The Summer Guest

by Alison Anderson

  Chekhov sent his letter before he knew whether the baby was a boy or a girl.

  Ana skimmed subsequent letters but found nothing. She switched off the computer and went back up to her room, stopping at the bar to buy a few miniatures of vodka. It had begun to rain. She opened the window and breathed in the fresh ozone. She didn’t know what to think; the Internet had brought no answer to her query. It was an old-fashioned query, for rural registry offices, dusty ledgers, pen and ink. So much could have disappeared during the Revolution, too—and who was this Comrade Sapukhin to impose his administrative wisdom upon generations of Chekhov scholars?

  She sat down with the vodka, then took out the book she had bought at the museum and began to leaf through it in the dim light.

  A. P. Chekhov in the Sumy Region, by one P. A. Sapukhin, the same. She looked more closely, although the quality of the print was so bad that she began to develop a headache and see spots.

  There it was, on page thirty-two, as Larissa Lvovna had said: 1888, born on July 7 and baptized on July 11, VSEVOLOD. With the names of the parents clearly set out below, Pavel Lintvaryov son of Mikhail and Antonida daughter of Fyodor.

  Ana did not sleep much that night for brooding. Putting together the possible pieces: Sergey Ivanovich had shown Katya around the museum; she could have gotten her misinformation from him (and had apparently neglected to buy a copy of Sapukhin). But even supposing (as Larissa might) that Katya Kendall had written the diary herself and incorporated Sergey Ivanovich’s mistake, why add Chekhov’s novel? A straight story about Zinaida Mikhailovna would be believable, even written in the first person, but why add Anton Pavlovich’s novel when there was no proof it had ever existed? Wouldn’t that raise suspicion?

  On the other hand, it would help the sales of Zinaida Mikhailovna’s diary if readers thought that every attic and archive from Saint Petersburg to Sevastopol was being turned upside down by literary sleuths—academics, students, publishers, editors, literary agents, theater directors, translators—eager to find Anton Chekhov’s lost novel.

  But as a prop within a forged diary . . . even supposing Katya had started out writing the journal not as a forgery but as pure fiction: Chekhov himself famously said you don’t plant a pistol in Act I if you don’t intend to use it.

  Ana awoke with a start to distant noises of traffic and two men arguing in the street, swearing drunkenly. They must have been at it all night, she thought; sunlight was streaming through the window. And then she realized with dread that she must look one more time on the Internet. Sapukhin—and Larissa Lvovna—must be disproved.

  Authentication, at least as far as Larissa Lvovna was concerned, would start with showing that Ksenia was Pavel and Antonida’s firstborn. Without knowing where Katya had obtained the diary, this would be difficult; the émigré attic? Perhaps the next place to look. Ana had an irrational vista of London rooftops stretching for miles, and herself flying over them like some literary Peter Pan.

  Why hadn’t she pressed Katya, nagged her at lunch, instead of allowing herself to be beguiled by wine and poetry?

  Then there were Georges Lintvaryov’s descendants: What had Sergey Ivanovich said? Spread all over the world, on three continents. Ana felt a wave of discouragement.

  After breakfast—a generous pile of delicious blini but meager consolation—she asked to use the computer again. She mumbled an excuse about having been interrupted by the storm; the receptionist merely smiled graciously. Slowly, Ana keyed in the siblings’ names in Cyrillic.

  This time she found a document, mostly in Ukrainian, twenty-nine pages long: Родословие Линтварёвых, or Родовід Линтварьових, a sort of genealogical history of the entire Lintvaryov family beginning in 1700, including quotations from Chekhov. She scrolled slowly through it, past names she could reasonably recognize as the family she knew, and finally, on page twenty-four, she came to the brother-and-sister pair she was looking for.

  Vsevolod Pavlovich, born July 9, 1888. Baptized July 11, 1888, at St. John the Baptist Church. Godparents: Dr. Basil P. Vorontsov from the city of Saint Petersburg and Elena Mikhailovna Lintvaryova.

  Ksenia Pavlovna, born January 24, 1894. Baptized April 20, 1894, at Sumy Church of the Resurrection. Godparents: Georgi Mikhailovich Lintvaryov and Elena Mikhailovna Lintvaryova.

  Three years after Zinaida Mikhailovna’s death.

  Ana stared at the screen, wondering if she had not confused the alphabet. She willed the words to move, to shift places.

  She tried in vain to find what authority lay behind this website; it was certainly not the Ukrainian government, only an amateur reproducing—albeit very professionally, as far she could tell—the genealogy of the Lintvaryov family.

  Was it incontestable proof? An old document retyped on the Internet? And what about Sapukhin—wasn’t he just some stuffy Soviet academic who couldn’t have been very interested in children?

  But deep down, Ana feared that Larissa Lvovna was right. And she feared for her modest pilgrimage.

  She suddenly saw them as vividly as if she were there physically. They were standing on the far shore of the Psyol, waving to her and laughing: Anton Pavlovich, and the three Lintvaryova sisters and their two brothers, and Grigory Petrovich, and Marmelad with his mustache, and Nikolay Pavlovich back from the dead, and Masha and Ivan and Misha and their mother, and finally, Tonya, holding a baby bundled in a pale gray blanket, and it was impossible to tell whether it was a boy or a girl, but they were all laughing and crying out, Girl! Boy! until a silence fell and Anton Pavlovich said in a deep, suspenseful voice, Crocodile!

  Ana printed the page, then sat for a long time with her head in her hands. The receptionist tapped gently on the door.

  Everything is okay?

  Fine, said Ana, I’m just tired, thank you.

  She took a taxi back to the museum. She hadn’t packed a picnic. All those picnics Zinaida Mikhailovna had described . . . inventions. Katya Kendall’s, Ana supposed.

  She recognized the affable young man who had driven her to Luka the previous day—how long ago it seemed. He had told her then that he had been to the museum as a schoolboy. Now he looked at Ana in the rearview mirror and winked. So, Anton Pavlovich?

  If she’d had more time, she would have told him the whole story. Taxi drivers were confessors by nature. He would have sympathized, found a way to cheer her up. It will all pass, he would have said. But it was only a short drive, so Ana mumbled something about the museum being interesting, and what a pity about the old estate falling to ruin.

  The estate belongs to the government. Hah, where is the money? Our ex-president used it for his vintage car collection. Seventy cars he had! One old one worth two million dollars alone! There’s your money to restore Luka! Between him and all the other thieves, what do you expect?

  Perhaps things will begin to change now, said Ana.

  Maybe, said the driver skeptically. Europe will help us now, right? EU, NATO?

  Flustered, Ana said, Maybe there’s a wealthy Ukrainian emigrant somewhere who’d be glad to rebuild the estate—to flatter his ego, but also for Ukrainian history or culture, no? They could build a writers’ colony, for example, a klimaticheskaya stantsia, as Chekhov called it?

  The driver exploded with laughter. Write Frau Merkel a letter! he said with a crooked smile. She’ll send us some German writers!

  Larissa Lvovna was waiting. I think you were right, said Ana with a sad smile. She showed Larissa the page from the genealogy that she had printed out.

  The director nodded, then said, Sergey Ivanovich means well, he’s a good person, but he’s not a family man, and details like that mean nothing to him, you see. Come, I’ll show you, she said, her expression soft, compassionate.

  They went back into the room that had been Chekhov’s. On the wall, near the bed, the small photograph of the Lintvaryov siblings.

  You see? she said. Vsevolod was older by six years. But he was very ill, he had a wasting disease; he didn’
t live past twenty. That is what inspired Ksenia Pavlovna to become a doctor.

  Ana reflected that there would have been a sad connection there, too, for Katya to have made, between the aunt and the nephew.

  Judging from the photograph, the siblings could have been the same age.

  Their clear, open faces.

  Larissa and Ana walked down to the river. It was a fine day, they could hear splashing sounds, children’s cries. Ana felt hungover, though she knew it was from the loss, and a restless night, and had very little to do with a few shots of vodka.

  The Psyol, too, had changed. It was not as she had imagined. She recalled the photographs she had seen and Chekhov’s own descriptions: The islands seemed to have vanished (how does an island vanish? Soviet engineering?), and Larissa Lvovna told her that the flow had narrowed. As with the pond, the vegetation was thick, encroaching.

  Some boys were swinging out over the river on a long rope hanging from a tall tree. Larissa Lvovna told her it was called a tarzanka. Ana thought of Zinaida Mikhailovna as a child with her father, then remembered the memory was imaginary. Was it right to feel cheated?

  They walked up along a path to a hill overlooking the river. Larissa turned to Ana and said, This is where Maria Pavlovna and Natalya Mikhailovna used to come and paint. Perhaps you saw the photographs and the reproductions in the museum?

  Two young women in white dresses on the bank above the river, paint boxes open on their laps, while a gentleman with his hands behind his back looks approvingly over their shoulders.

  When they were back in the museum office, Larissa Lvovna turned to Ana and said, What will you do? About the diary?

  What can I do? It’s not my manuscript.

  Is it worth publishing as a kind of fiction? Are there other errors, or just the one about Ksenia Pavlovna?

  I really don’t know, said Ana with a despairing shrug. I would have to compare every detail with every biography, every letter . . .

  And it’s not your manuscript, repeated Larissa Lvovna. It’s not worth it.

  No . . . it’s really out of my hands now. It belongs to Catherine—Ekaterina—Kendall. It’s her book. She wrote a novel about Grand Duchess Anastasia, she added.

  Larissa Lvovna could not suppress a laugh, and she patted Ana’s hand and offered her some tea.

  Ana looked around the office again. It had been Maria Pavlovna’s room. On the wall was a reproduction of the famous oil portrait of Anton Pavlovich—the one he hated, she had read, in his pince-nez, looking like a professor who has eaten horseradish. Stacks of books. Embroidered hand towels. A glass case full of cups and plates; a dusty samovar. Several reproductions of paintings by Levitan, who once proposed to Masha, not altogether in jest; Anton Pavlovich, predictably, had advised her to turn him down.

  Now Larissa Lvovna turned to Ana. Here’s the thing, she said. Do you think this . . . diary is faithful to the spirit of Luka? To Anton Pavlovich?

  Ana hesitated, then burst out, If I had been told from the start that this diary was a fiction, I probably still would have agreed to translate it—for other reasons, more mercenary ones—but I never would have come all this way, looking for Anton Pavlovich’s lost novel.

  How far she had fallen. Placing her hopes in a real, as yet undiscovered novel by Chekhov, which she would have been the first to translate. Now not only did Chekhov’s novel not exist, neither did Zinaida’s diary.

  And it was the loss of Zinaida’s diary that she felt much more keenly. She was both ashamed and bereft. She realized, not without a touch of surprise, that the loss of Zinaida seemed crueler than anything.

  How could the diary not be real? Zinaida had been so alive to her during those early spring days. Could it really only have been Katya Kendall, a frustrated Russian émigré in West London, who had said so much to her, sharing a life that was infinitely rich despite its loss?

  She turned to Larissa Lvovna and said, We don’t even know what Zinaida looked like! Are you sure you don’t have any pictures of her anywhere, even in a crowd?

  Larissa shook her head slowly.

  Now, in a spurt of anger, Ana thought of how she had been left with a sad, sorry fiction, a scam, a cynical hoax concocted by a lapsed poet who wrote pseudo-diaries of Russian demoiselles in her spare time and recited Pasternak in gastropubs to gullible Russophiles like Ana.

  In the distant echo I try to catch

  What the years ahead may bring.

  The famous Zhivago poem, “Hamlet”; Katya speaking, as if in a trance, to a clatter of dishes, a hiss of espresso machine. The young man, rapt, at the next table.

  Unless . . . unless Katya’s motivation lay elsewhere, thought Ana, not just in Zinaida Mikhailovna’s connection with Chekhov. Something deeper and mysterious, known only to herself.

  Larissa Lvovna was staring at her, waiting for her to go on. So Ana said, The publisher has gone bankrupt, you know. Perhaps this was their last-ditch effort to save their business. Chekhov wrote to feed his family, did he not?

  Larissa Lvovna spluttered, You cannot compare! He was a genius. This is fraud!

  Ana sighed and nodded. Yes, it is fraud. Because the Kendalls wanted the world at large to believe not only in the existence of Zinaida’s diary but also in Chekhov’s lost novel.

  The world already knows the lost novel exists, Larissa Lvovna said sarcastically, but perhaps these people planned to write it and publish it, too!

  Larissa Lvovna, said Ana, speaking slowly, with a few changes here and there, this journal could work as a novel. It is based on Zinaida Mikhailovna’s life, and Anton Pavlovich’s two summers here, and the characters are very true to life . . . and . . .

  She was not making sense. She was on the verge of tears and couldn’t go on. There were no more arguments.

  Zinaida Mikhailovna had died. She had vanished. The reality was in the absence of her photograph. Even her grave was gone. There was no trace of her, save in the dried ink of Anton Pavlovich’s letters and the obituary he wrote for her.

  But then Larissa Lvovna was squeezing her arm. On second thought, she began, it is a terrible but somehow wonderful story—that woman in England, going to all that trouble, writing such a book to try to save her business—I think it is something Anton Pavlovich could appreciate, if it has been done in the right spirit. The lengths to which people are prepared to go in life when they believe in something . . .

  Her voice trailed off, as if she were still unsure of the validity of her thought.

  How they would laugh, Anton Pavlovich and Zinaida Mikhailovna, thought Ana, if they knew her story! Not in an unkind way, no, but the irony of it! She had placed her hopes in Chekhov’s novel for the wrong reasons. To be the translator of Chekhov’s novel; to be not so much in his shadow as in his light. Like the very people who would approach him on the street because of his sudden fame after he won the Pushkin Prize:

  What is terrible is that they tend to like something in us that we often neither love nor respect in ourselves.

  As Ana sat beside Larissa Lvovna in that warm, comfortably cluttered room—the room where Maria Pavlovna had slept in the weeks before embarking on her own career as the writer’s sister—one small consoling thought came to her.

  She saw Katya as she’d been that day in the pub. Quiet, evasive not only about Chekhov’s novel but about the diary itself. As if even she had been feeling her own mixture of shame and loss. Perhaps it was only to do with her husband, with the press, as Larissa had suggested. But it seemed to Ana that there was more than that. Mustn’t she have cared about Zinaida Mikhailovna, or at least come to care about her? Enough to imagine a whole book about her? To weave that tapestry—every thread so carefully looped into another until the details emerged—Vata rowing Monsieur Pleshcheyev around the pond; Grigory Petrovich asleep under the cherry tree? To conjure Zinaida Mikhailovna’s darkness, her mortality, her painfully open heart? It did not feel like a book conceived simply to make money. Why, then, choose the doomed Zinaida Mikhailovna as her le
ns? Why Zinaida and not her more entertaining and expansive sister Natasha or the brooding, poetic Georges? Why, indeed, if not to examine a state of being? Why? Because Katya Kendall had something more to say.

  Just because the voice was not an authentic one from the past, did the words have any less meaning?

  Was that not the beauty of fiction, that it aimed closer at the bitter heart of truth than any biography could, that it could search out the spirit of those who may or may not have lived, and tell their story not as it had unfolded, as a series of objective facts recorded by an indifferent world, but as they had lived it and, above all, felt it? Was there a finer way to honor friendship, and love, and being in the world?

  Ana turned to Larissa Lvovna and said clumsily, earnestly, This Katya—she understood the importance of Chekhov’s time here; she imagined how precious the friendship of someone like Anton Pavlovich would have been to this woman who was losing everything. She put in all this work—and it’s not perfunctory, she brings Zinaida to life, or so it seems to me; she had me fooled, after all! She must have felt a sort of tenderness, affection, for her, for whatever reason, for whatever generous reason—yes—otherwise, why work so hard, why spend so much time, on writing her life?

  Larissa nodded, not entirely convinced.

  You haven’t read the whole book, Ana conceded. Of course, I read it believing a real person wrote it—I mean, a real person did write it, but not the one who lived it. But it’s as if she had. That’s the power of the imagination, isn’t it?

  Larissa sat quietly, staring out the window at the garden but seeing something else. Then she turned to face Ana with an earnest brightness in her eyes. Yes, she said, I believe you are right. It’s why we read. It’s why we need our writers.

  ANA RETURNED ALONE TO the abandoned estate. Larissa Lvovna, or maybe the caretaker, had forgotten to lock the gate. She stood in the courtyard and stared at the ruins splashed with late-day sunlight. A single muddy boot she had not noticed the previous day waited, forgotten, by the steps leading to the cellar. A woman on a bicycle rode slowly along a path behind the house, proof that it was pointless to lock the gate. Ana ventured in the direction of the pond and saw the well-worn bicycle trail. It had rained all night, and the path to the pond was muddy and very slippery. She turned back; she would not go looking at the pond’s opaque surface for bursts of cloudlight.