by Jay Parini
We stood about, stock-still. I was reminded of the time he almost died at Gaspra, nine years ago. Leo Nikolayevich had gone there to recuperate in the warm Crimean sun. He got worse at one point, and when it looked as though he might die, Sergey asked if he wanted to see the local priest, who had been begging for a final word with ‘the Count.’ Leo Nikolayevich replied, ‘Can’t they understand that even on one’s deathbed, two plus two is still four!’
Now Sasha hovered beside him, adjusting his pillow, smoothing the starched linen sheets, giving the blanket a tuck or tug.
‘My darling,’ he said. ‘You waste too much effort on an old man whose life is gone. There are many people in the world in need of your attention.’
‘Shush, Papa,’ she said.
Sofya Andreyevna, Andrey, and Ilya stood outside the cottage, a circle of hate, demanding entrance, but Dushan Makovitsky held them off like a brave lieutenant. He said that Leo Nikolayevich is much better today, that his temperature had dropped. Somehow, he managed to persuade them to return to their train.
Leo Nikolayevich grew delirious toward evening, and the Muscovite doctors insisted on giving him camphor injections, which made his body writhe, briefly, and relax. They put an oxygen balloon – a hideous modern contraption, a torture chamber – over his face. I had to turn my head.
We had trouble, too, with the Church. Leo Nikolayevich symbolized a challenge to their bankrupt dogmas. The Church has mesmerized the people, urging them to follow the tsar’s armies into an endless succession of futile battles. It was obviously in their interest to report that Leo Tolstoy, on his deathbed, had recanted and died in the arms of Mother Church.
A telegram came from the Metropolitan of St Petersburg, begging Leo Nikolayevich to repent. Soon a tedious monk called Father Varsonofy arrived on our doorstep. A comose little creature, his black beard flecked through with white, he reeked of garlic and wine. At first, he pretended to feelings of great sympathy for Tolstoyan ideas, then he tried to wheedle us into letting him see Leo Nikolayevich. ‘I only wish to see him!’ he cried. We told him this was impossible, so he approached Sofya Andreyevna, as if that would improve his chances of an interview! Then Ozolin told me that the bishop of Tula himself had been dispatched to Astapovo by the archbishop of Moscow. Such nonsense.
Sasha handed me a note the monk had written to her. It is a remarkable piece of deception, penned in an ornate hand:
You should be aware that the count told his sister, your aunt, that he wished to speak with a representative of the Church for the sake of his soul’s everlasting peace. He deeply regretted that this wish could not be granted while he was at Shamardino. I beg you, dear lady, with all respect, to inform him of my presence in Astapovo. I will be happy to see him, if for only a few minutes. Should he not want me to hear his confession, I shall return immediately to Optina and let God’s will be done.
I dropped his note into the fire, where it spread its wings slowly before it burst into orange flames.
I recalled a passage from Leo Nikolayevich’s diary of 1901, written in Gaspra during his illness: ‘When I seem on the edge of death, I want to be asked if I still see life as a continuous progression toward God, an increase of love. If I have no strength to speak, and the answer is yes, I shall close my eyes; if the answer, alas, is no, I shall look up.’ It occurred to me that I should ask him that question now, but it did not seem worth the risk.
My dear Leo Nikolayevich seemed close to whatever lay behind the papery veil that separates us from Eternity.
On Saturday evening, his lips turned stony. Blue spots emerged on his cheeks, on his ears and hands. He began to choke, calling in a raspy voice to his doctors, ‘I can’t breathe!’
They gave him further injections of camphor oil, though he continued to object.
‘Foolishness … foolishness!’ he shouted in a hoarse whisper. ‘Stop the injections…. Let me be, for God’s sake!’
Nevertheless, the injections helped. Again, he seemed much calmer almost immediately and sat up in bed. He called for Sergey.
‘My son,’ he said, as Sergey knelt beside him, his ear close to his father’s lips. ‘The truth … it matters so much to me … the way –’ His voice broke, exhausted by the effort, once again, to formulate the truth, to command the whip of language.
He fell asleep, looking quite blissful, at 10:30. I ushered everyone but Makovitsky out of the room.
Perhaps for the first time in his life, Dushan Makovitsky wept.
39
Sofya Andreyevna
After four days of silence, eating nothing, drinking only a little water, I wrote to him:
Don’t be afraid, my dear one, that I shall come in search of you. I can hardly move, so weak have I become. I would not force you to return, not for anything. Do what you think is best. Your departure taught me a lesson, a dreadful one, and if I do not die as a result of it, and you come back to me, I shall do anything I can to make things easier for you. Yet I feel, in my bones, that we shall never meet again…. Lyovochka, find the love that’s in you, and know that a great deal of love has awakened in me.
I needed a way to end, a way that would signal my affection, which has never ceased, not for a second: ‘I embrace you, my darling, dear old friend, who once loved me so much. God keep you, and take care of yourself.’
I slept badly that night, in spite of weariness beyond description, dreaming of Lyovochka and our life together. The next morning, before dawn, I went, again, to my writing desk, holding an old portrait of myself and Lyovochka to the candle, watching the flame bring life and color into the ghostly cheeks of ancient silhouettes.
I tried to make a few sentences that would touch him, yet the accusations began to tumble out, and I realized that this would only alienate him further. It was just no use.
A servant knocked on the door while I was writing. She had a telegram from a man called Orlov, a reporter from The Russian Word. ‘Leo Nikolayevich ill at Astapovo. Temperature 104.’
He was dying!
Duty presented itself. I realized I must go to him. He would want to see me, wouldn’t he? Hadn’t we lived together all these years? Hadn’t we brought thirteen children into the world? I did not doubt that, in the end, he would want me near him. He would want to hear and receive my confession, as I would hear and receive his. Whenever he was ill, he was like a child, thirsting for my attention. And I granted it, as I would grant it now, even if he insisted on mocking me, on making public ridicule of our marriage, which had lasted nearly half a century.
I traveled with Tanya, Ilya, Mikhail, and Andrey, taking a nurse, the psychiatric doctor who has been looking after me in the past weeks, and a few servants. One never knows what will happen on such journeys, and it is better to be prepared. We made our way to the station at Tula in several carriages. We had hurried to catch the morning train, but we missed it, obliging me to hire a special train, which cost five hundred rubles!
All day and well into the evening we rode southeast, arriving late that night. As we neared the station where my husband lay dying, I could hardly catch my breath. I felt like an important actress in Moscow who was about to make her farewell appearance to a packed house. I formed a dozen perfect sentences in my head for Lyovochka. His old, soft hands would touch my hair once again, as always. The curtain of death would fall across his eyes. And I would die, too. Affection would never waken in my breast again.
But the horrid facts hit me when I got to Astapovo. Lyovochka was surrounded by his followers, his fanatics, and they would not let me through to him. Sergey had arrived from Moscow on an earlier train and came to us like an ambassador from an enemy country, addressing the family circle like a pompous little prince. He is my own son, but I hated him. It would ‘kill’ his father if he saw me, Sergey said. Was I hearing him correctly?
I was too weak, however, to do otherwise than obey these men, who would force their will upon me now as they always had. Does a woman ever have a chance? Did I ever have a chance with Lyovochka, who used me like
an old cow?
Day after day he lay dying, while I lay mostly awake. Now and then the miracle of exhaustion released me, briefly, from my pain. But I could always hear my heartbeat ticking noisily in my temples, in my wrists. My mind was tortured by visions, images of hell.
All the while the cinematographers recorded my grief. The whole world saw but never understood my sorrows.
‘Turn to the right, Countess,’ cried the wretched cameraman Meyer. ‘Show us your eyes, Countess.’ I can still hear them, can see them cranking their machines, my Furies.
Once, as I passed the stationmaster’s cottage, I found no guard at the door. Boldly, I walked in, whereupon I saw him – my dying husband – writhing in the narrow bed. I saw his white beard and hair, his bleached eyebrows, white against the white sheets. A blur of whiteness, the image of death. Death and blight!
‘Lyovochka!’ I called, but somebody was pulling me backward as I spoke, like Eurydice, back into the hell of my loneliness.
A telegram arrived from the patriarch of St Petersburg, asking my husband to repent, but Chertkov refused even to show it to him. They kept from him, too, the Abbot Varsonofy, who had come from the monastery in Optina.
On the Lord’s Day, Sunday, Sergey woke me just after midnight. I had been dreaming of a day in June, decades ago, when Lyovochka and I went running in the woods. We sat in a bright clearing, surrounded by wildflowers, and ate venison and bread and drank wine. He told me that he would never leave me, that I was his life, that he could not live without me. He pushed me back in the buttercups and daisies; he lifted my skirt, tore at me with his big hands. And he pushed through me with his indomitable spirit. He raised the fiery sword of love, and he seized me. I gave myself wholly over to his rude and flashing soul.
And now this.
‘Mama, wake up!’ Sergey said. I could smell tobacco on his breath. ‘He will not last the night. You may see him now.’
Still in my nightdress, shaking, I followed my son through the double row of journalists.
‘Is he dying, Countess?’ a man shouted in French.
I brushed them all aside.
‘Let me see him!’ I screamed at Chertkov, who stood, a stony barrier, in my path. ‘You pig! Let me through!’
‘You must be patient, Sofya Andreyevna.’
What had I been doing? Had I not been waiting for days in a stuffy railway car while they conducted a party around the bed of my dying husband?
I stooped beneath Chertkov’s outstretched arm, and he did not try to stop me.
Lyovochka lay on the bed, empty of himself. His face was blue in the dim light, his nose sharply chiseled. I felt his forehead: it was damp and burning. He was moving his lips, but there was no sound. Not even a whisper.
‘Forgive me, my darling!’ I said, as I knelt beside him. I held his hand, so lifeless and strange.
He startled, slightly, and began to gasp. He could not breathe.
‘Please, my darling, forgive me! I have been foolish. I am not a wise woman – you know that…. I am a selfish woman, yes. I have never been able to show you the love I feel. You must believe me, Lyovochka! You must understand! Please! Please!’ I was speaking too loudly, but I was not shouting.
Sergeyenko dragged me backward from the room.
‘Control yourself, Countess.’ He looked at me coldly, having pushed me onto a chair in the adjoining room. A crowd circled above me, like vultures, waiting to tear at my flesh, to feast on my remains.
‘I want to speak to my husband,’ I said, sobs sputtering between each word.
They had given him morphine against his will, I soon discovered. And further injections of camphor oil, for his heart. It was all barbarous and cruel.
Later – hours later – Dr Usov persuaded them to let me sit by his bed, provided I did not speak loudly.
Near dawn, Dushan Makovitsky held a candle to my husband’s face. Lyovochka grimaced and turned. He began to twitch and groan.
‘Have a drink, Leo Nikolayevich. Wet your lips,’ said Dushan, holding a cup to his mouth. He drank a little, and fell back, sighing.
I cried, ‘Lyovochka!’ But he could not hear me.
His breathing grew slow, then fitful.
His consciousness widened, like circles on water, each ripple farther from the old center.
Abruptly, Dr Usov cried, ‘First cessation!’
I knew what was coming now, the moment that I had imagined and replayed for years. I pressed Lyovochka’s right hand tightly to my cheek. It was hot, coursing with blood. He was still alive, my Lyovochka. ‘I know you don’t believe it, Lyovochka, but I’m sorry. I have been callous and didn’t listen to you. Can you possibly, possibly …’ I could not control my sobbing now, and Sergey reached for me, tried to comfort me, but I swept with a hand at the boy’s face, and Sergeyenko grabbed me with his big hands and pulled me back.
I damned him, and I damned Chertkov, too. They had kept my husband from me, as they’d kept him from God’s vicar, the abbot, who’d pleaded with me, for the sake of my husband’s eternal soul, to let him talk to him, if only for a minute or two.
Dushan Makovitsky stepped forward now. ‘A quarter to six,’ he said.
What did he mean? I could not understand, even as he closed the eyelids of Leo Tolstoy, shuttered the eyes that would never again look to the light, crave the light, invent the light.
They had kept me from saying good-bye to my Lyovochka. They had done this to both of us. And now, it was over.
‘I am sorry, Sofya Andreyevna.’
The voice came, strange and soft. It was Chertkov, who stood over me, a hand on my shoulder.
As dawn fluttered at the curtains, teasing and mocking, I saw it was finished – the end of the world as I had known it. What happened from now on could never really matter. Never.
40
L. N.
– FROM THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYCH
Time did not exist for three days, while he fought hard to resist the black bag into which a hidden, invisible source was stuffing him. He fought like a condemned man fights his executioner, even though he knows that no escape is possible. He knew that each moment, in spite of his resistance, he drew closer and closer to what most horrified him. He was in agony because of that black bag, that black hole, but it was worse because he could not simply slip in. What held him up was the feeling that his life had been a good one. This self-justification buoyed him up, kept him from progressing, provoked his anguish more than anything else.
Suddenly a pressure struck him in the chest, on the side, then constricted his breathing. He slipped into the black hole, hit bottom, and found it shining. What had occurred was like the experience of being in a railway carriage when one thinks it’s moving forward but it’s really going backward, then one suddenly realizes the truth.
‘So, what I’ve experienced thus far was not the “real thing.” No matter. But perhaps I can make it the “real thing,” perhaps. But what is this thing I want?’ Ivan Ilych asked himself, then grew still.
This happened near the end of the third day, an hour before he died. At that moment, his son crept softly into the room and approached his bed. The dying man continued to cry and flail his arms. One hand touched the boy’s head. The boy grabbed it, kissed it, and began to weep. At this moment, Ivan Ilych slipped through and saw a light, and it came to him that his life had not been what it might have but that the situation was not beyond repair. ‘Yet what is the real thing?’ he asked himself and grew still, listening. Then he felt someone kissing his hand. Opening his eyes, he saw his son. He felt sorry for him. Then his wife entered the room and approached him. She looked at him softly with an open mouth, with tears on her nose and cheeks, with despair on her face. He felt terribly sorry for her.
‘Indeed, I’m making their lives miserable,’ he said to himself. ‘They pity me, but it will be better for them all when I die.’ He wished to say this but had not strength to speak. ‘But why speak? I have to do something,’ he thought. He glanced at his
wife and motioned to her to remove their son.
‘Take him away … I’m sorry … for him and you.’ He would have liked to have added, ‘Forgive me,’ but instead ‘Forget’ came out. He was too feeble to correct himself, however, and didn’t worry, since He would understand who had to know what he meant.
Suddenly it dawned on him that what had been weighing him down and would not disappear was vanishing, all at once – from two sides, ten sides, everywhere! He grieved for them and wanted to comfort them. To free them and himself from this anguish. ‘And the pain?’ he asked himself. ‘Where is it now? Where are you, Pain?’
He waited, anxious, for its return.
‘Ah, it’s still there. Well, so what? Let it be.’
‘And death? What is death?’
He tried to locate his accustomed fear of death and could not. Where was death? What death? He felt no fear because death did not exist.
Instead of death was light.
‘So, that’s it!’ he cried. ‘What joy!’
This all happened in an instant, but the significance was lasting. For those around him, his anguish stretched out for another two hours. A rattle invaded his chest; his wracked body trembled. Then the rattling and wheezing ceased.
‘It’s finished,’ someone said who stood beside him.
He heard this comment and repeated it in his soul.
‘Death is finished,’ he said to himself. ‘Death is no more.’
He sucked in quickly, broke off in midbreath, stretched out, and died.
41
Bulgakov
As he lay dying, I spent my days at Telyatinki. I wrote in my diaries – trying to remember everything I could about our last days together – and I worked on an essay about Tolstoy’s early years in the Caucasus. In 1854, in Sevastopol – having come from Odessa by ship in early November – he had spent some days helping in a military hospital. Several months before, on a long walk in Zasyeka Wood, he’d told me about his time there.