The Summer Guest (23 page)

And Elena? I asked softly. Has she not been to examine Nikolay Pavlovich?

They haven't asked—since Anton Pavlovich was there anyway, until yesterday; I believe she doesn't want to get involved, though of course if they ask her, she will go—but even Mama and Pasha have told her to wait. It seems from what
Masha told me that there is not much they can do except try to keep him comfortable—and make sure Tatyana remembers to bring the milk.

I have not been in Nikolay Pavlovich's company often, and no one has ever described him to me, but I cannot forget how we greeted each other this year when he arrived. The dry, hot hand. The angry, helpless cough. But while I sat talking with Natasha on the veranda, I could see him absolutely clearly: a gaunt, thin young man in his bed, with wild hair and a ragged beard, and a hand feebly lifted, looking around as if he had lost something; calling for a gray and white kitten.

As medical students, we learned, or tried to learn, to overcome our fear and disgust in the presence of death and disease. You had to or you could not be a doctor, it was as simple as that.

Sitting there on our quiet veranda with Natasha, I was almost overwhelmed, and I had to ask her to fetch some poetry. The imagined scene of Nikolay Pavlovich in his bed conveyed to me, far more bitterly than all the patients I saw when I was well, the threshold to one's fragile, too corporeal self. If one crosses that threshold, one is sucked down into a spiral of fear, disgust, and complete loss of hope.

I keep seeing the kitten: I feel its warm fur between my palms, its sharp yet gentle little claws; I hear its frenetic purring, a mixture of love and fear.

June 17

We were having our morning tea. I heard her footsteps, hurried; then a long pause before she knocked.

It was Anya, come to tell us that Nikolay Pavlovich had died at dawn.

The hours that followed—as if I were standing in the middle of a room with people swirling around me, and I could not catch anyone, stop anyone long enough, to find out what had happened, what was happening; like a game of blindman's buff, only it was real, they all hurried by me, eager to escape, all that was missing was laughter.

Elena and Mama have taken charge. At the guesthouse, they are stunned and weeping. The brothers argue, incriminate. Elena has brought Masha and Evgenia Yakovlevna to us for now, while the women from the village prepare the body. There will be a requiem; the coffin and a cross have been ordered. A telegram was sent to Anton Pavlovich. God knows how long it will take him to get back from the Smagins'.

I write these things—practical everyday things, real things that must be done—when neither I nor anyone else is fooled. Insignificant helpless gestures against grief, like this scribbling. Only Masha and her mother, sobbing quietly in a corner of the drawing room, tell the truth. We should all do just that, sit in a corner and weep.

June 18

I slept fitfully. Dreams, sounds in the night. Masha stayed with us. No one spoke. Rosa whimpered by my door. Even the owls, the frogs, seem mournful. Have they always sounded like this?

I am not much use. I do what I can, sit and talk quietly, keep vigil, carry messages. Elena is so good. She has offered to pay
for the burial. She takes things in hand. Natasha consoles; her presence soothes, she dares to smile, I am sure, because she is on the side of life, of hope.

We all knew how sick he was—why did Anton Pavlovich believe he could recover? Why these misdiagnoses of laryngeal infection or typhoid when it could only be consumption? You could hear it in the way he coughed!

We are all afraid, that is why: knowing that the disease can strike irrespective of age or rank or talent, that it does not retreat, and it spares no one. Death sitting in our midst, uninvited and implacable. Even as I write this and know my own death sentence, I do not want to accept it, I hope against hope for remission, indulgence. Some miraculous clemency. I go back and forth between my pragmatic medical acceptance of facts and some superstitious clinging to the illusory promise of life. For Nikolay Pavlovich, it was no different.

Midnight.

Elena says Anton Pavlovich has arrived, exhausted. He came by train. The others are following with Roman and the carriage.

The family is keeping vigil around the coffin, with the cantor and the village mourners.

I let Rosa stay in my bedroom with me, fleas be damned. It comforts me to hear her snuffling, her gentle whining as she dreams.

June 19, 1889

Our families joined, but not in the way any of us would have hoped.

Nikolay Pavlovich is buried in our graveyard on the hill.

I am told you can see the cross for miles around.

Many people came from the village for the funeral. I walked with Tonya and Pasha. Natasha and Elena carried the lid with Masha; Georges was a pallbearer with the Chekhov brothers and Ivanenko. Evgenia Yakovlevna has been so terribly distraught, clinging to the coffin and sobbing endlessly. That is her right; it is her suffering that pains me, that leaves a tight fist clenched inside my chest.

Later, when we were sitting for lunch, Natasha confided that in the midst of all the sobbing, including our own, I would not have heard Anton Pavlovich. He stayed dry-eyed throughout the service. No one has seen him weep.

You might think he has no heart; or you might think he buries sorrow so deep that we ordinary people cannot see his grief, nor can we share in his rites of mourning.

Either way, we do not know who he is. If we fault him for a lack of tears, that is our failure to understand, not his failing as a person.

They have gone to the monastery at Akhtyrka, the entire family. Luka is suddenly deathly quiet. I use the word consciously, deliberately. In their need to commune with death, to contemplate their God and seek consolation, they leave us with silence and absence.

Natasha broods, reminds me that they visited the monastery not two weeks ago with Anton Pavlovich and Svobodin. They made fun of the monks, she said. Anton Pavlovich introduced himself as Count Wild Boar. What will he say to them now?

I'm sure the monks have a sense of humor, I replied. They were glad of the entertainment.

And now?

It's their duty, is it not, to accompany those who grieve, to help them understand their relation with death?

Natasha grunted. They showed us the icons. That helped me understand my relation with life.

In what way?

Art, she said simply, then added, the force of life. The reason not to succumb to despair. We had a long discussion about it afterward. Every work of art—even an anonymous icon commissioned by God, so to speak—is an act of defiance, speaking for the possibility of immortality.

No, Natasha, that is an illusion. Death always wins.

It doesn't! And I know what you're thinking: No matter how I argue that
Dead Souls
is immortal, Gogol has been dead for thirty-seven years.

Well, can you prove that Gogol the person, Nikolay Gogol from Sorochintsy, is still alive?

The fact of the immortality of his work, of his spirit—it's a vast, worthy conspiracy among the living, a consolation and a source of hope and joy—

Precisely: a conspiracy to maintain a vast delusion—

And so it may be, but a delusion that helps people to live, gives meaning to the lowest of lives—

Are you sure? Have you asked Grigory Petrovich or Anya what art does for them?

Art is the conscious knowledge of defiance; religion is unconscious. For them, icons represent the story of Christ, and they find consolation and meaning in religion. Don't you agree?

I paused before answering; I pause now as I write. Once I would have agreed wholeheartedly, believed in the consolation, the brave assertions of art and even of religion. Now my soul is not so permeable. I am well acquainted with unremitting darkness.

Consolation, I said, is this—and I made a circle with my finger to point at her and include her in my thoughts—this conversation, this moment, this sharing of life. It's the only way of knowing for sure, of being absolutely certain of life. For me. The only immortality we have is in this very second. I speak on authority, Natasha; I stare down my own mortality every morning, and I live not for art or icons but for the moments I might spend with you, and Mama, and Elena, and our brothers, and everyone else who is dear to me, and even the dog. I do not believe that when I die, you can go to Akhtyrka and find me alive there, staring at you from the face of an icon. Nor do I believe, like Mama, in an afterlife.

But there is memory—others are kept alive through memory. Why are you writing your journal if not to leave something of yourself?

Perhaps. I like to think Ksenia will read it someday. But she will read my words, not me.

And what are words if not the expression of who you are? The expression of your defiance? Your soul, after all?

I am glad you see it that way, Natasha; perhaps you are right. I do not like to use the word
despair,
but there are times I believe my journal is merely an expression of despair. I am like Evgenia Yakovlevna, clinging to the coffin.

She reached out for my hand. We had come full circle, resolved nothing, understood little. I felt the warmth in her hand, my vibrant sister, and that is what mattered more than all the rest. That mysterious warmth, alone able to calm my heart and mind.

I remembered what Anton Pavlovich said last summer about living well, every moment. Yes, it was consolation, and each time I could realize that crystalline moment, it was like a burst of pure goodness and serenity. Surely worth living for.

June 20, 1889

I have not seen you in so long, Zinaida Mikhailovna—not seen you, I should say, in our way, where you can see me, too. I expect that, to you, I have been no more than a miserable bit actor this summer, reciting lines by rote, with no heart.

For a moment I wasn't certain what he meant, and then I understood and smiled. He sat down on the wicker chair next to me. The creaking told me he was stretching into the chair, relaxing. I had a sudden hope that he might stay for a while.

He sighed, stammered, as if about to say something, then thinking better of it. I encouraged him, told him I was listening. Then he hummed, sighed again, banged the floor with his heels.

Such boredom, Zinaida Mikhailovna, such restlessness! Do you feel it? Life has—this whole business, Kolya's illness and death—it's not even about grieving, that's normal, you expect it—it's the rest of the time, it's as if all the good passion, the good sap, has gone out of life. As if the terrible heat we have had has dried up every moist, tender, fragile feeling or disposition within me. I'm a husk, Zinaida Mikhailovna, a dry husk, cleaned out, dust.

This will pass, Anton Pavlovich. It is normal, surely, as you say.

Don't say that! That is what they all say—Masha, Vanya. You can do better, I know you can, you must tell me, you are wisdom itself, you are a light when all the others are blinded by convention—

He stopped suddenly, sighed. I'm sorry, he said. I'm not sleeping enough. I shouldn't speak to you like this.

I reached out, searching for his hand, did not find it, sat back again.

Anton Pavlovich. Perhaps what I say will be conventional, too, but it is all I know. Life is mysterious—for now the passion has gone, Nikolay Pavlovich has taken it with him to the grave, and
his death has shown you the vulnerability, the pointlessness, dare I say the cynicism of life. How can you laugh and go to the theater and enjoy yourself when your brother is dead? But I say you can and you will; there will come a time when your spirit will cease mourning and slowly fill again with that sap, as you call it.

I paused; his silence seemed impatient to me, so I hurried on.

I have died innumerable times since my first headache, my first dizziness. Each time, with each spell, seizure, degree of blindness, I have lost a part of life. Each time fear comes in, showing death to me. You have seen for yourself, from last summer to this, how life is draining out of me, just as it did with Nikolay, but more slowly, less dramatically. And each time I do not die—although I could choose to let go, see the pointlessness of it all—I do not die because I shake my fist at fear. This is all there is, yet it is still so much. Even I have my moments of hope—not for eternity, not even that I might survive or recover my sight—because I already have survived, and I have learned to see.

I sat up, tapped my foot on the floor.

What right, Anton Pavlovich, do you have, when you are fit and healthy, to come to me with your ennui? Boredom will pass—it is the least you owe your brother! It is
you
who are blind—open your eyes, look around you!

My head was pounding; a sudden stabbing pain caused me to gasp and threw me back in my chair. I did not care what he thought at that moment.

He cleared his throat. Bless you, Zinaida Mikhailovna, I knew I could count on you to talk sense to me.

It's not sense, I said breathlessly, it's not sense you want. That's not why you came here. Sense is convention, sense is—

I could not go on, the pain was a vice around my head. I think I nearly fainted, the floor of the veranda seemed to be tilting up, and I lay my head back and clung to the armrests to keep from
falling, as if I were on a ship in a storm, as if an earth tremor were shaking the house. Anton Pavlovich was speaking from far away, I could hear him but not understand him, I remember thinking he had his own language, it was music, the sound of his voice, full of sadness but also a bitter humor, and there was a major key in there, too, of hope or understanding. And still the words I recognized were like false notes, dissonances: life, death, soul, weariness, hope, God. Then came long interludes when his words flowed quietly and smoothly, like a lullaby, comforting me as the pain receded.

When I realized he was silent, I lifted my hand from the armrest. Anton Pavlovich, I'm not well, may we talk of this another time?

He must have come to kneel by my chair, because his voice was very close to my ear, and his hand took mine, yet his words seemed to come from far away.