You've Got to Read This (90 page)

"You know," Anderson said, "that's all bird sanctuary over there now."

"Sure," Elliot agreed.

Outfitted as he was, the professor attracted Elliot's anger in an elemental manner. The mask made him appear a kind of doll, a kachina figure or a marionette. His eyes and mouth, all on their own, were disagreeable.

Elliott began to wonder if Anderson could smell the whiskey on his breath. He pushed the little red bull's-eye safety button on his gun to Off.

"Seriously," Anderson said, "I'm always having to run hunters out of there. Some people don't understand the word 'posted.'"

"I would never do that," Elliot said, "I would be afraid."

Anderson nodded his head. He seemed to be laughing. "Would you?" he asked Elliot merrily.

In imagination, Elliot rested the tip of his shotgun barrel against Anderson's smiling teeth. If he fired a load of deer shot into them, he thought, they might make a noise like broken china. "Yes," Elliot said. "I wouldn't know who they were or where they'd been. They might resent my being alive. Telling them where they could shoot and where not."

Anderson's teeth remained in place. "That's pretty strange," he said. "I mean, to talk about resenting someone for being alive."

"It's all relative," Elliot said. "They might think, 'Why should he be alive when some brother of mine isn't?' Or they might think, 'Why should he be alive when I'm not?'"

"Oh," Anderson said.

"You see?" Elliot said. Facing Anderson, he took a long step backward.

"All relative."

"Yes," Anderson said.

"That's so often true, isn't it?" Elliot asked. "Values are often relative."

"Yes," Anderson said. Elliot was relieved to see that he had stopped smiling.

ROBERT STONE • 511

"I've hardly slept, you know," Elliot told Professor Anderson. "Hardly at all. All night. I've been drinking."

"Oh," Anderson said. He licked his lips in the mouth of the mask. "You should get some rest."

"You're right," Elliot said.

"Well," Anderson said, "got to go now."

Elliot thought he sounded a little thick in the tongue. A little slow in the jaw.

"It's a nice day," Elliot said, wanting now to be agreeable.

"It's great," Anderson said, shuffling on his skis.

"Have a nice day," Elliot said.

"Yes," Anderson said, and pushed off.

Elliot rested the shotgun across his shoulders and watched Anderson withdraw through the frozen swamp. It was in fact a nice day, but Elliot took no comfort in the weather. He missed night and the falling snow.

As he walked back toward his house, he realized that now there would be whole days to get through, running before the antic energy of whiskey.

The whiskey would drive him until he dropped. He shook his head in regret. "It's a revolution," he said aloud. He imagined himself talking to his wife.

Getting drunk was an insurrection, a revolution—a bad one. There would be outsize bogus emotions. There would be petty moral blackmail and cheap remorse. He had said dreadful things to his wife. He had bullied Anderson with his violence and unhappiness, and Anderson would not forgive him. There would be damn little justice and no mercy.

Nearly to the house, he was startled by the desperate feathered drumming of a pheasant's rush. He froze, and out of instinct brought the gun up in the direction of the sound. When he saw the bird break from its cover and take wing, he tracked it, took a breath, and fired once. The bird was a little flash of opulent color against the bright-blue sky. Elliot felt himself flying for a moment. The shot missed.

Lowering the gun, he remembered the deer shells he had loaded. A hit with the concentrated shot would have pulverized the bird, and he was glad he had missed. He wished no harm to any creature. Then he thought of himself wishing no harm to any creature and began to feel fond and sorry for himself. As soon as he grew aware of the emotion he was indulging, he suppressed it. Pissing and moaning, mourning and weeping, that was the nature of the drug.

The shot echoed from the distant hills. Smoke hung in the air. He turned and looked behind him and saw, far away across the pasture, the tiny blue-and-red figure of Professor Anderson motionless against the snow. Then Elliot turned again toward his house and took a few labored steps and looked up to see his wife at the bedroom window. She stood perfectly still, and the morning sun lit her nakedness. He stopped where he was. She had
512 • HELPING

heard the shot and run to the window. What had she thought to see? Burnt rags and blood on the snow. How relieved was she now? How disappointed?

Elliot thought he could feel his wife trembling at the window. She was hugging herself. Her hands clasped her shoulders. Elliot took his snow goggles off and shaded his eyes with his hand. He stood in the field staring.

The length of the gun was between them, he thought. Somehow she had got out in front of it, to the wrong side of the wire. If he looked long enough he would find everything out there. He would find himself down the sight.

How beautiful she is, he thought. The effect was striking. The window was so clear because he had washed it himself, with vinegar. At the best of times he was a difficult, fussy man.

Elliot began to hope for forgiveness. He leaned the shotgun on his forearm and raised his left hand and waved to her. Show a hand, he thought.

Please just show a hand.

He was cold, but it had got light. He wanted no more than the gesture.

It seemed to him that he could build another day on it. Another day was all you needed. He raised his hand higher and waited.

M a s t e r a n d M a n

by Leo Tolstoy

Introduced by Ron Hansen

WITH
WAR AND PEACE, ANNA KAKENINA,
AND "THE DEATH OF IVAN

Ilych," "Master and Man" is generally considered one of Leo Tolstoy's masterpieces, though one would never guess that from his diary entries about it.

"I have now written the rough draft of a not very interesting story," he initially noted, "but it helped me to while away the time." Weeks later while further revising it he wrote, "Don't know whether it is good. Very insignificant." Still later he was concerned that the content was "feeble" and that "it is no good. No character—neither the one nor the other." Even after a favorite editor accepted "Master and Man," Tolstoy was so pained about his failure with it that he wrote a friend, "I have sinned with the story I sent off to
The Northern Messenger.
I write 'I have sinned' because I am ashamed to have wasted my time on such stuff."

Written in the fall of 1894 and fully revised thirteen times before he finally surrendered it to publication in 1895, the story is set some twenty years earlier in order to give it the flavor of a legend or folk tale. "
Khozyain
i rabotnik,"
its Russian title, could be translated literally as "Householder and Laborer" but for the story's Christian underpinnings, which insist on the terms of the Gospels, where Jesus is often referred to as Master and humanity in general is the subject of his parables. And a parable "Master and Man"

surely is, a highly metaphoric but accessible tale of common life whose purpose is the spiritual conversion of its audience.

We miss, in our English translations, the high-flown historical tone of the first pages gradually giving way to a plainer ingenuous style and the urgency of the present tense. We miss, too, the significance of the names. The second guild merchant Vassili Brekhunoffs last name is from the Russian term for a braggart or liar, his village is Kresti, the Crosses, and Nikita, of course, must have been christened in honor of Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century Turkish bishop and wonderworker whose cult provided the basis for our Santa Claus. Like Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," with which Tolstoy was familiar, "Master and Man" features a haughty employer who feels only contempt for his lowly hired hand but finally has his worldview upset as he learns how to live and to love.

When Leo Tolstoy was first famous at twenty-nine, Ivan Turgenev characterized him as a "poet, Calvinist, fanatic, aristocrat." At age sixty-six, when he wrote "Master and Man," Count Tolstoy was changed only in having given up Calvinism for a fanatical Christian religion wholly his own and having forfeited a great deal of his wealth and prestige in order to live, to his mind, the holy life of a
muzhik,
or peasant.

At fifty-five he'd written, in
What I Believe,
that he'd been from the age of fifteen to fifty a Nihilist, one who has no religious beliefs.

INTRODUCTION BY RON HANSEN - 515

Five years ago I began to believe in the teaching of Jesus Christ, and my life was suddenly changed. I ceased to care for all that I had formerly desired, and began to long for what I had once cared nothing for. What had before seemed good, seemed bad, and what had seemed bad, now seemed good. That happened to me which might happen to a man, who, having left his home on business, should suddenly realize that the business was unnecessary and should go home again.

Adopting a metaphor that he would take up again in his great short story, Tolstoy wrote still later in
What I Believe
of the conflicting urges in his own psychology at the time of his religious conversion: I am lost in a snowstorm. One of my companions assures me that he sees lights in the distance and that there is a village. But it is only a delusion, which we believe because we wish to do so. We have searched for those lights and cannot find them. Another comrade goes looking about in the snow, and at last he reaches the road, and cries to us, "Do not go on, the lights you see are in your own fancy; you will but wander about and perish.

Here is the road, I am standing on it, and it will lead us to safety." It is very little. While we believed in the lights that shone only in our bewildered eyes we foresaw ourselves in the village, in a warm hut, safe and at rest. Now we have nothing but the hard road. But if we follow the false lights we must surely perish: if we follow the road, we shall surely be saved.

"Master and Man" can be read as a fictional elaboration of that metaphor, positing, in Brekhunoff, Tolstoy's self-portrait of pride, independence, waywardness, and death and, in Nikita, his hoped-for future self of simplicity, participation, certitude, and the firm road to life everlasting.

Brekhunoff fancies himself formidable and self-sufficient, but in crisis he's hapless, selfish, and lost, a church elder whose religious feelings have been a sham, a scheming businessman whose intrigues are useless in the wilds.

Nikita has no illusions about himself. Wholly lacking in possessions, importance, or aspirations, scorned as an "old fool," a drunkard, and cuckold, Nikita is free to be affectionate, genuine, humble, in harmony with nature, faithful to God, and unafraid of death. Tolstoy's own fierce struggle for human integrity and religious consolation is given form in these hugely different men who ultimately find and heed the same life force.

The plot is wonderfully simple. Merchant and hired man head off for a village but so often get lost in a harrowing snowstorm that they have to wait out the night in their sledge. Brekhunoff selfishly tries to flee on the horse, but fate brings him back to the freezing Nikita. Brekhunoffs first impulse is to protect Nikita from the cold as he would any of his properties, but when he offers his heated body to the old peasant and feels Nikita reviving beneath him, Brekhunoff is gradually changed. "Then he began to think about his money, his store, his house, his sales and purchases, and 516 • MASTER AND MAN

Mironoffs millions. He could not understand how that man whom men called Vassili Brekhunoff could bear to interest himself in such things as he did." Earlier he'd felt "to live"
(zhit
') was "to acquire"
(nazhit'),
but as Brekhunoff selflessly sacrifices himself for Nikita, he is fulfilled by Christ's gospel message that " 'Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.'"

Tolstoy annihilated a great deal of fiction for me with "Master and Man."

Everything I'd been reading up till then seemed petty and unimportant. Like Brekhunoff I could not understand how I could bear to interest myself in such things as I did. It was in the seventies, in winter; I was a first-year graduate student at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, and fat flakes of snow were softly falling as I hiked the two miles to Vance Bourjaily's afternoon class on Tolstoy's masterpieces. And as I hunched forward in a Russian cold with Tolstoy's story in my head, I felt challenged to be the kind of writer he was but also haunted by the fear that my standard was now too high.

And so it was for Tolstoy, too. Except for a handful of fables and the flawed novel
Resurrection,
"Master and Man" was the last fictional work Leo Tolstoy would publish. Two years after the story appeared, he argued in
What Is Art?
that the highest form of art was religious and, under that aesthetic, condemned his own great works of fiction up to that point as failures.

He feuded with his wife, Sofya, and his family of thirteen children over their life of ease on his grand estate at Yasnaya Polyana and in accordance with the faith he professed tried to give away all he owned and to be more and more like a peasant. At last, in late October 1910, Tolstoy took flight from his estate hoping to find refuge and religious consolation in an eastern monastery, and he was on his way there when he died of pneumonia in the railroad station in Astapovo, Riazan, at the age of eighty-two.

Tolstoy's dying must have seemed to him a good deal like Nikita's—not at home, but with
ikons
and candles, his wife left behind but forgiven, his focus wholly on "that other life which had been growing more and more familiar and alluring." Whether Tolstoy was disillusioned or found what he expected, we shall all soon know.

M a s t e r and M a n

Leo Tolstoy

Translated by Constance Carnett and C. I. Hogarth

I

It was in the seventies, the day after the feast of Saint Nicholas in the winter. There had been a festival in the parish, and the church sexton, Vassili Andreitch Brekhunoff (who was also a merchant of the second guild), had been forced to remain at home, since not only was his presence necessary at the church, but he had been receiving and entertaining some of his friends and relations. Now, however, the last of his guests had departed, and he was able to get himself ready to visit a neighbouring landowner, for the purpose of buying some timber for which he had long been in treaty. He was in a hurry to be off, lest rival buyers from the town should deprive him of this eligible bargain. The only reason why the young landowner had asked ten thousand roubles for the timber was that Vassili Andreitch had offered him seven—and seven represented about a third of its value. Perhaps Vassili might have gone on haggling still further (for the wood was in his own district, and there was a recognized agreement between the local merchants and himself that one merchant should not bid against another in the same district), were it not that he had heard that the Government forest contractors were also thinking of coming to treat for the Goviatchkinsky timber, and therefore he had better make up his mind to go at once and clinch the matter. So, as soon as ever the festival was over, he took seven hundred roubles of his own out of the strong-box, added to them two thousand three hundred more out of the church funds which he had by him (making three thousand in all), and counted them carefully. Then he placed them in his pocket-book and got ready to go.