The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (33 page)

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 room, 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.’

We stood about, stock-still. I was reminded of the time he almost died at Gaspra, nine years ago. Leo Nikolayevich had gone there to recuperate in the warm Crimean sun. He got worse at one point, and when it looked as though he might die, Sergey asked if he wanted to see the local priest, who had been begging for a final word with ‘the Count.’ Leo Nikolayevich replied, ‘Can’t they understand that even on one’s deathbed, two plus two is still four!’

Now Sasha hovered beside him, adjusting his pillow, smoothing the starched linen sheets, giving the blanket a tuck or tug.

‘My darling,’ he said. ‘You waste too much effort on an old man whose life is gone. There are many people in the world in need of your attention.’

‘Shush, Papa,’ she said.

Sofya Andreyevna, Andrey, and Ilya stood outside the cottage, a circle of hate, demanding entrance, but Dushan Makovitsky held them off like a brave lieutenant. He said that Leo Nikolayevich is much better today, that his temperature had dropped. Somehow, he managed to persuade them to return to their train.

Leo Nikolayevich grew delirious toward evening, and the Muscovite doctors insisted on giving him camphor injections, which made his body writhe, briefly, and relax. They put an oxygen balloon – a hideous modern contraption, a torture chamber – over his face. I had to turn my head.

We had trouble, too, with the Church. Leo Nikolayevich symbolized a challenge to their bankrupt dogmas. The Church has mesmerized the people, urging them to follow the tsar’s armies into an endless succession of futile battles. It was obviously in their interest to report that Leo Tolstoy, on his deathbed, had recanted and died in the arms of Mother Church.

A telegram came from the Metropolitan of St Petersburg, begging Leo Nikolayevich to repent. Soon a tedious monk called Father Varsonofy arrived on our doorstep. A comose little creature, his black beard flecked through with white, he reeked of garlic and wine. At first, he pretended to feelings of great sympathy for Tolstoyan ideas, then he tried to wheedle us into letting him see Leo Nikolayevich. ‘I only wish to see him!’ he cried. We told him this was impossible, so he approached Sofya Andreyevna, as if that would improve his chances of an interview! Then Ozolin told me that the bishop of Tula himself had been dispatched to Astapovo by the archbishop of Moscow. Such nonsense.

Sasha handed me a note the monk had written to her. It is a remarkable piece of deception, penned in an ornate hand:

I dropped his note into the fire, where it spread its wings slowly before it burst into orange flames.

I recalled a passage from Leo Nikolayevich’s diary of 1901, written in Gaspra during his illness: ‘When I seem on the edge of death, I want to be asked if I still see life as a continuous progression toward God, an increase of love. If I have no strength to speak, and the answer is yes, I shall close my eyes; if the answer, alas, is no, I shall look up.’ It occurred to me that I should ask him that question now, but it did not seem worth the risk.

My dear Leo Nikolayevich seemed close to whatever lay behind the papery veil that separates us from Eternity.

On Saturday evening, his lips turned stony. Blue spots emerged on his cheeks, on his ears and hands. He began to choke, calling in a raspy voice to his doctors, ‘I can’t breathe!’

They gave him further injections of camphor oil, though he continued to object.

‘Foolishness … foolishness!’ he shouted in a hoarse whisper. ‘Stop the injections…. Let me be, for God’s sake!’

Nevertheless, the injections helped. Again, he seemed much calmer almost immediately and sat up in bed. He called for Sergey.

‘My son,’ he said, as Sergey knelt beside him, his ear close to his father’s lips. ‘The truth … it matters so much to me … the way –’ His voice broke, exhausted by the effort, once again, to formulate the truth, to command the whip of language.

He fell asleep, looking quite blissful, at 10:30. I ushered everyone but Makovitsky out of the room.

Perhaps for the first time in his life, Dushan Makovitsky wept.

After four days of silence, eating nothing, drinking only a little water, I wrote to him:

I needed a way to end, a way that would signal my affection, which has never ceased, not for a second: ‘I embrace you, my darling, dear old friend, who once loved me so much. God keep you, and take care of yourself.’

I slept badly that night, in spite of weariness beyond description, dreaming of Lyovochka and our life together. The next morning, before dawn, I went, again, to my writing desk, holding an old portrait of myself and Lyovochka to the candle, watching the flame bring life and color into the ghostly cheeks of ancient silhouettes.

I tried to make a few sentences that would touch him, yet the accusations began to tumble out, and I realized that this would only alienate him further. It was just no use.

A servant knocked on the door while I was writing. She had a telegram from a man called Orlov, a reporter from
The Russian Word
. ‘Leo Nikolayevich ill at Astapovo. Temperature 104.’

He was dying!

Duty presented itself. I realized I must go to him. He would want to see me, wouldn’t he? Hadn’t we lived together all these years? Hadn’t we brought thirteen children into the world? I did not doubt that, in the end, he would want me near him. He would want to hear and receive my confession, as I would hear and receive his. Whenever he was ill, he was like a child, thirsting for my attention. And I granted it, as I would grant it now, even if he insisted on mocking me, on making public ridicule of our marriage, which had lasted nearly half a century.

I traveled with Tanya, Ilya, Mikhail, and Andrey, taking a nurse, the psychiatric doctor who has been looking after me in the past weeks, and a few servants. One never knows what will happen on such journeys, and it is better to be prepared. We made our way to the station at Tula in several carriages. We had hurried to catch the morning train, but we missed it, obliging me to hire a special train, which cost five hundred rubles!

All day and well into the evening we rode southeast, arriving late that night. As we neared the station where my husband lay dying, I could hardly catch my breath. I felt like an important actress in Moscow who was about to make her farewell appearance to a packed house. I formed a dozen perfect sentences in my head for Lyovochka. His old, soft hands would touch my hair once again, as always. The curtain of death would fall across his eyes. And I would die, too. Affection would never waken in my breast again.

But the horrid facts hit me when I got to Astapovo. Lyovochka was surrounded by his followers, his fanatics, and they would not let me through to him. Sergey had arrived from Moscow on an earlier train and came to us like an ambassador from an enemy country, addressing the family circle like a pompous little prince. He is my own son, but I hated him. It would ‘kill’ his father if he saw me, Sergey said. Was I hearing him correctly?

I was too weak, however, to do otherwise than obey these men, who would force their will upon me now as they always had. Does a woman ever have a chance? Did I ever have a chance with Lyovochka, who used me like an old cow?

Day after day he lay dying, while I lay mostly awake. Now and then the miracle of exhaustion released me, briefly, from my pain. But I could always hear my heartbeat ticking noisily in my temples, in my wrists. My mind was tortured by visions, images of hell.

All the while the cinematographers recorded my grief. The whole world saw but never understood my sorrows.

‘Turn to the right, Countess,’ cried the wretched cameraman Meyer. ‘Show us your eyes, Countess.’ I can still hear them, can see them cranking their machines, my Furies.

Once, as I passed the stationmaster’s cottage, I found no guard at the door. Boldly, I walked in, whereupon I saw him – my dying husband – writhing in the narrow bed. I saw his white beard and hair, his bleached eyebrows, white against the white sheets. A blur of whiteness, the image of death. Death and blight!

‘Lyovochka!’ I called, but somebody was pulling me backward as I spoke, like Eurydice, back into the hell of my loneliness.

A telegram arrived from the patriarch of St Petersburg, asking my husband to repent, but Chertkov refused even to show it to him. They kept from him, too, the Abbot Varsonofy, who had come from the monastery in Optina.

On the Lord’s Day, Sunday, Sergey woke me just after midnight. I had been dreaming of a day in June, decades ago, when Lyovochka and I went running in the woods. We sat in a bright clearing, surrounded by wildflowers, and ate venison and bread and drank wine. He told me that he would never leave me, that I was his life, that he could not live without me. He pushed me back in the buttercups and daisies; he lifted my skirt, tore at me with his big hands. And he pushed through me with his indomitable spirit. He raised the fiery sword of love, and he seized me. I gave myself wholly over to his rude and flashing soul.