by Rose Tremain
Anna Borisovna stared accusingly at her husband. After twenty years of childless living with him, he wearied her. Was this just another of his stupid jokes?
‘It’s September and the sun’s out after the long rains we’ve endured and there are no mushrooms in the forest?’
‘No. Or rather, I’m absolutely certain there had been mushrooms, but other people gathered them before I got there. You know there is now a local group calling itself The Mushroom League?’
‘What?’ said Anna Borisovna.
‘Yes, yes. The League believes that eating mushrooms makes a man – how can I put it so as not to shock you? – more virile.’
Anna Borisovna sniffed and turned away. ‘I would have thought Russian men were quite “virile” enough,’ she said.
In October, winter began to close in on Astapovo, as it did at this time each year.
Ivan Ozolin supervised the cleaning and oiling of the ancient snowplough kept in a dilapidated shed on a siding on the Smolensk side of the tracks. He chopped wood for the pot-bellied stoves that heated his own cottage, the two waiting rooms (ladies’ and gentlemen’s) and the station buffet on the Dankovo side. His mind, as he went about these familiar tasks, was preoccupied by his failed attempt to have a love affair with Tanya Trepova. Most men that he knew had love affairs and even boasted about them. But he, Ivan Ozolin, hadn’t been able to manage even this! It was laughable!
Ivan thought, My life’s at a standstill. Trains come and go, come and go past my door day and night, but I live without moving at a way-station where nothing stops for long or endures – except the monotony of all that’s already here.
The idea that this state of affairs would just go on and on and nothing important would happen to him ever again began to terrify him. One evening, he deliberately got drunk with his old friend Dmitri Panin, who worked in the one-man Telegraph office at Astapovo station and began to pour out his heart to him.
‘Dmitri,’ he said, ‘how on earth are we meant to escape from the meaninglessness of life? Tell me your method.’
‘My method?’ said Dmitri. ‘What method? I’m just a Telegraph operator. I send out other people’s messages and get messages back.’
‘At least you’re in touch with the wider world.’
‘I may be in touch with the wider world, but I don’t have any message of my own. Life has not . . . Life has not . . . equipped me with one.’
‘Equipped you? Have another drink, my friend. I think we’re both talking drivel, but it seems to me there are three ways and only three of escaping it.’
‘Escaping what?’
‘Meaninglessness. The first is ignorance. I mean the ignorance of youth, when you haven’t seen it yet.’
‘Seen what?’
‘Death waiting for you. Inevitably waiting. You know?’
Dmitri said that he knew that perfectly well and that meanwhile he’d order them another bottle of vodka and a piece of special Smolenski sausage to keep them from falling under the table. Then he asked Ivan Ozolin to hurry through the other ‘two ways of escape’ because he had a feeling that they were going to bore him or depress him, or both.
Ivan gulped more vodka.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the second is through religion, when you believe, as my wife does, that this life is a temporary hell, entirely without meaning, but that a condition of marvellousness attends you when you die.’
‘A condition of marvellousness? What’s that? D’you mean the kind of feeling one gets after five or six vodkas?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s even better than that? If it were no better, why would you wait out a whole life for it? You might as well just keep drinking the vodka.’
Dmitri nodded and sighed. Ivan went on to express his profoundly held opinion that, in his view, human beings were merely ‘randomly united lumps of matter’, but that some gullible people, such as his wife, Anna Borisovna, refuted this and believed that human life had been created by God. ‘She thinks,’ said Ivan Ozolin, ‘that, contrary to all evidence, God is benign . . . but to me that is illogical. I ask myself why a benign being would have decided to create the Russian winter.’
‘Well,’ said Dmitri, ‘I’m pretty sure we already know that twaddle and counter-twaddle. What’s the third way of escape?’
Ivan Ozolin scratched his head, balding on the crown, growing sensitive to winter cold. ‘I can’t remember what it was,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I knew it yesterday, but now I’ve forgotten it again.’
‘Oh well,’ said Dimitri. ‘Let’s talk about Tanya Trepova.’
Ivan didn’t really want to talk about Tanya Trepova, even to Dmitri. He began cutting up the hunk of sausage into manageable pieces.
‘That was a farce,’ he said.
‘A farce?’
‘Yes. I didn’t even kiss her.’ And then he let out one of his famous guffaws.
Dmitri began to cram his face with sausage. ‘I can’t see what’s so funny about that,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘If it had been me, I would have kissed her, at least.’
On the afternoon of 31st October, a cold day marked by an icy wind and flurries of snow, a southbound train from Tula arrived at Astapovo station.
Ivan Ozolin, wearing his stationmaster’s uniform, was standing alone on the platform, holding his flags, waiting to see if anybody was going to disembark before waving his green flag to send the train onwards towards Dankovo. He saw the door of one of the Second Class carriages open and a young woman step down and come towards him. She was plump, with a wide, homely face and wearing a peasant scarf over her brown hair.
‘Stationmaster!’ she called. ‘We need your help. Please. You must help us . . .’
Ivan Ozolin hurried towards her. Her voice, he noticed at once, was not the voice of a peasant.
‘What can I do?’ said Ivan.
‘My father is on the train. We were trying to get to Dankovo, but he’s been taken ill, very ill. A doctor is with us. The doctor says we must get off here and find a bed for my father. Or he could die. Please can you help us?’
Ivan Ozolin now saw that the young woman was trembling violently, whether with cold or agitation, or both, and he knew that he would have to do whatever he could to help her and her sick father; it was his duty as a stationmaster and as a human being. He followed her to the open door of the Second Class carriage. Steam billowed all around them in the freezing air. He climbed aboard the train and was led along the crowded carriage to one of the hard leather benches where an elderly man was lying, covered by a thin blanket. By his side, kneeled a man wearing a black coat, who was presumably the doctor. From all the other benches passengers were staring and whispering.
‘Dushan,’ the young woman said to the doctor. ‘Here’s the stationmaster. Between the two of you, you can carry Papa to the waiting room and then this good man is going to find us a bed for him, aren’t you, sir?’
‘A bed? Yes, of course . . .’
‘There’s an inn here, I suppose? What’s this place called?’
‘Astapovo.’
‘Astapovo. I’ve never heard of it, have you, Dushan? But everywhere has some little inn or hotel. Hasn’t it?’
Her agitation was growing all the time. He saw that she could hardly bear to look down at her father, so greatly did the sight of him lying there in his blanket upset her. Very calmly, Ivan Ozolin said: ‘There is no inn in Astapovo. But the fact that there is no inn here doesn’t mean that there are no beds. We can arrange a bed for your father in my cottage . . . just over there on the Smolensk side of the track . . . that red house you can glimpse . . .’
‘Dushan,’ said the young woman, now breaking down into tears, ‘he says there’s no inn. What are we going to do?’
The doctor stood up. He put a comforting arm round the young woman’s shoulders and held out his other hand to Ivan Ozolin. ‘I am Dr Dushan Makovitsky,’ he said. ‘Please tell me your name, Stationmaster.’
Ivan Ozolin took Makovitsky’s hand and sh
ook it. He bowed. ‘I am Ivan Andreyevich Ozolin, Doctor,’ he said.
‘Very well,’ said Makovitsky. ‘Now let me explain the situation. My patient here is Count Tolstoy: Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the world-famous writer. He was attempting to get as far as Novocherkassk, to stay with his sister, but he has been taken ill. I’m desperately afraid he may have pneumonia. Will you help us to save his life?’
Leo Tolstoy . . .
Ivan Ozolin felt his mouth drop foolishly open. He looked down at the old man, who was clutching in his frail hands a small embroidered cushion, much as a child clutches to itself a beloved toy. For a moment, he found himself unable to speak, but could only repeat to himself, Leo Tolstoy has come to Astapovo . . . Then he managed to pull himself together sufficiently to say: ‘I’ll do everything I can, Doctor. Everything in my power. Luckily the waiting rooms are on this side of the track, so we haven’t got far to carry him.’
Dushan Makovitsky bent down and gently lifted Tolstoy’s shoulders. The old man’s eyes opened suddenly and he began murmuring the words: ‘Escape . . . I have to escape . . .’
His daughter stroked his head. ‘We’re moving you, Papa,’ she said. ‘We’re going to find you a warm bed.’
Ivan Ozolin took hold of the writer’s legs, noting that underneath the blanket he was wearing peasant clothes: a tunic tied at the waist, moleskin trousers tucked into worn boots. When the two men lifted him up, Ivan was surprised at how light his body felt. He was a tall man, but with very little flesh on his bones. They carried him gently from the train and out into the snow. Feeling the snowflakes touch his face, Leo Tolstoy said: ‘Ah, it comes round me now. The cold of the earth . . .’
But the distance to the waiting room wasn’t great and soon enough Dr Makovitsky and Ivan Ozolin had lain the elderly writer down on a wooden bench near the wood-burning stove. Instructing the doctor to go back to the train for their bags, Tolstoy’s daughter did her best to make her father comfortable on the bench, tucking the blanket round him, taking the little pillow from his hands and placing it gently under his head, smoothing his springy white beard.
Ivan hovered there a moment. His heart was beating wildly. He explained that he had an immediate duty to supervise the train’s onward departure towards Dankovo, but as soon as this was done, he would run to his cottage and prepare a bed for Count Tolstoy. ‘My wife will help me,’ he said. ‘It will be an honour.’
The cottage had only four rooms: a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom and a small office where Ivan Ozolin kept his railway timetables and his stationmaster’s log. Outside the cottage was a vegetable garden and a privy.
When Ivan Ozolin came rushing in to tell Anna Borisovna that Leo Tolstoy, gravely ill, had arrived at Astapovo and needed a bed in their house, she was boiling laundry on the kitchen range. She turned and stared at her husband. ‘Is this another of your jokes?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Ivan. ‘On the soul of my mother, this is not one of my jokes. We must give up our bed, Anna. To the poor and needy of this land, Tolstoy is a saint. In the name of all those who suffer today in Russia, we must make our own small sacrifice!’
Anna Borisovna, though tempted to mock the sudden floweriness of Ivan’s language (brought on, no doubt, by the unexpected arrival of a famous writer), refrained from doing so, and together she and Ivan went to their room and began dismantling their iron bed. It was heavy and old and the bolts rusty, and this work took them the best part of half an hour.
They carried the bed into their sitting room and reassembled it, dragged their mattress on to it and then laid on clean sheets and pillow cases and woollen blankets from their blanket chest. While Ivan banked up the stove, Anna set a night table by the bed and a chamber pot underneath it. On the table she placed a jug of water and a bowl and some linen towels. She said to Ivan: ‘I wish I had some violets to put in a little vase for him.’
‘Never mind that,’ said Ivan Ozolin. ‘Now you must come with me and we’ll carry him across the tracks. Only twenty-nine minutes before the Dankovo train.’
When they got back to the waiting room, Tolstoy was sleeping. His daughter, too, had gone to sleep kneeling on the hard floor, with her head lying on the bench, near her father’s muddy boots. Dushan Makovitsky kept a lonely vigil at their side and seemed relieved to see Ivan return with Anna Borisovna.
‘Good people,’ he said in a whisper. ‘You can’t know how grateful I am. You must understand that this is a terrible business. Terrible beyond imagining. Count Tolstoy left his home in secret two nights ago. He left because his wife had made his life unbearable. He left to try to find peace, far away from the Countess. But he lives in mortal fear of being followed, of his whereabouts being discovered by her, so secrecy is vital. You understand? Nobody but you must know that he’s here.’
Ivan nodded. He stared fiercely at Anna until she nodded, too. Nevertheless, Ivan felt himself go cold with sudden terror. He looked down at the old man. Surely he – who must by now be in his eighties – would have preferred to live out his last years peacefully on his estates, and yet he’d run away in the middle of an October night! What marital persecutions had pushed him to make this extraordinary decision? If this was what marriage had done to someone as wise as Leo Tolstoy – to the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina – what might it eventually do to him, the humble stationmaster of Astapovo? He glanced up at the waiting-room clock. Seventeen minutes remained before the arrival of the Dankovo train.
‘We should hurry,’ he said. ‘Everything is prepared.’
Now, as darkness came down, the great writer was undressed tenderly by his daughter, who put a clean nightshirt on him and combed his hair and beard and helped him to lie down in the iron bed. He was very tired and weak, but he knew that he was in a strange place. Anna and Ivan, working next door in the small kitchen, heard him say to his daughter: ‘Sasha, I know I’m ill. I suppose I could be dying. So I want you to send a telegram to Vladimir Chertkov and ask him to come here. Send it tonight.’
‘Yes, all right, Papa. But if Mama finds out that you sent for Chertkov and not for her—’
‘I can’t help it. To see her face would kill me! I can’t set eyes on her ever again. I can’t. But I must see Chertkov. There’s all the wretched business of my will and my copyrights to settle . . .’
‘All of that was sorted out, Father. Vladimir and I know your wishes; that all the copyrights are willed to me and I authorise that your works are to be made available to the Russian people, free of any charge . . .’
‘Yes. But Vladimir is to be the Executor. Only him. Not you, not Tanya, not any of my good-for-nothing sons. Vladimir Chertkov alone will decide what’s to be published and by whom and when . . . both the novels and all the other work . . . and the diaries your mother tried to steal . . .’
‘He knows. You’ve been through it a hundred times.’
‘No, we haven’t been through it a hundred times. And I want him here, Sasha! Don’t argue with me! Arguments give me a pain in my heart. Where’s Dushan?’
‘Dushan’s sleeping, Papa. In the waiting room. He hasn’t slept for thirty hours . . .’
Then, as Ivan and Anna tugged out their few pieces of good china and Anna began to wash these, they heard the sound of wailing and it reminded Ivan of the noise that a wolf can make when it finds its leg caught in a trap. He stared helplessly at his wife. He tried to summon up a joke to crack, as a weapon against the noise coming from next door, and said: ‘I suppose that’s the din that all writers make. Their heads are so full of crazy thoughts.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Anna.
‘Try to stop crying, Papa,’ they heard Sasha say. ‘It really does no good. I’m going to send the telegram to Vladimir now. Then I’ll be back and we’ll see whether you can eat something.’
The front door of their cottage opened and closed. The Ozolins knew they were alone in their house with Leo Tolstoy. Anna Borisovna thought of the long night ahead, with no bed to sleep on. But it was almos
t time for the 5.18 train from Tula, so Ivan tugged on his overcoat and gloves and took down his red and green flags and went out by the back door. Anna dried the china slowly. After a few minutes, she heard the weeping diminish, breath by breath, as though the weeper had become exhausted with it.
The following morning under a blank grey sky, Vladimir Chertkov arrived on the 9.12 train from Moscow. He was a good-looking man in his fifties with a well-trimmed brown beard. When Sasha greeted the traveller on the Dankovo platform, Ivan Ozolin heard him say: ‘Where in heaven’s name have I come to? There’s nothing here.’
They had to wait for the Dankovo-bound train to leave before they could cross the tracks to the cottage. Ivan Ozolin had hoped to accompany them. He felt that, at last, his own life was bound up with something important and he didn’t want to miss a moment of it. But when the steam from the departed train cleared, he saw that Sasha and Chertkov were already walking away over the rails, so he stood there and let them go, while he slowly folded up his green flag.
Then he caught sight of Dmitri Panin running in an agitated way along the Smolensk platform, waving a telegram in his hand. As Chertkov and Sasha passed him, Dmitri stopped and hesitated, then hurried on to the end of the platform and began beckoning frantically to Ivan Ozolin. In the sunless morning, Dmitri’s face appeared as red as a beet.
‘Look at this!’ he gasped, when Ivan reached him. ‘It’s from Countess Tolstoy – to her husband! What in the world is going on?’
Ivan seized the telegram and read: We know where you are. Arriving with Andrei, Ilya, Tanya and Mikhail tonight. Special Pullman train from Tula. Signed: Your loyal wife, Countess Sonya Andreyevna Tolstoya.
‘Ivan,’ said Dmitri, ‘tell me what the hell is happening . . .’
‘All right, all right,’ said Ivan. ‘It’s too late for secrecy now, if she knows where he is. But how did she find out? You didn’t send a message, did you?’
‘Me? Message to who?’
‘Somebody must have sent a message. How could it have got out except via your Telegraph office?’
