by Steven Conte
‘The Enns,’ she said.
‘You remember it?’
‘I told you, I’ve read the book four times,’ she said. ‘Go on.’
‘Then you’ll know what I mean,’ he said, aware she might find his observations banal. ‘The bottleneck on the bridge, the suspense – will they get across or won’t they? The various ways the Russians repress their fright – with humour, annoyance, bravado. And then they get away with it. No casualties. That’s the surprise. But as a reader you’ve been warned. There’s going to be blood.’
‘Something rather hinted at by the title, wouldn’t you say?’
‘But even when blood is spilled, Tolstoy startles you. The first battle . . . ?’
‘Schöngraben.’
‘Yes, Schöngraben,’ he said, reassured she knew what he was talking about but also keen to prove that his interest wasn’t boyish or, worse, militaristic. ‘The Russian rearguard is saved by a junior officer, an artillery captain who’s homosexual.’
Trubetzkaya laughed. ‘Now that I don’t remember.’
‘I’m inferring,’ he admitted. ‘Tolstoy depicts him as gentle and fey. You get the impression he’s a military ignoramus who chooses targets on instinct, as an artist dabs paint onto canvas. And yet with only four cannon he holds the Russian centre together and stops the French deploying their reserves. I’ve never read a war scene like it.’
‘I’ll have to reread it,’ she said.
‘To tell me I’m wrong?’
‘Not necessarily. Your interpretation might have offended Tolstoy, but what of it? He was only the author. Good novels always outflank their authors, and War and Peace is better than good. Had poor Lev tried to resist, it would have put him to flight.’
What a pleasure it was to talk literature with her. A similar conversation might be had with Molineux, but only in an ironical mode. With Katerina Dmitrievna sincerity appeared to be an option, and suddenly it struck him she might be in need of a friend as much as he was.
‘Tell me, what made you notice that particular detail? The artillery captain. Are you homosexual?’
‘No,’ he said, taken aback but determined not to show it. ‘It just struck me as a sign of Tolstoy’s . . . capaciousness. The range of his curiosity, his empathy. Mind you, he’s clearly writing for Russians. He uses phrases like “our army”, “our flank”, “our cavalry”. That startled me a little, I must say.’
‘To be excluded.’
‘Exactly. And of course I’m not reading him in Russian.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘You’re not missing much. As a stylist he’s no match for, say, Turgenev. Or Flaubert.’
He laughed. ‘Now I’m scandalised.’
‘I’m not saying he’s not a great writer. The greatest, even. Just that he’s not especially concerned with mellifluence. Flaubert would be in agony if he had to use the same word twice on one page, whereas if a word suits Tolstoy he’ll flog it to death.’
‘I think you’re trying to shock me, Katerina Dmitrievna.’
‘Trust me, Captain, however much my words might shock you, you shock me more by being here.’
He let this comment pass, and luckily so did she. ‘The drawing room scenes,’ she said, ‘what about them? All those women. Are you in love with Natasha?’
‘When I read the book at fifteen I was. Besotted.’
‘But now?’
‘When the novel begins, Natasha is thirteen – I’d forgotten that – so it makes sense I loved her when I was much the same age. This time I’m not so sure.’
‘By Volume Two she’s a young woman.’
‘I’m no longer a young man.’
She laughed. ‘That’s true.’
‘And she doesn’t mature much, does she?’ Bauer said. ‘Yes, there’s heartbreak in store – I’m up to Book Two and she’s confronting it already – but she’s girlish to the end, or almost to the end. That’s what makes the epilogue so shocking – I still remember that: how Natasha turns into a portly matron.’
‘Girlish girls are by nature conventional, don’t you find? Personally, I don’t care for Natasha. If I were to meet her I doubt we’d be friends – though of course by putting it that way I’m praising Tolstoy, since even when I’m cross with his female characters they engross me. Take Anna Karenina.’
‘You’re cross with Anna?’ Bauer asked, pleased the conversation was expanding.
‘Enraged. She’s so implacably bent on self-destruction – as if she weren’t a woman but a force of nature, a daemon of desire. She’s tragic, in the Greek sense, and tragedy of that kind has no place in the novel.’
‘Oh, why not?’
‘Because the novel is about little people, not gods and heroes.’
Bauer pondered this for a while then said, ‘A woman bent on self-destruction – sounds like you when you first met Metz.’
‘Oh, Metz is more a figure from farce, don’t you think? He’d fit into a novel just fine.’
Somehow he’d brought them back to the present. To return to literature he said, ‘So Tolstoy can’t write women?’
‘Oh, he can write them all right – just when I’m most annoyed with him, he’ll astound me by turning the soul of a woman inside out.’
‘For instance?’
‘Countess Rostova,’ she said, without hesitation, ‘receiving a letter from her son Nikolai, who’s off soldiering, and marvelling at the man he’s become.’ She was gazing into space, her expression abstracted, and in a rush Bauer understood why.
‘You’re a mother,’ he said.
Katerina looked down at him. ‘Am I so transparent?’
‘A lucky guess,’ he said. ‘You have a son?’
‘Now a man, off killing or trying to kill as many of your countrymen as possible.’
‘You must have been young when you had him.’
‘Are you trying to flatter me, Captain?’
‘Just stating the truth.’
‘Because, if so, you’re wasting your time.’
‘What’s your son’s name?’ he asked, pressing on. She hesitated, and he said, ‘I can hardly arrange to have him hurt.’
‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ she said. ‘We called him Marlen.’
‘Is that a Russian name?’ he asked, though what interested him more was the other half of that ‘we’. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that she might have a husband? A senior Red Army officer, for example. Or maybe a civilian doing vital work for the Soviet war effort. A scientist. A politician. An engineer.
‘Yes and no,’ she said. ‘It’s a portmanteau name, a splicing of “Marx” and “Lenin”.’
‘How ingenious.’
‘Please, you needn’t pretend. Marlen was born in 1921, when his father and I were young and very zealous revolutionaries. It’s a ridiculous name, but quite a few boys his age had it foisted on them, so he’s not alone.’
‘He’s twenty?’
‘Nineteen. He turns twenty next month.’ She shelved the last of the books in her arms, descended the ladder and opened a new crate.
‘You must be worried about him.’
‘Of course.’
Bauer hesitated. ‘And his father?’
‘Dead. Four years ago.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he lied, and immediately felt ashamed of himself.
‘We were divorced. But thank you anyway. His name was Viktor. In many ways a very fine man. And a funny one. I miss him. His replacement makes me laugh far less often.’
‘You remarried?’
‘I haven’t gone that far.’
‘This replacement, where is he?’
‘In this room, I suppose. If anywhere.’
Bauer glanced around, idiotically, though he knew they were alone. He turned back to her in confusion.
‘Lev Nikolayevich,’ she explained, gesturing at the shelves, ‘is the only man in my life these days.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘A dead man is easier to get on
with than a live one, I find. With Tolstoy I get genius, compassion and searing love without the unpleasantness of an actual marriage. He was an awful husband to Sophia Andreyevna: evidently raped her when it suited him, especially later in life, after he’d sworn himself to celibacy. Thirteen children she bore him – all of them, at his insistence, on the chaise longue his mother had used to give birth to him.’
‘It sounds as if you don’t like him at all.’
‘Oh, I don’t. But I also adore him. It’s like any good marriage.’
‘You have a bleak view of marriage, Katerina Dmitrievna.’
‘Are you married?’ she asked.
‘I was. My wife died. Three years ago.’
‘That recently, eh. You’re still grieving, I take it?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘And how angry does she make you?’
‘Angry? Like I said, she’s dead.’
‘You don’t believe the living can resent the dead?’
‘Well, yes. Just not in this case.’
‘If you say so,’ she said. ‘And when she was alive? How angry did she make you then?’
‘She was an invalid,’ he said. ‘Disseminated sclerosis.’
‘When you married her?’
‘No, but shortly afterwards.’
‘Well, that must have been aggravating, surely?’
‘I wouldn’t say aggravating. In the beginning we were newly in love and didn’t really argue; then she fell sick and, well, she was so brave about it, so stoical, I could only admire her.’
‘Poor you. Did you have any children together?’
‘We didn’t, no. Clara’s illness . . .’
‘Or with anyone else?’
‘No.’
‘But you wanted to be a father?’
‘When she fell ill I was still a student and hadn’t given it much thought. Probably I assumed we’d have children one day. But that didn’t happen.’
‘Yet you still haven’t let yourself hate her.’
‘For falling ill? I have to say, Katerina Dmitrievna, I’m beginning to see why your own marriage failed.’
‘I don’t mean she was objectively to blame,’ Katerina said. ‘I’m speaking here not of the head but the gut. Viscerally you must have hated her at times but been unable to express it – even to yourself, apparently.’
He considered this, unsure if it was true but certain there was nobody else to whom he had spoken so candidly about his marriage. ‘Well, you have me there,’ he said. ‘I can’t deny having feelings you claim I’ve repressed.’
‘There’s no need to be ashamed,’ Katerina said. ‘No marriage would be complete without some murderous rage. Of course, one tries not to act on it . . .’
‘Is that what happened to your ex-husband?’ he said, attempting a joke. ‘You killed him?’
‘Not me, no,’ she said, and made to come down the ladder.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘let me pass them up to you.’
She accepted the books and, as if the topic flowed naturally from the last, said, ‘What I find so compelling about Lev Nikolayevich are the contradictions. A love–hate attitude to women, fictional and real. The obsession with celibacy while fathering all those children, the legitimate ones – how many he had with maids or peasants is anyone’s guess. Also his attraction to what he saw as the simplicity of the peasants – no small part of his attraction to peasant women, by the way – which in later years he tried to emulate; for example, by making his own shoes, badly, and by wearing peasant smocks. This from a nobleman who could trace his ancestry even further back than the Tsar could, to Ryurik the Viking himself.’
‘For a communist you sound impressed,’ Bauer said.
‘I’m just noting, not admiring.’ ‘
‘Not your blue blood coming out?’
‘None of us chooses our family, Captain. It’s where we end up that counts.’
‘And where have you ended up, Comrade Countess? If I’m not mistaken this is the only surviving manorial estate in the entire Soviet Union.’
‘What do you know about it?’ she said, smiling.
‘You’re right. I’m just a peasant.’
She came down the ladder and advanced on him. ‘Show me your palms.’ Obediently, he turned up his hands and without warning she seized the left one and brushed her thumbs across it. ‘Soft – as I thought,’ she said, and went over to one of the open crates.
‘That’s all you have to say?’ he asked. ‘What about my future?’
‘I only tell the past. Which in your case is clearly bourgeois.’
‘It’s been a while since I’ve worked the land,’ he said, the tracks of her thumbs still pulsating on his palm. ‘But since we’re speaking about class, how is it you communists so admire an aristocratic writer like Tolstoy?’
‘Easy,’ Katerina said. ‘His championing of the peasants. His feud with the Orthodox Church.’
‘But his writing – no proletarian could have done those drawing room scenes.’
‘Your point being what? That Lenin should have stayed on his train at the Finland Station so that aristocrats could go on writing novels? There are modern writers of Russian, you know. And poets. Also a Union of Soviet Writers which provides its members with the time and space to write.’ She carried another armful of books to the shelves. ‘I myself was once a member.’
‘As a writer?’ he asked.
‘What else? A chimney sweep?’
‘A writer of what?’ he asked.
‘Novels.’
‘Which were published?’
‘Of course. Only two of them, mind.’
‘Well, that’s . . . I’m lost for words.’
‘You needn’t sound so amazed.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . Oh my God, and there was I the other day boasting about my literary aspirations. You must have thought me such an idiot.’
‘You needn’t worry – women are used to dealing with men with inordinately high opinions of themselves.’
‘Please stop,’ he said, making a shield of one arm. ‘Tell me about your books.’
‘There were only two, as I said, and they were a long time ago. I was young.’
‘You seem to have done a lot when you were young.’
‘Yes, but so did most of my generation. Anyone who survived those times has an epic or two in them.’
‘Your books are epics?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Then what are they?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, the first was about three women friends, all Party members, coming of age during the Revolution and the Civil War.’
‘The title?’
‘Three Women.’
‘Tri Zhenshchiny,’ he said. ‘Direct. Straightforward.’
‘That was the idea. I saw myself as writing for the workers. Ordinary men and women on the factory floor.’
‘And did the workers read it?’
‘Not at first, no. But then the book was praised in The Young Guard, the Party’s youth magazine, and immediately afterwards bitterly denounced in Izvestia. After that a lot of people read it, including some highly influential Party men who, as it turned out, weren’t really lovers of literature.’
‘Denounced for what?’
‘Sexual themes, mainly. Not sexual scenes, mind – apart from a little kissing. But the women characters talk about sex, and that was enough. None of my critics seemed to notice that they also talk about romance, revolution, family. It’s one of the book’s main failings, actually: too much talk.’
‘Why? In life people talk about ideas. Young people especially.’
‘That’s true, I suppose. Certainly it was true of us. In a novel, though, conversations about ideas invariably sound forced, no matter how true to life they might be.’
‘So now I’m intrigued: what kind of scandalous conversations were your characters having?’
‘Oh, it was formulaic stu
ff really. One of the women was a sentimental romantic who was constantly being exploited by men. The second had a baby daughter and a straying husband and was questioning how best to go on working for the Revolution. The third was a tireless Party activist, and while the other two characters came in for criticism, it was Zhenya, the Party worker, who got me into the biggest trouble, since in order to dedicate herself more fully to the cause she rejects romance and only has sexual encounters as the need arises, “like drinking a glass of water”, as she says at one point. You can’t imagine what a storm that phrase caused. In the papers all kinds of critics and Party men lined up to condemn my “glass of water” theory of sex, without stopping to consider whether or not I shared my character’s views.’
‘You were the young mother, I take it.’
‘Yes, but it would be truer to say I was all three women. And none of them.’
‘And you really had no polemical intent?’
‘I had observations. For instance, that bourgeois romance was corrupt, but that new ways of loving had yet to be found. That the Revolution had complicated but not yet transformed the lives of young women. I had observations, I had questions, and I honestly believed that the Party would come up with the answers.’
‘But it didn’t?’
‘It did not. The Revolution had changed how we worked, how we talked, how we dressed – how we undressed, come to that – but it didn’t change men’s assumption that their work was more important than ours, and that whatever else a woman might do, her first responsibility was looking after children and keeping house. Zhenya, my activist character, threatened that view. Behaving sexually like a man – in the critics’ opinion, that is – was only part it.’
‘What I’d like to know,’ he said, ‘is how this incendiary work got past the censors.’
She smiled at him. ‘Quite easily. There were none. Not in those early years. This was revolution, Captain. This was tumult and freedom. A contest of ideas. We were upending the world – the entire world, we believed – and were out of our minds with excitement.’ She shook her head a little and made a rueful face, though her eyes, Bauer noticed, were gleaming.
‘I’d like to read your book. Your books.’
‘You can’t, I’m afraid. For one thing, I don’t have any copies.’