The Tolstoy Estate

by Steven Conte

  Once inside the gates Marlen asks her where she would like to go. The Volkonsky House, she says. ‘We’ll save the main house till last.’

  ‘You won’t be too tired to enjoy it?’

  ‘What are you? My parent? Have I become your child? I’m perfectly fine, my dear.’

  ‘Yes, now I’ve given you some water,’ he says, smiling down at her exactly like a father to a child.

  ‘Don’t be impertinent,’ she says. ‘I just needed a rest, that’s all.’

  They set off along the main drive, its avenue of beech a tunnel of shade.

  ‘How does it feel to be back home?’ Marlen asks.

  ‘A little strange,’ she says, ‘but, you know, I’ve never considered this as home. To me Yasnaya Polyana is, was and always will be Lev Nikolaevich’s.’

  ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s yours,’ Marlen says. ‘Your tenancy postdates his.’

  ‘How very biased of you. I’m touched. Though of course Yasnaya Polyana belongs to the Soviet people.’

  ‘Of course,’ he replies, echoing her mock-pious tone. Could it be that in his late middle age her son is finally loosening up a little?

  They stroll on to the driveway that leads to the Volkonsky House, and as if to confirm how little personal claim she has on the place, a group of the Young Pioneers troops past, chatting and laughing and, liberated from their bus, practically bouncing with adolescent vigour. In no time at all they are well ahead, their red neckerchiefs and white shirts or blouses seeming to flare in the sunlit gaps between the trees.

  At the front of the Volkonsky House she and Marlen join the end of a short queue. How much of her life has she spent in queues? Less than the amount spent sleeping and eating, or reading and writing, she presumes. Less than she has dedicated to teaching, too, though measured across her whole lifetime it might be a close-run thing.

  ‘Excuse me,’ says one of the Young Pioneers, a tallish girl about sixteen years old who has stepped out of the queue and is now standing before her, hands respectfully clasped. ‘Are you by any chance the writer Katerina Trubetzkaya?’

  ‘Well, yes, I am,’ Katerina says.

  ‘I knew it!’

  ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘Oh, I’m nobody,’ says the girl, ‘but I’ve read your book, and I just want to say —’

  ‘Come, come, you must have a name.’

  ‘That’s true,’ says the girl. ‘It’s Natalya. Natalya Kirillovna Rudova.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Natalya Kirillovna,’ Katerina says. She shakes Natalya’s hand, introduces Marlen then asks the girl where she is from. Saratov, Natalya replies; she and her fellow Pioneers are on an excursion.

  ‘All the way from Saratov?’

  ‘We left yesterday morning.’

  ‘Good grief. And this is your first visit to Yasnaya Polyana?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, enjoy yourself. It’s a special place.’

  ‘I’m very excited,’ the girl says, ‘I’ve read all his books. Well, not all, exactly. But the main ones: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Resurrection.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Katerina says, meaning it, always moved and somehow surprised to meet a young person who loves literature as she did at that age, though logically she knows that culture is precisely this: a baton passed from one generation to the next.

  ‘The fact is, though, your novel means more to me than any of his,’ Natalya Kirillovna says.

  ‘My goodness, what an exorbitant compliment,’ Katerina replies, resisting the mischievous urge to ask which of her novels she means. ‘Take care that Tolstoy doesn’t hear you,’ she adds, gazing about them.

  The girl smiles. ‘You think he might?’

  ‘Of course. You can’t feel his presence?’

  ‘Not yet. Maybe later at his grave.’

  ‘Maybe there, yes,’ Katerina says.

  ‘My mother is performing for you,’ Marlen says to the girl. ‘In reality she’s an arch rationalist – aren’t you, Mama?’

  ‘I don’t believe I’m an arch anything. Not any more. I just watch. I listen.’

  The girl brightens. ‘That’s what I love about A Life on Earth – one of many things, I mean – the lovely details, the textures, the scents. The impression of being there, of seeing through the heroine’s eyes, of being in her skin.’

  ‘That’s most kind of you,’ Katerina says, hoping by a hint of formality to cut this panegyric short.

  ‘What else do you like about it?’ Marlen asks.

  Katerina swats his arm. ‘Don’t be wicked. He’s trying to embarrass me,’ she explains.

  ‘But it’s not embarrassing,’ the girl says. ‘It really is a brilliant book. I love its integrity – the sense you get from that accumulation of detail that you are reading a true account of a woman’s life, and by extension a true account of her society, what it was like to be alive in a particular place, at a particular time.’

  ‘You make it sound as if I’m already dead,’ Katerina says, laughing to show she hasn’t taken offence. ‘But you know, I will be if we don’t get out of this sun.’

  The girl looks around. ‘Oh, sorry.’ The queue has dissipated; all her friends have gone ahead. ‘Shall we go inside?’

  ‘Let’s do that,’ Katerina replies.

  The grand entrance hall seems almost dark after the brightness outside, but rapidly her eyes adjust. The air is blessedly cooler. Natalya Kirillovna hesitates, apparently not ready yet to rejoin her friends. ‘Oh, I wish I had my copy of A Life on Earth with me now. I could ask you to sign it. How you’ve lived, Katerina Dmitrievna!’

  ‘Thank you, but you mustn’t go assuming that everything in A Life on Earth is true. Tatyana isn’t me. Details of her life that might seem autobiographical are made up. And vice-versa. Writers are slippery creatures. In fact, just about the slipperiest of them of all was Tolstoy,’ she says, hoping to redirect the conversation.

  The girl smiles. ‘I’d love to know which parts of A Life on Earth are true.’ Her eyes light up. ‘May I make a request?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Might I interview you? I have a sort of column, you see, in my school magazine. It’s not much, but . . .’

  ‘I’d be delighted.’

  ‘You would?’ exclaims the girl, rising on her toes and doing a little half-pirouette, before remembering herself and growing serious again. ‘Would now be a convenient time?’

  ‘Perhaps not now,’ Katerina replies, and the girl’s face immediately falls. ‘I’m a bit hot, you see. A little tired.’

  ‘You told me you were fine,’ Marlen says good-naturedly.

  Katerina stares sternly at him then turns to Natalya Kirillovna in mock exasperation. ‘You see what I have to put up with? The insolence of youth.’

  The girl peers doubtfully at Marlen, at his weathered face and grey, thinning hair.

  ‘Here, let me give you my address,’ Katerina says. ‘You can mail me your questions. That way I’ll be able to sound wiser than I really am.’ From her handbag she unearths a pencil and a scrap of paper, scribbles her address and hands it to the girl, who thanks her profusely. They shake hands and say goodbye. The girl thanks her again then hurries off to find her friends.

  ‘That was kind of you,’ Marlen says.

  ‘Not in the least. I’m just terrified of snubbing the next Tolstoy. Or worse, the country’s next great literary critic. It pays to remember that some of the young will be our betters, or at the very least our peers.’

  ‘Maybe. But it was also kind.’

  They take a turn about the Volkonsky House, never her favourite of the estate’s buildings, the scale of it more reminiscent of an institution than a home.

  ‘You know,’ says Marlen, ‘you’re too diffident about your work, about yourself. Here you are, author of one the most highly regarded novels of the decade, and yet you’re worried about being outstripped by a schoolgirl.’

  ‘Not worried, just rea
listic.’

  ‘That you’ll be surpassed by Natalya Kirillovna?’

  ‘If not by her then by someone else. A Life on Earth isn’t a particularly important book, you know.’ He makes an impatient gesture and she adds, ‘I’m not saying it’s bad, my dear, only that it isn’t important, because on a fundamental level it isn’t true.’

  ‘True to what? To your life? As you said to that girl, all writers are slippery.’

  ‘There’s a difference between a slippery writer and a slippery book. I’m not talking about literal truth here, the evocation of facts; I’m talking about a deeper veracity, a fidelity to what life is really like.’

  ‘But you heard what that critic of the future said: your book has integrity!’

  ‘What would she know?’ Katerina says. ‘She’s barely lived. The book leaves so much out, you’ve no idea. The pith of life.’

  ‘Like what?’ Marlen says.

  ‘Politics, for a start.’

  ‘But that’s not true. “A powerful condemnation of Stalinism” – that’s what Izvestia said.’

  ‘But not of politics as it is today.’

  ‘Because if you’d done that you wouldn’t have been published at all.’

  ‘Precisely. My pact with the Devil.’

  ‘The Devil here being the State?’ Marlen asks in a lower voice, affecting casualness but instead conveying unease.

  ‘If you like, though even in the West I daresay authors make similar bargains: worldly success in return for sanitising the truth.’

  ‘My God,’ Marlen says, throwing up his hands. ‘Who needs critics when the author herself does the hatchet job? You’ll end up convincing others, and what if you’re wrong? A male writer wouldn’t disparage his own work the way you do. This obsessive self-criticism – is it because you’re a woman? Have you thought about that?’

  She goes quiet, wondering if her son could be right about this. Certainly the truths she’s talking about, the ones left out of A Life on Earth, are for the most part a woman’s truths – abortions, her lusts, her low opinion of men as a class, her high regard for a foreign invader. ‘I don’t know,’ she admits at last. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’ By now they have returned to the entrance hall. ‘Where next?’ she asks. ‘Shall we go to the grave?’

  Marlen grins. ‘If we must.’

  They set out for the grave, toiling again through the heat. Now that she has invited him into her mind, Paul Bauer is busy making himself at home there. This is the same route, she realises, that the two of them followed all those years ago when she took him to Tolstoy’s grave, though the weather conditions, she recalls, could not have been more different: snow and ice on that day, the trees leafless and thrashing; today those same trees nodding heavily in green.

  Tolstoy’s burial glade, if not exactly thronged, is certainly busy with tourists. Predictably enough, one of them is Natalya Kirillovna, now reunited with some of her fellow Pioneers. Natalya smiles at her but doesn’t press for more contact, allowing Katerina to detach herself from her son and go over to the burial mound. As usual she is struck by the steepness of its sides, an unnaturalness at odds with the covering of grass – a note of discord that she supposes is entirely in keeping with the perverse, indispensable man who lies below.

  Of the Wehrmacht graves that thirty-four years ago laid siege to the mound there is not a single trace. Who was right, she wonders, her or Paul? Has Tolstoy triumphed or is his memory indelibly stained? Presumably for the likes of Natalya and her friends the incident of the graves, if they learn of it at all, will be no more than that: an incident, a footnote of minor interest and no lasting importance.

  She meets Marlen’s eye. ‘The main house?’

  ‘I’m at your command.’

  As they leave she nods in the direction of the great man’s grave – like some peasant departing a church, she thinks, a little cross with herself. Then they set off down the hill, and again she is reminded of her long-ago walk here with Paul Bauer, his nose blanched by the cold, his touching willingness to obey her commands. How much she misses him – no longer acutely but abidingly, his death a sadness that accompanies her everywhere these days, even in her moments of joy. Which are frequent enough, she supposes; she can’t complain. But Paul, Paul.

  Not that her grief is unalloyed. During their week together five years ago in Moscow, much of it spent under the gaze of their minders, she said yes – yes, she would marry him, whatever the bureaucratic obstacles might be. They would tear red tape into confetti, she told him, even as privately she worried she was making a mistake. And when two months later she learned of his death – by stroke, a week shy of his seventieth birthday – she was conscious of a small, shameful flicker of relief, if only at not having to force such a tender love through the grinder of marriage. Oh, but she grieved! Still does grieve, daily. She misses him. His visit to Moscow, though an open one, cost her her job, which in turn allowed her to write A Life on Earth. He had revived her writing, then, though not as he’d expected. Sad to say, even his dying helped.

  She and Marlen arrive at the bottom of the slope and take the path towards the main house, where she is looking forward to getting out of the sun. Old age, she has read somewhere, should be treated as a gift, an opportunity for reflection and repose, a view that in her opinion skates too glibly over the physical trials, and which in any case strikes her as logically flawed, since as she gets older she tends to like herself less, making self-reflection unconducive to repose.

  They reach the main house, go in by the front entrance and almost immediately encounter Irina Petrovna at the bottom of the stairs. A noisy exchange of greetings follows, in which Irina reproaches them for not having told her they were coming. Katerina and Marlen then congratulate her on her promotion, and although Irina hears them out with a dignity befitting her new station, Katerina can tell she is pleased. ‘Of course, without you proving that a woman could do the job, I would never have got it,’ she says.

  ‘Nonsense, I was just a stopgap. And that was years ago. You’re the real thing.’

  ‘Well, that remains to be seen.’

  ‘You certainly look the part,’ Marlen tells her, nodding admiringly at her outfit, a dark blue cotton jacket with broad lapels, plus, rather daringly, matching slacks and a pair of equally elegant sandals.

  ‘Please excuse my son,’ Katerina says to Irina, ‘he’s traditional, you see, and doesn’t comprehend that a woman might want to be praised for her abilities rather than her clothes.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Irina says. ‘At my age I’ll take any compliment I can get.’

  The fact is, thinks Katerina, Irina does look the part: a poised, self-confident middle-aged woman. As an adolescent, she recalls, Marlen was rather sweet on Irina, though unluckily for him she hardly noticed, being two years his senior.

  ‘Anyway, it’s lucky we’ve met,’ Katerina says, ‘or I would have had to come looking for you.’ From her handbag she removes a large book with a green cloth cover. ‘From the library.’

  ‘What is it?’ Irina asks.

  ‘Krieg und Frieden – War and Peace, the first German edition.’

  ‘You had that in there?’ Marlen asks. ‘I could have carried it for you.’

  ‘I suppose I felt it was my responsibility,’ she replies – a foundation of truth for the story she’s devised. ‘During the occupation I hid it – their lieutenant colonel wanted it destroyed. Then it got swept up with my own books and, what with one thing or another, I accidentally moved with it to Moscow. I only noticed it on my shelves the other day.’

  ‘Well, thank you,’ Irina says. ‘That’s quite a lengthy loan.’

  ‘I know. I’m embarrassed. And then there’s the matter of these,’ she says, then opens the book and shows Irina the annotations. ‘They’re Tolstoy’s.’

  ‘Intriguing,’ Irina says. ‘Anything interesting? My German isn’t what it ought to be.’

  ‘Nothing seismic,’ Katerina replies. ‘Just authorial gru
mbling. If you like I could write a summary for the catalogue.’

  ‘Do that,’ Irina says. ‘Will you need to keep the book?’

  ‘I’ve taken notes, so no.’

  ‘Shall we put it back on the shelves?’

  In the library Katerina locates the German collection and then identifies the book’s correct position: between Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and Tolstoy’s own Der Tod des Iwan Iljitsch. As she weighs the volume in her hands for a final time her sense of communion with Paul is so powerful that she has to shield her face from Marlen and Irina. Of course they both know about Paul, who in Moscow told much of his story to the press; but neither they nor anyone else (not even Simon Fleet) know the entire truth. Silence enshrines what was special between her and Paul Bauer, their sweet collusion, and Katerina likes it that way. As she slides the book home she feels a sense of spatial satisfaction, as if finishing a puzzle.

  Before she and Marlen return to the carpark, Irina insists on detouring to her office in the Volkonsky House, where a secretary brings them glasses and a jug of chilled, mint-infused water. For half an hour they talk about Irina’s plans for the estate, then about the success of A Life on Earth, until Katerina is forced to admit to feeling tired. Marlen offers to fetch the car, but she tells him no, a short walk will do her good. She rises from her seat, and from one of her knees comes a crack like a rifle shot. Marlen and Irina look at her in alarm and she laughs. ‘It’s nothing. Incipient rigor mortis, that’s all. Nature’s way of telling me to slow down.’

  The sun is lower and the air decisively cooler when she and Marlen leave the house and set out towards the gates, a change having arrived in the short time they were inside. The shady laneway makes her shiver. ‘This country!’ she exclaims. ‘You know, I think I’m actually cold.’

  ‘Do you have anything warm to put on?’ Marlen asks.

  ‘Only a scarf. I brought it for the sun.’

  ‘If I were you I’d put it on.’

  ‘Once we’ve walked a little I’ll be all right,’ she says. ‘The thing is to keep moving.’

  ‘Then you’d better go on ahead. My shoelace,’ he explains, and squats down to tie it up. ‘I’ll catch you up soon enough.’