The Lemon Table (11 page)

On the other hand, a year later, when everything is safe and stylized, he writes this: “You say, at the end of your letter, ‘I kiss you warmly.’ How? Do you mean, as you did then, on that June night, in the railway compartment? If I live a hundred years I will never forget those kisses.” May has become June, the timid suitor has become the recipient of myriad kisses, the bolt has been slid back a little. Is this the truth, or is that the truth? We, now, would like it to be neat then, but it is rarely neat; whether the heart drags in sex, or sex drags in the heart.

3
THE DREAM JOURNEY

H
e travelled. She travelled. But
they
did not travel; never again. She visited him at his estate, she swam in his pond—“the Undine of Saint Petersburg” he called her—and when she left he named the room in which she had slept after her. He kissed her hands, he kissed her feet. They met, they corresponded until his death, after which she protected his memory from vulgar interpretation. But thirty miles was all they travelled together.

They could have travelled. If only … if only.

But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past conditional.

She was about to marry for the second time. N. N. Vsevolozhsky, officer of hussars, clank, clank. When she asked his opinion of her choice, he declined to play. “It is too late to ask for my opinion.
Le vin est tiré—il faut le boire
.” Was she asking him, artist to artist, for his view of the conventional marriage she was about to make to a man with whom she had little in common? Or was it more than this? Was she proposing her own if-only, asking him to sanction the jilting of her fiancé?

But Grandpa, who himself had never married, declines either to sanction or applaud.
Le vin est tiré—il faut le boire
. Does he have a habit of lapsing into foreign phrases at key emotional moments? Do French and Italian provide the suave euphemisms which helps him evade?

Of course, if he had encouraged a late withdrawal from her second marriage, that would have let in too much reality, let in the present tense. He closes it off: drink the wine. This instruction given, fantasy can resume. In his next letter, twenty days later, he writes, “For my part, I am dreaming about how good it would be to travel about—just the two of us—for at least a month, and in such a way that no one would know who or where we were.”

It is a normal dream of escape. Alone together, anonymous, time on one’s hands. It is also, of course, a honeymoon. And where would the sophisticated artistic class go for their honeymoon if not to Italy? “Just imagine the following picture,” he teases. “Venice (perhaps in October, the best month in Italy) or Rome. Two foreigners in travelling clothes—one tall, clumsy, white-haired, long-legged, but very contented; the other a slender lady with remarkable dark eyes and black hair. Let us suppose her contented as well. They walk about the town, ride in gondolas. They visit galleries, churches, and so on, they dine together in the evening, they are at the theatre together—and then? There my imagination stops respectfully. Is it in order to conceal something, or because there is nothing to conceal?”

Did his imagination stop respectfully? Ours doesn’t. It seems pretty plain to us in our subsequent century. A crumbling gentleman in a crumbling city on a surrogate honeymoon with a young actress. The gondoliers are splish-sploshing them back to their hotel after an intimate supper, the soundtrack is operetta, and we need to be told what happens next? We are not talking about reality, so the feebleness of elderly, alcohol-weakened flesh is not an issue; we are very safely in the conditional tense, with the travelling rug tucked round us. So … if only … if only … then you would have fucked her, wouldn’t you? No denying it.

Elaborating the Venice honeymoon fantasy with a woman still between husbands has its dangers. Of course, you have again renounced her, so there is small risk that by exciting her imagination you might find her outside your front door one morning, perched on a travelling trunk and coyly fanning herself with her passport. No: the more real danger is of pain. Renunciation means the avoidance of love, and hence of pain, but even in this avoidance there are traps. There is pain to be had, for instance, in the comparison between the Venetian capriccio of your respectful imagination and the impending reality of her getting disrespectfully fucked on her actual honeymoon by an officer of hussars, N. N. Vsevolozhsky, who is as unfamiliar with the Accademia as he is with the unreliabilities of the flesh.

What heals pain? Time, the old wiseacres respond. You know better. You are wise enough to know that time does not always heal pain. The conventional image of the amatory bonfire, the eyeball-drying flame which dies to sad ashes, needs adjusting. Try instead a hissing gas-jet that scorches if you will but also does worse: it gives light, jaundicing, flat-shadowed and remorseless, the sort of light that catches an old man on a provincial platform as the train pulls out, a valetudinarian who watches a yellow window and a twitching hand withdraw from his life, who walks after the train a few paces as it curves into invisibility, who fixes his eye upon the red lamp of the guard’s wagon, holds on that until it is less than a ruby planet in the night sky, then turns away and finds himself still beneath a platform lamp, alone, with nothing to do except wait out the hours in a musty hotel, convincing himself he has won while knowing truly that he has lost, filling his sleeplessness with cosy if-onlys, and then return to the station and stand alone once more, in a kinder light but to make a crueller journey, back along those thirty miles he had travelled with her the previous night. The passage from Mtsensk to Oryol, which he will commemorate for the rest of his life, is always shadowed by that unrecorded return from Oryol to Mtsensk.

So he proposes a second dream journey, again to Italy. By now she is married, a change of status which is not an interesting subject for discussion. Drink the wine. She is going to Italy, perhaps with her husband, though travelling companions are not enquired after. He approves the journey, if only because it lets him offer her an alternative; not a rivalrous honeymoon this time, but a trip back in the painless past conditional. “I spent ten of the most delightful days in Florence, many, many years ago.” This use of time anaesthetizes pain. It was so many, many years ago that he was then “still under forty”—before the basis for life became renunciation. “Florence left on me the most fascinating and poetic impression—even though I was there
alone
. What it would have been like, had I been in the company of a woman who was understanding, good and beautiful—that above all!”

This is safe. The fantasy is manageable, his gift a false memory. A few decades later, the political leaders of his country would specialize in airbrushing the downfallen from history, in removing their photographic traces. Now here he is, bent over his album of memories, meticulously inserting the figure of a past companion. Paste it in, that photograph of the timid, appealing Verochka, while the lamplight rejuvenates your white hair into black shadow.

4
AT YASNAYA POLYANA

S
hortly after meeting her, he had gone to stay with Tolstoy, who took him out shooting. He was put in the best hide, over which snipe habitually passed. But that day, for him, the sky remained empty. Every so often, a shot would ring out from Tolstoy’s hide; then another; then another. All the snipe were flying to Tolstoy’s gun. It seemed typical. He himself shot a single bird, which the dogs failed to find.

Tolstoy thought him ineffectual, vacillating, unmanly, a frivolous socializer and a despicable Westernizer; embraced him, loathed him, spent a week in Dijon with him, quarrelled with him, forgave him, valued him, visited him, challenged him to a duel, embraced him, scorned him. This is how Tolstoy expressed sympathy when he lay dying in France: “The news of your illness has caused me much sorrow, especially when I was assured it was serious. I realized how much I cared for you. I felt that I should be much grieved if you were to die before me.”

Tolstoy at this time despised the taste for renunciation. Later, he began railing at the lusts of the flesh and idealizing a Christian peasant simplicity. His attempts at chastity failed with comic frequency. Was he a fraud, a fake renunciator; or was it more that he lacked the skills, and his flesh declined renunciation? Three decades later he died on a railway station. His last words were not, “The bell rang, and
ciao
, as the Italians say.” Does the successful renunciator envy his unsuccessful counterpart? There are ex-smokers who decline the offered cigarette but say, “Blow the smoke in my direction.”

She was travelling; she was working; she was married. He asked her to send him a plaster cast of her hand. He had kissed the real thing so many times, kissed an imagined version of the real thing in almost every letter he wrote her. Now he could lay his lips on a plaster version. Is plaster nearer to flesh than air? Or did the plaster turn his love and her flesh into a memorial? There is an irony to his request: normally it is the writer whose creative hand is cast in plaster; and normally by the time this is done he is dead.

So he proceeded deeper into old age, knowing that she was—had already been—his last love. And since form was his business, did he at this time remember his first love? He was a specialist in the matter. Did he reflect that first love fixes a life for ever? Either it impels you to repeat the same kind of love and fetishizes its components; or else it is there as warning, trap, counter-example.

His own first love had taken place fifty years before. She had been a certain Princess Shakhovskaya. He was fourteen, she was in her twenties; he adored her, she treated him like a child. This puzzled him until the day he found out why. She was already his father’s mistress.

The year after he shot snipe with Tolstoy, he visited Yasnaya Polyana again. It was Sonya Tolstoy’s birthday, and the house was full of guests. He proposed that each of them should recount the happiest moment of their lives. When his own turn in his own game arrived, he announced, with an exalted air and a familiar melancholy smile: “The happiest moment of my life is, of course, the moment of love. It is the moment when you meet the eyes of the woman you love and sense that she loves you too. This has happened to me once, perhaps twice.” Tolstoy found this answer irritating.

Later, when the young people insisted upon dancing, he demonstrated what was new in Paris. He took off his jacket, stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and capered about, legs kicking, head waggling, white hair flopping, as the household clapped and cheered; he panted, capered, panted, capered, then fell over and collapsed into an armchair. It was a great success. Tolstoy wrote in his journal: “Turgenev—can-can. Sad.”

“Once, perhaps twice.” Was she the “perhaps twice”? Perhaps. In his penultimate letter, he kisses her hands. In his last letter, written in failing pencil, he does not offer kisses. He writes instead: “I do not change in my affections—and I shall keep exactly the same feeling for you until the end.”

This end came six months later. The plaster cast of her hand is now in the Theatre Museum of Saint Petersburg, the city where he had first kissed the original.

Vigilance

I
t all started when I poked the German. Well, he might have been Austrian—it was Mozart after all—and it didn’t really start then, but years before. Still, it’s best to give a specific date, don’t you think?

So: a Thursday in November, the Royal Festival Hall, 7:30 p.m., Mozart K595 with Andras Schiff, followed by Shostakovich 4. I remember thinking as I set off that the Shostakovich had some of the loudest passages in the history of music, and you certainly wouldn’t be able to hear anything over the top of
them
. But this is jumping ahead. 7:29 p.m.: the hall was full, the audience normal. The last people to arrive were strolling in from a sponsor’s pre-concert drinks downstairs. You know the sort—oh, it seems to be about half-past, but let’s just finish this glass, have a pee, then saunter upstairs and barge past half a dozen people on the way to our seats. Take your time, pal: the boss is putting up some moolah, so Maestro Haitink can always hang on a bit longer in the green room.

The Austro-German—to give him his due—had at least arrived by 7:23 p.m. He was smallish, baldish, with glasses, a sticky-up collar and red bow-tie. Not exactly evening dress; perhaps some going-out gear typical of where he came from. And he was pretty bumptious, I thought, not least because he had two women in tow, one on either side. They were all in their mid-thirties, I’d say: old enough to know better. “These are good seats,” he announced, as they found their places in front of me. J 37, 38 and 39. I was in K 37. I instantly took against him. Praising himself to his escorts for the tickets he’d bought. I suppose he could have got them from an agency, and was just relieved; but he didn’t say it like that. And why give him the benefit of the doubt?

As I say, it was a normal audience. Eighty per cent on day release from the city’s hospitals, with pulmonary wards and ear-nose-and-throat departments getting ticket priority. Book now for a better seat if you have a cough which comes in at more than ninety-five decibels. At least people don’t fart in concerts. I’ve never heard anyone fart, anyway. Have you? I expect they do. Which is partly my point: if you can suppress at one end, why not at the other? You get roughly the same amount of warning in my experience. But people don’t on the whole fart raucously in Mozart. So I suppose a few vestiges of the thin crust of civilization which prevents our descent into utter barbarism are just about holding.

The opening
allegro
went pretty well: a couple of sneezes, a bad case of compacted phlegm in the middle of the terrace which nearly required surgical intervention, one digital watch and a fair amount of programme turning. I sometimes think they ought to put directions for use on the cover of programmes. Like: “This is a programme. It tells you about tonight’s music. You might like to glance at it before the concert begins. Then you will know what is being played. If you leave it too late, you will cause visual distraction and a certain amount of low-level noise, you will miss some of the music, and risk annoying your neighbours, especially the man in seat K 37.” Occasionally a programme will contain a small piece of information, vaguely bordering on advice, about mobile phones, or the use of a handkerchief to cough into. But does anyone pay any heed? It’s like smokers reading the health warning on a packet of cigarettes. They take it in and they don’t take it in; at some level, they don’t believe it applies to them. It must be the same with coughers. Not that I want to sound too understanding: that way lies forgiveness. And on a point of information, how often do you actually see a muffling handkerchief come out? I was at the back of the stalls once, T 21. The Bach double concerto. My neighbour, T 20, suddenly began rearing up as if athwart a bronco. With pelvis thrust forward, he delved frantically for his handkerchief, and managed to hook out at the same time a large bunch of keys. Distracted by their fall, he let handkerchief and sneeze go off in separate directions. Thank you very much, T 20. Then he spent half the slow movement eyeing his keys anxiously. Eventually he solved the problem by putting his foot over them and contentedly returning his gaze to the soloists. From time to time a faint metallic stir from beneath his shifting shoe added some useful grace-notes to Bach’s score.