by Jay Parini
‘Hush!’ She put a finger to my lips. ‘No excuses. You’re better than that. You are simply trying to keep the peace around here – a perfectly Christian thing to do.’
‘You do understand me, don’t you?’
‘I hope that in sixty-six years I have learned a little something, dear Valentin Fedorovich. I am to be pitied for what I haven’t learned, perhaps.’
I saw here a glimmer of the great person she might have been, given other circumstances. The situation of life here is not conducive to sainthood, especially for a woman in Sofya Andreyevna’s position. She is torn, like me, between two points of the compass.
Through all this, I remain impressed with Leo Nikolayevich. He cannot be flattered. A few days ago, I walked down by the Voronka and came upon the bathhouse used by the family in summer, an endearing little structure made of clay and wattles. There is one plastered wall on the outside, on which visitors to the estate have inscribed their comments. I copied them in my notebook:
1. Down with capital punishment!
2. May the life of L. N. be prolonged for as many years again.
3. In token of a visit to Count L. Tolstoy, a man with an intellect as large as a lion…
4. Come, all you who have grown weary in the struggle. Here you shall find peace.
5. This hallowed but was visited by a student of the Moscow Geodetic School.
6. A bumble pilgrim offers his respect.
7. An admirer of the Count, now and always.
8. Glory to the great one, glory!
9. No one, not even Tolstoy, knows the truth.
10. After long dreaming, we have at last visited the genius of the human mind.
11. ‘Those born to crawl cannot fly.’ What can I write? All look pale compared to you.
12. M. Bolsky was here.
At her request, I gave Sofya Andreyevna a copy of these remarks, and she placed it on the piano in the sitting room, where Leo Nikolayevich would see it. Passing through the room, he said gruffly, ‘What is this?’
‘Comments, my dear. Mostly about you. Bulgakov copied them from the bathhouse wall.’
He picked up the paper and skimmed the comments. His lips moved slightly as he read.
‘Not interesting,’ he said, dropping it on the piano.
Biryukov has been visiting. One of Leo Nikolayevich’s most ardent disciples, he is being prosecuted by the government for possession of certain banned texts by Tolstoy. The trial begins in four weeks, and he may be sent to prison for as much as eighteen months. This is an enormous source of pain to Leo Nikolayevich, who is reluctant to have anyone suffer on his behalf.
This afternoon he went for a long ride on Delire and returned looking haggard. He said he would go to his room for a nap – not his usual habit.
We waited for him to sit down to dinner, but when he hadn’t emerged from his room by seven we began eating without him. Sofya Andreyevna ladled out the soup, a hot chicken broth with fat carrots floating in it, then excused herself to check up on her husband. It was unlike him, she said, to miss a meal. None of us spoke, though we continued to eat. It is always nerve-racking when an old man does not appear on time.
Sofya Andreyevna came back wringing her hands. It seems that when she went in, he was sitting up on the edge of his bed. He looked pallid and claimed he was not hungry and would simply go to bed without dinner. His pulse was slightly rapid, and a fine sweat beaded his forehead and made his cheeks appear slick.
‘Do you think he’s all right?’ asked Sergey. He, like his sister Tanya, was visiting for a few days, drawn home by the crisis between his parents. They all imagine it’s possible to do something.
‘His eyes looked vacant,’ she said. ‘I think he’s about to have an attack.’
After a few sips of broth, she stood again. ‘I must go to him.’
When she left, Sergey and Tanya exchanged a look of annoyance. Why couldn’t she let the poor man rest?
Their mother reappeared with a ghastly look. ‘Go quickly, Dushan Petrovich! He is unconscious, and mumbling – God knows what is wrong!’ She crossed herself several times and knelt on the floor.
Everyone leaped from his place at the table, following Dushan Petrovich, who had run from the room as soon as he saw the flash of fear in Sofya Andreyevna’s eyes.
The bedroom was dark, though a candle glimmered on the small bed table, its flame nearly extinguished. Leo Nikolayevich lay on the spread, his jaw quivering. He made queer, inarticulate, lowing sounds. Everyone stood by, dumbfounded.
We watched as Dushan Makovitsky undressed and covered him with a wool blanket. The old man’s eyes were closed, but he struggled to talk, his brow contracted, his cheeks blown. He began to work his jaws as though he were chewing.
‘He will probably sleep now,’ Dushan said. ‘You might as well finish your dinner. I’ll stay with him.’
‘No, I’ll stay,’ said Biryukov. This was unexpected. But he feels intensely loyal to the man; for his sake he would endure prison.
‘Call me if there is any change,’ Dushan said. ‘And take his pulse every five minutes.’
We descended quietly into the dining room and resumed our meal. Hardly a word was said. I don’t think we had quite finished dessert when Biryukov came rushing into the room shouting for Dushan Makovitsky.
Once again, we raced upstairs. Leo Nikolayevich had gone into convulsions, though by the time we reached the bedroom they were subsiding. Still, his legs twitched violently and his face appeared distorted by pain; the edges of his lips were drawn upward in a grimace. His fingers opened and closed mechanically like the mandibles of an insect.
Dushan Makovitsky gave orders like a military captain: ‘Hurry! Go down and get hot-water bottles for his feet. We should put a mustard plaster on his calves, too. And coffee! Bring some hot coffee!’
Amid the commotion, Dushan remained cool and dispassionate, a scientist through and through. Sofya Andreyevna stood with her back against the wall, praying, her eyelids red and swollen, half-closed.
Awhile later, covered in plasters and cold packs, Leo Nikolayevich sat up in bed with our help. The worst seemed to be over. He was trying to speak.
‘Society…,’ he said. ‘Society concerning three… concerning three… make a note of this.’
‘He is delirious,’ Dushan Makovitsky said.
‘Must read!’ Leo Nikolayevich declared, abruptly. Then, in a low, phlegm-clogged voice: ‘Wisdom… wisdom… wisdom.’
What a grievous and unnatural thing to witness, a man of luminous intelligence reduced to blather. Nevertheless, even in his confusion, his central concerns as a human being boiled to the surface of his brain’s caldron.
Without warning, the convulsions started up again, a succession of seizures that racked his entire body, as if he’d been struck by bolts of lightning. After each seizure, he lay shaking, trembling, sweating.
Dushan Makovitsky held down his shoulders during the worst convulsions, while Biryukov grasped his legs. Following orders, I massaged his calves whenever the writhing stopped. He suffered five attacks in a row, the fourth being especially violent, tossing him crosswise on the bed. We could barely restrain him.
When the worst appeared over, Sofya Andreyevna knelt by the bed and clutched his feet. ‘Dearest Lord, not now! Don’t let him die now!’
Tanya put a hand on her mother’s shoulder and said, in a kindly way, ‘Let’s go downstairs, Mama. He should rest now.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Sofya Andreyevna said. ‘If he dies, you will lose a father. But I will have killed a man.’
Her words drilled through the dark.
‘You must all go down,’ Dushan Makovitsky said. ‘I shall keep watch over him myself.’
Leo Nikolayevich was not ready to die, however. By ten o’clock, he had nearly recovered, though he didn’t try to stand. He sipped tea and asked that Dushan Makovitsky read to him from the Gospels.
I listened, quietly, at the door.
‘A new commandmen
t I give unto you, that ye love one another.’ The words sang in my heart, they were so beautiful, so perfectly simple. ‘By this all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have loved one to another.’
Leo Nikolayevich echoed Dushan in a hoarse, low voice.
Now I lay in bed awake, unable to relax. It had been harrowing to observe the signature of death on that dear, wrinkled face. As always, my thoughts turned to Masha in Petersburg. I lit the candle on my table and wrote a letter to her:
I find myself wrestling once more with the old formulations. Is the soul really a separate entity? Is the body a vessel? I do not know, but – having seen dear Leo Nikolayevich in such a condition – life seems even more mysterious to me now, so fragile, evanescent. And precious. We pass, so briefly, from the unknown to the unknown, our days on earth like petals on a bough.
I think of you, Masha, even now, as I sit at this wooden table in the middle of the night. My thoughts return to you at odd times. Our friendship is like a chink of light in an otherwise dark wall. It’s as if, somehow, I have you with me always. Here again the mystery of time and space confounds me, upsets me. Your soul, I dare to think, has linked itself to mine, and the space between us is somehow irrelevant. I don’t believe it exists. I actually believe I have you here beside me when you’re not. Am I foolish to think such things?
I keep thinking, however, that only love could lessen the terrible rift between mind and body, between spirit and flesh, that torments me. I can’t imagine what it means to say that today I am a young man in the flush of youth, that tomorrow I will be old and alone, that the next day I shall be dust in the earth. If there is no love in the world, no enduring spirit in man, then I am nothing now, our affection is nothing, and we might as well both he dead.
But as soon as I write that, I feel the deep hunger for God that makes me aware that God exists. By God I mean the World Spirit, the sense of the Eternal, the hovering blaze or mind that informs and, in a way, creates the world around us. We are each of us a small God, and the love we engender between us can only increase the Godness within us, enlarge the circle of affection we can share, the breath of spirit.
You will, I hope, forgive my expostulations and philosophizing. It is horribly late, and language runs away from me. I am tired now, can hardly think. Tomorrow, I shall write again. Write to me. I miss you. I love you.
32
Sofya Andreyevna
‘Mother, you’re jealous of him,’ Sasha said to me yesterday. ‘That’s the problem.’
Where is that girl’s mind? Of course I’m jealous of him! Why should I share him with vagabonds and mountebanks, money grubbers and frauds? Yet I must try to ensure that he is not continually upset. The tension will kill him. It is my duty, as his wife, to see that he lives in a calm atmosphere.
The day after Lyovochka’s attack I told Sasha that she and Varvara Mikhailovna could return home. It was killing her father to have his little briar rose removed from him. And there was no telling what plots she might hatch with Chertkov once removed from my view. So I made a spectacle of myself, standing on the wooden steps at Telyatinki, begging forgiveness of my daughter and her friend. They appeared genuinely dumbfounded. I loved it.
Sasha is a sentimental girl, the kind who weeps over the death of a toad; she burst into tears at the sight of me, and we embraced like long-lost sisters. Even Varvara Mikhailovna, who has the sensitivity of a granite monument, shed a few lightly manufactured tears and hugged me.
‘A family gathering!’ said Chertkov, dripping poison as he stepped from the shadows. Light glanced from his slick, bald forehead. He was redolent of scent – a womanly affectation appropriate to a man of his Greekish ways.
‘It is good to see you, Vladimir Grigorevich.’
‘Always a pleasure, to be sure.’
‘I would like you to visit us tomorrow. Will you come for lunch?’
He thanked me without a trace of his usual irony, a marvelous performance.
The offer was rash, however. I should have known better. He contaminates the ground he walks on. And there is the matter of habit. If the idea were planted that he could visit us without difficulty, he would turn up every day.
When I heard the approach of his carriage, my pulse began to race: 142! I peered out the window of my bedroom with binoculars. Lyovochka stood on the front steps, happily waiting to receive his disciple. I had asked him not to embrace the man. That is more than I can bear. But he could not hide the joy on his face; he looked like a young bride who has just spied her lover in the distance. A disgusting thing for the servants to see!
How I managed I shall never know. With all my strength, I maintained a cool civility, inquiring after his mother and wife, inwardly counting the minutes till that scoundrel was out of my house. When he had finally gone, I begged Lyovochka to make this the last time I had to endure that malevolent presence. He unexpectedly agreed to write to Chertkov and his wife, suggesting that this experiment in reconciliation was premature. Some time must pass before they attempt another visit.
I suppose Lyovochka was unwilling to make my life harder because he feels guilty. A few days ago, I discovered a secret diary in his boot. I’ve said nothing to him about the diary, but he must realize it is missing. The wording is cryptic, but it confirms my suspicion that he and Chertkov have entered into an unholy contract to steal his copyrights from the family. This comes just when I have had an offer from Prozveshenye, one of the most sturdy publishing firms in Russia, to purchase all the rights to Lyovochka’s work upon his death. And they have offered one million rubles! Enough to sustain the Tolstoy family – all twenty-five grandchildren included – for life!
I went into Lyovochka’s study with the letter from Prozveshenye, but he waved me aside.
‘Don’t concern yourself with such matters,’ he said. ‘They are of no importance. I do not write for publishers. I write for people.’
He was beyond arguing with, so I was forced to write an explicit letter to him on the fourteenth of October:
You ask about my health every day with an air of compassion, Lyovochka. You ask how I have slept with such apparent concern in your voice. And yet, each day, you drive fresh nails into my heart, shortening my life and subjecting me to unbearable pain. Nothing I do seems to ease this pain – you should know that. It was the decision of Fate that I should learn about this twist, this corrupt deed you have perpetrated by depriving your numerous offspring of your copyrights (I might point out that your partner in crime has not done the same kind of thing to his family)….
The government that you and your friends slander and criticize in your pamphlets will now legally take the bread out of the mouths of your heirs and give it to some rich publishers in Moscow, while your very own grandchildren will starve as a result of your vanity and sin. And it is the government, again – in the form of the State Bank – that will receive Tolstoy’s diaries for safekeeping, a mere ruse for keeping them from your wife…
I am horrified, aghast, to think of what evil may grow up out of your grave, and in the memories of your children and grandchildren.
I put this letter on his desk in the morning. Just before lunch, my hands trembling, I knocked at the door of his study. I wanted his reaction, in person. This is too important an issue to leave to chance.
He told me to come in.
‘Lyovochka,’ I said, feeling like a schoolgirl on a visit to the headmaster. ‘I wonder if you have read my letter.’
‘I have.’
I waited beside him, my hands folded in front of my apron. ‘Do you have anything to say to me?’
He looked up at me with disdain such as I have never seen before on his face. His nostrils appeared, like a bull’s, to flare.
‘Can you possibly leave me in peace?’ he asked.
I implored him to think about his family, to reconsider whatever he had done to adjust his will, to listen to reason. But he sat impassively in his chair, casting a pall across the room like a bare electric light.
‘I am,’ I said. I could see that, in all ways, I was. Whatever love may have lived between us was dead.
We spoke not a word to each other that day. The following morning he left home before breakfast, on horseback. This was most unlike him. I realized he must be heading to Telyatinki, so I set off, on foot, for Chertkov’s house.
At the entrance to the estate, I hid myself in a low ditch. I lay there all day with binoculars trained on the house. I did not see Lyovochka’s horse anywhere, or catch a glimpse of him. Twice I saw Chertkov come and go, which made me wonder if, indeed, Lyovochka had gone to Telyatinki. Perhaps I had been mistaken?
When darkness began to fall, I set off, weary of heart, back to Yasnaya Polyana. By the time I got there, my temples throbbed. My feet burned. I felt dizzy and nauseated.
I sat on a wooden bench, beneath a tall pine, for an hour or two. Stars speckled the sky above me, and I felt I was looking into infinity. I said, in my heart, I am all yours, God. Take me. Take me. I wanted God or oblivion. I wanted to count myself among the thousand stars.
I might easily have sat there forever had not Ivan, the coach driver, seen me.
‘Countess? Is that you?’
‘Ivan,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I am quite unwell, Ivan. Help me.’
He took my hand and led me home, like an old mule back to the barn.
Lyovochka was still awake, sitting on his bed, reading by candlelight. I don’t know why I did this, but I told him exactly what I had done that day, how I had waited in the ditch, frantic, till nightfall. How I had asked, prayed, even begged, for death.
He listened carefully, then said, ‘Sonya, I am extremely tired of your whims. What I want now is freedom. I am eighty-two years old, and I refuse to let you treat me like a child. I will not be tied to my wife’s apron strings!’
‘What does this mean?’
‘It means that, from now on, I shall feel perfectly free to write to Chertkov, even to meet with him when I feel it is necessary. I cannot play this game any longer.’