I marveled at her self-possession.
‘You are very kind, Sofya Andreyevna. And I am glad that you have, at last, honored us with a visit. But I’m afraid I cannot help you with regard to the diaries. I can act only upon your husband’s directions.’
With this, Sofya Andreyevna bid them all good-bye, harshly, and summoned her driver.
‘Are you coming with me, Valentin Fedorovich?’ she asked.
Chertkov looked at me impassively.
‘Will Leo Nikolayevich be needing me this afternoon?’
‘You know better than I.’
It had been a mistake to hesitate.
‘I’ll be back later,’ I said to Sergeyenko. ‘After dinner.’
‘Masha will be delighted,’ he sneered.
Sofya Andreyevna looked at me knowingly, while Chertkov simply stared, his eyes as narrow as the tip of a pen.
In the droshky, Sofya Andreyevna turned to me coyly. ‘Have you been keeping something from me, Valentin Fedorovich? I should hope not. We have become close friends.’
‘It is nothing,’ I said.
‘A young woman in your life is nothing?’
‘Masha is a close friend.’
‘A lover?’
‘A good friend.’
‘That sounds serious.’
Friendship is always serious, I thought, irritated by her meddling.
‘I didn’t mean to annoy you,’ she said.
‘I’m not annoyed.’
‘You forget that I’m an experienced reader,’ she said. ‘I can read your face, every letter. The script is beautifully clear.’
Did I blush or merely imagine that my entire body flamed? I said, ‘My relations with Masha are somewhat painful, just now. I don’t really want to talk about them.’
‘Do you love her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t fret, my dear!’ she said. ‘I shall not tell the great man.’ She paused. ‘I suppose you know about his past. He was a whoremonger in his youth, insatiable. He has hardly ever had much self-control in this regard. Why else would he protest so violently? He doesn’t want anyone else to do what he’s been doing for sixty years!’
What could I say? Sofya Andreyevna knows far more than I do about the sexual history of Leo Tolstoy, although the general pattern of his life is familiar. He has never troubled to hide the facts of his early life. ‘I was a sinful young man,’ he once told me. ‘Obsessed with sexual longings, overcome by animal desire. Only a long struggle has rid me of these things.’ That’s what he says, though I have noticed his eyes grow lively whenever a young servant girl enters the room.
This afternoon I spent several hours in the Remington room with Sasha, answering letters. Leo Nikolayevich is so upset that he does not even want to sign, let alone revise, our responses. I feel strange, occasionally, as I write letters in his name. It’s as though I am Leo Tolstoy. Somehow, the letters don’t seem like forgeries. When I write as Tolstoy, I am Tolstoy. His spirit, like that of other men and women, is simply a demarcation of the human spirit, which in itself is a demarcation of the larger spirit, the God-spirit; in death, the demarcations end. We become, to use Emerson’s phrase, part of the Oversoul. We touch this God-spirit in daily life, too, during blessed moments, moments of affection, of peculiar insight, of fierce candor. The spirit of Leo Tolstoy is capacious, allowing easy entry. I left Yasnaya Polyana tonight feeling more like Tolstoy than myself.
I gradually reentered the spirit of Bulgakov as I approached Telyatinki. The sun burned on the hay fields, flamed in the elms, and turned the red earth redder under my horse’s gallop. I saw Masha standing in the back garden, alone, her shadow long on the grass. My groin began to ache, to swell before I could even see her face.
We said nothing to each other but walked, hand in hand, into the balsam wood behind the house. The forest was like a flame ball, with the sunset shattering through a thousand needles. The ground smelled cool, rich but cool, with its mauve mat of pine.
Standing between the tall and immensely thick trunks of two red pines, we looked at each other for a long time, saying nothing.
But there was something I wanted to say to her. I didn’t know how to say it. I was afraid to say it, since once it got said, we were stuck with it. It would either flap there in the wind like a loose shutter, an annoyance, or something definite and palpable would happen.
‘I love you, Masha,’ I said.
The words floated in the air, like a balloon, a bright, shimmering bubble. I waited for it to pop into nothingness, to disappear. For a terrible moment, I felt as though I hadn’t said it aloud, that the words had formed, cloudlike, in my head without condensing into utterance.
‘I’m glad,’ she replied.
But there was an aloofness there. She wasn’t glad. Not entirely.
‘Are you really?’
‘If I weren’t glad, I wouldn’t have said that, would I?’
‘It’s just that… you had to respond.’
‘I don’t have to do anything.’
I felt a twinge of panic. Masha has this cool edge, a blade of Damascus steel, which she flashes on occasion.
‘Valya,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to hurt you. Do you know that?’
‘You hurt me when you say nothing. I dislike it when I can’t tell what you’re thinking. When I can’t seem to find you.’
Was she weeping? Slightly. Her eyes caught the evening sun and absorbed its redness. They were watery, as many-sided as a gem. Her blond hair, too, turned a little pink in the strange, beautiful light. I wanted to touch that hair. I let my palm graze the delicate substance. I could feel the roundness of her head, its solid, gourdlike shape, beneath the long strands. I kissed her. I let myself breathe what came before me, the barely fathomable presence of another human being. It seemed impossibly magical. I lifted my hands onto her small shoulders, and I pulled her close.
‘I’ve got to return to Petersburg,’ she said finally. ‘Soon.’
‘For good?’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘I don’t understand, Masha… now that we–’
‘I know that you love me, Valya.’
‘I do.’
‘It’s difficult for me to respond to you. We’ve only just begun to know each other.’
‘That’s true, but–’
‘You seem young to me.’
‘I’m older than you are!’
‘Our pasts are what matter. I feel like I’ve lived so many lives already.’
‘Masha, that’s nonsense. Your life is just beginning.’
‘In other circumstances, I think I’d have been much… warmer. I feel my own coolness, and I don’t like it. I hate it, in fact. It’s not what I mean to happen.’
Her honesty overwhelmed me. And the exact, riveting way she spoke. I felt mute, stupid, even silly beside her. I could hardly hope to respond in kind. It wasn’t that I couldn’t be honest with her. Rather, I had almost nothing to be honest about.
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘You can’t go away.’
She smiled at me.
‘Perhaps I’ll go away for a brief while. I can return to Telyatinki whenever I want. I spoke to Chertkov last night, and he was sympathetic. He was actually kind.’
Chertkov remains incomprehensible to me. Whatever Masha or Leo Nikolayevich think, I would never trust him.
Masha touched my hair. It was the first gesture from her that I could really take as an expression of natural and unaffected love.
Her head fell against my shoulder.
‘I need you,’ I said.
‘I know you do,’ she said. ‘I know.’
25
L. N.
LETTER TO SOFYA ANDREYEVNA