The Summer Guest Read online

  Oh, but you know, Zina, I’m a doctor, and he needs one. But I’m not sure I’m the right sort. Of doctor.

  What do you mean?

  Well, he talks endlessly, and he’s had the most wretched time of it with his wife dying, and it seems his little boys are very slow in developing, and his life is such chaos. He says so himself. But he seems talented, and intelligent, as they all are. I think he has come to me for consolation, because I listen when others don’t. I mean it is a bit much, here his wife died not two weeks ago, and all the others think of is going fishing.

  Well, then you, at least, are helping him.

  Yes, but you see, I wouldn’t like my good nature to lead me astray . . . if you see what I mean.

  I paused, then said, Do you mean that you enjoy his company for reasons other than listening to his misfortunes?

  Oh, Zina, that’s what I don’t know! Sometimes the doctor in me is so dominant—the need to care, to heal—that I can’t see anything anymore of the person I am, or once was, of my own heart or mind; perhaps the doctor has gone off with them. Perhaps I have become my work.

  Bluntly, I said, Would you like to feel something for Aleksandr Pavlovich? Is that the problem?

  Oh, it’s not a problem! Please, Zina, I’ve said too much already, but you can see what the situation is: a young widower with two difficult children, and an unmarried doctor with few prospects beyond her work. It’s glaring, isn’t it?

  And the children?

  I don’t know them! I love children, but I don’t know them, I hardly know their father! What should I do, Zina? I would hate to let him think something that isn’t true.

  She reached out and took my hand. Her palm was warm and damp.

  I’m not really the right person to ask, I ventured. Have you spoken with Mama?

  But she’ll only tell me to go after him, as if I were Anton Pavlovich on his way to the river with his fishing pole and basket! She can be such a contradiction—fighting for our education, proud of our achievements, then thrusting us at widowers and bachelors.

  I’m not sure she would do that, don’t anticipate. I think you needn’t do anything, Lena. Give him time. So recently bereaved, he’s not seeing things clearly; he’s turned to you because you listen. I expect that’s all he wants from you at the moment. Don’t you think?

  She squeezed my hand and put her arms around me and held me for a long time.

  Neither of us mentioned the fact that Aleksandr Pavlovich has been drinking vodka almost constantly since arriving at Luka. It would have seemed callous, perhaps, given his recent loss.

  June 10

  Aleksandr Pavlovich left quite abruptly during the night, said Natasha. It’s not very clear why.

  Elena does not seem upset, did not even comment on the fact. Perhaps it’s all for the best.

  June 12, 1888

  Monsieur Pleshcheyev departed on the morning train. Mama sighs, consoles Vata, and they wander around the house like two restless children. They have come to me on the veranda no fewer than three times each to say things like, How quiet it will seem without him (totally untrue, you’ve never heard noisier than the Chekhov brothers); or, Just think, this great man was staying here and we rowed him around the pond; or, I shall reread all of his poetry, and perhaps Georges could set that sonnet to music. I don’t know quite what’s overcome them, they were not so ridiculous when he was here. Perhaps they worried he might surprise them at any minute. He did have an odd way of suddenly being there, his voice booming into the room.

  June 14, 1888

  I hear the birds; I hear the river, like a whisper reminding me of other things. Otherwise, Luka is silent. Georges, Natasha, Vata, and Anton Pavlovich have taken Roman and the carriage and set off for Sorochintsy, among other places; they will be staying with the Smagins, who have an estate not far from there. Once I would have joined them. I could have told them a lot about the region . . . Never mind, Natasha knows even more, and is not shy, and will ensure them of a good time.

  Maria Pavlovna often comes to join me for tea, as we are quite alone and dull without Natasha. She is shy with me; she brings books with her, and when silence weighs on us, she offers to read. We take advantage of her brother’s absence to read more from In the Twilight. When he is here, if he recognizes his own words, he tries to snatch the book away, tickling Maria Pavlovna, pleading, Stop reading that rubbish.

  But we both know that in a deeper place, he is proud of his work; it is the attention he does not like. I can understand that, just from writing these lines. Perhaps he is inventing people and situations, but nevertheless they have come from somewhere inside him, and not just his brain. He has taken close, secret feelings and worked them into a form he can reveal, but he is giving some part of himself to be examined, scrutinized, approved, or condemned . . . It is the same with Georges and the piano: When he first started playing as a little boy, he would chase us all out of the room if he had to practice, and he would say, How can I practice if you are here listening to me? And Elena or Mama would say, How can you want to perform for others someday if you don’t let them listen? And he would get red in the face, almost as if he were about to cry, and he would say, You are trying to steal my notes. There won’t be any music if you steal my notes. Now go away.

  Fortunately for Georges and for us, with time he overcame this fear of attention, though I suppose the notion of performing is a kind of nakedness—soul-nakedness. We are listening, taking words and music into our souls. It is such a dangerous openness, it requires so much trust to give that to another person . . . it’s a wonder anyone dares to be so open, and yet thankfully, most of us do open our selves . . . otherwise how would we ever know what is inside another person’s soul? What we say when sharing our thoughts is not the same.

  For example, Maria Pavlovna talks about her brothers, gives me all sorts of information about them—I have completely muddled up the details of their lives—but what she doesn’t say (and that I hear the loudest) is that it is Anton Pavlovich she is closest to; she is very proud of him and protective at the same time. Her Antosha. She is sharing him with my family, but she misses him, and I know she worries—about his future, whether they will be parted, would he be happy with a wife—although she doesn’t talk about it. She speaks little of herself, and that, too, is telling.

  I believe that she has forfeited a life of her own to devote it to her brothers. Or rather, she has chosen to make them—Anton Pavlovich in particular—her life’s work. She is the only girl; her mother is solid yet often overwrought, and Maria Pavlovna knows no selfishness.

  June 16, 1888

  This afternoon it rained; it grew too dark in the room for Maria Pavlovna to read to me, so she told me of a dreadful—yet comic—incident that occurred last week, shortly before Monsieur Pleshcheyev and Aleksandr Pavlovich left and the others set off for Sorochintsy.

  A magician was performing at the summer theater in Sumy that evening, and after dinner Natasha persuaded all the Chekhov siblings, along with Ivanenko and Vata and Elena and Georges, to go to see the show. I could hear their laughter and merriment long after they departed, a kind of echo on the still air. One or two of the brothers were already well into their vodka. I sat with Mama on the veranda—such a night, warm and full of other sounds of insects, and the hoopoe, and the nightingales. She held my hand and reminisced about our childhood; it was sad. I wanted to go to sleep, but I knew she wanted me there with her.

  So, the magician. Maria Pavlovna told me the whole story, bemused, half laughing, half annoyed. I will try to reproduce her words, just as she told it.

  For one of his tricks, she said, the magician asked for a volunteer from the audience. My brother Sasha went up: He began to joke with the magician in his jovial way, and everyone in the small audience was astonished—he made them look like utter fools, but the magician himself seemed to be delighted.

  I think, confided Maria Pavlovna almost apologetically, that Sasha was quite drunk. It was embarrassing. He was sh
outing and waving his arms and saying Abracadabra and Boo! and making faces at the magician. Some people laughed, but Antosha decided it was time to go up and remove him from the stage, and Sasha swore and insulted him in front of everyone. By then I’d seen enough, as had Elena Mikhailovna, and we begged Antosha to leave with us, and the three of us went for a walk by the river.

  Sasha did not return all night—we speculated that the magician had caused him to vanish. Until we learned from Georges that Sasha went straight from the theater to the station and took the first train back to Moscow. At two o’clock in the morning!

  To begin with, your sisters were very worried when they learned that he had left. They were concerned that he was somehow displeased with the guesthouse—Sasha is the eldest, after all—but apparently, he said to Georges—who repeated it to Natasha, who repeated it to me—Tell them that the only ones I’m happy with are you and Ivanenko, but as for the others . . . It’s dreadful! He didn’t even finish his sentence. Goodness knows what he meant, perhaps the fact that we walked out during his performance? To make things worse, when I mentioned the incident to Antosha, he conjectured that our brother had spoken out of drunken spite.

  She paused, perhaps for effect, then leaned closer to me. You see, he wrote a letter to your sister, Elena, asking for her hand in marriage (here Maria Pavlovna and I could not help but exclaim and laugh nervously). However, Antosha discovered the letter and tore it up before Sasha had a chance to send it.

  What? I exclaimed.

  Sasha wasn’t serious, concluded Maria Pavlovna softly, he can’t have been; he’s so confused, he’s lonely and he drinks and he thinks of his two small sons whom he must look after, no one understands him at all; he thinks that proposing marriage to your sister is a noble, grand gesture when it is unfounded and hasty and . . . ridiculous and makes us all look bad. So I think that’s why Antosha tore up the letter.

  We sat for a moment in silence. Then she took my hand and gave a quiet, musing, wistful laugh. I sighed. On the surface, it seemed almost a pity; Elena had begun by feeling genuinely fond of Aleksandr Pavlovich, certainly concerned about him and not unaware of the possible consequences. But this behavior at the theater, even related at second hand . . . I felt that for now I could not help but commend Anton Pavlovich’s intervention.

  I turned to Masha and said, I don’t want Elena to learn of this, she takes things far too much to heart. I believe she has been feeling genuinely sorry for Aleksandr Pavlovich. Her pity overwhelms her at times.

  Maria Pavlovna mumbled something; I had to ask her to repeat it.

  Is she hoping to marry?

  I think she doesn’t really know. She’s torn. She would like a family, but she loves her work. She has been working so hard that she forgets other aspects of life. You’ve seen her; she treats the entire village like her children, losing sleep if this one sneezes, that one coughs—

  Sasha is not a good man for her, said Masha emphatically. Your good peasants need her more than one man with two orphans and too great a fondness for his bottle.

  ANA HAD BEEN SLEEPING well, working with ease, losing herself in pages of Ukrainian summer.

  When she finished her work, she turned to the BBC website and read about the Ukrainian winter. She watched short videos showing the demonstrations on the Maidan: They had turned violent. The sky was dark with the smoke of burning tires. Already eight protesters had been killed, many others injured.

  Young people, despite their broken English, spoke eloquently and passionately to the reporters about their desire for change. These people died for my future. In the background, a brightness of flames from the braziers they lit to keep warm. Music, chanting, speeches. Ana had never been part of such a movement. At times she felt a surge of compassion that brought her close to tears, then relief: For all her isolation, she was still part of the human race; she could still feel.

  She had never been political; she had left that to Léo. He was the one who went to all the demonstrations, who spent hours in cafés with his friends from university, planning, debating, arguing. Sometimes he would drag her along to the Latin Quarter for a manif, to swell the numbers, but she never felt at ease with the French engouement for protest. Even when she spoke the language fluently, even when she obtained her French passport—though Léo was long gone by then, anyway. And fluency made no difference to the chanting of simplistic slogans; she could have done as much in Quechua.

  Perhaps it was Léo who had inspired her mistrust of political activism. He seemed to think it was part of his education as a Frenchman, a historical duty, a rite of passage, to be on the barricades. Or was it merely macho posturing, or an intellectual trend? Whatever his reasons, there was something not altogether sincere that she could only sense intuitively. He was always going on about unions and workers and the proletariat; he admired the Soviet Union. He envied her for speaking Russian, for having been there. Perhaps he was the dreamer and she was merely a realist. Politically, at any rate. But being involved was so much a part of who he was, the image he had of himself, the would-be revolutionary with his Guevara haircut (he stopped short at the beard).

  When he wasn’t plotting the next protest, he wrote novels. Earnest, wooden novels with archetypal peasants and workers and evil bosses. Ana found them difficult to judge: She thought he had a certain way with words, but she could not identify with his characters, their rigid motivation, their lack of emotion. Perhaps if her French had been better back then, she could have read the warning signs. Not one of those novels—she remembered three in the time they were together, written feverishly at night with shots of imported Moskovskaya—ever found a publisher; he used the ancient mimeograph machine at the Marxist student union to print up one of them and joked about capitalist samizdat. He would sneer at the paperbacks in English that Ana sometimes read—lusty historical romances that sold in the millions—and tell her she was polluting her brain. But every so often he would calmly, if condescendingly, enumerate the reasons behind those books’ commercial success—their accessibility, easy escapism, simplistically sympathetic characters, primacy of page-turning plot—as though he, too, could write such a book if only he cared to.

  What had become of him? She had looked for him online more than once, to no avail. She imagined him living in Bolivia or Venezuela or even Cuba, still fighting the fight, cynically, a balding, potbellied bureaucrat, smoking second-rate cigars in the fly-infested offices of a struggling guerrilla movement. Or maybe he was the manager of a Super U or a furniture outlet in Lille or Calais or somewhere dreary like that, driving a Renault through the rain to pick up the kids for a microwaved dinner of Fleury Michon moussaka.

  She wasn’t sure which would be worse.

  She would like to see him on her computer screen, chanting on the Maidan. Handsome, flamboyant Léo. But it wouldn’t be him, it would be a young Ukrainian who actually felt what Léo—for all his scorn for emotions—had so desperately wanted to feel all those years ago.

  KATYA HANDED PETER HIS umbrella and waved as he went down the path and out the gate. Trees dripping with rain; a swoosh of traffic in the distance. She turned and went back to the kitchen, poured another cup of coffee, switched off the radio with its refrain of road accidents and suicide bombings and child sex abuse. Was it her own perception, or had the world really changed for the worse? Or was it the media, digging up stories that once remained under silence?

  She’d grown up in such a vacuum of false good news. Celebratory five-year plans and visits from friendly heads of state or folk-dancing troupes. All the bad things always happened over there, na zapadye, in the West. Yet when she’d arrived in the West with Peter, she had seen none of those bad things—she had been dazzled by the novelty of it all, the shelves full of choice, the elegant window displays, the gardens. The gardens above all, justifying and defying the miserable weather, the pervasive damp; rain-soaked villages with their bursts of compensatory color; everywhere you looked, even on the smallest plots of land next to motorways o
r car parks. Katya was fascinated by plants and flowers, but she had never learned to garden. Peter used to in the early days; they had more time then. They had real weekends. They threw parties in their own little back garden when it was warm. It was a good life. Peter would mow their tiny lawn, then move about on his knees, up to his wrists in soil. Bushes, borders, bursts of color and texture. She never learned the names of the plants. Except the hydrangeas; everyone knew hydrangeas. He prepared the garden for their parties the way she prepared the zakuski. Everyone loved Katya’s zakuski. After a while, though, five or ten years, she began to doubt the enthusiasm of those polite English guests or their louder American friends and colleagues: They did not know how to classify her, she was too exotic, she was no hydrangea, so out of awkwardness, they enthused about her zakuski. She used to smile and shrug and say, They’re just hors d’oeuvres. But because she was exotic, they tasted better.

  Nowadays people just went out and bought expensive sushi.

  And those parties: She always went to bed—the dishwasher half loaded, piles of plates and parades of glasses all over the kitchen—with a sense of something lost or never attained. Where were the conversations, the truly enthusiastic and deep philosophic engagement she remembered from parties back in Russia? These people gossiped about authors and actors, or house prices, or where they would send their children to school, or a skiing trip to some French resort whose name she could hardly pronounce (nor could they); they were not stupid, far from it, she just wondered if they did not accept their comfortable lives as glibly as her erstwhile Soviet compatriots had accepted the drivel churned out by Pravda and Izvestia. She wanted to shake them.

  But once, she had sat until sunrise in the garden with a guest. And that time she had felt as if she were back in Russia, philosophizing, questioning life. Do you love your husband? Is it enough to have a job, to travel? What about religion? Death? How do you define freedom? What gives meaning? Where are the limits of the individual?