The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (12 page)

‘That’s my girl,’ he said, putting his face against Delire and whispering in her ear, stroking her long, thick neck.

The horse got back onto her feet, and Papa led her over the shale and remounted. I couldn’t believe a man of his age could be so agile. ‘See that your mother hears nothing about this spill,’ he said.

Last summer, riding near the Voronka, we passed the little hut we often use as a bathhouse. Soon we came into a small clearing that, in spring, is spread with a bright quilt of forget-me-nots. That day, fat
boroviki
mushrooms studded the field, glistening on their rosy stems, their tops like velvet and their underlining a rich, creamy tan. Papa stopped and dismounted.

‘Is anything wrong?’ I asked, coming to a halt.

‘Right over there,’ he said, pointing his whip to a deep grassy spot between two lordly oaks. ‘I want to be buried there.’

He looked at me, squinting. I nodded, slowly, keeping my eyes on his. ‘All right, Papa,’ I said.

He smiled, and a look of strange satisfaction passed over his old face. I was smiling, too, aware that something of great importance had passed between us.

‘Let’s go home,’ Papa said, breaking the spell. ‘I could use a glass of tea.’

He has never again mentioned that incident in the clearing, but I have not forgotten his request. Until that moment, it never occurred to me that Papa could die.

*

In the thickest part of Zasyeka, Papa’s favorite haunt, is a small trail that leads to a spring at the bottom of the woods. A pool of clear water has formed in one spot, and the horses drink there. We call it Wolves’ Well. Nearby, a family of badgers live like kings in a dusty hillock. They burrow into deep dens that branch into a maze of connecting tunnels. Papa occasionally brings his favorite dogs – Tiulpan and Tsygan – here; they are crazy for badgers, scratching away at the hillock with a wild hope of unearthing them.

Papa says that writing is like that: you keep scratching away at the dirt, hoping a badger might run out. But it rarely does.

Sometimes, in spring, Papa would come into my room after lunch, saying, ‘Sasha, would you like to go on a vegetarian hunt with me?’ We didn’t really hunt as he did as a young man in the Caucasus, where he’d charge like a madman (so he says) through fields teeming with hare, killing as many as sixty in a day. Papa loves bragging about his wayward youth, though it makes people like Dushan Makovitsky or Sergeyenko wince. They want to believe he was always as he is now – as if morality were a gift, bestowed at birth, not something won by hard spiritual work, by the agony of living through sin.

So we’d pull on thick marsh boots that smelled of tar, and I’d race after him across the orchard into the Chapysh and, farther on, into the blue shadows of Zasyeka. Snow, muddy and caked, still clung to the dark sides of ditches. The trees were bare, but the buds would have swollen, turning the woods a washed-out purple. Eventually, we step into a clearing.

‘Shush now,’ Papa would say, putting a finger to his lips.

Sitting on a rock, we’d wait for a long time, trying not to breathe. ‘Become the woods,’ he’d say. ‘You are part of things here.’

Then, when you thought nothing was going to happen that day, Papa would raise one of his furry eyebrows and say, ‘Sasha, look!’

Close by, we’d hear the odd coughing sound of a snipe. It would lift itself into the air, wheeling overhead in great broken rings, then flap across the tips of the trees. Maybe nothing else would come all afternoon, but Papa didn’t seem to mind. We’d sit there, silent and happy, till darkness fell.

‘It’s so peculiar,’ Papa would say. ‘Imagine. There was a time when I was fascinated by hunting and killing.’ He would always say the same thing, and I would always say nothing.

This past January, Tanya’s stepson, Dorik Sukhotin, was visiting and came down with measles. He was bedded down next to the Remington room in a cot, a somewhat halfhearted attempt to quarantine him from the rest of the family. We were all frantic and did everything to make him feel better. Doctors came and went, pontificating and prattling, while I brought the child sweet things and cool drinks for his fever. Each evening I would read to him from a children’s encyclopedia. Dorik recovered, thank God, but before long I found myself breaking out in a rash on my stomach. It spread to my back and arms. Soon I began to cough blood.

Papa grew anxious for me, remembering how my sister Masha had swiftly been taken from us by an illness. Every night he brought me water in a large tin cup, his wrinkled hand trembling. The water would run out of my mouth and down my chin, but I would cover his dear, sweet hand with kisses. And he would sob, taking hold of my hand, pressing it to his beard.

Varvara Mikhailovna almost never left my side. Her soft, full face and chestnut curls were a comfort to me. When Papa left the room, she would climb onto the bed and hold me, rubbing her cheek against mine, so close, without any fear that she might catch my illness.

We had become dear friends. Though we’d met several years before in Moscow, we didn’t see much of each other. Our correspondence grew longer and more intimate, and I finally persuaded Mama to let her come and live with us. Secretarial help is always needed at Yasnaya Polyana, and Varvara can type and take dictation.

She has been here for several months now, and we have grown to love each other in the pure love of Christ. We share all fears, all hopes. We touch: hand to hand, chin to chin. We call and respond, alternately, reveling in the flux of real affection.

Now March has come, and the air shimmers with expectation. The midmorning sun on the snow outside is almost too bright to bear, brassy on the windows, filling the house with thick shafts of light. The ice lining the dirt road to our door has begun to melt at the edges.

I’m feeling better, too, though I still cough blood in the morning. The measles have disappeared, but Dr Makovitsky has raised the specter of consumption. This worries Papa – terrifies him, in fact. But Mama does not trust Dr Makovitsky, which is pure spite on her part; she insists on bringing these doctors from Moscow. They claim that I must spend at least two months in the Crimea for my lungs. I spoke of this possibility to Varvara Mikhailovna last night as she daubed my forehead with a moist cloth.

‘If I go,’ I explained to her, ‘Papa will be left alone, and Mama will devour him. He’ll be miserable without me. Who would protect him?’

‘There is Dr Makovitsky.’

‘Mama isn’t afraid of him. She treats him like a little boy. She would have free reign over the house. There’s no telling what damage –’

‘Your father can take care of himself, Sasha. He’s far more in control here than you realize. Your mother is the one who doesn’t stand a chance.’

This was absurd, but I didn’t pursue it, turning on my stomach so that Varvara could massage my neck and shoulders.

‘I’m frightened, Varvara,’ I said.

‘By what?’

‘If I go, I may never see Papa again. He is so frail.’

‘Leo Nikolayevich has been frail for many years. But he’s a tough old bird.’

Varvara muttered something about my silliness as she bent down, putting her chin against the crook of my neck. I could feel her warm breath on my skin, her rhythmical exhalation. We do this almost every night now, savoring these quiet moments together. Occasionally we will read a passage together from the Bible or some piece of Buddhist scripture. Bulgakov, at my request, supplied us with a copy of his list of quotations from the great European thinkers and poets, and we read these aloud. I fall asleep thinking of Leconte de Lisle and Sully Prudhomme, dreaming of a warm, sunlit terrace on the Black Sea, where Varvara and I will sit for hours, reading novels, eating oranges, and drinking tea.

But I hate to leave Papa at a time when he seems terribly in need of my support. He needs to feel that I am here, his shield against Mama.

Papa is old, yes, but he is working well on so many projects. There is ‘The Khodynka,’ a story, and his introduction to
The Way of Life
. He writes endless letters, too. I don’t know why he bothers. Thank goodness for Bulgakov and Varvara, who help him every day by typing into the wee hours.

Papa came into my bedroom this morning, dressed in white. Like a priest.

‘My sweetheart, I just spoke with your mother, and we have decided that you must leave for the Crimea as soon as possible. You can take Varvara Mikhailovna with you, for company.’

‘Do you want me to go?’

He put his thin arms around my shoulders and said that he would give anything not to lose me, but that I must go to preserve my health. He also said that I must not worry about him, and that, in any case, I’d be gone for only a short time.

‘It will be summer before you even notice,’ he said. ‘Soon we’ll all be swimming in the Voronka – like always.’

He promised a vegetarian hunt as soon as I came back. He winked, and we kissed, but his eyes had filled with tears. I wondered whether in three months Papa would exist for me as anything but a sharp feeling of sadness, a photographic image on my bed table, a row of books, an empty room.

It’s not that I don’t like it here at Yasnaya Polyana. Would I have stayed for nearly half a century if I’d wanted to leave? Yasnaya Polyana was once magnificent – in the days of old Count Volkonsky, Lyovochka’s grandfather.
That
house would have suited me fine. But Lyovochka gambled it away. One wing had become a schoolhouse for peasant children – an attempt to put Rousseau’s idiotic theories of education into practice. The heart is naturally wicked, as the Scriptures say. The other wing is where I was asked to live. It was barren, with floors of polished oak mixed with dimpled pine and no carpets. The windows had no curtains to subdue the harsh light teeming in from the fields. Except for the odd portrait of an illustrious ancestor, the white walls were devoid of ornament. My husband of only a few days led me into a bedroom that was more like a barracks, without wardrobes or chests of drawers. The miserably hard bed was simply a pad of tightly woven straw, and Lyovochka insisted that we use an old red-leather pillow that had been his grandfather’s. I was expected to sleep in felt slippers to keep my feet warm, or to get a pair of bast shoes of the kind worn by peasant women!

I had been through the most trying week of my life. Lyovochka turned up at the church in the Kremlin an hour late for the wedding ceremony, saying he could not find a clean shirt!

After the service, through which I wept like a ninny, we bade everyone good-bye and set off into the future. We went by coach to a little village outside of Moscow called Birulyevo, where we stayed at an inn. Lyovochka behaved like a rabid dog, but I had expected this, after reading his diaries. It took me years to understand why he gave me those diaries. Lyovochka wanted a reader, not a wife. Someone to devote herself to his language, his vision. And now he wants other readers: Chertkov, Sasha, Bulgakov, Dushan Makovitsky. So I am useless.

I feel as forlorn now as I did then, forty-eight years ago, when we drove through the gates of Yasnaya Polyana on a hot, dusty day in late September. I was swimming in my own perspiration, overdressed for the occasion in a blue silk dress. Aunt Toinette, wizened and skeptical, stood on the front stoop with an icon in her hands. The stony look in her eye contradicted her welcoming words.

‘She is preparing to suffer,’ Lyovochka whispered in my ear.

I genuflected before the icon, kissed it, and greeted everyone politely. Sergey Nikolayevich passed around a tray of stale bread and salt. I was eager to get inside, where it was cool. We sat opposite one another in the front hall, and tea was passed around from the antique samovar. It was lukewarm and tasted of burnt metal.

‘We are delighted to welcome you,’ Sergey said. He seemed short of breath and deeply uncomfortable in the presence of his younger brother’s new wife – though he would soon enough fall in love with my sister Tanya. Aunt Toinette nodded heavily, looking a thousand years old. I was introduced, one by one, to the three servants who were living behind the kitchen. Only three servants for a house of that size!

That night, after another round of animalistic sex, Lyovochka fell into a snoring slumber, but I lay awake, my nerves tingling, wondering what I had done. Lyovochka woke halfway through the night and shouted ‘Not her! Not her!’

‘Darling,’ I said, shaking him. ‘What on earth is wrong?’

‘I must have been dreaming.’

‘About me?’

‘No.’

‘About what?’

‘Do I always have to confess my dreams? Is that what marriage means to you?’

I apologized and let him drift back to sleep in my arms. But I know now that, yes, that is what marriage is about. Or should be about.

During those first lonely months, I kept thinking about Mama, wondering what the first months of her married life were like. Her marriage was not perfect. Papa was something of a flirt, which did not make life easy. She, of course, had her own flaws. I have since learned, through Lyovochka, about her dalliance with Turgenev, that they were lovers. What a literary family we have turned out to be!

Mama was fifteen when she met Papa. She had been ill for several weeks at her parents’ country house in Tula. A mysterious fever had consumed her, and the prognosis was not good. In desperation, her father turned to a famous young doctor from Moscow, Dr Andrey Behrs, who at age thirty-three was making a name for himself at court. This handsome young doctor was a friend of Turgenev, who had a summer estate in the nearby district of Orel.

Once Papa set eyes on Lyubov Alexandrovna, his heart was no longer free. Her pale skin and dark eyes, her black hair and clean, broad forehead obsessed him. He remained at her bedside for a month, sitting up with her through the night when her fever rose. His courtly manners impressed Alexander Islenyev, my grandfather, though he buckled when his daughter announced, at the end of the doctor’s supposedly medical visit, that she wished to marry her physician.