The Summer Guest (31 page)

Some boys were swinging out over the river on a long rope hanging from a tall tree. Larissa Lvovna told her it was called a
tarzanka
. Ana thought of Zinaida Mikhailovna as a child with her father, then remembered the memory was imaginary. Was it right to feel cheated?

They walked up along a path to a hill overlooking the river. Larissa turned to Ana and said, This is where Maria Pavlovna and Natalya Mikhailovna used to come and paint. Perhaps you saw the photographs and the reproductions in the museum?

Two young women in white dresses on the bank above the river, paint boxes open on their laps, while a gentleman with his hands behind his back looks approvingly over their shoulders.

When they were back in the museum office, Larissa Lvovna turned to Ana and said, What will you do? About the diary?

What can I do? It's not my manuscript.

Is it worth publishing as a kind of fiction? Are there other errors, or just the one about Ksenia Pavlovna?

I really don't know, said Ana with a despairing shrug. I would have to compare every detail with every biography, every letter . . .

And it's not your manuscript, repeated Larissa Lvovna. It's not worth it.

No . . . it's really out of my hands now. It belongs to Catherine—Ekaterina—Kendall. It's her book. She wrote a novel about Grand Duchess Anastasia, she added.

Larissa Lvovna could not suppress a laugh, and she patted Ana's hand and offered her some tea.

Ana looked around the office again. It had been Maria Pavlovna's room. On the wall was a reproduction of the famous oil portrait of Anton Pavlovich—the one he hated, she had read, in his pince-nez, looking
like a professor who has eaten horseradish
. Stacks of books. Embroidered hand towels. A glass case full of cups and plates; a dusty samovar. Several reproductions of paintings by Levitan, who once proposed to Masha, not altogether in jest; Anton Pavlovich, predictably, had advised her to turn him down.

Now Larissa Lvovna turned to Ana. Here's the thing, she said. Do you think this . . . diary is faithful to the spirit of Luka? To Anton Pavlovich?

Ana hesitated, then burst out, If I had been told from the start that this diary was a fiction, I probably still would have agreed to translate it—for other reasons, more mercenary ones—but I never would have come all this way, looking for Anton Pavlovich's lost novel.

How far she had fallen. Placing her hopes in a real, as yet undiscovered novel by Chekhov, which she would have been the first
to translate. Now not only did Chekhov's novel not exist, neither did Zinaida's diary.

And it was the loss of Zinaida's diary that she felt much more keenly. She was both ashamed and bereft. She realized, not without a touch of surprise, that the loss of Zinaida seemed crueler than anything.

How could the diary not be real? Zinaida had been so alive to her during those early spring days. Could it really only have been Katya Kendall, a frustrated Russian émigré in West London, who had said so much to her, sharing a life that was infinitely rich despite its loss?

She turned to Larissa Lvovna and said, We don't even know what Zinaida looked like! Are you sure you don't have any pictures of her anywhere, even in a crowd?

Larissa shook her head slowly.

Now, in a spurt of anger, Ana thought of how she had been left with a sad, sorry fiction, a scam, a cynical hoax concocted by a lapsed poet who wrote pseudo-diaries of Russian
demoiselles
in her spare time and recited Pasternak in gastropubs to gullible Russophiles like Ana.

In the distant echo I try to catch

What the years ahead may bring.

The famous Zhivago poem, “Hamlet”; Katya speaking, as if in a trance, to a clatter of dishes, a hiss of espresso machine. The young man, rapt, at the next table.

Unless . . . unless Katya's motivation lay elsewhere, thought Ana, not just in Zinaida Mikhailovna's connection with Chekhov. Something deeper and mysterious, known only to herself.

Larissa Lvovna was staring at her, waiting for her to go on. So Ana said, The publisher has gone bankrupt, you know. Perhaps this was their last-ditch effort to save their business. Chekhov wrote to feed his family, did he not?

Larissa Lvovna spluttered, You cannot compare! He was a genius. This is fraud!

Ana sighed and nodded. Yes, it is fraud. Because the Kendalls wanted the world at large to believe not only in the existence of Zinaida's diary but also in Chekhov's lost novel.

The world already knows the lost novel exists, Larissa Lvovna said sarcastically, but perhaps these people planned to write it and publish it, too!

Larissa Lvovna, said Ana, speaking slowly, with a few changes here and there, this journal could work as a novel. It is based on Zinaida Mikhailovna's life, and Anton Pavlovich's two summers here, and the characters are very true to life . . . and . . .

She was not making sense. She was on the verge of tears and couldn't go on. There were no more arguments.

Zinaida Mikhailovna had died. She had vanished. The reality was in the absence of her photograph. Even her grave was gone. There was no trace of her, save in the dried ink of Anton Pavlovich's letters and the obituary he wrote for her.

But then Larissa Lvovna was squeezing her arm. On second thought, she began, it is a terrible but somehow wonderful story—that woman in England, going to all that trouble, writing such a book to try to save her business—I think it is something Anton Pavlovich could appreciate, if it has been done in the right spirit. The lengths to which people are prepared to go in life when they believe in something . . .

Her voice trailed off, as if she were still unsure of the validity of her thought.

How they would laugh, Anton Pavlovich and Zinaida Mikhailovna, thought Ana, if they knew her story! Not in an unkind way, no, but the irony of it! She had placed her hopes in Chekhov's novel for the wrong reasons. To be the translator of Chekhov's novel; to be not so much in his shadow as in his light. Like the
very people who would approach him on the street because of his sudden fame after he won the Pushkin Prize:

What is terrible is that they tend to like something in us that we often neither love nor respect in ourselves.

As Ana sat beside Larissa Lvovna in that warm, comfortably cluttered room—the room where Maria Pavlovna had slept in the weeks before embarking on her own career as
the writer's sister—
one small consoling thought came to her.

She saw Katya as she'd been that day in the pub. Quiet, evasive not only about Chekhov's novel but about the diary itself. As if even she had been feeling her own mixture of shame and loss. Perhaps it was only to do with her husband, with the press, as Larissa had suggested. But it seemed to Ana that there was more than that. Mustn't she have cared about Zinaida Mikhailovna, or at least come to care about her? Enough to imagine a whole book about her? To weave that tapestry—every thread so carefully looped into another until the details emerged—Vata rowing Monsieur Pleshcheyev around the pond; Grigory Petrovich asleep under the cherry tree? To conjure Zinaida Mikhailovna's darkness, her mortality, her painfully open heart? It did not
feel
like a book conceived simply to make money. Why, then, choose the doomed Zinaida Mikhailovna as her lens? Why Zinaida and not her more entertaining and expansive sister Natasha or the brooding, poetic Georges? Why, indeed, if not to examine a state of being? Why?
Because
Katya Kendall had something more to say.

Just because the voice was not an authentic one from the past, did the words have any less meaning?

Was that not the beauty of fiction, that it aimed closer at the bitter heart of truth than any biography could, that it could search out the spirit of those who may or may not have lived, and tell their story not as it had unfolded, as a series of objective facts recorded by an indifferent world, but as they had lived it and, above
all, felt it? Was there a finer way to honor friendship, and love, and being in the world?

Ana turned to Larissa Lvovna and said clumsily, earnestly, This Katya—she understood the importance of Chekhov's time here; she imagined how precious the friendship of someone like Anton Pavlovich would have been to this woman who was losing everything. She put in all this work—and it's not perfunctory, she brings Zinaida to life, or so it seems to me; she had me fooled, after all! She must have felt a sort of tenderness, affection, for her, for whatever reason, for whatever generous reason—yes—otherwise, why work so hard, why spend so much time, on writing her life?

Larissa nodded, not entirely convinced.

You haven't read the whole book, Ana conceded. Of course, I read it believing a real person wrote it—I mean, a real person did write it, but not the one who lived it. But it's as if she had. That's the power of the imagination, isn't it?

Larissa sat quietly, staring out the window at the garden but seeing something else. Then she turned to face Ana with an earnest brightness in her eyes. Yes, she said, I believe you are right. It's why we read. It's why we need our writers.

ANA RETURNED ALONE TO
the abandoned estate. Larissa Lvovna, or maybe the caretaker, had forgotten to lock the gate. She stood in the courtyard and stared at the ruins splashed with late-day sunlight. A single muddy boot she had not noticed the previous day waited, forgotten, by the steps leading to the cellar. A woman on a bicycle rode slowly along a path behind the house, proof that it was pointless to lock the gate. Ana ventured in the direction of the pond and saw the well-worn bicycle trail. It had rained all night, and the path to the pond was muddy and very slippery. She turned back; she would not go looking at the pond's opaque surface for bursts of cloudlight.

Instead, she went once again to stand by the entrance to Zinaida's house. Steps leading up to where there used to be a door. She waited—for a sign, an epiphany. There was only the loud croaking of the frogs in the pond, and birds calling. Children's voices in the distance; a motorbike.

She saw some wild strawberries growing amid the unruly vegetation in the yard. She picked one and ate it slowly, thinking of Zinaida Mikhailovna and Anton Pavlovich. At least she had come to Luka, and they really had been here, 125 summers ago. She had to believe what Katya had dared to write, she had to believe in the truth of the imagination. She was glad she had come, despite what she had learned.

So for a moment she allowed the wild sweetness of the berry to connect her to them, to those moments when they paused in conversation to share some fruit, their words suspended in the still summer air.

THERE WAS PLENTY OF
time to think on the train from Sumy to Kiev.

This strange interlude in her ordinary life. The uprising of her well-planned, obedient days, in defense of the absurd and the sublime, from her near-encounter with Léo in London, to this wild-goose chase to eastern Ukraine.

Now she just wanted to get home, to Doodle, the mountains, tranquillity, her own firm pillow and fluffy duvet. It seemed so far away. For a while she gazed restlessly at the fields, the villages, the abandoned factories. Then she began to read.

She had brought along a slim volume of Chekhov stories—fortunately, as she hadn't seen a single bookstore in Sumy. She read two late stories, “At Christmas Time” and “The Bishop”; they suited her mood of puzzled melancholy. An illiterate peasant and his wife pay a shifty soldier to write a Christmas letter to their daughter, whose brutal husband has neglected to post her own letters to her old parents all along. A bishop senses he may be dying and questions the significance of his life.

The straightforward precision of the language; the lightness of the irony. As if the author were shaking his head or shrugging, with a smile, a nod to the never-ceasing human struggle to give meaning, to put a brave face on mortality and incomprehensible suffering. Our failures to communicate with others, with ourselves. That late in life, sick with tuberculosis, Chekhov would have understood his characters' confusion and helplessness only too well, thought Ana. And yet his lucid, tender portrayals were, in their way, a source of hope, or at least of comfort.

She put the book down and folded her hands over her waist, looking up and out the window at the lush early-summer landscape. How easy it was, amid the superficial pressures—of society, of one's own making—to forget what really mattered. There had been other reasons for her desire to translate Chekhov's lost novel, she saw that now. All reasons that had nothing to do with careers, recognition, or the light a great author casts. She was indebted to Anton Pavlovich for the vision he gave her—that vibrant grasp of life, the next best thing to being in love, without all of love's blindness. If Ana had longed to be his translator, it was so she could take his Russian words and, with each moment of slow, considered re-creation in her own language, enter the prism, where sunlight refracted vision, and know that she was living well.

Ana went to the Maidan, saw the piles of tires, the shields, the tents. Memorials with candles and photographs. A gas mask dangling from a wooden board. People milling about, curious, expectant, some of them ordinary tourists like her, others edgier, rougher regulars, men who hadn't slept, whose blood ran with vodka and outrage. She found the photograph of Oleksiy Bra-tushko from Sumy at the memorial on Instytutska Street. His smiling, hopeful face. She left a flower and whispered a short, private prayer, as if she had brought it to him from Sumy.

People were friendly and open; they seemed grateful to see her there, just as Yves had said they would be. She wandered through the city and let her mind go blank, the better to absorb the colors and smells and sounds around her. She visited the Pechersk Lavra Monastery of the Caves and was stunned by the contrast between the gilded domes and the sepulchral gloom where the mummies lay; she gazed at the aptly named House of Chimeras; she strolled up and down Andreevskiy Descent and lingered sadly outside Bulgakov's house: The museum had already closed for the day, and she was leaving the next morning.
She had comforting food and cool beer. She sat on a square in the sunshine. War seemed impossible, despite glaring headlines at newspaper kiosks and heated discussions in multiple languages all around her, and as she looked at passing faces she realized it wasn't only about Ukraine—yes, she was here, now, but so was Russia, in her heart, and she was torn, angry, outraged by what seemed, as always, a cynical tragedy scripted by politicians and their propagandists. From all sides, including her own. Because when people heard her accent, they asked where she was from; when she told them, they smiled indulgently, as if they both envied her and knew she must be naive.

Ana could not help her naïveté; she could only show them her sincerity and share her hopes for the best possible outcome to the conflict, and soon, so that people could get on with their lives in the future they had fought for.

In the end, everything she had learned about Zinaida Mikhailovna's diary, about the Lintvaryovs, about Chekhov's novel—these were things she could have learned without leaving her desk in the village. That Ukraine belonged to novels and history books, beneath a layer of dust, behind a scrim of romanticism. But the Ukraine where she was walking now, in the late afternoon sun, smiling at strangers, was a place for which she already felt the nostalgia of imminent departure—a place that did not exist, or did not exist yet, a country that was changing by the hour. She remembered the French map with its polite degrees of warnings. She had reinforced her vigilance, but not in the way the cartographer had intended.