The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (24 page)

Dr Makovitsky asked me to sit with him. ‘You know, she’s been following him in the woods lately, in Zasyeka. And she’s been stopping everyone – even peasant children – asking them if her husband has been seen with Chertkov. It’s no way for a wife to behave.’

Dushan Makovitsky looked shrunken and hurt as he huddled in the chair, alone. He was like a muffin that, having been mixed with too much yeast, expands beyond its natural limits before collapsing into itself. I felt sorry for him, and (for the first time) I liked him. He is terribly innocent and well intentioned, however ridiculous. There is something in everyone that can be loved.

I wanted to ask Dushan Makovitsky what he thought of those passages Sofya Andreyevna had read, but I didn’t dare. The idea of Leo Nikolayevich lying with another man was upsetting. I realized that I, too, find men attractive in a way that could easily be misconstrued. I love to see young men haying in the field with their shirts off or bathing in the Voronka without their clothes; indeed, I cannot help but stare at the boy who grooms the horses at Telyatinki with something akin to lust in my heart. I understood exactly what Leo Nikolayevich meant in his diaries, and – once again – his directness and honesty startled me. I would never have risked putting such bold feelings into words.

Bidding good night to Dr Makovitsky, I went to see if there was something I could do for Leo Nikolayevich before I left.

‘What am I to do?’ he asked. ‘In my situation, inertia seems the lesser evil. I must do nothing, undertake nothing. I shall respond to every provocation with the silence it richly deserves. Silence, as you will know, is a powerful weapon.’ Having said this, he seemed to reconsider. ‘No, I must aspire to the condition of loving even those who hate me.’

‘This difficulty between you and your wife can, perhaps, be taken as a challenge,’ I said. ‘It might well increase your spiritual sense, bring you closer to God.’

He shook his head affirmatively. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but she goes too far, too far.’

I volunteered to bring him a glass of tea, and he accepted my offer. When I returned, he was sitting in his chair, his boots off. His face, his entire countenance, had softened.

‘You must understand that Sofya Andreyevna is not well,’ he said. ‘I wish Vladimir Grigorevich could see her when she breaks down, when she shakes and weeps like a scolded child. One can’t help but take pity on her …. I fear we treat her too severely. She is suffocating here … can’t breathe …’ His voice trailed off.

I touched him on the shoulder and noticed a large tear on his cheek.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Leo Nikolayevich, I –’

‘You are good to say this to me, dear boy,’ he said. ‘It is a problem that has been a long time gathering, like a wave at sea. It is about to break over my head. I pray to God for the strength to withstand it.’

We kissed each other and said good night.

Back in my room, I found the copy of
What Then
Must We Do?
that I had borrowed from Leo Nikolayevich’s study. With a sense of growing wonder, I read it till, near midnight, I fell asleep in my clothes.

– FROM
WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

I had spent my life in the country, and when in 1881 I came to live in Moscow, the sight of town poverty took me by surprise.

Country poverty I had known, but town poverty was new and incomprehensible to me. In Moscow one cannot cross a street without meeting beggars, and beggars quite unlike the ones in the country. They don’t ‘carry a sack and beg in Christ’s name,’ as country beggars like to say of themselves. They go without a sack and do not beg. When you meet them, they usually only attempt to catch your eye; depending upon your response, they either ask for something or don’t. I know of one particular beggar from the gentry class. The old fellow walks slowly, stooping with each step. When he meets you, he stands on one leg and appears to bow. If you happen not to stop, he pretends that this just happens to be his way of walking, and continues. If you stop, he takes off his cocked cap, bows again, and begs.

He is the usual sort of educated beggar one finds in Moscow.

At first, I wondered why they didn’t just ask you plainly. Later I learned something of the situation, but I still didn’t understand it.

It seems that in Moscow, by law, all beggars (of whom one meets several in each street, with rows of them outside every church whenever there is a service, especially if there happens to be a funeral) are forbidden to beg.

But I never did find out why some are caught and detained, while others roam freely. Either there are legal and illegal beggars, or there are so many that they can’t catch all of them; perhaps as soon as some are caught, others spring up.

Moscow presents all kinds of beggars. There are some who live by it; and there are others, ‘real’ beggars, who have come to the town for some reason and are genuinely destitute.

Among these latter are many simple muzhiks, men and women alike, wearing muzhik clothes. I often meet them. Some of them have fallen ill here and have been let out of the hospital; they can neither support themselves nor get away from Moscow. Some are not ill but have lost everything they own in a fire, or are elderly, or are women with children. Others are healthy and able to work. These healthy ones, begging alms, interested me especially. For since I came to Moscow I had, for the sake of exercise, formed the habit of going to work at the Sparrow Hills with two muzhiks to saw wood there.

These two men were just like those I’d met in the streets. One was Peter, a soldier from Kaluga; the other was Simon, a muzhik from Vladimir. They owned nothing except the clothes on their backs and their own hands. With those hands they earned a tiny sum per day, something of which they were able to save: Peter to buy a sheepskin coat, Simon to pay for the journey back to his village. I was especially keen to talk to them.

Why did these men work and others beg?

On meeting such a fellow I usually began by asking how he came to be in such a state. Once I met a healthy muzhik whose beard was turning gray. He begged. I asked who he was, and he said he had come from Kaluga to look for work. At first he had found some work, cutting up old timber for firewood. He and his mate cut up all the wood in one spot. Then he searched for another job, but nothing could be found. His mate left him, and now he had been knocking around for two weeks, having eaten all he had, and he had nothing with which to buy either a saw or a chopper. I gave him money for the saw and told him where he could find work. (I had previously, as it happened, arranged with Peter and Simon to take on another worker.)

‘So, my friend, be sure and go. There is plenty of work for you there,’ I said.

‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘Why not? Do you think I enjoy begging? I can work.’

He swore he’d go, and I felt he was in earnest and meant to appear.

The next day I joined my friends, Peter and Simon, and asked if the man had turned up. He had not. As it happened, several other men behaved in much the same way. I was also cheated by men who said they only needed money to buy a railway ticket home, but whom I met on the street again a week later. Several of these I recognized, and they recognized me; but sometimes, having forgotten me, they told me the same story again. Some turned away on seeing me. So I learned that among this class there are many cheats, too; but I felt extremely sorry for these cheats. They were a half-dressed, thin, impoverished, sickly group: the sort of people who often freeze to death or hang themselves, as we often read in the papers.

When I spoke to the Moscovites about this destitution in their city I was usually told: ‘What you have seen is nothing! Go to Hitrof Market and visit the doss houses. That’s where you’ll see the real “Golden Company.”’ One fellow told me, somewhat dryly, that it was no longer a ‘Company’ but a ‘Golden Regiment’ – there are so many of them. The man was right, but he’d have been even more correct had he said that in Moscow these people are now neither a company nor a regiment but a vast army that numbers, I am told, fifty thousand. Old residents of Moscow, when speaking of town poverty, always spoke of it with a kind of pleasure – as if proud to know about it. I recall, too, that when I was in London, people there bragged about London pauperism: ‘Just look what it’s like here!’ they said.

I wanted to see this destitution, about which I’d been told; and several times I set out toward Hitrof Market, but each time I felt uncomfortable and ashamed. ‘Why go to look on the sufferings of people I can’t help?’ a voice within me said. ‘If you live here and see all the allurements of town life, go and see that, too,’ said another voice. And so, one frosty, windswept day in December 1881, I went to the heart of the town’s destitution – Hitrof Market. It was a weekday, almost four o’clock in the afternoon. In Solyanka Street I had already become aware of more and more people wearing strange clothes not made for them, and in yet stranger footgear – people with an odd, unhealthy complexion, all possessing a common air, an air of indifference. I noticed one man walking alone rather casually, dressed in strange, incredible clothes, evidently unfazed by what he looked like to others. All proceeded in the same direction. Without asking the way (which I didn’t know), I went with them, arriving eventually at the Hitrof Market.

There were also women of the same type, adorned in all sorts of capes, cloaks, jackets, boots, and galoshes, equally indifferent to appearances in spite of the hideousness of their garb. Old and young, they sat exchanging goods of some sort, milling about, swearing and scolding. There were few people in the market. It was apparently over, and most were walking uphill, passing through or past the market, always in one direction. I followed them, and the farther I went the more people there seemed to be, all going one way. Passing the market and following up the street, I overtook two women: one old, the other young. Both wore tattered, drab clothes. Neither was drunk. Something, however, preoccupied them, and the men who met them, as well as those behind and before them, paid no attention to their manner of speech, which to my ears was peculiar. It was evident that, here, people always talked like this.

To the left were private doss houses, and some turned into them, while others went farther on. Having climbed the hill, we came to a large house on the corner. Most of those among whom I had been walking stopped here. All along the sidewalk and in the snow-covered street, people of the same type stood or sat. To the right of the entrance door were the women, to the left the men. I passed both the women and the men (there were hundreds of them), and stopped where the line ended. The house they were waiting for was the Lyapinsky Free Night-Lodging House. The crowd were lodgers waiting for admission. At 5:00 p.m. the doors open, and people are let in. Nearly all those I had overtaken were coming here.

When I stopped, where the lines of men ended, those nearest began to stare at me, drawing me to them by their glances. The tatters covering their bodies were extremely varied, but they all looked at me with the same stare, as if to say: ‘Why have you, a man from a different world, stopped among us? Who are you? A self-satisfied rich man who wants to enjoy our misery, to kill time, to torture us – or are you that thing which can hardly exist – someone who pities us?’ These questions hung on every face. They looked, caught my eye, and turned away. I wanted to speak to some of them but could not decide what to do. Nevertheless, as widely as life had separated us, having exchanged glances I felt that we were similar, that we ceased to be afraid of one another.

Near me stood a fellow with a swollen face and a red beard, in a torn coat with worn galoshes on his bare feet. (And it was well below freezing!) I met his look three or four times, and felt so near him that instead of being ashamed to speak to him, I should have been ashamed not to say something. So I asked where he came from. He answered readily and began talking, while others drew near. He was from Smolensk and had come to seek work, hoping to be able to buy corn and pay his taxes. ‘There is no work to be had,’ he said. ‘The soldiers have taken all the work. So I’m wandering about, and, as God knows, I haven’t eaten for two days!’ He spoke timidly, trying to smile. A seller of hot drinks (made of honey and spices) stood nearby. I called him, and he poured out a glass. The man took the drink in his hands and tried to contain the heat as he cupped his hands around the glass. While doing so, he told me about his adventures (the adventures or stories told by these men were almost all the same). He had had a little work, but it came to an end; then his purse, with his passport and what money he had, had been stolen, right here in the Lyapinsky House. Now he couldn’t get away from Moscow. He said that during the day he warmed himself in the drink shops and ate scraps of bread, which were sometimes given to him; but often they drove him away. He got his night’s lodging free here. He was now only waiting for the police to arrest him for having no passport, to imprison him or send him on foot, under escort, back to his native town. ‘They say there will be a police search on Thursday,’ he said. Prison or escort home were, for him, the Promised Land.

As he was talking, two or three others from among the crowd confirmed his words and said they were in the same mess. A skinny kid, pale, long nosed, with nothing over his shirt (which had a tear at the shoulder) and wearing a peakless cap, pushed his way sidelong to me through the crowd. He shivered violently all over, but he tried to smile contemptuously at the beggar’s speech, hoping thereby to adapt himself to my attitude. He looked me in the eye, and I offered him, too, a hot drink. On taking the glass he also warmed both hands around it, but he had only begun to speak when he was pushed aside by a big, black, Roman-nosed fellow in a print shirt and a vest but wearing no cap. The Roman-nosed man also asked for a hot drink, followed by a tall, drunken old man with a pointed beard who wore an overcoat tied around the waist with a cord and bast shoes. Then came along a dwarfish fellow with puffy cheeks and watery eyes who wore a brown nankeen pea jacket; his bare knees poked through the holes in his summer trousers and knocked together from the cold. He shivered so badly he could hardly hold the glass and spilled the contents all over himself. The rest began to abuse him, but he only smiled rather pitifully and shivered. Then came a crooked, deformed man in rags, with strips of linen tied round his bare feet; then something that looked like an officer, then something that looked like a cleric, then something strange and noseless: all were hungry, freezing, importunate, and submissive, drawing round me and pressing near the seller of hot drinks, who dispatched what he had till all was gone.