Flights

THE TSAR’S COLLECTION

The next day at dawn the Russian sailboat with the collection carefully arranged in the hold raised its anchor and headed out to sea. It met with good fortune crossing the Danish straits, and after several days it was received by the Baltic. The captain, in a good mood, was contemplating his recent purchase, a beautifully executed tellurion by Dutch artisans. He had always been interested in such things much more than sailing itself, and deep down he would rather have been an astronomer, a cartographer, someone who reaches beyond the space available to our gaze and our ships.

From time to time he went down into the hold and checked to make sure the precious cargo was still in place, but somewhere around Gotland the weather changed – after a not-too-violent storm the wind dropped. The air hovered over the sea, forming a great block of atmospheric amber out of August’s final heat. The sails slumped, and this went on for several days. The captain, in order to occupy people somehow, ordered them to roll and unroll the halyards, scrub the deck, and in the evenings he made them go through drills. After dark, his authority lost its outlines somewhat, and he snuck back into the cozy cocoon of his cabin, partly of wariness towards these gruff, primitive sailors, partly on account of his travel journal, which he was writing for his two sons.

On the eighth day of dead calm the sailors began to be stormy themselves, and the vegetables they’d bought in Amsterdam, especially the onion, turned out to be poor quality and in large part mouldy. Their supply of vodka was already running out – the captain was actually afraid to look under the deck, where they kept the barrels, but the reports of his first officer certainly did not bode well. The captain felt uneasy as nocturnal clattering on deck reached his ears. At first they were individual steps. But then it was several pairs of legs knocking, and in the end he heard a peaceable trot and a rhythmic shouting (could they be dancing?), which finally transitioned into raucous drunken shouts and uneven choruses sung so pathetically and painfully that it reminded him of the wailing of some marine animals. This happened over several long nights, almost until dawn. By day he saw the sailors’ puffy eyes and swollen eyelids and their gazes that avoided him. But both he and his first officer agreed that deepest darkness at stilled sea would hardly favour any behavioural correctives. It wasn’t until the tenth day of silence, when the nocturnal excesses could no longer be tolerated, that he went out onto the deck, in full sun so that his epaulettes and insignia could be seen, and arrested the ringleader, a man by the name of Kalukin.

Unfortunately, with a trembling heart, he confirmed his suspicions that some of the cargo had been damaged. Some dozen or so of the hundreds of jars they were transporting had been opened, and their liquid contents, a strong brandy, drunk till the last drop. The specimens themselves were still there, lying around on the floor, submerged in tow and sawdust. He didn’t take too close a look at them, out of disgust and fear. The next night he made some men stand with arms in hand to guard the entrance to the hold; a mutiny was close to breaking out. The August heat was driving the men crazy. And the smoothness of the surface of the sea. And the cargo itself.

In the end there was no other way – the captain had the remains that were left sewn up in a cloth bag and he personally threw them overboard. And as though at the touch of a wizard’s wand, the sea, mollified by this morsel, smacked and moved. Somewhere near the Swedish mainland the wind came in and pushed the Tsar’s sailboat towards home.

When they got back to Petersburg the captain had to write a secret report. Kalukin was convicted and hanged, and the collection itself, though incomplete, was transferred safely to rooms prepared expressly for it.

The captain, meanwhile, for his failure to take care of the transport, was sent along with his family to the Far North, where for the rest of his life he organized little fishing expeditions and contributed to the drawing up of more detailed maps of Novaya Zemlya.