When the worst appeared over, Sofya Andreyevna knelt by the bed and clutched his feet. ‘Dearest Lord, not now! Don’t let him die now!’
Tanya put a hand on her mother’s shoulder and said, in a kindly way, ‘Let’s go downstairs, Mama. He should rest now.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Sofya Andreyevna said. ‘If he dies, you will lose a father. But I will have killed a man.’
Her words drilled through the dark.
‘You must all go down,’ Dushan Makovitsky said. ‘I shall keep watch over him myself.’
Leo Nikolayevich was not ready to die, however. By ten o’clock, he had nearly recovered, though he didn’t try to stand. He sipped tea and asked that Dushan Makovitsky read to him from the Gospels.
I listened, quietly, at the door.
‘A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.’ The words sang in my heart, they were so beautiful, so perfectly simple. ‘By this all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have loved one to another.’
Leo Nikolayevich echoed Dushan in a hoarse, low voice.
Now I lay in bed awake, unable to relax. It had been harrowing to observe the signature of death on that dear, wrinkled face. As always, my thoughts turned to Masha in Petersburg. I lit the candle on my table and wrote a letter to her:
I find myself wrestling once more with the old formulations. Is the soul really a separate entity? Is the body a vessel? I do not know, but – having seen dear Leo Nikolayevich in such a condition – life seems even more mysterious to me now, so fragile, evanescent. And precious. We pass, so briefly, from the unknown to the unknown, our days on earth like petals on a bough.
I think of you, Masha, even now, as I sit at this wooden table in the middle of the night. My thoughts return to you at odd times. Our friendship is like a chink of light in an otherwise dark wall. It’s as if, somehow, I have you with me always. Here again the mystery of time and space confounds me, upsets me. Your soul, I dare to think, has linked itself to mine, and the space between us is somehow irrelevant. I don’t believe it exists. I actually believe I have you here beside me when you’re not. Am I foolish to think such things?
I keep thinking, however, that only love could lessen the terrible rift between mind and body, between spirit and flesh, that torments me. I can’t imagine what it means to say that today I am a young man in the flush of youth, that tomorrow I will be old and alone, that the next day I shall be dust in the earth. If there is no love in the world, no enduring spirit in man, then I am nothing now, our affection is nothing, and we might as well both he dead.
But as soon as I write that, I feel the deep hunger for God that makes me aware that God exists. By God I mean the World Spirit, the sense of the Eternal, the hovering blaze or mind that informs and, in a way, creates the world around us. We are each of us a small God, and the love we engender between us can only increase the Godness within us, enlarge the circle of affection we can share, the breath of spirit.
You will, I hope, forgive my expostulations and philosophizing. It is horribly late, and language runs away from me. I am tired now, can hardly think. Tomorrow, I shall write again. Write to me. I miss you. I love you.
32
Sofya Andreyevna
‘Mother, you’re jealous of him,’ Sasha said to me yesterday. ‘That’s the problem.’
Where is that girl’s mind? Of course I’m jealous of him! Why should I share him with vagabonds and mountebanks, money grubbers and frauds? Yet I must try to ensure that he is not continually upset. The tension will kill him. It is my duty, as his wife, to see that he lives in a calm atmosphere.
The day after Lyovochka’s attack I told Sasha that she and Varvara Mikhailovna could return home. It was killing her father to have his little briar rose removed from him. And there was no telling what plots she might hatch with Chertkov once removed from my view. So I made a spectacle of myself, standing on the wooden steps at Telyatinki, begging forgiveness of my daughter and her friend. They appeared genuinely dumbfounded. I loved it.
Sasha is a sentimental girl, the kind who weeps over the death of a toad; she burst into tears at the sight of me, and we embraced like long-lost sisters. Even Varvara Mikhailovna, who has the sensitivity of a granite monument, shed a few lightly manufactured tears and hugged me.
‘A family gathering!’ said Chertkov, dripping poison as he stepped from the shadows. Light glanced from his slick, bald forehead. He was redolent of scent – a womanly affectation appropriate to a man of his Greekish ways.
‘It is good to see you, Vladimir Grigorevich.’
‘Always a pleasure, to be sure.’
‘I would like you to visit us tomorrow. Will you come for lunch?’
He thanked me without a trace of his usual irony, a marvelous performance.
The offer was rash, however. I should have known better. He contaminates the ground he walks on. And there is the matter of habit. If the idea were planted that he could visit us without difficulty, he would turn up every day.
When I heard the approach of his carriage, my pulse began to race: 142! I peered out the window of my bedroom with binoculars. Lyovochka stood on the front steps, happily waiting to receive his disciple. I had asked him not to embrace the man. That is more than I can bear. But he could not hide the joy on his face; he looked like a young bride who has just spied her lover in the distance. A disgusting thing for the servants to see!
How I managed I shall never know. With all my strength, I maintained a cool civility, inquiring after his mother and wife, inwardly counting the minutes till that scoundrel was out of my house. When he had finally gone, I begged Lyovochka to make this the last time I had to endure that malevolent presence. He unexpectedly agreed to write to Chertkov and his wife, suggesting that this experiment in reconciliation was premature. Some time must pass before they attempt another visit.
I suppose Lyovochka was unwilling to make my life harder because he feels guilty. A few days ago, I discovered a secret diary in his boot. I’ve said nothing to him about the diary, but he must realize it is missing. The wording is cryptic, but it confirms my suspicion that he and Chertkov have entered into an unholy contract to steal his copyrights from the family. This comes just when I have had an offer from Prozveshenye, one of the most sturdy publishing firms in Russia, to purchase all the rights to Lyovochka’s work upon his death. And they have offered one million rubles! Enough to sustain the Tolstoy family – all twenty-five grandchildren included – for life!
I went into Lyovochka’s study with the letter from Prozveshenye, but he waved me aside.
‘Don’t concern yourself with such matters,’ he said. ‘They are of no importance. I do not write for publishers. I write for people.’
He was beyond arguing with, so I was forced to write an explicit letter to him on the fourteenth of October:
You ask about my health every day with an air of compassion, Lyovochka. You ask how I have slept with such apparent concern in your voice. And yet, each day, you drive fresh nails into my heart, shortening my life and subjecting me to unbearable pain. Nothing I do seems to ease this pain – you should know that. It was the decision of Fate that I should learn about this twist, this corrupt deed you have perpetrated by depriving your numerous offspring of your copyrights (I might point out that your partner in crime has not done the same kind of thing to his family)….
The government that you and your friends slander and criticize in your pamphlets will now legally take the bread out of the mouths of your heirs and give it to some rich publishers in Moscow, while your very own grandchildren will starve as a result of your vanity and sin. And it is the government, again – in the form of the State Bank – that will receive Tolstoy’s diaries for safekeeping, a mere ruse for keeping them from your wife…