Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

by Nina Sankovitch

  On the last day of my year of reading I read Pete Dexter’s Spooner. Spooner tells the story of two men, Calmer and Spooner, bound together by the love of a very difficult and bitter woman. Calmer is reserved, patient, and hardworking. His stepson Spooner is restless, reckless, and openhearted. Calmer leads Spooner to understand that every person is just one “part of the story,” and by understanding the part Spooner plays, he can understand everything important, including how to work, how to teach, and how to love. When Spooner finds himself in the unlikely role of novelist, it is Calmer’s example he follows: “There were two things Spooner absolutely knew about writing, and the first one was that you can’t get away with pretending to care. The other one, if you’re interested, is that nobody wants to hear what you dreamed about last night.”

  Very funny and engaging and moving. I read Spooner with pleasure. But I also found a mandate in that final book. I understood that I was “in the world . . . as part of the story” of everyone around me. My book-a-day project affected not only my life but those of everyone with whom I shared my reading. I spread the gratification of reading through discussing books, much as authors create bliss by writing them. What a gift, to share the joy and the comfort and the wisdom! Everything I shared, I found first through the simple act of sitting down in my purple chair and reading a book.

  But there was still one more lesson to learn, and one more part of the story to be told.

  Chapter 21

  Tolstoy in My Purple Chair

  Something had happened which was not noticed by anyone, but which was much more important than all that had been exposed to view.

  LEO TOLSTOY,

  The Forged Coupon

  MY FATHER SPENT TWO YEARS, TWO MONTHS, AND TWO DAYS in a sanatorium. He was twenty-four years old the day he went in and twenty-six when he came out again. While living and studying in Regensburg, Germany, he had been accepted into the University of Leuven’s medical school in Belgium, winning a place as a scholarship student. As part of the enrollment process all incoming students were required to undergo a physical examination. X-rays of my father’s chest showed spots on his lungs, a dampness that indicated my father had tuberculosis. His tuberculosis was a remnant of the war, a disease probably contracted when living in refugee camps in southern Germany. The examining doctors in Belgium told my father they would arrange for him to get away from the city air of Leuven and up to the healthy air of the open hills of Eupen. Medical school would have to wait.

  Eupen was a bucolic town set among meadows and forests close to the border between Belgium and Germany. The sanatorium was housed in a huge stone building set up on a ridge overlooking the surrounding hills and valleys. For the first two months he spent at the sanatorium, my father was confined to bed in a room he shared with another patient. After his health improved, he was allowed to join in the routine of the sanatorium, a monotonous rhythm of meals, socializing, and rest. Mornings were spent talking and reading. After an ample midday meal, my father spent the afternoons resting on a cot set out on the open verandas of the hospital, alongside dozens of other patients on cots. The patients rested under warm woolen blankets, basking in sun and the healing breezes coming down off the hills of the Hohes Venn to the south and the Aachener Wald to the north.

  My father didn’t know anyone at the sanatorium, but he slowly made friends among the strangers. One friend from Poland taught my father to play chess, and the two of them played for hours out on the veranda. Another friend, this one from Belgium, worked with my father on his French. Together my father and Charles deVries read novels out loud, and Charles helped my father with his articulation. My father still remembers that he learned how to pronounce the phrase “pince-nez” from reading Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.

  Some of the patients at the sanatorium died from their TB. Most, like my father, hung in there and survived. They improved their chess games, ate big meals of sustaining foods, rested after lunch on the veranda, and went to bed early every evening. Some patients were treated with antibiotics; others, less seriously ill like my father, were treated with pumps of air shot directly into their chests to cause lung collapse. Deprived of oxygen, the TB bacteria would die. The collapse allowed the lungs to reboot, like a computer turned off and then back on again.

  In 1951 my father was deemed healthy and released from the sanatorium. He returned to Leuven and to medical school. One evening, while attending a lecture on theology and philosophy, my father first saw my mother. While the professor lectured on Saint Thomas Aquinas, my father sketched the profile of my mother in his notebook. After the lecture ended, my father approached my mother and introduced himself. My parents left the lecture hall together and went to a nearby café to play Ping-Pong. Six years later they were married, and seven years later, Anne-Marie was born.

  My father’s time in the sanatorium at Eupen was a pause in his life, a suspension of activity between war and peace. It was the hiatus between the murders of his sister and brothers, his forced separation from his parents and village, his months as a soldier and a refugee, and the next part of his life, the part in which he found my mother, moved to America, and welcomed the arrival, one by one, of his three girls. The second part of his life might not have come without the intervention of the two years, two months, and two days he spent at the sanatorium. His time there was his period of salvation not only from the tuberculosis but also from the wounds left by the war. He learned how to play chess and how to rest without a care in the world on a veranda under a blue sky. The time he spent taking care of his lungs was time he spent getting ready for the rest of his life, a strengthening of his body and his soul for the wonders still to come.

  My father still plays chess almost every day in Central Park in New York City. In my parents’ apartment, he usually has a game going on the chessboard set out in the living room, a game he plays against himself. When we were growing up, my father set up chess games after dinner, marking off moves on a wooden board in the study. During the day he played chess in the doctors’ lounge at the hospital, in between operations and patient visits. I remember going along one Saturday morning and watching as a crowd of doctors gathered around my father and another doctor playing out a game of chess.

  “Your daddy, he’s good,” one of the doctors told me. I knew that. He’d learned from great players, like the Polish patient waiting out the days alongside my father years ago in the Eupen sanatorium.

  In Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Forged Coupon, Tolstoy examines the twists and turns that one life takes, and the impact that one person can make on the life of another. The novella begins with a father, Fedor Mihailovich Smokovnikov, having a bad day at work. He comes home from the office and takes his bad day out on his family, first refusing to lend his son Mitia the money that Mitia needs to repay a loan and then being sullen and short-tempered at dinner: “The trio finished their dinner in silence, rose from the table, and separated, without a word.”

  Fedor’s failure to lend his son a paltry sum, a seemingly minor act in the whole of Fedor’s life, results in a cascade of actions and reactions affecting a huge and varied slew of characters. Mitia forges a coupon of payment (similar to a signed-over check) and passes it to a shopkeeper to get the money that he needs to repay his friend. When the shopkeeper discovers that the coupon he holds in his hand is a fraud, he plots his own deceit to get rid of the forged coupon, using it to pay for a load of wood from Ivan Mironov, a passing peasant. When the peasant attempts to use the coupon at a tavern, he is thrown into jail. Ivan pays a fine and, when released, seeks to redress the injustice by taking the shopkeeper to court. But the shopkeeper successfully bribes Vassily, a servant, to testify that no wood was ever bought from the peasant, and Ivan is told by the judge to pay court costs and get out.

  Ivan, now destitute, turns to a life of crime, and steals the horses of Stepan Pelageushkine. The servant Vassily, sure now of the evilness of mankind, indulges in a life of thievery, even against his master, the shopkeeper. Mit
ia, having successfully pulled off the fraud, slides into a life of shallow materialism. Stepan, discovering that it was Ivan who stole his horses, kills Ivan with a stone, is sent to prison for one year, and comes out penniless and homeless. One by one the ripples of deceit and injustice spread, connecting previously unconnected lives in a course of greed, treachery, disillusionment, anger, and, eventually, murder.

  The downward spiral of the actions and reactions is transformed, however, with the murder of a kindly older woman named Maria Semenovna. Just before she dies, she warns Stepan, her murderer, “Have mercy on yourself. To destroy somebody’s soul . . . and worse, your own!” Stepan kills her anyway, but from the moment he draws the knife across her neck, he feels strange, and altered from the person he was before: “He felt suddenly so exhausted that he could not walk any farther. He stepped down into the gutter and remained there lying the rest of the night, and the next day, and the next night.”

  When Stepan finally gets up from the gutter, he goes straight to the police to turn himself in. In prison, Stepan begins to live his life as a form of redemption for the lives he has taken from others. He is kind to the other prisoners, compassionate to everyone, and touched with the gift of persuasion.

  From this point on The Forged Coupon becomes a “pay it forward” story, wherein Stepan sets in motion a progression of goodness. Each good and generous act performed by a character is repaid in kind with an act of goodness toward another, and so the goodness passes along from person to person, and finally back to Mitia, the son who forged the coupon in the first place. Mitia meets Stepan and listens while the wizened man tells him of his life story. The story of Stepan’s life transforms Mitia, “who up to that time used to spend his time drinking, eating, and gambling” but now changes his life. He buys an estate, marries, and devotes himself “to the peasantry, helping them as much as he could.” Mitia, who had been estranged from his father, goes to see him to make up for the past. Old Fedor, greatly moved, realizes the goodness that lies in his son, and in himself.

  It was only at the very end of my year of reading that I understood the story Tolstoy tells in The Forged Coupon. Back in July, when I first read it, I understood the message about how we are all connected, and how one action sets off a chain reaction of impacts and consequences. But now, sitting back in my purple chair and remembering The Forged Coupon, I realized that Tolstoy was laying out an explanation for everything that had happened to me, and setting forth the meaning of my life. The events I had experienced—dodgeball on the front lawn on summer nights, travels with my parents, being pulled off the wrong bus by my sister, ramming into the cop car, all the times I’d fallen in love, the birth of my children, the death of my sister—set the contours of my life. But the meaning of my life is ultimately defined by how I respond to the joys and the sorrows, how I forge crossbars of connection and experience, and how I extend help to others as they travel on their own winding road of existence.

  My year of reading one book a day was my year in a sanatorium. It was my year away from the unhealthy air of anger and grief with which I’d filled my life. It was an escape into the healing breezes of hills of books. My year of reading was my own hiatus, my own suspension in time between the overwhelming sorrow of my sister’s death and the future that now waits before me. During my yearlong respite filled with books, I recuperated. Even more, I learned how to move beyond recuperation to living.

  When I ran from the hospital room where Anne-Marie died, the room where I last saw her alive and kissed her and told her, with confidence, that I would see her again tomorrow, I was running away. Running away from that room where I found my parents destroyed by grief and Natasha sobbing, where Marvin paced the room manically and Jack tried to comfort us all.

  For three years I had run as fast as I could, trying to live and love and learn at double speed to make up for what Anne-Marie had lost. Trying to anesthetize myself from what I’d lost. When I decided to read a book a day and write about it, I’d finally stopped running away. I sat down, sat still, and started to read. Every day I read and devoured and digested and thought about all the books, their authors, their characters, and their conclusions. I immersed myself in the world the authors had created, and I witnessed new ways of handling the twists and turns of life, discovering tools of humor and empathy and connection. Through my reading, I reached the point of understanding so much.

  My life would not be constrained by how my sister died but could only be amplified by how she had lived. Her place in my life is defined by everything that she did, everything she showed me, and the way she led me to new ideas.

  The summer after I graduated from college, I went to visit Anne-Marie in New York City. She was subletting an apartment in Chelsea for the summer, the top floor of a brownstone. Chelsea was still on the edge then, a mix of newly arrived upwardly mobile types and a solid lower middle class that had lived there for decades, fringed by a seedier element of SRO occupants, drunks, and drug dealers.

  Anne-Marie had just started things up with Marvin, and I had fallen in love with the manager of the ice-cream store where I worked in Harvard Square. But during our weekend together, we didn’t talk about the men in our lives. We talked about the church Anne-Marie studied, Saint-Eustache in Paris, and how beautiful its arches were, its decorative flourishes and its imposing facade. We talked about the short stories of Ann Beattie, whose apartment Anne-Marie was subletting, and our conflicting reactions to her writing (we both loved her apartment). Anne-Marie allowed that I was still too young to like Beattie’s stories but that I would, one day. We talked about what I should do with a law degree, pursue my interest in history or start a political career. Anne-Marie was sure I’d make a good senator.

  On Saturday evening, early still with plenty of light left before the sun went down, we climbed out through a window of the apartment onto the tarred roof of the brownstone. The black surface was squishy beneath our feet, and warm. We perched on the stone parapet edges of the roof and looked out over New York City. We could see the Empire State Building rising above a maze of roofs and water towers. We took Polaroids of each other. In the photos, which I have still, we are young and healthy, skinny in our tight white T-shirts and our short shorts, and we are smiling, looking vigorous and confident. We stayed out on the roof as the sky darkened into a deep purple. We must have eaten dinner at some point, but I don’t remember that. I just remember sitting beside her, the lights of New York City going on all around us, and talking late into the night.

  Anne-Marie was right in predicting that I would grow to appreciate the writer Ann Beattie, but everything else that happened, we could never have foreseen: how Anne-Marie would write about Saint-Eustache in a whole new way of looking at architecture; how I would become a working lawyer, leaving both history and politics behind, and then become a mother, leaving law behind; how Anne-Marie and Marvin would become godparents to the third of my four boys; how one January morning, just twenty years after our evening out on the roof, Anne-Marie would feel a lump in her abdomen; and how four months after that, she would die.

  Tolstoy wrote, “The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.” He understood this service as a religious duty. For me, I understand it as a fact of life, as the fact of life, and as the sustaining fact of life. What we do for each other is what survives. My sister is dead, but everything she did for me while she was alive is still going strong. I can still feel her hand reaching across the backseat of our car in Berlin, and I still hear her voice, our conversations going late into the night.

  Anne-Marie is defined by everything that she was to me, as oldest sister, scholar, beauty, friend. She is the way I worshipped her and bugged her and loved her. My life is a reflection of her life. I will anchor myself with her life, and not with her death. Death took all choices away from her, but not from me, and I choose to live on with her beside me always, alive in all my memories of how she lived. She will continue to shape me, direct me, and advise me. She pulled me toward my year of rea
ding a book a day, spurring me on with our shared love of books and my desire to read all the volumes upon volumes that we might have read together.

  I have learned, through books, to hold on to my memories of all the beautiful moments and people in my life, as I need those memories to help me through difficult times. I have learned to allow forgiveness, both of myself and of people around me, all trying with “their heavy burden” just to get by. I know now that love is a power great enough to survive death, and that kindness is the greatest connector between me and the rest of the world. Most important—because I know now that Anne-Marie will always be with me, and with everyone she loved—I understand the lasting impact that one life can have on another, and another, and another.

  There is no remedy for the sorrow of losing someone we love, nor should there be. Sorrow is not an illness or an affliction. It is the only response possible to the death of a loved one, and an affirmation of just how much we value life itself, for all its wonder and thrill and beauty and satisfaction.

  Our only answer to sorrow is to live. To live looking backward, remembering the ones we have lost, but also moving forward, with anticipation and excitement. And to pass on those feelings of hope and possibility through acts of kindness, generosity, and compassion.

  My whole life, I have read books. And when I needed to read the most, books gave me everything I asked for and more. My year of reading gave me the space I needed to figure out how to live again after losing my sister. My year in the sanatorium of books allowed me to redefine what is important for me and what can be left behind. Not all respites from life can be so all-consuming—I will never again read a book a day for one year—but any break taken from the frenetic pace of busy days can restore the balance of a life turned topsy-turvy. For some people it will be an afternoon spent knitting or the weekly yoga class or a long walk with a friend or a leashed animal. We all need a space to just let things be, a place to remember who we are and what is important to us, an interval of time that allows the happiness and joy of living back into our consciousness.