The Last Station

4 Sofya Andreyevna

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.

Lyovochka’s Aunt Toinette, a shriveled thing in a country dress, welcomed us. ‘Bienvenu! Comme c’est bon!’ she kept chirping. It seemed incongruous, this distinctly peasantlike woman – a real krestyonka – speaking Parisian French with almost no accent.

Mama accepted her welcome in garbled French, which, to my ear, sounded more like Chinese. ‘Merci beaucoup! C’est une belle maison! Une belle maison! Mais oui!’ she cried.

Lyovochka, looking red-faced and out of breath, came hurling through the door apologetic, saying that he hadn’t quite expected us. But he didn’t make us feel guilty. Like a French courtier, he kissed everyone’s hand in turn, lingering that extra moment over mine. I lit up inside, ablaze with love. I did not know where to look or what to say.

‘Let me show you the orchard,’ he said. It seemed odd, especially to Mama, that he wanted us to see the orchard before we toured the house itself, but Mama was not going to object.

‘We just adore orchards,’ she said. ‘Don’t we adore orchards, girls?’

‘I haven’t thought much about it,’ Lisa said. She could be so tedious.

We paused by a thicket of bushes strung with ripe, red fruit. ‘Raspberries!’ Tanya screamed, as if she’d never seen them before.

Lyovochka handed around pails, and we were all told to begin picking, right then and there – even Mama, who made the best of what she considered an unfortunate situation. ‘What charming raspberries,’ she said. ‘Don’t we just adore raspberries?’

I stepped off with a pail behind one of the big bushes and had been happily, mindlessly, picking berries for a few minutes when Lyovochka sprang, like a bear, from behind a swatch of leaves.

‘You frighten me!’ I said.

He took my pail away and held my hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I am.’

‘You should be.’

He did not let go of my hands. ‘These are city hands,’ he said.

He held them and looked at me for such a long time. I said, ‘Would you like a berry?’

Like a defiant child, he plucked a berry from my pail and popped it between his coarse lips. I spotted his fat red tongue and looked away.

‘I must go,’ he said. And disappeared.

Now I knew that my instincts were correct. It’s strange how one can know everything at once about the future – not the details, but the overall picture. I knew that my life would be spent here, on these grounds, with Leo Tolstoy. I also knew that I would be his harshest critic and his best friend. And that heartache lay ahead of me, unspecified but cruel.

I carried this secret, miraculous knowledge with me, hoarded it like an amulet. It would ruin everything if they found out before the time was ripe.

Tanya, Lisa, and I lodged together in the vaulted room on the ground floor that nowadays is crammed with stinking, uncouth disciples: insane noblemen, beggars who are proud of their fallen state, toothless nuns, idealistic students, revolutionaries, criminals, vegetarians, foreigners. The mad economist Nikolayev is here, preaching Henry George’s theory of the single tax. He slurps his soup on the linen tablecloth, splashing those to his right and left. Drankov, the cinematographer, is here, too. I don’t mind him, although he is constantly taking our picture.

I thought Lyovochka would propose to me after dinner, but he didn’t. By the time we left, two days later, nothing had happened. Worse, he acted as though we had never exchanged a moment of intimacy. I began to doubt my perspicacity. Perhaps I had been mistaken all along? Perhaps he had behaved the same with Lisa? Even with Tanya? As we departed, I could barely fend off despair, though I maintained a cheerful countenance. I comforted myself with the fact that Lisa was more miserable than I. She wept openly as we clattered off behind a troika, and Mama scolded her. ‘He will ask you in his own good time,’ she said, disappointment curdling her voice.

Two days later, at Grandfather’s house, Tanya wakened me. ‘It’s the count!’

‘You’re teasing me.’

‘No, it’s true! He’s come on a white horse.’

Leave it to my Lyovochka. Grandstanding, as usual. ‘A horse,’ he once said, ‘is the symbol of the rider’s soul.’

Grandfather welcomed him eagerly, grinning and bowing. He was so queer, with his close-shaven skull and black skullcap, a razorlike nose. His hairy fingers, like the legs of a tarantula, seemed always to be moving. His eyes were independent of each other, like fish eyes, poking out from opposite sides of his narrow head.

Lyovochka was covered with white dust and sweat. He affected a shy, boyish grin, apologizing for his condition.

Grandfather told him not to think twice about it. It was an honor, he said. ‘And how long did it take you, Leo Nikolayevich? It’s such a long way to come on horseback.’

‘Three hours. Perhaps a bit more. I was in no hurry. It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’

‘Let me get you a drink?’

‘That would be very kind of you, sir.’

We huddled in the shade of the hall, listening to their exchange. I wore a muslin dress that day, a white one for summer, with a lilac-tinted rosette on the right shoulder. I trailed a long ribbon down one arm, the kind we used to call Suivez-moi, jeune bomme.

‘He has come for you, Lisa,’ my mother said. She could barely restrain her giddiness and pride. ‘Today is your day.’

‘I wouldn’t sleep with a dusty man like that,’ said Tanya to Lisa.

Lisa turned her nose up. To give in to her sister’s taunts would be unbecoming of a future countess.

The day followed a summery course of gay (though hardly extraordinary) meals, with lots of party games and silly jokes. The strain of waiting for the count to strike seemed unbearable to poor Grandfather. Mama was hardly any better. Her conversation lapsed into inanities that, fortunately, the count never noticed.

It happened after dinner. Everyone had left the dining room but myself and the rather obviously hyperventilating count. He turned to me and said, ‘Could you wait a moment, Sofya Andreyevna? It’s so pleasant in here.’

‘It’s a charming room, isn’t it?’ I said, lying through my teeth.

‘The food is excellent here.’

‘Grandfather likes his food.’

We shifted from foot to foot. Get on with it, I thought.

‘Come sit beside me on the sofa,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t mind that, would you?’

I smiled and followed him to the little sofa along the side wall. He sat down first, impolitely, but his doing so allowed me to choose my position. For the sake of modesty, I left a few inches between us.

He pulled a green, baize-covered table up to our knees and took a piece of chalk from his coat pocket. I watched him closely as he leaned over the table and began to scribble on its soft cover.

He wrote: ‘Y.y.a.y.d.f.h.r.m.c.o.m.a.a.t.i.o.h.f.m.’

I stared at the peculiar inscription.

‘Can you decipher this?’

‘It’s a string of letters, Leo Nikolayevich.’

Was this some sort of after-dinner game played by the aristocracy? My stomach tightened.

‘I can help you,’ he said. ‘The first two y’s represent the words Your youth.’

‘Your youth and your desire for happiness remind me cruelly of my age and the impossibility of happiness for me,’ I cried, having reconstructed the entire sentence. It was a miracle!

When the meaning wakened in my head, I shuddered. Everything fell clear.

Lyovochka, meanwhile, was rubbing out what he had written and starting the little game all over again.

This time, he wrote: ‘Y.f.i.w.a.m.f.t.L.H.m.t.c.t.’

I knew exactly what he meant once I understood that L was for Lisa. ‘Your family is wrong about my feelings toward Lisa. Help me to clarify this.’

An actual proposal did not follow for several weeks, but I knew now that poor Lisa was finished. He loved me alone.

When Lyovochka visited us in Moscow in September, I gave him a story I had written. It was about a tender young girl who had a suitor called Dublitsky – an old, rather ugly nobleman. He wished, more than anything in the world, to marry her, but she wasn’t sure if she really wanted him. I don’t know why I wrote such a story. I didn’t actually think of Lyovochka as old and ugly, though he was a little of both. I gave it to him without realizing it might cause pain. His response came, by post, a few days later:

Naturally when I read your story, my dear one, I saw that I was Dublitsky. How could I think otherwise? I realized that I am what I am: Uncle Leo, an old, uncommonly plain – even ugly – character who should concern himself with God’s work and nothing more. I should do God’s work and do it well, and that should be enough for me. But I become miserable when I think of you, when I recall that I am Dublitsky. I am reminded of my age and the impossibility of happiness. For me, anyway. Yes, I am Dublitsky. But to marry simply because I need a wife is something beyond my ken. I can’t do it. I would ask of my future wife something terrible, impossible: I insist on being loved as I love. Forget about me. I shall not bother you anymore.

I’d have stabbed myself in the breast a thousand times if that could have made a difference. I cursed myself for giving him my story. What had I been thinking? For days I was inconsolable.

A week later, I sat at the piano, comforting myself with a light Italian score, a waltz called ‘Il Bacio,’ the kiss. There was a knock at the door. It was Lyovochka, his eyes sunken like potholes beneath his bushy brows. I may misremember this, but he smelled of lavender.

He sat beside me at the piano and said, ‘I’ve been carrying a letter in my pocket for several days now. Will you read it, Sonya? It’s for you.’

I quietly took the letter down the hall to my room, locking myself in to read it. My hands trembling, the characters difficult to see through my tears, I read: ‘Would you possibly consent to be my wife?’

‘Open this door!’ Lisa shrieked. She knew exactly what was going on. ‘Sonya! Open this door.’

I peeked out.

‘What has he written to you? Tell me frankly.’

‘He has offered me his hand in marriage.’

Her face tightened. She seemed fit to burst, like an overripe tomato. ‘Refuse him, Sonya! Say no!’ She began to pull at her own hair, ‘I will die if you don’t. It’s intolerable!’

Such a scene! I adored every minute of it, of course, but I kept my composure. At least somebody in this house was worthy of the title Countess Tolstoy.

Mama came scuffling down the hall when she heard the commontion. She dragged Lisa, kicking and squealing like a pig, back to her room. ‘What the count must think!’ Mama cried.

‘You must go into the parlor and deliver your response,’ she said to me flatly. All possible pleasure had drained from the scene she had so long anticipated.

I found Lyovochka standing against the wall, his face white as a sail. He wrung his hands.

‘So?’ he asked. I heard a note of resignation in that question, and my heart went out to him. The poor, dear man!

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I will marry you, Leo Nikolayevich.’

Soon an avalanche broke over our heads, what with servants rushing about, Lisa weeping beside me, Tanya shouting in her vulgar way, Mama offering drinks. Everyone was there but Papa, who pretended he was ill. In truth, he was upset that the count had revealed such bad manners. He should first have asked Papa. Indeed, he should have asked for Lisa’s hand. It took several days and much coaxing by Mama to bring him round, but he acquiesced. He always did.

Life became miserable again too quickly. Lyovochka, in a fit of honesty, gave me his diaries. I was honored, at first, and thrilled. It seemed wonderfully romantic to read the most private thoughts of one’s future husband!

One sentence hangs in my memory like a black crow: ‘I consider the company of women a necessary evil and avoid it when possible. Women are the source of all frivolity, all sensuality and indolence, all the vices to which men are prone.’ He went on to recount the whole disgusting story of endless nights on the town in Moscow, St Petersburg, even Tula and Sevastopol! Whores and peasant women of all stripes had shared his bed!

I read on with disbelief, learning that he had lost his innocence as a boy of fourteen in Kazan, led to a brothel by his elder brother Sergey, who’d specialized in debauchery from the beginning. After he had performed the disgusting act, he stood by the harlot’s bedside, weeping. It was as if he foresaw all.

And there was more. I heard for the first time about Axinya, the peasant woman who had served his vile needs for three years before our marriage. I could have borne this were it not for their son, Timothy, who haunts us still. The hideous, dim-witted Timothy, who snorts and guffaws, who prowls our house like a demon spirit from hell. Worse, he looks just like Lyovochka: the same height, the same slightly rounded shoulders, the unmistakable eyebrows and wispy spume of a beard! He has Lyovochka’s profile, too, with the fleshy nose and jutting chin. A loathsome parody of my husband, he lurches about Yasnaya Polyana, carrying wood, doing errands, creeping in the shadows.

I have begged my husband to get rid of Timothy, to send him to Moscow, at least. We are never there anyway. But the Master wants his sins to cluster about him. He wants to suffer, to see that grotesque reflection of himself at every turn.

I married Leo Tolstoy, the great author, on 23 September 1862, at eight o’clock, in the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin, right under the Kremlin’s long, imperial shadow.

‘How can I live without your company?’ my sister Tanya said, as I was leaving the church.

‘Try, my dear. Try.’

I was pleased to slough off the old life. I was tired of being beholden to Papa, plagued by doubts about my future life. My life was settled, once and for all.

Oh, was it settled.