The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (30 page)

FROM ANDREY TO L. N.

Dear Papa,

Only the very best of feelings, such as I mentioned at our last meeting, oblige me to say what I think about my mother’s condition.

Tanya, Sergey, Ilya, Mikhail, and I have gathered here, and however much we consider the matter, we have been unable to think of any way but one of protecting Mama from herself, though I think she will eventually kill herself no matter what we do. The only way to prevent it is to put her under constant supervision. Of course, she would never submit to it. The present situation is an impossible one, since we cannot abandon our own families and work to remain at our mother’s side. I know you have finally decided not to return, but as a conscientious duty I must warn you that by this final decision you are killing our mother.

I know how heavy the burden has been for you during the last months, but I also know that Mama is mentally ill, and that living together has, in these late years, been unbearable for you both. Had you summoned us to speak with Mama, so that you might not separate for an infinite period but amicably in the hope that her nerves would calm, we might not have experienced this dreadful suffering that we share with you both – even though you are far away. As to what you said to me the last time we met about the luxury surrounding you, it strikes me that since you have endured it up until now you might have sacrificed the last years of your life for the sake of your family and put up with it awhile longer.

Forgive me, dearest Papa, if my letter seems too full of advice, but I feel how painful and sad things are for you and Mama, whom I find it impossible to look at without anguish.

FROM TANYA TO L. N.

Dearest, most precious Papa,

You have always suffered from too much advice, so I won’t give you any more. Like everyone else, you have to act as best you can and as you consider necessary. I shall never condemn you. Of Mama, I will say only that she is pitiable and touching. For her, either fear or power is necessary. We try to calm her, and this seems to help.

I am exhausted and foolish. Forgive me. Good-bye, my friend.

FROM L. N. TO SERGEY AND TANYA

4:00
A.M., OPTINA
. 31
OCTOBER
1910

Dearest Sergey and Tanya,

Thank you very much, kind friends, true friends, for your sympathy in my grief and for your letters. Your letter, Sergey, gave me special pleasure. It is brief, pithy, clear, and – above all – generous. I can’t help being afraid of everything and can’t free myself from a feeling of responsibility, but I had not the strength to act otherwise. I am also writing to Mama. She will show you the letter. I wrote, after thinking it over carefully, what I was able to write.

We are just leaving here, but we do not yet know where we’re going. You can always reach me through Chertkov.

Good-bye, and thank you, sweet children. Forgive me for causing you to suffer – especially you, my darling Tanya. Well, that is all. I must hurry to avoid what I most fear – that your mother will find me. A meeting with her now would be terrible. Well, good-bye.

FROM L. N. TO SOFYA ANDREYEVNA

OPTINA
. 31
OCTOBER
1910

Dearest Sonya,

A meeting between us, still more my return at this time, is impossible. It would be harmful for you, as my position and ill health would become even worse than they are because of your agitation and irritability. I advise you to reconcile yourself to what has happened. Try to settle down in your new situation and, above all, attend to your health.

If you … I cannot say love me but at least do not hate me … you should try to understand my position to some extent. And if you do that, you will not only not condemn me but help me find peace and the possibility of living some sort of human life. Help me by controlling yourself, by not wishing for me to return right now.

Your present mood reveals more than anything else your loss of self-control, which makes my return unthinkable at present. Only you can free me from the suffering we endure. Try to channel all your strength toward pacifying your soul.

I have spent two days at Shamardino and Optina, and now I am leaving. I will mail this letter on the road. I shall not say where I’m going, since I consider our separation essential for us both. Don’t think I left because I didn’t love you. I love and pity you with all my heart, but I can’t do otherwise than as I am doing. Your letter was written sincerely, I know, but you are not capable of carrying out what you say. What matters is not the fulfillment of any wish or demand of mine, only your equanimity and calm and reasonable relation to life.

As long as that is missing, life with you is unthinkable for me. To return to you while you are in such a state would mean to renounce life. And I do not consider that I have the right to do that.

Farewell, dear Sonya, and may God help you! Life is not a jest, and we have no right to throw it away on a whim. And to measure it by its length of time is also unreasonable. Perhaps those months that remain to us are more important than all the years we have yet lived, and they should be lived well.

I traveled to Shamardino with Varvara Mikhailovna just two days after Papa. Chertkov told me exactly where to find them.

All day we felt free, Varvara and I, riding in a second-class carriage with the golden sun of October glazing the stubble fields on either side of the train as we rode southward. We would lunge through a deep pine forest, full of shadows, then burst onto open plains. We would rise over small hills, descend into valleys, then pass beneath rocky cliffs. We both sat tensely in our seats, upright, gazing at the wonder of creation.

When I think of the world’s great beauty, I am saddened by humankind. We have nothing to match it. Our souls are dirty, soiled by greed, by hatred of differences.

Occasionally Varvara would reach across the seat and touch my hand. It moved me to tears. There is such love between us. It makes the bright world all the more blazing.

I had brought with me a cache of letters from my brothers, from Tanya and Mama. I had not, of course, read them, but I knew they would cause Papa a good deal of pain. What he required now was release. It seems we cannot let him die in peace.

Near dusk, we arrived at the white-walled nunnery at Shamardino, where my aunt now lives. She is an Orthodox Christian who adheres slavishly to the letter of the law, but she and Papa have remained on excellent terms. We went straight to my aunt’s narrow cell. I hardly recognized her. A dried-out little fig of a woman in a dark habit, she was taken aback when I entered.

‘A family conference?’ she said, with only a whiff of cynicism.

A nun should never be ironic, and she knew that.

‘Where is my father?’

‘Sit down, my dear,’ she said. She pointed a crooked finger at Varvara Mikhailovna. ‘And you, sit. Who is this young woman you have brought with you?’

I introduced my aunt to my companion, who looked fresh and fine in a peasant dress with yellow embroidery on the neckline. Her dark hair shone in the candlelight.

‘Alexandra Lvovna!’ cried Papa, who stood frozen in the doorway.

‘Papa!’

We embraced tightly, and he wept. I knew at once that he was glad to see me.

‘And you, Varvara,’ he said, cupping her chin in his hand.

He studied her like a bronze statue, then turned to me. ‘I hope your mother has not accompanied you?’

‘She is at home. But she is suffering.’

Papa shifted awkwardly from foot to foot.

‘There was nothing else you could do.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless, if something happens to her, it will sadden me. She is still my wife. One can’t avoid a sense of responsibility for things….’

‘She wants you back. You must know that.’

He shifted again, uncomfortably. ‘I have found an isba to rent,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the floor. ‘It’s a pleasant little hut within the sound of church bells. A good place to end my days, Sasha. I shall read and think and, perhaps, even write a little.’

‘Mama will find you. She will drag you home.’

Varvara Mikhailovna squeezed my wrist. Enough.

‘You’re right, I’m afraid,’ Papa answered. ‘We must leave before she finds us here.’

A servant passed in the hallway, and my aunt called to her for tea. ‘Sit down,’ she said to us. ‘This useless chatter upsets everyone.’

Papa bent to kiss his sister on the brow. ‘I cannot stay, though I would like to.’

I gave Papa the letters, and he took them reluctantly and went back to his room to read them.

Later that night, we sat about in Papa’s room, planning our next move. A fire in the stony hearth gave off the sweet odor of peat.

‘If we are to go,’ said Dushan Makovitsky, with his penchant for truisms, ‘we must know where we are going.’

‘Excellent, Dushan Petrovich,’ Varvara said, though I was the only one in the room who caught her sarcastic undertone. ‘Let us go somewhere.’

Papa seemed quite eager to discuss possible routes. It was suggested that Bulgaria or Turkey might be good destinations – nobody would know us there, and the climate would be tolerable. I wondered, however, if we might not need passports to cross the border. Why not settle in the Caucasus? There are several Tolstoyan colonies there, and they would be only too flattered if Leo Tolstoy himself chose to pass his final days among them.

We had been debating the pros and cons of the Caucasus for a while when, unexpectedly, Papa began to speak in an angry voice. It was quite unlike him. ‘No! I cannot stand these projections, these ridiculous plans. Let us go … anywhere will do. We need no plans.’

Papa has always avoided plans, preferring the spontaneity of a butterfly. He likes to point out that Christ himself was against plotting the future.

‘I am very tired,’ Papa said.

‘Let me take you to your bed, Papa.’

I led him to a cot in the small room with whitewashed walls and a vaulted ceiling. The bed table had been laid out just like at home, with a candle, some matches, a notebook, and sharpened pencils. He likes to be able to make notes in the middle of the night if he should awaken with an idea or want to record a dream.

He lay down gingerly. He was so exhausted he did not even want me to remove his boots, though I covered him with a rough wool blanket, since the room was very cold. He was asleep before I left, snoring through his wrinkled mouth. It worried me that his breathing was so uneven.

I slept in a room with several other women and Varvara Mikhailovna. It was a peculiar, disorienting experience. The room smelled of beeswax and disinfectant. A filthy cat slept under my cot, making my eyes itch. An old woman coughed in her sleep like a goat on the hillside. I was freezing.

Somehow, I managed to fall asleep. But Varvara Mikhailovna woke me at four, pricking the bubble of my dreaming with her sharp words.

‘Wake up, Sasha! We’re leaving. Your father wants to go while it’s dark. He thinks Sofya Andreyevna is closing in.’

I hated the cynical note she had been adopting. ‘It’s not possible,’ I said.

‘You frightened him last night. He thinks your mother is planning to follow you. He won’t be convinced otherwise.’

‘This is insane. Papa can’t stand this kind of shifting about.’

I saw Dushan Makovitsky in his nightdress, standing in the doorway with a candle. He had come to wake us and was waving frantically. His feet were bony and bare.

The road to the station at Kozelsk was full of ruts and runnels. Parts of it had been washed away by a recent storm, and there was a lengthy detour through a farmer’s turnip patch. Though the station was only nine miles away, it took hours to get there. The droshky we had borrowed from the nuns seemed barely to hang together. Papa groaned as the wheels rattled over each bump, and I knew now that he was dying. The glaze of his eyes frightened me. He seemed already to have abandoned the life of this world, though he had not yet entered the next one. I wanted to weep but restrained myself.

We took the first southbound train from Kozelsk, aiming vaguely for my cousin’s estate near Novocherkassk. Denisenko is fond of Papa, and they have recently been in correspondence. Papa seemed to approve of this plan, even though it would take at least twenty-four hours to get there.

‘Leo Nikolayevich is well enough for such a journey?’ Varvara asked Dushan.

‘He’s in reasonably good shape,’ he said.

Dushan Makovitsky is an optimist, as I am. We wanted very much to push straight through to Novocherkassk, if possible. But Papa looked ghastly when we got to the station, his eyes clouding over, his hands trembling.

‘Are you sure you’re able to travel, Papa?’

He looked at me askance, hurting my feelings.

‘Do you feel well enough, Leo Nikolayevich?’ Dushan asked him, taking his pulse. ‘There is no point in damaging your health.’

‘We have to go, Dushan. I have no choice.’

‘Pulse – seventy-six. Excellent,’ announced Dushan, as if my father’s health were his invention.

‘I think we should stay here,’ said Varvara. ‘Sofya Andreyevna will not follow. Tanya is with her.’

But the decision had already been made, and Papa was not going to change his mind.

‘Please get me the newspapers,’ he said. Whenever he begins a journey by train, he buys all the papers.

Dushan Makovitsky bought the papers, but I could see by his dour expression that something was amiss.

‘Read the headlines,’ he said, pointing to the front page of one paper. It read:
TOLSTOY ABANDONS HOME
!
WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN
! Another paper said:
SAGE OF
YASNAYA POLYANA TAKES FLIGHT
!

Papa leafed through them and shook his head. ‘They know everything,’ he said. ‘It’s no use.’

Everyone in the railway car was yammering about the headlines, embarrassing Papa. A dapper fellow behind us in an English waistcoat said, ‘He’s given her the slip. Good for him!’ His friend, a slightly older man, gave a wink and said, ‘She wasn’t giving him what he wanted, eh?’ They both giggled like schoolboys. Papa’s face took on the impassive but depthless quality of stamped tin. He clenched his fists.