‘Help!’
I reached for her hand and helped her back to the wooden dock.
‘She’s drowning!’
‘You mustn’t try to help!’ I said. ‘I can manage!’
Though we were face to face, I was shouting.
Pushing away from the dock, I made a sharp plunge in what seemed like the right direction and, after an impossibly long time, perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, touched Sofya Andreyevna’s head. Snarling my fingers in her long hair, which had come undone in the water, I dragged her back to the bank, rolling her large body up along the margin of the pond. She was black with mud, her eyes closed, her tongue lolling between her teeth.
‘She’s dead!’ Sasha was crying. ‘My mother is dead!’
Vanya, the overweight manservant, was beside Sofya Andreyevna now, and he seemed to know what to do. He turned her over on her stomach and pushed some water from her lungs with his knees, astride her like one hippo mounting another. She lay there in silence, in what I imagined was agony, a great, dark slab of a woman. In a few moments, she was breathing normally, her eyes closed. Life had returned to torture her for another while.
When she was able to stand, we led her back to the house, stopping to rest every few minutes. At one point she fell sobbing to the ground, saying, ‘Let me die here! Let me die! Why must you all rob me of my death?’
Finally, Vanya and I made a seat with our hands and carried her to the house. She was shuddering throughout, and her lips were dark blue. Before we even got her into bed, however, she told Vanya to go immediately to the station to inquire what train her husband had taken.
She fell into a kind of stupor and slept for an hour, but when she woke she began beating her breast with a stone paperweight. We took away the paperweight as well as the penknife on her desk and the vial of opium in her dresser drawer.
Sasha, who seemed quite unstable herself now, sent to Tula for the psychiatric doctor who had helped Sofya Andreyevna during previous crises. She also summoned the Sukhotins by telegram.
When Vanya returned with news of the train Leo Nikolayevich had taken, Sofya Andreyevna wrote a telegram, which she addressed to Train Number 9. It said, ‘Dearest Papa: Return at once, Sasha.’ She had told Vanya to show it to no one, but – thank goodness – he showed the telegram to Sasha (since, like most of the servants, he is loyal to Leo Nikolayevich and dislikes Sofya Andreyevna). Sasha let the telegram go but sent with it one of her own telling her father to ignore all telegrams supposedly from her that were not signed ‘Alexandra.’ Sasha enjoys these little deceits. She is not unlike her mother in this regard.
I sat in the Remington room with Sasha throughout the long afternoon. She told me frankly that she didn’t know where her father had gone. Indeed, his remark in the letter to her mother had puzzled her. He had told several people, including her, that he would probably visit his sister, a nun at the Shamardino, in the province of Kaluga. This was, as he put it, ‘on his way.’ But where he planned to go after visiting Shamardino was anyone’s guess.
Having talked to Sasha and several of the house servants, I was able to piece together what happened last night.
Near midnight, Leo Nikolayevich had been awakened by the sound of rustling papers in his study. It was Sofya Andreyevna, who was looking for concrete evidence of a new will. This was the last straw. A few hours later, he knocked quietly on the door of Sasha and Varvara Mikhailovna, who share a small room on the same floor.
‘Who is it?’ Sasha cried.
‘It is I.’
Sasha opened the door and found her father with a candle in his hand. He had a look of resolution in his eyes.
‘I’m leaving immediately, for good,’ he said. ‘But I need your help.’
Dushan Makovitsky had already been roused and was packing for himself. He would accompany Leo Nikolayevich on his final journey.
They huddled in Leo Nikolayevich’s room, trying to decide what he must take.
‘Only the essentials!’ he kept saying. ‘I can take nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary.’ These included a flashlight, a fur coat, and the apparatus for taking an enema.
The packing done, he went to the stables to harness the horses himself. On the way, in total darkness, he fell into a thicket and lost his hat. He returned, hatless, demanding his flashlight. Sasha began to worry that he was not sufficiently well to travel, but she said nothing. Her father had made up his mind to go.
Adrian Eliseyev, the coachman, had been summoned by Dushan Makovitsky, and he went to the barn with his master to harness the horses to the droshky. Filya, a postilion, lit a torch to ride ahead of the droshky, since it was a starless, moonless night and they could barely see the road.
‘Everything was ready to go,’ Sasha told me, ‘when Papa asked for a moment by himself. He walked to the front lawn and stood for a long while looking up at the house where he was born. I thought, briefly, that he might change his mind and go back to bed. Suddenly, he knelt in the wet grass, bowing low to rub his fingers in the blades. Then he kissed the ground and rose. His past life was behind him now.’
Sasha and Varvara Mikhailovna helped him to the droshky, having exchanged a tearful farewell, and Adrian drove them off to the Yasenki Station, where Leo Nikolayevich and Dushan Makovitsky took the eight o’clock train for all points south.
This was the beginning of a new life for Leo Tolstoy. Of that much, everyone was sure.
34
L. N.
DIARY ENTRY
28 OCTOBER 1910
I lay down at half past eleven and slept till three. Then, as on previous nights, I heard footsteps, the squeaking of doors. I had not before bothered to look, but I did so now and found a light under the crack in my study door. I heard the riffling of papers. It was Sofya Andreyevna, searching my study, probably reading things I had written. The day before she had insisted that I not close my doors, and she kept her own doors open, so that my slightest movements could be detected. She wants my every word and movement to be known to her instantly, to be under her control. When I heard her this time, closing the door, walking down the hall, I felt the deepest sense of aversion and rage. I don’t know why, but I could not restrain myself. I tried to fall asleep, but that was impossible now. I tossed and turned, lit a candle, then sat up.
My door suddenly opened. It was Sofya Andreyevna, who said, ‘How are you?’ She was surprised, she said, to discover a light. My fury increased. I checked my pulse – ninety-seven.
I could lie there no longer, and suddenly I made the final decision to leave home. I am writing her a letter and am beginning to pack only what is necessary in order to leave. I woke Dushan, then Sasha – they helped me. I shook at the thought that my wife would hear and come out to check on us. There would have been scenes, hysteria, and – afterward – no getting away without an upset. At six o’clock everything was packed, somehow, and I went to the stable to tell them to harness. (Dushan, Sasha, and Varvara finished the packing.) It was still night – pitch dark. I missed the path to the barn, stumbled in some brush, fell, lost my hat, then made my way back to the house with difficulty. The others came back with me. I trembled inside, fearing pursuit. But, at last, we drove off.
At Yasenki Station we had to wait an hour, and I fully expected my wife to appear at any moment. At last we took our places in the railway carriage and the train lurched forward; my fear evaporated, and pity for Sofya Andreyevna rose in my breast. Still, I had no doubts about what I had done. Perhaps I am wrong and merely seeking to justify my behavior, but it strikes me that I have saved myself – not Leo Nikolayevich but that something of which there is sometimes a spark in me.