The Summer Guest (2 page)

Turnham Green, London

January 2014

KATYA SAT AT
her computer, drumming her fingers next to the keyboard. Peter had told her it was time to find a translator for the Sumy diary.

He called it the Sumy diary.
Zinaida Mikhailovna
was too much of a mouthful, he said. They had been married for over twenty years, and he still couldn't get his tongue around some of
your long Russian names
.

Over the years she had learned to be indulgent. His passive Russian was excellent, as were his endearments. Katyusha, Katyenka, Katyushka—those names he could handle. Although sometimes it was simply, most affectionately, Kate.

What would they call it:
The Diaries of Zinaida Mikhailovna Lintvaryova
? He was right, it was a mouthful, no mainstream publisher would ever bring out a book with such a title, even for a work of nonfiction. She wanted to find something that would convey the Russianness, and the fact that it was a diary. Perhaps
Something Something
colon,
then
The Diaries of . . .

Perhaps the translator would have an idea. A translator would have more distance, obviously, might be able to find those few words that would draw the reader's interest. At the end of her message, Katya would write,
We don't have a title yet. If you have any ideas as you work on the text, please let us know
.

Now for the translator.

There was that American woman in France who'd done the Crimea guidebook. Anastasia something. Harding, that was it. Or Vassily Yuryevich. But Vassily Yuryevich was a man. It might be
better to have a woman for this project, a female sensibility. She would have done it herself, but she did not want to act as a translator; her English was good enough for most things, had been good enough for those other projects, with the help of an editor, but this was different.

She typed
Anastasia Harding
to take a closer look at the woman's background. Many novels translated from French; the most recent one had a very favorable review. Good. The guidebook had been a one-off, and it had been excellent. Not a great deal of work from Russian otherwise, but what mattered was her English, after all. And her female sensibility.

She must care for Zinaida Mikhailovna as much as I have, thought Katya. Together we must bring her back to life, along with her famous guest.

That night, in bed, Peter turned to her. I have a good feeling about this project, he said. It will get us back on our feet, I'm sure of it.

Katya was not so sure. They were governed by something larger than themselves, bearing down on them and their small publishing house. Banks, credit crunch, bailouts, crisis, recession; e-books, online booksellers, the disappearance of bookshops, the closure of libraries, the decline of reading. The monolith of market censorship, too. Oh, the irony, thought Katya, to have left the Soviet Union only to find another form of censorship. All the poetry she had been unable to publish as a student, when she was being watched; she had left her homeland as a young wife, in love not so much with her young husband as with the idea of becoming a poet in the free West.
The Free West.
Hah.

Well, none of that mattered anymore.

She reached for her husband. She loved him more now than she had in the early years; her present misgivings about the future sharpened her love, brought an almost physical ache of impending
loss. It was not something she could say to him, not yet; she had to try, with him, for his sake, to focus her energies.

Polyana Press had been their life together, after all; the child they did not have, the novels and poems they did not write, the journeys they did not take. Perhaps that was why, now, it was failing. They should have loved it for its own sake; it should not have been in lieu of something.

They had been distant with each other lately: He had his worries, and she had hers. They couldn't share those worries, or it might have brought them closer.

Perhaps you're right, she whispered. It could be a great success: We have to believe in it, make it happen.

Trust me, Katya, please, I know what I'm doing. He touched her cheek, then left his finger there, while he looked at her in that way she had almost forgotten.

They made love that night for the first time in many months. For so long, their separate worries had deadened desire, even tenderness, but they understood that this silent reproach was not personal, that it came from anger at the injustice of their life at that time, the casual, random cruelty of what had befallen them. Katya had found her private way to accept, to overcome; Peter was still searching, dreaming again like a boy. But perhaps. This wild idea of his.

In the dark they smiled at each other. He stroked her cheek again. She reached out and touched his: warm stubble. This tenderness felt new.

And have you found a translator? he asked.

I think so. Anastasia Harding. If she agrees.

And how long will it take?

Not long. A few months.

A year, then, until publication, give or take. Can we hold on until then? Give it everything we've got?

Of course, she whispered.

He sighed, content. She turned her head away. There was a mutinous tear. She told herself it was a tear of emotion—this unexpected closeness. And the release, the letting go. All good reasons for a tear.

A village in eastern France, near the Swiss border

January 2014

Z
INAIDA
MIKHAILOVNA
'
S
DIARY
arrived in her inbox one day. Like a misdirected parcel intended for someone else, as if it had been forgotten in a dusty provincial post office and finally found its way to her, a century late, and only because its intended recipient was long departed from this earth. There was a message from the publisher, Katya Kendall at Polyana Press in London. Ana had worked for them in the past, translating a guidebook to Crimea.

She had hesitated to take on the guidebook at the time, as she would now with Zinaida Mikhailovna. Russian was difficult, its beauty idiosyncratic and complex, and it intimidated her. Ana's Russian was perfectly adequate, but she didn't go looking for translations from Russian; they found her. As Katya Kendall had found her that first time, and for a few weeks Ana's mental space had been all Crimea. She had found herself dreaming of tsars' palaces and Chekhov's dachas, of craggy slopes dropping into the Black Sea, and exotic resorts with names like Feodosia and Koktebel and Gurzuf. There were the markers of history, like the Livadia Palace, where the last Romanovs had lived briefly and the Yalta Conference was held, and the villa where Gorbachev was staying at the time of the coup.

Now this new message, just there in her email.
Dear Anastasia (if I may), We are terribly
excited about this project,
Katya Kendall enthused. Would she have a look at the enclosed text and let them know at her earliest convenience whether it was something she would like to take on?

Ana stopped and looked out the window at the lake and the mountains. The sun was setting, leaving a wild streak of light among the clouds; it had rained earlier. She had no reason to refuse; the text, or the ten pages that she had scrolled through, seemed fairly straightforward, even if the language was dated. Four months, she figured, all told. She wasn't busy, she needed the money. She decided to sleep on it and give Katya Kendall her answer in the morning. Just a formality, sleeping on it; she knew she would say yes.

The publisher had attached a second document, an obituary. Ana skimmed it.

Much later, after she had finished all the rest, its poignant relevance would leave her unable to translate it for three days.

In a postscript, Katya Kendall had written:
I thought we could use the obituary as an introduction or an afterword
.
It's a remarkable document. Like everything he ever wrote. A story in itself.

At the time Ana didn't realize who
he
was. She missed the author's name in small letters at the bottom of the obituary. Would it have made any difference if she had seen it at once? It was odd, too, that Katya Kendall did not mention him in the body of her message, but then perhaps she was like that, discreet to the point of evasiveness.

The shadow of Zinaida Mikhailovna's soon-to-be-famous summer guest fell later onto the page, and by then Ana had befriended the diarist in that odd way translators sometimes have, if they are lucky, of knowing their authors through a text, of inhabiting their identity and seeing through their eyes.

The next morning she wrote back to Polyana Press, told them she was interested, and requested a slightly higher rate, citing the antiquated language.

It was Peter Kendall who answered, tersely.
Unfortunately,
given the economic situation, we cannot offer a better rate.
The contract was enclosed. If she was still willing to go ahead, would she print out two copies, sign them, and return them to him?

In the contract, there was a special clause stipulating that the subject of the translation was to be kept confidential.

First false warmth of spring. I am sitting in the conservatory in a thick coat. I close my eyes, listen to the birds, and wish I knew the notation for birdsong, so that in dark silent times, winter times, I might ask Georges to play their song to me.

I beg Mamochka to find me something to do, some vegetable to peel, some simple sewing I could do blindly, so to speak. She pushes me away with words of comfort: I must rest, preserve my strength.

I have not had a seizure for some days, but I fear one might be coming. A strange light-headedness, a giddy centrifugal pull on my senses. I think of Elena and everything she has to do, how busy she is these days on calls or with the patients who come to the house. Our peasants are a worrisome lot, and I fear she spoils them; they come to her for a hangnail. Because she is kind, and does not talk down to them, but listens and tries to prescribe a better life with the small means at her disposal. Sometimes a smile suffices, especially with children. It is like religion for them; they place their faith in her and are healed. We speak of it sometimes at dinner; Pasha and Georges scoff; Mamochka nods wisely; Natasha laughs and ridicules us all.

Yesterday Mamochka told us that this summer she will let out the guesthouse. It will go some way toward helping with the household expenses. I fear the arrival of some noisy, vulgar family from Moscow, newly wealthy and full of crass disregard for our provincial ways. Natasha laughs and says that such people go to Yalta, where they can be seen. Who can see them here?

April 25, 1888

Great excitement on the estate. Through our cousin Sasha Ivanenko, Mama has found a family to rent the guesthouse for the summer. A family from Moscow. One of the sons, Mikhail Pavlovich, came to have a look; he told Mama that one of his brothers is a gifted artist, and another a promising writer, and his sister is a teacher; both his parents are still alive, and all the family will be coming at various times over the summer. So Mamochka is brimming with enthusiasm and delight: She can already imagine the wealth of conversation they will bring, the entire outside world—news of Petersburg and Moscow and perhaps even Vienna and Paris—to our humble Luka.

There is a great flurry of cleaning and preparing and I am often on my own, feeling useless and frustrated. Mama gave me some silver to polish—that I could do—but then Ulyasha grew impatient with me, as she wanted to put everything away again as quickly as possible, so she tended to snatch things from me, kindly but firmly.

They arrive next week. I hope they will be sociable, amenable to sharing conversation. I hope they won't get into political quarrels with Pasha and Georges. I mustn't get too excited—what if they turn out to be the self-regarding, pretentious sort? But knowing Mama, and knowing Pasha, who must have shown this Mikhail Pavlovich around, they would not agree to come to us if they were not curious, open-minded people—artists, teachers, precisely. The guesthouse is rather run-down as well—Grigory Petrovich had to spend the morning repairing the steps to the porch! The young man didn't seem to mind; according to Pasha, he just laughed and said, This will be the perfect antidote to Moscow, we are coming for the tranquillity and the river and the garden—and there is so much space! he exclaimed over and over. We live in a chest of drawers in Moscow, he said.

Imagine. A chest of drawers!

It's true, we cannot imagine how people must live, cramped in flats in Moscow and Petersburg. Here we have so much land and sky . . . I feel it even now that the light has gone—I venture to say I feel it more strongly, this space, when I stand out in the garden and breathe in the fresh air, and the odors come to me from near and far—the linden trees, the river, the stables, incense from the village church, the dog who's been swimming, the earth after rain, the lovely aroma of burnt caramel from Kharitonenko's factory, and Pasha stopping by in the evening, smelling of good hard work. That's how the world comes to me these days.

Sometimes I like to think I can smell the clouds, a faint crisp dampness, full of blue.

May 6, 1888

They have arrived! Mama and Pasha greeted them and helped them settle in. They are not all here yet, just the mother, daughter, and middle son. The father and other brothers will arrive over the course of the summer. The daughter is a teacher, like Natasha: such good company to look forward to! Mama says we are to let them get settled and tomorrow they'll come for tea. They are tired after thirty hours of train from Moscow.

Pasha says the young man was very gallant and polite but also joking quite easily with Mama and teasing his own mother.

I am infinitely relieved. I was so afraid that they would be like that family who took the summer villa on the neighboring estate all those years ago. Andryusha—Andrey Kirillovich; I've never forgotten.

In the meantime, Natasha reads to me. What a luxury. Sometimes she reads too quickly, her voice tripping over the words—that's her personality, forever in a hurry. We've had
Anna Karenina
again, but she gets impatient with it, impatient with Anna, and with Levin, and with Tolstoy, and our reading degenerates into arguments about the place of women in literature. So, lately she has been reading
lighter
things, as she calls them—articles from the major papers or short stories; but there, too, we find reasons to argue, or to conclude that life is unfair, and what shall we do about it?

Yes, I say, our lot as women is unfair—but look at our peasants and their children—isn't their lot even worse? Are we not, in fact, incredibly fortunate?

She tells me that it is relative. She says if I remove the peasantry from the equation, we women become the peasantry. Even if our good fortune, as the Lintvaryova sisters, has been to be educated and enjoy a degree of freedom, that does not reflect the situation in general, and we should use our good fortune to help others, etc.

But we do, I protest, we are helping—

—those less fortunate, she interrupts. But what have we done to change the status of women as a whole?

By example, I insist. If other women see that they can receive an education, become doctors and teachers, find equal positions in work—

She laughs and says, But most women don't want what we have. They don't see the situation as it truly is. And authors like Tolstoy do not help, writing of fallen women and ingenues . . .

Natasha, surely you're exaggerating or simplifying, I counter. One spoiled aristocrat from Petersburg with a broken heart does not represent Russian women.

But you have heard how Tolstoy exploits his own wife—he
could not write if he did not have her there. Although perhaps that is where she wants to be.

Natasha is eager, almost angry, tapping her foot on the floor.

I wish I could see her: her pink cheeks, her eyes burning dark with anger, her eyebrows never still, lively with irony or astonishment. But I cannot, so I say, We would have to ask Sofia Tolstoy herself if that is where—who—she wants to be. We don't know if she is oppressed or willing.

How could she be willing? Running his household and copying out his dreadful handwriting and keeping all the children and visitors at bay, always in his shadow—

Perhaps she reckons his shadow is better than no shadow. Is it such a bad thing to be in the shadow? Have you thought of the power she might have, agreeing to the shadow?

I smile, and though I cannot see her expression, there is a sudden calm in the room, an end to foot-tapping and exasperated sighs. I have humbled my little sister, but I do not know if it is my shadow—the one in which I live now, permanently—or that of the great man himself that gives her pause for thought.