The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (26 page)

We sat in the hall, listening in near disbelief. Then Mama poked her head out, her eyes black as dirt. ‘I don’t care what your father does, Sasha. He can make everything over to Chertkov, if that’s what he wants. It won’t matter, because I shall break the will. Your brothers will stand behind me, and so will the tsar!’ She throbbed like a chicken’s disembodied heart.

Varvara assured Mama that Chertkov had no such evil plans.

‘The man will stop at nothing,’ Mama replied. ‘He wants to destroy me!’ She decided to return to Kochety at once.

The next few days were dreadful. Back at Kochety, Mama refused to eat any solid food. She would sit at meals, sulking, while Papa hovered meekly, imploring her to nibble. ‘Just a piece of black bread, my love,’ he would say. It was so pathetic that Sukhotin, who is normally pacific, lost his temper. Livid, he rose, leaning on clenched fists at the head of the table. ‘For God’s sake, Sofya Andreyevna!’ he said. ‘Do you know what you’re doing? Your only claim in life is as Leo Tolstoy’s wife, don’t you know that? If he leaves you, history will say it was your fault. And, I swear to you, they will be right!’

Papa’s head sagged. He realized that the situation was unbearable and put a hand on his wife’s shoulder and sighed.

I saw tears on Mama’s cheeks now, a look of unbearable sorrow pooling in her face.

She left that day for home – a merciful gesture on her part – asking her husband to follow in a few days. She wanted them together at Yasnaya Polyana, however, for their forty-eighth wedding anniversary, on the twenty-third of September. He could hardly not agree.

On the morning of the anniversary, Mama came down from her bedroom dressed in a white silk dress, a childlike smile on her face, as if their marriage had been half a century of inexpressible bliss. I confess, she looked radiant. Varvara Mikhailovna and I both complimented her.

‘Tell your father to put on a clean shirt,’ she said. ‘I will ask Bulgakov to take our picture on the front lawn.’

With reluctance, Papa put on a white linen blouse and his best leather boots – ones that he had made himself a couple of years ago and reserves for what he calls ‘state occasions.’ He brushed his hair and beard carefully.

Husband and wife of nearly five decades had a cup of hot chocolate before going outside for the picture. It was a warm day for late September. Though it was not yet noon, the sun burned with an almost lurid brightness, and the heat stood, quivering, on the recently mowed fields – the last cut of the year. Bulgakov was assigned the role of photographer because he supposedly has a knack for it.

Mama thought that a grand, stately photograph of herself and Papa appearing in all the newspapers would put to rest what she called the ‘persistent rumor that there is marital strife between us.’ Papa could hardly refuse to be photographed beside her, since he lets Chertkov take his picture at the slightest whim. I doubt that any man in history has been more photographed than Leo Tolstoy.

I put a screen behind the anniversary couple, as Bulgakov directed. He was being ‘professional.’

‘The screen will concentrate the sun’s rays on the photographic subject,’ Bulgakov said. Varvara Mikhailovna and I giggled behind his back, while Dushan Makovitsky frowned.

Papa squinted into the sun, haggard and distracted.

‘Please try to smile, Leo Nikolayevich,’ Bulgakov said.

Papa forced a meager smile.

Bulgakov put his head under the camera’s black hood, holding the rubber pear to one side. ‘A little to the left, please … There! Now smile …’

Mama, of course, looked like heaven on a dish. She stealthily slipped her arm around her husband’s waist and cocked her head toward his shoulder. She wanted the world to see the Perfect Couple. But nothing would alter Papa’s mood.

The shutter clicked, but when Bulgakov attempted to develop the pictures, two featureless ghosts appeared on the strong-smelling paper. Varvara Mikhailovna said, ‘The camera knows what is really there.’

They tried again the next day, with better results. Afterward, I took Papa aside. ‘You should never have let her talk you into that photograph. It was dishonest.’

‘You are much like your mother,’ he said. ‘Full of anger.’

He should never have spoken to me like that. But I realized his situation made it impossible to behave rationally.

Before lunch, I went in to take his dictation. He was sitting on the couch and looked up like an old spaniel. ‘It’s not your shorthand I need, Sasha. It’s your love.’

Intense love, pity, and sadness rushed from my heels up my spine and broke in a full wave over my head. ‘I need you so, Papa,’ I said, falling to the floor. I wrapped my arms around his knees and wept.

‘What a dear girl,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘So dear, I love you. So dear …’

The next day Papa put the photographs taken by me and Chertkov back on his study walls. That afternoon, Mama lost her mind.

Varvara and I had been invited to visit a friend for a few nights, and we left after breakfast. That same afternoon, Papa went off into the woods on Delire. When he returned, he discovered that Mama had gone into his study with a cap pistol and fired shots at Chertkov’s pictures before tearing them up – the servants recounted the whole sordid tale in scrupulous detail, as always. When Mama saw Papa in his study, she rushed at him with the same pistol and fired several times at his head before racing back to her room.

Varvara and I were immediately sent for by one of the servants. When we returned, Mama pretended that nothing had happened. ‘You silly girls, what brings you back so quickly? I suppose your hostess was dull.’

I lost my temper. ‘You’re crazy and you’ll kill us all.’

‘Is that what you think?’ She began to enumerate her sufferings, but it was too much for Varvara Mikhailovna to endure.

‘Be still, for once!’ Varvara said.

Mama looked bitterly at my friend. ‘I have tolerated you for a long time, a very long time, Varvara Mikhailovna,’ she said. ‘But I am going to have to ask you to leave us for good. You and Sasha act like tiny children, milling about, pecking and cooing at each other. You disgust me, both of you. The presence of my own daughter I must accept. But you!’ She pointed a crooked finger at Varvara and shook it. ‘I will not have
you
in my house!’

I wanted to bash her to the floor. Instead, I slammed the door and went to Papa’s study and told him what had happened. He suggested that Varvara and I go to Telyatinki for a few days until Mama’s temper cooled.

Today, before breakfast, I rode off beside Varvara Mikhailovna with a few loosely packed bags and my parrot. Even Chertkov’s company seemed preferable to that of a woman whose entire life was now a sustained note of hatred streaked with self-pity.

LETTER TO GANDHI

KOCHETY, 7 SEPTEMBER 1910

Your journal,
Indian Opinion
, arrived, and I was delighted to find out that so much has been written there by those who practice nonresistance. I would like to share with you my thoughts upon reading this material.

As I grow older, and now that I feel so vividly the approach of death, I want to tell others about things that move me in a special way. I want to talk about what seems to me of extreme importance, especially what is called nonresistance (but which is really nothing more than the teaching of love unsullied by false interpretations). The fact that love, which is the striving of human souls toward unity and the activity that follows from this striving, is the highest law of human life is sensed by most people in the depths of their souls (we see this most vividly with children) – sensed, that is, until the world snags them in its false teachings. All the great prophets – Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Greek, and Roman – have proclaimed this law. But I think it has been expressed most cogently by Christ, who stated explicitly that the Law and all true prophecies hang on this one supreme law. Having foreseen the possible distortions of this law, Christ pointed out the dangers threatening those who live according to more worldly interests; specifically, he mentioned the danger of letting oneself defend worldly interests by force (that is, returning a blow with a blow, reappropriating by force stolen objects, etcetera). Christ knew, as does any reasonable person, that the use of violence is incompatible with the basic law of love, and that once violence is tolerated, the inadequacy of the law of love reveals itself and repudiates it. Christian civilization, so brilliant on the surface, was founded on this obvious, strange, occasionally conscious but mostly unconscious misunderstanding and contradiction.

In essence, once resistance was allowed to exist side by side with love, love could no longer continue as a fundamental law. The only law that survived was the law of strength – the power of the stronger over the weaker. This is how, for nineteen centuries, Christians have lived. I grant that, at all times, people have mostly been guided by violence as they sought to organize their lives. The only difference between Christian civilization and the others is that Christianity has expressed this contradiction clearly. At the same time, while Christians accept this law, they disregard it in their private lives. Hence, Christians live a contradiction, basing their lives on violence while professing love. This contradiction continued to grow as the Christian world progressed, and it has reached new heights recently. The question now becomes this: either we recognize that we don’t follow any religious or moral teaching and are guided by the power of the strong, or we recognize that all our taxes have been collected by force, and that our institutions (our courts, our police, but – above all – our armies) must be abolished.

This past spring, during a Scripture examination in Moscow, the teacher, a bishop, asked the girls being examined about the commandments, especially the sixth one. When the right answer was produced, the bishop routinely asked a further question: Is killing always forbidden by the Scriptures? The poor girls, corrupted by their mentors, had to answer ‘not always.’ Killing, they had been taught to say, is allowed in time of war and for the execution of criminals. Alas, when one of these poor girls (this is a true story, told to me recently by an eyewitness), after giving her answer, was asked the routine question about whether or not killing was always sinful she replied, blushing nervously, ‘Yes, it is always sinful.’ When questioned further, she pointed out that even in the Old Testament killing was forbidden; she added that Christ, in the New Testament, had even forbidden the perpetration of evil against one’s brother. In spite of his renowned eloquence, the bishop was silenced, and the girl walked away victorious.

Yes, we may talk in our journals about the successes of aviation, about complex diplomatic relations, about clubs, inventions, alliances of all kinds, or about so-called works of art, yet still ignore what the girl in Moscow said to the bishop. However, we must not do that. Everybody in the Christian world knows this – knows it more or less vaguely – yet knows it. Socialism, communism, anarchism, the Salvation Army, the growth of crime, unemployment, the continuing luxury of the wealthy classes and the destitution of the poor, even the rate of suicides – all register this internal contradiction, which must be solved, and, of course, solved in the sense of acknowledging the law of love. And so your work in the Transvaal, at what seems to us the other end of the world, is the most central and important of all tasks now being done in the world, and not only Christians but all people will inevitably take part in it. I think you will be glad to know that this work is also rapidly developing in Russia in the form of refusals to do military service, a movement that grows every year. However insignificant the number may be among your people or ours who practice nonresistance, they can all say boldly that God is with them. And God is more powerful than men.

In recognizing Christianity, even in its distorted form as professed today, and in recognizing at the same time the necessity for armies and arms to kill in wars on such an enormous scale, governments express such a crying contradiction that sooner or later, probably sooner, they will be exposed. Then they shall put an end either to Christianity (which has been useful to them in maintaining power) or to the existence of armies and the violence they support. All governments – your British and our Russian included – feel this contradiction keenly; as a result, they attack those who practice nonresistance all the more vigorously, out of a feeling of self-preservation. Governments know where the enemy lies, and they keep a close eye on their own interests, aware that their very existence is at stake.

It has been awkward for me here, living between two worlds. I still have a few friends at Telyatinki, mostly among the servant boys and drivers, but Sergeyenko and Chertkov have abandoned me. Since Chertkov came to live here again, the situation has grown even less tolerable. He is a crude, manipulative ideologue and, worse, a bore. On the other hand, Yasnaya Polyana is no longer the comfortable place for me it briefly was. Sofya Andreyevna has become skeptical of my intentions. She doesn’t understand that my first loyalty must be to Leo Nikolayevich, that I try to do what serves him best. Her attitude toward me goes to extremes: either she treats me as a traitor or she behaves as she did yesterday when I passed her in the hall. ‘It’s a godsend having you here with us, my dear. Did you realize that?’ she said.

‘If that’s true, I’m pleased to hear it.’

‘It’s much less tedious when you’re here. Even Leo Nikolayevich feels livelier in your presence. And you are so tactful! A walking miracle of tact!’

It occurred to me that she was teasing, but she was not being entirely false. The problem with Sofya Andreyevna, always, is her manner of expression. Like many people, she has no control over her tone. A myriad of conflicting feelings cross in her head and mangle her nuances. You have to guess at what she really means.