The Summer Guest (3 page)

GOD, IT WAS COLD.

What weather deity had invented that terrible wind they called
la
bise
? He must have been a friend of Monsieur Guillotin of infamous revolutionary fame, thought Ana as she stepped out into the street: Her hair tore at her cheeks, her scarf streamed behind her, and her coat flapped against her legs as if to keep her from walking.

The village was deserted; a last copper sheen caught the roof tiles, and beyond, the russet plaid of fields, the jagged parade of mountains. She walked quickly, pulling her shapka down tighter over her ears, holding her scarf to her nose, her eyes tingling, strained from a day's work. Not what she had expected, two proto-feminist sisters discussing Tolstoy; but what a restful change from the frivolous or self-absorbed contemporary French novels that were her usual source of income. So what if it wasn't going to pay much—there were times when work must be about more than income.

But it wasn't easy to make ends meet, even with the better-paid commissions from bigger publishers—the crime novels and thrillers and bestsellers—that she'd been taking on since her divorce. Her colleagues who did commercial translation made twice as much. When they raised their eyebrows at her, half in commiseration, half in consternation, she pleaded job satisfaction. And she'd made it this far, living on her own in this village for the last three years; she squared her shoulders and raised her chin as her thoughts compelled her onward, into the wind.

Did she miss the easy days, back in Paris, with a husband?
Easy only to a point, easier financially; as his business grew, Mathieu had taken on more and more of the burden of expenses. But ultimately, the financial inequality (among other things, not least of which was his infidelity) became a source of strife between them, and they parted. Not amicably, but knowing it was for the best. While Ana's lawyer had urged her to claim a
prestation compensatoire,
she wanted total independence. There were no children; she wanted nothing more to do with that part of her life. She was still trying to understand why her reaction had been so violent: Was it the knowledge of having spent twenty years with someone only to end up complete strangers? Or the realization she had nothing to show—not really, most of the books she'd translated were out of print—for all those years? Mathieu had gotten the flat in the Marais (it had been in his family since the Revolution, after all), and Ana had accepted a small moving allowance that enabled her to resettle.

She did not like to think about Mathieu. Once the divorce and the move were behind her, she tried to pick up her life where she had left off before him, as if she were still in her early thirties, but she soon realized that society had changed (as had she, simply by aging physically, if nothing else—the eloquent streaks of gray in her long hair, which she refused to color) and the world was not about to let her get on as she would have liked. So her initial relief at being on her own soured into resentment toward Mathieu, and because she did not want him to poison her life, she forbade herself from thinking about him—a proscription that was often unsuccessful, given precisely such moments when her mind was allowed to wander. She had tried to rescue the good memories of their early years but thus far had been unable. Perhaps it was too soon; perhaps the weight of more recent incompatibility had buried their early happiness for good. How much was her own fault, too? Hadn't she married him for the wrong reasons—the stability, the companionship,
the passport? Which was also why, out of a distorted sense of pride, she had wanted no
prestation compensatoire.

For three years now she had been starting over, starting from scratch—relatively late in life, according to some, but you couldn't dwell on that fact or you would founder in useless projection and disappointment. That was how she saw it.

And her newly regained freedom meant she could organize her days as she saw fit. On a fine day, she could jump in the car and head off exploring the back roads of Haute-Savoie and neighboring Switzerland. The expanse of nature was new to her. She had not known until now how vital it was to her well-being, how comforting and sustaining the presence of clouds and mountains and a glimpse of lake could be. Or something as banal and universal as a bird or a tree! Not that there weren't parks in Paris, and lovely ones—but so much land and sky to oneself, even in a bitter wind like this, was a luxury that no city, however spacious and elegant, could provide. Sometimes she missed the near-village life of her Parisian neighborhood—the cafés and boulangeries and small shops where everyone knew her—but this village, even with its dearth of shops and cafés, had opened other doors through which she began, tentatively at first, to explore her solitude, and through solitude—as if she found herself in a hall of mirrors—her very sense of who she was, who she wanted to be.

Not that she didn't miss or need people from time to time; they were not far from Geneva, and in half an hour or less, she could be there for her required dose of crowds and people-watching. She had one close friend in Geneva, Yves: They had been together on a summer language course to Moscow back in the early 1980s and had kept in touch. When she missed other friends, she called them on Skype or took the TGV up to Paris for the weekend. But more and more, she found that people were
all so busy.
She settled ever deeper into her isolation: At least it offered the consolations of beauty.

And now this real, bone-chilling winter of the kind you rarely felt in a city, with its climatic fug of traffic and people and the proximity of warm interiors. She pulled her scarf tighter, thumped her arms around herself, half-hug, half-encouragement. She must find a fake fur in a thrift shop somewhere.

Her Ukrainian heroines would not have feared the cold. Any more than those brave protesters on the Maidan in Kiev did; some of them had been camping there for weeks. They built walls with bags of frozen snow. She had seen them on the news, the women muffled like her in scarves and shapkas, bringing supplies, cooking vast kettles of soup, swelling the ranks at the rallies.

For decades Ana had heard hardly anything about Ukraine, other than the Orange revolution in 2004, which ultimately failed, and of course her little guidebook to Crimea, and now the country suddenly seemed to be dwarfing her corner of France. What sort of coincidence was that, Ukrainian gentry in the daytime at work, so to speak, then Ukrainian protesters on the news at night? Where was it all going? Who knew—with protest movements, they either fizzled out, or were crushed, violently, or they triumphed.

As for her own Ukrainian heroines, Ana had not read the diary through, so she did not know where they were headed, either. As a rule, she liked to discover a book as she progressed with the translation; it kept her fresh, curious, made her look forward to sitting down to work each day, and this would be no exception, she sensed. But at the same time, she was eager to find out why the diary must be kept confidential, whether there was something more in the text, something remarkable, that might bring her to another level professionally, propel her ever so briefly into the limelight that eluded most translators by definition. She did have a few colleagues who translated Nobel laureates and prizewinning authors; they were interviewed, wrote blogs or books, mingled at conferences as speakers. Their lives seemed to have substance.

She had had enough of being invisible, of slipping inconspicuously behind the more glamorous author whose photograph beckoned from the back cover of a book they had both written. As translator, she mused, she was no more than the lining of the dust jacket. This substance she craved—beyond meaningful texts, beyond creativity—should lead to an identity.

She turned to head home, wind at her back, and looking at the darkening landscape, she knew instinctively that it was not enough to have lived this long in France or to have acquired a French passport to feel French; perhaps it was equally foolish to expect an identity from her profession. Although people often did, and their profession defined them—to others, to society. A sort of representational convenience, when in fact the true self was elsewhere: going for walks at twilight, talking to the cat.

Ana had read somewhere that if you wanted your cat to meow, to converse with you, you had to talk to it. As if it were a furry plant. She had never had a cat before—had adopted Doodle some six months earlier—and she was as disconcerted by the creature's sudden displays of affection as she was by its self-serving indifference. In the end, such unpredictability was proving instructive. In the morning she would turn to the cat and say, Right, Doodle, what sort of day are we in for?, and Doodle's condescending stare would tell her all she needed to know. For twenty years, Ana had lived a life of unquestioning routine and not a little boredom. She had been happiest crafting the very literary translations she favored back then: poetry, memoirs, obscure novels that sold a few hundred copies at best. She had spent her days bent over her typewriter, and then the computer, like some
maître horloger
over his instruments. Mathieu had resented her for it—the hours she spent, the pecuniary pointlessness of it. Now she worked much harder than she ever had, but she was free; she need fear neither routine nor boredom, and she felt a tremendous urge to make up for lost time.

What was most surprising to her, after three years on her own, was how little the absence of a relationship troubled her. In the distant past, before she had met Mathieu, any period of celibacy or recovery from a breakup had been a source of distress and worry; she lived with it, but with a terrible awareness of inadequacy and time passing. Now time was passing faster than ever, yet Ana was poised and cheerfully resigned. She surveyed the rubble of her romantic yearnings with the dispassionate cynicism of the hardened aid worker. She had earned her name in the end. Harding. She didn't think of herself as a hard person, but as a woman gracefully adjusting to the inevitable.

You do what you have to do, her father used to say. Strange, coming from him, the precise, articulate professor of history. She didn't like this catchall phrase, with its negative implication of just making do, the
pis aller,
but she could point to experience, if challenged. Perhaps others had her best interests in mind when they questioned her solitude, but they hadn't lived her life. She always said she was open to new experiences, but maybe she no longer knew how to reach out in this increasingly crowded, competitive world. Or she didn't feel she needed to reach out. Her profession suited her; her reclusion buoyed her.

And her little house was a sanctuary. Rundown but palatial compared to the Paris flat, a disputed legacy belonging to an old family in Thonon-les-Bains. She knew she wouldn't be able to stay there forever, but as she hurried through the door into the warmth, eager for a cheering shot of Calvados, she refused to worry about the future. She tried now, after questioning her furry oracle, to take each unpredictable day as it came—but that didn't exclude the occasional daydream of a perfectible future.

I told myself when I sat down for the first time with this ledger that I would not fill it with regrets. Life has been good to me. I've had opportunities, I have had a good and loving family, but there are one or two things I do regret.

Perhaps to ease my mind, although it will bring a moment's melancholy, I should let my thoughts return to those memories and see if there is still reason for regret.

It was the summer before I left for Petersburg. There was a wealthy family from Moscow staying with their uncle on the neighboring estate. We never had much to do with this uncle, the owner of the estate; just before Papa's death they had argued, and somehow Mama could not bring herself to forgive the man. Still, the family was bored and had children our age, so they sent an invitation. And there was a reconciliation. I began to spend time with Andryusha, the eldest brother, and with hindsight it would be easy to say he was spoiled and arrogant, or that he looked down on us. But I did not feel it at the time, and we went on long walks through the fields, looking for butterflies, and we sat on the hill above the river, and I saw him only as part of that joy of being seventeen, in a landscape of glorious colors. I was with a boy who spoke softly and took my hand and told me about the life he might lead, until he laughed and said, I suppose you are expecting to have suitors and get married?

I must have blushed, but I told him proudly I would be going to Petersburg to attend the Bestuzhev courses and study to be a doctor. He took his hand away from mine and looked at me with amused astonishment: A doctor—what sort of idea is that?

It was my father's wish, and my mother's. They see no reason why a woman cannot be educated and useful.

I could not tell him that I suspected my mother was afraid I might not marry; perhaps I was not yet aware myself of the reasons why. Sitting there with him, watching the fishermen languidly casting their lines into the water, I could believe for a moment that he saw me differently, for who I was and who I wanted to be, since he was holding my hand, and spent these afternoons with me. He was pleasing, and I always felt a certain breathless urgency when Ulyasha or Grigory Petrovich called to me to say that the young man was waiting.

Now he said, Useful? You don't need to be educated to be useful.

He was smiling at me, at the same time playing with a lock of my hair; he had taken it up so gently in his fingers that I hadn't even noticed until then.

Useful, how?

He leaned closer and kissed me chastely on the cheek. I've always wanted, he said, leaning back, to know what a girl's cheek feels like. And now I know.

Before I could say anything, he put his lips on mine. I started to pull away, but he had his hand against my back and he held me and made his kiss more insistent, though still gentle. His other hand had moved up my hair to rest on my shoulder, and he curled my hair round and round with his fingers against my neck and it was as if all of me were being twirled by those soft fingers and lips.

I pushed him away.

He shrugged, raised an eyebrow, and said, You'll have to learn to be more useful than that the day you have to start cutting people open and chopping off their legs, Dr. Lintvaryova.

Andryusha, you're horrid, I said, but my cheeks were burning, and I scrambled to my feet.

He saw me back to the house, kissed my hand in a gentlemanly fashion, his eyes full of irony, and walked away.

In the days to come, every time I thought about that moment, his blue eyes staring into mine, his fingers twirling my hair, I felt a dizziness that left me on my feet but filled me with both shame and surrender. I waited for him. I wanted him to do it again, to blur me into the summer landscape.

He came a few more times but ignored me and went fishing instead with Pasha and Georges, even though they were so much younger. When he saw me, he always called me Doctor and my cheeks went red. Mama looked at me, but I remained stubbornly silent.

I had pushed him away. That is my regret. I don't know if it was instinctive, or my good upbringing, or mistrust. Because even though there were other young men later, in Petersburg or Moscow or even Sumy, and even though there were those I loved who did not kiss me, and those who kissed me whom I did not love, it was never the same. I did not love Andryusha; I don't know what strange luminosity warmed the evening air that summer and stayed with me until I left for Petersburg. Perhaps it was youth, the last days of a certain blissful inexperience, nothing more. The moment above the river reflected it all.

For Andryusha, it had been meaningless—a moment's flirtation, engaged through boredom; the lack of anything better to do, futile but vivid.

Mama told me that he made a wealthy marriage and lives on a huge estate not far from Kharkov.

I suppose I still regret it, yes. Because it won't come again, that I know.

There were other suitors, or should I say real suitors, with nobler intentions; they hardly bear thinking about, but what
else do I have to do at this moment? There was the fat one, Konstantin Ignatyevich, with his paunch and his fob watch, like a character out of an English novel; there was Aleksey Sergeyevich, with his spots and his stammer, so servile he made me want to giggle and hit him with my parasol (the rare times when I went about with a parasol—that is Natasha's
manie
). Mama wrung her hands, urged me; Elena dissuaded me. And thankfully so. Could I have continued my work as a doctor? Can marriage provide that satisfaction of good work and generosity? Perhaps with children, but . . . When I see the unhappiness of some of my cousins or friends who have married—they do not know they are unhappy, they delude themselves quite successfully and proudly, but their illnesses and complaints tell a different story—I think I made the wise choice. As did Elena. For Natasha, it is too soon to say. She is immensely happy with her work as a teacher, but she is also a flirt who loves company and laughter and children, and noise and chaos . . .

But am I being truly honest with this page? In the end, is it not a mirror, too, a distorting mirror? There are words that are like faults in the silver behind the glass . . . Of course I could avoid putting down the words that will follow, of course I could be evasive with myself, with the page, but the matter has tormented me—and perhaps Elena and Natasha, too—all my life, and as a doctor who studies the human body and the human soul, I cannot disregard this simple physical fact: We three sisters, without exception, are plain. We do not have beauty to recommend us. Elena is earnest to the point of being stern; Natasha is much more whimsical, but her laughter is perhaps too boyish, even rowdy. Perhaps that is why, early on, all three of us decided to study, and Mama encouraged us. Our Russian boys, like Andryusha, like Pasha and Georges, when
they talk of women—if they talk of women—talk of little else: appearance. We are prizes in some competition they play among themselves. For Andryusha, I was an easy prize and a worthless one. A plain girl, eager and innocent, her affection easily won, just as easily tossed aside.

If I had placed my hopes in marriage, I might feel bitter. Instead, I chose a path that brought a sense of usefulness and hope: Here was something in nature that I could change, where life's unfairness could be redressed. Knowing that I eased suffering, even saved lives: those two little girls who had been caught in a fire in the village, or the infant with the terrible fever in Baranovka. Every day I think of them.

But even if this journal is my only mirror, I don't wish to indulge in vanity, however plain it might be. I know, and my patients know, what was done. Perhaps it was beauty of a different kind.

I have gotten out of bed—it is the middle of the night—but I cannot sleep, so I take to scribbling on my writing board. It calms me to form the words, my sightless scratching against mortality. I lay in bed for the longest time, listening to the night through the window, before resolving to get up. The usual peaceful sounds of the river, and the owls and frogs, and some dogs far in the distance (and closer, Rosa snuffling in her sleep), and I thought I could hear someone singing. It's not impossible, but it was so beautiful, so mysterious, it filled me with a sudden inexplicable hope: not that I might be cured and live a normal life after all, but that this short life remaining to me might be filled with an unexpected happiness of a rare, special kind—perhaps so rare because of what awaits me (and that is what is so odd, because it awaits us all, it is just that I must leave before my time, as they say, and with this suffering
that I bear as best I can)—but now it is as if some strange reward might still come to me, utterly unexpectedly, with a kind of grace, like that faraway singing in the night.

My heart is at rest now; perhaps I can sleep.

The following night

Again insomnia; perhaps it is from the excitement, or an excess of wine, which I know I ought not to drink but, at the same time, I realize how little difference it will make; or perhaps it's the glorious weather, spring rushing up to us with open arms.

I met our guests yesterday—yes, I like to think that they are guests (although they are paying for their room and board) and we are hosts. There is Evgenia Yakovlevna, who must be Mama's age, with dry hands and a timorous voice; then the daughter, Maria Pavlovna, very soft-spoken. According to Natasha, she is not beautiful—if she'd been a man, she says, she'd have been handsome, but she has a calmness about her, and a smooth, sweet face that is most appealing. Natasha went on to describe their conversation at length—the schools, the children, the pedagogy, the problems with the
zemstvo
. I have not yet had a chance to speak with her on my own, any more than an introduction; she is much in demand by her brother and her mother; she has a laugh like a clear, chiming bell, an infectious laugh that makes me want her brother to continually tease her and tell jokes. Which it would seem he does quite frequently already.

This brother, then, is called Anton Pavlovich, and he is the writer. His voice is deep and strong, as befits a man of words; he kissed my hand and held it for a moment, a sensitive touch that did not surprise me when I learned he is also a doctor.
Mama made much of his writing—he has had a play produced in Moscow, and his stories have been published in
Northern Herald
and
New Times
—but he seemed to suggest it was almost accidental, not so much a hobby as a fortuitous source of revenue. With Elena, the three of us talked briefly about the medical work here in the environs of Luka, and he offered to assist in any way he could. Elena was very grateful; she is quite overwhelmed at the moment. But did he not come here to write or relax? asked Mama, almost disappointed, and he laughed and said, Oh no, Madame, to be perfectly honest, I have come here for the fish! My brother, Misha, told me you have pike and perch and chub and crayfish and I don't know what else in your river Psyol, and I'm looking forward to some good sport and excellent food.

Then that you shall have, Mama assured him, if you don't let my medical daughters drag you off on their house calls! Please use our rowboats, and when you bring back your catch, Anya is very good at preparing the fish as you like it,
à la polonaise
—she is Polish—but also
à la russe, à l'ukrainienne . . .

Natasha interrupted, saying something rather rude in Ukrainian that our guests did not understand, fortunately; and Georges grumbled to scold her and apologize for her at the same time, until Mama suggested he play something for us on the piano.

I had a moment of sadness, because while Georges was playing—some Chopin nocturnes, and they always fill me with melancholy at the best of times—I could hear Anton Pavlovich murmuring with Elena, and there were words that rose above the music like the notes of a dissonant melody. His tone was concerned, the voice of a doctor, yes, but also dispassionate, one might even say clinical. I may still be a doctor for others, when my opinion can be of use, but to be my own patient is impossible, intolerable. So I recognized that professional tone,
and I knew that, for the length of a brief conversation, I was his incurable patient.

This insomnia is torment. Hours lost churning over one's existence, changing nothing, fuming particles of sleep and anger and restlessness. Unless one uses the time to write, as I do now: idle thoughts that might otherwise have washed away, harmless, at dawn.

Although it is said there are writers and poets who find inspiration in sleepless hours, I do not envy them. This dark time belongs to owls and frogs and stray dogs, to foxes and wolves. I do not feel safe until the cock crows. There was a time when candle or lamp could chase away foolish shadows, but now I must do it myself.