The American Lover Read online

  Dmitri wiped a hand across his sweating brow. ‘Ivan,’ he said, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about!’

  ‘Oh, the poor man . . .’ murmured Ivan. ‘He said he’ll die, if he catches sight of her!’

  ‘What? Who will die?’

  ‘Count Tolstoy. He’s here, Dmitri.’

  ‘Here? What d’you mean? Here, where?’

  ‘In my bed. No, keep your hair on, it isn’t one of my jests. I swear. Leo Tolstoy is here, in the bed of the stationmaster of Astapovo! Now, give me back the telegram. I’d better give somebody this news.’

  When Ivan Ozolin went into the dark living room of the cottage, he saw by the soft candlelight a scene that reminded him of a religious picture. Leo Tolstoy was lying, propped up on the white pillows, with his white hair and beard fanning out from his face like a frosty halo. Leaning towards him, one on either side of him, were his daughter Sasha and his friend and faithful secretary, Vladimir Chertkov. Their heads rested tenderly against Tolstoy’s shoulders. They stroked his hands, clasping the embroidered cushion. Sasha’s dark hair was loose and spread over her blue blouse. The Madonna, thought Ivan. The Madonna (just a little plump) with St John, at the foot of the cross . . .

  Though he hesitated to interrupt this scene of ador­ation – particularly with news he imagined would be so unwelcome – he knew that he had to warn someone about the arrival of the Countess. Fortunately, when Tolstoy saw him come in, he said: ‘Oh, my friends, here is the good man, Ivan Andreyevich Ozolin, who has been so very kind to us. Come here, Stationmaster, and let me introduce you to my most beloved friend, Vladimir Chertkov.’

  Chertkov stood up and Ivan Ozolin shook his hand. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done,’ Chertkov said. ‘We fervently hope the Count will soon be well enough to travel onwards, but in the meantime . . .’

  ‘Sir,’ said Ivan, ‘anything we’ve been able to do for Count Tolstoy . . . it’s done from deep in our hearts. But I wonder whether I might have a word with you in private?’

  Chertkov followed Ivan out into the cold, closing the door behind them, and they walked a little way from the window of the living room and stood by the fence that bordered the vegetable garden. Looking distractedly down at the carrots, onions and leeks in their futile rows, Ivan passed the telegram to Chertkov and heard his gasp of horror as he took in the news.

  ‘Disaster!’ said Chertkov. ‘God in heaven, how could she have known?’

  Ivan shook his head. ‘I asked my Telegraph man, Dmitri Panin, if anything had gone from here and he swore—’

  ‘No, no. I’m not suggesting you were in any way . . . Oh, but you can’t know, Stationmaster, what a fiend that woman is! Mad with jealousy. Prying among the Count’s papers and diaries day and night. Threatening suicide. Never giving him any peace . . . And now . . . This is going to kill him!’

  At this moment Dr Dushan Makovitsky came over the tracks, from where he’d been taking breakfast in the small buffet which served dry little meals to the few travellers who boarded or left trains at Astapovo. When news of the arrival of the Countess was conveyed to Makovitsky, he remained calm. ‘The solution is simple,’ he said. ‘We’ll say nothing to Leo Nikolayevich. We’ll just close the doors to the cottage – front and back – we’ll close them and lock them and neither Countess Tolstoy nor any of her other children will be allowed to enter.’

  ‘So we’re going to be locked in?’ said Anna Borisovna to Ivan that afternoon, as she toiled over her bread baking. ‘This is getting stupid. We’ve given up our bed. Now, we’re going to be prisoners, are we?’

  Ivan looked at his wife. He noticed, as if for the first time, how grey and straggly her hair appeared. He wondered how it would look – and how he would cope with the way it looked – when she was old.

  ‘Well, or you could get on a train and leave, Anna Borisovna,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Countess Tolstoy would let you take her private Pullman back to Tula?’

  ‘That’s not funny,’ said Anna Borisovna. ‘Nothing you say is funny any more.’

  Ivan Ozolin smiled. ‘Jokes need the right audiences,’ he said. ‘A joke is a contract with another human being.’

  As Anna turned away from him, they both heard a new sound coming from next door, the sound of hiccups. They heard Tolstoy cry out for Chertkov and then for Makovitsky. They waited. The hiccups continued, very loud. Tolstoy now called out for Sasha, but no consoling voice was heard.

  ‘They must be asleep,’ said Ivan. ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘Well, and that’s another thing,’ hissed Anna. ‘Just where in the world are all these new arrivals going to be housed? Are you expecting them to sleep under the Telegraph counter with Dmitri?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ivan. ‘I was thinking that would be convenient. That way they’re on hand to send telegrams to the Press bureaus of the world.’

  Anna Borisovna seized a dishcloth covering a bowl of yeast and snapped it in her husband’s face, stinging his cheek. He put his hand to his face. He wanted to retaliate by pulling her dishevelled hair, pulling it until it hurt, but he stopped himself. He didn’t want to become the kind of pig who beat his wife. He didn’t want to become a pig at all. He was enjoying his role as the ‘saviour’ of Leo Tolstoy’s life.

  He was on the platform, with Sasha and Dr Makovitsky, when the gleaming Pullman arrived. Once Countess Tolstoy and her four eldest children had descended and had been led into the ladies’ waiting room by Sasha, Ivan Ozolin, as instructed by Chertkov, told the driver of the Pullman to shunt the two carriages into the siding running parallel with the Dankovo track and leave them there.

  He then went into the waiting room. He found the Countess weeping in Sasha’s arms and the other grown-up children standing around with faces set in expressions of grumpy disdain. When the Countess raised her head to acknowledge his presence, he saw a fleshy face, every part of which appeared swollen, whether by grief or malady or an excess of cream cakes, he was unable to say.

  ‘So it’s you!’ she said, flinging out an accusing gloved finger. ‘It’s you who are hiding him!’

  ‘Hush, Mama,’ said Sasha.

  ‘You should know,’ said the Countess to Ivan, ‘that wherever my husband goes, I go too. If he’s in your bed, then that is where I am going to sleep!’

  She broke again into a storm of weeping, which calmed only a little when Anna Borisovna came into the waiting room with a tray of hot tea and some slices of cinnamon cake, which everybody fell upon. It was now near to midnight. Dr Makovitsky drew Ivan aside.

  ‘Are the Pullman cars staying here?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Ivan was able to say. ‘But I think the train company is going to levy a charge.’

  ‘Friend,’ said Makovitsky, ‘in any crisis, there are always roubles to pay.’

  All night, Leo Tolstoy coughed and hiccupped. At around three o’clock, Sasha woke Anna and Ivan and asked if some infusion could be made to relieve these sufferings.

  They staggered, exhausted, to the kitchen and put water on to boil and took down jars of dried sage and comfrey and cloves.

  ‘How much longer is this going to go on?’ asked Anna. ‘Sleeping on the floor makes my bones ache.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ivan, ‘but think how good it is for the posture!’

  ‘That’s another thing about your jokes that I can’t stand,’ said Anna Borisovna. ‘They’re always founded upon lies.’

  Ivan smiled. He began asking himself whether this were true or not, but was too tired to be able to decide.

  He carried the infusion to the living room, which was very dark, the candles having burned low. He laid the jug down on the cluttered night table. Vladimir Chertkov, in his nightshirt, was lying across the end of Tolstoy’s bed. Dr Makovitsky was taking the old man’s pulse. The great writer was curled up in the bed, seeming small like a child. Ivan glimpsed blood on his pillow.

  ‘Escape . . .’ he was heard to murmur once again. ‘I must escape . . .’

  Ivan Ozolin rose earl
y to see in the 7.12 from Moscow via Tula to Dankovo.

  In the normal way, perhaps two or three passengers got off, or the train crew changed here. But this morning, every single door all the way down the train opened and fifty or sixty people disembarked.

  Ivan Ozolin stared at this crowd. Perhaps he’d known they’d come, eventually, that the life of Leo Tolstoy was as precious to the people of his country as the earth itself and that, if he was going to die, they would want some part in his dying. He could see straight away that many of the arrivals were newsmen with cameras and as they milled around on the platform – looking in vain for some grand Station Hotel or the presence of a commodious Telegraph office – he felt himself surrender to them, to the grand circus that was accumulating at Astapovo. He wanted to embrace them, to say, ‘You were right to come! Life is uneventful, my friends! Don’t I know it! But here’s an event: the dying Tolstoy trying to keep his wife at bay! So come and get your bit of it and remember for ever whatever you think it teaches you.’

  Now, the two waiting rooms, the station buffet, the Pullman cars and the freezing anteroom that adjoined Dmitri Panin’s Telegraph office were crammed with reporters, all trying to buy food, send messages, write copy and above all to catch a glimpse of the writer, as he lay gasping and hiccupping in Ivan Ozolin’s iron bed. Dmitri, made faint by cigarette smoke, noise and rudeness, struggled on at his post.

  To ease his friend’s lot, Ivan Ozolin laboriously wrote out a notice, which he pinned above Dmitri’s small counter. It read: Your Telegraph Operator has not read the works of L. N. Tolstoy, so please do not waste time by asking him any questions about them. Signed: I. A. Ozolin, Stationmaster.

  More journalists arrived by every train. And then from across the surrounding countryside, as the news spread, peasant farmers, blacksmiths, carpenters, laundresses, wheelwrights, slaughterers, seamstresses, milkmaids and bricklayers began to converge on Astapovo. These last slept out in the open, or in hay barns, made fires in the fields, seeming not to mind cold or hunger. A cohort of sausage-makers did a brisk trade. Potatoes were dug up by hand and roasted in the fires. Snatches of the patriotic song ‘Eternal Memory’ floated out across the dark earth. Normal existence was put to one side. Astapovo was where life had paused.

  Ivan felt immoderately proud of this, as though he himself had been responsible for organising it. He hoped – foolishly, he knew – that Tanya Trepova might arrive here and, when she saw him at the centre of this altered world, discover that she had feelings for him far stronger than those she had expressed on their cycling outing.

  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 dispatched 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 sometime 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.’

  ‘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 other men’s souls – 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’re fortunate compared to him. 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. I am the guardian of Count Tolstoy’s dying wish.’

  ‘Is that not a rather pretentious thing to say?’

  ‘It may be,’ said Ivan. ‘But for once I am not joking.’

  The priest – despite his beard and headdress, which gave him such gravitas and authority – 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.

  This last inconvenience occasioned so many complaints that Ivan took upon himself the unsavoury task of emptying it. He lugged the great stinking drum as far as the outskirts of the woods and tipped the excrement into a ditch, where the benign earth would, in time, absorb it and weeds and grass come to cover it. He found himself smiling as he wondered whether, next season, mushrooms would spring up here. And the thought amused him. This feeling of amusement was so intense that he felt joyful to be alive.

  When he returned to the cottage, Tolstoy’s daughter whispered to him that the last hours of Tolstoy’s life were now slipping by. She told him that his temperature wavered between 102.5 and 104. He was unconscious most of the t
ime, yet bouts of hiccupping still tormented him.

  It had grown very dark in the room, owing to a shortage of candles. In this foetid darkness, Sasha asked Ivan to prop up the bed. It seemed that one of the bolts had sheared off under the weight of the ‘holy family’ constantly sitting or leaning on the mattress. All Ivan could find to use was a pile of snow-covered bricks, stacked near the privy, so he brought some of these inside and inserted them 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 7th November, Countess Sonya Andreyevna Tolstoya 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 bloodstained 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 away the body of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. 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.