The Death of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Omniscience is, admittedly, a dubious gift.
Olga and I look very small indeed as we step from the carriage and peer up at the splendour of the Hotel Römerbad. Above its mansard roof and towers, the swallows dip and soar, and like them, I can see the balding crown of my own head and the soft yellow flutter of a handkerchief as Olga pats the heat from my face. It is humid, and the trees of the estate stoop under lush canopies of every shade of green. ‘This weather needs to break,’ Olga tells me. But I’m distracted by a swallow as it swoops low to drink from the hotel’s ornamental pond; it neither pauses in its flight nor misses a single wingbeat.
Coins glint in Olga’s palm as she tips our driver. I watch a porter manhandle our bags. Thank God he does. It is work enough to find my hat and straighten my bow-tie, not to mention myself, for I am bent and irritable after the long journey.
On the train from Moscow, in our stifling compartment, and likewise from Berlin, I hardly slept. But by day, I nodded off and dreamed at times of the Steppe, of my brother Alexander and I awake under the watchful stars, in grass that was as tall and alive as we were.
But Olga and my physician agree a German spa is what I need, not the wilderness of the Steppe – and I suppose I am no longer fit for sleeping in gullies or in the lee of ancient burial mounds.
When I was fifteen, my brother and I spent one last summer there, lodging with the family of a long-standing tenant of my father’s. They were Cossacks and owned a ranch, and were as wild and uncouth as my family were pious and fearful. The floor was earthen, the roof was made of straw, their goat shared the rug on which we slept and the walls of the house were covered in sabres, pistols and whips. Every Sunday, the old Cossack grandmother made goose soup that tasted of greasy bathwater, and she told tales around the turf fire. Each began in the same way: ‘There was a time and no time.’
As Olga and I arrive at the hotel, it is both 17th June and 30 June. The Julian calendar of Russia disagrees with the Gregorian calendar of Europe. Thirteen days slip like loose kopeks into the coat lining of the universe, and as we follow our porter through the wide doors, I suspect that we, like my Cossack crone, have been drawn into a cosmic secret: There is a time and no time.
At the front desk, the Maître d’Hôtel regards us over the rims of his pince-nez. His face is a pickled onion. It’s clear that my personage offends him. I am far too thin and look like I haven’t slept – largely because I haven’t. I’m aware I smell of medication and illness. I am bad-tempered because I haven’t seen a single well-dressed woman from Berlin to Badenweiler, nor one who was not trimmed with some kind of absurd braid. The Maître d’Hôtel eyes the little spittoon that pokes from my jacket pocket.
You’re bad for business, his eyes say. We are a health spa, not a sanatorium.
I smell the faint mineral stink of the baths. At the height of the season, the village of Badenweiler’s population of 700 swells to nearly 7,000.
Olga believes the Maître d’Hôtel pockets the daily visitor’s tax.
The peace, quiet and order of Germany unnerve me. Scarcely a dog barks here. It would be easy to feel dead already were it not for the sound of the band rising above the Kurpark. No version of any afterlife could feature an oompah band.
As we sign the hotel register, I am already plotting my escape. We will go to Norway. My next play will be set on an ice-bound ship. We will see the Arctic Circle. What could be more thrilling than white vistas of ice and endless horizonless views?
Our room is pristine – all gleaming furniture and white linen. Olga, I see, has packed a bedpan. She is a marvel.
She bounces on each bed and takes the one by the window.
At the writing desk, I compose a hasty note to my mother:
The bread in Germany is wonderful. I eat butter, enormous quantities. The coffee is excellent. There is no decent tea. (We have brought our own.) I am already better. My legs no longer ache, and I walk about much of the day. My asthma is nearly gone, I have no diarrhoea and I am beginning to get fat. Yours, Anton.
Two days later, after a carriage ride into the mountains and a feast of a dinner, some of which I even managed to eat, the Maître d’Hôtel approaches our table and explains something to Olga in German in a terse, low voice. We have not yet had our coffee and strudel, but she pushes back her chair, and I can but trail after. In our room, she kicks her valise, still open on the floor, and tears come into her eyes.
‘What is it, dear heart?’ I ask. ‘Whatever it is, it’s nothing to us. That man is nothing to us.’
‘We have to leave,’ she says.
‘Yes, let’s leave. The restaurant is second-rate. The tea is like spittle. The bar is a morgue. We’ll plan a new itinerary – Norway it is! – and leave at the end of the week.’
‘Tomorrow,’ she says. ‘We have to leave tomorrow morning. He claims your coughing disturbs the other guests.’
The palpitations start up in my chest. ‘Excellent. You know how restless I get.’ I press her to me. ‘Whatever happens, dearest Olya, don’t get upset. Everything they say is for the best. Absolutely everything.’
On both 20th June and 3rd July we depart the Hotel Römerbad for a perfectly decent lodging house on the other side of the Kurpark.
‘No balcony,’ Olga laments.
‘No stairs!’ I sing.
In the mornings, Olga finds me the Russian papers, and translates the German ones. In the afternoon, I play patience, and she narrates the daily dramas that unfold outside the Badenweiler post office. I tell her that Germany is incapable of drama. Everyone is far too well-behaved. But she assures me that a man is hurriedly posting a letter, that a dog truly does lift its leg against a lamp post and that a child falls down and scrapes its knee. I tell her the tedium of Badenweiler will kill me even if the TB does not.
How I long for the dirt and commotion of Moscow.
Later, we sit in the park until the sun goes down. Then, in our room, Olga injects me with morphia and rubs my feet. Sometimes I sleep.
My next terrible coughing fit is, it turns out, a godsend, for it introduces us to Dr Schwoerer, the only interesting man ever to have resided in Badenweiler. He is a sunburnt, handsome sort, and his face bears the scars of youthful duels. He bear-hunts every other year in Russia, and his laughter is a distraction from the fearful oompah of my heart.
He arranges a comfortable balcony room for us at the Hotel Sommer, where he is doctor-in-residence. On 24th June and 7th July we install ourselves. His Russian wife delivers a samovar to our room. Olga beams. ‘Decent tea at last!’
Which is just as well. Dr Schwoerer forbids me coffee. My heart can’t take it, he says. It’s working double-time as a result of my lungs’ dereliction of duty. I ask him if that is the reason for the dearth of well-turned-out women in Germany. ‘Exactly!’ he booms. ‘Your heart must have no excuse to stop. Every dreadful dirndl is just for you!’
His regimen is strict. At 7.00, I am brought tea in bed. I must stay in bed and not wander. At half seven, a masseur appears and rubs me down with warm water. I must lie still until eight, when Olga helps me to dress, and acorn cocoa is brought to our room, with bread and an immense quantity of butter. Then I am permitted fresh air in the park until lunchtime. Later, I scribble ideas in my notebook, or sit and chat with Lev Rabenek, who reads me the latest news of Russia’s doomed war with Japan.
Lev is a University of Moscow student. He has a long, pensive face and a humble, nuanced intelligence. He is in Badenweiler while his brother overcomes a melancholy – which descended as they ascended a Swiss alp.
My bird’s-eye view widens. I see that, in the years to come, Lev will struggle to embrace the Revolution and will leave for London. He will pass his youth and middle years in the leafy borough of South Kensington, where he will sometimes loiter in a red-brick museum, staring, bewildered, at the catalogued jewels of the Tsarina, or the toy of an Imperial child, or the stage notes of Stanislavsky, who wa
s a friend of his family’s.
I am so easy in Lev’s company that I sometimes drift off and return to the Steppe, to its vast ocean of land, to the hymn of the lark, the cry of the kite and the mystery of the kurgans – those earthen mounds which tower over everything on the endless plain.
I see the river where the Cossack girls bathed while Alexander and I spied on their nakedness from the gully. I see the ancient well, and beside it, the beautiful, fierce-eyed girl who let me kiss her, and kissed me back, as we stood for solemn, dizzying minutes without speaking a word.
In the night, Olga eases herself gently into my bed, lays my head on her breast and will not allow me to forget that I am still alive.
We sleep under only a sheet, for a heatwave has come and there is no relief. By day in the park, even my light woollen suit is unbearable, so Olga travels to Freiburg to have two flannel suits made up: one, white with a blue stripe; the other, light blue with a white stripe.
It is in the small hours of both 2nd July and 15th July that my heart stops. Lev is with us, and the good doctor too, whom Lev roused from his bed. I hear Olga gasp. I see her grab our friend the doctor by the lapels and insist he do something. But dead or alive, my heart is stubborn, and no amount of crushed ice will persuade it to start. Dr Schwoerer shakes his head, and I feel Lev tenderly close my eyes.
Lev leads Olga to our balcony and speaks with her until dawn. As the sky pales, they smell the hay from the fields. Somewhere a bell ringer practises. Later that day, Lev and Dr Schwoerer have a job getting me into the white-and-blue suit for my laying out. I never was anyone’s straight man, and true to myself, I died doubled up on my side.
Never let it be said that I don’t amuse myself.
I am reliably informed that the authorities would much prefer it if I didn’t amuse myself, for, as I narrate the story of my own demise, it would seem I fall foul of Decree No. 02030, issued by the Central Office. This thoughtful decree bans ‘the publication of any letter or book that might trivialise or discredit Anton Chekhov’.
On my head, be it.
In the corridor outside our room, the doctor and the Maître d’Hôtel are arguing. Finally I am removed from the hotel under the cover of darkness in – how fantastic! – a hotel laundry basket. At 6'1'', there is nothing for it: this corpse can only sit up.
Olga and a small procession of acquaintances bear me to a nearby chapel. The light from two lanterns plays upon my face, and I seem to wear a most inappropriate smile.
You couldn’t make it up.
Of course travel arrangements for the dead rarely achieve the gravitas of the grave. In the end, the Russian Embassy commandeers a train – or, to be specific, a refrigerated car marked ‘Oysters’.
I never subscribed to any heroic ideal.
I am happy to be mistaken for an oyster.
Before my departure, Olga and the embassy staff try their reverent best to sing the panikhida from the train platform, but, true to form, the German authorities approach and ask them to be quiet.
Hear, hear, I say.
I am met at the station in Petersburg by the Temporary President of Russia’s Literary Foundation. When Olga asks where the Permanent President is, she is informed that the poor man is down with the human variety of foot-and-mouth disease.
I am transferred to a red luggage car and hurtle onward to my beloved Moscow. Just as I was happy to be taken for an oyster, I am now content to be mistaken for baggage. It’s true I would be a poor first-class steamer trunk, but I believe I have the makings of an excellent carpet bag.
The Berlin correspondent of the Russian Gazette, a fine chap called Dmitri with whom I chatted often at the hotel, tearfully cables the news of my death to Moscow, France and even London. In Britain, The Times Literary Supplement will conclude: ‘He may or may not have been a man of genius.’
No one can equivocate as unequivocally as the English.
I bow down before them.
Myself, I give my stories six years until they are forgotten – seven at best.
It is in the darkness of the railway car that the Cossack girl appears. She leads me through the columns of luggage and over the gleaming railway tracks into the warmth of the day. We pass Moscow’s golden domes, and are suddenly and strangely at the Steppe. The grass is chest high. Butterflies flash in the milkwort. I see our well, and beyond it, the low entrance to the kurgan. When I hesitate, she tugs on my hand.
Inside, it is airy and unexpectedly dry. I haven’t breathed so freely in years. The walls are lined in white stone.
At my feet, I see the debris of my life: the birch rod my father used ruthlessly upon us; my stethoscope, spectacles and pocket telescope; my accursed spittoon; my fox-fur greatcoat; the landscapes painted by dear Levitan, gone before me; the proofs of The Cherry Orchard, which I corrected only a month ago on a Sunday in Moscow as its 250 church bells rang out.
Deep in the mound, I see the bones of nomad chiefs and wandering mystics. I long for Olga, for her bright eyes and cool hand. I am heartsick, too, for Alexander, for my sister Masha and my mother; for the sun through the willow tree by the house in Yalta; for the dolphins leaping in the Bay; for a sleigh ride over fresh snowfall on Moscow streets.
‘I am afraid,’ I say to the Cossack girl.
But it’s too late. There is a time and no time. Before I can stop her hand, she heaves open a door at the back of the kurgan. There is a surge of light and heat, a great thermal uplift, a tugged loop of time and being – and, before I can take possession of myself, I am looking down once more on Olga outside the Hotel Römerbad as she tips our driver. The coins glint in her hand. Thirteen days rush back upon themselves in a collision of cloud, shadow, heat and electricity. ‘This weather needs to break,’ Olga tells me. I see the porter usher us in. We have just arrived. I swoop to the pond, drink, then rise, tail streamers dripping. I see my old self linger for a moment more. Hand to his eyes, he follows my flight, eyes squinting, as I strain towards Norway and the Pole.
How to Make a Citizen’s Arrest
Ensure there is no possibility of a police officer doing the job for you.
In the night of Harrowby Street, we’re alone. You stoop into the wind to peer, your expression strained but benign. It wasn’t easy to catch you up – you have a long stride. Behind us, in Edgware Road, we hear a police siren go up like a war cry.
Try to stay calm.
I squeeze your hand but I do not let go. Your fingers, I notice, are cold against mine. In your other hand, you clasp a carrier bag, and through the transparent polythene, I see a beef fettucini meal-for-one. Your coat flaps in the wind. Your knuckles are white. I’d imagined you to be the sort of man who wore good gloves on nights like this.
London seems abandoned. Only a few pass. They study their phones as they walk, each face sombre and ghoulishly uplit. Around us, the night seems to stretch and thicken, and my phone vibrates endlessly with the news alerts.
‘No,’ I explain to you over the buzzing, ‘no, I don’t want a selfie – but thank you.’ Will it help to clarify? ‘I’m not wired either,’ I say.
‘“Weird?”’ You cup your free hand to your ear. The wind snatches at our words.
Should I walk away now?
I see the wheels of risk assessment spinning behind your eyes. A stranger has taken hold of your hand. Is she mad? Will she scream if you forcibly separate yourself? Will she make false claims? Are we on CCTV?
You simply wanted an easy meal and an early night.
Neither of us could have dreamed it would come to this.
‘It’s a horrid evening,’ you say, straightening. Above the bridge of your nose, the frown lines deepen. You stare at the sight of your hand locked in mine. You do not pull away, though you could do so, as we’re both aware. My grip is stubborn rather than strong, and it wouldn’t take a great deal of effort to overpower me. You can’t, however, risk a scene. Twitter. Instagram. You have your Foundation to think of. Your face-for-hire.
It’s irrelevant o
f course, but I don’t think your ears are as large as people used to say.
‘How can I help?’ Your words are terse, perfunctory. You’re losing patience.
I quite understand.
‘If I’m honest,’ I begin, ‘I’m not sure you can help.’ Because – how to say it? – everything is already too late.
I can feel your pulse racing in your thumb. Please bear in mind that I have no contingency for fight-or-flight. I have simply relied upon your conciliatory nature and your well-known fear of giving offence. No wonder you can’t make sense – not really – of the endless public anger. After all, you’re famously nice.
all the beloved ghosts Page 12
