by Leo Tolstoy
Will my love for you and the children end with my life? I’ve realized that that is impossible. I feel too strongly at this moment to think that the feeling without which I cannot comprehend existence could ever be destroyed. My soul can’t exist without my love for all of you, and I know that it will last forever, if only because a feeling like my love could not have come into being if sometime it had to end.
I won’t be with you, but I’m certain that my love will remain with you always, and that thought gives such comfort to my soul that I calmly await my approaching death without fear.
I’m serene and God knows that I’ve always looked and even now look upon death as a transition to a better life, but why then do tears choke me? Why deprive the children of a beloved mother? Why inflict such a heavy, unexpected blow on you? Why should I die when your and the children’s love has made life infinitely happy for me?
His holy will be done.
I cannot write any more from my tears. Perhaps I won’t see you. But I thank you, my precious one, for all the happiness with which you’ve surrounded me in this life, and I’ll ask God to reward you. Farewell, my dear. Remember that I’ll be gone, but my love will remain with you forever. Farewell, Volodya, farewell, my angel, farewell, Nikolenka, my Benjamin. 58
Can it be that they’ll forget me someday?!
Enclosed with the letter was the following note in French from Mimi.
The doleful forebodings of which she speaks have been only too well confirmed by the doctor’s words. Last night she ordered that this letter be sent at once for posting. Thinking that she had said it in a delirium, I waited until this morning and then decided to open it. As soon as I had done so Natalya Nikolayevna asked me what had happened to the letter and ordered me to burn it, if it hadn’t been sent. She keeps talking about it and is sure that it will be the death of you. Don’t put off your trip if you want to see that angel before she has left us. Excuse my scrawl. I haven’t slept for three nights. You know how much I love her!
Natalya Savishna, who spent the whole night of 11 April in Mama’s bedroom, told me that after writing the first part of the letter, maman put it beside her on the bedtable and fell asleep.
‘I’ll admit,’ Natalya Savishna said, ‘that I dozed off myself in the armchair and the stocking I was knitting fell out of my hands. It was only in my sleep – it was sometime before one – that I seemed to hear her talking to someone. I opened my eyes to look: my darling was sitting on the covers with her arms crossed like this with tears running in three streams down her face. “So, it is over?” was all she said, and then she covered her face with her hands. I jumped up and started to ask, “What’s the matter?”’
‘“Oh, Natalya Savishna, if only you knew whom I have just seen.”
‘However many times I asked, she wouldn’t say anything more, but only told me to hand her the bedtable, wrote something else, and told me to seal the letter in her presence and send it at once. After that, everything got worse and worse.’
TWENTY-SIX
What Awaited Us in the Country
The travelling barouche arrived at the front steps of the Petrovskoye house on 18 April. Driving out of Moscow, Papa was preoccupied and, when Volodya asked him if maman was ill, he looked at him sadly and silently nodded. During the trip he was noticeably calmer, but as we got closer to home, his expression grew increasingly sombre, and when, on getting out of the barouche, he asked the breathless Foka, who had run from the house, ‘Where’s Natalya Nikolayevna?’ his voice was unsteady and there were tears in his eyes. With a quick glance at us, the kind old Foka lowered his eyes, turned aside to open the door to the entryway, and answered, ‘It’s the sixth day now that my lady has been confined to her bedroom.’
Milka, who I later learned had whined pitifully from the very first day that maman got sick, joyfully rushed to Papa and licked his hands, but he pushed her aside and passed on to the drawing room, and then to the sitting room with its door leading directly to the bedroom. The closer he got to that room, the more his movements betrayed his anxiety. On entering the sitting room, he proceeded on tiptoe, barely breathing, and crossed himself before taking hold of the latch of the closed door. At that moment the tear-stained, uncombed Mimi ran in from the hallway. ‘Oh, Pyotr Aleksandrovich!’ she said in a whisper with an expression of genuine despair, and then, noticing that Papa was turning the handle of the latch, she added almost inaudibly, ‘You can’t go in that way; you’ll have to enter through the maids’ room.’
Oh, how cruelly that affected my young imagination, already disposed to grief by a terrible foreboding!
We went to the maids’ room. In the hallway we ran into the halfwit Akim, who had always amused us with his faces, but this time not only did he not seem funny to me, but nothing struck me so painfully as the sight of his mindlessly indifferent gaze. In the maids’ room two young women who were sitting over some work got to their feet to bow to us, but with such sorrowful expressions that it terrified me. After passing through Mimi’s room, Papa opened the door to the bedroom and we went in. The two windows to the right of the door were covered with shawls. Natalya Savishna was sitting next to one of them with spectacles on her nose, knitting a stocking. She didn’t kiss us as she usually did, but merely got to her feet and gazed at us through her spectacles with tears streaming down her face. I didn’t like it that, although they had been perfectly calm before, they all started to cry as soon as they saw us.
To the left of the door stood a screen and behind the screen the bed, a little table, a small chest filled with medicines, and a large armchair in which the doctor was dozing. Beside the bed stood a young, very fair, remarkably beautiful young woman in a white morning gown with the sleeves pushed slightly back, who was applying ice to maman’s forehead, but I still couldn’t see maman herself.
The young woman was La belle Flamande, about whom maman had written and who would later play such an important role in the life of our family. As soon as we entered, she removed her hand from maman’s head and rearranged the folds of her own gown over her breast and then said in a whisper, ‘She’s unconscious.’
I was overwhelmed with grief at that moment, but involuntarily took in all the details. It was almost dark in the room and hot, and it smelled of a mixture of mint, eau de cologne, camomile and Hoffmann’s anodyne. The odour made such an impression on me that not only when I smell it now but even when I simply remember it, my imagination instantly transports me to that dismal, stuffy room and reproduces the smallest details of that terrible moment.
Maman’s eyes were open, but she saw nothing. I’ll never forget that frightening gaze! So much suffering was expressed in it!
We were led out.
When I asked Natalya Savishna later about Mama’s last moments, this is what she said: ‘After you were led out, my darling continued to toss and turn a long time, as if something was crushing her right here. Then her head slipped off the pillows and she dozed so quietly and calmly that she was like a heavenly angel. I had just gone out to see why something hadn’t been brought for her to drink, and when I came back she, the poor dear, was throwing off the bed clothes and beckoning to your papa to come to her. He bent over her, but it was clear that she didn’t have the strength to say what she wanted to; she only parted her lips and moaned, “O God! O Lord! The children! The children!” I wanted to run and get you, but Ivan Vasilyevich stopped me and said, “You had better not; it will only upset her more.” After that she just raised her arm and let it drop. What she meant by that God alone knows. I think she was blessing you unseen, since the Lord had not, right before her final end, allowed her to see her little ones. Then my darling propped herself up, put her hands like this, and started saying in such a voice that I can’t bear to remember it, “Holy Mother, don’t abandon them!” Then the pain reached her heart and you could see in her eyes that the poor thing was suffering terribly. She fell b
ack on the pillows and bit down on the sheet, while the tears, little master, poured down her cheeks.’
‘Well, and what happened then?’ I asked.
Natalya Savishna couldn’t say any more, and turned away and bitterly wept.
Maman died in dreadful agony.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Grief
The next day, late in the evening, I wanted to look at her again and, overcoming an involuntary feeling of fear, I quietly opened the door and tiptoed into the salon.
The coffin stood in the middle of the room on a table with sooty candles in tall silver candlesticks around it. In a far corner sat a lector reading from the Psalter in a low monotone.
I paused at the door and looked around, but my eyes were so swollen from crying and my nerves were in such a jumble that I couldn’t make out anything at all. It was somehow all strangely blended: the candlelight, the brocade, the velvet, the tall candlesticks, the pink lace-trimmed pillow, the funeral band,59 the beribboned bonnet, and something translucent with a waxy colour. I got up onto a chair to examine her face, but instead found that same pale-yellow translucent thing. I couldn’t believe that it was her face. I stared harder at it, and little by little I began to make out her dear, familiar features. I shuddered in horror upon assuring myself that it was maman, but why were her closed eyes so sunken? And what was the reason for that awful pallor and the dark smudge under the translucent skin of one cheek? What made her whole face so severe and cold? Why were her lips so pale and their placement so beautiful and majestic, expressing such unearthly serenity that a cold shiver ran over my scalp and down my spine as I gazed at them?
As I looked, I sensed that some mysterious, irresistible power was drawing my eyes to her lifeless face. I continued to look at it, but my imagination limned pictures teeming with life and happiness. I forgot that the dead body lying in front of me, and at which I was senselessly staring, as if at an object that had nothing in common with my memories, was maman. I imagined her one way and then another – as lively, gay, smiling – until I was suddenly struck by some feature of her pallid face as my gaze dwelt on it, and I remembered the horrible reality with a shudder, even as I continued to gaze. And then dreams again replaced the reality, and again awareness of the reality dispersed the dreams. In the end my imagination grew weary and stopped deceiving me, and awareness of the reality vanished, too, and I became completely oblivious. I don’t know how long I remained in that state, or what it consisted of; I know only that for a time I ceased to be aware of my own existence and experienced a kind of lofty, inexplicably pleasing, yet sad bliss.
Perhaps as it was flying away to a better world, her beautiful soul looked back with sadness on the one in which it had left us, saw my sorrow, took pity, and on the wings of love and with a heavenly smile of compassion returned to earth to comfort and bless me.
The door creaked and another lector entered the room to relieve the first. The sound roused me, and the first thought that came to me was that since I wasn’t crying and was standing on a chair in a posture that had nothing touching about it, the reader might take me for an unfeeling boy who had climbed on to the chair from mischief or curiosity, and I crossed myself, bowed and started to cry.
Remembering my impressions now, I find that my only real grief was that moment of oblivion. I didn’t stop crying before the funeral or after it, and was overwhelmed with sadness, although I’m ashamed to recall it now, since there was always an admixture of pride in it: either a desire to show that I was more unhappy than everyone else, or a concern about the impression that I was making on others, or an idle curiosity that led to observations about Mimi’s mobcap and the faces of the rest of those present. I despised myself for not experiencing only grief, and tried to conceal the other feelings, and that made my sorrow insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I took a kind of pleasure in knowing that I was unfortunate and tried to heighten that awareness, and, more than anything else, that egotistical feeling stifled the genuine sorrow in me.
After sleeping soundly and peacefully through the night, as always happens after a great sadness, I awoke with dried tears and calmed nerves. At ten we were called for the memorial service that came before the procession. The room was full of weeping servants and peasants who had come to bid farewell to their mistress. During the service I wept befittingly, crossed myself and bowed to the ground, but I didn’t pray from my heart and was rather unfeeling. I worried about whether the new jacket they had put on me was too tight in the armpits, I thought about how to keep the knees of my trousers from getting too soiled, and I engaged in furtive scrutiny of everyone present. Father stood at the head of the coffin, was as white as his handkerchief, and was holding back his tears with conspicuous effort. His tall figure in its black tailcoat, his pale expressive face, and his ever graceful, confident movements as he crossed himself, bowed and brushed the ground with his hand, took a candle from the priest or stepped over to the coffin, produced a remarkable impression. But, I don’t know why, I didn’t care for it in him that he could, in fact, seem so impressive at such a moment. Mimi leaned against the wall and seemed barely able to stand. Her dress was wrinkled and flecked with down, her mobcap was pushed over to the side, her eyes were swollen and red, her head shook, and she sobbed unceasingly in a harrowing voice and kept covering her face with her handkerchief and hands. To me it seemed that she was doing it all to hide her face from view and gain a brief respite from her feigned sobbing. I remembered her saying to Father the day before that maman’s death was such a terrible blow that she had no hope of ever recovering from it, for it had deprived her of everything, and that the angel, as she called maman, had not forgotten her at the brink of death, and had indicated a desire to provide for her and Katenka’s future forever. She wept bitter tears as she reported that, and perhaps her grief was genuine, but it wasn’t purely or entirely so. Lyubochka, wet with tears and wearing a short black dress trimmed with weepers, bowed her head and rarely looked at the coffin, her face expressing only childish terror. Katenka stood beside her mother and was as rosy as ever, despite her solemn face. Volodya’s forthright nature was just as forthright in grief: he either stood preoccupied, directing an unwavering gaze at some object, or his mouth would suddenly start to twist and he would hurriedly cross himself and bow. All the other people at the funeral were unbearable to me. The comforting phrases they spoke to Father – that she was in a better place, that she wasn’t made for this world – provoked in me a kind of vexation.
What right did they have to speak about and weep for her? Some of them referred to us as ‘orphans’. As if we didn’t know without them that that’s what children are called who have no mother! It pleased them, apparently, to be the first to use that name, much as people hurry to call a just married young woman ‘madame’ for the first time.
In a far corner of the salon, nearly hidden behind the open door of the pantry, knelt a grey, bent old woman. Clasping her hands and looking up towards heaven, she didn’t weep but prayed. Her soul strained towards God, she entreated Him to reunite her with the one she had loved more than anything in the world, and she fervently hoped that it would come soon.
‘That’s who truly loved her!’ I thought, and felt ashamed of myself.
The service ended. The face of the deceased was still uncovered, and one after another all those present, except us, started to file past the coffin to pay their respects.
Among the last to bid farewell to the deceased was a peasant woman carrying a pretty five-year-old girl whom, goodness knows why, she had brought with her. I had accidentally dropped my damp handkerchief and was going to pick it up, but no sooner had I bent over than I was startled by a terrible, piercing cry full of such horror that if I should live to be a hundred I’ll never forget it, and whenever I do remember it, a cold shiver always passes through my body. I looked up – standing on the stool beside the coffin was the same peasant woman, struggling to hold the little girl, who had thrown her
own frightened little face back and was staring goggled-eyed at the face of the deceased and screaming in a frenzied, terrifying voice and flailing her arms. I cried out in another voice that was, I think, even more terrible than the one that had frightened me, and ran out of the room.
It was only then that I understood the source of the strong, oppressive smell that had filled the room together with the odour of frankincense, and the thought that the face of the one whom I loved more than anything in the world, a face that had just a few days before been suffused with such beauty and tenderness, could nonetheless evoke so much horror, revealed to me as if for the first time the bitter truth and filled my soul with despair.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Last Sad Memories
Maman was gone, but our life continued the same round as before: we went to bed and got up at the same time and in the same rooms; morning and evening tea and the other meals were served at their regular times; and the tables and chairs remained in their usual places. Nothing in the house or in our way of life had changed, except that she was gone.
I thought that after such a calamity everything would have to change. Our usual way of life seemed an affront to her memory and reminded me all too vividly of her absence.
The day before the burial, I was feeling sleepy after dinner and went to Natalya Savishna’s room, intending to get in her soft feather bed under her warm quilt. Natalya Savishna was lying down, probably asleep, when I came in. Hearing my footsteps, she sat up, threw off the wool shawl that had covered her head to keep off the flies, and put her legs over the edge of the bed, while adjusting her mobcap.
