by Alice Munro
“It is a weakness of his heart for one thing, and the pneumonia he had in the autumn that he cannot seem to get over. Also he has a growth in the generative organs,” said Elisa, lowering her voice but speaking frankly as German women did.
Clara appeared in the doorway.
“He is waiting for you now.”
Sophia climbed the stairs thinking not of the professor but of these two women who had made him the center of their lives. Knitting mufflers, mending the linen, making the puddings and preserves that could never be trusted to a servant. Honoring the Roman Catholic Church as their brother did—a cold undiverting religion in Sophia’s opinion—and all without a moment of mutiny as far as you could see, or any flicker of dissatisfaction.
I would go mad, she thought.
Even to be a professor, she thought, I would go mad. Students have mediocre minds, generally speaking. Only the most obvious, regular patterns can be impressed on them.
She would not have dared admit this to herself before she had Maksim.
She entered the bedroom smiling at her luck, her coming freedom, her soon-to-be husband.
“Ah, here you are at last,” said Weierstrass, speaking somewhat weakly and laboriously. “The naughty child, we thought she had deserted us. Are you on your way to Paris again, off to amuse yourself?”
“I am on my way back from Paris,” said Sophia. “I am going back to Stockholm. Paris was not at all amusing, it was dreary as can be.” She gave him her hands to kiss, one after the other.
“Is your Aniuta ill, then?”
“She is dead, mein liebe professor.”
“She died in prison?”
“No, no. That was long ago. She was not in prison that time. Her husband was. She died of pneumonia, but she had been suffering in many ways for a long time.”
“Oh, pneumonia, I have had it too. Still, that was sad for you.”
“My heart will never heal. But I have something good to tell you, something happy. I am to be married in the spring.”
“Are you divorcing the geologist? I do not wonder, you should have done that long ago. Still, a divorce is always unpleasant.”
“He is dead too. And he was a paleontologist. It is a new study, very interesting. They learn things from fossils.”
“Yes. I remember now. I have heard of the study. He died young then. I did not wish him to stand in your way, but truly I did not wish him dead. Was he ill long?”
“You might say that he was. You surely remember how I left him and you recommended me to Mittag-Leffler?”
“In Stockholm. Yes? You left him. Well. It had to be done.”
“Yes. But it is over now and I am going to marry a man of the same name but not closely related and a different sort of man entirely.”
“A Russian, then? Does he read fossils also?”
“Not at all. He is a professor of law. He is very energetic and very good-humored except when he is very gloomy. I will bring him to meet you and you shall see.”
“We will be pleased to entertain him,” said Weierstrass sadly. “It will put an end to your work.”
“Not at all, not at all. He does not wish it. But I will not teach anymore, I will be free. And I will live in a delightful climate in the south of France and I shall be healthy there all the time and do all the more work.”
“We shall see.”
“Mein Liebe,” she said. “I order you, order you to be happy for me.”
“I must seem very old,” he said. “And I have led a sedate life. I have not as many sides to my nature as you have. It was such a surprise to me that you would write novels.”
“You did not like the idea.”
“You are wrong. I did like your recollections. Very pleasant to read.”
“That book is not really a novel. You would not like the one I have written now. Sometimes I don’t even like it myself. It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love. Never mind, you will not have to read it. The Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian.”
“I am not generally fond of novels.”
“They are for women?”
“Truly I sometimes forget that you are a woman. I think of you as—as a—”
“As a what?”
“As a gift to me and to me alone.”
Sophia bent and kissed his white forehead. She held back her tears till she had said good-bye to his sisters and left the house.
I will never see him again, she thought.
She thought of his face as white as the fresh starched pillows that Clara must have placed behind his head just that morning. Perhaps she had already taken them away, letting him slump down into the softer shabbier ones beneath. Perhaps he had fallen asleep at once, tired out from their exchange. He would have thought that they were meeting for the last time and he would have known that the thought was in her mind as well, but he would not know—this was her shame, her secret—how lightened, how free, she felt now, in spite of her tears, freer with every step away from that house.
Was his life, she thought, so much more satisfactory to contemplate than his sisters’?
His name would last awhile, in textbooks. And among mathematicians. Not so long as it might have done if he had been more zealous about establishing his reputation, keeping himself to the fore in his select and striving circle. He cared more for the work than for his name, when so many of his colleagues cared equally for both.
—
SHE SHOULD NOT have mentioned her writing. Frivolity to him. She had written the recollections of her life at Palibino in a glow of love for everything lost, things once despaired of as well as things once treasured. She had written it far from home when that home and her sister were gone. And Nihilist Girl came out of pain for her country, a burst of patriotism and perhaps a feeling that she had not been paying enough attention, with her mathematics and the tumults of her life.
Pain for her country, yes. But in some sense she had written that story in tribute to Aniuta. It was the story of a young woman who gives up the prospect of any normal life in order to marry a political prisoner exiled to Siberia. In this way she ensured that his life, his punishment, should be somewhat alleviated—southern instead of northern Siberia—as was the rule for men accompanied by their wives. The story would be praised by those banished Russians who might manage to read it in manuscript. A book had only to be refused publication in Russia to engender such praises among political exiles, as Sophia well knew. The Raevsky Sisters—the recollections—pleased her more, though the censor had passed it, and some critics dismissed it as nostalgia.
IV
SHE HAD FAILED WEIERSTRASS once before. She failed him when she had achieved her early success. It was true, though he never mentioned it. She had turned her back on him and on mathematics altogether; she had not even answered his letters. She went home to Palibino in the summer of 1874, with her degree won, stored in a velvet case, and then put away in a trunk, to be forgotten for months—years—at a time.
The smell of the hay fields and the pine woods, the golden hot summer days, and the long bright evenings of northern Russia intoxicated her. There were picnics and amateur plays, balls, birthdays, the welcome of old friends, and the presence of Aniuta, happy with her year-old son. Vladimir was there as well, and in the easy summer atmosphere, with the warmth and wine and long merry suppers, the dances and the singing, it was natural to give in to him, to establish him after all this time as not just her husband but her lover.
This was not done because she had fallen in love with him. She had been grateful to him, and had convinced herself that such a feeling as love did not exist in real life. It would make them both happier, she thought, to agree with what he wanted, and for a while it did.
In the autumn they went to Petersburg, and the life of important amusement continued. Dinners, plays, receptions, and all the papers and periodicals to read, both frivolous and serious. Weierstrass begged Sophi
a, by letter, not to desert the world of mathematics. He saw to it that her dissertation was published in Crelle’s Journal for mathematicians. She barely looked at it. He asked her to spend a week—just a week—polishing up her work on the rings of Saturn, so that it too might be published. She could not be bothered. She was too busy, wrapped up in more or less constant celebration. A celebration of name days and court honors and new operas and ballets, but really, it seemed to be, a celebration of life itself.
She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood—that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. It could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone. Acquiring what you needed for a comfortably furnished life, and then to take on a social and public life of entertainment, would keep you from even being bored or idle, and would make you feel at the end of the day that you had done exactly what pleased everybody. There need be no agonizing.
Except in the matter of how to get money.
Vladimir revived his publishing business. They borrowed where they could. Both of Sophia’s parents died before long, and her inheritance was invested in public baths attached to a greenhouse, a bakery, and a steam laundry. They had grand projects. But the weather in Petersburg happened to have turned colder than usual, and people were not tempted even by steam baths. The builders and other people cheated them, the market became unstable, and instead of managing to make a reliable foundation for their lives they went deeper and deeper into debt.
And behaving like other married couples had the usual expensive result. Sophia had a baby girl. The infant was given her mother’s name but they called her Fufu. Fufu had a nurse and a wet nurse and her own suite of rooms. The family employed also a cook and a maid. Vladimir bought fashionable new clothes for Sophia and wonderful presents for his daughter. He had his degree from Jena and he had managed to become a subprofessor in Petersburg, but this was not enough. The publishing business was more or less in ruins.
Then the czar was assassinated and the political climate became disturbing and Vladimir entered a period of such deep melancholy that he could not work or think.
Weierstrass had heard of the death of Sophia’s parents, and to allay her grief a little, as he said, he sent her information on his own new and excellent system of integrals. But instead of being drawn back to mathematics she took to writing theater reviews and popular science pieces for the papers. That was using a talent more marketable and not so disturbing to other people or so exhausting to herself, as mathematics.
The Kovalevsky family moved to Moscow, hoping that their luck would change.
Vladimir recovered, but he did not feel able to go back to teaching. He found a new opportunity for speculation, being offered a job in a company that produced naphtha from a petroleum spring. The company was owned by the brothers Ragozin, who had a refinery and a modern castle on the Volga. The job was contingent on Vladimir’s investing a sum of money, which he managed to borrow.
But this time Sophia sensed trouble ahead. The Ragozins did not like her and she did not like them. Vladimir was now more and more in their power. These are the new men, he said, they have no nonsense in them. He became aloof, he took on rough and superior airs. Name me one truly important woman, he said. One who has made any real difference in the world, except by seducing and murdering men. They are congenitally backwards and self-centered and if they get hold of any idea, any decent idea to devote themselves to, they become hysterical and ruin it with their self-importance.
That is the Ragozins talking, said Sophia.
Now she picked up her correspondence with Weierstrass. She left Fufu with her old friend Julia and set out for Germany. She wrote to Vladimir’s brother Alexander that Vladimir had bitten at the Ragozins’ bait so readily that it was really as if he were tempting fate to send him another blow. Nevertheless she wrote to her husband offering to come back. He did not reply favorably.
They met once more, in Paris. She was living there cheaply while Weierstrass tried to get her a job. She was again submerged in mathematical problems and so were the people she knew. Vladimir had become suspicious of the Ragozins but he had involved himself to the point where he could not pull out. Yet he talked of going to the United States. And did go, but came back.
In the fall of 1882 he wrote to his brother that he realized now that he was a completely worthless person. In November he reported the bankruptcy of the Ragozins. He was afraid that they might try to implicate him in certain criminal procedures. At Christmas he saw Fufu, who was now in Odessa with his brother’s family. He was happy that she remembered him, and that she was healthy and clever. After that he prepared farewell letters for Julia, his brother, certain other friends, but not Sophia. Also a letter for the court explaining some actions of his in the Ragozin matter.
He delayed a while longer. It was not until April that he tied a bag over his head and inhaled chloroform.
Sophia, in Paris, refused food and wouldn’t come out of her room. She concentrated all her thought on the refusal of food, so she would not have to feel what she was feeling.
She was force-fed, at last, and fell asleep. When she woke she was deeply ashamed of this performance. She asked for a pencil and paper, that she might continue working on a problem.
—
THERE WAS NO MONEY LEFT. Weierstrass wrote and asked her to live with him as another sister. But he continued to pull strings wherever he could and was successful, finally, with his past student and friend Mittag-Leffler, in Sweden. The new University of Stockholm agreed to be the first university in Europe to take on a female mathematics professor.
At Odessa Sophia collected her daughter, taking her to live for the present with Julia. She was furious with the Ragozins. She wrote to Vladimir’s brother calling them “subtle, poisonous villains.” She persuaded the magistrate hearing the case to proclaim that all the evidence showed Vladimir to have been gullible but honest.
Then she took a train once more from Moscow to Petersburg to travel to her new and much publicized—and no doubt deplored—job in Sweden. She made the trip from Petersburg by sea. The boat rode into an overwhelming sunset. No more foolishness, she thought. I am now going to make a proper life.
She had not then met Maksim. Or won the Bordin Prize.
V
SHE LEFT BERLIN in the early afternoon, shortly after having said that last sad but relieved good-bye to Weierstrass. The train was old and slow, but clean and well heated, as you would expect any German train to be.
About halfway in the journey the man across from her opened up his newspaper, offering her any section she might like to read.
She thanked him, and refused.
He nodded towards the window, at the fine driving snow.
“Ah well,” he said. “What can one expect?”
“What indeed,” said Sophia.
“You are going beyond Rostock?”
He might have noted an accent that was not German. She did not mind his speaking to her or coming to such a conclusion about her. He was a good deal younger than she, decently dressed, slightly deferential. She had a feeling that he was someone she had met or seen before. But this did happen when you were travelling.
“To Copenhagen,” she said. “And then to Stockholm. For me the snow will only get thicker.”
“I will be leaving you at Rostock,” he said, perhaps to reassure her that she was not letting herself in for a long conversation. “Are you satisfied with Stockholm?”
“I detest Stockholm at this time of year. I hate it.”
She was surprised at herself. But he smiled delightedly and began to speak in Russian.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I was right. Now it is I who speak like a foreigner to you. But I studied in Russia at one time. In Petersburg.”
“You recognized my accent as Russian?”
“Not surely. Until you said what you did about Stockholm.”
“Do all Russians hate Stockholm?”
<
br /> “No. No. But they say they hate. They hate. They love.”
“I should not have said it. The Swedes have been very good to me. They teach you things—”
At this point he shook his head, laughing.
“Really,” she said. “They have taught me to skate—”
“Assuredly. You did not learn to skate in Russia?”
“They are not so—so insistent about teaching you things as the Swedes are.”
“Nor on Bornholm,” he said. “I live now on Bornholm. The Danes are not so—insistent, that is the word. But of course on Bornholm we are not even Danes. We say we are not.”
He was a doctor, on the island of Bornholm. She wondered if it would be entirely out of line to ask him to look at her throat, which was now very sore. She decided that it would be.
He said that he had a long and probably a rough ferry ride ahead of him, after they had crossed the Danish border.
People on Bornholm did not think of themselves as Danes, he said, because they thought of themselves as Vikings taken over by the Hanseatic League in the sixteenth century. They had a fierce history, they took captives. Had she ever heard of the wicked Earl of Bothwell? Some people say he died on Bornholm, though the people of Zealand say he died there.
“He murdered the husband of the queen of Scotland and married her himself. But he died in chains. He died insane.”
“Mary Queen of Scots,” she said. “So I have heard.” And indeed she had, for the Scottish queen had been one of Aniuta’s early heroines.
“Oh, forgive me. I am chattering.”
“Forgive you?” said Sophia. “What have I to forgive you for?”
He flushed. He said, “I know who you are.”
He had not known in the beginning, he said. But when she spoke in Russian, he was sure.
“You are the female professor. I have read about you in a journal. There was a photograph as well, but you looked much older in it than you do. I am sorry to intrude on you but I could not help myself.”
