The Serpent of Paradise - Chapter 39

Mikhail looked at her in surprise when she suddenly called his name. Her green eyes stared intently at him from where she stood beside him.

“Mikhail.”

At the sound of his name again, Mikhail slowly blinked. It sounded as though the world itself were calling him. A call he absolutely had to answer. No, one he wanted to answer…. The green eyes calling to him blinked slowly, and her voice came again.

“Please hurry and write it.”

Only then did Mikhail finally come to his senses and turn his gaze back to the paper. He could feel her staring intently at him from beside him, and absurdly, the hand that tried to write the first letter of his name ended up writing something entirely different. Feeling inexplicably embarrassed, Mikhail crossed out the mistaken letter with his pen and adjusted his grip.

Before the nib touched the paper, he saw it trembling faintly.

Trembling? Why am I trembling?

Mikhail tightened his grip and began writing his name on the paper. Mikhail Sokolov. The name he wrote countless times while signing all manner of contracts looked strangely unfamiliar today.

Mikhail’s handwriting was rather sharp. Igor and Yuri once snickered that a person’s handwriting seemed to resemble his temper. Mikhail caught them, and they had to work late that night, staring at the sharp handwriting they mocked until their eyes grew dry.

He wrote his name in fairly large letters across the top of the white paper. Then Mikhail handed the pen back to Anastasia. While he wrote, Anastasia never looked away, carefully observing how the pen moved. The position and shape of the fingers holding the shaft, even the angle at which the nib touched the paper.

Anastasia pressed her left hand against the paper bearing Mikhail’s name to keep it from moving. The texture of the rough paper felt pleasant. It reminded her of how it felt when she buried her face in the book the night before. And now, for the first time, she was about to write letters on this paper with a pen and ink.

Anastasia’s heart raced at this first experience of her life.

The nib touched the edge of the paper. No matter how fine the pen was, the moment the nib moved over the paper, the scratching sensation traveled through the shaft and into Anastasia’s hand. A black dot appeared where the nib touched, and before it could spread, she moved her hand and drew a line. Straight, then curved.

Naturally, the first words she ever wrote with a pen couldn’t possibly be beautiful. Anastasia’s first attempt was… nothing but chicken scratch.

Mikhail didn’t say a word, but Anastasia’s face crumpled when she saw her terrible writing.

She had copied letters she happened to see on the ground a few times before. Yesterday, while looking through the book, she repeatedly traced with her finger the words Mikhail taught her and letters whose meanings she didn’t know. So she secretly felt confident. She was certain that once she held a pen, she would be able to reproduce the letters in the book perfectly.

But the result was disastrous.

Clenching her teeth, Anastasia moved her hand again. The second time, the pen felt slightly more familiar than the first, so she managed to draw the straight lines a little more evenly. Even so, it was still chicken scratch.

Her lips gradually began to jut out in a pout. Standing beside her, Mikhail desperately suppressed his laughter as he watched.

His name written this terribly. Had it appeared on the walls of the Sokolov residence, his political enemies might have suspected someone had written a curse.

Anastasia kept moving her hand without pause. Before long, the entire page was filled with his name. At first, she wrote the letters large, but as the pen became more familiar in her hand, they gradually grew smaller. Her handwriting still wasn’t beautiful, but her own style was slowly beginning to emerge. Smaller and rounder than his. He remembered what Igor and Yuri said. A person’s handwriting resembled them.

Perhaps because she worked so diligently without saying a word, no blank space remained on the paper. When Anastasia insisted on squeezing even one more letter into a corner, Mikhail stopped her and pulled the page away. Then he pointed to the fresh sheet beneath it.

“At this rate, the day will end with you writing nothing but my name. Why don’t you try writing something else?”

“Something else…?”

Mikhail considered what other word he should write for her. What was an easy word?

But before he could write a new word on the paper, Anastasia moved her hand again. Her hand clumsily formed a word.

In truth, Anastasia’s handwriting was still closer to drawing than writing. Even so, it was legible enough.

Hepatica.

Mikhail’s eyes widened at the flower’s name written on the paper. Anastasia didn’t stop there. Lilium. Dahlia. Poppy. The names of the flowers he told her appeared on the page one by one. Sometimes she got the order of the strokes wrong and even wrote from the end backward, but Anastasia remembered most of the flower names he told her. She even wrote rose, dahlia, and anemone, which he had never read aloud to her.

As Mikhail stared in astonishment, he remembered that he gave her the illustrated flower guide. Surely….

“…Did you memorize all of them?”

“Yes! You gave me the book.”

Anastasia answered as though it were obvious. Mikhail was speechless. Was this… possible?

“Did I get any of the words wrong?”

“This one, slightly.”

“Are there any mistakes in the others?”

“There aren’t any mistakes, but I’ll write them out more neatly for you once more.”

Mikhail rewrote the words Anastasia had written as neatly as possible so she could recognize them more accurately.

Just how much had she memorized last night? She probably hadn’t even learned each individual letter properly yet, so it was astonishing that she memorized all these words in their entirety. When Mikhail returned the paper, Anastasia excitedly began moving her hand again.

He thought she would want to learn to read, but he hadn’t expected her to enjoy it this much. At first, it was difficult to see her smile even once, but now her entire face was filled with one. She took such pleasure in learning simply because it would allow her to read books, without any particular objective or reward.

‘What was I like?’

Mikhail tried to remember when he learned to read.

***

He had to work at the inn where his mother abandoned him until he was ten years old.

By the time he was ten, he realized there were many places besides the inn where he could work. In particular, the factories being built near the capital supposedly paid what he considered a large daily wage. But when he said he intended to leave the inn, the innkeeper held out a sheet of paper before him.

“Can’t you see this? It’s the contract your mother signed before she left! You can never leave until you repay me one hundred rubles. Just try walking out! I’ll report you to the constabulary immediately. The moment they catch you, you’ll rot in the prison dungeons for the rest of your life!”

The underground prison was a place everyone feared. Mikhail had heard more than enough about its infamy. Moreover, Nikolai III, the emperor at the time, ordered people to be arrested and imprisoned without mercy even for minor offenses. Mikhail saw far too many people from the back alleys dragged to prison for trivial crimes, never to return, or else returning in a state no different from a corpse.

In the end, Mikhail had to abandon the idea of going to the factories. But one day, he overheard the innkeeper speaking to a friend while drunk.

“The idiot mistook the letter my son sent from the academy for a contract and bowed his head. You should have seen him. It was hilarious.”

“Wasn’t that going too far? I heard the boy earns you quite a lot of money. He’s quick-witted and knows what the guests want too.”

“That’s true. But how am I the one at fault? It’s his own fault for not knowing how to read. He’ll have to live like that for the rest of his life. Ignorant bastards should do as they’re told and be grateful for whatever they’re given.”

An ignorant bastard. Live like that for the rest of his life….

That night, Mikhail fled the inn.

It was a life of sleeping in stables, stealing fodder from horses, and trembling from cold and hunger. One of the children who worked alongside him couldn’t endure the hunger and even ate horse dung. The child died not long afterward.

If that was to be his life, he had to escape.

After fleeing, Mikhail drifted from place to place until he reached Sokolov’s port. At the time, construction of the first pier had just been completed, and the port was only beginning to develop. There, Mikhail met a man named Alexei, who would hand everything over to him and teach him all he knew.

They met at a gambling table.

Two years after drifting into Sokolov, Mikhail became famous in Sokolov’s gambling dens.

A gambling den was a place where everyone was equal before money. As long as someone could hold cards, it didn’t matter whether his opponent was a three-year-old child or a hundred-year-old elder, a woman or a man. This was Novgod, where most laborers died before the age of thirty-five. There, a twelve-year-old was already treated as a fully grown adult.

After learning the rules of cards, Mikhail became the person with the highest winning rate there. What the game required was the sharpness to notice before an opponent could cheat and the ability to lie skillfully. Mikhail possessed talents that even he hadn’t known about.

Cards made from simple pictures and ten numbers. Whenever those cards made one circuit around the table, hundreds of rubles changed hands.

Then, the day after Mikhail stripped the men working on the pier construction of not only every coin in their pockets but even their work equipment, a well-dressed man came to the gambling den.

“My name is Alexei.”

“Mikhail.”

It was a brief exchange of names.

“I heard you won big against my workers and took everything they had. But you’re younger than I expected. How old are you?”

“Twelve. If you’re going to keep running your mouth, get out. Otherwise, put down some money.”

Alexei gave a faint laugh, then pulled a small gold ingot from inside his thick coat and tossed it onto the table.

Thud!

Every gaze turned toward the center at the heavy sound.

“It’s a gold ingot from Schweik. At this size, it must be worth at least ten thousand rubles.”

Ten thousand rubles. It was an amount he could barely earn after dozens of games. And during those games, having his life threatened came as an added bonus.

“…What do you want? Did you come to get the construction equipment back?”

“No. Just play one game with me.”

Mikhail looked at the gold ingot lying carelessly on the table. To this man, that much gold was something he could toss down for amusement.

“I don’t have anything worth that much to wager.”

Then Alexei smiled and said, “That’s all right. If I win, I intend to take you with me.”