The Summer Guest (21 page)

May 15, 1889

I was sure of visitors yesterday; I was wrong. Only Evgenia Yakovlevna, briefly, to see Mama; she wept. My son, he's
coughing his soul out, she said. Then she remembered about me, which in all fairness I wish she hadn't, but I was sitting right there. She said, At least she doesn't cough! Mama did not know what to say, where to turn—such an awkward silence in the room. Evgenia Yakovlevna began to apologize clumsily until I said to her, It doesn't matter, Evgenia Yakovlevna, really, it doesn't. She hurried away, poor woman, she only came for comfort, and now she'd made herself feel worse.

May 18, 1889

What do you think, Zinaida Mikhailovna, with your sixth sense—will there be a harvest this year?

Anton Pavlovich, we have not known it to be this hot and dry since 1876. The harvest failed that year. It is very likely, I'm afraid. But perhaps if it rains in the next few days . . . Did Monsieur Suvorin enjoy his visit?

Very much so, thank you.

I apologize for my family's . . . principles.

You should never apologize for your principles, Zinaida Mikhailovna, if they are important to you. Otherwise, they are not principles, just whims, passing fancies.

I smiled. Of course, Anton Pavlovich. What I meant was the uncustomary lack of hospitality.

You have always shown my family the most generous hospitality. We'll leave Aleksey Sergeyevich out of it. He has more than enough hospitality wherever he goes. And now he is on his way to Biarritz. He is not to be pitied.

There was a long moment of awkwardness that spoke of all the time elapsed since our last true, warm conversation. Finally, to say something, I asked, more a statement than a question: I
suppose, with his visit and your brother's illness, you have not had time to write?

He let out an exasperated sigh. Very little, only intermittently. Did I tell you I'm also working on a play? Somewhat inspired by my time here—the setting, that is, not the characters.

Indeed, what a relief. I would not like to find myself in a play.

There was a faint tapping sound, as if he were consulting his fingertips in hesitation, deliberation. Finally, he said, Zinaida Mikhailovna, I have a very odd request to make of you.

Yes?

I need to put the novel aside for some time. I cannot concentrate—my brother is ill, it is hot, there are all these visits—and yet everyone from my publisher to my friends and family continues to ask me about it. I put them off, tell them I'm working on it, tell them it will be ready in November or in March, give them all sorts of eloquent excuses. Masha has been begging to read it, she will arrive soon, she . . . In short, I need a safe place to store the manuscript for a time. It's such a responsibility, carrying all that paper around, worrying about nosy family members or journalists from Piter or stagecoach robbers. Do you have a safe place, may I leave it with you? Forgive my presumption, but I know you cannot read it, and I trust you implicitly not to share it with Natalya Mikhailovna—

Anton Pavlovich! Of course you may entrust it to me. I have a hiding place where I keep my journal. There is room. A niche designed to withstand Napoleon's armies. Our secrets will converse
en toute tranquillité
.

That's good, then! Thank you, Zinaida Mikhailovna, thank you from the bottom of my heart!

I heard a certain unnatural politeness in his voice. He seized my hand, kissed it briefly. I'll bring it to you in the next day or two, if you can arrange to be alone.

Come Tuesday. Mama goes in to Sumy on Tuesdays. No one
will be here except Georges, and we can send him on an errand or ask him to play for us.

This morning Anton Pavlovich brought me a heavy box.

You have written a great deal, I whispered as he handed me the box to feel its weight.

Georges was already playing, at our request. I motioned to Anton Pavlovich to follow me from the veranda to my room. He waited by the door while I knelt and struggled to put the manuscript in the hiding place where it would not be in the way of my journals. I could not manage it, so he in turn knelt by the bed and followed my instructions. When the box was safely stowed behind my journals, he got to his feet.

You are dusty, Zinaida Mikhailovna, and so am I. Do you have a cloth, a towel?

The dust would give us away, wouldn't it, I laughed. I groped about for some towels at the washstand.

When I returned, he gently wiped the dust from my sleeves and my skirt. You must scold the housemaid, she's not doing her job properly.

She is a treasure and helps me to wash and to dress, and she does my hair; Ulyasha is irreplaceable. Simply, she's not allowed to dust hiding places and Napoleonic niches. She might be a spy for the
New Times
.

He laughed and thanked me again. We returned to tea, and Georges was none the wiser.

Now at night, I lie awake over his words. I think of last summer—how different it was, how true our complicity was then, not one of childlike conspirators, hiding things, but of gentle friends. Time has taken that away. Anton Pavlovich has given me a great gift of trust, which I cherish, and which is based upon our time last summer; but I regret more bitterly
than I can say the change I have perceived in our conversations. He seems distracted, absent, too polite; spontaneity and ease are gone. I know he is preoccupied by his brother's health. Perhaps there are other things I do not know.

Now all those words beneath me, in his handwriting; and here am I—blind, dying Zinaida, who cannot read them. At times it feels a cruel joke. Not on the part of Anton Pavlovich, no, but of life itself.

Although I believe he cannot be unaware of the irony of it.

If I could see, I would be sorely tempted to read the manuscript.

If I were to break his trust, Natasha and I could read it late at night.

But I cannot see, and his trust means everything to me, and I shall not betray it.

ANA LOOKED UP FROM
her keyboard and blinked. Here was the confirmation she had been hoping for—the very thing Katya Kendall had hinted at so evasively, the beginning of the long and fascinating story she had refused to tell. What had she said?
We are working on it,
something like that. Which could mean anything: looking for it, following a lead, or perhaps already trying to get permissions for an English-language version.

Ana sent Yves an email:
I am on the lookout for a mongoose
. He immediately wrote back and said,
Don't wear yourself out trying to charm the local zookeepers. A good
andouillette
at the Boeuf Rouge will be ample compensation for the terms of our bet. Look forward to seeing you.

Ana went through Chekhov's letters for the years 1888 and 1889 and found frequent, steady mention of a novel in progress, particularly in the letters sent from Luka—although there was also obvious confusion, even self-contradiction, as to when he actually started and how much was mere intention, deliberate obfuscation, or wishful thinking.

       
January 12, 1888:
In the summer I'll get back to my interrupted novel.

       
February 9, 1888:
If only you knew what sort of subject for a novel is sitting in my head just now!

       
October 9, 1888:
I want to write a novel, I have a marvelous subject.

       
Early May 1889:
I just have to get three thousand rubles off the theater management and finish my novel.

       
May 4, 1889:
I'm writing a novel that I like better and that is closer to my heart than
The Wood Demon.

       
May 14, 1889:
I'll go to Piter in November to sell my novel.

       
May 31, 1889:
I'm writing a novel [ . . . ] that I'll finish in 2 to 3 years.

       
June 26, 1889:
I've done some work on the novel, but it's more ink-stained fingers
than actual writing.

What happened? Other than events in his life that might have prevented him from continuing? Did something happen to the manuscript at Luka? Discovery, theft, fire? How much had he written? Would it be publishable today, or did it remain a rough, inconclusive draft? Above all, where was it? Since Zinaida's journal had been found, could the novel not be somewhere close by?

Why was Katya Kendall being so secretive! She must have the answers to at least some of these questions, behind her
we are working on it.
If Ana had not drunk so much wine and been so subjugated by poetry that day, she might have dared to press for more information. Who, for example, was the Olga Ivanova who had typed up the diary? Such a common name! To try to find her would be next to impossible.

Ana skimmed Rayfield's authoritative biography; she skimmed later letters. After that fateful summer of 1889 at Luka, Chekhov threw himself into preparation for his trip across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. Ana was beginning to sense
—
knowing full well she would need to research it exhaustively to have the facts, and even then it would remain conjecture—that Chekhov found he was ill suited to be a writer of novels; he realized his strength lay in short, immediate tableaux: stories and plays. Perhaps he did go back to the Luka novel—or another?—from time to time but did not have the patience or stamina to complete it; perhaps he did
finish it but decided not to publish it or was discouraged by Suvorin or another editor; or perhaps he felt no need to expand on his characters' lives, preferred to see them in representative incidents. He painted microcosms, life on the wing.

But this was not to belittle the potential worth of a novel, even unfinished, if it existed.

She knew she must waste no time. She had almost reached the end of the diary. She must write again to Katya Kendall—find out what she meant when she said
we are hoping—hoping—to publish the novel Anton Pavlovich was writing at Luka
. Hoping, a vagueness that confirmed nothing, implied everything; they could have found it and were negotiating rights or other legalities with the Russians, or they didn't have it yet, or they were still searching for the physical manuscript on the basis of the most tenuous of clues.

And did she dare even think it, let alone write it, for fear of jinxing her own shifting hopes, now humble, now grandiose: If Chekhov's novel were in the Kendalls' hands, would they ask her to translate it?

Ana compiled an informal list of Chekhov's translators. She needed to visualize her name on that list, along with so many other unknown translators, most of them men and most of them invisible, with the exception of Michael Redgrave, John Gielgud, and Tom Stoppard. There were literally dozens. But there was one whose name came up again and again: Constance Garnett.

Ana trawled the Internet to supplement what she already knew about Garnett, which wasn't much, other than that she was English and had been one of the first translators of the great Russians in Queen Victoria's time. Ana found a photograph of a prim, bespectacled young woman with big ears, wearing a fussy hat. Ana read that she'd married in that same fateful year of 1889; her husband was an editor for an eminent British publisher; much later, her son would become a member of the Bloomsbury Group and marry Virginia
Woolf's niece. In 1893 Constance Garnett met Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. She began to translate Chekhov only after his death in 1904, and apparently, he was the author she preferred. By the late 1920s, she was half blind; in 1934
Three Plays
by Turgenev
was her last translation; three years later her husband died and she lived in reclusion and obscurity, tending her garden somewhere in Kent, until her own death nine years later.

In her long career, Garnett translated more than seventy works, and no fewer than two hundred of Chekhov's stories. She was a pioneer, venturing into a difficult, unknown, and vastly glorious terrain.

Ana imagined the conversation she might have with her. Mrs. Garnett, she would say respectfully, this novel is something I've been praying for, yet now that I have the proof of its existence, I am losing my nerve. Perhaps I should just finish Zinaida Mikhailovna's diary and let you, please, take over your usual task of translating Chekhov.

But you mustn't be afraid, my dear. After all, it's only words. Look down, read what he's written, look up again, blink, then write it all down in English.

It's not that easy. I want it to be perfect.

There's no such thing as perfect. You know that.

The whole world will be waiting. It's their expectation, their perception, that demands perfection.

Let them wait. Your duty is to the writer.

(Peering at Ana over her wire glasses and pursing her lips.)

But it's Chekhov.

He's not the hardest, my dear, don't worry. Subtle, yes, you must be careful not to miss anything, but he's not tricksy or affected or even complicated. A joy to translate, really.

But it's a whole novel!

You will find it gets easier as it stretches out, you'll become comfortable with his voice, the characters, the words will flow
from your pen, my dear. For those reasons a novel is often easier than a short story, let alone a poem! I should know, after
War and Peace.

I do want his novel to be found, but sometimes the hope that I might translate it . . . it's daunting. Overwhelming. What if the critics say the translation is not good, or that I'm not an academic, so what business have I to do it, or I haven't lived in Russia, or any of these excuses they give when they slam a translation:
stilted, clunky, awkward.
Unfaithful.
Or even just ordinary readers on the Internet who say,
I didn't like it, it must be because it was a translation.
It's one thing for a contemporary potboiler, but Chekhov?

But my dear, it is an honor to translate Chekhov, so if the publisher chooses you, it means they must trust you, and you must accept.

Just the thought of it—I've been waking up in the middle of the night with a knot in my stomach, from dreaming about the manuscript—I can actually see his fine, neat script. Not that they would give the actual manuscript to me, of course not, but there's something symbolic about its priceless physical worth in itself, all dust and ink and fraying paper . . . Imagine, it's from the stationer's in Sumy, the paper, the ink . . . What is wrong with me? People translate Chekhov all the time, it seems as though whenever one of his plays is produced, a new translation is commissioned. But you were there first, Mrs. Garnett. And this novel, too, is waiting to be translated for the first time. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people will be waiting to read it for the first time. Please come back and do it for me.

My dear, don't worry, you'll be fine, you'll be invisible. You always are. But that's how you'll know you've done a good job.