He fell asleep, looking quite blissful, at 10:30. I ushered everyone but Makovitsky out of the room.
Perhaps for the first time in his life, Dushan Makovitsky wept.
39
Sofya Andreyevna
After four days of silence, eating nothing, drinking only a little water, I wrote to him:
Don’t be afraid, my dear one, that I shall come in search of you. I can hardly move, so weak have I become. I would not force you to return, not for anything. Do what you think is best. Your departure taught me a lesson, a dreadful one, and if I do not die as a result of it, and you come back to me, I shall do anything I can to make things easier for you. Yet I feel, in my bones, that we shall never meet again…. Lyovochka, find the love that’s in you, and know that a great deal of love has awakened in me.
I needed a way to end, a way that would signal my affection, which has never ceased, not for a second: ‘I embrace you, my darling, dear old friend, who once loved me so much. God keep you, and take care of yourself.’
I slept badly that night, in spite of weariness beyond description, dreaming of Lyovochka and our life together. The next morning, before dawn, I went, again, to my writing desk, holding an old portrait of myself and Lyovochka to the candle, watching the flame bring life and color into the ghostly cheeks of ancient silhouettes.
I tried to make a few sentences that would touch him, yet the accusations began to tumble out, and I realized that this would only alienate him further. It was just no use.
A servant knocked on the door while I was writing. She had a telegram from a man called Orlov, a reporter from The Russian Word. ‘Leo Nikolayevich ill at Astapovo. Temperature 104.’
He was dying!
Duty presented itself. I realized I must go to him. He would want to see me, wouldn’t he? Hadn’t we lived together all these years? Hadn’t we brought thirteen children into the world? I did not doubt that, in the end, he would want me near him. He would want to hear and receive my confession, as I would hear and receive his. Whenever he was ill, he was like a child, thirsting for my attention. And I granted it, as I would grant it now, even if he insisted on mocking me, on making public ridicule of our marriage, which had lasted nearly half a century.
I traveled with Tanya, Ilya, Mikhail, and Andrey, taking a nurse, the psychiatric doctor who has been looking after me in the past weeks, and a few servants. One never knows what will happen on such journeys, and it is better to be prepared. We made our way to the station at Tula in several carriages. We had hurried to catch the morning train, but we missed it, obliging me to hire a special train, which cost five hundred rubles!
All day and well into the evening we rode southeast, arriving late that night. As we neared the station where my husband lay dying, I could hardly catch my breath. I felt like an important actress in Moscow who was about to make her farewell appearance to a packed house. I formed a dozen perfect sentences in my head for Lyovochka. His old, soft hands would touch my hair once again, as always. The curtain of death would fall across his eyes. And I would die, too. Affection would never waken in my breast again.
But the horrid facts hit me when I got to Astapovo. Lyovochka was surrounded by his followers, his fanatics, and they would not let me through to him. Sergey had arrived from Moscow on an earlier train and came to us like an ambassador from an enemy country, addressing the family circle like a pompous little prince. He is my own son, but I hated him. It would ‘kill’ his father if he saw me, Sergey said. Was I hearing him correctly?
I was too weak, however, to do otherwise than obey these men, who would force their will upon me now as they always had. Does a woman ever have a chance? Did I ever have a chance with Lyovochka, who used me like an old cow?
Day after day he lay dying, while I lay mostly awake. Now and then the miracle of exhaustion released me, briefly, from my pain. But I could always hear my heartbeat ticking noisily in my temples, in my wrists. My mind was tortured by visions, images of hell.
All the while the cinematographers recorded my grief. The whole world saw but never understood my sorrows.
‘Turn to the right, Countess,’ cried the wretched cameraman Meyer. ‘Show us your eyes, Countess.’ I can still hear them, can see them cranking their machines, my Furies.
Once, as I passed the stationmaster’s cottage, I found no guard at the door. Boldly, I walked in, whereupon I saw him – my dying husband – writhing in the narrow bed. I saw his white beard and hair, his bleached eyebrows, white against the white sheets. A blur of whiteness, the image of death. Death and blight!
‘Lyovochka!’ I called, but somebody was pulling me backward as I spoke, like Eurydice, back into the hell of my loneliness.
A telegram arrived from the patriarch of St Petersburg, asking my husband to repent, but Chertkov refused even to show it to him. They kept from him, too, the Abbot Varsonofy, who had come from the monastery in Optina.
On the Lord’s Day, Sunday, Sergey woke me just after midnight. I had been dreaming of a day in June, decades ago, when Lyovochka and I went running in the woods. We sat in a bright clearing, surrounded by wildflowers, and ate venison and bread and drank wine. He told me that he would never leave me, that I was his life, that he could not live without me. He pushed me back in the buttercups and daisies; he lifted my skirt, tore at me with his big hands. And he pushed through me with his indomitable spirit. He raised the fiery sword of love, and he seized me. I gave myself wholly over to his rude and flashing soul.
And now this.
‘Mama, wake up!’ Sergey said. I could smell tobacco on his breath. ‘He will not last the night. You may see him now.’
Still in my nightdress, shaking, I followed my son through the double row of journalists.
‘Is he dying, Countess?’ a man shouted in French.
I brushed them all aside.
‘Let me see him!’ I screamed at Chertkov, who stood, a stony barrier, in my path. ‘You pig! Let me through!’
‘You must be patient, Sofya Andreyevna.’
What had I been doing? Had I not been waiting for days in a stuffy railway car while they conducted a party around the bed of my dying husband?
I stooped beneath Chertkov’s outstretched arm, and he did not try to stop me.
Lyovochka lay on the bed, empty of himself. His face was blue in the dim light, his nose sharply chiseled. I felt his forehead: it was damp and burning. He was moving his lips, but there was no sound. Not even a whisper.
‘Forgive me, my darling!’ I said, as I knelt beside him. I held his hand, so lifeless and strange.
He startled, slightly, and began to gasp. He could not breathe.
‘Please, my darling, forgive me! I have been foolish. I am not a wise woman – you know that…. I am a selfish woman, yes. I have never been able to show you the love I feel. You must believe me, Lyovochka! You must understand! Please! Please!’ I was speaking too loudly, but I was not shouting.
Sergeyenko dragged me backward from the room.
‘Control yourself, Countess.’ He looked at me coldly, having pushed me onto a chair in the adjoining room. A crowd circled above me, like vultures, waiting to tear at my flesh, to feast on my remains.
‘I want to speak to my husband,’ I said, sobs sputtering between each word.
They had given him morphine against his will, I soon discovered. And further injections of camphor oil, for his heart. It was all barbarous and cruel.