Why had this happened to Ilya and not to Leo Nikolayevich? Was life fundamentally irrational? He could not answer these questions.
That night, he went to the house of the Cossack girl. He did not tell her what had happened to Ilya. ‘I was overcome by a powerful feeling of what was probably lust, but it felt like… love.’ He lay with her till dawn, he said, swearing to himself that this would be their last night together. He was sinning against God, that he knew. But – as Martin Luther put it – he was sinning boldly.
‘You know, I still think of her quite often,’ Leo Nikolayevich told me. There was a strange look in his eyes as he said that, a mingling of nostalgia, regret, and genuine sorrow.
I don’t know why, but I was thinking of that Cossack girl as I sat beside Masha, who had come down from St Petersburg to attend the funeral the next morning. She arrived on the late train at Tula. I met her in a droshky, which I drove myself.
We turned abruptly into the long gravel driveway. Telyatinki was lit up like a skull, with candles burning in the windows. The oak trees, which still retained their leaves, chittered in the cold wind. ‘Welcome home,’ I said to Masha, who smiled ruefully.
The household was in mourning, of course, and the place had a ghostly feel to it. Chertkov and Sergeyenko had been with Leo Nikolayevich throughout his ordeal, and reports were just filtering back. The funeral would attract large crowds. Indeed, the trains from Moscow and elsewhere had been crammed all day, with hundreds of people – most of whom had never met Tolstoy – already camped on the grounds at Yasnaya Polyana.
‘I can hardly believe you’re here,’ I said. ‘I guess I won’t have to put today’s letter in the mail. You can have it.’ She grinned as I handed her the envelope and stuffed it into her coat pocket.
I reached for her hand and held it, briefly. She looked at me with an intensity that almost hurt.
We had a glass of tea in the kitchen.
‘I think I know you a lot better now,’ I said to her, softly. ‘I’m almost afraid that, face to face, we won’t speak directly to one another. It’s much easier in letters. I’m a more honest person in print.’
‘You keep too much to yourself – even in your letters.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘There’s no reason that we can’t speak openly,’ she said.
I saw that she shivered.
‘Are you cold?’
‘I’m all right.’
I took off my coat and put it around Masha’s narrow shoulders, inhaling the lovely odor of her hair, which had a slightly waxy sheen that I did not mind. It smelled of water and mud.
‘You’ve been traveling all day. You must be exhausted.’
‘It’s so good to see you, I don’t care.’
When we had drunk our tea, I carried her leather case to her room, which I had prepared with fresh sheets.
‘Thank you,’ she said timidly.
Closing the door behind us, I reached my hand to her face and let my fingers graze the skin lightly, lightly. She closed her eyes.
‘May I kiss you, Masha?’
She said nothing. She just opened her eyes. They were deep and wet, blue-green in the candlelight, large as a calf’s.
I could feel the shyness slipping away from me, sloughing off like a snake’s skin. Emboldened, I pressed my lips to hers. I put my hands firmly on her hips.
When she reached her arms around my shoulders, I knew that all would be well.
‘I love you, Valya,’ she said.
‘I’m so glad.’
That night we made love – not the frenzied lovemaking I had expected, but a gentle, almost ceremonious mingling. I knew I would never be the same again.
For several hours we nestled against each other like children. She seemed to sleep hard, but I lay solidly awake, astounded by everything that was happening. I did not even want to sleep. I wanted to feel everything, the swollen sheets, the full length of her body beside mine, her thighs and back and arms and shoulders. I was floating now, permeable, fully human – a creature of skin and hair and bones.
Near dawn, I saw that Masha was awake and kissed her gently on the forehead. ‘I wish I understood what love is,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to understand it,’ she said. ‘It’s not something that needs analysis.’
People were talking at the end of the corridor now, and I realized it was time to get up if we were to meet the train at Zasyeka Station, the train that was bringing the body of Leo Nikolayevich home to rest.
‘It’s here!’ a muzhik shouted.
The train, an hour late, wheezed into the station. It was a briskly cold morning, with a cover of dry snow in the railway yard; milkweed and mullein – the surviving bones of summer – poked through the white crust. In a few places, bare ground showed through, the black Russian dirt I have always loved. I heard eight bells ring in the chapel tower.
The air sparkled, our breath forming a white cloud in front of us. Policemen were everywhere. The tsar, I was told, feared an uprising. Everywhere in Russia the police and the militia had doubled their ranks, and censorship was in effect for all the papers.
But the feelings of the Russian people could not be stifled. People wept openly in the streets. Theaters in Moscow and St Petersburg had closed, and university professors refused to lecture. Masha and I stood behind a delegation of students from Moscow.
I knew, intellectually, that Leo Tolstoy meant a great deal to the Russian people. But I had somehow not understood, not fully, the significance of his life. Of his example.
Sofya Andreyevna stepped from the train, looking dignified and at peace. She, like her husband, had been longing for closure. When people saw her, they began to sing ‘Eternal Memory,’ an old hymn that Leo Nikolayevich was known to admire. The entire station lifted in song. Even the railway conductors sang from their cars.
The coffin appeared, at last. A plain coffin made of dark yellow pine, long and narrow; Leo Nikolayevich’s four strong sons carried it on their shoulders from the railway car to a waiting cart. Muzhiks tossed flowers in their path, singing loudly and weeping. One group of peasants carried a poster that read: ‘Dear Leo Nikolayevich: We remember your goodness. It will never die.’ It was signed, ‘The orphaned muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana.’
We formed a slow procession to the Tolstoy estate, feet scraping along the frozen road, scuffling through snow, a vast train of two or three thousand people who filed through the majestic white pillars at the entrance to Yasnaya Polyana with heads bent low. By ten-thirty, the coffin had made its way to the entrance of the study where Leo Nikolayevich wrote the words that have burned their way into the collective memory of the race.
Sergey, who had taken charge of the day, opened the coffin, revealing what remained of Leo Tolstoy. And the long, sad procession began.
Leo Nikolayevich did not look like himself. He was shockingly thin, his nose bulbous at the tip but shrunken along the sides. His cheeks were hollow. Someone had combed his hair to the wrong side, and his beard was fluffed out like cotton wool. His lips had been sewn shut to prevent his jaw from dropping open. The skin of his face was splintered like an old plate in a million pieces, holding together by force of habit more than physical substance.
When my turn came to stand beside the coffin, I touched his cold fingers. I prayed, ‘God, accept your son, Leo Nikolayevich, into your eternal arms.’ And I wept openly for the first time that day.
Masha held my hand.
Leo Nikolayevich had asked to be buried near the edge of a ravine in Zasyeka Wood. It was a place where his brother Nikolenka once said that the secret of eternal love was buried, engraved on a green stick. Sasha pointed out the exact spot, and the funeral was held there in the midafternoon – the time of day when Leo Nikolayevich would usually be riding in these woods on Delire. Had I not, in fact, been riding by that very spot with him less than a month before? It seemed impossible…