The Staircase to the Moon

There once lived a boy named Ilya who believed the moon was the most beautiful thing in existence.

In the summer he turned seven, Ilya stood in the yard and looked at the moon until his neck ached and his mother had to carry him inside. When she set him down he told her, in the grave voice of a small boy delivering important news, that he intended to touch the moon.

She said, "All right."

She was tired. People say all right to children.

He began the next morning. A kitchen chair on the table, a crate on the chair, a milking stool on the crate. He got as high as a man's head before the whole invention folded underneath him and put him down on the flagstones with a broken wrist and an expression of enormous surprise.

The girl holding the bottom of it was called Mira. She was eight. She had told him it would fall.

She had held it anyway.

He learned. That was the frightening thing about Ilya. He was not clever, but he was patient in a way that made grown men uneasy. He took work at the mill for the offcuts. He read the village's only book about bridges until the spine came apart in his hands, and then he read the pages loose.

By twelve he had nine steps standing in the field behind his mother's house, and they did not wobble.

By twenty he had four hundred.

People came out to look at it the way people come out to look at a fire. The priest called it blasphemy for about a year and then lost interest. The schoolmaster arrived with a slate and explained the distance to the moon in numbers so large they stopped meaning anything halfway through; Ilya listened politely, thanked him, and used the back of the paper for a bracing diagram. Men walked in from other towns to argue with him. He was courteous to all of them. He found the arguments restful.

It never occurred to him that they might be right. Not as a thought he considered and rejected. As a thought that never arrived at all, the way it does not occur to water to climb.

One spring a goat got up as far as the ninth step and would not come down, and for three days it was the most interesting thing that had ever happened in the village.

Old Bekker ran the wager at the inn. Not on whether Ilya would reach the moon. Nobody was fool enough to take that side, and nobody was quite willing to take the other. The bet was on Mira. On when she would stop coming.

"Next spring," Bekker said, every year, for forty years. He paid out every autumn and never once changed his answer.

She brought bread. Always with the crust torn off, wrapped in a blue cloth, because when he was nine he had said that crusts tasted like the inside of a shoe and she had laughed until she had to sit down. After that there was never crust again. He never noticed that a decision had been made.

She brought nails when he ran short, and did not mention that she had paid for them. She was better than he was at reading weather; she knew which shoulder of the hill the wind came round, and she was the one who worked out that steps forty and forty-one would keep rotting until they were made of something other than pine. She sat with him at night while the fire went down, and to make him laugh she invented constellations. The Spoon. The Other Spoon. The Drunk Man Looking For His Spoon.

Sometimes he laughed. Those were the good nights.

His mother died when he was thirty-one. He came down for the funeral and went back up the same evening. Mira walked him to the bottom step and did not say anything about it.

The winter he was forty-four, the wind took two hundred and eleven steps in a single night. He sat down in the snow at the foot of the wreckage and could not speak. Mira arrived at first light with a hammer and started on step one. She had been working three days before he stood up and joined her.

Once, on one of the good nights, he looked over at her in the firelight and asked why she kept coming.

She thought about it properly, the way she thought about everything.

"Somebody has to hold the bottom," she said.

He laughed and went back to his drawing, because he thought it was a joke about the chair.

The staircase grew, and the climb grew with it.

An hour, at first. Then half a day. Then she was leaving her house before dawn to reach him by dark, sleeping on the wide landing at nine hundred with her coat pulled over her, going on in the morning.

Every night, at the foot of the staircase, she lit a lamp. She said it was so he could find the ground in the dark.

He used it for something else. Whenever he wanted to know whether his line was true, he would lean out over the edge and sight the whole length of the thing down to that one small point of light, and see whether he had built it straight.

He called it his plumb line. That is genuinely what he called it, for forty years.

When he was fifty he built a rope and a basket so that the food could come up without her. He had worked on the mechanism for a month and he was proud of it. "Now you don't have to climb," he said.

She looked at the basket for a while.

Then she said thank you.

She climbed anyway, for another six years. Then less often. Then the basket came up in the mornings and she did not.

He was relieved, a little. A visit cost him a day of work.

The last time he saw her, her hair had gone the colour of ash and the climb had taken her two days.

"Come down for one night," she said.

"I'm close."

"I know."

"After," he said.

"After," she said.

She stood a while at the top of the finished steps, where the wind was, looking not at the moon but at the country below her, which she had never seen from that height and would not see again. Then she turned to the ladder.

"You'll want a warmer coat up there," she said.

He thanked her, and meant it, and did not look up from his work.

The bread kept arriving. Somebody down there went on baking. He never thought about who.

Some years later he noticed that the crust was still on it.

He tore it off with his thumbs, and ate, and went on climbing.

He had stopped counting the steps at a hundred thousand, somewhere in his forties. He built the last stretch slowly, because his hands had begun to argue with him, and because the cold up there was not like weather. It was more like a fact.

He was an old man when he reached it. He set the final step, and rested, and then he stood and put his hand on the moon.

It was grey. The grey of a fire that has been out a long time. There was a fine dust over it that took the shape of his fingers and held it, and that was the only answer it gave him.

It was cold in the way a thing is cold when it has never once been warm.

And it was silent. He had expected — he did not know what he had expected. A sound. A note. Something. He had given it sixty-one years, and somewhere underneath all that work he had assumed, without ever once putting it into words, that when he finally arrived it would have something to say to him.

It was the first thing he had ever touched that did not touch him back.

He stood with his palm flat against it for a long while.

Then he lifted his head, because that was what his face did, because that was the shape a life makes. There was nothing above him. The dark went up and up and did not end anywhere and held nothing he had ever loved.

So he looked down.

He found the country, small and folded like a cloth. He found the river, a grey thread. He found the roofs of the village, and the mill, and the field behind his mother's house. He found the foot of his staircase, and the patch of ground beside it where a lamp had been lit every night since he was seven years old.

There was no lamp.

He was standing on the most beautiful thing that had ever been made. He did not look at it.

For the first time in his life, he looked down instead of up.