Only the Animals (13 page)

Some regrets presented themselves to me while I waited, at having abandoned Oleg in his custom-built house at the bottom of the landscaped gardens of the noble family next door. The family had hired him half a century before to be their ornamental hermit in the Hermitage, one of several architectural follies the estate contained, imitations of the grand English manors of the eighteenth century. They believed him to be an old man when they appointed him, but in fact he was only thirty years old – he'd managed to fool them with his filthy long hair and beard and the druid costume he wore at their first meeting. The terms of his contract were that he would not wash or cut his hair or nails; would not engage in conversation with anybody else on the estate (servants included) except by repeating a single phrase in Latin (
Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur:
It is a wise man who speaks little); and would take exercise around the grounds whenever they had guests, looking appropriately melancholy and carrying with him a skull, a book and an hourglass which they'd purchased for him.

In return, he would receive food and wine and free lodging in the Hermitage. Fifty years later and the poor man was still there, eighty years old and completely insane. The irony of the situation did not seem evident to the family: their ornamental hermit had morphed over his lifetime into the real thing. They were always threatening to kick him out of the Hermitage (one of the granddaughters wanted to convert it to a conservatory) and replace him with a stone garden gnome, a threat to which he would respond, as per his contract,
‘Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur.'

Unfortunately he wasn't so wise in private. Over the years, he coped with his solitude by reading and talking endlessly to me. His reading was haphazard, arbitrary, manic, which meant that he burned through fascination after fascination without ever letting the knowledge he was acquiring really
change
him. Quite early on he became obsessed with the Ancient Greeks and Romans – one of his recurring delusions was that he was the original hermit owned by the Roman Emperor Hadrian. It was at this time that he named me Plautus the Tortoise, after the Roman comic playwright who valued imagination and the fantastic above anything he could scavenge from real life. Oleg built himself a lyre, thankfully using an old tortoise shell that he found in the garden, and liked to pretend he was Orpheus, entrancing me – the wild beast – with the sweetness of his playing. In this role I was expected to sway on my four feet and close my eyes.

He was won over by the scholars who argued that the famous Ancient Greek storyteller Aesop was in fact an Ethiopian slave whose fables about animals were adaptations of tales from African oral traditions, and were intended as disguised moral kicks in the teeth to his owners. Oleg would put coal dust on his face and shorten his tunic so that it looked a bit Greek, and sitting beside the fire he would orate Aesop's tales about me, the tortoise, throwing his shadow dramatically with sweeps of his arms. In this way I learned that I was given a shell because one of my ancestors couldn't be bothered going to Zeus's wedding supper and had a night in at home instead, so Zeus punished him by forcing him to carry his home on his back forevermore; and that eagles like to drop tortoises from great heights (then eat our exposed flesh) because one of my less cautious ancient ancestors insisted that the eagle teach him to fly.

Then there was Oleg's Far Eastern phase. I awoke from my slumber one year to find that he had woven his beard into a thin plait and had broken apart the lyre so that he could use the tortoise shell for the ancient Chinese art of divining the future. This involved polishing the shell and heating it with hot pokers until it cracked. The goal for Oleg was to have his questions about the future answered in accordance with the sound, speed or shape of the cracks, but he must have done something wrong for the whole shell split in two. I watched this warily, knowing that my own attached shell stood between Oleg and his second chance at predicting the future. Luckily for me, soon afterwards he read a passage about the ancient Chinese belief that the entire universe is supported on the back of a tortoise, and he looked at me with new admiration. Not only that, but according to the Chinese, the tortoise was one of the divine animals beside P'an Ku (the Chinese version of Adam, as Oleg described him to me) while he tinkered away building the world, creating massive chunks of granite to float suspended in space.

After that phase ended, Oleg became entranced with Darwin. He declared that I was not some lowly Russian tortoise but a living fossil, most ancient of all the living land reptiles, proof that animal life had started in water and moved onto land; my kind had evolved a domed shell over the eons so that predators would struggle to get their jaws around it, the shell eventually fusing with our very backbones, while we withdrew deeper and deeper within our armour to survive. This pleased Oleg as a metaphor for his own life. He read out long passages from Darwin's notes on his expeditions, about walking for miles on the shells of live giant tortoises in the Galapagos, not once having to touch the ground for the creatures were so plentiful.

Oleg had never been a religious hermit in the true sense of the word, but a couple of years before I ran away he began to flirt with Christianity. He couldn't help but take everything literally, for during his lifetime as a hermit he'd had nobody else but me to filter his ideas through, no other human mind to help clarify his thoughts like butter, leaving them richer. So you can imagine how difficult things became for me when he read Leviticus 11:29 (
These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind
) and discovered that in early Christian art the tortoise was meant to symbolise ignorance and evil; that my slow, laborious movement across the stone floor of the Hermitage was due to the massive burden of sin I carried on my back. After surviving his first summer as a Christian, I couldn't wait to get back into my hibernation burrow and go to sleep, but when I emerged again at the end of winter, there he was, still engrossed in the Bible. That's when I decided I needed to get myself over to the Tolstoys.

Her Woman Friday

I was too late to become the great Tolstoy's pet tortoise. When somebody finally noticed me at the bottom of the steps and I was brought inside the house and fed a bowl of milk and bread, I was disappointed to discover he had died almost three years before.

His youngest daughter, Countess Alexandra, who had for years been his assistant and secretary, had taken to her bed to grieve after his death, and had hardly moved from there since. Her mother, Sophia, decided I should be given to Alexandra to cheer her up, and a servant was ordered to create a terrarium for me so that I could be kept in Alexandra's bedroom. It was a thoughtfully created living space, with a water bath, a hideaway for me to sleep in at night, a sandy corner, and a stone sunbathing spot that was in just the right place to catch the sunlight as it came through the windows in the morning. The maid kept the terrarium scrupulously clean, replaced the fine-grained river sand often, and on overcast days brought me a hot water bottle made of calfskin to warm up my blood.

Alexandra did not pay me much attention at first. She did nothing but read all day in bed. She sent her maid away whenever she arrived to groom her, and for the entire summer did not once wash, cut or brush her fair hair. I watched all this from my terrarium, and observed that every seven days her hair cleaned itself, quite miraculously – the oil at her scalp waxed then waned. She had her father's pointy elfin ears, and they poked out from between her fallen-forward hair when she was particularly engrossed in a book. She was very thin, and ate almost nothing. When she squatted over the chamber pot I saw that her legs too were covered with fine blonde hair.

You may think that I was dismayed at finding myself in the presence of another hermit, but to me her female solitude was so radically different from Oleg's that I was nothing but fascinated. Until I met Countess Alexandra, I hadn't given much thought to my own gender. In fact, for the decades I'd lived with Oleg he'd believed me to be male (tortoise gender is notoriously difficult to decipher), a misconception I'd encouraged for my own amusement by periodically mounting a large rock warmed up by the sun, pretending to believe it was a female tortoise. This had always seemed to make Oleg feel better about his own lack of carnal options.

It took me many days of observing Alexandra to try to understand this difference in the quality of her solitude, and the best I could come up with was that hers was a political solitude, but I didn't yet know how. She suffered from it, certainly, but not in the same way that Oleg had suffered; his state struck me in comparison as isolation, loneliness. But solitude is different, and female solitude, when it is truly chosen, can be blissful.

Alexandra's visitors – for there were many who wanted the privilege of her company – were turned away, told that she was still unwell, weak; they left her flowers or fresh mushrooms and whispered in an anxious way about her extreme melancholia, but there was nothing sickly about the way she read during those years in bed: she was beyond voracious, a famished reader. Whenever the maid announced a new batch of hopeful visitors, I could see Alexandra struggle with a vestigial impulse to give her energy – all of it, mental, emotional, physical – to her friends and family, as she must have done for the previous years of her existence. Her guilt at telling the maid to make excuses rose in her sharply once the door was closed (I could see her cheeks go pink with it), then this would give way to relief that she could safeguard her energy, her mindful wanderings, for just a little longer.

I wanted to know, more than anything, what it was she was reading with such intensity, what answers she was seeking. One morning in autumn, when the maid had taken the terrarium out of the bedroom for cleaning and left me sunning myself on the floorboards, I decided to climb up to Alexandra and her books on the bed. I have the advantage of being small – the Russian tortoise is one of the smaller varieties, hence our popularity as pets – and a surprisingly good climber, and soon I had pulled myself up onto the bedspread and was stalking in my mechanical way across the quilt towards her. She looked up at the movement and – to her credit – did not jump at finding a small reptile sharing her bed. She simply watched my journey, and when I made it all the way to the pile of books I put my front legs with some effort on top of them and stuck my head out as far as I could to read the titles.

At this she laughed, made a little warm space for me against the pillows, and began to read aloud. We didn't stop reading even when her meals arrived on a tray. While she read, I ate what I could of her lunch and dinner to thwart her mother, who came after every meal to check if Alexandra had eaten. I knew it was bad for my liver to ingest so much cream and meat, but I didn't care. I crouched beside her and watched the sun cross the bedspread and listened to her voice, breathed in her smell of blackcurrants and salt, yeast and orange peel. I had to concentrate hard to hear her – hearing isn't my strong suit, but my sight and smell tell me most of what I need to know – and this is how I became acquainted with the writings of the early American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and with Alexandra's reasons for choosing a period of solitude.

I am aware that one person's insights and epiphanies from unique reading journeys are not always interesting to another, just as other people's tales about their travels mostly inspire boredom. I've wondered why this is for humans, and I've decided it has something to do with the perceived alchemical magic of the discoveries that books (or travel) enable: they are utterly private and idiosyncratic, and, to the person undergoing them, feel ordained, auspicious, designed especially for them at that particular moment in their lives. In a century during which many people have lost the religious framework of fatalism, it seems books have become signs to interpret and follow – this book has come into my life for a reason, the author is speaking to me and to me alone. And this, in a strange way, leads to people becoming evangelical about books. You
must
read this, they preach, forgetting that it was the way they stumbled serendipitously upon the book – finding it abandoned on the seat of a coach, or dusty in the attic, or neglected in a dark stack at the library – that was partially responsible for its powers.

But in the days when reading aloud was the norm, this magic was shared. The words Alexandra read electrified us both, none more so than this moving passage from Elizabeth Cady Stanton's speech to the US House Judiciary Committee in 1892, when she was – think of it! – seventy-six, an old woman giving an address to powerful men that she dared to title ‘The Solitude of Self':

In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness … To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us, we leave it alone, under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life.

Alexandra mused to me about the meaning of this. You could fool yourself your whole life and think you're not alone, but you will know – how clearly you will know – when you're in pain, when you're dying. And if a person has not been allowed, in times of solitude, to develop her mind's many resources (intellectual, creative, emotional, spiritual) to shore herself up, to provide good company for herself, she will experience the further desolation of being alienated even from her best self. Nothing could be lonelier. On a visit to the exiled Prince Kropotkin in England, an anarchist philosopher whom Alexandra's father had also admired, Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked how he'd endured his time in the prisons of Russia and France, and he responded that he'd tried to recall everything he'd ever read, and had reread it in his mind and heart, secure that nobody could invade the sovereignty of his thoughts.