by Alice Munro
Weierstrass’s thoughts, and now hers, were concerned with elliptic and Abelian functions, and the theory of analytic functions based on their representation as an infinite series. The theory named for him contended that every bounded infinite sequence of real numbers has a convergent subsequence. In this she followed him and later challenged him and even for a time jumped ahead of him, so that they progressed from being teacher and pupil to being fellow mathematicians, she being often the catalyst to his investigations. But this relationship took time to develop, and at the Sunday suppers—to which she was invited readily because he had given up his Sunday afternoons to her—she was like a young relation, an eager protégée.
When Julia came she was invited as well, and the two girls were fed roast meat and creamed potatoes and light delectable puddings that upset all the ideas that they had about German cooking. After the meal they sat by the fire and heard Elisa read aloud. She read with great spirit and expression from the stories of the Swiss writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Literature was the weekly treat, after all the knitting and mending.
At Christmas there was a tree for Sophia and Julia, though the Weierstrasses themselves had not bothered about one for years. There were bonbons wrapped in glittery paper, and fruitcake and roast apples. As they said, for the children.
But there came before long a disturbing surprise.
The surprise was that Sophia, who seemed the very image of a shy and inexperienced young girl, should have a husband. In the first few weeks of her lessons, before Julia arrived, she had been picked up at their door, on Sunday nights, by a young man who was not introduced to the Weierstrass family and was taken to be a servant. He was tall and unattractive, with a thin red beard, a large nose, untidy clothes. In fact, if the Weierstrasses had been more worldly, they would have realized that no self-respecting noble family—which they knew Sophia’s to be—would have such an unkempt servant, and that therefore he must be a friend.
Then Julia came, and the young man disappeared.
It was some time later that Sophia released the information that he was named Vladimir Kovalevsky and that she was married to him. He was studying in Vienna and Paris though he already had a law degree and had been trying to make his way in Russia as a publisher of textbooks. He was several years older than Sophia.
Almost as surprising as this news was the fact that Sophia gave it out to Weierstrass and not to the sisters. In the household they were the ones who had some dealings with life—if only in the lives of their servants and the reading of fairly up-to-date fiction. But Sophia had not been a favorite with her mother or her governess. Her negotiations with the General had not always been successful but she respected him and thought that perhaps he respected her. So it was to the man of the house that she turned with an important confidence.
She realized that Weierstrass must have been embarrassed—not when she was talking to him but when he had to tell his sisters. For there was more to it than the fact that Sophia was married. She was well and legally married, but it was a White Marriage—a thing he had never heard of, nor the sisters either. Husband and wife not only did not live in the same place, they did not live together at all. They did not marry for the universally accepted reasons but were bound by their secret vow never to live in that way, never to—
“Consummate?” Perhaps it would be Clara who said this. Briskly, even impatiently, to get the moment over with.
Yes. And young people—young women—who wanted to study abroad were compelled to go through with this deception because no Russian woman who was unmarried could leave the country without her parents’ consent. Julia’s parents were enlightened enough to let her go, but not Sophia’s.
What a barbarous law.
Yes. Russian. But some young women found their way around this with the help of young men who were very idealistic and sympathetic. Perhaps they were anarchists as well. Who knows?
It was Sophia’s older sister who had located one of these young men, and she and a friend of hers set up a meeting with him. Their reasons were perhaps political, rather than intellectual. God knows why they took Sophia along—she had no passion for politics and did not think herself ready for any such venture. But the young man looked over the two older girls—the sister named Aniuta however businesslike could not disguise her beauty—and he said no. No, I do not wish to go through with this contract with either of you estimable young ladies, but I would agree to do so with your younger sister.
“Possibly he thought the older ones would be troublesome”—it might be Elisa who said this, with her experience of novels—“particularly the beauty. He fell in love with our little Sophia.”
Love is not supposed to enter into it, Clara may have reminded her.
Sophia accepts the proposal. Vladimir calls upon the General, to ask the hand of his younger daughter in marriage. The General is polite, aware the young man comes from a good family, though he has not so far made much of a mark in the world. But Sophia is too young, he says. Does she even know of these intentions?
Yes, said Sophia, and she was in love with him.
The General said that they could not act on their feelings immediately but must spend some time, some very considerable time, getting to know each other at Palibino. (They were at present in Petersburg.)
Things were at a standstill. Vladimir would never make a good impression. He did not try hard enough to disguise his radical views and he dressed badly, as if on purpose. The General was confident that the more Sophia saw of this suitor, the less she would want to marry him.
Sophia, however, was making plans of her own.
There came a day on which her parents were giving an important dinner party. They had invited a diplomat, professors, military comrades of the General’s from the School of Artillery. Amidst all the bustle Sophia was able to slip away.
She went out alone into the streets of Petersburg, where she had never walked before without a servant or a sister. She went to Vladimir’s lodgings in a part of the city where poor students lived. The door was opened to her at once, and as soon as she was inside she sat down and wrote a letter to her father.
“My dear father, I have gone to Vladimir and will remain here. I beg you that you will no longer oppose our marriage.”
All were seated at the table before Sophia’s absence was noticed. A servant found her room empty. Aniuta was asked about her sister and flushed as she answered that she knew nothing. To hide her face she dropped her napkin.
The General was handed a note. He excused himself and left the room. Sophia and Vladimir were soon to hear his angry footsteps outside their door. He told his compromised daughter and the man for whom she was willing to forfeit her reputation to come with him at once. They rode home, all three without a word, and at the dinner table he said, “Allow me to introduce to you my future son-in-law, Vladimir Kovalevsky.”
So it was done. Sophia was overjoyed, not indeed to be marrying Vladimir but to be pleasing Aniuta by striking a blow for the emancipation of Russian women. There was a conventional and splendid wedding in Palibino, and the bride and groom went off to live under one roof in Petersburg.
And once their way was clear they went abroad and did not continue to live under one roof anymore. Heidelberg, then Berlin for Sophia, Munich for Vladimir. He visited Heidelberg when he could, but after Aniuta and her friend Zhanna arrived there, and Julia—all four women theoretically under his protection—there was not enough room for him any longer.
Weierstrass did not reveal to the women that he had been in correspondence with the General’s wife. He had written to her when Sophia returned from Switzerland (really from Paris) looking so worn and frail that he was concerned for her health. The mother had replied, informing him that it was Paris, in these most dangerous times, that was responsible for her daughter’s state. But she seemed less upset by the political upheaval her daughters had lived through than by the revelations that one of them, while unmarried, lived openly with a man, and the other, proper
ly wed, did not truly live with her husband at all. So he was made rather against his will to be the mother’s confidant even before he was the daughter’s. And indeed he told Sophia nothing about this until her mother was dead.
But when he did tell her at last, he told her also that Clara and Elisa had asked immediately what was to be done.
This seemed to be the way of women, he had said, to assume that something should be done.
He had replied, quite severely, “Nothing.”
In the morning Sophia took a clean though crumpled frock out of her bag—she had never learned how to pack tidily—fixed her curly hair as well as she could to hide some little patches of gray, and came downstairs to the sounds of a household already astir. Her place was the only one still set in the dining room. Elisa brought in the coffee and the first German breakfast that Sophia had ever eaten in this house—cold sliced meat and cheese and thickly buttered bread. She said that Clara was upstairs preparing their brother for his meeting with Sophia.
“At first we had the barber come in,” she said. “But then Clara learned to do it quite well. She turned out to be the one who has the skills of a nurse, it is fortunate one of us has them.”
Even before she said this Sophia had sensed that they were short of money. The damask and net curtains had a dingy look, the silver knife and fork she used had not recently been polished. Through the open door to the sitting room a rough-looking young girl, their present servant, was visible cleaning out the grate and raising clouds of dust. Elisa looked her way, as if to ask her to shut the door, then got up and did it herself. She came back to the table with a flushed, downcast face, and Sophia asked hastily, if rather impolitely, what was the illness of Herr Weierstrass?
“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 Sophia, 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.
