Hepatica
At the sudden sound of his own name, Mikhail turned to her in surprise. A pair of green eyes stood close beside him, staring intently.
“Mikhail.”
Hearing his name again, Mikhail slowly blinked. It sounded like the world itself was calling him—something he had to answer, no, something he wanted to answer. The green eyes that had spoken his name blinked slowly once more, and then the voice returned.
“Please write it for me. Quickly.”
The words finally pulled him back to himself. He forced his gaze down to the paper again. Feeling her stare fixed so closely on him from the side, his hand absurdly wrote the wrong characters just as it prepared to form the first letter of his name. Embarrassed for no reason at all, Mikhail drew a line through the mistake with the pen and adjusted his grip.
Before the nib even touched the paper, he saw it tremble finely.
Trembling? Why am I…?
Mikhail put strength into his hand and wrote his name across the page. Mikhail Sokolov. A name he had signed countless times on every kind of contract looked strangely unfamiliar today.
His handwriting was sharp. Igor and Yury had once snickered that handwriting took after a man’s temper, only to be caught by Mikhail and forced into overtime that very night—staring at those sharp letters until their eyes burned.
He wrote his name in fairly large letters near the top of the white sheet, then held the pen out to Anastasia once more. While he wrote, she never looked away for even a second, watching every motion of the pen: the placement of his fingers on the shaft, their shape, the precise angle at which the nib met the paper.
Anastasia pressed the sheet bearing his name flat with her left hand so it would not shift. The rough grain of the paper felt pleasant under her palm—the same sensation as when she had buried her face in a book the night before. And now, on this very paper, she was about to form letters for the first time with pen and ink.
Her heart raced at the first such experience of her life.
The nib touched the edge of the page. However fine the instrument, the moment it moved it rasped and scratched across the surface; that dry friction traveled straight up the shaft into her hand. A black speck appeared where the point rested. Before it could bloom, she dragged her hand forward and made a line—straight, then curved.
The first letters anyone writes with a real pen are never beautiful. What Anastasia produced was, quite simply… a scrawl.
Mikhail said nothing, yet Anastasia’s face crumpled into a near-tearful pout at the sight of her own mess.
She had copied letters she happened to see scrawled on the ground a few times before. Only yesterday she had traced, over and over with her fingertip, both the words Mikhail had taught her and the mysterious shapes whose meanings she still did not know. So she had felt quietly confident. The moment she held a real pen, she had believed, the letters would emerge as perfect as those printed in books.
The result was disastrous.
Anastasia clenched her teeth and set her hand in motion again. The second attempt felt a little more familiar; the straight lines came out a shade cleaner. Still a scrawl.
Her lower lip began to jut farther and farther. Beside her, Mikhail watched, desperately holding back laughter.
To see his own name written so wretchedly—if those letters ever appeared on the walls of the Sokolov mansion, his enemies might well have believed someone had painted a curse.
Anastasia did not stop. Before long the entire sheet was crowded with his name. She had begun with large letters; as the pen grew easier in her grip the writing shrank. Still far from beautiful, yet little by little a handwriting that was purely hers began to show through—smaller and rounder than his. Igor and Yury’s old remark returned to him: handwriting resembles the person.
Perhaps because she had worked in such concentrated silence, not a blank space remained. Mikhail finally stopped her as she tried to squeeze even one more letter into a corner, drew the paper away, and pointed to the clean sheet beneath.
“At this rate the day will end with nothing but my name. Why not try writing something else?”
“Something else…?”
Mikhail considered what simple word he might offer next. What would be easy?
But before he could write anything new, Anastasia’s hand moved again. Clumsily, yet unmistakably, she formed a single word.
In truth her letters were still closer to drawing than writing. Even so, they were legible enough.
Hepatica.
Mikhail’s eyes widened at the name of the flower on the page. Anastasia did not stop. Lilium. Dahlia. Poppy. One after another the flower names he had spoken for her appeared. Sometimes the order of the letters was reversed and she wrote from the end forward, yet she remembered nearly every name he had ever given her—even rose, dahlia, and anemone, which he had never once read aloud.
Staring in astonishment, Mikhail suddenly recalled the flower encyclopedia he had given her as a gift. Could it be…
“…You memorized them all?”
“Yes! You gave me the book.”
She answered as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Mikhail found himself speechless. Was this… even possible?
“Are any of the words wrong?”
“Here—just a little.”
“Nothing else incorrect?”
“Nothing wrong, but I’ll write them once more, a bit cleaner, for you.”
Mikhail carefully rewrote each of her words so the correct forms would be easy to see.
Just how much had she memorized in a single night? She could not yet have learned every individual letter perfectly, yet she had somehow swallowed whole lists of names. When he returned the paper she set to work again with fresh delight.
He had expected she would want to learn to write, but never that she would love it this much. A smile that once appeared only with difficulty now filled her entire face. No special purpose, no reward—simply the prospect of being able to read books was enough to make learning pure joy.
What was I like, back then?
Mikhail found himself remembering the days when he himself had learned to write.
In the inn his mother had abandoned him to, he was forced to work until the age of ten.
By then he understood there were other places a boy could earn his keep. The factories rising near the capital, especially, were said to pay daily wages that seemed enormous to him. But the moment he announced he would leave, the innkeeper slapped a sheet of paper down in front of him.
“Can’t you see this? It’s the contract your mother signed before she left! You’re not going anywhere until you’ve repaid me a hundred rubles. Just try walking out—I’ll report you to the watch that same hour. The second they catch you, you’ll rot in the prison basements for the rest of your life!”
The underground prisons were objects of terror to everyone. Mikhail had heard their reputation until his ears ached. And the emperor of that time, Nikolai III, was a man who ordered even petty offenders locked away without mercy. Mikhail had seen too many people from the alleys dragged off on trifling charges, never to return—or returned in a state no better than corpses.
So he abandoned the idea of the factories. Then one night he overheard the drunken innkeeper talking with a friend.
“The stupid bastard mistook the letter my son sent from the Academy for a contract and bowed his head. You should’ve seen his face—hilarious.”
“Isn’t that a bit much? The boy’s been bringing in decent money for you, hasn’t he? Sharp-eyed, knows what the customers want.”
“True enough. But what’s the harm to me? The one who can’t read is the fool. That one’s going to live like that forever. Ignorant creatures should just do as they’re told and be grateful for whatever they’re given.”
Ignorant bastard. Live like that forever… That very night Mikhail fled the inn.
He slept in stables, stole horse fodder to keep from starving, and shook with cold and hunger. One of the children who had worked beside him could not bear the emptiness any longer and ate horse dung. The boy did not last long after that.
If that was the life waiting for him, he had to run.
Running, drifting, he finally reached Sokolov Port. In those days the first pier had only just been completed; the harbor was only beginning to rise. There Mikhail met the man who would one day hand him everything and teach him everything—Alexei.
They met at a gambling table.
Two years after he washed up in Sokolov, Mikhail had already become a name at the port’s gambling dens.
A gambling house was the one place where money made all men equal. As long as you could hold the cards it did not matter whether your opponent was a three-year-old child or a hundred-year-old elder, woman or man. In Novgord most laborers were dead before thirty-five. There, a boy of twelve was already treated as a full-grown man.
Once he learned the rules, Mikhail became the player with the highest win rate in the house. What the game required was a sharp eye that caught a cheat before it was played, and the skill to lie without blinking. He discovered a talent in himself he had never suspected.
Simple pictures and ten ranks of numbers. Every time those cards circled the table, hundreds of rubles changed hands.
Then came the day after he cleaned out not only the pockets but the very tools of the men working on the pier. A well-dressed stranger walked into the den.
“I am called Alexei.”
“Mikhail.”
The introductions were brief.
“I hear you took everything from my laborers in one sitting. You’re younger than I expected. How old are you?”
“Twelve. If you’re going to keep talking, get out. Or put money on the table.”
Alexei gave a short laugh, reached inside his heavy coat, and tossed a small gold bar onto the felt. The solid thud drew every eye in the room.
“Schweik gold. At this size it should be worth at least ten thousand rubles.”
Ten thousand rubles—money that took dozens of games to scrape together, each one played with a knife hovering near one’s throat.
“…What do you want? The tools back?”
“No. Just one game with me.”
Mikhail looked at the bar lying carelessly on the table. To this man, gold of that weight was something he could throw for amusement.
“I don’t have anything worth that much to put up.”
Alexei smiled.
“No need. If I win, I intend to take you with me.”