She had dispatched her strongest argument, and felt that what might prove a fateful week was nearing its end, but instead, she had received, that Friday, a letter with an enclosure: Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, who for some reason (why? her heart sank, fearing some new mischief) had arrived at GHQ on Tuesday, and not only taken it upon himself to lecture the Emperor but had left with him a disgusting letter, and Nicky, who had suspiciously failed to mention the occasion at all on Wednesday, on Thursday enclosed the letter so that the Empress could read it for herself—and now it was burning her fingers.
Miserable old blabbermouth! Filthy, loathsome person! This stuff he was peddling—against his Emperor’s wife and in time of war—was obscene filth, treason! For the whole twenty years he had hated the Empress, spoken ill of her in his club, so that even complete outsiders were shocked by the things he said. He was the incarnation of all that was vile, he could not bear the fact that people were beginning to take notice of the Empress’s opinion. How easy it is to give advice when you are uninvolved and unburdened with responsibility!
She lit a cigarette, although smoking dilated her heart.
Was this what her dream about the severed arm had portended?
On Friday, after two fine days, the weather became gloomy and terribly oppressive.
What hurt her most was that Nikolai Mikhailovich undoubtedly had the backing of the Emperor’s mama and his sisters—they had given a ready ear to malicious gossip and no doubt approved of his action! It hurt her that in the course of their conversation Nicky had not once pulled the insulting old windbag up short (and maybe was even swayed by him to some extent?).
Why did you not tell him that if he said another word against me you would send him to Siberia, since what he is doing borders on treason? You are too kindhearted, my dear one. I am your wife, and they cannot be allowed to do it. How dare he try to turn you against your Sunny? Even a private individual would not tolerate for a single hour such attacks on his wife! It makes not a scrap of difference to me, such worldly things, such dirty little tricks have no effect on me, but my dear litle husband should have stood up for me. Many people may think that you don’t care.
Nasty people everywhere were bandying the name of the Empress about. She was receiving the most scurrilous anonymous letters. A poisoned fog of rumor rose from Petrograd and Moscow. By no means all the details of this vicious tittle-tattle reached the ears of the imperial couple, but what they did hear was inflammatory enough. The Empress was English by upbringing, but there were asses who called her “the German woman” (just as the unfortunate Marie Antoinette had been “the Austrian woman”). (As if a single Tsaritsa in the past two centuries had been Russian!) Now, at the height of the war, foreignness was more or less equated with treason! The man of God had come to symbolize all that was hated by Russian educated society, which itself did not understand a quarter of what it read. In the two corrupt capitals reckless talk about the imperial couple was rife. To begin with, they merely laughed at all this gossip. Who are these critics of ours? A handful of Petrograd aristocrats who spend their time playing bridge and don’t know the first thing about Russia. And anyway, in the middle of the greatest of wars, should we really be paying attention to contemptible scandalmongering (which was now spreading like wildfire even in the diplomatic corps!)? It only encouraged them to shut themselves up more closely in their immediate family circle and not to see or listen to anyone else.
But their privacy was breached by direct approaches from insolent persons, some of them wearing court uniform, who wrote ten-page memoranda brazenly telling the monarch what he must do. (This Frederiks of ours is a dotty old ditherer, long past his prime as Minister of the Court, incapable of punishing the Master of the Royal Hunt for slander, but Nicky keeps the old man because dismissal would upset him. Never mind, they’ll be made to pay for it when peace comes, and many of them will be struck off the register of courtiers.) Even the archpriest at GHQ had offered unsought advice.
The noxious mists of slander steamed around them. Everyone was free to lie, to indulge in innuendo, to sling mud, and nowhere in Russia did anyone rise up to defend the Empress.
She wore the Russian crown and whole regiments bore her name—but had she any means at all of defending herself against these slanders? The awesome power and the wrath of her imperial husband were her only protection.
But he had not come to her defense even when, at the former GHQ, Nikolasha had discussed with the Emperor’s officers, and with some of the Grand Dukes, the possibility of locking up the living and reigning and still not dethroned Empress as if she were an inanimate object or wild beast.
*Referring to Anna (Anya) Vyrubova (nee Taneyeva). [Trans.]
[73]
Pavel Ivanovich had a dream. He was lying with Lyoka on a wide bed, not to make love, but engaged in one of those exhausting conversations of which there had been so many in their last few years together. Then she started soliciting his caresses and although he sensed even in his sleep that it was unnatural and forbidden they began kissing each other’s cheeks. Suddenly he felt that his cheeks were very wet. What could the reason be? It was then that he suddenly saw Lyoka’s face clearly (until then he had not seen it at all). There were bloody marks in two or three places on her cheeks, not subcutaneous bruises but wet patches as though from deep cuts, and in the shape of two rows of teeth. Then he realized that the wetness on his own face was also where he had been bleeding freely. They had not been kissing but biting each other, unintentionally, and at first unaware of it. He got up and went to wash himself. When he got back he saw in the light from some invisible and inexplicable source that Lyoka was lying just where she had been, fully dressed. Her face was washed clean and showed no trace of those cuts but was contorted into the grimace of pain and self-pity which he had often seen before they parted. Some invisible mischief-maker had given her a piece of paper and something to rest it on, and Lyoka was reluctantly signing it with the same miserable expression, full of pity not for him but for herself. He knew that she was doing something shameful, that she would be horrified when she realized it. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “People will find out!” She laughed bitterly. “Ah, what does it matter?”
He awoke, sick at heart, as always after a vivid dream of her. There had been no pleasant ones for a long time now.
Pavel Ivanovich dreamt of no one else so frequently. It was extraordinary. So many years since they had lived together, or even seen each other, yet Leokadia intruded on his dreams as importunately, as vengefully as ever. It had not been like that when they were falling in love, nor when they were husband and wife. These relentless dreams must be of her doing. She must be able, when she was experiencing strong emotions, to project them. And Pavel Ivanovich was receptive and a frequent dreamer. So that although he had not seen Lyoka in years, and no longer exchanged letters with her, he sometimes knew almost exactly what she was feeling or doing. He had only to extract the underlying meaning of the dream, and by now he was used to that. Once she appeared to him in what had been an evening gown, now completely threadbare, bedraggled, and in holes. On another occasion he saw her with a twisted spine, and bent at the waist as though doubled up by illness or a stab wound. Another time they were riding in a hired phaeton, but facing backward, so that they could not see whether there was a coachman or a horse, and the phaeton was rolling backward. He had said, apparently sincerely, “I was hoping to see you at home,” meaning here, at Maly Vlasievsky. And she had replied quite mournfully, looking younger in her sadness, “Have we really still got a home?”
Today, as always after such dreams, he awoke with an aching heart. An ache that never went away.
He turned the dream over in his mind, and could not get to sleep again. It was already light. Perhaps he had slept long enough.
As he got older, Pavel Ivanovich had started piling the pillows high. If he didn’t, the blood went to his head during the night, and it ached the whole day afterward. He had long ceased to
jump out of bed, eager for action, as soon as he woke up. Nowadays he shifted slowly, very slowly, into his daytime mode, gradually pushing himself higher until he was half sitting.
And all the time he could see—ever since the bed had been moved to its present position, nine years ago now—the same familiar scene, the view he saw first every morning: of a small window in an old wooden house (single frame in summer, double frames, with cotton wool and tumblers filled with salt on the ledge between them, in winter). In the bottom right corner of the picture was the ornamental carving above the gable of an outbuilding, part of a roof, and most of a brick chimney (with smoke, sometimes transparent, sometimes dense, streaming from it, sometimes vertically, sometimes in ragged wisps chased sideways by the wind). Higher and to the left he could see a stout elm branch—in leaf, or bare, or snow-covered, still, or swaying gently with its twigs shining independently, under overcast skies or in slanting sunlight. Beyond it and from behind the neighboring building he saw the little church of St. Vlasi, the upper ridge of its brickwork, but not its dome. Beyond this there was a wooden wall and part of another roof.
This view had faced the bed for nine years, and had indeed not changed for as long as Varsonofiev could remember—and he had been born in this house, sixty-one years ago. Previously he had been vaguely aware of its existence, but now that it took him so long to get out of bed, the view, colored by his mood and by the weather, prepared him for the sometimes cruel day ahead.
Over the years rising had become a problem. This time it was still very early, and the gray November morning was just breaking through wet bare branches and over a wet sheet-iron roof. What he would have liked to do was to sleep a little more, his body felt so feeble and so listless. Ever since his former mother-in-law, Lyoka’s mother, had died, she too had sometimes appeared in Pavel Ivanovich’s dreams, just as vividly as Lyoka, and with all the energy she had displayed in her lifetime. Shortly after her death he had dreamt of her walking quickly along the Arbat, with her gray hair loose and untidy. Pavel Ivanovich could hardly keep up with her, passersby might just as well not have been there, they were like disembodied spirits, and there was no risk of bumping into them. His mother-in-law gesticulated as she walked along, urgently pointing to something, and muttering inarticulately about things in shopwindows, or even the cinema signs. Suddenly, the Arbat vanished, there was no more traffic, and she was sitting like a matryoshka doll, wearing a peasant head scarf and very red in the face, saying plaintively, “Pashenka! I have something to ask you—please take me in!” But even in his sleep Varsonofiev realized that she was not asking to be allowed into his house, because she was dead, and it was good that she was not inviting him to join her. He demurred. “How can I, Maria Nikolaevna, it’s impossible.” She looked downcast and said, “I get visitors here, you know”—meaning visitors from earth. Even in his sleep he felt puzzled. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked. She answered coldly, “Make what you like of it.”
Varsonofiev was used to treating such dreams not as kaleidoscopic jumbles of incoherent fancies but as genuine spiritual encounters with the living or the dead, but always in code: we sometimes find it difficult to decipher, sometimes we refused to waste time trying. No one from the other life can express his thoughts satisfactorily to the living, and our occasional communications with the dead are inevitably imprecise, a matter of guesswork and tentative interpretation. But character and mood are always expressed in dreams almost without concealment. Tearfulness and grief were evidently dominant in Maria Nikolaevna’s state beyond the grave, as they had been toward the end on earth, during her long illness. He had twice dreamt of her weeping with bitter resentment, and both times (on different nights) it had something to do with a fish—indeed, she was slumped across the table with her chest touching the plate of fried fish she was eating. She was obviously weeping not so much for herself as for Lyoka. On another occasion, Pavel Ivanovich seemed to see himself lying in bed, with Maria Nikolaevna, in a hospital smock, standing at his feet and twisting his toes painfully. As if revenging herself on him.
The wrong you have done to someone constantly changes its character as long as that person lives. Not just your actions, but fleeting thoughts of the past day, or something you have just learned, can change the complexion of your offense and your relationship with the injured person. But once that person is dead your offense is fixed forever. Sometimes it is black, and burns cruelly. Sometimes it is a gentle glow, a persistent signal, a greeting from one world to another.
Pavel Ivanovich’s life with Lyoka remained in suspense somewhere, now neither his nor hers, where beginnings and ends, causes and consequences were no longer distinguishable. Neither he nor she, whether separately or together, could have disentangled and analyzed it all, still less could any outsider, acting for them—and who would have the patience to hear the argument on both sides, to trace the true story and pass sentence? It had taken Pavel Ivanovich a long time to get over his surprise that he had found the willpower to struggle out of the grinder and crawl away to nurse his wounds.
He had seen it often before in their last excruciating years together and again that morning, her wry grimace of pity and grief as she said, “Ah, what does it matter?”—mingling condescending mockery of his inadequacy with hopeless sadness for herself.
Lyoka too had lived all those years, and the three hundred sixty-five days in each of them, as his wedded wife, undivorced but long since a stranger (she always became something of a stranger as soon as she escaped from his influence), and yet he could tell from his dreams that she thought of him almost every day, and perhaps that very day in Kazan she had dreamt a dream that mirrored his own.
For some reason—why?—they had brought into the world and reared and educated a daughter, who was now mired in such a marriage herself (but that was just as it should be) and such a stranger, so remote that it no longer mattered what she said her maiden name had been, Varsonofiev or some other, or who her family were, all that mattered was that she had gone away and severed all contact.
This time of gradual awakening, struggling to haul himself out of nocturnal nonexistence, and to face the dictates of daytime, was also a time for reviewing the memories which rose spontaneously and flitted through his mind.
The nagging power of memory can make the past seem more real than the present.
It had become so difficult to wake up and begin his day! He was after all not so very old, but his inability to jump up and spring into action like a young man slowed down his awakening. It was a mental rather than a physical disability, not so much physical as psychological impotence. His mind, more heavily weighed down into the nocturnal state than ever, was slower to emerge from it, cautiously and reluctantly returning to this world.
In those first minutes of reemergence the world seemed so harsh, so oppressive, that living in it, struggling around in it, was hardship enough. His obligations were so burdensome. And all that he had ever done was botched and flawed.
Gone was the confidence with which he had once met the morning: up with you and get to work quickly! Gone was his former commitment to action, his eagerness for success. He no longer cared.
Nowadays he could think of very little in his past life which should not have been done differently.
Lyoka, for instance. At first he had thought of separation from her as a healing process, and the only way to save his soul. It was only some five or seven or eight years later that Pavel Ivanovich realized the truth: separation from her had ruptured his soul. It was as though he had lost his buoyancy forever and acquired an eternal stoop.
Now he could see it all. It had been a mistake long ago to take up with her, to believe in her. It had been a mistake to live with her for so many years. And it had been a mistake to part from her. Nothing but mistakes all along the line.
In old age the heart begins to feel heavy, and you carry it around like a burden. All the problems of your past life, even those easy to bear in earlier decades, surmounted (or so
you thought) successfully, and put behind you long ago, are suddenly found to be still with you, pressing down like so many stone slabs on your chest.
Yet Varsonofiev had almost gotten to like these slow, laborious, lonely awakenings. He could lie for half an hour, or sometimes a whole hour, motionless, having neither the strength nor the will to spring the catch of his watch on the bedside table and look at the time. Busy noises from the outside would sometimes reach his ears, but he was not concerned to interpret them. He lay thinking whatever thoughts came into his head, helped by his scrutiny of the patterns carved in the dark, unwhitewashed ceiling.
As consciousness gradually reached the upper level of his mind, Varsonofiev eased himself up on his pillow. He waited a few more minutes while wakefulness flowed downward to his chest, to his trunk, along his arms and legs, willing his body to obey, readying it to rise and take up its burden.
He heaved a sigh, and lowered his legs to the floor, with no great difficulty. It seemed rather cold in the room. He took his robe from its usual place on the back of a chair heaped with last night’s books, put it on, and took a few steps, gradually straightening up.
His thoughts, not his years, had bowed him.
He touched the white tiles of the Dutch stove in passing. It was barely warm. It would have to be stoked higher: seen through the windows the weather was damp, gloomy, dirty, with perhaps a slight drizzle falling.
He went through two other low-ceilinged rooms, past chests and bookcases, a Japanese screen, piles of newspapers on the floor and on chairs, more cupboards, a commode, a wardrobe, all of it from the last century, none of it displaced for fifteen, twenty, thirty years, a wolfskin, more bookshelves crammed with books up to the ceiling, some upright, some lying down, some in old leather bindings, some quite new. Past a stack of firewood—and he was in the mezzanine looking down into the hallway. There was a samovar, big enough to serve twenty, never used. He began descending the creaking stairs.
November 1916 Page 148