by Jay Parini
‘Last night I dreamt I was at a formal ball in Moscow, one much like the balls I attended as a young officer. When the orchestra struck up a certain dance, I realized that I knew the music perfectly well but that the steps had changed. I could not understand what everyone was doing, and they began to laugh at me, to point their fingers and laugh.’
‘You have always been out of step with your time,’ I said, but Leo Nikolayevich did not respond. I put my head down and continued to write.
‘How can you write when I’m not speaking?’ he asked. ‘Are you making things up, Dushan Petrovich?’
‘I would never make up anything. You know how much I value what you say.’
‘I know, I know.’ He stood up now and began to pace his study floor. ‘I have had too many troubled dreams this winter,’ he said. ‘Some of them sexual in nature. I have often been tortured by fantasies.’
‘This is natural,’ I said.
‘Is that so, Dushan? Have you had sexual dreams lately?’
‘I do not dream.’
He ignored my remark. ‘Here is one of the dreams I keep having. It concerns a young, black-eyed Tartar girl I met in Sevastopol during the war. She lived in Eski-Simferopol, in fact – a little village not far from the front. I was stationed there. It was quite unreal, that village – a haven of exiles from Petersburg society – parasites, all of them. You would never know that thousands of young Russian soldiers were dying – or heaped in stinking piles – just a few versts away. They played cards and dressed for dinner and held balls.’
‘You loved this Tartar girl?’
‘I never loved her, Dushan. You romanticize everything. I made foul use of her body for my own purposes.’ He grinned slightly.
‘You committed sexual intercourse with her,’ I said.
‘Indeed. Sometimes twice a day.’
I could not help but shudder. I could not imagine Leo Nikolayevich in this act.
‘I upset you, Dushan Petrovich. You are a man of delicate conscience. I should be more careful what I say in front of you.’
‘I’m sorry. I –’
‘You’re a virgin, I know.’
‘Leo Nikolayevich, I –’
He waved his hand to silence me. I was relieved.
‘Her name was Katya. I have never forgotten her. If she were here, I would beg her forgiveness. But – may I speak so bluntly? – I continue to dream of her body. I recall too perfectly our times together, the exact positions of our bodies, the taste of her, everything. Even a few of the jokes…’
His eyes grew watery now. It seemed, to me, that we understood each other.
‘Leo Nikolayevich,’ I said, at last. ‘You torture yourself with memories. This all occurred many years ago.’
‘More than half a century. Katya will be an old woman now, shriveled, with white hair and dry, wrinkled breasts. She will hardly remember my name, I suspect. She may well be dead.’
‘You are the most celebrated writer in Europe,’ I said. ‘She would have heard your name, even if she hasn’t read your books.’
‘She couldn’t read, Dushan. How would she know?’
It occurred to me, with mild horror, that most of Russia could not read. Yet it also seemed true that everyone – even an illiterate krestyonka in the Crimea – must have heard the name of Leo Tolstoy somewhere, somehow. The papers have always been full of stories about him.
‘I had another dream last night. Did you hear me scream? I dreamt I was a big black bull. I entered a field of a thousand cows, beautiful white cows, and I made my way through the lot of them, mounting them from behind, one by one. Suddenly, clouds filled what had been a brilliant blue sky. Lightning shot from cloud to cloud, and thunder shook the ground. A pit opened up, and the wind pushed against my side, toppling me over. I was dropped into that deep pit by the wind, whereupon I was struck by a bolt of lightning. My skin exploded into flames.’
‘I heard you scream,’ I said. ‘I almost came to your room. But you apparently fell back to sleep quickly.’
‘Sleep and waking are much the same to me now. I suspect the same may be true of death. It will hardly differ from the life I lead these days.’
‘That is very pessimistic,’ I said.
‘What a dear man you are,’ he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘I don’t think I could live here another day without you.’
‘I intend to stay,’ I said.
‘Thank you, Dushan. Thank you.’
He kissed me on both cheeks now, and I kissed him. His cheeks were wet, which moved me greatly. This past year has been difficult for him, and the toll is severe. His nerves jangle and buzz. His eyes are red, his skin milky, his hands tremble, and his lips quiver. I fear that he may die soon and that the quarrels with Sofya Andreyevna will hasten the end.
I watch her connive, pretend to have fits, dissembling daily. The woman is rapacious. She wants luxury of a kind that offends her husband, who wishes only to live simply. Her talk at the dinner table is frivolous and self-serving, like that of a Petersburg matron. It disgusts me, though I have held my tongue. There is no point in making a fuss. I’m a guest here, after all.
I sit alone in my room most evenings after dinner, reading. I fall asleep easily. The routine here is pleasant, but the emotional pressure exhausts me.
Leo Nikolayevich assumes that I am a virgin. Technically, I suppose I am. I wish, in fact, I were. Sexual relations have always upset me when I think about them. I was never a good-looking man. In my youth, this troubled me. How many nights did I lie awake, taunted by fantasies and horrified by my own ugliness?
Once, when I was a medical student in Hungary, desire over-whelmed me. I had been drinking, and I paid a woman to come back to my flat. She was not expensive, nor was she worth what I did spend. Her teeth had lost their enamel and were distressingly clear; she had rude marks on her legs, the result of problems with her circulatory system, I decided. Her breasts sagged.
She undressed upon entering my flat. I watched her with my heart fluttering in my throat like a winter wasp. She danced around me, teasing me, making little jokes about sexual intercourse. I had to close my eyes.
She sat beside me on the bed and rubbed my temples, slowly. I asked her to rub my shoulders, and she suggested I remove my clothes. I had never been naked before a woman, and I only partially complied, stripping down to my underwear. She snickered slightly, as one might expect a whore to do.
‘What is your name?’ she asked me, in a soft voice I can still hear.
‘Anton,’ I said.
‘You have something to hide, Anton?’ she asked.
‘Do what you are paid to do,’ I said.
She laughed piercingly, and I had to restrain myself. It is disagreeable to find oneself enraged, ready to strike a blow. But I controlled myself and rolled onto my stomach on the bed, letting her knead my shoulders. She worked slowly, beautifully, down my spine with her strong hands. I could feel the roughness of the skin of her fingers, like a pumice stone.
When she insisted that I roll onto my back, I hesitated. My erection could not be disguised. But I did so, and she put her hand upon it, gently, then her mouth.
I will never understand why I let her complete this grotesque, unnatural act. It would have been far less damning in the eyes of God had I actually committed sexual intercourse with her. But I felt utterly helpless, weak as a whippet, unable to speak or move. I let her proceed to the terrible finish.
When she was done, she said, ‘And how did you like that, my dear Anton? Pretty good, no? Shall I come back tomorrow night?’
‘There is money for you in that envelope on the dressing table. Please take it and leave me alone. I never want to see you again.’
‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please let me alone now.’
She looked unexpectedly downcast as she left. And I realized now how old she was, perhaps forty or fifty. To my surprise, I felt sorry for her. She was just another of God’s cr
eatures. What she did for a living was a burden, her burden. Had she, perhaps, been a princess in another life? Or an animal of some kind?
‘Everything is holy,’ Leo Nikolayevich said to me recently. ‘Everything that lives is part of God.’
I agreed with him and told him of my fascination with the Hindu religion and reincarnation. He dismissed the idea, saying it is ‘interesting but not plausible.’
I am less convinced. Sometimes I worry that I accept whatever he tells me without questioning. At times, Leo Nikolayevich is so utterly unconventional, ready to defy any tenet of Orthodox Christianity. Other times, he seems oddly scriptural and dogmatic. But I rarely argue with him. It is not my nature.
What I know is that I love God, that my duty is to serve man, and that by serving man, I serve God. I also serve the mystery and spirit that inhabit the body of Leo Tolstoy. I have been privileged to dwell under his roof, to have access to him on a daily basis. I have been singled out by God for this assignment, however difficult at times the task may seem.
12
Bulgakov
I rode back to Telyatinki on a horse borrowed from Chertkov’s stables, a white mare with a powerful, slightly concave back and black hairs on its rump. As I rode, a storm gathered in the west. Clouds thickened at the edges and turned opaque, with large purple underbellies. A thunderhead drove a school of mackerel-like wisps into the darkening east. It is rare to see such drama in winter. Now the pink rim of Zasyeka Wood turned violet. Sunlight glowered on the fields, with long shadows cast by every tree and hillock. A rich wind, damp and gusty, blew up from the south. I kept thinking about Masha.
She has become my closest friend at Telyatinki, though we have to be careful we don’t spend too much time in each other’s company. Sergeyenko is a dreadful puritan about such things, and though he doesn’t actually ban sexual relations, he makes sure that everyone understands Leo Nikolayevich’s ideas on the subject. ‘Better to marry than to burn’ is Sergeyenko’s rather too Pauline philosophy. He often reads aloud from the Confessions of St Augustine of Hippo, with whom he shares an aversion to sex (though Augustine’s later puritanism arose from a rakish past). He also favors those Buddhist scriptures that preach the insignificance of the physical world. The spirit, he says, is all that matters. ‘We are ephemera. Flotsam and jetsam thrown up by the universal spirit.’
It’s not that I utterly disagree with Sergeyenko – or Augustine, for that matter. It seems useless to let one’s physical desires control one’s life or interfere with the progress of the soul. The object of sexual relations is necessarily reproductive. One copulates to propagate the race. Taken so, copulation fits nicely into the broad scheme of human activity. But the needs of the spirit dwarf the requirements of the flesh – that is, they ought to. There is no point in living like an animal, ignoring the goal of existence, which is union with God. Man is man because God gave him the powers of reflection. These powers enable him to understand his place in the divine creation.
Mind is the great gift, the Promethean fire handed to human beings by the gods, which is why Leo Nikolayevich places so much importance on study, on contemplation. My grandmother always told me to pray without thinking. But thinking is the only way to make sense of life, to learn to live with the fact of death, the possibility of extinction.
In my teens, I found myself drawn to indecent images and thoughts. I realize now that the issue of decency is bogus. Is it decent for the tsar to force young Russian men to kill young men from other countries, in the most brutal ways? Is it decent for society to allow people to starve in the streets, to die alone in miserable little isbas, to live like rats in Moscow sewers? Slavery of any kind – economic, military, social – is indecent. But sexual activity, how men and women choose to combine their physical parts, is completely neutral. It is merely the energy devoted to it – the time it takes away from proper mental and spiritual work – that debases it.
I saw Masha in the distance, cutting wood with a double-bladed ax. Not what most Russians think of as women’s work. I stopped my horse and watched as sunlight glistened off the sharp steel blade. Her thick fur hat nearly covered her eyes.
‘How can you see what you’re doing?’ I asked, approaching on horseback.
She kept swinging. ‘You’re done for the day?’
‘Leo Nikolayevich was playing chess with Sukhotin. He didn’t need me this afternoon. I was asked to stay for dinner, but I decided to come home.’
‘Why?’ She paused, stretching her back. Wind lifted her long hair and made her dress flap. Her ankles were slender, protected by canvas spatterdashes.
‘I felt like it.’ I let that sink in. ‘Anyway, there’s going to be a storm.’
‘I made a pot of soup, Valya. We can eat together in the kitchen when I’m done with chopping.’
I do not like the idea of women chopping wood. But the women among the Tolstoyans oppose separate work. Masha is adamant on this subject.
‘You will be the next tsar, Masha,’ Sergeyenko teases her.
Leo Nikolayevich’s attitudes toward women are mildly reactionary, even though he imagines himself liberal. He would never let Sasha chop wood.
‘I’m hungry,’ I said.
‘You’re always hungry, Valya.’
She had invented the name Valya from Valentin, which she claims is far too serious a name for me.
While she finished at the woodpile, I put the horse in his stall, unsaddled him, brushed him down. His rich white coat steamed in the cool barn. A couple of boys, local muzhiks, forked hay from the loft into the wooden stalls. I felt warm inside, happy. The mingling smell of straw and mud filled the little enclosed night of the barn. Shards of sunlight splintered through the roof.
As I walked toward the big house, it began to sleet, a diagonal slush that drilled the mud, that whitened the brown grass, that popped off the wooden steps and broad pine boards of the porch. Telyatinki is a rambling, ungainly structure, somewhat crudely made of scraped logs, with a simplicity inside that reminds one of a country schoolhouse. The plank floors are waxed, then buffed to a mirrorlike sheen. We take turns doing this work on a biweekly rotation drawn up by Sergeyenko, who has a passion for schedules and lists.
Masha joined me in the kitchen. She poured a thick, salty broth with carrots and beets into clay bowls that we had fashioned ourselves the week before and hardened in the oven. We ate with big wooden spoons, alone. There was plenty of black bread, which the women bake every Sunday afternoon, and freshly churned white butter. Neither of us spoke for a while.
‘How is Leo Nikolayevich feeling?’ she asked, breaking the silence. ‘Everyone here is worried.’
‘He has a bad cough.’
‘He should be careful. A man of his age can go quickly. My grandfather was perfectly well one day and dead the next.’
‘He says he will last only a few months, perhaps a year. And he means it.’
‘I wonder if he’s serious. If he were serious, he would take precautions.’
‘All I know is that yesterday I asked him whether or not I should take my name off the university registry, which would force me to face the question of military call-up directly. And he said that since he had only a short time to live, he was not the right person to ask.’
‘You should resign from the university, Valya. It’s dishonest to pretend to be a student when you’re not really attending classes. It’s your duty to resist evil, isn’t it?’
Her bluntness annoyed me. ‘Maybe I don’t feel like wasting away in jail? Maybe there is more important work that I should be doing?’
‘Perhaps you’re a coward.’
I was taking this more seriously than she was. She ate as we talked.
‘More soup?’ She looked up finally.
‘Yes, please.’ I almost said no, just to spite her. But I was starving. One does not eat well at Yasnaya Polyana.
‘By their deeds ye shall know them,’ she said.
In this, and only this, Masha reminds me of my m
other, who quotes Scripture in the most unlikely circumstances, always drawing on the same half dozen verses she knows by heart. In recent years, I have taken to confounding her by quoting unfamiliar Scriptures back at her to prove exactly the opposite of what she has quoted to me. It drives her crazy.
‘Whatsoever the heart commandeth, this must ye do,’ I said.
Masha looked at me, puzzled. ‘Micah?’
‘Bulgakov,’ I said.
She did not like it when I did the teasing. She poured herself another bowl of soup and paid no attention to me. ‘You have a high opinion of yourself.’
I nodded.
‘Let’s just hope that God shares your opinion.’
I poured tea from the samovar, two steaming glasses, with lots of sugar. She accepted hers, putting the hot rim to her lips, pausing to blow, then sipping.
Footsteps and voices sounded in the hallway.
‘Sergeyenko,’ I said.
‘Let’s go to my room,’ Masha offered. ‘We can talk there. I don’t feel like conducting a seminar.’
Her frankness always startles me. I feel, by comparison, sly and hollow, a master of deceit. With a tingling in my groin, I followed her down the corridor.
A rickety chair with a lattice seat stood by the dressing table, but it had newspapers piled high on it; I had no choice but to sit beside her on the muslin bedspread. The brownish photograph of an older woman, presumably her mother, was propped on the table.
‘Tolstoy got a letter yesterday from a student in Kiev,’ I said, matter-of-factly. Masha craves little bits of information and gossip, and I feel my ability to satisfy this craving as a source of power over her. Otherwise, with her beauty and supreme self-confidence, she would control everything.
Masha looked at me intently.
‘Don’t get angry,’ I said.
‘I’m not angry. You’re playing a game with me. I don’t like that.’
‘This is no game.’
‘I won’t quarrel with you.’
I laughed a bit too ruefully. ‘You say that, but you quarrel nonetheless. We’re quarreling now, aren’t we?’
