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  Chertkov ordered that the windows of Ivan’s cottage be boarded up from inside. Though, with every hour, Leo Tolstoy was growing weaker, his determination not to let his wife come near him never faltered. While reporters came and went from the Pullman cars, where the Countess was giving interviews, Sasha, Makovitsky and Chertkov kept round-the-clock guard at the door of the cottage. Anna Borisovna worked tirelessly in the kitchen, making soups and vegetable stews bulked out with barley, to feed the exhausted household.

  Then, on the morning of 4th November, after Ivan Ozolin had despatched the early train to Smolensk, he turned to go back to his cottage and saw the unmistakable figure of Countess Tolstoy making her way towards his door. Behind her came several press reporters, some of them carrying cameras. Ivan Ozolin followed.

  Countess Tolstoy beat on the front door of the cottage with her fists. ‘Sasha!’ she cried. ‘Let me in!’

  Ivan couldn’t hear whether any reply came from inside. He watched the Countess lay her head against the door. ‘Open up!’ she wailed. ‘Have pity, Sasha! Let people at least believe I’ve been with him!’

  Still the door didn’t move. The photographers jostled to get pictures of Countess Tolstoy begging to see her dying husband and being refused. But then Ivan saw his wife, who had been pegging out washing in the vegetable garden, approach the distraught woman and take her arm and lead her gently round towards the back of the house.

  Anna Borisovna had a back-door key. The posse of journalists followed the two women, clumping along the little path beside the privy. And it was at this moment that Ivan Ozolin discovered the role that destiny had kept up its sleeve: he was going to be Leo Tolstoy’s bodyguard!

  He ran to the front door. His hands were shaking as he let himself in. He called out to Chertkov and Makovitsky: ‘She’s coming in the back door! My wife has a key!’

  The two men rushed out into the hallway, but Ivan was the first at the door. He caught a momentary glimpse of his wife, with the Countess at her shoulder. He just had time to execute a formal bow before he slammed his weight against the door to close it in their faces. Chertkov and Makovitsky now joined him to hold the door shut. Ivan reached up and slid an iron bolt into its housing. He heard his wife crying out: ‘This isn’t fair! You men! We slave for you and you keep us out of your hearts!’ He could hear the growl of the pressmen, pushing and questioning outside in the cold day.

  ‘Well done, Ozolin,’ said Chertkov.

  ‘Yes, well done,’ said Makovitsky. ‘You may have saved his life.’

  That night, as they lay on their hard floor, trying to sleep, Anna said: ‘Countess Tolstoy says he’s only doing this to draw attention to himself.’

  ‘What?’ said Ivan. ‘Dying, d’you mean? I must try that some time when I want to get your attention.’

  She turned away from him. She tugged a cushion under her shoulder.

  He was up early the following day for the Tula train. A priest with an impressive beard alighted from the train and came towards him. ‘I’m here to save Tolstoy’s soul,’ he said. ‘Am I in the right place?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ivan. ‘I thought Leo Tolstoy had been excommunicated many years ago.’

  The priest was old but had lively, glittering eyes. ‘The Church can punish,’ he said, ‘but it can also forgive.’

  ‘Follow me,’ said Ivan Ozolin. Then he added: ‘My wife is a church-goer, but I am … well, I think I’m nothing. I’m just a stationmaster.’

  The priest didn’t smile. As they crossed the tracks, he said: ‘To be a stationmaster is not enough for a man’s soul.’

  ‘Erm … well, I don’t know,’ said Ivan Ozolin. ‘I’ve thought a lot about that. You see, I think I bring quite a fair bit of gladness to the world – just by existing. When people on the trains catch sight of me in my uniform, on the freezing platforms, they say to themselves: “Look at that poor idiot, with his red and green flags. At least we’re not stuck in this nowhere of Astapovo! We have destinations!”’

  ‘But you have none,’ said the priest.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Ozolin. ‘I have one. I understand it now. My destination is here.’

  The priest fared no better than Countess Tolstoy. Nobody inside the cottage would open the door to him and he had to be housed in the Pullman with, by now, so many people aboard the two carriages that the luggage racks were being used as hammocks and the on-board commode was full to overflowing.

  And, in the iron bed in Ivan Ozolin’s living room, the last hours of Tolstoy’s life began to slip slowly by. His temperature wavered between 102.5 and 104. He was unconscious most of the time, yet bouts of hiccuping still tormented him. It grew very dark in the room, owing to a shortage of candles. In this fetid darkness, Ivan Ozolin was asked to come and prop up the bed itself, where one of the bolts had sheered off, under the weight of ‘holy family’ constantly sitting or leaning on the mattress. All he could find to use was a pile of bricks and he inserted these laboriously one by one, as the patient cried out in his sleep. Ice from the bricks melted and formed a pool on the floor, not far from where the chamber pot had been placed. Ivan snapped out a handkerchief and hastily mopped up the ice-water. There were, he thought, confusions enough in everybody’s hearts without adding others of a domestic nature.

  ‘When will it be over?’ Anna Borisovna asked for the third or fourth time. ‘When will we be free?’

  ‘When he decides,’ replied Ivan breezily. ‘Writers make up their own endings.’

  It came at last. On the early morning of Sunday November 7th, Countess Tolstoy was permitted to come into the sickroom – but not to approach the bed. She sat in a rocking chair, vigorously rocking and praying, with her older children clustered round her, scowling in the half-light. Sasha begged her to rock and pray more quietly, in case the patient suddenly awoke to find her there. But the patient heard nothing. And at 6.05 Dushan Makovitsky noted the final cessation of Tolstoy’s breath.

  The children wept – not only Sasha, but the grumpy ones as well. Vladimir Chertkov tried not to weep, but was unable to hold back his tears. Dr Makovitsky closed the dead man’s eyes and folded his arms across his chest. The Countess lay her head on the blood-stained pillow and howled.

  And then the great cavalcade began slowly to depart from Astapovo. As the reporters queued up at Dmitri’s office to send their last messages, an engine was once again joined to the Pullman cars and the locomotive took the body of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy away. To wave off the Pullman with his green flag, Ivan had to push through a pungent throng of peasants, present to the last, singing ‘Eternal Memory’, with their arms raised in a passionate farewell and their faces blank with sorrow.

  When the train had finally gone, Ivan Ozolin felt very tired and yet strangely triumphant, as though he himself had achieved victory over something that had always eluded him. He wanted to savour this victory for a little while, so he went into the now deserted station buffet and ordered a tot of vodka and a slice of cinnamon cake and sat at one of the tables with his eyes closed and his heart beating with a steady and beautiful rhythm. He knew there were many tasks still to be done; he shouldn’t remain sitting like this for long, but he felt so unbelievably elated and happy that it was tempting to order a second vodka and a second slice of cake …

  He was on his third vodka and his third slice when Dmitri came into the buffet with a telegram. ‘I just took this down,’ said Dmitri, whose habitually red face, Ivan noticed, looked suddenly pale. ‘It’s from your wife.’

  Ivan Ozolin reached up and took the telegram and read: Women, too, have the right to escape. I am leaving you, Ivan Andreyevich. I hope to start a flower shop in Tula. Please do not follow me. Signed: Your unhappy wife, Anna Borisovna Ozolina.

  Ivan re-read this message several times, while Dmitri stood by him, with his arms hanging limply by his sides.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ said Dmitri at last.

  ‘Well,’ said Ivan, ‘she was always fond of flowers, especially
violets.’

  ‘But why would she leave you, Ivan?’

  ‘Because she’s tired of my jokes. I don’t blame her at all.’

  Dmitri sat down. He yawned. He said in a melancholy voice that History had come to them and taken up residence and was now leaving again. He asked Ivan what he planned to do once they found themselves quite alone once more.

  Ivan thought about this question for a long time and then he said, ‘The woods can look very beautiful at this time of year. I thought I might go mushroom picking.’

  The Nettle Pit

  JONATHAN COE was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include The Rotters’ Club, The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The House of Sleep and What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. His latest novel is The Rain Before it Falls (2007).

  ‘CHEATING IS AN INTERESTING CONCEPT, don’t you think?’ said Chris.

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Max.

  Caroline stood against the kitchen sink and watched the two men talking. Even from this seemingly insignificant exchange, she felt that she could detect a world of difference between them. Chris was a skilled and attractive conversationalist: however small the subject, he would approach it enquiringly, quizzically, endeavouring always to penetrate to the truth and confident that he would get there. Max was perpetually nervous and uncertain – nervous even now, in conversation with the man who was (or so he liked to tell everyone, including himself) his oldest and closest friend. It made her wonder – not for the first time on this holiday – exactly why the fondness between these two men had endured for so long.

  ‘What I mean is, as adults, we don’t talk about cheating much, do we?’

  ‘You can cheat on your wife,’ said Max, perhaps a touch too wistfully.

  ‘That’s the obvious exception,’ Chris conceded. ‘But otherwise – the concept seems to disappear, doesn’t it, some time around teenagerhood? I mean, in football, you talk of players fouling each other, but not cheating. Athletes take performance-enhancing drugs but when it’s reported on the news the newsreader doesn’t say that so and so’s been caught cheating. And yet, for little kids, it’s an incredibly important concept.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry—’ Max began.

  ‘No, I’m not talking about today,’ said Chris. ‘Forget about it. It’s no big deal.’

  Earlier that afternoon Max’s daughter Lucy had been involved in a fierce and tearful argument with Chris’s youngest, Sara, over alleged cheating during a game of French cricket. They had been playing on the huge expanse of lawn at the front of the house and their screams of reprimand and denial had been heard all over the farm, bringing members of both families running from every direction. The two girls had not spoken to each other since. Even now they were sitting at opposite ends of the farmhouse, one of them frowning over her Nintendo DS, the other flicking through the TV channels, struggling to find anything acceptable to watch on Irish television.

  Chris continued: ‘Is Lucy curious about money yet?’

  ‘Not really. We give her a pound every week. She puts it in a piggy bank.’

  ‘Yes, but does she ever ask you where the money comes from in the first place? How banks work, and that sort of thing.’

  ‘She’s only seven,’ said Max.

  ‘Mm. Well, Joe’s getting pretty interested in all that stuff. He was asking me for a crash course in economics today.’

  Yes, he would be, Max thought. At the age of eight and a half, Joe was already starting to manifest his father’s omnivorous, bright-eyed curiosity, while Lucy, only one year younger, seemed content to exist in a world of her own, composed almost entirely of fantasy elements: a world of dolls and pixies, kittens and hamsters, cuddly toys and benign enchantments. He was trying not to worry about it too much, or to feel resentment.

  ‘So I told him a little bit about investment banking. You know, just the basics. I told him that these days, when you said that someone was a banker, it doesn’t mean that he sits behind a counter and cashes cheques for customers all day. I told him that a real banker never comes into contact with money at all. I told him that most of the money in the world nowadays doesn’t exist in any tangible form anyway, not even as bits of paper with promises written on them. So he said to me, “But what does a banker do, Dad?” So I explained that a lot of modern banking is based on physics. That’s where the concept of leverage comes from. And then of course he asked me what leverage was. So I told him that … Well, you can probably imagine what I told him.’

  Max nodded, even though he couldn’t, in fact, imagine what Chris would have told him. Caroline, who knew her husband well (too well) after all this time, saw the nod and recognised it for the bluff that it was. The little private smile she offered to the kitchen floor was tinged with sadness.

  ‘I told him that a lot of modern banking consists of borrowing money – money that isn’t your own – and finding somewhere to reinvest it at a higher rate of return than you’re giving to the person you’re borrowing it from. And when I told him that, Joe thought about it for a while, and said this very interesting thing: “So bankers,” he said, “are really just people who make a lot of money by cheating”.’

  Max smiled appraisingly. ‘Not a bad definition.’

  ‘It isn’t, is it? Because it brings a different moral perspective to bear on things. A child’s perspective. What the banking community does isn’t illegal – at least, most of the time. But it does stick in people’s throats, and that’s why. At the back of our minds we still have unspoken rules about what’s fair and what isn’t. And what they do isn’t fair. It’s what children would call cheating.’

  Max was still thinking about this conversation later that night, when he and Caroline were lying in bed together, up in the attic bedroom, both on the point of falling asleep.

  ‘I didn’t think Chris would have gone for all that “out of the mouths of babes” stuff,’ he said. ‘Bit too cute for him, I would have thought.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Caroline, non-commitally.

  Max waited for her to say more, but there was only silence between them; part of a larger, magical near-silence which hung over the whole of this coastline. If he listened closely, he could just about hear the noise of waves breaking gently on the strand, about half a mile away.

  ‘Close, aren’t they?’ he prompted.

  ‘Who?’ Caroline murmured through her encroaching cloud of sleep.

  ‘Chris and Joe. They spend a lot of time together.’

  ‘Mmm. Well, I suppose that’s what fathers and sons do.’

  She rolled over slowly and lay flat on her back. Max knew this meant that she was almost asleep now, and conversation was over. He reached out and took her hand. He held on to her hand and looked up at the restless clouds through the bedroom skylight until he heard her breathing become slower and more regular. When she was fully asleep, he gently let go and turned away from her. They had not made love since Lucy was conceived, almost eight years ago.

  When they prepared for their walk the next morning, the skies were grey and the estuary tide was low.

  The two wives would be staying behind to prepare lunch. Pointedly sporting a plastic apron as her badge of domestic drudgery, Caroline came out onto the lawn to wave the party off, but before they all struck off through the fields and down the path towards the water’s edge, Lucy took her parents to one side.

  ‘Come and see this,’ she said.

  She clasped Max’s hand and led him across the wide expanse of lawn towards the hedgerow which marked the boundary of the farmland. Out of the hedge grew a young yew tree, with a single, gnarled branch stretching out back towards the lawn. A piece of knotted rope hung from the branch and, underneath it, the earth had been scooped out to form a deep basin, now choked and brimming with a dense thicket of stinging nettles.

  ‘Wow,’ said Max. ‘That looks nasty.’

  ‘If you fell in there,’ said Lucy, ‘would you have to be tak
en to hospital?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Max. ‘But it would really hurt.’

  Caroline said: ‘Not a very good place to put a rope, really. I don’t think you’d better do any swinging on that.’

  ‘But that’s our game,’ said a boy’s breathless voice behind them.

  They turned round to see that Joe had run over to join them. His father was following.

  ‘What game would that be?’ Caroline asked.

  ‘It’s a dare game,’ Lucy explained. ‘You have to get on the rope and then the others push you and then you have to swing across, like, ten times.’

  ‘I see,’ said Chris, in a tone of resigned understanding. ‘Somehow this sounds like one of your ideas, Joe.’

  ‘It was, but everybody wants to do it,’ his son insisted.

  ‘Well, I don’t think you’d better.’

  ‘What would you do’, Caroline asked, ‘if one of you fell in there? The stinging would be terrible. It would be all over your body.’

  ‘That’s the point of the game,’ said Joe, with the triumph of one stating the obvious.

  ‘There are lots of dock leaves,’ said Lucy. ‘So if you fell in you could make yourself better.’

  ‘Five words,’ said Caroline. ‘No, no, no, no, no.’

  Joe let out a sigh of resignation and turned away. But he was not given to brooding on life’s disappointments, and his enquiring mind was never at rest for long. As they headed down towards the estuary path, Caroline could hear him asking his father why it was that dock leaves always grew in proximity to stinging nettles, and she could hear his father replying – as always – with a concise, informed explanation. Her eyes followed them as their figures receded, and as Joe’s two sisters ran and caught up with them: the bodies of father and son, so alike already in shape and bearing despite the years between them, and the eager, thronging daughters – the three children clustered around their father, drawn together into an inseparable group by blood and mutual affection and above all their unflinching regard for him. And she watched Max and Lucy following them down the same path: hand in hand, yes, but somehow sundered – some force intervening, holding them apart – and sundered in a way that she herself recognised, from personal experience. For an instant, in the odd paradox of their closeness and separation, she saw an emblem of her own relationship with Max. A shaft of keen, indefinable regret pierced her.