There was another transaction in Colombo. Midshipman Glinka and Chekhov went to an Indian animal-dealer and each bought a tame male mongoose; Chekhov went back to the dealer and bought another animal, too wild to handle and sold as a female mongoose. With these animals they returned to the Petersburg. On 12 November 1890 the ship left Colombo. Thirteen days passed without a port. Midshipman Glinka and Anton Chekhov sat on deck with their mongooses. In late November Chekhov passed through the Suez Canal. Pavel wrote: 'Greetings to Holy Palestine, in which the world's Redeemer lived. You will be passing Jerusalem'. Uncle Mitrofan was so moved, Georgi reported, that 'my father put Anton's letter on the chest of drawers, covered it with his hat and went to church.' Pavel was tracing Anton's journey on a wall map of Siberia; he wrote to Vania just before Anton
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ANNl'llS!)!?: I'fcl.K RINAGE docked in Odessa: 'I think only about Antosha, may he return safe and sound. Such separation is unbearable. Come and meet him. Misha will come too.'25 Anton saw Mt Sinai, and then sailed past the island of Santurini which supplied Taganrog with wine. On 2 December the ship reached Odessa. After three days' quarantine the passengers disembarked. Anton, Glinka, Father Irakli and the mongooses took the express to Moscow. On 7 December Evgenia and Misha intercepted the train at Tula. Misha recalled: We found Anton dining in the station restaurant with Midshipman Glinka… and a strange looking man, an aborigine with a broad, flat face and narrow slanting eyes. This was the chief priest of Sakhalin, monk-priest Irakli… wearing an ordinary suit of an absurd Sakhalin cut. As they ate, the mongooses stood on their hind legs and kept peeking at their plates. The Sakhalin priest, his face as flat as a board and without a hint of facial hair, and the mongooses seemed so exotic that a whole crowd gathered around the diners, gawping at them. 'Is he a Red Indian?' 'Are they apes?' came the questions. After a touching reunion with the writer, mother and I got in the same carriage and the five of us set off for Moscow. Apart from the mongoose Anton had brought in a cage a very wild female mongoose which soon turned out to be a palm cat.26 Misha and Anton drank and played with the mongooses for the four hour journey. Father Irakli and Midshipman Glinka's mongoose stayed with the Chekhovs for some time. The Firgang house was crowded. Pavel now came home every evening. (He was soon to retire from Gavrilov's warehouse.) While he put up with the mongooses, which dug up potted plants and scrabbled in his beard, the palm cat was unbearable. It would emerge at night and bite the twitching feet of any guest sleeping in the dining room. (For Pavel, Anton's 'mongooses' were a bench mark of animal delinquency.) The male mongoose was christened Svoloch, best translated as 'Sod'. Sod and Suvorin were uppermost in Anton's mind. Sick with the change of climate (he had a cold, constipation, haemorrhoids and, he claimed, impotence), he stayed at home and wrote letters. He told Leikin that mongooses were better than dachshunds, 'a mixture of rat and crocodile, tiger and monkey'. To Shcheglov he wrote: If only you knew what lovely animals I brought from India! They are mongooses, the size of half-grown kittens, very cheerful lively
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beasts. Their qualities are: daring, curiosity and affection for man. They fight rattle snakes and always win, they are afraid of nothing and nobody and, as for curiosity, there isn't a parcel or package in the room they don't open; when they meet anyone they first of all poke around in pockets to see what's there? When they're left alone in the room they start to cry. He did not mention mongooses to Suvorin: instead he confessed his disillusionment with humanity - after Sakhalin his contempt for the Russian intelligentsia extended to Suvorin's closest collaborators: I passionately want to talk to you. My soul is seething. I want nobody but you, for you are the only one I can talk to… When shall I see you and Anna? How is Anna? Greetings to Boria and Nastia; to prove I have been a convict I shall, when I come to see you, attack them with a knife and yell wildly. I shall set fire to Anna's room… I embrace you and all your house warmly, except for… Burenin who… should long ago have been exiled to Sakhalin. For a month Anton was too ill to leave the house, let alone visit Petersburg. He spent Christmas and New Year with his family.
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The Flight to Europe January-May 1891 ANTON SPENT DECEMBER 1890 sorting out boxes of cards and papers from Sakhalin and revising his story 'Gusev'. Winter in Russia that year was harsh: Moscow plunged to minus 300, in Taganrog snow reached the eaves. Irregular heart beats and a cough kept Chekhov awake; by day haemorrhoids made sitting painful. The house was crowded - Vania had caught typhoid in the marshes of Sudogda and came to recuperate. Mentally, Anton had changed. His fiction was to show how Sakhalin had destroyed his respect for authority and strong men. His affection for Suvorin survived, but he now felt contempt for New Times. He rarely referred to Sakhalin in his fiction, but his confirmed distrust of ideology, and his preference for unspoilt nature over spoiled humanity are Sakhalin's legacy. Chekhov's remarks to Suvorin that December echo those he would give to his fictional heroes: 'God's world is good. One thing is not good: us.'
Lika Mizinova, Olga Kundasova - who brought her seventeen-year-old sister Zoe along - and the piano teacher Aleksandra Pokhlebina all danced attendance on Anton. In the Crimea Masha had met Countess Klara Mamuna: she became Misha's fiancee, but for a year she too focused on Anton. In Petersburg others were waiting. New rumours of impending marriage were spreading. While Anton was away, the old poet Pleshcheev had unexpectedly inherited two million roubles from a cousin who died intestate. His daughter Elena became an heiress. All Petersburg, from Anna Suvorina to AJeksandr Chekhov, urged Anton, half in jest, to propose.
To Burenin the journey to Sakhalin had been radical posturing by a failed talent. The radicals, however, acclaimed a politicized Chekhov. 'Gusev' won praise all round: the story's hero, a doomed tubercular soldier buried at sea, was seen by the left as a victim of a ruthless system and by the right as a model of Christian resignation. Tchaikovsky
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was moved. Natalia's dentist refused to accept payment from her, as Chekhov's sister-in-law. Two years late, the Dauphin sent a promised gift of Santurini wine, with a letter in fine Latin, ending: 'Dii te servent, nymphae ament, doctores que ne curent. Tuus A.27 The Gods were not obliging, and Anton would not let any doctor treat him, but the nymphs were loving. The Dauphin's wine helped Anton cope with his friends' misery.
Ezhov was still suicidal after his wife's death; he survived because he now wrote for Suvorin, and, vouched for by Masha, was teaching drawing to girls in a school run by a Madame Mangus [Mongoose].1* Ivanenko, his sister-in-law dead, his brother dying of ÒÂ, had lost hope and abandoned his flute, while Zinaida Lintvariova, ill with a brain tumour, Ivanenko reported, 'is sincerely and patiently waiting for her end. She keeps asking with great interest after you and your family, the poor woman cannot bear it.'29 The 'white plague' struck old friends in Taganrog. Death was gathering in Aunt Fenichka in Moscow and Anton's friend the actor Svobodin in Petersburg. After watching a soldier die on board the Petersburg, how could Anton not think of his own inevitable end? Nor had he forgotten Anna and Kolia: in March 1891 he put in his new notebook: 'The trouble is that both these deaths (A. and N.) are not an accident and not an event in human life, but an ordinary thing.'