Chapter 7
Levchenko checks his watch.
It is half past nine in the evening, and he needs to be ready for ten o’clock precisely.
Of course, there is no way the client would ever know if the order was completed late, but Levchenko is scrupulously professional about the special work he takes on – God is watching him, after all, even if the client, Edward Enwright, is not.
And so it is time to begin.
He checks the shop is locked, then turns off the light and retreats to the work area in the back room.
Along one side are his stoves and benches, scattered with scissors, clipped wicks and opaque plastic cases of various shapes and sizes.
Opposite, rickety wooden racks support hundreds of candles: blocks and cylinders, arranged in rainbow rows.
There are too many smells in here to count, as though the air is made from pressed flowers.
Levchenko selects a small metal saucepan.
It is battered, as though by countless hammer blows, and the base is soot-black from the soft, blue flames that have licked at it from the gas burner over too many years to remember.
He sits at the bench and clicks the burner on now, then lights it with a crackling match.
The smell of the gas mingles with the flower scents; a gentle hissing burr touches his ears.
From below the bench, he retrieves a crumpled plastic bag of thin white pellets.
Nearly empty. The wax rattles into the pan, then gradually begins to dissolve into something that looks like greasy water.
He adds dye with a pipette from the bench, and the liquid turns a beautiful shade of blue.
Even after all these years, he is amazed by how magnificently wax takes its colour – so clean and pure.
Staring into the steaming pan, he might be looking into a perfect sea or up at a cloudless sky.
Not everyday examples, but the ones people see in their imaginations and their dreams.
There is a large clock on the wall, the second hand ticking silently around. It is just after quarter to ten.
Levchenko reaches out and prods a cautious fingertip into the pan.
At first, there is a mild sensation of pain: the initial half-second of burning you would get from boiling water.
But wax is a precarious substance; it melts and solidifies over a smaller fulcrum of temperature, and the contrast of his flesh is enough to tilt the liquid touching his skin, so that when he lifts his finger out a moment later the tip is covered in a soft blue case.
Should he so desire, he could make himself the most brittle of gloves.
It is nearly ready.
He unrolls the wax from his finger and brushes away the rubbery scraps that cling.
Then he stands up and ponders the candles on the racks behind him, finally selecting a tall, white one – a cylinder.
Back at the bench, he uses a nub of putty to stick the candle to the base of a small circular metal dish, using just enough to hold it upright.
There is a cracked porcelain sink in the workshop. Levchenko fills an old, plastic washing up bowl with ice-cold, frothing water to a depth of about eight inches. Then he places the bowl carefully on the bench beside the gas burner, allowing the rolling water to settle.
Five to ten.
He eyes the clock as the remaining minutes pass.
With one minute to spare, Levchenko clicks off the heat and wraps a hand-towel round the bare metal handle of the pan in order to lift it safely from the hob.
Lost in his work, he sniffs loudly, up through one nostril, then pours the melted blue wax into the dish around the white candle.
It stands, now, like a miniature lighthouse in the middle of a still sea.
The second hand ticks slowly round.
At ten o’clock precisely, he picks up the dish and plunges it down into the bowl of cold water, all the way to the bottom.
Liquid meets liquid. The wax splays upwards from the dish into the water around it – but cools so quickly that it solidifies almost as it escapes.
It is too swift for the naked eye to catch, resembling a frozen explosion rather than a bloom.
In less than half a second it is already done, but Levchenko leaves the candle underwater for seconds longer before lifting it back out and placing the dish down on the bench.
Is it satisfactory?
It is.
The original white candle still stands upright – thick and firm.
But the pool of blue wax has leapt up in unpredictable swirls around it.
The colours are paled and mottled; the wax is as thin and delicate as petals.
And yes, it does look a little like a flower.
But it reminds Levchenko more of the sky, the perfect blue slightly hazy now and the pure white centre the colour of childhood clouds.
The sky – he always think there is something fitting about that.
After all, the weather appears random and chaotic, with small initial changes producing unpredictable and complex patterns, so much so that weather reports are only vaguely reliable for a few days at best. We cannot predict them, and yet it is only the laws of physics in action.
It is all set. The world simply unfolds: a carpet that nobody has ever seen but which is already entirely made.
Clouds are only one pattern upon its surface.
The same is true of his flowered candle.
If you knew the exact starting conditions of every atom in the workshop – in the wax and the water; in his arms and his brain – if you could track their movements and make the impossibly numerous calculations, you could know in advance where the wax would move, how it would cool.
Where each brittle, pale blue tip would finish.
Levchenko leans on either side of the candle and peers down at it.
The truth is that you can know none of those things.
God, perhaps, can know them – but no man.
Even the act of observing the atoms and particles, it is said, can alter their course.
So this candle, with its beautiful spread of wax petals, is as close to random as possible.
Each one is totally unique, cast in and of its moment.
A second later, and it would have been different. That is what makes them special.
Beyond the randomness, there is also the practical matter of construction.
Levchenko knows from experience that customers often look at these special candles and wonder how exactly they were made.
They are puzzled because, in their own experiences of the world, candles must be formed with molds rather than by the eddies of chance.
That is the appeal of these, after all.