The Summer Guest

by Alison Anderson

  Yesterday Mamochka told us that this summer she will let out the guesthouse. It will go some way toward helping with the household expenses. I fear the arrival of some noisy, vulgar family from Moscow, newly wealthy and full of crass disregard for our provincial ways. Natasha laughs and says that such people go to Yalta, where they can be seen. Who can see them here?

  April 25, 1888

  Great excitement on the estate. Through our cousin Sasha Ivanenko, Mama has found a family to rent the guesthouse for the summer. A family from Moscow. One of the sons, Mikhail Pavlovich, came to have a look; he told Mama that one of his brothers is a gifted artist, and another a promising writer, and his sister is a teacher; both his parents are still alive, and all the family will be coming at various times over the summer. So Mamochka is brimming with enthusiasm and delight: She can already imagine the wealth of conversation they will bring, the entire outside world—news of Petersburg and Moscow and perhaps even Vienna and Paris—to our humble Luka.

  There is a great flurry of cleaning and preparing and I am often on my own, feeling useless and frustrated. Mama gave me some silver to polish—that I could do—but then Ulyasha grew impatient with me, as she wanted to put everything away again as quickly as possible, so she tended to snatch things from me, kindly but firmly.

  They arrive next week. I hope they will be sociable, amenable to sharing conversation. I hope they won’t get into political quarrels with Pasha and Georges. I mustn’t get too excited—what if they turn out to be the self-regarding, pretentious sort? But knowing Mama, and knowing Pasha, who must have shown this Mikhail Pavlovich around, they would not agree to come to us if they were not curious, open-minded people—artists, teachers, precisely. The guesthouse is rather run-down as well—Grigory Petrovich had to spend the morning repairing the steps to the porch! The young man didn’t seem to mind; according to Pasha, he just laughed and said, This will be the perfect antidote to Moscow, we are coming for the tranquillity and the river and the garden—and there is so much space! he exclaimed over and over. We live in a chest of drawers in Moscow, he said.

  Imagine. A chest of drawers!

  It’s true, we cannot imagine how people must live, cramped in flats in Moscow and Petersburg. Here we have so much land and sky . . . I feel it even now that the light has gone—I venture to say I feel it more strongly, this space, when I stand out in the garden and breathe in the fresh air, and the odors come to me from near and far—the linden trees, the river, the stables, incense from the village church, the dog who’s been swimming, the earth after rain, the lovely aroma of burnt caramel from Kharitonenko’s factory, and Pasha stopping by in the evening, smelling of good hard work. That’s how the world comes to me these days.

  Sometimes I like to think I can smell the clouds, a faint crisp dampness, full of blue.

  May 6, 1888

  They have arrived! Mama and Pasha greeted them and helped them settle in. They are not all here yet, just the mother, daughter, and middle son. The father and other brothers will arrive over the course of the summer. The daughter is a teacher, like Natasha: such good company to look forward to! Mama says we are to let them get settled and tomorrow they’ll come for tea. They are tired after thirty hours of train from Moscow.

  Pasha says the young man was very gallant and polite but also joking quite easily with Mama and teasing his own mother.

  I am infinitely relieved. I was so afraid that they would be like that family who took the summer villa on the neighboring estate all those years ago. Andryusha—Andrey Kirillovich; I’ve never forgotten.

  In the meantime, Natasha reads to me. What a luxury. Sometimes she reads too quickly, her voice tripping over the words—that’s her personality, forever in a hurry. We’ve had Anna Karenina again, but she gets impatient with it, impatient with Anna, and with Levin, and with Tolstoy, and our reading degenerates into arguments about the place of women in literature. So, lately she has been reading lighter things, as she calls them—articles from the major papers or short stories; but there, too, we find reasons to argue, or to conclude that life is unfair, and what shall we do about it?

  Yes, I say, our lot as women is unfair—but look at our peasants and their children—isn’t their lot even worse? Are we not, in fact, incredibly fortunate?

  She tells me that it is relative. She says if I remove the peasantry from the equation, we women become the peasantry. Even if our good fortune, as the Lintvaryova sisters, has been to be educated and enjoy a degree of freedom, that does not reflect the situation in general, and we should use our good fortune to help others, etc.

  But we do, I protest, we are helping—

  —those less fortunate, she interrupts. But what have we done to change the status of women as a whole?

  By example, I insist. If other women see that they can receive an education, become doctors and teachers, find equal positions in work—

  She laughs and says, But most women don’t want what we have. They don’t see the situation as it truly is. And authors like Tolstoy do not help, writing of fallen women and ingenues . . .

  Natasha, surely you’re exaggerating or simplifying, I counter. One spoiled aristocrat from Petersburg with a broken heart does not represent Russian women.

  But you have heard how Tolstoy exploits his own wife—he could not write if he did not have her there. Although perhaps that is where she wants to be.

  Natasha is eager, almost angry, tapping her foot on the floor.

  I wish I could see her: her pink cheeks, her eyes burning dark with anger, her eyebrows never still, lively with irony or astonishment. But I cannot, so I say, We would have to ask Sofia Tolstoy herself if that is where—who—she wants to be. We don’t know if she is oppressed or willing.

  How could she be willing? Running his household and copying out his dreadful handwriting and keeping all the children and visitors at bay, always in his shadow—

  Perhaps she reckons his shadow is better than no shadow. Is it such a bad thing to be in the shadow? Have you thought of the power she might have, agreeing to the shadow?

  I smile, and though I cannot see her expression, there is a sudden calm in the room, an end to foot-tapping and exasperated sighs. I have humbled my little sister, but I do not know if it is my shadow—the one in which I live now, permanently—or that of the great man himself that gives her pause for thought.

  GOD, IT WAS COLD.

  What weather deity had invented that terrible wind they called la bise? He must have been a friend of Monsieur Guillotin of infamous revolutionary fame, thought Ana as she stepped out into the street: Her hair tore at her cheeks, her scarf streamed behind her, and her coat flapped against her legs as if to keep her from walking.

  The village was deserted; a last copper sheen caught the roof tiles, and beyond, the russet plaid of fields, the jagged parade of mountains. She walked quickly, pulling her shapka down tighter over her ears, holding her scarf to her nose, her eyes tingling, strained from a day’s work. Not what she had expected, two proto-feminist sisters discussing Tolstoy; but what a restful change from the frivolous or self-absorbed contemporary French novels that were her usual source of income. So what if it wasn’t going to pay much—there were times when work must be about more than income.

  But it wasn’t easy to make ends meet, even with the better-paid commissions from bigger publishers—the crime novels and thrillers and bestsellers—that she’d been taking on since her divorce. Her colleagues who did commercial translation made twice as much. When they raised their eyebrows at her, half in commiseration, half in consternation, she pleaded job satisfaction. And she’d made it this far, living on her own in this village for the last three years; she squared her shoulders and raised her chin as her thoughts compelled her onward, into the wind.

  Did she miss the easy days, back in Paris, with a husband? Easy only to a point, easier financially; as his business grew, Mathieu had taken on more and more of the burden of expenses. But ultimately, the financial inequality (among oth
er things, not least of which was his infidelity) became a source of strife between them, and they parted. Not amicably, but knowing it was for the best. While Ana’s lawyer had urged her to claim a prestation compensatoire, she wanted total independence. There were no children; she wanted nothing more to do with that part of her life. She was still trying to understand why her reaction had been so violent: Was it the knowledge of having spent twenty years with someone only to end up complete strangers? Or the realization she had nothing to show—not really, most of the books she’d translated were out of print—for all those years? Mathieu had gotten the flat in the Marais (it had been in his family since the Revolution, after all), and Ana had accepted a small moving allowance that enabled her to resettle.

  She did not like to think about Mathieu. Once the divorce and the move were behind her, she tried to pick up her life where she had left off before him, as if she were still in her early thirties, but she soon realized that society had changed (as had she, simply by aging physically, if nothing else—the eloquent streaks of gray in her long hair, which she refused to color) and the world was not about to let her get on as she would have liked. So her initial relief at being on her own soured into resentment toward Mathieu, and because she did not want him to poison her life, she forbade herself from thinking about him—a proscription that was often unsuccessful, given precisely such moments when her mind was allowed to wander. She had tried to rescue the good memories of their early years but thus far had been unable. Perhaps it was too soon; perhaps the weight of more recent incompatibility had buried their early happiness for good. How much was her own fault, too? Hadn’t she married him for the wrong reasons—the stability, the companionship, the passport? Which was also why, out of a distorted sense of pride, she had wanted no prestation compensatoire.

  For three years now she had been starting over, starting from scratch—relatively late in life, according to some, but you couldn’t dwell on that fact or you would founder in useless projection and disappointment. That was how she saw it.

  And her newly regained freedom meant she could organize her days as she saw fit. On a fine day, she could jump in the car and head off exploring the back roads of Haute-Savoie and neighboring Switzerland. The expanse of nature was new to her. She had not known until now how vital it was to her well-being, how comforting and sustaining the presence of clouds and mountains and a glimpse of lake could be. Or something as banal and universal as a bird or a tree! Not that there weren’t parks in Paris, and lovely ones—but so much land and sky to oneself, even in a bitter wind like this, was a luxury that no city, however spacious and elegant, could provide. Sometimes she missed the near-village life of her Parisian neighborhood—the cafés and boulangeries and small shops where everyone knew her—but this village, even with its dearth of shops and cafés, had opened other doors through which she began, tentatively at first, to explore her solitude, and through solitude—as if she found herself in a hall of mirrors—her very sense of who she was, who she wanted to be.

  Not that she didn’t miss or need people from time to time; they were not far from Geneva, and in half an hour or less, she could be there for her required dose of crowds and people-watching. She had one close friend in Geneva, Yves: They had been together on a summer language course to Moscow back in the early 1980s and had kept in touch. When she missed other friends, she called them on Skype or took the TGV up to Paris for the weekend. But more and more, she found that people were all so busy. She settled ever deeper into her isolation: At least it offered the consolations of beauty.

  And now this real, bone-chilling winter of the kind you rarely felt in a city, with its climatic fug of traffic and people and the proximity of warm interiors. She pulled her scarf tighter, thumped her arms around herself, half-hug, half-encouragement. She must find a fake fur in a thrift shop somewhere.

  Her Ukrainian heroines would not have feared the cold. Any more than those brave protesters on the Maidan in Kiev did; some of them had been camping there for weeks. They built walls with bags of frozen snow. She had seen them on the news, the women muffled like her in scarves and shapkas, bringing supplies, cooking vast kettles of soup, swelling the ranks at the rallies.

  For decades Ana had heard hardly anything about Ukraine, other than the Orange revolution in 2004, which ultimately failed, and of course her little guidebook to Crimea, and now the country suddenly seemed to be dwarfing her corner of France. What sort of coincidence was that, Ukrainian gentry in the daytime at work, so to speak, then Ukrainian protesters on the news at night? Where was it all going? Who knew—with protest movements, they either fizzled out, or were crushed, violently, or they triumphed.

  As for her own Ukrainian heroines, Ana had not read the diary through, so she did not know where they were headed, either. As a rule, she liked to discover a book as she progressed with the translation; it kept her fresh, curious, made her look forward to sitting down to work each day, and this would be no exception, she sensed. But at the same time, she was eager to find out why the diary must be kept confidential, whether there was something more in the text, something remarkable, that might bring her to another level professionally, propel her ever so briefly into the limelight that eluded most translators by definition. She did have a few colleagues who translated Nobel laureates and prizewinning authors; they were interviewed, wrote blogs or books, mingled at conferences as speakers. Their lives seemed to have substance.

  She had had enough of being invisible, of slipping inconspicuously behind the more glamorous author whose photograph beckoned from the back cover of a book they had both written. As translator, she mused, she was no more than the lining of the dust jacket. This substance she craved—beyond meaningful texts, beyond creativity—should lead to an identity.

  She turned to head home, wind at her back, and looking at the darkening landscape, she knew instinctively that it was not enough to have lived this long in France or to have acquired a French passport to feel French; perhaps it was equally foolish to expect an identity from her profession. Although people often did, and their profession defined them—to others, to society. A sort of representational convenience, when in fact the true self was elsewhere: going for walks at twilight, talking to the cat.

  Ana had read somewhere that if you wanted your cat to meow, to converse with you, you had to talk to it. As if it were a furry plant. She had never had a cat before—had adopted Doodle some six months earlier—and she was as disconcerted by the creature’s sudden displays of affection as she was by its self-serving indifference. In the end, such unpredictability was proving instructive. In the morning she would turn to the cat and say, Right, Doodle, what sort of day are we in for?, and Doodle’s condescending stare would tell her all she needed to know. For twenty years, Ana had lived a life of unquestioning routine and not a little boredom. She had been happiest crafting the very literary translations she favored back then: poetry, memoirs, obscure novels that sold a few hundred copies at best. She had spent her days bent over her typewriter, and then the computer, like some maître horloger over his instruments. Mathieu had resented her for it—the hours she spent, the pecuniary pointlessness of it. Now she worked much harder than she ever had, but she was free; she need fear neither routine nor boredom, and she felt a tremendous urge to make up for lost time.

  What was most surprising to her, after three years on her own, was how little the absence of a relationship troubled her. In the distant past, before she had met Mathieu, any period of celibacy or recovery from a breakup had been a source of distress and worry; she lived with it, but with a terrible awareness of inadequacy and time passing. Now time was passing faster than ever, yet Ana was poised and cheerfully resigned. She surveyed the rubble of her romantic yearnings with the dispassionate cynicism of the hardened aid worker. She had earned her name in the end. Harding. She didn’t think of herself as a hard person, but as a woman gracefully adjusting to the inevitable.

  You do what you have to do, her father used to say. Strange,
coming from him, the precise, articulate professor of history. She didn’t like this catchall phrase, with its negative implication of just making do, the pis aller, but she could point to experience, if challenged. Perhaps others had her best interests in mind when they questioned her solitude, but they hadn’t lived her life. She always said she was open to new experiences, but maybe she no longer knew how to reach out in this increasingly crowded, competitive world. Or she didn’t feel she needed to reach out. Her profession suited her; her reclusion buoyed her.

  And her little house was a sanctuary. Rundown but palatial compared to the Paris flat, a disputed legacy belonging to an old family in Thonon-les-Bains. She knew she wouldn’t be able to stay there forever, but as she hurried through the door into the warmth, eager for a cheering shot of Calvados, she refused to worry about the future. She tried now, after questioning her furry oracle, to take each unpredictable day as it came—but that didn’t exclude the occasional daydream of a perfectible future.

  May 7, 1888

  I told myself when I sat down for the first time with this ledger that I would not fill it with regrets. Life has been good to me. I’ve had opportunities, I have had a good and loving family, but there are one or two things I do regret.

  Perhaps to ease my mind, although it will bring a moment’s melancholy, I should let my thoughts return to those memories and see if there is still reason for regret.

  It was the summer before I left for Petersburg. There was a wealthy family from Moscow staying with their uncle on the neighboring estate. We never had much to do with this uncle, the owner of the estate; just before Papa’s death they had argued, and somehow Mama could not bring herself to forgive the man. Still, the family was bored and had children our age, so they sent an invitation. And there was a reconciliation. I began to spend time with Andryusha, the eldest brother, and with hindsight it would be easy to say he was spoiled and arrogant, or that he looked down on us. But I did not feel it at the time, and we went on long walks through the fields, looking for butterflies, and we sat on the hill above the river, and I saw him only as part of that joy of being seventeen, in a landscape of glorious colors. I was with a boy who spoke softly and took my hand and told me about the life he might lead, until he laughed and said, I suppose you are expecting to have suitors and get married?