The Last Station

23 Sofya Andreyevna

My chest is so tight I can hardly breathe. At first, I wanted Lyovochka to go to Meshcherskoye. His pulse was sinking. He could remember almost nothing with clarity. I thought the trip to see his beloved would help. Alas, it did. He became well obscenely quickly. It was almost embarrassing to watch him charge to the station in Tula on horseback.

A long absence was not planned. I could have granted him a week or so. But the visit lengthened, and he never said a word about coming back. Didn’t he realize how sick I was, with sleeplessness and my rapid heartbeat, my headaches and dizziness?

The bare truth is that my husband, the greatest Russian author since Pushkin, has developed a ludicrous, senile crush on a plump, middle-aged flatterer. As a boy, even as a young man, he was drawn to men. He liked nothing better than his hunting trips. I have talked about this openly, but it makes him indignant. He does not see how foolish it is for a man to love another man. Not only is it foolish, it is sinful in the eyes of God.

Sasha says that I’m fantasizing, but I think Lyovochka would sleep with Chertkov if his conscience could bear it. But it can’t. It hovers over him like Father Time, flashing its sickle, making ridiculous demands. He is hounded by Furies, too – demons that pursue him into all corners of his life. It suits him to regard this mania as a visionary religion, but it’s nothing more than mental illness.

Religion should be a comfort, not a goad. When I go to the little church in the village, I expect God to calm my nerves. And He does. Otherwise I could not have remained married to Leo Tolstoy for nearly half a century. Nobody could withstand that pressure. It’s like living with a tornado.

Chertkov’s bitter stare and flabby jowls haunt me when I try to sleep. His smell, his voice, his pudgy fingers – everything about him taunts me, even when he is not here. He would be nothing without my Lyovochka; with him, Chertkov has risen in the world’s eyes to the rank of Leo Tolstoy’s closest friend, counselor, and publisher. He wears these facts on his shirtsleeves and lapels. ‘Look at me!’ screams from every pore. ‘I am the beloved of Leo Tolstoy! I am his conscience! His beacon!’

After Lyovochka’s death, which cannot be far away, Chertkov will discover who he is. Nobody.

I regard jealousy a defect of character. And I am jealous. I admit it and pray to God for forgiveness. But what does anyone, even God, expect of me? Chertkov has stolen the one thing that has sustained my life for forty-eight years! He has snatched Lyovochka from my arms. My dear, sweet Lyovochka….

Various ways of committing suicide have occurred to me, but I am not the type really. I do not want to die. But I do not want to live like this, either, with the knife of jealousy pushing its hot blade through my heart. This morning I wanted to go to Stolbovo and lie down on the tracks beneath the train on which it was convenient for Leo Nikolayevich to return from Meshcherskoye. What irony if the author of Anna Karenina should ride home over the pullulating body of his own dear wife! What a story that would make for the international press!

I have consulted Florinsky’s book on medicine to see what the effects of opium poisoning might be. I do not want a painful death, and death by train sounds dreadful. What if I didn’t die instantly? I once saw a dog run over by a heavy cart, its body crushed in the middle of the road. It writhed horribly, trying to drag itself to the edge of the road, bent like a horseshoe. A benevolent muzhik, fortunately, crushed its skull with a large stone, ending its misery. No, that is not for me.

Opium poisoning begins with a feeling of excitement, which soon turns to lethargy. It’s a little like freezing to death in the snow. It doesn’t really hurt; you just go numb. Eventually, the sky and the earth meet, and your mind becomes your body, and your body turns to air. And there is no antidote.

I daresay if I don’t succeed in killing myself but do half a job of it, Chertkov will have me committed to an insane asylum. Perhaps then Leo Tolstoy, with his great admiration for the insane, will visit me. Then I shall garner his respect. Not now. I am too sane now. I tell the truth, and it hurts him.

Lyovochka arrived at ten on the twenty-fourth, much later than I wished. It was an act of defiance, of course. Like a little boy who cannot say directly what is angering him. Perhaps without his even knowing it himself, his delay said to me, ‘See, my dear. You are not so important as you think you are. I do not believe you are ill. But I shall go along with your petty game.’ Sometimes I feel hatred for him, a black bile that rises in my veins, dragged up through the roots of our ill relations. Sometimes I want to kill him.

I wanted to hate him then, but he seemed meek and nervous, frail as a bird, as he sat beside me on the bed, his hand pressed to my forehead.

‘Dear Sonya!’ he said. ‘I was so worried about you. Those telegrams had us all frantic.’

So. But I did not trust him. He has so often in the past affected great concern when what he usually wanted was sex. Now what he wants is to be let off the hook, to be forgiven for this emotional infidelity he commits repeatedly with Vladimir Grigorevich.

‘You want to kill me, don’t you?’ I asked. ‘You would prefer that I were dead.’

He shook his head. ‘Nonsense, Sonya. Where do you get such ideas? I don’t understand you anymore.’

‘It’s a question of logic, is it? You don’t see why B follows A? Is that your problem?’

‘You are trying to upset me.’

‘Do you still love me, Lyovochka?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he whispered. I waited for him to continue, to expand on this.

He lay down beside me on the bed, putting his broad forehead against my shoulder, and soon we both fell asleep and remained like that through the night. It was altogether strange and caused me to remember our first passionate years together, when it meant so terribly much to feel him beside me, to know that I mattered to him as I had mattered to my father. Once my father went to Paris to attend an international conference of doctors when I was thirteen. He stayed away for three months. And he never wrote me.

The next morning I spoke gently to Lyovochka about Chertkov.

‘It is quite insane, darling,’ I said, nestling beside him. ‘Everyone is making fun of you.’

‘Who?’

‘Andrey, Sukhotin, even the muzhiks. I heard them giggling in the horse barn one day, and I listened at the door. They were talking about you. Yes, about you!’

‘It matters very little what anyone says about me. Let them giggle if they find it amusing.’

‘I don’t find it amusing. I find it sick.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, sitting up in bed, kicking back the blankets.

‘I know what’s not normal. You’re obsessed with that man. You hang on his every word, as if God spoke through his mouth!’

‘He is a dear friend, and we have much in common.’ He was putting on his leather boots. ‘In any case, I do not find it a subject worth discussing. We have been over this ground before, Sonya. So many times….’

‘You and that man have nothing in common. He’s a sycophant and a pervert. He’s just using you, but you can’t seem to see it. It may not bother you, but I will not have such a person making a fool of my husband!’

He spat at the floor – I can’t remember when he last did that. ‘Let me alone,’ he said, ‘for God’s sake!’

I watched as he snapped the door shut behind him, leaving me alone. More alone than I have ever been. I wanted my bottle of opium.

I went downstairs, into the library. I don’t know exactly how long I waited there, on my knees like a scrubwoman, trying to work up the courage to swallow the fateful substance. I should have done it instantly.

It was Sasha who found me.

‘What idiotic thing is this, Mama?’ she said, as if it were nothing. Just Mama on her knees with a little opium in her hands.

‘One swallow, please! Just one!’ I said, waving the vial before my lips.

She tried to grab it from my hands, but I closed my fists about it. ‘It’s mine! It’s mine!’ I could hear myself saying, as if someone else were talking.

‘So drink it,’ she said. ‘Suit yourself.’

The ungrateful bitch.

‘You disgust me,’ I said.

I fell on the floor, hardly able to breathe. The vial spilled, and the smell of the opium surrounded me. Three servants lifted me into bed, one of them the ghostly Timothy, whose eyes quiver with the perpetual fury of a bastard. I was examined by Dushan Makovitsky, who kept muttering to himself as if I were not present. He is a nasty little cur.

My husband feigned concern, as he must. He is too cowardly to say outright that he finds me repulsive. But he does. The very sight of me sours his stomach.

‘Do you love me, Lyovochka?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘Nothing can stop that.’

‘Then fetch me your diary. I want to read what you’re writing about me. I must have the truth.’

‘What makes you think there is anything to read that concerns you?’

‘I want to read your diary,’ I repeated, coolly. He looked like the sky had fallen on his shoulders. ‘I have no secrets,’ he said. ‘My relations with you are public knowledge. I doubt if there is one muzhik in Russia who does not know everything about us.’

The diary was brought to me by a servant, Leo Tolstoy not being man enough to bring it himself. My fingers, twitching uncontrollably, turned the thick pages. It was almost too much to bear. Almost at once the telltale sentence snapped its beak like a prehistoric bird, ugly and devouring: ‘I must try to fight Sonya consciously, with kindness and love.’

I called for my husband, repeating the sentence in my head like a death knell: I must try to fight Sonya consciously, with kindness and love.

He stood in the doorway, meek, almost insubstantial.

I glared at him.

‘Yes, darling?’

‘Why do you want to fight me? What is it I’ve done to deserve such treatment?’

‘I see nothing in what I’ve written that should upset you.’

‘Let me see your other diaries. I want to read all your diaries from the last ten years.’

‘I’m afraid that’s impossible.’ He looked away from me as he spoke.

‘Where are they, Lyovochka? Where have you hidden them?’

‘I have not hidden them.’

‘Are they here?’

‘No.’

‘Does Chertkov have them?’

‘Please, Sonya. I… I–’

‘I knew it! He is greedily reading everything you have said about me. This is despicable. Have I not been an honest, loving wife for all these years? Answer me, Lyovochka!’

It began raining hard against the house, the wind blowing in through the curtains. The room grew hot and damp, and the day fell dark.

‘I don’t mind telling you the truth,’ he said, after a difficult pause. ‘Chertkov certainly has them. I gave them to him for safekeeping.’

‘This is the worst thing you have ever done to me,’ I said.

My stomach was sick now. I wanted to vomit. I threw off the covers and ran from the bedroom, down the slippery stairwell, out into the rain. For an hour I wandered in the orchard, blind with misery, but nobody came for me. They all hoped I would die. That was just what they wanted, but I was not about to grant them that satisfaction. I came home shivering, wet as moss, and crawled into bed like a child beaten once too many times.

Voices drifted into my room from down the hall. My husband was talking with Dushan Makovitsky. I could faintly make out his words. ‘The insane are always better at achieving their purposes than the sane,’ he was saying. ‘They have no morality to hold them back. They have no shame, no conscience.’

The very next day, Bulgakov told me the horrifying news that spelled – in essence – the end of my life. Chertkov had been granted permission to return to Telyatinki to visit his mother. He could stay as long as his mother remains in the province. Indeed, he was already there, plotting and scheming only a few versts from Yasnaya Polyana.

On the morning of the twenty-eighth, while everyone was asleep, Chertkov slipped through a deep mist that stood in the fields, the thick morning mist of midsummer that snags in the pine trees of Zasyeka, that blankets the isbas, a mist like sleep itself, a swirl on the cool Voronka. He came into our house like a thief and woke the kitchen servants, insisting that tea be brought to him in the parlor.

Lyovochka was wakened by Ilya, the servant boy, and he came bounding down the stairwell like a bridegroom on his wedding day. I know this even though I did not see it. Once you have seen the moon, you know what it looks like.

When I came into the parlor, Vladimir Grigorevich bowed with revolting politeness. He remains a dandy, in spite of the Tolstoyan overlays. His britches were made in England, and his red cashmere socks were distinctly un-Tolstoyan. He affected a blue linen blouse – the kind the muzhiks wear to church.

‘Good morning, Sofya Andreyevna. I am delighted to see you,’ he said.

He handed me a note:

Feeling lost and stupefied, I went back to my room and wept. Chertkov had doubtless shown this letter to Lyovochka, who would have said to himself, ‘See! Vladimir Grigorevich is bending over backward to befriend her. He is being generous and openhearted.’ He cannot see that Chertkov is trying to hoodwink us both.

Three days later, Chertkov walked brazenly into the dining room during the midday meal. My husband became wildly solicitous, as if the tsar himself had arrived unexpectedly. He dragged a chair from the wall for him, offering him anything he might like. ‘What will it be, my dearest dear, my lovely Vladimir Grigorevich? My wife’s heart on a platter? Her kidneys? With salt? But of course, my dear Vladimir Grigorevich! Whatever pleases you! You would like the estate, is that it? Fine! And permanent copyright on everything I’ve ever written? Certainly!’

I tried, with difficulty, to sit through the meal, but they had no interest in my company. After the first course, I excused myself by saying that a headache was coming on (it was) and left the room. Upstairs, I settled at my desk to write in my diary. It was July 1. The hottest day yet. In the past, writing in my diary relieved certain feelings. Now, I could think of nothing to say.

Chertkov stayed through the afternoon and remained for dinner. I pretended not to care. Indeed, I was as polite as could be, inquiring after his mother’s health, his various projects. I showed interest in his wretched publishing company, the very company that is stealing my children’s inheritance. It surprised me that I could remain so cool in the face of such an outrage.

The entire table normally retires to the library for coffee or tea at the end of the meal. Tonight, Sasha furtively whisked Chertkov and her father into the study. I could see that they were plotting. They are always plotting. The whole thing cut and tore at my nerves. I hate it when people lack the courage to tell me what evil deeds they have concocted behind my back….

I tiptoed to the study, where they had shut the door firmly. Lyovochka never shuts his door. It is always ajar, as if to say, ‘Yes, I am working, but you may knock and enter.’

As I listened, my worst fears were confirmed. They were whispering, and my heart stopped when, above the low rustle of language, I heard my name.

My heart caught between beats; I thought surely I would faint when Sasha said, clearly, ‘Of course, Mama would kill us if she found out.’ And Chertkov hushed her. They waited, panicky, for a long time, as if listening for footsteps. But I did not move.

When they resumed their whispering, I fled downstairs, where I sat in the parlor with a glass of vodka, burning inside. I resolved to climb onto the balcony where the door, with its venetian slats, might allow me to hear what they were planning. It was information that might be crucial to the welfare of my family.

There is a narrow ledge running along the second floor, and it is possible to slip along the building if you keep your back pressed tightly to the wall. Squeezing through a window, I was able to edge my way along the wall. My weight, unfortunately, is such that the balance was precarious. At several points I swayed forward, almost swooning. Soon I stood exactly outside Lyovochka’s study.

I listened at the blinds. Their voices, though hushed, could be clearly discerned through the lathwork.

‘I cannot do it,’ said Lyovochka.

‘Papa, I think he is right. You must listen to him. He has in mind only your best interests.’

‘The interests of the people,’ Chertkov added. ‘Which are, of course, identical with the best interests of Leo Nikolayevich.’

Here were my enemies, huddled and scheming, inventing their little plots. It was all too horrific. Suddenly I lost my balance; the ground tilted over my ankles, or seemed to tilt, and I shrieked.

‘Who’s there?’ shouted my daughter. Her voice was harsh, bitter, unforgiving.

I went bowling through the latched shutters, flung like a turnkey by the weight of gravity. My skirts fluttered up over my shoulders. I was upside down, peering at the assembled company from between my thighs. ‘You’re all plotting against me!’ I shouted. ‘In my own house, too!’

My husband slumped in his chair, staring ahead weirdly.

‘You will kill him, Mama,’ Sasha said smugly. ‘But that’s what you want, isn’t it? You want him to die!’

She left me standing there by myself as Ilya, the houseboy, and Chertkov carried Lyovochka out of the room.

When Chertkov returned, he seemed more ferocious than I have ever seen him. The putty of his cheeks blazed like newly fired clay.

I said, ‘Vladimir Grigorevich, I know exactly what you’re trying to do. Don’t think that you deceive me for one little moment. I want my husband’s diaries back. Return them immediately to this house, where they belong. In the name of God!’

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘You’re the Devil himself,’ I said.

He looked beyond me to a far corner of the room. ‘Had I cared to, I could have demolished you and your family. It would have been only too easy, you know. The press is bloodthirsty.’

I wish to God my husband could have heard him talking then, the real Chertkov.

‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘Ruin us. Tell them anything you like.’

‘I have too much respect for Leo Nikolayevich to attempt such a thing. You are lucky.’

‘I detest you, Vladimir Grigorevich.’ My lips quivered. I could barely contain myself.

‘If I had a wife like you,’ he said, moving toward the door, ‘I would have blown my brains out a long time ago. Or gone to America.’

That night, in bed, I dreamt that my husband and Vladimir Grigorevich were lying on the wet forest floor of Zasyeka, naked, writhing in the dead leaves: an old man, white haired, with a beard of snow, engaged with his fat-faced, oily disciple in an act of monstrous intercourse. They wriggled in the mud like worms.

I woke with a start, pooled in sweat. Trembling, I knelt at the side of my bed and prayed, aloud, ‘God, dear God. Have mercy on me, a sinner.’