I handed my goose over to Chekhov, who was next in the line of Tolstoy’s opponents. Sitting on the edge of the lawn, watching the Tolstoy-Chekhov game, I suddenly realized, with a shiver, the identity of the living corpse. It was Chekhov. Tolstoy had written that play about Chekhov, whom he had always intended to outlive.
I woke to the crunching of gravel. We had reached Melikhovo, where we were offered the choice of a full or abridged tour. “We want the full tour,” the conference organizer said grimly, pulling out her video camera. Our tour guide, a pensioner with hair dyed a strange tangerine color, took twenty minutes to guide us from the ticket booth to the front door. “Respected guests!” she shouted. “We are now located in the backyard of the neighbor of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov!”
Inside the house, I felt nothing. Yasnaya Polyana was Tolstoy’s ancestral estate, and the center of his universe; it makes sense to visit Yasnaya Polyana. Chekhov had no ancestral estate. He bought Melikhovo, a house infested at that time by bedbugs and roaches, from a destitute artist; seven years later, when tuberculosis obliged him to seek a milder climate, he sold the land to a timber merchant and moved to Yalta. Melikhovo was just a stage for Chekhov—almost a stage set. The neighboring estates were owned by social outcasts: the body-building grandson of a Decembrist rebel; a fallen countess and her much younger lover.
No single room in Chekhov’s house was large enough to contain the entire body of International Tolstoy Scholars. We shuffled along a dark corridor. The guide gestured toward various rooms, too small to enter.
We passed to a tiny “parloir”: “the scene of everlasting, interesting conversations.”
“Did Chekhov play the piano?” someone asked.
“No!” the guide exclaimed, with great emphasis. “He absolutely did not play!”
I noticed a pocket of space around the Living Corpse scholar, who looked a bit forlorn. I approached him but inadvertently stepped back because of the smell.
Somewhere in the shadows that lay ahead, the guide was shouting, “Here is the beloved inkwell of the great writer!”
I extricated myself from the dark forest of shoulders, hurried down the narrow hallway, and exited into Chekhov’s garden. The garden was empty but for the conference organizer, who was making a video recording of Chekhov’s apple trees, and the Malevich scholar, who stooped to pick up an apple, stared at it, and took an enormous, yawning bite.
I walked quickly, trying to recapture the spark of mystery. Perhaps, I thought, Tolstoy had been killed by the “corpse”—by Gimer, who was supposedly dead two years at this time, but had anyone actually seen the body? “Now who’s the corpse!” I imagined Gimer muttering, setting down the teaspoon—all I had to do was think of a motive. But somehow this time the motive wasn’t forthcoming. My heart wasn’t in it anymore. I found myself remembering “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the first and last story in which Watson has no trouble and no fun applying Holmes’s method: “It was, alas, only too easy to do.” Two sets of prints lead to the waterfall, and none lead back; nearby lies the alpenstock of the best and wisest man he has ever known.
Later, of course, Conan Doyle recants. Holmes’s death and Watson’s bereavement turn out to be a temporary illusion, and real life starts again: the late nights, the hansom rides, the peat bogs, the thrill of the chase. But can things ever really be the same between the doctor and the “living corpse”? Will there not come a time when Holmes has to tell his friend that all the murderers they apprehended were but the pawns of a far greater force, untouchable by human justice—a force even capable of acting independently, with no human agent?
Watson will be utterly confused. “A criminal act, without a criminal actor—my dear Holmes, surely you cannot have gone over to the supernaturalists!”
Holmes will smile sadly. “Nay, my old friend—I fear that, of all forces, it is the most natural.”
Call it Professor Moriarty or Madame la Mort, call it the black monk, or use its Latin name: this killer has infinite means and unfathomable motives.
And still life goes on in Chekhov’s garden, where it’s always a fine day for hanging yourself, and somebody somewhere is playing the guitar. In a hotel in Kharkov, the old professor is deducing the identity of his future murderer: “I will be killed by . . . that abominable wallpaper!” Interior decoration is often the Final Problem; Ivan Ilyich was done in by some drapes. Now the samovar has almost gone cold, and frost has touched the cherry blossoms. Dr. Chekhov, loyal custodian of the human body, you who could look in the ear of an idle man and see an entire universe—where are you now?
_____________
*The Dukhobors—literally, “Spirit Wrestlers”—were a Russian peasant religious sect, whose tenets included egalitarianism, pacificism, worship through prayer meetings, and the rejection of all written scripture in favor of an oral body of knowledge called the “Living Book.” When they were persecuted for their refusal to fight in the Russo-Turkish war, Tolstoy donated all the proceeds from his novel Resurrection to finance their immigration to Canada in 1899.
* There really was an accordion concert, although I have been unable to confirm the existence of a Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy.
Summer in Samarkand (continued)
If there is one thing I heard a thousand times in Samarkand, it’s that they have the greatest bread in Uzbekistan because of their amazingly clean water and air. The famous bread of Samarkand comes in round, flat loaves, known in Russian as lepyoshka. As legend has it, the emir of Bukhara once summoned the best baker of Samarkand to bake him some Samarkand bread. The baker arrived in Bukhara bringing his own flour and water and firewood. But according to some kind of inter-emirate bread arbiter, the bread he baked didn’t taste the same as real Samarkand bread. The emir decided to have the baker executed, pausing only to ask if he had anything to say in his own defense. “Well,” the baker replied, “there isn’t any Samarkand air here, to leaven the bread.” The emir was so impressed by these words that he spared the baker’s life.
This story was invariably deployed as evidence not of the baker’s cleverness, but of some actual properties of the Samarkand air.
Instead of relying on one of the abstract or inedible representations of “bread” so popular in other parts of the world, the Samarkand bread sellers used, as signage, an actual lepyoshka hammered to a board with a large iron nail, like the body of Christ. Looking at those signs was like witnessing the first glimmerings of abstract thought. How does a loaf of bread nailed to a board differ from a loaf of bread in a store window at an unmarked bakery? Both indicate the sale of bread, but you can actually buy and eat the bread you see in a bakery window. In Samarkand, the bread had been sacrificed—rendered inedible by being nailed to a board and hung out all day, maybe multiple days, in the sun—in the name of signification.
My introduction to the lepyoshka of Samarkand took place on that first evening at Gulya’s house. I had just returned from my first meeting at the university with Vice-Rector Safarov and my future language teacher, Muzaffar, and was so tired I could barely walk. I found Eric in the dining room of the guest wing of the house, sitting in a fake Louis XV chair at a long Louis XV table, solving chess problems. Bukhara carpets lay beneath his bare feet, and ghostly curtains floated in front of the windows. The sun was setting outside and orange light filled the room, bouncing off the mirrored walls and the crystal chandelier.