The Summer Guest

by Alison Anderson

  Andrey Stepanovich. They had paid for his ticket from the newly rebaptized Saint Petersburg. He was a rising young author, and Polyana had published his prizewinning novel. They had spent more on the marketing budget than for any other book in their short history. They had arranged readings and signings and radio appearances for Andrey, which he performed with charm and earnestness. They expected him to become the new Nabokov, the next Kundera.

  He seemed to have brought the white nights with him in his pale, vibrant eyes. He made her want to stay awake, not to miss anything, as if he were an ambassador bearing a gift that would dissolve in the morning sunlight. He was not dazzled by the West, because in those early days of transition he believed he could contribute to a new, democratic Russia. The other guests had left, Peter had gone to bed, and Katya sat on with Andrey, wrapped in her shawl, shivering from the chill air, and something else.

  Why do you stay here now? he asked her. You could go back to Russia, start a business, teach English, translate literature. Now is the time.

  Katya did not remember what she had told him. A flat excuse, My life is here now, that sort of thing.

  His voice went on into the night, weaving circles around her, entrapping her with a long list of all the reasons why she should go back to Russia. She laughed at some of them—he was such an idealist! But she recalled that by the end of his list, she had an image as vivid and real as if she had turned the clock back to before Peter, before England. Finally, she stopped him and said, This is just nostalgia. I won’t find that Russia, because I’ve changed, too. And what you describe is what you dream of—it’s your utopia, it’s not real. It’s like your book, beautiful but unreal. You have kept all the best things from our childhood, all the eternal Russian values, and added some fantasy of a sort of modernized, enlightened democracy. No such place exists even outside Russia.

  He hung his head as if disappointed in her bleak realism or his failure to convince her. Then he turned and looked at her. It is because, he said in English as if for emphasis, it is because when you love, you see everything more beautiful.

  She burst out laughing. She thought he was referring to Russia, and she was beginning to find his love of motherland a bit overblown. There was a moment of silence, and then with his voice quiet and even but almost pained, he said in Russian, When I leave tomorrow—I mean tonight—Ekaterina Sergeyevna, will you come with me?

  Katya’s shivering seemed to grow worse. He stood up and came over to her, put his hands on her elbows, and coaxed her up from her chair. There was a kiss, a very long one. She realized his eyes were the same color as hers. And that he was probably younger than she was. She thought that if she were able to believe a fraction of what he had said, the long poem that had filled her with a homesickness no less potent than this simple desire to kiss and be kissed, she would go with him to Saint Petersburg. But she didn’t, couldn’t, believe. Her sense of timing had changed. Deep down, she disapproved of his spontaneous declaration.

  Andrey had gone back to Saint Petersburg, and Katya and Peter heard nothing more from him. The book did only moderately well. As Katya had found with her poetry, the West was no longer interested in the literature of the former Eastern bloc. There was enough new, democratic material written directly in English. India was hot; Ireland was hot.

  Sometimes, in idle moments like this one, she wondered what would have happened if she had gone back to Russia. Left Peter and gone back. There had been those shaky years in their marriage, not unlike now. She would not have gone to Andrey; she would have gone to the evanescent dawn place of her nostalgia, the country they had imagined between them. That something she thought she had lost, or somehow never attained, in her life in England—would she have found it?

  No. Because she would have had to define it first; she did not know what she was looking for. It was not geographical, it was personal. Perhaps it was something all exiles looked for: a key, a missing self, a cultural identity.

  She thought it was a sad irony that these last months had served to sharpen her understanding more effectively than an entire comfortable adult life in Britain. And then with a rush of something almost like joy, she realized that she had found that key to completion after all—at last, yes, she realized what it was, not that it had been there all along: It had crept into her life unobtrusively, discreetly. Together with Zinaida Mikhailovna.

  June 21, 1888

  Laughter, not horsepower, propelled us the entire way, said Anton Pavlovich. Roman the coachman was so dour and cross that he made us laugh, and off we’d go, all the faster for his irritation. Laughter was our fuel!

  We stopped off to look at a peasant wedding, and they offered us vodka so foul, it made your hair and beard stand on end and induced the most extraordinary belching—Georges and I had a contest while the ladies went off to comment on the wedding clothes. We arrived at the Smagins’ estate late at night, to an immediate chorus of dogs barking and geese honking, and when they came out to greet us, Sergey and Aleksandr Smagin were half asleep, Sergey tripped and fell over, and Aleksandr bashed his head, then Vata scraped her neck—but fortunately, Dr. Chekhov was on duty. Although I was not needed, with so much restorative laughter: For five days, our convulsions did not stop. We even roused their sad-eyed sister from her melancholy beauty to grace us with a touching smile. They live on a tumbledown estate full of charm, with a sort of poetic ruin about it, overgrown with plants and wildflowers . . . Do you know, Zinaida Mikhailovna, after this visit, I am determined to buy my own farmstead in Ukraine. I want it more than anything, I want to live the way you do here, I want to practice medicine, and to hell with Moscow. What do you think, Zinaida Mikhailovna—I should be able to make a living between a farm and a medical practice, wouldn’t you say? My soul thrives just on being here—what need would I even have to write, why invent something? My inventions are for Moscow winters, for Moscow frustrations—you’ve seen my characters, their mal de vivre . . . Listen, one morning I heard a small commotion outside my window, and there, just by the sill, was a nest full of chicks: nightingales, performing for me. The miracle of it!

  His hand was on my forearm as if to share the smile I could not see, the gleam in his eye; then he continued, And everywhere this endless sky, and the smell of freshly mown hay—like here but stronger, it made you dizzy, by the lungful, and peasants by the roadside when the day was over, playing their violins and waving to us as we passed. Glorious, Zinaida Mikhailovna, just glorious. I wish you could have come along, too. You, and Masha, and Pleshcheyev, and Ivanenko, and Elena Mikhailovna, and Rosa and Pulka and the pigs in their Sunday best—

  I felt for his hand. I was laughing, too, but I told him to stop, to spare me, please; his mirth was infectious, and I felt dangerously close to an immense, irrepressible sadness and loss, and I did not want to reach that place, not with him there.

  He did stop; he squeezed my hand, let it go, and said, I’m being thoughtless, Zinaida Mikhailovna. It’s unfair of me to go on like this, I’m gloating, reveling in the sound of my own voice. Forgive me.

  They had been gone barely a week, but I had missed them terribly.

  I like to think I missed them as a group, particularly my own Georges and Natasha—the house was so quiet without his piano, her gaiety—but as the days seemed to grow longer, I knew it was above all Anton Pavlovich whom I missed. Just the knowledge of his proximity, that he might stop by to sit on the veranda for tea and a talk.

  Now I am heartened by his decision to buy a house in the region. As if something were about to be fulfilled after all, not just for him but for me, for my declining days; as if, with each visit from his farmstead, he would bring the sky and the fresh scent of hay and those waving peasants . . . since I cannot go to them.

  St. Pavel’s Day, June 1888

  So, just now, began Anton Pavlovich, there is a great deal of confusion by the riverbank—Vanya’s hat has just blown away, my father is running after it, nearly trips—there, he’s caught the hat, but he’s br
ight red in the face and wheezing like an aging opera singer bowing to applause; your brother Pavel Mikhailovich is holding his wife by the arm, she’s walking slowly with her hands on her belly and shaking her head; there are waves on the river, Zinaida Mikhailovna, we won’t be able to go to the island, it’s too rough, and there are dark clouds and in the distance a curtain of rain . . . Now my papasha is waving his arms in the direction of the guesthouse, and my mamasha and your mamochka are nodding like hens and looking around for their chicks, to herd us all to shelter.

  There’s a peasant in his rowboat, I can see him now on the far side of the island, he’s rowing like mad to get to the other shore. The boat rises, he looks around, he finds himself sliding down a wave in a splash of water—he looks surprised and worried, he’s rowing, he hasn’t got far to go, he’s shouting to someone on shore but they can’t hear him in this wind, now a wave has washed right into his boat, the poor fellow is drenched.

  Natalya Mikhailovna is waving at us; the others have taken the baskets and are heading back up the hill. Come, Zinaida Mikhailovna, we’d better go.

  And the man in the rowboat? I asked.

  We’ll look again from the top of the riverbank—for the moment he’s still struggling.

  He gave me his arm and led me up the path. From time to time he stopped, turned around, and gave a worried sigh: Not there yet, Zinaida Mikhailovna, the wind wants to push him this way, he’s having a devil of a time, after all, and the current is pushing him downstream.

  I could feel the wind tearing at my hair, at my skirt, catching in my legs, obliging me to free my arm from Anton Pavlovich’s to adjust my skirt so I could walk. Then I waved my hand and his was there again, supporting me.

  He paused as we reached the crest of the hill, and he turned to look for the peasant in the rowboat. I don’t see him, he said. Perhaps he’s gone back to the island to wait. Or they’ve pulled the boat ashore, but you can’t see a thing. I don’t know, Zinaida Mikhailovna. We’ll ask when next we go fishing.

  Last night, I said, I could already feel the storm coming. I could feel the air changing. Natasha said we’d be all right, that she could see the stars, but I told her there was rain on the way.

  We reached the house just as the first heavy drops began to fall.

  I lie in my bed at night, the window open but securely fastened so it won’t bang, and there are sounds of wind in the room and in the garden—things rustling and flying about—leaves, branches; and then in the distance, this roar as of the sea.

  Anton Pavlovich has told me he’ll be leaving next week to join his publisher friend Suvorin in the Crimea, in Feodosia. How I envy him! I’ve been only once to the seaside, long ago, as a child. We stood behind a parapet, clinging to our hats in the wind, and far below, the waves were crashing against the rocks as if to break them into a thousand pieces; I thought surely they must, and we would go plummeting into the water. I was exhilarated and frightened at the same time, and I asked Elena—who seemed calmer and more knowledgeable about such things, even though she’s the younger one—whether the parapet we were standing on wouldn’t be wrecked to pieces and us along with it, and she held my hand and told me not to worry, that the cliff face and the rocks below us were very strong, and it would take the waves centuries to erode them, so we wouldn’t be there anymore.

  We returned to the parapet a few days later and the water was quite still and gentle, hardly moving, lapping indolently against the rocks. At other times we saw it in the distance as we rode along the shore—vaster than any field of wheat, undulating blue in the sunlight, a few ships here and there like toys.

  My picture of the sea is a partial one, transformed by memory and imagination, and the paintings of Aivazovsky, no doubt, among others; now I hear the Psyol in its uncharacteristic fury and wish I could know more of what the sea truly is, yet I know that this is as close as it will come to me, a complete illusion, a freshwater river in a storm. I am landlocked, lifelocked; I will never know what it is to sail.

  Why didn’t we sail that time we went to the sea? I must ask Mama. Perhaps she suffers from seasickness, perhaps it was too rough or there were no trips available. I don’t even know where we were—Yalta or Sevastopol, I suppose, I was too young to notice or care at the time.

  I do remember the ice cream.

  When next I saw Anton Pavlovich, I asked if he had news of the unlucky fellow in his rowboat. He told me he’d heard the poor man had to spend the night on the island, cold and wet, until the wind and waves subsided and he was able to row back to the other side. I would have done the same, said Anton Pavlovich. I can imagine worse fates than a night with owls and frogs; I might even have seen the water bittern.

  There was a long silence; I don’t know what came over me, because I asked—thinking perhaps of the man’s family, desperate with worry—Are you afraid of death, Anton Pavlovich?

  He gave a loud, hesitant sigh, not of annoyance but as if wondering how best to formulate his answer. Finally, he said, We see death all the time, as doctors, you and I. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing: We know what to expect, all the clever, malicious ways death uses to lower our vigilance and call us away from life; we know—or try to know—when to continue to fight on behalf of a patient, and when there is nothing more to be done, and I’ve seen grief that’s far worse than death. But as to fear, that’s all for other people. My own death? I can’t really imagine it; I suppose I’m still too young. My parents are alive and healthy, so I can imagine living to transform this little beard into a long bushy thing like my father’s, full of wisdom and thundering ideology. There’s a kind of immortality, seen from the age I am now.

  I took a deep breath and added, And if you were diagnosed—as I have been—with an untimely illness?

  (I must have been mad, asking him things like this—but I have noticed that people are only too pleased to tolerate my madness, and so I say the most untoward things—and I know he enjoys engaging in honest self-examination. Soul dissection, as Mama and I call it.)

  And he replied, Then I don’t know. I suppose I would fight mentally, imagine all sorts of possible misdiagnoses, or expect a sudden remission . . . which, to answer your first question, is a symptom of fear. Yes. He paused, then said, Zinaida Mikhailovna, I do apologize for this conversation—

  No, Anton Pavlovich, I started it. Please don’t apologize. It helps me in a way, makes me feel almost normal . . . if I know there are others who share my fear. It helps to talk, now and again, about—

  And are you afraid?

  (If I’d had my sight at that moment, I am sure I would have found him looking right into my eyes, grave, intent. I could almost see him from the image I have constructed in my imagination.)

  At times, yes. Fear of pain, of not knowing what to expect. But the worst is my fear for others’ sake—for Mama, for my brothers and sisters—for their pain. I am sorry to cause them this pain.

  You haven’t caused it! They know that.

  As do I, but I feel it nevertheless. It can’t be helped. So when I am weak and afraid, I tell myself that at least when I die, their suffering on my behalf will end.

  No, it won’t, because they will always miss you. He paused, placed his hand on my arm briefly, then continued, We cannot control these things, Zinaida Mikhailovna—what a stupid, obvious thing to say, but it’s true! It’s an unfortunate, inevitable part of life, the price we must pay to be here in the first place. That is why we must live now, as if . . . We must live well. Every moment.

  He paused again, perhaps considering what that might mean for me, because then he added with a hushed excitement in his voice, This, Zinaida Mikhailovna, is living well. Sitting here on the veranda, talking, we are living deeply, with our awareness of each other, our questioning of life. Never let a moment escape that hasn’t been turned over in your hands, inspected for honesty and fullness and awareness . . . as I believe you do already. Uncomplainingly.

  I did not know what to say. I could have thanked him
for his words of wisdom, but I knew it was not something belonging to him that he had given me. It was simply a shared way of apprehending life. I also knew that I did not need to point this out to him. It is why we sit together—on the veranda, in the garden, above the river—and talk.

  ANA WAS HAVING DIFFICULTY concentrating on her work. Until now she’d had a quiet, idyllic picture of Ukraine—fields of wheat, slow-moving rivers, and above all, those long conversations by the samovar—but contemporary events were supplanting the sepia scenes, filling the screen and all her attention with people who were real and alive and in danger. And what made the events on the news all the more urgent and charged for her was the connection between the two Ukraines: She could not have felt this draw, this irrepressible need to follow every moment, if the Maidan were located in, say, Belarus or Turkey or Bulgaria. She knew them now, those protesters, as if they were all the legitimate descendants of Pavel Mikhailovich Lintvaryov or his brother Georges; she searched the faces of the young women for the features of a Zina, a Natasha, a Lenochka. She wanted to believe in a continuity of emotion as authentic as a genetic heritage, because she was beginning to care for those nineteenth-century Ukrainians who filled her imagination.

  The Maidan had become a battlefield. There had been dozens of victims, and even from the artificial front-row seat that technology and modern media offered onto the scene, Ana could sense the feverish waiting, the fear, the imminence of change. She watched as young men in flimsy helmets carried the wounded and the dead; she heard the steady crack of bullets fired by government snipers. It could all so easily spiral out of control, now that blood had been shed. Ana was just old enough to remember the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: her parents glued to the old black-and-white television, their concern, their veiled explanations, not to alarm their little girl. Don’t worry, it’s far, far away. The Russians won’t come here. Tanks can’t cross oceans. But perhaps now the Russians would send other tanks, would come to the president’s help.