The Summer Guest

by Alison Anderson

  Now all those words beneath me, in his handwriting; and here am I—blind, dying Zinaida, who cannot read them. At times it feels a cruel joke. Not on the part of Anton Pavlovich, no, but of life itself.

  Although I believe he cannot be unaware of the irony of it.

  If I could see, I would be sorely tempted to read the manuscript.

  If I were to break his trust, Natasha and I could read it late at night.

  But I cannot see, and his trust means everything to me, and I shall not betray it.

  ANA LOOKED UP FROM her keyboard and blinked. Here was the confirmation she had been hoping for—the very thing Katya Kendall had hinted at so evasively, the beginning of the long and fascinating story she had refused to tell. What had she said? We are working on it, something like that. Which could mean anything: looking for it, following a lead, or perhaps already trying to get permissions for an English-language version.

  Ana sent Yves an email: I am on the lookout for a mongoose. He immediately wrote back and said, Don’t wear yourself out trying to charm the local zookeepers. A good andouillette at the Boeuf Rouge will be ample compensation for the terms of our bet. Look forward to seeing you.

  Ana went through Chekhov’s letters for the years 1888 and 1889 and found frequent, steady mention of a novel in progress, particularly in the letters sent from Luka—although there was also obvious confusion, even self-contradiction, as to when he actually started and how much was mere intention, deliberate obfuscation, or wishful thinking.

  January 12, 1888: In the summer I’ll get back to my interrupted novel.

  February 9, 1888: If only you knew what sort of subject for a novel is sitting in my head just now!

  October 9, 1888: I want to write a novel, I have a marvelous subject.

  Early May 1889: I just have to get three thousand rubles off the theater management and finish my novel.

  May 4, 1889: I’m writing a novel that I like better and that is closer to my heart than The Wood Demon.

  May 14, 1889: I’ll go to Piter in November to sell my novel.

  May 31, 1889: I’m writing a novel [ . . . ] that I’ll finish in 2 to 3 years.

  June 26, 1889: I’ve done some work on the novel, but it’s more ink-stained fingers than actual writing.

  What happened? Other than events in his life that might have prevented him from continuing? Did something happen to the manuscript at Luka? Discovery, theft, fire? How much had he written? Would it be publishable today, or did it remain a rough, inconclusive draft? Above all, where was it? Since Zinaida’s journal had been found, could the novel not be somewhere close by?

  Why was Katya Kendall being so secretive! She must have the answers to at least some of these questions, behind her we are working on it. If Ana had not drunk so much wine and been so subjugated by poetry that day, she might have dared to press for more information. Who, for example, was the Olga Ivanova who had typed up the diary? Such a common name! To try to find her would be next to impossible.

  Ana skimmed Rayfield’s authoritative biography; she skimmed later letters. After that fateful summer of 1889 at Luka, Chekhov threw himself into preparation for his trip across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. Ana was beginning to sense—knowing full well she would need to research it exhaustively to have the facts, and even then it would remain conjecture—that Chekhov found he was ill suited to be a writer of novels; he realized his strength lay in short, immediate tableaux: stories and plays. Perhaps he did go back to the Luka novel—or another?—from time to time but did not have the patience or stamina to complete it; perhaps he did finish it but decided not to publish it or was discouraged by Suvorin or another editor; or perhaps he felt no need to expand on his characters’ lives, preferred to see them in representative incidents. He painted microcosms, life on the wing.

  But this was not to belittle the potential worth of a novel, even unfinished, if it existed.

  She knew she must waste no time. She had almost reached the end of the diary. She must write again to Katya Kendall—find out what she meant when she said we are hoping—hoping—to publish the novel Anton Pavlovich was writing at Luka. Hoping, a vagueness that confirmed nothing, implied everything; they could have found it and were negotiating rights or other legalities with the Russians, or they didn’t have it yet, or they were still searching for the physical manuscript on the basis of the most tenuous of clues.

  And did she dare even think it, let alone write it, for fear of jinxing her own shifting hopes, now humble, now grandiose: If Chekhov’s novel were in the Kendalls’ hands, would they ask her to translate it?

  Ana compiled an informal list of Chekhov’s translators. She needed to visualize her name on that list, along with so many other unknown translators, most of them men and most of them invisible, with the exception of Michael Redgrave, John Gielgud, and Tom Stoppard. There were literally dozens. But there was one whose name came up again and again: Constance Garnett.

  Ana trawled the Internet to supplement what she already knew about Garnett, which wasn’t much, other than that she was English and had been one of the first translators of the great Russians in Queen Victoria’s time. Ana found a photograph of a prim, bespectacled young woman with big ears, wearing a fussy hat. Ana read that she’d married in that same fateful year of 1889; her husband was an editor for an eminent British publisher; much later, her son would become a member of the Bloomsbury Group and marry Virginia Woolf’s niece. In 1893 Constance Garnett met Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. She began to translate Chekhov only after his death in 1904, and apparently, he was the author she preferred. By the late 1920s, she was half blind; in 1934 Three Plays by Turgenev was her last translation; three years later her husband died and she lived in reclusion and obscurity, tending her garden somewhere in Kent, until her own death nine years later.

  In her long career, Garnett translated more than seventy works, and no fewer than two hundred of Chekhov’s stories. She was a pioneer, venturing into a difficult, unknown, and vastly glorious terrain.

  Ana imagined the conversation she might have with her. Mrs. Garnett, she would say respectfully, this novel is something I’ve been praying for, yet now that I have the proof of its existence, I am losing my nerve. Perhaps I should just finish Zinaida Mikhailovna’s diary and let you, please, take over your usual task of translating Chekhov.

  But you mustn’t be afraid, my dear. After all, it’s only words. Look down, read what he’s written, look up again, blink, then write it all down in English.

  It’s not that easy. I want it to be perfect.

  There’s no such thing as perfect. You know that.

  The whole world will be waiting. It’s their expectation, their perception, that demands perfection.

  Let them wait. Your duty is to the writer.

  (Peering at Ana over her wire glasses and pursing her lips.)

  But it’s Chekhov.

  He’s not the hardest, my dear, don’t worry. Subtle, yes, you must be careful not to miss anything, but he’s not tricksy or affected or even complicated. A joy to translate, really.

  But it’s a whole novel!

  You will find it gets easier as it stretches out, you’ll become comfortable with his voice, the characters, the words will flow from your pen, my dear. For those reasons a novel is often easier than a short story, let alone a poem! I should know, after War and Peace.

  I do want his novel to be found, but sometimes the hope that I might translate it . . . it’s daunting. Overwhelming. What if the critics say the translation is not good, or that I’m not an academic, so what business have I to do it, or I haven’t lived in Russia, or any of these excuses they give when they slam a translation: stilted, clunky, awkward. Unfaithful. Or even just ordinary readers on the Internet who say, I didn’t like it, it must be because it was a translation. It’s one thing for a contemporary potboiler, but Chekhov?

  But my dear, it is an honor to translate Chekhov, so if the publisher chooses you, it means they must trust you, and you must accept.<
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  Just the thought of it—I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night with a knot in my stomach, from dreaming about the manuscript—I can actually see his fine, neat script. Not that they would give the actual manuscript to me, of course not, but there’s something symbolic about its priceless physical worth in itself, all dust and ink and fraying paper . . . Imagine, it’s from the stationer’s in Sumy, the paper, the ink . . . What is wrong with me? People translate Chekhov all the time, it seems as though whenever one of his plays is produced, a new translation is commissioned. But you were there first, Mrs. Garnett. And this novel, too, is waiting to be translated for the first time. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people will be waiting to read it for the first time. Please come back and do it for me.

  My dear, don’t worry, you’ll be fine, you’ll be invisible. You always are. But that’s how you’ll know you’ve done a good job.

  KATYA CLOSED HER EYES and tightened her arms around the heavy handbag on her lap. She concentrated on the sounds, all those familiar sounds from decades of living in London and riding the Underground: conversation, laughter, newspapers rustling, the rattle and whoosh of wheels, the voice of the woman announcing the stations, prim and emphatic: Sloane Square, South Kensington, Gloucester Road, the clunk of doors opening and closing. With her eyes closed, her attention focused, it all seemed so different, farther away and yet louder at the same time, as if she were not sitting there on the plush seat but somewhere on her own, listening to a soundtrack through headphones, like so many of her fellow passengers.

  Earl’s Court. A press of new passengers, and she sensed two people standing by her knees, deep in conversation. A man and a woman. They were talking about a seminar they had attended, content strategies, trends, digital sharing, and it was only when the woman said, Francis landed a major deal for a celebrity cookbook that she remembered it was mid-April and they must have come from the Book Fair. Katya and Peter had stopped going; they couldn’t afford it anymore. They had gone for the last time three years ago, and only because the market focus that year was Russia and they were hopeful. They spent a lot of money on a nice stand in a good location, as if betting their all. They smiled; they handed out catalogs, gave away free books; they had earnest discussions with publishers and agents from Moscow and Saint Petersburg and Kiev and even one from Tbilisi. They made a few small deals, better than nothing, but hardly covered their costs. There was one young woman, Zhanna something-or-other, from a small literary press in Moscow. After a long discussion at the stand, they had invited her out to dinner. In Zhanna’s enthusiasm and love not just of literature but also of the physical book—she would hold up a volume and caress the binding, the paper, the dust jacket, inspect the font and the endpapers—Katya had found something of her younger self from the good years. She had been like Zhanna, traveling all over Europe, not just to Russia and Ukraine but also to France and Italy and Germany: There had been translations, there had been what Peter liked to call the flow, when a single computer file radiated out into the world, sometimes through those translations, and of course through the physical book: the thrill of walking into Daunt Books or Hatchards or Borders, or Fnac, or Feltrinelli, or any of hundreds of smaller bookshops all over Europe, and finding one of their books, sometimes prominently displayed, and knowing they had made this possible. They had never had best sellers—they weren’t that sort of press (although they hoped for one now, thought Katya with a melancholy smile)—but the guidebooks had kept them going, steady, reliable sales, rising over the years as more people traveled to the former Soviet Union. There had been the political books, too. Gian Paolo in Rome, always asking her, What have you got for me? Any good dirt on the Cremlino?

  Good dirt. If they still had the wherewithal, they could have turned up plenty of dirt. It all started to go downhill with the war in Georgia and then the financial crisis that same year; the Georgia guidebooks sat ominously in a pile in their boxes, unordered or returned. Were it not for their losses now, they would have traveled to Kiev, to Simferopol and Sevastopol, to Moscow; they would have met with authors and journalists, rushed books on the Ukrainian and Crimean crises; and there were plenty of émigrés right here in London with stories to tell. Dirt to dish. But Katya did not have the strength anymore. She couldn’t do it on her own, and these days Peter was all secrecy and, she suspected, Scotch.

  They hadn’t seen it coming. The crisis or the whole digital thing. They weren’t financial analysts or geeks. They were artisans, in their way, thought Katya; they stopped short only at printing and binding the books themselves. They belonged to the generation of proofreaders and manual typesetters. Dying, dead professions.

  She opened her eyes and looked at the two Book Fair people. Conservatively dressed, much younger than their confident, almost brash voices had implied. The woman was tall, blond, freckled, looked as if she would be the tennis-playing type, with a rough-edged Eastern European name: Sharapova, Azarenka, Wozniacki. Katya dressed her in tennis whites and smiled to herself. She liked watching tennis; it calmed her. The man had the faintest outline of a beard, perhaps the shadow of what was tolerated by a corporate culture. Or perhaps it was in itself a fashion. Katya felt a sudden longing for Peter—his near-white hair, his wrinkles, the tiny ruptured veins on his cheeks—a longing so strong and so physical that she had to look away. These young people seemed to radiate good health and a slight arrogance that, to Katya, evoked power. For a second she felt depleted, replaced, but then she looked at them again and smiled, knowing that she had been there once, in that place of power. She, too, had put books in readers’ hands, had helped them find a restaurant in Yalta, or get a same-day ticket for the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky, or make the best borscht. She had even helped deliver a few sacks of dirt, Gian Paolo.

  Cremlino. It sounded like ice cream. Zuppa Inglese. Stracciatella. Cremlino. Katya loved Italy. It had been one of their best markets. Perhaps they could go. Forget their troubles for a few days.

  There was still Zinaida. It remained to be seen what she might do in translation with her summer companion. Whether they could give Peter a boost, at least.

  She imagined the money coming in, the thrill of being not only solvent but also able to turn things around. To defy the recession and geopolitics and the received opinions of the publishing world; to see Peter smiling again, taking her hand and waltzing her around the kitchen, the way he used to when the money came in. Ah, Zinaida, miracles do happen.

  Waltzing, whirling around the Piazza del Campo in Siena, laughing when they stumbled and caught each other. They had done that, yes, many years ago. Could do it again. Why not.

  Katya laughed out loud. The publishing people looked at her. Do you even know, she thought, you cocksure naive editor-publisher-content provider-literary-MBA types. Do you even know what it really takes to make a book.

  Late May 1889

  Masha is here at last. We have spent nearly the entire day together with Natasha; we went down to the river with parasols and bottles of water. They described it all to me—the small boats in the distance—Anton Pavlovich with Artyomenko, Ivan and Misha, and Georges and Ivanenko, who spent more time falling in the water to cool off than fishing. Natasha went swimming with them, too. She doesn’t care about propriety or the fact that her hair was soaking wet. I asked Masha if she would join her; I hope she wasn’t offended. In any event, she said kindly that she didn’t want to leave me on my own. After a long pause, she added, Antosha would never let me forget it if I were to swim in the river.

  I was surprised and was about to answer when she said, almost rebelliously, I’ll come back on my own someday, or with Natasha, when there’s no one about. It does look so refreshing.

  I came so often to the river as a child, swimming with Papa. His strong arms throwing me up in the air, letting me splash back down into the water. Or catching me as I came running from the riverbank. He teased me: Zina, our terror, you’re afraid of nothing.

  I collected baby frogs and put them in frag
ile boats made of paper or light wood. I watched them carefully. Only one got away, hopped out of the boat. I can still see that moment, the spring of the creature’s legs against the bright water before it vanished. I asked Papa where it went.

  Back to the other frogs. It didn’t like being away from its family.

  But I would have put it back after the boat ride—what if it doesn’t find its family?

  It will, he reassured me. Don’t worry.

  When Papa died, I remembered the frog and worried that it hadn’t found its way back after all.

  Anton Pavlovich came to me with a small bowl of wild strawberries. They’re everywhere, he said. I know, I replied, I used to pick them myself.

  We talked for a long time, pausing between our words to eat berries. He placed them in my palm; at one point I imagined him feeding them to me, and had to turn away, because I found myself blushing. As if he had truly placed a berry against my lips, the way a parent or an older sibling would with a child. As I closed my lips and teeth, there would be a moment of hesitation, whether I might bite him by mistake, but his thumb and forefinger would slip away in time. And I imagined that, together with the berry, I could taste the salt from his fingers.

  May 31

  More guests. An actor who has worked with Anton Pavlovich in one of his plays, Pavel Svobodin.

  Elena says he has all the signs of the consumptive but hides it with the most extraordinary extravagant behavior. Going fishing in his top hat and tails, for example. Passing himself off as nobility and intimidating all the servants, then bursting with laughter at their gullibility. It might seem cruel if it were not so deliciously defiant.

  The days pass, and I write of these insignificant things that are mere hearsay in my life. This is my lackluster defiance, alas. I cannot strut about in a top hat. So I struggle with drying ink and a trembling hand.