The Summer Guest (22 page)

KATYA CLOSED HER EYES
and tightened her arms around the heavy handbag on her lap. She concentrated on the sounds, all those familiar sounds from decades of living in London and riding the Underground: conversation, laughter, newspapers rustling, the rattle and whoosh of wheels, the voice of the woman announcing the stations, prim and emphatic: Sloane Square, South Kensington, Gloucester Road, the clunk of doors opening and closing. With her eyes closed, her attention focused, it all seemed so different, farther away and yet louder at the same time, as if she were not sitting there on the plush seat but somewhere on her own, listening to a soundtrack through headphones, like so many of her fellow passengers.

Earl's Court. A press of new passengers, and she sensed two people standing by her knees, deep in conversation. A man and a woman. They were talking about a seminar they had attended,
content strategies, trends,
digital sharing
, and it was only when the woman said,
Francis landed a major deal for a celebrity cookbook
that she remembered it was mid-April and they must have come from the Book Fair. Katya and Peter had stopped going; they couldn't afford it anymore. They had gone for the last time three years ago, and only because the market focus that year was Russia and they were hopeful. They spent a lot of money on a nice stand in a good location, as if betting their all. They smiled; they handed out catalogs, gave away free books; they had earnest discussions with publishers and agents from Moscow and Saint Petersburg and Kiev and even one from Tbilisi. They made a few small deals, better than nothing, but hardly covered their costs.
There was one young woman, Zhanna something-or-other, from a small literary press in Moscow. After a long discussion at the stand, they had invited her out to dinner. In Zhanna's enthusiasm and love not just of literature but also of the physical book—she would hold up a volume and caress the binding, the paper, the dust jacket, inspect the font and the endpapers—Katya had found something of her younger self from the good years. She had been like Zhanna, traveling all over Europe, not just to Russia and Ukraine but also to France and Italy and Germany: There had been translations, there had been what Peter liked to call the flow, when a single computer file radiated out into the world, sometimes through those translations, and of course through the physical book: the thrill of walking into Daunt Books or Hatchards or Borders, or Fnac, or Feltrinelli, or any of hundreds of smaller bookshops all over Europe, and finding one of their books, sometimes prominently displayed, and knowing they had made this possible. They had never had best sellers—they weren't that sort of press (although they hoped for one now, thought Katya with a melancholy smile)—but the guidebooks had kept them going, steady, reliable sales, rising over the years as more people traveled to the former Soviet Union. There had been the political books, too. Gian Paolo in Rome, always asking her, What have you got for me? Any good dirt on the Cremlino?

Good dirt. If they still had the wherewithal, they could have turned up plenty of dirt. It all started to go downhill with the war in Georgia and then the financial crisis that same year; the Georgia guidebooks sat ominously in a pile in their boxes, unordered or returned. Were it not for their losses now, they would have traveled to Kiev, to Simferopol and Sevastopol, to Moscow; they would have met with authors and journalists, rushed books on the Ukrainian and Crimean crises; and there were plenty of émigrés right here in London with stories to tell. Dirt to dish. But Katya
did not have the strength anymore. She couldn't do it on her own, and these days Peter was all secrecy and, she suspected, Scotch.

They hadn't seen it coming. The crisis or the whole digital thing. They weren't financial analysts or geeks. They were artisans, in their way, thought Katya; they stopped short only at printing and binding the books themselves. They belonged to the generation of proofreaders and manual typesetters. Dying, dead professions.

She opened her eyes and looked at the two Book Fair people. Conservatively dressed, much younger than their confident, almost brash voices had implied. The woman was tall, blond, freckled, looked as if she would be the tennis-playing type, with a rough-edged Eastern European name: Sharapova, Azarenka, Wozniacki. Katya dressed her in tennis whites and smiled to herself. She liked watching tennis; it calmed her. The man had the faintest outline of a beard, perhaps the shadow of what was tolerated by a corporate culture. Or perhaps it was in itself a fashion. Katya felt a sudden longing for Peter—his near-white hair, his wrinkles, the tiny ruptured veins on his cheeks—a longing so strong and so physical that she had to look away. These young people seemed to radiate good health and a slight arrogance that, to Katya, evoked power. For a second she felt depleted, replaced, but then she looked at them again and smiled, knowing that she had been there once, in that place of power. She, too, had put books in readers' hands, had helped them find a restaurant in Yalta, or get a same-day ticket for the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky, or make the best borscht. She had even helped deliver a few sacks of dirt, Gian Paolo.

Cremlino. It sounded like ice cream. Zuppa Inglese. Stracciatella. Cremlino. Katya loved Italy. It had been one of their best markets. Perhaps they could go. Forget their troubles for a few days.

There was still Zinaida. It remained to be seen what she might
do in translation with her summer companion. Whether they could give Peter a boost, at least.

She imagined the money coming in, the thrill of being not only solvent but also able to turn things around. To defy the recession and geopolitics and the received opinions of the publishing world; to see Peter smiling again, taking her hand and waltzing her around the kitchen, the way he used to when the money came in. Ah, Zinaida, miracles do happen.

Waltzing, whirling around the Piazza del Campo in Siena, laughing when they stumbled and caught each other. They had done that, yes, many years ago. Could do it again. Why not.

Katya laughed out loud. The publishing people looked at her. Do you even know, she thought, you cocksure naive editor-publisher-content provider-literary-MBA types. Do you even know what it really takes to make a book.

Masha is here at last. We have spent nearly the entire day together with Natasha; we went down to the river with parasols and bottles of water. They described it all to me—the small boats in the distance—Anton Pavlovich with Artyomenko, Ivan and Misha, and Georges and Ivanenko, who spent more time falling in the water to cool off than fishing. Natasha went swimming with them, too. She doesn't care about propriety or the fact that her hair was soaking wet. I asked Masha if she would join her; I hope she wasn't offended. In any event, she said kindly that she didn't want to leave me on my own. After a long pause, she added, Antosha would never let me forget it if I were to swim in the river.

I was surprised and was about to answer when she said, almost rebelliously, I'll come back on my own someday, or with Natasha, when there's no one about. It does look so refreshing.

I came so often to the river as a child, swimming with Papa. His strong arms throwing me up in the air, letting me splash back down into the water. Or catching me as I came running from the riverbank. He teased me: Zina, our terror, you're afraid of nothing.

I collected baby frogs and put them in fragile boats made of paper or light wood. I watched them carefully. Only one got away, hopped out of the boat. I can still see that moment, the spring of the creature's legs against the bright water before it vanished. I asked Papa where it went.

Back to the other frogs. It didn't like being away from its family.

But I would have put it back after the boat ride—what if it doesn't find its family?

It will, he reassured me. Don't worry.

When Papa died, I remembered the frog and worried that it hadn't found its way back after all.

Anton Pavlovich came to me with a small bowl of wild strawberries. They're everywhere, he said. I know, I replied, I used to pick them myself.

We talked for a long time, pausing between our words to eat berries. He placed them in my palm; at one point I imagined him feeding them to me, and had to turn away, because I found myself blushing. As if he had truly placed a berry against my lips, the way a parent or an older sibling would with a child. As I closed my lips and teeth, there would be a moment of hesitation, whether I might bite him by mistake, but his thumb and forefinger would slip away in time. And I imagined that, together with the berry, I could taste the salt from his fingers.

May 31

More guests. An actor who has worked with Anton Pavlovich in one of his plays, Pavel Svobodin.

Elena says he has all the signs of the consumptive but hides it with the most extraordinary extravagant behavior. Going fishing in his top hat and tails, for example. Passing himself off as nobility and intimidating all the servants, then bursting with laughter at their gullibility. It might seem cruel if it were not so deliciously defiant.

The days pass, and I write of these insignificant things that are mere hearsay in my life. This is my lackluster defiance, alas.
I cannot strut about in a top hat. So I struggle with drying ink and a trembling hand.

I have strange dreams—the laudanum. Last night, for example: I am in the rowboat with Anton Pavlovich, and I am blind, and the boat is rocking with the waves, and I can hear Rosa barking on shore, I don't know if she is upset at being left behind or is warning me of a storm. We must go back, Anton Pavlovich! I cry, but he doesn't hear me, just hums to himself—dear Lord, it's Grigory Petrovich's hum—then he says, We must catch crayfish for Rosa's dinner, and you'll have a prize, dear Zinaida Mikhailovna.

Then Rosa is swimming toward us, with great difficulty, waves washing over her head—I can't see her, but I know she's swimming—and I'm afraid for her, afraid she will drown, and I wake up.

This made me so upset that I crept out into the corridor and called to her very quietly, and she followed me back to the room, and I lay on the floor with her. I wept and held her warm body until my trembling stopped and I could return to my bed.

June 8

Marian Semashko has arrived with his cello. The concerts we'll have! With Ivanenko on flute and Georges on the piano, our very own Luka Chamber Orchestra.

Our cellist was practicing: mere notes, scales, nothing containing an actual melody, and it was so mournful, that sound, but still the beauty of it surpasses the sadness. And why can sadness be so beautiful?

Fortunately, Anton Pavlovich did not take long to befriend him and fill the room with laughter: He has baptized the cellist
Marmelad Fortepianich Semashechka. Marian Romualdovich takes things in stride; quite spontaneously, he composed a silly song, which he sang very gravely with the deepest and most lugubrious sounds from the cello, about a writer from Moscow called Antonio Konfityurovich Scriblovsky. I think for once Anton Pavlovich was speechless.

June 10, 1889

Poor Marmelad—that's what everyone calls Semashko now. He only made things worse by telling us that, as a boy, he had a ginger cat called Marmelad, so now everyone meows at him. Natasha says he's a splendid-looking fellow, with a mass of curly dark hair and a mustache.

I believe that before Anton Pavlovich had us in stitches, I was wondering about the beauty of sadness. I have had, if not an answer—for I'm not sure such abstract, even emotional queries can have answers—at least an illustration that went some way toward revealing the nature of the sadness.

The flute or the piano on their own can be light and airy—a passage of clouds, a stream, birds, a ladder of sunlight—that is what our modest recitals or Georges's practicing have often evoked to me in the past. And now the cello, this mournfulness. I am grateful to the musicians and the composers—Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Brahms, among others—for bringing spontaneous images of the world to me on their notes. Some might argue that music does not contain images, that Tchaikovsky did not see fields of wheat when he composed his Little Russian Symphony; I only know that is what
I saw
in the music—at times, and in
waves or snatches of consciousness—when we went to hear the symphony at the concert hall in Petersburg.

Now Marmelad (I can't help it, it makes me laugh) and Ivanenko and Georges played together last night in our drawing room. All our guests came to listen, including Nikolay Pavlovich. So there were a dozen of us crowded into the room, and Anton Pavlovich took Nikolay Pavlovich and led him out onto the veranda. In case he doesn't feel well, he said, I can see him back to the guesthouse and not disturb you all; we can hear quite well, and will have the added chorus of frogs and owls and mosquitoes, and perhaps, with any luck, the bittern will grace us with a solo performance.

Nikolay Pavlovich tried to laugh, but all that came out was a hacking cough. He gasped for breath and at last fell silent, and we waited for the concert to begin.

Georges played the opening notes. The music was strange, unfamiliar to me. He had told me the name—a Petersburg composer, one of his professors, but I've forgotten it.

I was sitting not far from the French doors that open onto the veranda; I could hear Anton Pavlovich's voice murmuring, gently but firmly, like that of a parent to a child. The tones of the cello deepened and grew louder at that very moment, as if to silence Anton Pavlovich's voice, a sort of desperate reprimand; then again a lull, where the flute tried to restore a bitter gaiety, and from the veranda I could hear, ever so faintly, the sound of sobs, then again Anton Pavlovich's voice, trying to be soothing but failing, his whisper impatient, and again the cello, almost angry, as if trying to drown out the voice from the veranda. Nikolay Pavlovich was coughing again, quite audibly, and after a moment Anton Pavlovich led him away. A lull in the music, and I could hear their steps fading at the end of the veranda, and then three long, sustained notes from the cello, like a sort of final, desolate call.

It was all purely by chance—the choice of the music, and Anton Pavlovich's decision to lead his brother away just when he did, but the sound of those fading footsteps against the sustained notes of the cello was almost more than I could bear. Everything seemed to have gathered into that moment: the sympathy between the music and the injustice of life, and the ephemeral beauty of being there, having my whole life, such as it was now, there in the drawing room and on the veranda, all my loved ones playing or listening to the music. The music seemed to be speaking to me alone, as if it had been written for me, for that moment, when I understood what was waiting for me: what, like Nikolay Pavlovich, I would lose.

The music was scraping me from within, but I needed it more than anything. To prove to myself that I am still alive, to witness the alchemy that turns sadness to a beauty I can still see.

June 13, 1889

Not left my bed for three days. Some sort of fever. Limbs so weak, I can hardly hold the pen.

Outside, beyond, is heat. Elena brings cloths, cold water. No news from our guests, no visits. No music. Laudanum.

I cannot write.

June 14

He took my hands between his own.

I am better, thank you, Anton Pavlovich.

I am glad. A pause, then before I had time to ask, he added: I wish I could say as much for Nikolay Pavlovich.

There's no progress?

He's losing weight. I cannot get him to eat, he only drinks milk, the coughing exhausts him. He won't leave the house now.

His voice was angry; I could not determine whether it was a desperate anger against his brother or against his own inability to change things.

There's a kitten. A tiny gray and white thing. He plays with it, it goes to him, jumps on his hand, he dips his finger in the milk and gives it to the kitten to lick, to suck. For a moment he forgets, loses himself, he stops coughing, he is completely concentrated on the tiny paws and whiskers, on the little animal's curiosity, as if he can somehow learn something. But when I suggest the river or the garden, he shakes his head and coughs again and stares out the window and pushes the kitten away.

I did not know what to say.

I'm thinking of going to the Smagins' again, said Anton Pavlovich, in a day or two. Aleksandr is coming from Moscow with the children and the nanny. I don't want to be around them. It's too much.

I see.

This was quite sudden. We had not heard anything more from Aleksandr Pavlovich since the end of last summer. I was hoping that Elena would have quite forgotten him.

The harvest has failed, did you know that, Zinaida Mikhailovna?

Yes, Pasha told me. It's been a terrible spring, hasn't it?

At least the crayfish have been abundant.

But we can't make bread in the winter with crayfish.

Indeed. How peculiar that would be.

How will we feed the peasants?

You will find a way.

His voice sounded distant, preoccupied, almost as if he didn't care. Although I know he does.

But the moment of tension was there, and carried its weight of silence, until Anton Pavlovich thought of a funny story to tell me about Svobodin, and then Masha arrived to spend some time with me, and he left soon thereafter.

He's overwhelmed, said Masha. She offered no explanation; none was needed.

June 16

They have left. Georges, Svobodin, Anton Pavlovich, and Ivan Pavlovich. I wondered if Natasha was hurt that she wasn't invited to the Smagins' this year; she says she has better things to do, but I believe that is her pride speaking.

She sat down to read to me, and all the restlessness in her heart punctuated her sentences; the characters in the story hesitated, sighed, stared out at the garden, and forgot themselves. Finally, she put the book down in exasperation. Do you mind, Zinochka? It's such a boring book, what do you think?

I disagreed but didn't say so. She pulled her chair closer to mine and took my hand.

There's this woman with Aleksandr Pavlovich, she said. The children's nanny, so they say. She's called Natalya, like me, Natalya Aleksandrovna Golden. They call her Nata-chez-vous, too. I feel almost offended. I thought that was my exclusive nickname.

Is she unpleasant?

No, not at all. I'd say it's Aleksandr Pavlovich who seems unpleasant. Poor woman, it must have been dreadful to travel with him and those children. They're absolute scamps.

We were silent, then she continued: Masha doesn't like being there while Antosha is away. Her brothers argue all the time.
Mikhail Pavlovich has gone off somewhere, and Aleksandr is all alone to look after Nikolay Pavlovich. Evgenia Yakovlevna can't handle Nikolay Pavlovich; she just sits and sobs, and Masha holds her hand. Aleksandr's little boys run around tormenting Anya, she is threatening to leave. They grab her braid and call her Fat Pole.

And this Natalya Aleksandrovna?

She wanders around the garden as if she's come here by mistake. Apparently, the family doesn't like her. They have had to take rooms in the village, Evgenia Yakovlevna won't have them here for some reason. Perhaps because of Aleksandr's behavior last year. I know she's very careful not to offend Mama. Besides, there really isn't room.

I sighed and felt very weary. Not a minute's walk away, there is a man who is gravely ill, and his family continues to squabble and bicker and find reasons to dislike one another and act indignant. Ever since he arrived this year, Anton Pavlovich has made no secret of the fact that he resents his brother's illness, that it keeps him from traveling here and there and beyond with Suvorin. Now he has left Luka not one hour after his other brother arrived, as if to mark his disapproval—or was it simply to leave the burden of caring for Nikolay Pavlovich to his older brother at last?

But perhaps anger is one way to cope with losing someone you love, however selfish it may seem to others. Perhaps it is altogether too much for him, and he feels only an irrational urge to flee that is contrary to all his affection for Nikolay Pavlovich. He cannot bear to see him as he is now.