The Summer Guest Read online

  Dedication

  For Amelia

  Epigraph

  The tyranny of the visible makes us blind.

  The brilliance of the word pierces the night of the world.

  —CHRISTIAN BOBIN

  Note to the Reader

  Zinaida Mikhailovna Lintvaryova’s journal is based on a true story, on the little that is known about her from Anton Chekhov’s letters and the obituary that he wrote when she died.

  The town of Sumy is located in eastern Ukraine. Both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken there, as they were in Chekhov’s time. For the sake of consistency, I have generally used the Russian versions of Ukrainian proper nouns (Kiev for Kyiv, Elena for Olena, etc.) throughout the book, except when referring to certain contemporary events, where the Ukrainian is more appropriate.

  Cast of Characters

  The Lintvaryovs

  Aleksandra Vassilyevna, landlady, owner of the Luka Estate

  Zinaida Mikhailovna (Zina), her eldest child, a doctor

  Elena Mikhailovna (Lena), a doctor

  Pavel Mikhailovich (Pasha), manager of the estate, a revolutionary

  Natalya Mikhailovna (Natasha), a schoolteacher

  Georgi Mikhailovich (Georges), the youngest, a musician

  Antonida Fyodorovna (Tonya), Pasha’s wife

  The Chekhovs

  Pavel Yegorovich, the father

  Evgenia Yakovlevna, the mother

  Aleksandr Pavlovich (Sasha), the eldest son, a writer and journalist

  Nikolay Pavlovich (Kolya), an artist

  Anton Pavlovich (Antosha), a doctor and writer

  Ivan Pavlovich (Vanya), a schoolteacher

  Maria Pavlovna (Masha), the only daughter, a schoolteacher

  Mikhail Pavlovich (Misha), a student

  Their Guests

  Aleksandr Ignatyevich Ivanenko (Sasha), a flautist and cousin to the Lintvaryovs

  Valentina (Vata), another cousin

  Aleksey Nikolayevich Pleshcheyev, a poet

  Kazimir Stanislavovich Barantsevich, a writer

  Marian Romualdovich Semashko, a cellist

  Aleksey Sergeyevich Suvorin, a wealthy Petersburg publisher

  Pavel Matveyevich Svobodin, an actor

  Grigory Petrovich, a loyal servant

  Anya, a cook

  Ulyasha, a maid

  Roman, a coachman

  Artyomenko, Panas, and Mishka, Anton Pavlovich’s fishing companions

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Note to the Reader

  Cast of Characters

  The First Summer

  The Second Summer

  Luka

  After Luka

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  SHE WROTE:

  The road is leading into the distance, the distance where we are going and which we cannot see; there’s a slight rise toward the horizon of tall grass and a long line of poplar trees. It’s deserted, we have the whole world to ourselves; the tall grass is bending to the breeze. The air is the color of candlelight on an icon. The sun has almost reached the horizon. There’s not much time, and yet you feel, with so much space around you, that nothing could ever change: not the sun, or the tall grass, or the road into the distance.

  She was pleased with her words.

  Well, not exactly her words; they were meant to be his words, and only as she reported them. Perhaps he had said something quite different. They had been for a ride in the carriage, and these words were a gift of vision, a way of helping her see the world. The difficulty lay in capturing a moment: his voice, its warmth and depth, was lost already. What could a short paragraph do to convey so much—the road, the trees, the sky, the light, a whole vista no one could see now, except through words? And his presence there, with her, a brief respite in her darkness, his breath, his low laughter.

  You take the words, she thought; by themselves, individually, they are almost meaningless. You take them one by one and you build not only a description, a vision, but also a memory, where you are present, and he is present, too, though neither of you is described by those words. What sort of magic was this?

  If she were sentimental, or mystical, she might invoke love, or faith; but for now she must be satisfied with craft. Yes, craft. They were someone else’s words, after all; she was not the author. Just the scribe, the interpreter, the diarist, the translator.

  THE FIRST SUMMER

  Luka, Sumy, Kharkovsky Province

  April 1888

  A journal. That is what I need to fill these dull long hours when I used to be working, helping others and forgetting myself. Now it seems I must remember. A journal will occupy me, although there won’t be much to say.

  Or will there? If my life were as it had always been until this untimely rebellion of my flesh, I would indeed have little of interest to relate. A catalogue of peasants’ woes: Grigory Petrovich has the gripes again, Anyusha is suffering from sciatica and about to give birth, Kostya’s toes were crushed beneath the cart wheel. My own provincial life: visits to neighboring estates, conversations when we all find a moment to be together, Pasha’s problems, as usual, with the authorities. His politics, of some concern to the tsar’s representatives in our remote province. There would not be much to say about me. But that bit of flesh in my brain is forcing me to withdraw from the life I knew, and I become the subject of my life. This embarrasses me and seems wrong, but Mama and Elena have encouraged me, and now they bring me tea and ink and a bound notebook and sit quietly by me while I scribble as clearly as I can. Mama says, rather too wisely, I am certain you will discover the territory of the soul, as once you discovered the human body.

  I laugh and say, You mean I am to dissect myself?

  You may dissect us all, in a manner of speaking. You must do what you can, whatever is necessary, to live with your diagnosis.

  I’m a doctor, still, and I know what awaits me. Professor Chudnovsky himself was clear about that. I am living, as the English say, on borrowed time. To whom am I to repay this time, and when?

  I am young, only thirty, and in our family we live long lives. We are not consumptive, nor are we drinkers of alcohol; we eat well and go for long walks, summer and winter alike. What have I done to deserve this? It’s nothing I caught at the practice, no, no contagious disease like typhus or diphtheria; I am simply a victim of chance misfortune. Yet I have been a useful person: If I had believed in God, I would now lose whatever tattered faith remained. Why has He chosen to take me away when I am useful to Him? Or am I, precisely, too useful, interfering with His ways?

  I recall our friends in Kiev, the Zemlinskys, their youngest son was stricken in this way. They asked me about his headaches. There is so little one can do to relieve the pressure. I prescribed laudanum, then morphine. Now the headaches have come to me, though not yet so terrible. Elena will bring me what I need when the time comes . . . I try to accept my fate, if one can speak of fate.

  Still I cannot believe what has befallen me, if belief is to the mind as faith is to the heart: My emotions rebel. They were trained for the useful life of a country doctor and its attendant satisfactions and disappointments. I was not meant to be taken so early from my family, and from this task that has given me a sense of honor and accomplishment, and pleasure, too.

  Elena has promised that I may continue to work with her now and again. She will be my eyes; I still have my hands and my mind and my experience.

  Pasha is a fine brother. He has made me a special device, a box to hold my ledger, with a ruler that I can move down the page after each line, measuring two fingers’ width—there are little notches. I
t will keep your letters and lines straight, he says, so that what you write will be clear.

  For whom am I writing? I won’t be here, some old crone by the fire, to reread my youth. It must be a sort of testament to my family when I am gone. I have nothing else to leave them.

  Turnham Green, London

  January 2014

  KATYA SAT AT her computer, drumming her fingers next to the keyboard. Peter had told her it was time to find a translator for the Sumy diary.

  He called it the Sumy diary. Zinaida Mikhailovna was too much of a mouthful, he said. They had been married for over twenty years, and he still couldn’t get his tongue around some of your long Russian names.

  Over the years she had learned to be indulgent. His passive Russian was excellent, as were his endearments. Katyusha, Katyenka, Katyushka—those names he could handle. Although sometimes it was simply, most affectionately, Kate.

  What would they call it: The Diaries of Zinaida Mikhailovna Lintvaryova? He was right, it was a mouthful, no mainstream publisher would ever bring out a book with such a title, even for a work of nonfiction. She wanted to find something that would convey the Russianness, and the fact that it was a diary. Perhaps Something Something colon, then The Diaries of . . .

  Perhaps the translator would have an idea. A translator would have more distance, obviously, might be able to find those few words that would draw the reader’s interest. At the end of her message, Katya would write, We don’t have a title yet. If you have any ideas as you work on the text, please let us know.

  Now for the translator.

  There was that American woman in France who’d done the Crimea guidebook. Anastasia something. Harding, that was it. Or Vassily Yuryevich. But Vassily Yuryevich was a man. It might be better to have a woman for this project, a female sensibility. She would have done it herself, but she did not want to act as a translator; her English was good enough for most things, had been good enough for those other projects, with the help of an editor, but this was different.

  She typed Anastasia Harding to take a closer look at the woman’s background. Many novels translated from French; the most recent one had a very favorable review. Good. The guidebook had been a one-off, and it had been excellent. Not a great deal of work from Russian otherwise, but what mattered was her English, after all. And her female sensibility.

  She must care for Zinaida Mikhailovna as much as I have, thought Katya. Together we must bring her back to life, along with her famous guest.

  That night, in bed, Peter turned to her. I have a good feeling about this project, he said. It will get us back on our feet, I’m sure of it.

  Katya was not so sure. They were governed by something larger than themselves, bearing down on them and their small publishing house. Banks, credit crunch, bailouts, crisis, recession; e-books, online booksellers, the disappearance of bookshops, the closure of libraries, the decline of reading. The monolith of market censorship, too. Oh, the irony, thought Katya, to have left the Soviet Union only to find another form of censorship. All the poetry she had been unable to publish as a student, when she was being watched; she had left her homeland as a young wife, in love not so much with her young husband as with the idea of becoming a poet in the free West. The Free West. Hah.

  Well, none of that mattered anymore.

  She reached for her husband. She loved him more now than she had in the early years; her present misgivings about the future sharpened her love, brought an almost physical ache of impending loss. It was not something she could say to him, not yet; she had to try, with him, for his sake, to focus her energies.

  Polyana Press had been their life together, after all; the child they did not have, the novels and poems they did not write, the journeys they did not take. Perhaps that was why, now, it was failing. They should have loved it for its own sake; it should not have been in lieu of something.

  They had been distant with each other lately: He had his worries, and she had hers. They couldn’t share those worries, or it might have brought them closer.

  Perhaps you’re right, she whispered. It could be a great success: We have to believe in it, make it happen.

  Trust me, Katya, please, I know what I’m doing. He touched her cheek, then left his finger there, while he looked at her in that way she had almost forgotten.

  They made love that night for the first time in many months. For so long, their separate worries had deadened desire, even tenderness, but they understood that this silent reproach was not personal, that it came from anger at the injustice of their life at that time, the casual, random cruelty of what had befallen them. Katya had found her private way to accept, to overcome; Peter was still searching, dreaming again like a boy. But perhaps. This wild idea of his.

  In the dark they smiled at each other. He stroked her cheek again. She reached out and touched his: warm stubble. This tenderness felt new.

  And have you found a translator? he asked.

  I think so. Anastasia Harding. If she agrees.

  And how long will it take?

  Not long. A few months.

  A year, then, until publication, give or take. Can we hold on until then? Give it everything we’ve got?

  Of course, she whispered.

  He sighed, content. She turned her head away. There was a mutinous tear. She told herself it was a tear of emotion—this unexpected closeness. And the release, the letting go. All good reasons for a tear.

  A village in eastern France, near the Swiss border

  January 2014

  ZINAIDA MIKHAILOVNA’S DIARY arrived in her inbox one day. Like a misdirected parcel intended for someone else, as if it had been forgotten in a dusty provincial post office and finally found its way to her, a century late, and only because its intended recipient was long departed from this earth. There was a message from the publisher, Katya Kendall at Polyana Press in London. Ana had worked for them in the past, translating a guidebook to Crimea.

  She had hesitated to take on the guidebook at the time, as she would now with Zinaida Mikhailovna. Russian was difficult, its beauty idiosyncratic and complex, and it intimidated her. Ana’s Russian was perfectly adequate, but she didn’t go looking for translations from Russian; they found her. As Katya Kendall had found her that first time, and for a few weeks Ana’s mental space had been all Crimea. She had found herself dreaming of tsars’ palaces and Chekhov’s dachas, of craggy slopes dropping into the Black Sea, and exotic resorts with names like Feodosia and Koktebel and Gurzuf. There were the markers of history, like the Livadia Palace, where the last Romanovs had lived briefly and the Yalta Conference was held, and the villa where Gorbachev was staying at the time of the coup.

  Now this new message, just there in her email. Dear Anastasia (if I may), We are terribly excited about this project, Katya Kendall enthused. Would she have a look at the enclosed text and let them know at her earliest convenience whether it was something she would like to take on?

  Ana stopped and looked out the window at the lake and the mountains. The sun was setting, leaving a wild streak of light among the clouds; it had rained earlier. She had no reason to refuse; the text, or the ten pages that she had scrolled through, seemed fairly straightforward, even if the language was dated. Four months, she figured, all told. She wasn’t busy, she needed the money. She decided to sleep on it and give Katya Kendall her answer in the morning. Just a formality, sleeping on it; she knew she would say yes.

  The publisher had attached a second document, an obituary. Ana skimmed it.

  Much later, after she had finished all the rest, its poignant relevance would leave her unable to translate it for three days.

  In a postscript, Katya Kendall had written: I thought we could use the obituary as an introduction or an afterword. It’s a remarkable document. Like everything he ever wrote. A story in itself.

  At the time Ana didn’t realize who he was. She missed the author’s name in small letters at the bottom of the obituary. Would it have made any difference if she had seen it at onc
e? It was odd, too, that Katya Kendall did not mention him in the body of her message, but then perhaps she was like that, discreet to the point of evasiveness.

  The shadow of Zinaida Mikhailovna’s soon-to-be-famous summer guest fell later onto the page, and by then Ana had befriended the diarist in that odd way translators sometimes have, if they are lucky, of knowing their authors through a text, of inhabiting their identity and seeing through their eyes.

  The next morning she wrote back to Polyana Press, told them she was interested, and requested a slightly higher rate, citing the antiquated language.

  It was Peter Kendall who answered, tersely. Unfortunately, given the economic situation, we cannot offer a better rate. The contract was enclosed. If she was still willing to go ahead, would she print out two copies, sign them, and return them to him?

  In the contract, there was a special clause stipulating that the subject of the translation was to be kept confidential.

  April 10, 1888

  First false warmth of spring. I am sitting in the conservatory in a thick coat. I close my eyes, listen to the birds, and wish I knew the notation for birdsong, so that in dark silent times, winter times, I might ask Georges to play their song to me.

  I beg Mamochka to find me something to do, some vegetable to peel, some simple sewing I could do blindly, so to speak. She pushes me away with words of comfort: I must rest, preserve my strength.

  I have not had a seizure for some days, but I fear one might be coming. A strange light-headedness, a giddy centrifugal pull on my senses. I think of Elena and everything she has to do, how busy she is these days on calls or with the patients who come to the house. Our peasants are a worrisome lot, and I fear she spoils them; they come to her for a hangnail. Because she is kind, and does not talk down to them, but listens and tries to prescribe a better life with the small means at her disposal. Sometimes a smile suffices, especially with children. It is like religion for them; they place their faith in her and are healed. We speak of it sometimes at dinner; Pasha and Georges scoff; Mamochka nods wisely; Natasha laughs and ridicules us all.