The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (7 page)

I loved thinking that these volumes were Tolstoy’s very own. I clasped my hands behind my back, determined to touch nothing else. Various portraits on the wall caught my eye. There was Dickens in the flush of youth, his quick eyes blazing, and the poets Fet and Pushkin. I sat down again on the leather sofa, focusing my eyes on the ornate little table beside it, an antique, with a bell on it (for summoning me, perhaps?), and a vase of blue glass, filled with ornamental straw.

The door opened before I had even heard footsteps. It was Tolstoy, who stepped into the room like a sweet, old grandfather, apple cheeked and beaming, his fur-lined Siberian boots trailing clumps of snow. He wore loose, baggy trousers and a blue linen blouse, tied at the waist. He rubbed his red hands together.

‘I’m so glad you’re here!’ he said. ‘I’m so glad!’

His greeting was almost fulsome, but I did not question his sincerity. There was no room for that.

I handed him the letter from Chertkov, but he put the envelope on the desk without a glance. ‘Vladimir Grigorevich has already written about you at great length. I need your help quite badly. My new collection is hard work – it requires so much effort, and I am such an old man. Too old. But let’s talk about you. How is your own work progressing?’

I thanked him for his interest, but he dismissed my gratitude, saying that my writing had caught his attention, as it had Chertkov’s. I was grateful.

We talked about the work I might do on
For Every
Day
, which Tolstoy had once thought of calling
Circle
of Reading
, suggesting that one should keep reading and rereading the sayings it contained, continuously, as a circle is continuous. (Chertkov preferred the other title, so it was called
For Every Day
.) My work will be to compile an anthology of wise sayings for daily use in contemplation by the average Russian. An alternative to the Scriptures, or something to be read alongside them. I am to help in gathering and selecting quotations, and Tolstoy will read and approve (or disapprove) of what I do.

We sat together on the couch like children, our legs side by side, while Leo Nikolayevich (as he immediately told me to call him) spoke. Each day thirty or forty letters arrive from well-wishers, people in a state of spiritual crisis, angry readers, political revolutionaries, madmen. Leo Nikolayevich sifts through these himself, labeling the envelopes with a chalk marker: N.A. (no answer), A. (appeal for help), and S. (silly). Some of the silly letters and letters of appeal will be put in a tray each morning, and I will be asked to construct some response to them. Leo Nikolayevich reserves for himself those that most interest him. All letters will, after drafting, be taken to the Remington room for typing by his daughter Sasha. ‘You will like Sasha,’ he said. ‘She’s a lively girl, very attentive.’

The day will unfold from there, routinely. He explained that, unless he rings for me, he prefers to work undisturbed until two, when the entire household sits down to lunch in the dining room, with Leo Nikolayevich presiding over a discussion of some current topic. After eating, he likes to walk the grounds or, if he feels well enough, ride into the village or along a dirt trail in the forest on Delire. At five he returns to his study and takes a glass of tea, then works until the call comes for dinner, which is promptly at seven. I have an open invitation to remain whenever I choose. After dinner there is music or chess. He retires early most nights with the hope of reading, though now he reads less, or so he said.

‘You do not look well, Valentin Fedorovich,’ he said to me. ‘Do you feel all right?’

‘I slept rather badly last night. It may take a few days to adjust to a new bed.’

He put his frail hand on my forehead and asked me to lie on the couch. I protested, of course, but he insisted.

‘Lie here. Take a brief nap. I find that brief naps can help a great deal when one doesn’t feel well.’ He put a blanket around my knees. ‘I will bring you a glass of tea.’

As he left the room to get my tea, I savored the unreality, the touching absurdity, of my situation. Here was the greatest author of the West, Leo Tolstoy, fetching tea for me, his new secretary, nearly sixty years his junior. This was a man I could easily love. Indeed, as I lay there on my back, surveying the crumbling plaster on the ceiling, I loved him already.

Mama came into the Remington room this morning as I was typing, carrying a shawl. A blue shawl spun to a woolly froth, which she insisted I simply must have over my legs. ‘You’ve never been a healthy girl,’ she said, tucking the ends around my knees. I reminded her that it was Masha who had always been ill, not me. Mama just wanted to snoop.

‘So what is this you’re typing?’ she asked, casually. ‘Letters? A new story?’ The woman has no grace.

‘A nosy woman soon loses her nose,’ I said.

‘Alexandra Lvovna!’

Whenever she wants to feign disapproval, she calls me by my Christian names. Even the servants around here call me Sasha. I am not pretentious.

‘He’s working with Bulgakov on
For Every Day
,’ I said. ‘You needn’t worry. He’s been saying nothing
in
print
about you.’ We both know that Papa writes the truth about her in his diary. That’s why she wants to read it all the time, and why Papa tries to keep it hidden. It’s become a silly game of hide-and-seek.

‘You’ve become rude and unladylike,’ Mama said. ‘I don’t know why Papa makes you do all his dirty work,’ she added, gesturing toward the typewriter.

‘There’s nothing dirty about the work I do for Papa.’ I turned my back and began typing again.

‘Do you like Bulgakov?’

‘Well enough,’ I said. ‘He’s polite. A bit naive, perhaps. But he’s young.’ In fact, I find him disingenuous, even shifty. But I would not tell Mama such a thing. She is always looking for potential allies, and Bulgakov strikes me as one of those people who quickly turn the color of any room they enter.

This past year Mama has become impossible, positively bleeding with jealousy and bourgeois rancor. Weeping, preening in the mirror, prowling about the house all night like a crazed animal! Papa does not deserve this. I cannot understand why God put this particular burden on Russia’s greatest author.

Masha, my sister, was Papa’s favorite before she died. She always appeared to understand his ideas, though I doubt she did; still, it’s not worth criticizing the dead. Since she passed away, I have made myself indispensable to Papa, and he is grateful to me. He loves me now, much as I love him. Masha loved him, but she was weak. Her cheeks were pale as eggshells, her lips were always blue, quivering even when she was silent. She professed Tolstoyan values, including chastity, but how she tumbled into the arms of Obolensky, that fool, who was all fancy breeding with no cash to back it up. Papa cried at her wedding, but the tears were not joyful ones. I, on the other hand, have resolved to dedicate myself to Papa. I have read his books and, unlike most of those who surround him, I have
understood
them.

And I will never marry. Why would the daughter of Leo Tolstoy wish to serve another man?

Mama can hardly bear it that Papa lets me type his work. She used to recopy his manuscripts in that finicky hand of hers. She likes to recall how day after day, during the composition of
Anna
, she would wake up dreaming about Vronsky, Levin, Kitty, wondering what would next befall them.

Sometimes I envy her those early days when Papa was fresh, writing novels and stories. But his work now is more important. Novels are bourgeois entertainment unless the author adopts a clear moral tone. This is why Papa dislikes William Shakespeare. ‘You can never tell where Shakespeare stands,’ Papa says. ‘He’s invisible. It is the duty of an author to present himself to the public. To say,
this will do, and this will not do
.’

Papa adores the clean copy that I bring him every morning, though he quickly spoils it, scratching out words, putting in new phrases, whole sentences, and paragraphs in the margins or between lines. He likes to make balloons at the side, full of corrections that I’m supposed to understand and incorporate into further drafts. I hate when I have to creep into his study to ask for clarification. Of course, he’s infinitely patient. He thanks me every time, as if anyone wouldn’t be glad to do as much for Leo Tolstoy.

I’m working late tonight, the lantern buzzing beside the typewriter, trying to finish today’s projects. What a day it has been! Sergeyenko’s father was here, one of Papa’s oldest friends. Father is always like a little boy around Sergeyenko, joshing and teasing. I love to see that. He brought us a gramophone for a gift, including a voice recording of Papa made some months before in Moscow. Mama put the record on that ghastly machine, with its brass horn and terrifying knobs. It was set up in the dining room on the table opposite the door, where everyone could gape at it. Our servants – the footmen, the cook, even a few stable boys – gathered in the hallway to listen. Some peered through the balustrade into the dining room as Papa’s voice boomed through the house in its queer distortion. It was Papa, yes. But it was
not
Papa. The glass vase on the mantel tingled to the point of shattering.

The machine pleased everyone but Papa. I understood exactly why he crouched like that in the Voltaire chair, drawing himself inward like a turtle hiding within its shell.

My brother Andrey came from Moscow, looking dapper, grating on Papa as usual with his chatter about countess this and colonel that. He cares nothing for his father’s feelings and knows little of his ideas. ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’ Andrey kept saying, fussing with the gramophone to make it talk louder and louder.

Papa said, ‘Like all foolish inventions of this so-called civilization, this machine will soon become a bore,’ and left the room.

The remark upset Sergeyenko, whose father had brought the gramophone and the record in the first place. But he knows Papa and his ways.

‘Your father is something of a Luddite, I fear,’ he said, scratching his beard.

Mama, bless her, immediately took Papa’s recording off the gramophone and put on a Glinka duet – also a gift from Sergeyenko. This brought Papa back into the room, smiling. He sat back in his chair, putting his hands on his knees and shutting his eyes. When the duet was finished, Mama put on another of the records we had been given: Ballinstin’s version of the serenade from
Don Giovanni
. Papa produced a wide smile that showed his pink, wet gums. ‘This is very nice,’ he said, patting his legs with both hands. ‘Very nice.’ Sergeyenko glowed.

An hour later we gathered for tea. Mama had invited Bulgakov to stay. He seemed to gape at everyone and blew his nose repeatedly on a dirty handkerchief. I can hardly stand him and cannot imagine what Chertkov saw in him. Papa’s last secretary, Gusev, was ever so much better, a sincere man who understood Papa’s ideas better than Papa does himself. Even Chertkov said so.

Andrey, like Mama a lover of discord, rambled on about patriotism, soon turning to the superiority of western Europe over Russia and questioning the proper relation of landowners to the muzhiks. Tanya’s husband, Sukhotin, grew excited and began to lecture about the price of land. When he finished his little address, Sergeyenko added that the Russian peasant has grown increasingly furious with landowners in the past decade, and rightly so. They deserve better treatment, he said, punctuating the air with a finger.