Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

by Nina Sankovitch

  And then one day we weren’t. Carol moved to a street far enough away that we could no longer just drop in on each other. Our play had to be planned and involved parents and cars and schedules. When summer vacation began, I was left in the old neighborhood with old—but not best—friends while Carol moved on to new friends. And, very quickly, she found a new best friend. Carol was no longer interested in me or the Professor.

  The only way I got through the loneliness of that summer was by reading Harriet the Spy. Harriet became my new best friend. I could not play Gilligan’s Island alone, but I could spy on my own. In fact, that was one of Harriet’s rules of spying! Suddenly, being alone was not so bad. I began to carry around a notebook and scribble my thoughts down in it. I didn’t do much actual spying. My sisters caught on quickly to what I was up to with my notebook, my dime-store binoculars, and the copy of Harriet the Spy that I always had with me. They told my mother, and she gave me a quiet lecture on respecting the privacy of our neighbors. No big deal. I was more interested in writing my own thoughts in my notebook than in spying on boring suburban neighbors. Reading and rereading Harriet the Spy brought me somewhere new, to a place where a girl my age lived, a girl who loved to read and scribble and eat peculiar foods just like me. Harriet took me with her to her world, a place where Ole Golly talked to us kids as if we were smart and big, telling us all about writers like Henry James and Dostoyevsky and making them sound wonderful. It was a place of solitary freedom and tomato sandwiches. When Harriet found herself in deep trouble with her friends, I didn’t want her to work things out with them. I wanted her to be alone, like I was.

  In mid-July of that summer my mother and I left for Belgium. My grandmother was in the final stages of cancer, and my mother was going to care for her. I was brought along because at age ten I was too young to be left unsupervised at home, and maybe because my mother had noticed my sadness over losing Carol. She wanted to keep an eye on me. My father and older sisters would join us in August, when we would head east to visit relatives in Poland. I was happy to be flying away to Belgium, unaware of just how ill my grandmother was. I sat on the plane feeling very safe, with my mother beside me, and my copy of Harriet the Spy, my notebook, and my stuffed Piglet—beloved Piggy—anchored in between our seats.

  I remember sitting on the bed where my grandmother lay, very ill but still smiling, still eager to spoil me. “When I’m better, we’ll go shopping, yes?” she asked in her lovely voice, her English accented and slightly warbling. But she didn’t get better. I don’t remember anyone telling me that she had died. I just remember my aunt taking me to buy clothes for the funeral, a plain blue skirt, white jersey, black shoes.

  Just before the funeral I developed a brain-splitting headache, so bad that I vomited again and again. My grandfather, a doctor, gave me a sedative that made me feel better, and I went to the funeral. I sat beside my mother, waiting alone on the bench while she went up to the casket. My mother cried, the only time I saw her cry that summer, but I don’t remember crying—I was half numb with the headache medication.

  In the days that followed, my mother took me all over Antwerp. We walked everywhere. It was wonderful being with her, going to the zoo, down to the port by the river, and to Rubens’s house, filled with his paintings. I liked the blue-and-white tiles encircling the kitchen fireplace in Rubens’s house, each tile presenting a different tiny scene from life. Afternoons we would sit at a café and share sugared waffles, my mother drinking coffee while I had hot cocoa. I would scribble away in my notebook, poems and thoughts and notes about what we’d seen that day. Harriet was always with me. My mother and aunt bought me new books to read, but I always went back to favorite pages of Harriet the Spy, like the scene where Harriet describes how she first began to listen in on other people’s conversations while drinking her egg cream at the counter of her local diner. I had no idea what an egg cream was, but I understood the fun when Harriet “would play a game and not look at the people until from listening to them she had decided what they looked like. Then she would turn around and see if she were right.”

  My mother was good at eavesdropping, but I was even better, picking up the English conversations going on around us in those cafés and reporting the funny stuff I heard. Then my mother and I would both turn around and peek at the overheard couples and families, and laugh behind our hands.

  In August my father and sisters arrived in Belgium. We left for Poland, driving eastward across Europe to visit brothers my father hadn’t seen for thirty years, since World War II. There was a dramatic change as we drove into Eastern Europe from Germany. Well cared for brick and stone buildings, clean cobblestone streets, and the sleek Autobahn gave way to a drab and gray symmetry of cement block buildings interspersed with crumbling roads and long banks of fields being worked by rusty machinery or by hand.

  We stayed first with my father’s oldest brother, who lived and worked on an old estate that was now a large flower nursery. Despite the shabbiness of the once-grand house, the property was impressive, with gorgeous wide rows of flowers spreading out in all directions. There was also a small vegetable garden next to the house. We ate salads of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers during long meals with everyone smiling and talking in a language that, for once, my mother didn’t understand. She just nodded and smiled, and we girls followed along.

  We drove on after a few days to Kraków, to visit another brother. His two-room house was jam-packed with vases, photographs, bowls, paintings, and books. Mismatched pieces of furniture pushed up against each other, fighting for space. Again there were long meals (bread and sausage) and lots of smiling and talking in a language that I didn’t understand. I stuck to talking with my sisters and rereading Harriet the Spy. At night, my sisters and I slept in the back room of the house, sharing the larger of the two beds with our aunt. My parents slept in the other bed, a narrow twin.

  My aunt was a large woman, and when she shifted on the bumpy mattress, my sisters and I tumbled and rolled. Anne-Marie reached out with her arm to hold me in the bed. I might have fallen onto the floor without her steadying hand. I clutched Anne-Marie with one hand and held tightly on to Piggy with the other. None of us girls slept much.

  We left Poland, driving north into East Germany, with the idea of crossing back over into Western Europe through Berlin. But tourists were supposed to enter West Berlin from the south, avoiding East Berlin altogether. The reason for this became obvious as we drove through the streets of East Berlin. Our shiny Western car stuck out like a display of fireworks in a gloomy sky. The few people we passed on the crumbling streets stopped to stare at us. All talk in the car ceased, and we made our way silently along entire blocks of bombed-out buildings, under the dim lights of weak streetlamps. Only Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point to West Berlin, was lit up, bright and big against the dark sky. Firing out from the roof of the long shed, which spanned the roadway, were what seemed like hundreds of spotlights, crisscrossing back and forth across our car as we approached.

  Guards at the checkpoint stopped the car and ordered us to get out. We girls were separated from our parents and taken inside the elongated shed to a small room. It seemed to me as if we stood there huddled together and alone for hours. When we were finally led back outside, our parents were standing rigidly beside the car. Guards searched it from top to bottom. Our suitcases were piled up on the sidewalk and the doors of the car stood open, along with the roof of the trunk. A guard stood leaning over the trunk, his body half inside the depth of the car and his hands reaching down and pushing back into the empty spaces. Another guard circled the car with a mirror on wheels that allowed him to search underneath, while another perched in the front seat of the car and reached into the back, peeling back the seating to peer beneath the cushions. The guards even opened wide the hood of the car to stare deep into its guts.

  “What are they looking for?” I asked.

  “Shhh!” My mother shook her head, her lips pursed tightly together. One of the guards turned
to look at me. His face was impassive, his eyes cold and his mouth a straight line of disapproval. When the search of the car was over, we were given back our passports, allowed to get in our car, and told to drive on to the other side. We passed through the no-man’s-land between East and West, a stretch of fifty yards of asphalt glittering under the passing spotlights. Darkness reached in from either side of the traverse, and the gates of West Berlin beckoned before us. My father finally answered my question.

  “They were looking for people in our car, seeing if we were carrying any relatives to the West.”

  “And if they found someone?” I asked.

  “They would be taken away, maybe killed.” My father was angry, looking back through the rearview mirror. He was not looking at us girls in the backseat. He was looking at the guards we’d left behind.

  I saw my mother shoot my father a warning look, but he went on. “People die every day trying to leave, trying to get to the West. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Anne-Marie answered for all of us. She reached for my hand and squeezed.

  One week later we flew home to Chicago. In my excitement to be home, I left Harriet the Spy, my notebook, and Piglet in the taxicab. My parents tried to track down the cab but without any luck. For weeks I had trouble sleeping. I woke up from nightmares I couldn’t remember, crying and shaking. My mother bought me a new copy of Harriet the Spy, and a family friend sewed me a new Piglet. I bought myself a clean notebook and started in writing all over again. I wrote about Harriet, about Carol and about my grandmother, about my relatives in Poland and the terrors of Checkpoint Charlie. I wrote a poem about Anne-Marie and her hand coming for me across the lumpy mattress of my aunt’s bed, and then across the backseat of our car as it carried us into the West. I don’t have that notebook any longer, but I do have my second copy of Harriet the Spy, and I do have the stuffed pig. Comfort of the pig I outgrew—comfort of the book, never.

  I needed comfort now. I needed hope. Hope that when life turns on you for the worst, it will turn back again, for the good. We girls had been protected for so long from misfortune. But then everything changed. My sister, the one with the reaching hand, was dead. Life had unleashed its unfairness, its random dispersal of pain, its uncaring lynching of certainty. I had tried running, but now I would try reading. I would trust in Connolly’s promise that “words are alive, and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”

  My book reading would be a discipline. I knew there would be pleasure in my reading, but I needed to hold myself to a schedule as well. Without a commitment, the rest of life could creep in and steal time away, and I wouldn’t read as much as I wanted to or needed to. I couldn’t have my escape if I didn’t make books my priority. There is always dust to sweep and laundry to fold; there is always milk to buy and dinner to cook and dishes to wash. But none of that could get in my way for one year. I was allowing myself one year to not run, not plan, not provide. A year of nots: not worry, not control, not make money. Sure, our family could use another income, but we’d gotten by for so long on just one salary, we could do it for one more year. We would lay off the extras and find enough in what we had already.

  I planned to begin my book-a-day project on my forty-sixth birthday. I would read my first book that day, and the next day I would write my first review. The rules for my year were simple: no author could be read more than once; I couldn’t reread any books I’d already read; and I had to write about every book I read. I would read new books and new authors, and read old books from favorite writers. I wouldn’t read War and Peace, but I could read Tolstoy’s last novel, The Forged Coupon. All the books would be ones I would have shared with Anne-Marie if I could have, ones we would have talked about, argued over, and some we would have agreed upon.

  The summer before I turned forty-six, I had put together a Web site for book exchanges—allowing people who needed books to connect with people who wanted to give their old books away—and I decided to use that Web site as a place where I’d record my year of reading a book a day. It was already called Read All Day, a premonition of my life to come. Perfect. Anyone who has kids in school knows how hyped-up librarians and teachers are about getting kids to read every single day. I agreed with the hype, but why not push reading for adults too? Why not foster daily reading in adults? My year of intense reading would be my own project of escape, but my site would also be a place for nudging along other adults in their reading. The motto of the Read All Day Web site was “Great Good Comes from Reading Great Books.” My year could prove its truth.

  I set myself up in a room downstairs, off the kitchen. It had a piano in it and George’s tuba, along with a few discarded recorders and plenty of old music books. The room had two bookshelves, and I cleared away space for the books I’d be getting from the library, from bookstores, and from family. I dragged a paint-stained wooden desk—stolen from the playroom—and placed on top of it the computer abandoned to me by Meredith, my stepdaughter, when she’d upgraded to a laptop. There was one big chair in the room, and I pondered its fate.

  The chair looked older than it was, but then it had been through a lot in the thirteen years we’d owned it. Jack had brought it home a few days before Michael was born. At the time, it was the most elegant piece of furniture in our apartment, glorious with its ivory white raised upholstery, ridged mahogany legs, amply stuffed arms, and gracefully curved back. But white? With our Magic Marker–equipped one-year-old on the loose and a baby on the way, it wouldn’t remain white for long. And I knew from past experience that there would be more than just juice boxes leaking on the furniture with a new baby to be fed.

  The chair stayed in our apartment—as it was purchased on sale, there was no returning it—but it did not stay white for long. Patches began to appear, with a rainbow of colors, purple (wine), brown (coffee), pink (Magic Marker), blue (bubble gum ice cream), and yellow (milk). By the time we came to child number three, the chair was so stained it looked like a world map. But it was still sturdy and very comfortable, the arms still amply stuffed and providing a good cushion for rocketing children. We had the chair reupholstered in a very tough fabric, muted purple with a pattern of flowers and vines, and invincible against stains.

  As invincible as the chair was against stains, it was powerless against cats. Or one cat, in particular. Milo had been brought home from the shelter as a gift for Michael. He was a black-and-white longhair. Sweet in disposition, he meowed rarely and never scratched the furniture. But he did have one fault. Every once in a while he would pee, just a tiny, little bit, on the purple chair. It was as if he were marking the chair as his beloved chair and his alone. His marking worked. The odor of cat pee is daunting to the average nose-owning human, and no one could sit there for longer than a minute or two before hightailing it out of the chair. My husband wanted to dump the chair after smelling the ablutions of Milo’s love, but I revolted. It was too good a chair, and I had by now too many memories associated with it. Meredith read to Peter snuggled up in that chair, Michael’s birth announcement photo had been shot there, and the chair had been George’s favorite nursing spot. Peter used it as a prop in his one-act plays involving kings and queens. Although it smelled, it was still regal.

  I placed the chair in the farthest corner of the house and sprayed it daily with a magical elixir that managed to dull the odor to only mildly repulsive. The spray also worked to repel all future dousing by Milo. He never sat in or marked the chair again. Over the years the odor faded, and by now the chair had no real odor, only an occasional disagreeable whiff. It was still very sturdy and even more comfortable. The purple chair would be my dedicated reading chair.

  I was ready—ready to sit down in my purple chair and read. For years, books had offered to me a window into how other people deal with life, its sorrows and joys and monotonies and frustrations. I would look there again for empathy, guidance, fellowship, and experience. Books would give me all that, and more. After three years of carrying the truth of my si
ster’s death around with me, I knew I would never be relieved of my sorrow. I was not hoping for relief. I was hoping for answers. I was trusting in books to answer the relentless question of why I deserved to live. And of how I should live. My year of reading would be my escape back into life.

  Chapter 3

  Such Beauty in the World

  Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart and my stomach all like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that’s what life is about: there is a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same . . . an always within never.

  MURIEL BARBERY,

  The Elegance of the Hedgehog

  I STARTED READING THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG BY Muriel Barbery on the train ride into New York City on the day of my forty-sixth birthday. The day had started with breakfast served up alongside kisses and hugs, envelopes and homemade cards waiting to the side. There was the usual card from my son Michael with its accurately numbered candles on the cake, each drawn in with its own flame. This was a cake to be wary of: so many candles, so much fire. There was a card from the cats, signed “from the cats” by Jack. We’ve always had cats but Jack never knows their names.

  I opened the envelopes that had come in through the mail over the last few days. There was a card from my parents and one from Jack’s parents, with the yearly cash enclosed. With fifty-plus children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and daughters- and sons-in-law, Jack’s parents could go broke with birthday-card cash, but until they did, the gift was always there.

  There was a final pile of cards for me to read, the slew of Hallmark mush that my husband is a sucker for and that I have come to look forward to. Tears and smiles along with our peanut-butter toast and coffee. I was grateful to be loved. I knew that most days I took the love for granted, just like I had taken life for granted, and this day I wanted to be different. I would begin my year of reading with gratitude. Gratitude for having all these lives and this love around me. Gratitude for living on into my forty-sixth year.