Jay Parini - The Last Station

‘Do you think he’s all right?’ asked Sergey. He, like his sister Tanya, was visiting for a few days, drawn home by the crisis between his parents. They all imagine it’s possible to do something.

‘His eyes looked vacant,’ she said. ‘I think he’s about to have an attack.’

After a few sips of broth, she stood again. ‘I must go to him.’

When she left, Sergey and Tanya exchanged a look of annoyance. Why couldn’t she let the poor man rest?

Their mother reappeared with a ghastly look. ‘Go quickly, Dushan Petrovich! He is unconscious, and mumbling – God knows what is wrong!’ She crossed herself several times and knelt on the floor.

Everyone leaped from his place at the table, following Dushan Petrovich, who had run from the room as soon as he saw the flash of fear in Sofya Andreyevna’s eyes.

The bedroom was dark, though a candle glimmered on the small bed table, its flame nearly extinguished. Leo Nikolayevich lay on the spread, his jaw quivering. He made queer, inarticulate, lowing sounds. Everyone stood by, dumbfounded.

We watched as Dushan Makovitsky undressed and covered him with a wool blanket. The old man’s eyes were closed, but he struggled to talk, his brow contracted, his cheeks blown. He began to work his jaws as though he were chewing.

‘He will probably sleep now,’ Dushan said. ‘You might as well finish your dinner. I’ll stay with him.’

‘No, I’ll stay,’ said Biryukov. This was unexpected. But he feels intensely loyal to the man; for his sake he would endure prison.

‘Call me if there is any change,’ Dushan said. ‘And take his pulse every five minutes.’

We descended quietly into the dining room and resumed our meal. Hardly a word was said. I don’t think we had quite finished dessert when Biryukov came rushing into the room shouting for Dushan Makovitsky.

Once again, we raced upstairs. Leo Nikolayevich had gone into convulsions, though by the time we reached the bedroom they were subsiding. Still, his legs twitched violently and his face appeared distorted by pain; the edges of his lips were drawn upward in a grimace. His fingers opened and closed mechanically like the mandibles of an insect.

Dushan Makovitsky gave orders like a military captain: ‘Hurry! Go down and get hot-water bottles for his feet. We should put a mustard plaster on his calves, too. And coffee! Bring some hot coffee!’

Amid the commotion, Dushan remained cool and dispassionate, a scientist through and through. Sofya Andreyevna stood with her back against the wall, praying, her eyelids red and swollen, half-closed.

Awhile later, covered in plasters and cold packs, Leo Nikolayevich sat up in bed with our help. The worst seemed to be over. He was trying to speak.

‘Society…,’ he said. ‘Society concerning three… concerning three… make a note of this.’

‘He is delirious,’ Dushan Makovitsky said.

‘Must read!’ Leo Nikolayevich declared, abruptly. Then, in a low, phlegm-clogged voice: ‘Wisdom… wisdom… wisdom.’

What a grievous and unnatural thing to witness, a man of luminous intelligence reduced to blather. Nevertheless, even in his confusion, his central concerns as a human being boiled to the surface of his brain’s caldron.

Without warning, the convulsions started up again, a succession of seizures that racked his entire body, as if he’d been struck by bolts of lightning. After each seizure, he lay shaking, trembling, sweating.

Dushan Makovitsky held down his shoulders during the worst convulsions, while Biryukov grasped his legs. Following orders, I massaged his calves whenever the writhing stopped. He suffered five attacks in a row, the fourth being especially violent, tossing him crosswise on the bed. We could barely restrain him.

When the worst appeared over, Sofya Andreyevna knelt by the bed and clutched his feet. ‘Dearest Lord, not now! Don’t let him die now!’

Tanya put a hand on her mother’s shoulder and said, in a kindly way, ‘Let’s go downstairs, Mama. He should rest now.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Sofya Andreyevna said. ‘If he dies, you will lose a father. But I will have killed a man.’

Her words drilled through the dark.

‘You must all go down,’ Dushan Makovitsky said. ‘I shall keep watch over him myself.’

Leo Nikolayevich was not ready to die, however. By ten o’clock, he had nearly recovered, though he didn’t try to stand. He sipped tea and asked that Dushan Makovitsky read to him from the Gospels.

I listened, quietly, at the door.

‘A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.’ The words sang in my heart, they were so beautiful, so perfectly simple. ‘By this all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have loved one to another.’

Leo Nikolayevich echoed Dushan in a hoarse, low voice.

Now I lay in bed awake, unable to relax. It had been harrowing to observe the signature of death on that dear, wrinkled face. As always, my thoughts turned to Masha in Petersburg. I lit the candle on my table and wrote a letter to her:

I find myself wrestling once more with the old formulations. Is the soul really a separate entity? Is the body a vessel? I do not know, but – having seen dear Leo Nikolayevich in such a condition – life seems even more mysterious to me now, so fragile, evanescent. And precious. We pass, so briefly, from the unknown to the unknown, our days on earth like petals on a bough.

I think of you, Masha, even now, as I sit at this wooden table in the middle of the night. My thoughts return to you at odd times. Our friendship is like a chink of light in an otherwise dark wall. It’s as if, somehow, I have you with me always. Here again the mystery of time and space confounds me, upsets me. Your soul, I dare to think, has linked itself to mine, and the space between us is somehow irrelevant. I don’t believe it exists. I actually believe I have you here beside me when you’re not. Am I foolish to think such things?

I keep thinking, however, that only love could lessen the terrible rift between mind and body, between spirit and flesh, that torments me. I can’t imagine what it means to say that today I am a young man in the flush of youth, that tomorrow I will be old and alone, that the next day I shall be dust in the earth. If there is no love in the world, no enduring spirit in man, then I am nothing now, our affection is nothing, and we might as well both he dead.

But as soon as I write that, I feel the deep hunger for God that makes me aware that God exists. By God I mean the World Spirit, the sense of the Eternal, the hovering blaze or mind that informs and, in a way, creates the world around us. We are each of us a small God, and the love we engender between us can only increase the Godness within us, enlarge the circle of affection we can share, the breath of spirit.

You will, I hope, forgive my expostulations and philosophizing. It is horribly late, and language runs away from me. I am tired now, can hardly think. Tomorrow, I shall write again. Write to me. I miss you. I love you.

‘Mother, you’re jealous of him,’ Sasha said to me yesterday. ‘That’s the problem.’

Where is that girl’s mind? Of course I’m jealous of him! Why should I share him with vagabonds and mountebanks, money grubbers and frauds? Yet I must try to ensure that he is not continually upset. The tension will kill him. It is my duty, as his wife, to see that he lives in a calm atmosphere.

The day after Lyovochka’s attack I told Sasha that she and Varvara Mikhailovna could return home. It was killing her father to have his little briar rose removed from him. And there was no telling what plots she might hatch with Chertkov once removed from my view. So I made a spectacle of myself, standing on the wooden steps at Telyatinki, begging forgiveness of my daughter and her friend. They appeared genuinely dumbfounded. I loved it.