‘Do you expect me to believe this?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘There is no reason to believe otherwise.’
He looked around the room, skeptically, then settled back, tucking his chin into the blanket we had wrapped around him. ‘I’m terribly cold,’ he said. ‘There is a draft somewhere.’
At midday, Goldenweiser arrived from Moscow with Gorbunov, our publisher. I had wired Goldenweiser two days before, but I did not expect to see him in Astapovo. I knew, as did Leo Nikolayevich, that he had an important concert date in Moscow, at the Academy. Some weeks ago we had been discussing the possibility of surprising him with an appearance at the concert. Leo Nikolayevich, though gravely ill, remembered the date of the concert and scolded Goldenweiser for canceling it.
‘I could not have done otherwise,’ Goldenweiser said. ‘How could I play in public with you lying ill in a distant place?’
‘Nonsense,’ Leo Nikolayevich said. ‘When a farmer is plowing his fields, he does not leave those fields, even if his father should be dying. The concert is your field. You should not have left the plow.’
Leo Nikolayevich then turned eagerly to Gorbunov to discuss future publications of The Intermediary. He was going to finish a book called The Way of Life when he settled in the Caucasus or wherever, he explained. He had taken extensive notes already, some of which remained at Yasnaya Polyana, and he hoped we could retrieve them. I assured him that this was no problem. Sasha backed me up, saying she knew which notes he referred to and would help.
Leo Nikolayevich lay back, closing his eyes. He continued speaking, but his voice grew weak.
Suddenly the face of Sofya Andreyevna filled the small glass-paned door of the sickroom. That fat, distorted face, her tomatolike cheeks and nose, pressed against the glass. Her eyes grew wide.
Sasha leaped from her chair, startling her father, who caught a passing glimpse of Sofya Andreyevna before she was pulled away.
‘What!’ he shouted. ‘Who was there?’
‘The stationmaster’s wife,’ Sasha said. ‘She wanted to come in. I told her you were sleeping, that you were not to be disturbed–’
‘It was Sofya Andreyevna!’
‘You’re imagining things,’ she said. ‘It was Ozolin’s wife.’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘It was not your wife. She is at home, as Sergey told you.’
‘If Sonya should want to see me, I could not refuse her,’ Leo Nikolayevich said. ‘But it would kill me. I know it would kill me.’
‘There is no possibility of that,’ I said. ‘She is at home.’
Fortunately, he was too sick to argue. He accepted our remarks, though again I wondered if he didn’t know the truth. To prevent further intrusions, we put a blanket over the glass, telling him that the stationmaster’s friends were curious and would disturb him further if we didn’t block the pane.
‘Sasha,’ he said, his voice trembling, barely audible. ‘I must dictate another letter.’
‘Yes, Papa.’ She took up a pad on her knee.
‘Send this to Alymer Maude in England: “Dear Maude – On the way to a place where I hoped to be alone, I was taken ill….”’ He tried to continue, but Sasha couldn’t hear him; his voice dissolved in a loose gargle of phlegm.
‘You can finish later, Papa,’ Sasha said. ‘After you’ve slept.’
I saw in his face the intense frustration of a man for whom human communication had been everything. He could hardly bear it.
Sasha fastened tightly onto her father’s statement that a meeting with his wife would kill him. Rather cruelly, I thought, she rushed to the blue train to convey this sentiment. I followed to make sure Sofya Andreyevna believed it.
‘Have you told him that I nearly drowned myself in the pond?’ her mother asked.
‘He knows everything,’ Sasha said.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said that if you killed yourself, it would upset him horribly, but that he could not have acted other than he did.’
‘Do you know what this train is costing me?’ Sofya Andreyevna screeched. ‘Five hundred rubles!’
Sasha replied that she didn’t care if that ridiculous train had cost her the entire Tolstoy estate, whereupon Sofya Andreyevna became frenzied, accusing me, then Sasha, then her husband, of every sort of perfidious act. I could hear her screaming from the train, ‘Liar! Liar!’
Later, in a calmer mood, she implored Dushan Makovitsky to give her husband a small embroidered pillow that she had brought with her from Yasnaya Polyana. It was a favorite of his, she said. He would rest more easily with it tucked gently beneath his head.
Makovitsky is sentimental about such things and, stupidly, brought the pillow into the sickroom and set it on the bed. Leo Nikolayevich noticed it right away.
He said, ‘Where did that thing come from?’
‘Your daughter Tanya is here. She brought it,’ Makovitsky said.
The idiot!
‘Tanya! Let me see my daughter,’ he said. ‘Where is Tanya?’
Tanya, shaking and tearful, was led into the stationmaster’s cottage by Sasha. She embraced her father and wept on his shoulder.
‘Where is your mother, Tanya?’ he asked.
‘She remained at home.’
‘How is she? Is she going to come here?’
Tanya’s eyelids quivered. ‘I don’t think so…. I don’t know, Papa. There is no way to–’
‘To what?’
Tanya could hardly speak. Her father reached for her hand and told her not to worry, that he would be fine in a couple of days. ‘Ask Dr Nikitin,’ he said. ‘It’s just a rattle in the left lung. That lung has always been a problem.’
Tanya is hopelessly weak in character. And her sweetness is cloying. As Varvara Mikhailovna once said, she has the patience of old wallpaper.
Leo Nikolayevich called for his diary, whereupon he wrote in a wobbly hand:
Horrid night. Two days in bed, feverish. They say Sofya Andreyevna… The third of November, Tanya. Sergey came last night. I was extremely moved by his visit. Today, the third, Nikitin, Tanya, Goldenweiser, Gorbunov. And so my plan. …Fais ce que dois adv…. It’s for the good of others, I hope, but mostly for myself.
He rarely used French anymore – not like others of our class. But he chose a good proverb: ‘Do as you must, no matter what happens.’
Outside the cottage, it had become a circus. A reporter had found out about the visit to Shamardino, and he’d traced our whereabouts. The otherwise forgettable town of Astapovo became famous. Word spread like smallpox through the journalistic community, which feeds and survives on gossip. At first, a trickle of reporters joined us. Before long, the numbers swelled to a small throng, culminating with the arrival of Pathé newsmen, who carried cine cameras for shooting newsreels to be broadcast throughout the world. Now every train brought a fresh load of cameramen, copy editors, reporters, typists. The telegraph office was jammed, and Makovitsky was reduced to giving regular press conferences, announcing Tolstoy’s pulse and temperature, projecting the state of his health for the next few hours.
Mounted police arrived by order of the government, who feared, I suppose, a revolutionary uprising. They overestimate us greatly.
The railway people felt obliged to erect a large tent for the reporters and set up a dozen rows of cots. It was like an army camp, except for the sounds of typewriters clacking and cameras clicking. The Ryazan-Ural Railroad Company contributed a number of sleeping cars, which arrived this morning, and an unfinished warehouse was prepared for yet further platoons of gawkers, hangers-on, and so-called members of the press. If Leo Nikolayevich did not die, there would be hell to pay somewhere….