s sake, man—!”

“How the Devil—!”

Mikhail twirled the pistol round his finger, cowboy style.

“It’s just a prop. Found it in the lumber-room, I did, stuffed down one of those baskets. So I thought to myself, if old Antosha had one in his pocket, so should I.”

“Put it away, you fool!” bawled Sergey.

“Yes, do put it away, there’s a good fellow—before she gets back.” Now that the initial shock was over, Felix seemed quite amused.

Mikhail returned the gun to his pocket. “We don’t know anything for sure.”

“Ah, but we will once we make the film,” said Felix.

At this moment Sonya Suslova came bac. . .