The Summer Guest

by Alison Anderson

  So the young woman does not get her prince?

  Alas, no. She is too provincial, and an heiress from Piter sweeps him off to Baden-Baden.

  I could not help but laugh. Oh, Anton Pavlovich, you were right all along, it sounds dreadful!

  No, Zinaida Mikhailovna, it’s not dreadful—you see, I read it right through, beyond your first chapter; she’s established the suspense, and you really do want to find out whether little Tatyana Fyodorovna will succeed in catching her prince. And it’s not for lack of trying, poor girl. A clever young heroine, like her author.

  Baden-Baden?

  Quite. I suspect she’s been there, so she’s neither entirely poor nor provincial, our author—her descriptions of German matrons are an absolute treasure. I shall tell her as much. Not to cut a word, there, in any case. For all the surplus folds of flesh and swaths of taffeta.

  We are by the pond; it is late afternoon, almost evening. The air is cooler; I have had so little time with Anton Pavlovich since his brothers arrived. He is in constant demand, especially from Nikolay. As for his novel, it is, he says, on the top shelf of the wardrobe, at the back, behind three blankets and under a dozen pillowcases.

  Tell me what you see, Anton Pavlovich? I ask. Just now, just here, from where we are sitting.

  I see, he says, the evening light on the pond . . . the sky is clear, there are two or three clouds over Sumy. There are rushes and reeds on the opposite bank, your sister and Masha are strolling, both wearing long white dresses like summer brides; now Natasha has stopped, she’s turning to Masha and waving her hand, as if to make a point, and now Masha is bending at the waist, doubled over in laughter. Vanya and Kolya are farther along, sitting on the bench, slouching, not looking at each other. Vata and her friend Lizaveta Nikolayevna from the town are rowing Monsieur Pleshcheyev around the pond, as they do every evening. They are gazing admiringly at him and are even refraining from giggling, as you can hear. He is like a cat having its whiskers stroked. And here comes Rosa, her tongue hanging out and full of drool, she’s been looking for you—

  Rosa jumps against my knees. I hold her head, feel her warm ears, her doggie vibrancy.

  Perhaps Anton Pavlovich described something more; it doesn’t matter. I asked him to tell me what he saw not so much for him to be my eyes but so I could hear his voice. It is a way of seeing him. I did ask him once to describe himself to me—what was he wearing, how had he combed his hair that morning, but he snorted at me in a friendly way and said I would be terrified if I did see him, that he was a cross between a crocodile and a boa constrictor, with a billy goat’s beard, and that he had borrowed his brother’s tunic, the one with the paint splashes all over it, and some felt boots that Grigory Petrovich had left in the yard, equally smeared with horse manure, and to complete the picture, a pince-nez and a top hat.

  But he understood my need to see, to know—and to laugh—and since that time by the pond, he has spontaneously described the river, the trees, the sky, the figures in white or the young men strolling or Grigory Petrovich and Anya with their loads. There are shadows of light; he has a way of speaking that no laborious efforts of my own can ever reproduce with this sorry pen.

  I’ve been thinking about solitude. Perhaps having company like Anton Pavlovich is making it more difficult for me to be alone. Solitude is something I have discovered only since I became ill. To be sure, I have spent time alone—in Piter as a student; or on the road on a house call to a faraway village; on occasion when traveling to and from Luka. But it was never the sort of deep solitude of unending self-accompaniment, only an interlude, and there was always someone waiting at the other end, or someone who came to interrupt my indulgence in the anatomy textbook.

  Now I am surrounded by people, but I am alone, I cannot accompany them in what they are seeing and doing, where their busy steps are taking them. Natasha has quite abandoned me for the Chekhovs, who have swollen in number yet again with the arrival of the eldest, Aleksandr. According to Natasha, he is a tall man with large questioning eyes, as if he’s just woken up, although she says his gaze is not so much full of sleep as of vodka.

  (With good cause: He has recently lost his wife and has two little boys to bring up alone now; he has left them with an aging aunt in Moscow to come here and literally, it would seem, drown his sorrows.)

  So Natasha is there and I am here (with this notebook, among my thoughts), and I am learning—because it is a harsh apprenticeship—how to turn solitude from an enforced exclusion to a welcome introspection. People who are writers, like Anton Pavlovich and Monsieur Pleshcheyev, might be the only people, other than religious hermits and anchorites, who need or seek solitude. Even if Anton Pavlovich writes in a corner of a crowded room, he is alone in his head, alone in his thoughts; otherwise, how could he enter an alternative world to give us a story? Solitude does this: It is a vast room, emptied of people, where we must create our own world. Or concentrate upon the world we see or hear or smell. I have lost my sight but have gained sensitivity to those other senses that I never suspected could exist. I have learned not to depend on others but to use my solitude to reflect deeply on life and not just float on the surface, as I used to, happy to agree with others or adopt their opinions as my own. I have learned a greater attentiveness to the world through sound and smell, and I am somehow closer to an essence of life, to its significance, than when I was busy as a doctor, always rushing about and concerned with other things. Thoughts come to me now that once would have seemed irrelevant or uninteresting, as if my soul suddenly came out of hiding, no longer ashamed of its isolation, shouting ideas like those itinerant preachers in America one hears about. It quite astonishes me at times, and I will try to reproduce these unexpected visitations on the paper, as my strength allows. Sadly, I realize that paper is the only thing that still stands between me and mortality, and the idea that placing my scrawl—perhaps it is totally illegible by now—on this page for the generations to follow—Tonya and Pasha’s little one, to start with—is a comfort and a reason to hope. They may not like what they will read someday, but their eyes will keep me alive in memory.

  ANA LOOKED AROUND AT the snow-covered fields and forest. For a long time she didn’t move, until the chill began to penetrate her light jacket. Then she lifted one foot after the other, stomped her skis on the ground in readiness, and set off along the trail.

  She had decided to give herself the day off. She hadn’t been skiing since she started on Zinaida Mikhailovna’s diary; she needed the air, the movement, the silence. The forecast was good—slightly overcast for now but sunshine later on. It had snowed the previous day, and the boughs of pine and fir were heavy with Christmas-card perfection.

  For a good quarter of an hour, she simply moved with the progression of the trail—slight inclines, nothing steep that would require too great an effort or instill a fear of speed going downhill. Ana had found a fairly flat trail in the Jura Mountains that she liked coming to; the drive was long, but she listened to music, singing out loud—opera, Irish folk, nineties pop songs, whatever was on her aging cassettes—and once she was here, the trail was worth it, because there weren’t many other skiers, especially during the week, and the geography was sublime. None of the drama of the Alps, but old farms tucked in hollows between forests and sloping fields, with the occasional brief sighting of the lake in the distance and, above all, a stillness and serenity that filled her each time with gratitude and wonder. She was alone with the sound of her breath, the smooth swish of her long skis, the occasional crisp reaction of the snow to her passage.

  Once she was warmed up and no longer needed to concentrate on the trail and her rhythm, her thoughts began to wander, as they usually did, to the reasons why she loved this simple sport. She might never have tried it, might have followed friends and fellow students to the downhill slopes in a resort near Grenoble, had she not met—just after Moscow and during what was meant to be her only year in Paris—a dark boy with a poetic allure who, almost on a dare, invited he
r for a weekend of cross-country skiing in the Morvan. Her friends had been teasing him, saying that cross-country was for old people, and where was the excitement, where were the bars and the places for parties—but this boy was unflappable, criticizing them in return for their snobbish bourgeois values, launching into a long tirade about how downhill skiing destroyed the environment and contributed to class warfare. At which point the other students whooped with laughter; only Ana sat there quietly, almost gravely, wondering if he didn’t have a point, and concluding that he was certainly brave to express it, and her silent approval earned her the defiant invitation to the Morvan in his battered Deux Chevaux. You can’t tip these things over, he said, taking the bends at breakneck speed. You want me to try? Ana was terrified, and euphoric. Before they even passed Fontainebleau, she knew she would go anywhere with this boy. His name was Léo.

  Now she paused in the first spray of sunlight, her breath rising in a cloud. Léo had taught her how to ski; she still had that. Mathieu, on the other hand, used to hire a chalet in some high alpine resort, and Ana would have to drive back down the mountain, often in an abortive quest for a well-groomed cross-country trail. They would meet again in the evening, and Ana would listen to Mathieu’s long descriptions of his exploits off-piste, the thrill of it, and at least once a year he would say, That damned lover of yours, teaching you cross-country. Quel con, what was he thinking? And even now, as Mathieu’s remembered taunts resonated in her inner silence, she thought of Léo and wondered if she skied for his sake, as a kind of tribute to their time together.

  No, of course not. It had ended badly, he had hurt her, but with the years, in his case, she had learned to separate the good memories from the bad, to be grateful to have had him in her life. To those memories she affixed the label Love of My Life, though he would not have approved, not Léo, with his adamantine dislike of emotion. Love was sex; love was skiing on a bright morning through a forest of lace-strewn evergreens, turning every now and again to smile.

  She set off again; she could feel her heart working; her left thigh was beginning to ache. I’m becoming too sedentary, she chided herself.

  She came out of the forest into a clearing and caught her breath as she slid to a halt. The sky was blue; she could hear the first dripping of melting snow. The clearing was sparkling, blanketed in white, with a ragged fringe of pine trees. The absolute stillness enveloped her in something beyond mere reverence or well-being. Ana, for all her words, could not define it, but she also knew this was why she came here—rarely, but often enough not to forget. She liked to think of these moments as pure distillations of solitude, as a necessary communion with self and nature of the sort that mystics and hermits practiced. There was no loneliness, no longing to be with anyone. She breathed deeply, closed her eyes, flung her head back, and let the sun pour over her.

  Once he knew she’d gotten the hang of her skis, Léo had started going far ahead, leaving her behind, instructing her in a skill beyond mere skiing. When, both angry and elated, she eventually caught up with him, she invariably found him smoking in the sun, and he would say something teasing, like, Well, did you find your God?

  Now there was no one to catch up with, no one waiting, casually smoking. And that was fine. Yet for a split second Ana thought she would like to see Léo again, or someone like him, with whom to exchange cryptic, teasing remarks.

  But then she would lose the silence, just when she had learned how to listen for its message.

  June 5, 1888

  There was a dreadful argument over dinner. Mama had made some religious reference, as she is wont to do, something about Our Savior and the afterlife.

  Pasha turned to her and said, Mama, you’ve been listening to the priest again, it’s all just superstition, you know that. How can you read your scholarly journals and yet believe that nonsense? Don’t you realize the church and the government conspire to enslave the people?

  She sputtered a few words of protest: But it’s faith, Pashenka, how can you not understand this? You must just let God’s goodness—

  Goodness, shouted Georges, if God were good, would He have let this happen?

  There was a heavy silence in the room, and I sensed he might be pointing at me. Then he cried out, almost in tears, What compassionate God would allow our sister to, to— How can He exist, how can He call himself God if He does exist and yet He sends this terrible disease? It’s not as if she were some Petersburg flibbertigibbet, she has been a useful member of society, actually saving lives, not taking them away! What, Mama, what can you say to that?

  Elena was trying to break in, her voice soothing, her words unintelligible. Mama was sobbing. I felt quite uncomfortable crushed between Herr Marx and Christ the Lord. Of course Georges is right, and I know from witnessing medical proof of the suffering of others that God is not compassionate, if He even exists—but does that mean He does not exist in Mama’s soul? Even if He does not exist in mine or in Georges’s?

  I held out my hand, waved it, tried to attract their attention. Then I turned to Georges and said, Just because you don’t believe, does that mean Mama cannot? Or must not? Your Marx is telling you not to believe, and that is no different from the village priest telling Mama to believe. Can’t truth be relative, or selective, in matters of faith? Does truth even apply to faith? It isn’t science . . .

  Exactly, shouted Pasha. Which is why it must not be credited. It is superstition, Mama, that is all there is to it. You are afraid of death, so you believe that dying is just going to another place. There is no other place.

  Stop it, please, both of you, shouted Natasha, this is cruelty, you are being cruel to Mama, cruel to Zina. Are you so proud that you aren’t afraid of death? With your high-minded intellectual proof that God does not exist, you think it makes you immortal? Why can’t you see that other people have a right to believe? What difference does it make to you if Mama believes?

  Because we love her, shouted Georges, and we want what’s best for her. Religion will deceive her, you’ll see, Mama, there will be no consolation.

  Oh no, my dear boys, said Mama firmly, roused from her tears, I will be saved, and I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing my poor daughter is in heaven. And that she is saved.

  I did not have the heart to contradict Mama openly; I know she wants me to believe in an afterlife, it makes her feel better. Georges and Pasha know what I think and that I generally agree with them. But what I feel? As I go toward greater darkness, might I not begin to crave the so-called light of God?

  There was a scraping of chairs, and Pasha grumbled that he’d heard enough. He left the room with Georges. We women sat on in silence for a while. Natasha reached over and held my hand. Stupid boys, she muttered, then laughed, more nervously than in amusement.

  As I write and think of God and solitude, I find myself sharing my thoughts—too rapid to commit all of them to paper—with an absent Anton Pavlovich. What would he say? What would he make of our discussion? I know he teased Mama gently for reading Schopenhauer; on the other hand, he is friends with that right-wing press magnate in Piter, that Suvorin man he mentioned, with his villa in the Crimea, so he cannot wholly defend my brothers’ socialist point of view—or can one somehow reconcile such conflicting loyalties?

  Perhaps that is the gift of his writing, why he pleases his readers so—to be able to take on all of life’s contradictions with equanimity, befriend people of every station and every creed. He is friends with Artyomenko the factory worker; he is friends with Monsieur Suvorin the Petersburg press magnate. He is friends with little Panas and with the venerable Pleshcheyev. Would Anton Pavlovich agree with everything we say or simply refuse to be drawn? He does not share his opinions easily, I have noticed.

  June 6, 1888

  According to Natasha, Elena seems quite taken with Aleksandr Pavlovich, Anton Pavlovich’s widowed brother, even after only a few days’ acquaintance. They go for long walks in the evening; they were caught in the thunderstorm last night. Elena came home so dr
enched, you could hear the water in her clothes and shoes. She didn’t seem to mind.

  Anton Pavlovich has confirmed to me that his brother drinks but that he has had a very hard life. His parents never approved of the woman who became his wife, and their first child died; now she, too, has died, so recently. He tries to act normally, but I can sense, from the few times I’ve been in the same room with him, a kind of frenzy, a terrible restlessness trying to hide grief and expiate it at the same time.

  What did Aleksandr Pavlovich’s wife die of? I asked Elena later that day.

  Consumption, she replied. After a pause she continued, The brother has it, too, did you know? Although I’m not sure he knows it.

  Which brother?

  Nikolay, the artist.

  We fell silent. We both knew, we have seen more than our share of the disease. Some sufferers live a long time and are able to fight it; others succumb well before their time, like Aleksandr Pavlovich’s wife. I asked Elena her opinion regarding Nikolay; she did not answer. We spoke of other things.

  June 8, 1888

  Elena came to see me earlier on her way back from a house call. She seemed relieved—a child with scarlet fever who is doing much better—but once she had shared this information, she lapsed into a hesitant silence of sighing and throat clearing. Finally, I said, do you have something on your mind, Lenochka?

  (I was beginning to suspect what it might be, as Natasha has made a few comments, but Elena has always found it difficult to speak openly.)

  She said, I’m rather confused. I cannot decide whether Aleksandr Pavlovich enjoys my company.

  Clearly he does, or he wouldn’t be seeking you out—there’s no lack of company at the moment.