Jay Parini - The Last Station

‘I have a mild headache, Leo Patrovich. Nothing serious.’

‘Keep well, my boy. You are doing excellent work with Leo Nikolayevich. He has communicated this to Chertkov, who asked me to pass the word along.’

‘Tell Vladimir Grigorevich that I am honored.’

‘I shall. But he also urged me to say that your diaries have not been as detailed as he should have liked. You must remember that it is difficult for him, being cut off. He is hungry for details.’

‘I will try harder,’ I said, though I felt disingenuous. Spying on Tolstoy and his family is a disagreeable activity, and I had quickly taken to making things up or filling Chertkov’s notebooks with long, boring passages in which I meditate on aspects of Tolstoyan thought.

I took a cup of fragrant linden tea to my bed and, for several hours, sat up in my nightdress, the oil lamp burning on the bed table. I continued to study the Inner Chapters of Chuang Tsu, marking passages with a red pencil. At some point I must have fallen asleep. It was past midnight when I realized that I was not alone. Was I dreaming?

‘Masha!’

She put a finger to her lips. I had not turned off the oil lamp, and her brow flickered in the yellow light. Her short hair was parted in the middle and fell straight along either side of her head. It was light as corn silk. Her face was a lovely oval, her eyes steady as she knelt above me on the bed. I could hardly breathe.

‘Masha.’

She sat across my thighs, putting her knees on either side of my legs. They sunk into the mat. She leaned forward slowly. She seemed almost in a trance. As if sleepwalking. Dreaming.

I was afraid of her. What was happening? I put my hands on her narrow shoulders, cupped them in my palms. A flame seemed to burn them as I held her there, almost pushing her away, yet not wanting to. I could not wish for more than was happening to me now. It was a dream, but a dream from which I wanted never to waken.

She was so deliberate, moving over me with a strange, convulsive certainty. A shadow, but palpable. Suddenly her face was close to mine, her lips touching my lips. Our mouths opened into each other, tongues loose and searching. Our teeth touched and clattered like bits of ice.

I breathed her into me, the smell I had come to savor. I drew circles on her back, her neck and shoulders, with moist fingertips. She seemed so terribly slight now, a fantasy, a succuba.

It shouldn’t have taken me by surprise but it did when, casually, she sat upright again and lifted her nightdress, exposing her bare stomach, her thighs. She lifted my nightdress, too, curling her hand around me tightly. I turned my head to the side, the pleasure so intense it bordered on pain.

‘Is this all right, Valya?’

She looked at me with a peculiar frankness, suspended before me, motionless and beautiful as any piece of statuary from the ancient world. It broke my heart to look at her.

I nodded, and she moved forward slowly but firmly, gathering me into her with ease.

She was so warm, so wet, taking me between her soft, white thighs. With astonishing sureness, she rocked forward, then back. A slow, steady rhythm of attraction and repulsion. When I came, too quickly, I felt that my entire body had been sucked into a holy space, that a lively, understandable spirit had filled me, as I had filled it. Valya and Masha had become, if briefly, more than the sum of their parts. I had obtained union, something like the fabled state of bliss spoken of by Plotinus and Porphyry.

Masha lay heavily on me now, breathing slowly, deeply. Then she curled beside me. The bed is small, but we did not require more room.

When I woke, she was still sleeping, her blond hair against the white pillow, the sunlight blowing through the curtains. I could hear birds in the elm by the window, recent arrivals from the Crimea, perhaps. Or from Africa or Siam. They cackled in the tree, and I began to laugh.

‘What are you laughing about, Valya?’

‘The birds,’ I said.

‘Do birds always make you laugh?’

‘Only when you are beside me, Masha. And we have just made love.’

I dug myself as close to her as I could, my bare thighs against hers, our stomachs touching, and I understood that my life could never be the same again.

LETTER TO GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

YASNAYA POLYANA, 9 MAY 1910

My dear Mr Bernard Shaw,

I have received your play The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and witty letter. I have read it with pleasure. I am in full sympathy with its subject.

Your remark that the preaching of righteousness has generally little influence on people and that young men regard as laudable that which is contrary to righteousness is quite correct. It does not, however, follow that such preaching is unnecessary. The reason of the failure is that those who preach do not fulfill what they preach, that is, hypocrisy.

I also cannot agree with what you call your theology. You enter into controversy with that which no thinking person of our time believes or can believe: with a God-creator. And yet you seem to recognize a God who has got definite aims comprehensible to you. ‘To my mind,’ you write, ‘unless we conceive God engaged in a continual struggle to surpass himself as striving at every birth to make a better man than before, we are conceiving nothing better than an omnipotent snob.’

Concerning the rest of what you say about God and about evil, I will repeat the words I said, as you write, about your Man and Superman , namely that the problem about God and evil is too important to be spoken of in jest. And therefore I tell you frankly that I received a very painful impression from the concluding words of your letter: ‘Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?’

Yesterday the new century arrived in Tula.

I refer to the Moscow-Orel automobile race, which destroyed the peacefulness that one has come to expect from provincial life. The horrid machines – black, ugly things that cough and spit, spewing a pitch of smoke out their backs – came streaking past us as we walked on the Kiev road in the bright morning sunlight.

The drivers recognized Tolstoy, who was unmistakable as he leaned on his stick, with his cloud white beard and bristly eyebrows. This is the problem one must deal with should Fame attach itself like a parasite, feeding, draining one’s vital fluids – a frightful prospect that I, happily, shall never have to confront.

The young, Italian-looking men with narrow, cheerful faces and dark mustaches shouted at him, waving their caps, and one of the machines clattered to a halt beside us, frightening Leo Nikolayevich, who shook his head to register disapproval. To make amends, the driver invited us to peer into the mechanism. Leo Nikolayevich is curious about everything. Too much so, I thought, as he peered into the mechanism and flicked a lever with his big finger. The dark machine shook and sputtered, a mess of black, tubular intestines, shiny pistons, whirring belts and fans.

‘I wish you good luck in the race,’ Leo Nikolayevich said, bowing to the driver, who grinned stupidly and bowed even lower.

‘It is our honor, sir, to meet Your Excellency,’ he said. ‘I have read about you in the papers.’

Leo Nikolayevich sighed.

Bulgakov was with us, awestruck as usual. Leo Nikolayevich seems to like him, so I do not interfere. For myself, I avoid the young man whenever possible, though Sofya Andreyevna courts him like a prince, which cannot be a good sign.

Thank goodness I was never young, except in years. Even as a boy, I understood that eternal things are all that count. And I have never wavered in my commitment.