The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (3 page)

I dipped my head forward and mumbled.

Chertkov drew his lips into a sidelong sharklike smile. ‘I like you very much, dear boy. I’m sure that Leo Nikolayevich will be grateful to you for whatever help you can give him.’ As he spoke, he pulled thin black leather gloves over his hands to hide a particularly raw patch of eczema. I felt sure, at last, the job was mine.

‘I hope I will be able to help him,’ I said.

‘You will. I see that.’

I grinned stupidly, and Chertkov, as if annoyed with me, stood up. ‘Good-bye now,’ he said. ‘I look forward to receiving your diaries. And remember: Don’t let anyone find out about them. Not even Leo Nikolayevich. It would distress him.’

We shook hands, exchanging a few words about my preparations for the trip to Tula, by train, the following week. He escorted me into the dark front hall. Our footsteps echoed off the high ceiling and slate floor. A servant held out my coat and hat for me.

‘I would not entrust you with this position if I didn’t believe you were one of us,’ Chertkov said, his black-gloved hands resting on my shoulders. ‘I’m terribly worried, you know. Leo Nikolayevich is frail and nervous, though you will never hear a word of complaint from him. It is painful that I should have to live apart from him in his last days.’

I nodded, but his comment did not seem to require affirmation.

‘I’m grateful to you, Vladimir Grigorevich,’ I said.

He deflected my comment with a wave of one hand.

‘Godspeed,’ he said, pushing the door open against a swirl of snow. ‘And remember what I said:
write everything
down
!’ He kissed me on either cheek and pushed me into the fierce January wind. A black sleigh waited for me in the drive, with a driver bundled in so much fur that he did not look human.

We drove off at a trot along a winding road through a line of bare elms. Huddled in my kaftan, with the light snow ticking on my forehead, I felt exalted and terrified – like Elijah being whisked to heaven in a whirlwind fire.

LETTER TO PYOTR MELNIKOV,
A WORKER FROM BAKU

YASNAYA POLYANA, 22 JANUARY 1910

It seems to me that two issues concern you: God? – what is God? – and the nature of the human soul. You also inquire about God’s relation to humankind, and wonder about life after death.

Let me take the first question. What is God and how does he relate to humankind? The Bible says a lot about how God created the universe and how he relates to his people, meting out rewards and punishments. This is nonsense. Forget it altogether. Put it out of your mind. God is the beginning of all things, the essential condition of our being, and a little bit of what we take to be life within us and revealed to us by Love (hence we say, ‘God is Love’). But, again, please forget those arguments about God creating the world and the human race and how he punishes everyone who disobeys. You must erase that from your mind in order to consider your own life freshly.

What I have said is all we know of God, or can know.

About the soul, we can only say that what we refer to as life is merely the divine principle. Without it nothing would exist. There is nothing physical about it, nothing temporal. So it cannot die when the body ceases to exist.

You also – like all of us – want to know about life after death.

In order to understand me, pay close attention to what I say next.

For mortal man (that is, for the body alone) time exists: that is, hours, days, months, and years pass. For the body alone, there also exists the physical world – what can be seen, touched by the hands. What is big or little, hard or soft, durable or fragile. But the soul is timeless; it merely resides in the human body. The
I
that I spoke of seventy years ago is the same
I
I refer to now. Nor does the soul have anything physical about it. Wherever I am, no matter what happens, my soul, the
I
that I refer to, stays the same and is always nonphysical. Thus, time exists only for the body. For the soul, time and place and the physical world have no reality. Therefore, we can’t really ask what will happen to the soul or where, after death, it will go, because the phrase
will be
suggests time, and the word
where
suggests place. Neither time nor place has meaning for the soul once the physical body has ceased to be.

That speculations about life after death or heaven and hell are shallow and mistaken should by now be clear. If the soul were going somewhere to live after death, it would have been somewhere before birth. But nobody seems to notice that.

My feeling is that the soul within us does not die when our body dies, but that we cannot know what will happen to it and where it will go – even though we
do
know that it cannot die. About punishments and rewards: I think our life here has meaning only when we live in accordance with the commandment to love one another. Life becomes distressing, troubled – bad – when we ignore this commandment. It would seem that whatever rewards and punishments our deeds warrant, we shall receive in this life, since none other can be known.

I know it for sure now. They’ll do anything to come between me and my husband. It would be hard enough, God knows, without them pursuing us like Furies. What’s worse is they think I don’t know about their plan to write me and my children – Leo Tolstoy’s children and grandchildren! – out of his will. I always know what’s going on behind my back. I can tell it by their looks, their whispers and winks, even their deference. They somehow imagine I don’t notice the secret messages delivered when my back is turned. Only yesterday a servant carried a letter from Sergeyenko to Lyovochka right under my nose, but, of course, I recognized his big, loopy handwriting on the envelope! Do they think I was born yesterday?

They spread rumors about me to the press. Last week an article appeared in Moscow claiming, ‘Countess Tolstoy has become estranged from her husband. They barely talk. They do not share a similar view of politics or religion.’ What nonsense! And it has all been spread by Chertkov and his friends, who have succeeded in coming between me and Lyovochka, in spite of our forty-eight years of marriage. In the end, however, I will triumph. Our love will triumph.

I’m treated as a stranger here. But am I not the very person who bore Leo Tolstoy his thirteen children (not bad for a preacher of chastity!), the woman who sees that his clothes are washed and mended, his vegetarian meals prepared to his liking? Am I not the one who takes his pulse before he falls asleep each night, who gives him enemas when his bowels are blocked, who brings him tea with a large slice of lemon when he cannot sleep?

I am a slave. An outcast in my own household. To think that I was the daughter of a famous Moscow physician! My father admired Leo Nikolayevich for his position in the aristocracy, yes, but also for his literary accomplishments. Who wouldn’t? Even then, it was obvious that he would become an important writer. He was the talk of Moscow and St Petersburg. I can remember my mother saying to me, ‘One day you will read about Count Tolstoy in the Encyclopedia.’

When my sisters and I were teenagers, Papa would put tapers in the window once a week, as was the custom then – to signal our ‘at home.’ We waited, Lisa, Tanya, and me. We all loved Count Tolstoy desperately, though Papa and Mama assumed that Lisa, as the eldest, was the obvious mate for him. I was the middle girl, slender and dark-eyed, with a soft, reedy voice and teeth like ivory. I was the envy of Lisa, who was a cat – clawing and mewing, slinking about the house. Lisa had brains, yes. She was an ‘intellectual.’ But she was pompous and, if I do say so myself, a fraud.

Tanya could have been more dangerous. She was all mischief and commotion, eyes black as coal, with hair cut straight across her forehead like an Oriental whore. When she walked across the room, every muscle in her body signaled to the world. I hated her then. Who could tolerate the fetching way she would dance and sing, her grandiose schemes for ‘making it’ in the theater? As if Papa would let one of his daughters spread her tail feathers on the Moscow stage! Poor Papa.

I don’t think I was as difficult as the others. Nor should it have surprised anyone that Count Tolstoy chose me over my sisters. Though not brazen about it, I had accomplishments. I could play the piano – not like I do today, though not so badly either. My watercolors were passable. I could dance as well as most girls of my rank and position. And I could write like the wind – stories and poems, diaries, letters. Then, as now, Lyovochka had an instinct for self-preservation. He has always known how to get what he needs.

I first met the count when I was ten. He had come to visit Papa in the Kremlin, where we had an apartment, his dark mustache drooping, his uniform perfectly pressed, the boots so shiny you could see his knees reflecting on his toes. A ceremonial sword hung from his belt. He was about to join his regiment in the Danube, he said, affecting a quiet, slightly melancholic swagger. I stood meekly in one corner while he and Papa talked.

They sat in the front parlor, directly across from each other. Papa couldn’t see me, but I could see the count, his knees pressed together, his hands large and red, folded awkwardly on his lap like sea crabs. As Papa spoke, the count’s eyes seemed to flash with attentiveness. His stare, then as now, was compelling, irresistible. He hunched forward on the low cerise chair. The yellow epaulets and the double row of brass buttons on his uniform were almost too much for me to bear!

He and Papa talked for two hours in muffled tones, as if plotting the overthrow of the monarchy. What was all the hush about? Were they deciding which of us girls would be the future Countess Tolstoy? I don’t think I could have wondered such a thing. After all, I was only ten years old. But my heart went out to Leo Tolstoy. I decided then and there that, one day, I would be his wife. When he left, I stole back into the parlor and tied a pink ribbon around the back leg of the chair he’d sat on.

After that, Papa spoke often of the young count, for whom he had a special affection. Once he let me borrow his novel
Childhood
. I read it in one long night, by candlelight, while my sisters slept. Every sentence blazed like a match tip. The images whirled in my head for weeks. No wonder all of Moscow was agog.

But that was years before any of us was really old enough for marriage. Suddenly, we were ready. Lisa was, anyway. And Mama was fed up. This courting business – the gentlemen callers, the endless teas and tension – had gone far enough. She wanted Lisa off her hands as quickly as possible.

In July a brainstorm overtook her; she would visit her father at Ivitsi, in the province of Tula, not far from the Tolstoy family estate at Yasnaya Polyana. It just so happened that we three girls (and little Volodya, of course) trotted along as well.

Mama said Lisa was the ideal mate for this eccentric, overly intellectual count, and she always made sure that Lisa sat next to him on the sofa in Moscow. Lisa would natter on about the latest philosophical works hot off the German presses. ‘It often occurs to me,’ intoned our Lisa, her small voice trilling like a bird’s, ‘that the German Higher Criticism has made ill use of Hegel’s dialectic. Don’t you think so, Count?’ Lyovochka’s face would glaze over.

What was actually on the count’s young mind was hunting in the Caucasus, though he would occasionally dazzle (and alarm) us with a speech about the wonders of Immanuel Kant. Sometimes, catching my eye, he would wink, and once, in the hallway, he squeezed my hand when nobody was looking.

Much as self-advertisement disgusts me, I will admit I was lovely in those days, with a tiny waist a man could happily surround with his powerful hands! That hot July morning, when the maid came to say the coach was ready to take us to Count Tolstoy’s estate, I knew that he would soon be my husband.

Papa waved his handkerchief from the steps of Grandfather’s small manor house as the ancient coach creaked and wobbled down the dirt road. Miles down the road we came to the soft, undulating cornfields typical of the Tula region. The corn, wheat, and rye, the long, symmetrical bands of muzhiks bending over their work in happy unison rolled past, then the forest of Zasyeka, with its thick, green woodland smelling of pine and mud. We came upon the village of Yasnaya Polyana, which did not impress me. A miserable clutch of thatched huts, shaky isbas, and stone barns. The village pump, with a tin pail slung beneath the spout, was spurting muddy water. The big wooden door of the church swung wide, and a middle-aged widow in a black veil stood beside it, chattering away to a toothless old nun the size and shape of a tree stump. The widow bowed gravely at our coach as we passed, feigning deference – the typical hypocrisy of the Russian lower classes.

Leo Tolstoy lived in his large ancestral home, which bore the same name as the village, Mama told us. Like all good teachers, she had a way of seeming enthusiastic about the obvious. She went on to explain how the count, like most young men of his rank, had been addicted to gambling. (‘Your father, of course, was the exception,’ she said.) Playing cards with an unscrupulous neighbor, he had bet the central part of his house to stay in a game. He lost, and the unforgiving neighbor actually hauled off the main body of Yasnaya Polyana, leaving the wings behind, freestanding and ridiculous.

‘He no longer gambles, I believe,’ Lisa said. ‘Nor does he drink overmuch. He is practically a teetotaler. And he is
very
devout.’ She sucked her lips into a pert rosebud that made me want to slap her. But I restrained myself, knowing what I knew about the count’s real intentions.

‘I’ll bet he’s worse than ever,’ Tanya said. ‘All young men drink and gamble, and Lord knows what they do with women.’

‘That tongue of yours is going to wag you all the way to a nunnery,’ Mama said, fussing with her hair.

We passed between two whitewashed towers at the entrance to the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana. The big stone house that had been refashioned from the abandoned wings stood at the end of the long serpentine drive, with parallel rows of silver birches rising along it like an honor guard. The meadows beyond them looked rich and silky, spotted with buttercups. And butterflies, too! The house competed admirably with nature for our attention. It was a long house on two floors, white as alabaster, with a Greek pediment topping a veranda over the entrance. A beautiful house, I whispered to myself. I was determined to be its mistress.