The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (11 page)

‘Why?’ She paused, stretching her back. Wind lifted her long hair and made her dress flap. Her ankles were slender, protected by canvas spatterdashes.

‘I felt like it.’ I let that sink in. ‘Anyway, there’s going to be a storm.’

‘I made a pot of soup, Valya. We can eat together in the kitchen when I’m done with chopping.’

I do not like the idea of women chopping wood. But the women among the Tolstoyans oppose separate work. Masha is adamant on this subject.

‘You will be the next tsar, Masha,’ Sergeyenko teases her.

Leo Nikolayevich’s attitudes toward women are mildly reactionary, even though he imagines himself liberal. He would never let Sasha chop wood.

‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

‘You’re always hungry, Valya.’

She had invented the name Valya from Valentin, which she claims is far too serious a name for me.

While she finished at the woodpile, I put the horse in his stall, unsaddled him, brushed him down. His rich white coat steamed in the cool barn. A couple of boys, local muzhiks, forked hay from the loft into the wooden stalls. I felt warm inside, happy. The mingling smell of straw and mud filled the little enclosed night of the barn. Shards of sunlight splintered through the roof.

As I walked toward the big house, it began to sleet, a diagonal slush that drilled the mud, that whitened the brown grass, that popped off the wooden steps and broad pine boards of the porch. Telyatinki is a rambling, ungainly structure, somewhat crudely made of scraped logs, with a simplicity inside that reminds one of a country schoolhouse. The plank floors are waxed, then buffed to a mirrorlike sheen. We take turns doing this work on a biweekly rotation drawn up by Sergeyenko, who has a passion for schedules and lists.

Masha joined me in the kitchen. She poured a thick, salty broth with carrots and beets into clay bowls that we had fashioned ourselves the week before and hardened in the oven. We ate with big wooden spoons, alone. There was plenty of black bread, which the women bake every Sunday afternoon, and freshly churned white butter. Neither of us spoke for a while.

‘How is Leo Nikolayevich feeling?’ she asked, breaking the silence. ‘Everyone here is worried.’

‘He has a bad cough.’

‘He should be careful. A man of his age can go quickly. My grandfather was perfectly well one day and dead the next.’

‘He says he will last only a few months, perhaps a year. And he means it.’

‘I wonder if he’s serious. If he were serious, he would take precautions.’

‘All I know is that yesterday I asked him whether or not I should take my name off the university registry, which would force me to face the question of military call-up directly. And he said that since he had only a short time to live, he was not the right person to ask.’

‘You
should
resign from the university, Valya. It’s dishonest to pretend to be a student when you’re not really attending classes. It’s your duty to resist evil, isn’t it?’

Her bluntness annoyed me. ‘Maybe I don’t feel like wasting away in jail? Maybe there is more important work that I should be doing?’

‘Perhaps you’re a coward.’

I was taking this more seriously than she was. She ate as we talked.

‘More soup?’ She looked up finally.

‘Yes, please.’ I almost said no, just to spite her. But I was starving. One does not eat well at Yasnaya Polyana.

‘By their deeds ye shall know them,’ she said.

In this, and
only
this, Masha reminds me of my mother, who quotes Scripture in the most unlikely circumstances, always drawing on the same half dozen verses she knows by heart. In recent years, I have taken to confounding her by quoting unfamiliar Scriptures back at her to prove exactly the opposite of what she has quoted to me. It drives her crazy.

‘Whatsoever the heart commandeth, this must ye do,’ I said.

Masha looked at me, puzzled. ‘
Micah?
’

‘Bulgakov,’ I said.

She did not like it when I did the teasing. She poured herself another bowl of soup and paid no attention to me. ‘You have a high opinion of yourself.’

I nodded.

‘Let’s just hope that God shares your opinion.’

I poured tea from the samovar, two steaming glasses, with lots of sugar. She accepted hers, putting the hot rim to her lips, pausing to blow, then sipping.

Footsteps and voices sounded in the hallway.

‘Sergeyenko,’ I said.

‘Let’s go to my room,’ Masha offered. ‘We can talk there. I don’t feel like conducting a seminar.’

Her frankness always startles me. I feel, by comparison, sly and hollow, a master of deceit. With a tingling in my groin, I followed her down the corridor.

A rickety chair with a lattice seat stood by the dressing table, but it had newspapers piled high on it; I had no choice but to sit beside her on the muslin bedspread. The brownish photograph of an older woman, presumably her mother, was propped on the table.

‘Tolstoy got a letter yesterday from a student in Kiev,’ I said, matter-of-factly. Masha craves little bits of information and gossip, and I feel my ability to satisfy this craving as a source of power over her. Otherwise, with her beauty and supreme self-confidence, she would control everything.

Masha looked at me intently.

‘Don’t get angry,’ I said.

‘I’m not angry. You’re playing a game with me. I don’t like that.’

‘This is no game.’

‘I won’t quarrel with you.’

I laughed a bit too ruefully. ‘You say that, but you quarrel nonetheless. We’re quarreling now, aren’t we?’

‘Valentin, my dear.’ She sighed. ‘Tell me about the letter.’

‘It was an odd letter, really … presumptuous.’

‘In what way?’

‘He said that Leo Nikolayevich ought to perform one final symbolic act. He should distribute his property among his relations and the poor, then leave home without a kopeck, making his way from town to town as a beggar.’

Masha was awed. Her face tilted upward in my direction, her thin nose razoring the light, which fell into the room through a small north window. Like a magician, ready to dazzle her, I produced a copy of Leo Nikolayevich’s response:

I had forgotten that last line.

‘You should not have shown it to me,’ Masha said.

I wished she had been less explicit.

‘But what sincerity he has!’ she continued.

‘Remarkable.’

It pleased me that she passed quickly over the fact of my having shown her the letter.

‘He speaks the truth,’ I said, ‘even when it’s painful to him.’

She agreed. I tucked the letter back into my pocket, still regretting my lack of foresight. I had just been showing off. It seems I have no moral standards.

‘He admires you,’ said Masha.

‘Me?’

‘Sergeyenko told me so. He’s miserable about it. It’s unfair, he says, that someone like you, who has only just arrived, should enjoy such close relations with Leo Nikolayevich when so many Tolstoyans, such as himself, hardly ever see him.’

‘Leo Nikolayevich treats me well. But he’s kind to everyone, even Tanya’s silly husband, Sukhotin.’

‘Perhaps, but he lets you answer his personal letters. And he trusts you with the anthology.’

‘I’m his secretary. I’m sure Gusev had the same privileges. Otherwise, I would be quite useless to him.’

‘But he also takes you with him in the afternoon. Gusev did not go with him to Zasyeka Wood.’

It is true enough. Leo Nikolayevich takes few people with him on rides or walks in the woods, yet he often asks me to accompany him. Occasionally he will take Sasha or Dr Makovitsky. But almost nobody else.

‘What do you talk about when you’re with him?’

I told her the truth. ‘We talk about me.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s stupid, isn’t it? We should be talking about him, or about his ideas. But he seems so curious about me. He wants to know everything about my parents, about my relations with women, my experience of God – everything.’

‘What relations with women?’

She tried not to smile, but her eyes shone like quartz crystals. She stirred in me a strange feeling of warmth – like the coals bedded down in a fire pit after a long night’s burning.

Without calculation, I moved my hand to her hair and stroked it. It was blond, hay colored, fresh, and perfectly straight. Her eyes, with an emerald tint that recalled the sea, fixed me in their beams. The green irises circled each dark pupil like summer fields around a pond. One could dive into those dark waters easily, and never return.

‘I suppose you don’t want to talk about the women you have loved,’ she said. The irony had gone, burned off like morning fog.

‘There’s almost nothing to tell.’

‘I don’t mean to pry. It’s just that I like to know everything about my friends. I’m nosy.’

‘It’s good that you would ask me, but I suspect you’ll be disappointed. I’ve been enamored of many …’ I hung on the lip of that modifier, speechless.

I would have told her everything – what little there is – but I found it difficult to talk about my past relations. It seemed like a betrayal of this moment of intimacy. I wanted to believe, I did believe, that Masha and I were the only people left on the planet just then.

‘I had a lover before coming here,’ she said. ‘He was the headmaster of the school where I taught. His name was Ivan.’

‘Ivan the Terrible,’ I said. My head was swirling. I thought I might fall off the bed.

‘He was married – happily married. This made things difficult for us, since we could only make love at school.’

‘At school?’

‘In the gymnasium, when the girls had left for the day. It was a day school, you see. There were straw mats on the floor. In the gymnasium.’

‘Ah, I see,’ I said. But I didn’t. My fists clenched, unclenched. Women of Masha’s class and rank in society do not allow themselves to be used in this way. She is not a serf.

‘He was much older, almost forty,’ she said. I felt, perhaps unjustly, that she enjoyed telling me, as if my torment gave her pleasure. ‘There was no future in it, nowhere it could go. I’m much happier here.’

I wanted to respond but couldn’t. Fortunately, she didn’t require a response from me. Her narrative had its own life, which had nothing to do with me.

‘My parents suspected that Ivan and I were involved in a dangerous way. I had talked about him rather too freely. Though they detest Tolstoy, they were glad when I left Petersburg. At least in Telyatinki they thought I would not cause them embarrassment.’

It was all quite baffling, but I didn’t want to appear ignorant. I was, myself, still a virgin. And it seemed ludicrous and unreal that Masha wasn’t. In romantic novels, it does not work like this.

‘You look distracted, Valya,’ she said. ‘Have I upset you?’

‘No. I appreciate your frankness.’

‘You disapprove of me. I see that in your eyes.’

‘I don’t.’

She stood up, growing more furious every moment. ‘I’m sorry I told you all of this. I should never have spoken.’

‘I’m glad you told me.’

‘You are a prig, aren’t you? A puritan, like Sergeyenko. I should have guessed. Why else would they have hired you? You’re a hired man, aren’t you?’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘I don’t care if it’s fair. It’s true. What is true is rarely fair.’

‘Masha.’ I stood up. ‘I’m leaving.’

‘Do as you like, Valentin Fedorovich.’

She walked over to the window and looked out, sulking. The dusk was coming on fast, its violet color streaking the horizon. The room had a gloomy luster that made everything seem unreal.

‘Good-bye,’ I said.

She stood, silent, looking away from me. I closed the door behind me softly, though inside I raged.

Once in a while Papa takes me riding with him in the afternoons. He rides Delire, ‘the Count’s horse,’ as the muzhiks say, which means that nobody else dares ride her. We trot aimlessly along little trails in the forest as branches snap across our faces and bracken thickens into brake; pretty soon you can’t tell where you are, but Papa simply presses forward. The more difficult the terrain, the better he likes it.

If a stream crosses our path, Papa will urge Delire on, shouting ‘Heigh!’ like a Tartar and whipping her rump. Delire will jump a small stream or swim a larger one with relish. Once clear of the water, she’ll charge ahead, uphill, with Papa shouting. It is impossible to keep up with them.

One day we were galloping past the old iron foundry when Delire stepped into some loose shale, skidded, and lost her footing. Papa pitched sideways off the saddle as Delire crashed on her flank! I panicked, but Papa, without even dropping the bridle from his hand, slipped from the stirrups and landed on his feet beside the whinnying horse.