The Summer Guest Page 21

  I have strange dreams—the laudanum. Last night, for example: I am in the rowboat with Anton Pavlovich, and I am blind, and the boat is rocking with the waves, and I can hear Rosa barking on shore, I don’t know if she is upset at being left behind or is warning me of a storm. We must go back, Anton Pavlovich! I cry, but he doesn’t hear me, just hums to himself—dear Lord, it’s Grigory Petrovich’s hum—then he says, We must catch crayfish for Rosa’s dinner, and you’ll have a prize, dear Zinaida Mikhailovna.

  Then Rosa is swimming toward us, with great difficulty, waves washing over her head—I can’t see her, but I know she’s swimming—and I’m afraid for her, afraid she will drown, and I wake up.

  This made me so upset that I crept out into the corridor and called to her very quietly, and she followed me back to the room, and I lay on the floor with her. I wept and held her warm body until my trembling stopped and I could return to my bed.

  June 8

  Marian Semashko has arrived with his cello. The concerts we’ll have! With Ivanenko on flute and Georges on the piano, our very own Luka Chamber Orchestra.

  Our cellist was practicing: mere notes, scales, nothing containing an actual melody, and it was so mournful, that sound, but still the beauty of it surpasses the sadness. And why can sadness be so beautiful?

  Fortunately, Anton Pavlovich did not take long to befriend him and fill the room with laughter: He has baptized the cellist Marmelad Fortepianich Semashechka. Marian Romualdovich takes things in stride; quite spontaneously, he composed a silly song, which he sang very gravely with the deepest and most lugubrious sounds from the cello, about a writer from Moscow called Antonio Konfityurovich Scriblovsky. I think for once Anton Pavlovich was speechless.

  June 10, 1889

  Poor Marmelad—that’s what everyone calls Semashko now. He only made things worse by telling us that, as a boy, he had a ginger cat called Marmelad, so now everyone meows at him. Natasha says he’s a splendid-looking fellow, with a mass of curly dark hair and a mustache.

  I believe that before Anton Pavlovich had us in stitches, I was wondering about the beauty of sadness. I have had, if not an answer—for I’m not sure such abstract, even emotional queries can have answers—at least an illustration that went some way toward revealing the nature of the sadness.

  The flute or the piano on their own can be light and airy—a passage of clouds, a stream, birds, a ladder of sunlight—that is what our modest recitals or Georges’s practicing have often evoked to me in the past. And now the cello, this mournfulness. I am grateful to the musicians and the composers—Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Brahms, among others—for bringing spontaneous images of the world to me on their notes. Some might argue that music does not contain images, that Tchaikovsky did not see fields of wheat when he composed his Little Russian Symphony; I only know that is what I saw in the music—at times, and in waves or snatches of consciousness—when we went to hear the symphony at the concert hall in Petersburg.

  Now Marmelad (I can’t help it, it makes me laugh) and Ivanenko and Georges played together last night in our drawing room. All our guests came to listen, including Nikolay Pavlovich. So there were a dozen of us crowded into the room, and Anton Pavlovich took Nikolay Pavlovich and led him out onto the veranda. In case he doesn’t feel well, he said, I can see him back to the guesthouse and not disturb you all; we can hear quite well, and will have the added chorus of frogs and owls and mosquitoes, and perhaps, with any luck, the bittern will grace us with a solo performance.

  Nikolay Pavlovich tried to laugh, but all that came out was a hacking cough. He gasped for breath and at last fell silent, and we waited for the concert to begin.

  Georges played the opening notes. The music was strange, unfamiliar to me. He had told me the name—a Petersburg composer, one of his professors, but I’ve forgotten it.

  I was sitting not far from the French doors that open onto the veranda; I could hear Anton Pavlovich’s voice murmuring, gently but firmly, like that of a parent to a child. The tones of the cello deepened and grew louder at that very moment, as if to silence Anton Pavlovich’s voice, a sort of desperate reprimand; then again a lull, where the flute tried to restore a bitter gaiety, and from the veranda I could hear, ever so faintly, the sound of sobs, then again Anton Pavlovich’s voice, trying to be soothing but failing, his whisper impatient, and again the cello, almost angry, as if trying to drown out the voice from the veranda. Nikolay Pavlovich was coughing again, quite audibly, and after a moment Anton Pavlovich led him away. A lull in the music, and I could hear their steps fading at the end of the veranda, and then three long, sustained notes from the cello, like a sort of final, desolate call.

  It was all purely by chance—the choice of the music, and Anton Pavlovich’s decision to lead his brother away just when he did, but the sound of those fading footsteps against the sustained notes of the cello was almost more than I could bear. Everything seemed to have gathered into that moment: the sympathy between the music and the injustice of life, and the ephemeral beauty of being there, having my whole life, such as it was now, there in the drawing room and on the veranda, all my loved ones playing or listening to the music. The music seemed to be speaking to me alone, as if it had been written for me, for that moment, when I understood what was waiting for me: what, like Nikolay Pavlovich, I would lose.

  The music was scraping me from within, but I needed it more than anything. To prove to myself that I am still alive, to witness the alchemy that turns sadness to a beauty I can still see.

  June 13, 1889

  Not left my bed for three days. Some sort of fever. Limbs so weak, I can hardly hold the pen.

  Outside, beyond, is heat. Elena brings cloths, cold water. No news from our guests, no visits. No music. Laudanum.

  I cannot write.

  June 14

  He took my hands between his own.

  I am better, thank you, Anton Pavlovich.

  I am glad. A pause, then before I had time to ask, he added: I wish I could say as much for Nikolay Pavlovich.

  There’s no progress?

  He’s losing weight. I cannot get him to eat, he only drinks milk, the coughing exhausts him. He won’t leave the house now.

  His voice was angry; I could not determine whether it was a desperate anger against his brother or against his own inability to change things.

  There’s a kitten. A tiny gray and white thing. He plays with it, it goes to him, jumps on his hand, he dips his finger in the milk and gives it to the kitten to lick, to suck. For a moment he forgets, loses himself, he stops coughing, he is completely concentrated on the tiny paws and whiskers, on the little animal’s curiosity, as if he can somehow learn something. But when I suggest the river or the garden, he shakes his head and coughs again and stares out the window and pushes the kitten away.

  I did not know what to say.

  I’m thinking of going to the Smagins’ again, said Anton Pavlovich, in a day or two. Aleksandr is coming from Moscow with the children and the nanny. I don’t want to be around them. It’s too much.

  I see.

  This was quite sudden. We had not heard anything more from Aleksandr Pavlovich since the end of last summer. I was hoping that Elena would have quite forgotten him.

  The harvest has failed, did you know that, Zinaida Mikhailovna?

  Yes, Pasha told me. It’s been a terrible spring, hasn’t it?

  At least the crayfish have been abundant.

  But we can’t make bread in the winter with crayfish.

  Indeed. How peculiar that would be.

  How will we feed the peasants?

  You will find a way.

  His voice sounded distant, preoccupied, almost as if he didn’t care. Although I know he does.

  But the moment of tension was there, and carried its weight of silence, until Anton Pavlovich thought of a funny story to tell me about Svobodin, and then Masha arrived to spend some time with me, and he left soon thereafter.

  He’s overwhelmed, said Masha. She of
fered no explanation; none was needed.

  June 16

  They have left. Georges, Svobodin, Anton Pavlovich, and Ivan Pavlovich. I wondered if Natasha was hurt that she wasn’t invited to the Smagins’ this year; she says she has better things to do, but I believe that is her pride speaking.

  She sat down to read to me, and all the restlessness in her heart punctuated her sentences; the characters in the story hesitated, sighed, stared out at the garden, and forgot themselves. Finally, she put the book down in exasperation. Do you mind, Zinochka? It’s such a boring book, what do you think?

  I disagreed but didn’t say so. She pulled her chair closer to mine and took my hand.

  There’s this woman with Aleksandr Pavlovich, she said. The children’s nanny, so they say. She’s called Natalya, like me, Natalya Aleksandrovna Golden. They call her Nata-chez-vous, too. I feel almost offended. I thought that was my exclusive nickname.

  Is she unpleasant?

  No, not at all. I’d say it’s Aleksandr Pavlovich who seems unpleasant. Poor woman, it must have been dreadful to travel with him and those children. They’re absolute scamps.

  We were silent, then she continued: Masha doesn’t like being there while Antosha is away. Her brothers argue all the time. Mikhail Pavlovich has gone off somewhere, and Aleksandr is all alone to look after Nikolay Pavlovich. Evgenia Yakovlevna can’t handle Nikolay Pavlovich; she just sits and sobs, and Masha holds her hand. Aleksandr’s little boys run around tormenting Anya, she is threatening to leave. They grab her braid and call her Fat Pole.

  And this Natalya Aleksandrovna?

  She wanders around the garden as if she’s come here by mistake. Apparently, the family doesn’t like her. They have had to take rooms in the village, Evgenia Yakovlevna won’t have them here for some reason. Perhaps because of Aleksandr’s behavior last year. I know she’s very careful not to offend Mama. Besides, there really isn’t room.

  I sighed and felt very weary. Not a minute’s walk away, there is a man who is gravely ill, and his family continues to squabble and bicker and find reasons to dislike one another and act indignant. Ever since he arrived this year, Anton Pavlovich has made no secret of the fact that he resents his brother’s illness, that it keeps him from traveling here and there and beyond with Suvorin. Now he has left Luka not one hour after his other brother arrived, as if to mark his disapproval—or was it simply to leave the burden of caring for Nikolay Pavlovich to his older brother at last?

  But perhaps anger is one way to cope with losing someone you love, however selfish it may seem to others. Perhaps it is altogether too much for him, and he feels only an irrational urge to flee that is contrary to all his affection for Nikolay Pavlovich. He cannot bear to see him as he is now.

  And Elena? I asked softly. Has she not been to examine Nikolay Pavlovich?

  They haven’t asked—since Anton Pavlovich was there anyway, until yesterday; I believe she doesn’t want to get involved, though of course if they ask her, she will go—but even Mama and Pasha have told her to wait. It seems from what Masha told me that there is not much they can do except try to keep him comfortable—and make sure Tatyana remembers to bring the milk.

  I have not been in Nikolay Pavlovich’s company often, and no one has ever described him to me, but I cannot forget how we greeted each other this year when he arrived. The dry, hot hand. The angry, helpless cough. But while I sat talking with Natasha on the veranda, I could see him absolutely clearly: a gaunt, thin young man in his bed, with wild hair and a ragged beard, and a hand feebly lifted, looking around as if he had lost something; calling for a gray and white kitten.

  As medical students, we learned, or tried to learn, to overcome our fear and disgust in the presence of death and disease. You had to or you could not be a doctor, it was as simple as that.

  Sitting there on our quiet veranda with Natasha, I was almost overwhelmed, and I had to ask her to fetch some poetry. The imagined scene of Nikolay Pavlovich in his bed conveyed to me, far more bitterly than all the patients I saw when I was well, the threshold to one’s fragile, too corporeal self. If one crosses that threshold, one is sucked down into a spiral of fear, disgust, and complete loss of hope.

  I keep seeing the kitten: I feel its warm fur between my palms, its sharp yet gentle little claws; I hear its frenetic purring, a mixture of love and fear.

  June 17

  We were having our morning tea. I heard her footsteps, hurried; then a long pause before she knocked.

  It was Anya, come to tell us that Nikolay Pavlovich had died at dawn.

  The hours that followed—as if I were standing in the middle of a room with people swirling around me, and I could not catch anyone, stop anyone long enough, to find out what had happened, what was happening; like a game of blindman’s buff, only it was real, they all hurried by me, eager to escape, all that was missing was laughter.

  Elena and Mama have taken charge. At the guesthouse, they are stunned and weeping. The brothers argue, incriminate. Elena has brought Masha and Evgenia Yakovlevna to us for now, while the women from the village prepare the body. There will be a requiem; the coffin and a cross have been ordered. A telegram was sent to Anton Pavlovich. God knows how long it will take him to get back from the Smagins’.

  I write these things—practical everyday things, real things that must be done—when neither I nor anyone else is fooled. Insignificant helpless gestures against grief, like this scribbling. Only Masha and her mother, sobbing quietly in a corner of the drawing room, tell the truth. We should all do just that, sit in a corner and weep.

  June 18

  I slept fitfully. Dreams, sounds in the night. Masha stayed with us. No one spoke. Rosa whimpered by my door. Even the owls, the frogs, seem mournful. Have they always sounded like this?

  I am not much use. I do what I can, sit and talk quietly, keep vigil, carry messages. Elena is so good. She has offered to pay for the burial. She takes things in hand. Natasha consoles; her presence soothes, she dares to smile, I am sure, because she is on the side of life, of hope.

  We all knew how sick he was—why did Anton Pavlovich believe he could recover? Why these misdiagnoses of laryngeal infection or typhoid when it could only be consumption? You could hear it in the way he coughed!

  We are all afraid, that is why: knowing that the disease can strike irrespective of age or rank or talent, that it does not retreat, and it spares no one. Death sitting in our midst, uninvited and implacable. Even as I write this and know my own death sentence, I do not want to accept it, I hope against hope for remission, indulgence. Some miraculous clemency. I go back and forth between my pragmatic medical acceptance of facts and some superstitious clinging to the illusory promise of life. For Nikolay Pavlovich, it was no different.

  Midnight.

  Elena says Anton Pavlovich has arrived, exhausted. He came by train. The others are following with Roman and the carriage.

  The family is keeping vigil around the coffin, with the cantor and the village mourners.

  I let Rosa stay in my bedroom with me, fleas be damned. It comforts me to hear her snuffling, her gentle whining as she dreams.

  June 19, 1889

  Our families joined, but not in the way any of us would have hoped.

  Nikolay Pavlovich is buried in our graveyard on the hill.

  I am told you can see the cross for miles around.

  Many people came from the village for the funeral. I walked with Tonya and Pasha. Natasha and Elena carried the lid with Masha; Georges was a pallbearer with the Chekhov brothers and Ivanenko. Evgenia Yakovlevna has been so terribly distraught, clinging to the coffin and sobbing endlessly. That is her right; it is her suffering that pains me, that leaves a tight fist clenched inside my chest.

  Later, when we were sitting for lunch, Natasha confided that in the midst of all the sobbing, including our own, I would not have heard Anton Pavlovich. He stayed dry-eyed throughout the service. No one has seen him weep.

  You might think he has no heart; or y
ou might think he buries sorrow so deep that we ordinary people cannot see his grief, nor can we share in his rites of mourning.

  Either way, we do not know who he is. If we fault him for a lack of tears, that is our failure to understand, not his failing as a person.

  They have gone to the monastery at Akhtyrka, the entire family. Luka is suddenly deathly quiet. I use the word consciously, deliberately. In their need to commune with death, to contemplate their God and seek consolation, they leave us with silence and absence.

  Natasha broods, reminds me that they visited the monastery not two weeks ago with Anton Pavlovich and Svobodin. They made fun of the monks, she said. Anton Pavlovich introduced himself as Count Wild Boar. What will he say to them now?

  I’m sure the monks have a sense of humor, I replied. They were glad of the entertainment.

  And now?

  It’s their duty, is it not, to accompany those who grieve, to help them understand their relation with death?

  Natasha grunted. They showed us the icons. That helped me understand my relation with life.

  In what way?

  Art, she said simply, then added, the force of life. The reason not to succumb to despair. We had a long discussion about it afterward. Every work of art—even an anonymous icon commissioned by God, so to speak—is an act of defiance, speaking for the possibility of immortality.

  No, Natasha, that is an illusion. Death always wins.

  It doesn’t! And I know what you’re thinking: No matter how I argue that Dead Souls is immortal, Gogol has been dead for thirty-seven years.

  Well, can you prove that Gogol the person, Nikolay Gogol from Sorochintsy, is still alive?

  The fact of the immortality of his work, of his spirit—it’s a vast, worthy conspiracy among the living, a consolation and a source of hope and joy—

  Precisely: a conspiracy to maintain a vast delusion—

  And so it may be, but a delusion that helps people to live, gives meaning to the lowest of lives—