Page 6 of The Crown's Game
And so it went. Galina would make demands, and Nikolai would comply.
Now she drifted away from the library, down Nevsky Prospect, in the direction from which they had come.
“If only her lessons didn’t take place in the middle of the night.” But Nikolai took a deep breath and cracked his knuckles. Exhaustion could be overcome; he’d done it plenty of times before.
He tossed aside his self-pity and rose from where he’d sat against the streetlamp. He focused on the Imperial Library’s impenetrable walls. Imagine they are transparent, he thought. Imagine the walls are nothing but air.
They held on to their solidness for a moment. And then the walls seemed to shimmer before evaporating from Nikolai’s sight altogether, and he could see straight through them.
At first, everything seemed too airy, too insubstantial, as if he’d entered a dimension inhabited solely by ghosts. But slowly, the rooms began to fill in, first the tables and chairs, then the columns and shelves, and finally, the books themselves.
Nikolai gasped. Seeing the hundreds of thousands of books now, when he had an impossible task to accomplish, was so much more daunting than in the past when he had browsed the shelves. I’ll never be able to sort through all of them. Even if he had been physically inside the library, it would take weeks, perhaps months, to check all the spines to ensure they were in the proper order.
If he were more powerful, he might have been able to command all the books in the library to fly off the shelves at once and direct them to reorder themselves correctly. But that was the sort of dream one had after too many glasses of wine followed by too many shots of cheap vodka.
In his mind, Nikolai walked through the inside of the library, from the more popular reading rooms full of newspapers and magazines, to the rare documents room, which required special permission—at least, permission was required for those who could not see through walls and peruse the holdings in the middle of the night.
If I can isolate the books that have been touched within the last twenty-four hours—maybe not even that long, since Galina likely visited near the end of the day to minimize the risk of the librarians undoing her work—then I can command those books to reshelve themselves in the right places.
He clasped his hands in front of him, as if in prayer, and concentrated on catching the attention of every last book in the library. If you were moved yesterday, I command you to move again, now. Slide forward, pull yourself off the shelf.
Nikolai held his breath. Some of the volumes quivered in place. Slide forward, pull yourself off the shelf, he willed again. A few books started to move, just an inch. He knit his brow. Slide forward, pull yourself off the shelf!
And then all at once, a few hundred books leaped off the shelves and came to a sudden halt, suspended in midair. Nikolai smiled.
Now go back to your places, he commanded the books.
They did nothing but hover.
Hmm. Nikolai twisted his mouth. It would not be as simple as he’d hoped, for his plan apparently didn’t work if the books weren’t told specifically where to go. Still, it was only a few hundred books. He could do that. He could check the numbers on the spines against the numbers of the adjacent books, push back the ones that belonged, and pluck out the ones that did not. Unless a convention of anarchists visited the library yesterday, most books ought to be in their rightful spaces.
And so Nikolai began the painstaking sorting. The first book was a Russian dictionary; the books on the shelf behind it were all labeled with the same classification number. You may slide back. It obeyed and slotted itself neatly in place. The next several books were similarly in their corresponding spaces. Apparently, they had just been taken off the shelves to be perused, but the patrons had put them back correctly.
After forty-five minutes, though, Nikolai had not found a single misplaced book. He rubbed the back of his neck. Perhaps this strategy wasn’t any good. Perhaps the charm he’d cast on the books was faulty. But it was creeping toward four in the morning now, too close to when the city would wake, and Nikolai couldn’t start all over. He had to press on before he was discovered.
The next book floating off its shelf was a manual on the cultivation of wheat. But it had been placed beside economic treatises, which was clearly wrong even without comparing the numbers on the spines. “Finally,” he said aloud. Nikolai directed the wheat manual several aisles down to its brethren.
One down, four to go.
But a pair of voices sounded from around the corner of Sadovaya Street. Nikolai inhaled sharply, then darted around the other corner of the library and pressed himself against the wall.
It was a couple of fishermen staggering home—or perhaps to the docks on the banks of the Neva River—after a long night at a tavern. They stopped a mere foot from where Nikolai stood holding his breath and every muscle. One of the drunkards unfastened his trousers and relieved himself on the streetlamp. The other laughed and undid his trousers, too, but he aimed his stream at the other man’s.
“You motherless bastard!” The first fisherman waved his own stream like a stuttering liquid saber at the other’s. A urine duel commenced.
Deuces! Were they eight years old?
The fishermen convulsed with laughter as they “battled” with their stinking yellow swords. Nikolai plastered himself flatter against the wall as the second drunkard’s aim grew even worse and came within inches of Nikolai’s boots.
Finally, they finished and tottered on their merry, unfettered way. Only when their sloppy footfalls receded did Nikolai allow himself to exhale.
He worked at a quicker tempo thereafter and found three more books in the wrong sections. Only one misplaced title remained. But Nikolai was no longer the only person on the street. It was now a quarter after five, and others had begun trickling past. Nevsky Prospect was, after all, one of the busiest streets in the city. And those people had begun casting strange glances at the well-dressed young gentleman who stood as if in a trance on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Sadovaya Street.
A flower girl across the street eyed him. She waved over a man carrying several crates of apples.
Now or never, Nikolai thought. There were only thirty or so books that needed to be checked. He was not powerful enough to handle the movement of an entire library of books, but surely he could handle thirty? He clasped his hands even tighter in front of him and murmured, almost to himself, “Return to your proper places! All of you!”
Inside the library, two dozen books shot straight back into their spaces. Five or six, on the other hand, whizzed through the air, a couple nearly colliding with each other, and weaved their way through the library, back to their correct rooms, correct aisles, correct shelves.
