The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year

by Jay Parini

  A fit of coughing took him by surprise, and he shook violently. I gave him a glass of water.

  ‘All will be well,’ he said. ‘You are quite right.’

  I looked at the floor. It was foolish of me to address him like a child.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Checkmate.’

  I looked up at him, and he was smiling.

  38

  Chertkov

  I rejoiced when Leo Nikolayevich left Sofya Andreyevna. Everyone assumed that I was behind his departure, although this was untrue. Reporters from Moscow and Petersburg, from Paris and London, were in touch with me from the outset. But I told them, at first, the truth: I did not know where he had gone. I told them that Tolstoy wanted to escape. He did not want publicity.

  But the cause needs publicity. In order to prevent Sofya Andreyevna’s side of the story from dominating the press, I prepared a statement on the reasons for Tolstoy’s flight. For moral consistency, he had no choice but to leave, it explained.

  The telegram from Astapovo, which requested my presence, moved me terribly. I was breathless and strangely elated now. My work had not been in vain.

  I left at once, arriving on Tuesday in the little railway station, having traveled through the night to his bedside. Sergeyenko accompanied me.

  My heart leaped when I saw Leo Nikolayevich, the weary, shrunken, but still beautiful face, a blanket drawn up beneath his chin. He was feverish, flushed, and exhausted, but he greeted me with tears and embraces. ‘It is you!’ he kept repeating. ‘I can hardly believe you’re here, at last. Thank you, Vladimir. Thank you.’

  The stationmaster asked if I was his son.

  Leo Nikolayevich nodded eagerly. ‘He is my son,’ he said. ‘I have no other son who has understood.’

  We drank a glass of tea and talked about his departure from home. The business of Sofya Andreyevna is all quite impossible. Being out of her mind, she would pounce on us as soon as she learned of her husband’s whereabouts. That much was certain.

  ‘I don’t know when she’ll come,’ Leo Nikolayevich said. ‘But she will come. I know it.’

  ‘She will not bother you,’ I said.

  He seemed to relax when I said that, and I determined to keep her away from him. She will not make his death a miserable one.

  As I feared, we did not have to wait long for the wretched woman. Sometime in the early afternoon Ozolin appeared and asked Sasha and me to step outside. Leo Nikolayevich was dozing, luckily.

  ‘A telegram has come from Tula,’ he said. ‘The Countess Tolstoy has hired a private train, a first-class train! She will arrive in Astapovo after dinner.’

  At once I called everyone together in the waiting room of the station: Sasha, Varvara Mikhailovna, Dushan, Sergeyenko. All agreed that Sofya Andreyevna must not be allowed to see her husband. In his condition, it would kill him.

  ‘Mama would drag him back like a sack of beans, dead or alive,’ Sasha said.

  ‘We must form a protective circle around the stationmaster’s cottage,’ I said. ‘Sofya Andreyevna, and her dreadful offspring – I refer to the odious ones, Ilya and Andrey – must be prevented from invading his sickroom.’

  We could be grateful for one thing, that young Leo was in Paris. He is a liar and a bully, and Lord knows how he would have tried to thwart my plans.

  That evening, before dinner, Sergey arrived. But I felt strongly that he should not be admitted to his father’s bedside – not now.

  ‘I shall see my father,’ the boy insisted, standing boorishly in the doorway.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Sasha said. ‘He can go in.’

  I saw no point in resisting. Consenting would give me leverage later on, when I might need it.

  Leo Nikolayevich was, as I suspected, confused and upset by Sergey’s arrival.

  ‘How did you find me, Sergey?’ he asked, in a whisper of panic.

  ‘I was passing through Gorkachev,’ Sergey replied. ‘And I happened upon a conductor who knew where you were. It was sheer luck, Papa!’

  Leo Nikolayevich seemed to realize that a game was afoot, and that he had to play his part.

  To my surprise, he seemed eager to get news from Sergey about his wife and Yasnaya Polyana. I realized, sadly, that he still yearned for his past life.

  After dinner, his fever shot up and he became delirious. Near ten, he fell asleep.

  ‘What do you think, Dushan?’ I asked in a low voice.

  ‘It is almost over,’ he said. ‘It would be dishonest to say otherwise.’

  Sofya Andreyevna’s dark blue train arrived at midnight and was put on a sidetrack. She rode in a luxurious carriage with several servants, a nurse, and miscellaneous children and their spouses. It was a ludicrous spectacle, worthy of the countess in all respects.

  Dushan Makovitsky went to greet her, saying that both he and Dr Nikitin agreed that nobody else could see her husband at present. His unwavering approach paid off: Sofya Andreyevna accepted his argument, agreeing to remain in the train until Leo Nikolayevich was stronger.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Sergeyenko whispered to me afterward, ‘a warm wind blows from the north.’

  No other accommodations were available, so the private train became a makeshift hotel.

  Dr Nikitin didn’t arrive until the next day, but Sofya Andreyevna didn’t know this. He examined Leo Nikolayevich and said that his heart was weak and that the left lung was indeed infected. Nonetheless, it was a good sign that the fever had dropped to 100.9 and was holding steady. Pneumonia was by no means the final diagnosis, he said, since he could hear rattling in Leo Nikolayevich’s chest. With pneumonia, the lung – or lungs – fill up with fluid. Instead of rattling, one hears an ominous silence.

  Leo Nikolayevich was alert now and delighted by this report; he huddled in a cushioned chair with a blanket around his shoulders and his legs on a stool. He seemed eager to talk.

  ‘Let me explain to you my view of life, Dr Nikitin, so that you will understand why I left my wife, and why, even if I’m too old for such a thing, I feel I must continue this journey.’

  We sat back, astonished, as he delivered a miniature lecture on his philosophy of life: concise and well articulated. I could not have done better.

  ‘It would be ill-considered of me to recommend anything but prolonged rest,’ Dr Nikitin said. ‘Your resistance is low.’

  ‘How long, then? A week?’

  ‘Two weeks – at least. A month would, in fact, be safer.’

  ‘Impossible! My wife would certainly find me in so much time. That must not happen.’ He turned to me. ‘Vladimir, you understand why this must not happen, don’t you?’

  I assured him that I did, but I told him he must not worry. Hadn’t Sergey just explained that Sofya Andreyevna was reconciled to her new life?

  ‘Do you expect me to believe this?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘There is no reason to believe otherwise.’

  He looked around the room, skeptically, then settled back, tucking his chin into the blanket we had wrapped around him. ‘I’m terribly cold,’ he said. ‘There is a draft somewhere.’

  At midday, Goldenweiser arrived from Moscow with Gorbunov, our publisher. I had wired Goldenweiser two days before, but I did not expect to see him in Astapovo. I knew, as did Leo Nikolayevich, that he had an important concert date in Moscow, at the Academy. Some weeks ago we had been discussing the possibility of surprising him with an appearance at the concert. Leo Nikolayevich, though gravely ill, remembered the date of the concert and scolded Goldenweiser for canceling it.

  ‘I could not have done otherwise,’ Goldenweiser said. ‘How could I play in public with you lying ill in a distant place?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Leo Nikolayevich said. ‘When a farmer is plowing his fields, he does not leave those fields, even if his father should be dying. The concert is your field. You should not have left the plow.’

  Leo Nikolayevich then turned eagerly to Gorbunov to discuss future publications of The Intermediary. He was going t
o finish a book called The Way of Life when he settled in the Caucasus or wherever, he explained. He had taken extensive notes already, some of which remained at Yasnaya Polyana, and he hoped we could retrieve them. I assured him that this was no problem. Sasha backed me up, saying she knew which notes he referred to and would help.

  Leo Nikolayevich lay back, closing his eyes. He continued speaking, but his voice grew weak.

  Suddenly the face of Sofya Andreyevna filled the small glass-paned door of the sickroom. That fat, distorted face, her tomatolike cheeks and nose, pressed against the glass. Her eyes grew wide.

  Sasha leaped from her chair, startling her father, who caught a passing glimpse of Sofya Andreyevna before she was pulled away.

  ‘What!’ he shouted. ‘Who was there?’

  ‘The stationmaster’s wife,’ Sasha said. ‘She wanted to come in. I told her you were sleeping, that you were not to be disturbed –’

  ‘It was Sofya Andreyevna!’

  ‘You’re imagining things,’ she said. ‘It was Ozolin’s wife.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘It was not your wife. She is at home, as Sergey told you.’

  ‘If Sonya should want to see me, I could not refuse her,’ Leo Nikolayevich said. ‘But it would kill me. I know it would kill me.’

  ‘There is no possibility of that,’ I said. ‘She is at home.’

  Fortunately, he was too sick to argue. He accepted our remarks, though again I wondered if he didn’t know the truth. To prevent further intrusions, we put a blanket over the glass, telling him that the stationmaster’s friends were curious and would disturb him further if we didn’t block the pane.

  ‘Sasha,’ he said, his voice trembling, barely audible. ‘I must dictate another letter.’

  ‘Yes, Papa.’ She took up a pad on her knee.

  ‘Send this to Alymer Maude in England: “Dear Maude – On the way to a place where I hoped to be alone, I was taken ill….”’ He tried to continue, but Sasha couldn’t hear him; his voice dissolved in a loose gargle of phlegm.

  ‘You can finish later, Papa,’ Sasha said. ‘After you’ve slept.’

  I saw in his face the intense frustration of a man for whom human communication had been everything. He could hardly bear it.

  Sasha fastened tightly onto her father’s statement that a meeting with his wife would kill him. Rather cruelly, I thought, she rushed to the blue train to convey this sentiment. I followed to make sure Sofya Andreyevna believed it.

  ‘Have you told him that I nearly drowned myself in the pond?’ her mother asked.

  ‘He knows everything,’ Sasha said.

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said that if you killed yourself, it would upset him horribly, but that he could not have acted other than he did.’

  ‘Do you know what this train is costing me?’ Sofya Andreyevna screeched. ‘Five hundred rubles!’

  Sasha replied that she didn’t care if that ridiculous train had cost her the entire Tolstoy estate, whereupon Sofya Andreyevna became frenzied, accusing me, then Sasha, then her husband, of every sort of perfidious act. I could hear her screaming from the train, ‘Liar! Liar!’

  Later, in a calmer mood, she implored Dushan Makovitsky to give her husband a small embroidered pillow that she had brought with her from Yasnaya Polyana. It was a favorite of his, she said. He would rest more easily with it tucked gently beneath his head.

  Makovitsky is sentimental about such things and, stupidly, brought the pillow into the sickroom and set it on the bed. Leo Nikolayevich noticed it right away.

  He said, ‘Where did that thing come from?’

  ‘Your daughter Tanya is here. She brought it,’ Makovitsky said.

  The idiot!

  ‘Tanya! Let me see my daughter,’ he said. ‘Where is Tanya?’

  Tanya, shaking and tearful, was led into the stationmaster’s cottage by Sasha. She embraced her father and wept on his shoulder.

  ‘Where is your mother, Tanya?’ he asked.

  ‘She remained at home.’

  ‘How is she? Is she going to come here?’

  Tanya’s eyelids quivered. ‘I don’t think so…. I don’t know, Papa. There is no way to –’

  ‘To what?’

  Tanya could hardly speak. Her father reached for her hand and told her not to worry, that he would be fine in a couple of days. ‘Ask Dr Nikitin,’ he said. ‘It’s just a rattle in the left lung. That lung has always been a problem.’

  Tanya is hopelessly weak in character. And her sweetness is cloying. As Varvara Mikhailovna once said, she has the patience of old wallpaper.

  Leo Nikolayevich called for his diary, whereupon he wrote in a wobbly hand:

  Horrid night. Two days in bed, feverish. They say Sofya Andreyevna … The third of November, Tanya. Sergey came last night. I was extremely moved by his visit. Today, the third, Nikitin, Tanya, Goldenweiser, Gorbunov. And so my plan. … Fais ce que dois adv…. It’s for the good of others, I hope, but mostly for myself.

  He rarely used French anymore – not like others of our class. But he chose a good proverb: ‘Do as you must, no matter what happens.’

  Outside the cottage, it had become a circus. A reporter had found out about the visit to Shamardino, and he’d traced our whereabouts. The otherwise forgettable town of Astapovo became famous. Word spread like smallpox through the journalistic community, which feeds and survives on gossip. At first, a trickle of reporters joined us. Before long, the numbers swelled to a small throng, culminating with the arrival of Pathé newsmen, who carried cine cameras for shooting newsreels to be broadcast throughout the world. Now every train brought a fresh load of cameramen, copy editors, reporters, typists. The telegraph office was jammed, and Makovitsky was reduced to giving regular press conferences, announcing Tolstoy’s pulse and temperature, projecting the state of his health for the next few hours.

  Mounted police arrived by order of the government, who feared, I suppose, a revolutionary uprising. They overestimate us greatly.

  The railway people felt obliged to erect a large tent for the reporters and set up a dozen rows of cots. It was like an army camp, except for the sounds of typewriters clacking and cameras clicking. The Ryazan-Ural Railroad Company contributed a number of sleeping cars, which arrived this morning, and an unfinished warehouse was prepared for yet further platoons of gawkers, hangers-on, and so-called members of the press. If Leo Nikolayevich did not die, there would be hell to pay somewhere….

  Sofya Andreyevna, for once, had an audience commensurate with her ego. She preened before the camera and supplied an endless stream of printable lies. She told them I was keeping her from her dying husband, so everyone assumed I must be a devil of the first rank. I should have expected this, but it was shameful of her all the same.

  In any case, we succeeded, day by day, in preventing her from disturbing the tranquillity of Leo Nikolayevich, who at least pretended to believe he was alone in the country, surrounded by a circle of friends who sympathized with his view of life. He appeared happy, even serene, whenever the fever dropped and he could speak.

  On Thursday morning, he said to Sasha, ‘I think I will die soon, but perhaps not. How can one know?’

  ‘Try not to think, Papa,’ she told him.

  Her remark pricked him in the wrong place. ‘How is it possible not to think?’ he said. ‘I must think!’

  Much of the time when he was conscious, I sat beside him and read passages from For Every Day, focusing on important chapters of the Gospels, the Upanishads, and the Analects of Confucius. Leo Nikolayevich often asked for something from Rousseau, too, though I tried to dissuade him from this old habit. He also insisted on Montaigne, another atheist. I could not understand this wish, either, but I acquiesced.

  That night, Leo Nikolayevich suffered a number of small convulsions. He shook from head to toe, briefly; all the while his right hand held an imaginary pencil and scribbled on nonexistent paper.

  Varvara Mikhailovna came noisily into the roo
m, and Leo Nikolayevich startled. ‘Masha! Masha!’ he cried, then sank back into a stupor. He has never recovered from the death of his beloved daughter Masha. It hurt Sasha’s feelings that he would cry Masha’s name with such ferocity and obvious pain of loss.

  On Friday, his condition worsened. The eminent Dr Berkenheim, a specialist in lung cases, arrived from Moscow, and he did not conceal his opinion.

  ‘It is the end, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  ‘It can’t be!’ Sasha said. ‘You’re quite wrong about this. His fever is down.’

  But the fever was not down. It had been 103.6 for two days. The pulse became unbelievably rapid in the afternoon, so that we thought his heart might burst. Dushan Makovitsky was frantic, since he considered himself personally responsible for his patient’s pulse rate.

  Dr Berkenheim had brought with him an arsenal of modern medicine: oxygen balloons, digitalin. But Leo Nikolayevich, distrusting modern medicine and its gadgetry, refused treatment.

  His condition fluctuated hour by hour. He was perfectly coherent during dinner, ordering us about, discussing The Intermediary. By eight o’clock, he was delirious, calling to his long dead Aunt Toinette.

  Tanya reappeared, and he said to her, ‘So much has fallen upon Sonya, my dear Sonya. She can’t stand this. It will kill her.’

  ‘Do you want to see her?’ Tanya asked. ‘Shall I call her?’

  Everyone stiffened. What had got into her head?

  Fortunately, her father said nothing. He looked at us, confused, and slumped into his pillow. His mouth sank into his toothless gums like a yeasty loaf of bread collapsing into itself.

  Two more doctors arrived from Moscow, Dr Usov and Dr Shurovsky. Andrey and Ilya had summoned them. Incompetent hacks, they huddled in one corner and discussed the situation in pseudoscientific gibberish with Makovitsky, who looked painfully confused.

  When Leo Nikolayevich saw them, he whispered to Tanya, ‘So this is it. The end. And it’s nothing.’