ROSE TREMAIN (born London, 1943) lives in London and Norfolk, with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have won many prizes: Restoration (1989) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a film and a stage play; Sacred Country (1992) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Fémina Etranger; Music and Silence (1999) won the Whitbread Novel Award; and The Road Home (2007), her most recent book, won the Orange Prize for Fiction.
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE the main events of this story disturbed forever the life of its protagonist, Ivan Andreyevich Ozolin, he had believed himself to be in love with an older woman, Tanya Trepova.
The year was 1910. Ivan Andreyevich Ozolin was the stationmaster of Astapovo, an insignificant little stop some 120 miles south-east of Moscow, on the Smolensk–Dankovo section of the Ural railroad line. He was forty-six and had been married to his wife, Anna Borisovna Ozolina, for twenty years. Tanya Trepova was a widow of fifty-three with excellent deportment, but whose pale face wore an expression of perpetual and affecting melancholy. It had been this melancholy of hers that Ivan Ozolin had longed to alleviate. On one of his days off (which were few) he arranged to go on a bicycling trip to the forest with Tanya Trepova, pretending to Anna Borisovna that he was going mushroom picking.
Ivan Ozolin and Tanya Trepova sat down on the mossy earth, where there were indeed a few pale mushrooms nestling among the tree roots. Ivan wanted to lean over and kiss Tanya, but he felt that to touch with his lips features still set in such a sorrowful arrangement was tantamount to an insult. So what he decided to do was to lean back on his elbows and cross one leg over the other and point out to his would-be mistress the ridiculous appearance of his white cycling socks.
‘Look at these!’ he said with a guffaw. ‘And look at the little bit of my leg showing between the top of the sock and the bottom of my trousers. How can we take anything seriously – anything in the world – when we catch sight of things like this? Life’s a joke, don’t you think so, Tanya? Every single thing in life is a joke – except love.’
A smile did now appear on Tanya Trepova’s face. It remained there long enough for Ivan to get up the courage to say: ‘I’d like to make you happy. I’m serious about that. My wife thinks I’m a fool who jokes about everything, but to jest is better than to despair, don’t you think?’
The September sun, coming and going between clouds, flickering through the trees, now suddenly laid on Tanya Trepova’s pale skin a steady and warming light. But as soon as this light arrived there, her smile vanished and she said: ‘Sometimes despair is unavoidable.’
Then she got to her feet and brushed down her skirt and said: ‘I shouldn’t have come to the forest with you, Ivan Andreyevich. I can’t think what I was doing. I only agreed because I was flattered by the kind attention you’ve shown me since my husband died, and because I enjoy cycling. But please let’s go back now.’
Ivan was a courteous man. Despite his strong feelings for Tanya Trepova, he wasn’t the type to take advantage of any woman – even here, in the eternal silence of the woods.
So he got up obediently, tugging down his trouser leg over his rucked white sock, and he and Tanya Trepova walked to where their bicycles were parked and then rode back to Astapovo, side by side, talking only of inconsequential things.
When Ivan Ozolin got home to his red-painted stationmaster’s cottage, Anna Borisovna asked: ‘Where are the mushrooms, then?’
‘Oh,’ said Ivan, swearing silently at his forgetfulness, ‘I couldn’t find any. I searched and searched. I didn’t find a single one.’
Anna Borisovna stared accusingly at her husband. After twenty years of childless living with him, he wearied her. Was this just another of his stupid jokes?
‘It’s September and the sun’s out after the long rains we’ve endured and there are no mushrooms in the forest?’
‘No. Or perhaps there were mushrooms, but other people gathered them before I got there.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.
In October, winter began to close in on Astapovo, as it did at this time each year.
Ivan Ozolin supervised the cleaning and oiling of the ancient snowplough kept in a dilapidated shed on a siding on the Smolensk side of the tracks. He chopped wood for the pot-bellied stoves that heated his own cottage, the two waiting rooms (ladies’ and gentlemen’s) and the station buffet on the Dankovo side. His mind, as he went about these familiar tasks, was preoccupied by his failed attempt to have a love affair with Tanya Trepova. Most men that he knew had love affairs and even boasted about them. But he, Ivan Ozolin, hadn’t been able to manage even this! It was laughable. Ivan Ozolin thought, My life’s at a standstill. Trains come and go, come and go past my door day and night, but I live without moving at a way-station where nothing stops for long or endures – except the monotony of all that’s already here.
The idea that this state of affairs would just go on and on and nothing important would ever happen to him ever again began to terrify him. One evening, he deliberately got drunk with his old friend Dmitri Panin, who worked in the one-man telegraph office at Astapovo station, and began to pour out his heart to him.
‘Dmitri,’ he said. ‘How on earth are we meant to escape from the meaninglessness of life? Tell me your method.’
‘My method?’ said Dmitri. ‘What method? I’m just a telegraph operator. I send out other people’s messages and get messages back …’
‘So, you’re in touch with the wider world.’
‘I may be in touch with the wider world, but I don’t have any message of my own. Life has not … Life has not … equipped me with one.’
‘Equipped you? Have another drink, my friend. I think we’re both talking drivel, but it seems to me there are four ways and only four ways of escaping it.’
‘Escaping what?’
‘Meaninglessness. The first is ignorance. I mean the ignorance of youth, when you haven’t seen it yet.’
‘Seen what?’
‘Death waiting for you. Inevitably waiting. You know?’
Dmitri said that he knew perfectly well and that meanwhile he’d order them another bottle of vodka and a piece of special Smolenski sausage to keep them from falling under the table. Then he asked Ivan Ozolin to hurry through the other ‘three ways of escape’ because he had a feeling that they were going to bore him or depress him, or both.
Ivan gulped more vodka. He tried to explain to Dmitri Panin that, in his view, human beings were just merely ‘randomly united lumps of matter’. Some people, such as his wife, Anna Borisovna, refuted this and believed that human life had been created by God. ‘She thinks’, said Ivan Ozolin, ‘that, contrary to all evidence, God is benign … but me, I can’t go along—’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Dmitri. ‘We know all that twaddle and counter-twaddle. Come on, Ivan, let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about Tanya Trepova, for instance.’
Ivan Ozolin scratched his head, balding on the crown, growing sensitive to winter cold.
He didn’t really want to talk about Tanya Trepova, even to Dmitri. He began cutting up the hunk of Smolenski sausage into manageable pieces.
‘That was a farce,’ he said.
‘A farce?’
‘Yes. I didn’t even kiss her.’ And then he let out one of his famous guffaws of laughter.
Dmitri began to cram his face with sausage. ‘I can’t see what’s so funny about that,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘If it had been me, I would have kissed her, at least.’
On the afternoon of 31st October, a cold day marked by an icy wind and flurries of snow, a southbound train from Tula arrived at Astapovo station. Ivan Ozolin, wearing his stationmaster’s uniform, was standing alone on the platform, holding his flags, waiting to see if anybody was going to disembark before waving his green flag to send the train onwards towards Dankovo. He saw the door of one of the second-class carriages open and a young woman stepped down and came towards him.
She was plump, with a wide, homely face, and wore a peasant scarf over her brown hair.
‘Stationmaster!’ she called. ‘We need your help. Please. You must help us …’
Ivan Ozolin hurried towards her. Her voice, he noticed at once, was not the voice of a peasant.
‘What can I do?’ said Ivan.
‘My father is on the train. We were trying to get to Dankovo, but he’s been taken ill, very ill. A doctor is with us. The doctor says we must get off here and find a bed for my father. Or he could die. Please can you help us?’
Ivan Ozolin now saw that the young woman was trembling violently, whether with cold or agitation, or both, and he knew that at all costs he would have to do whatever he could to help her and her sick father; it was his duty as a stationmaster and as a human being.
He followed her to the open door of the second-class carriage. Steam billowed all around them in the freezing air. He climbed aboard the train and was led along the crowded carriage to one of the hard leather benches where an elderly man was lying, covered by a thin blanket. By his side knelt the doctor, wearing a black coat. From all the other benches passengers were staring and whispering.
‘Dushan,’ the young woman said to the doctor. ‘Here’s the stationmaster. Between the two of you, you can carry Papa to the waiting room and then this good man is going to find us a bed for him, aren’t you, sir?’
‘A bed? Yes, of course …’
‘There’s an inn here, I suppose? What’s this place called?’
‘Astapovo.’
‘Astapovo. I’ve never heard of it, have you, Dushan? But everywhere has some little inn or hotel. Hasn’t it?’
Her agitation was growing all the time. He saw that she could hardly bear to look down at her father, so greatly did the sight of him lying there in his blanket upset her. Very calmly, Ivan Ozolin said: ‘There is no inn in Astapovo. But the fact that there is no inn in Astapovo doesn’t mean that there are no beds. We can arrange a bed for your father in my cottage … just over there on the Smolensk side of the track … that red house you can glimpse …’
‘Dushan,’ said the young woman, now breaking down into tears, ‘he says there’s no inn. What are we going to do?’
The doctor stood up. He put a comforting arm round the young woman’s shoulders and held out his other hand to Ivan Ozolin. ‘I am Doctor Dushan Makovitsky,’ he said. ‘Please tell me your name, stationmaster.’
Ivan Ozolin took Makovitsky’s hand and shook it. He bowed. ‘I am Ivan Andreyevich Ozolin, doctor,’ he said.
‘Very well,’ said Makovitsky. ‘Now let me explain the situation. My patient here is Count Tolstoy: Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the world-famous writer. He was attempting to get as far as Novocherkassk, to stay with his sister, but he has been taken ill. I’m desperately afraid he may have pneumonia. Will you help us to save his life?’
Leo Tolstoy …
Ivan Ozolin felt his mouth drop foolishly open. He looked down at the old man, who was clutching in his frail hands a small embroidered cushion, much as a child clutches to itself a beloved toy. For a moment, he found himself unable to speak, but could only repeat to himself: Leo Tolstoy has come to Astapovo … Then he managed to pull himself together sufficiently to say: ‘I’ll do everything I can, doctor. Everything in my power. Luckily the waiting rooms are on this side of the track, so we haven’t got far to carry him.’
Dushan Makovitsky bent down and gently lifted Tolstoy’s shoulders. The old man’s eyes opened suddenly and he began murmuring the words: ‘Escape … I have to escape …’
His daughter stroked his head. ‘We’re moving you, Papa,’ she said. ‘We’re going to find you a warm bed.’
Ivan Ozolin took hold of the writer’s legs, noting that underneath the blanket, he was wearing peasant clothes: a tunic tied at the waist, moleskin trousers tucked into worn boots. When the two men lifted him up, Ivan was surprised at how light his body felt. He was a tall man, but with very little flesh on his bones.
They carried him gently from the train and out into the snow. Feeling the snowflakes touch his face, Leo Tolstoy said: ‘Ah, it comes round me now. The cold of the earth …’
But the distance to the waiting room wasn’t very great and soon enough Dr Makovitsky and Ivan Ozolin had lain the elderly writer down on a wooden bench near the wood-burning stove. Instructing the doctor to go back to the train for their bags, Tolstoy’s daughter did her best to make her father comfortable on the bench, tucking the blanket round him, taking the little pillow from his hands and placing it gently under his head, smoothing his springy white beard.
Ivan hovered there a moment. His heart was beating wildly. He explained that he had an immediate duty to supervise the train’s onward departure towards Dankovo, but as soon as this was done, he would run to his cottage and prepare a bed for Count Tolstoy. ‘My wife will help me,’ he said. ‘It will be an honour.’
The cottage had only four rooms: a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom and a small office where Ivan Ozolin kept his railway timetables and his stationmaster’s log. Outside the cottage was a vegetable garden and a privy.
When Ivan Ozolin came rushing in to tell Anna Borisovna that Leo Tolstoy, gravely ill, had arrived to Astapovo and needed a bed in their house, she was boiling laundry on the kitchen range. She turned and stared at her husband. ‘Is this another of your jokes?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Ivan. ‘On the soul of my mother, this is not one of my jokes. We must give up our bed, Anna. To the poor and needy of this land, Tolstoy is a saint. In the name of all those who suffer today in Russia, we must make our own small sacrifice!’
Anna Borisovna, though tempted to mock the sudden floweriness of Ivan’s language (brought on, no doubt, by the unexpected arrival of a famous writer), refrained from doing so, and together she and Ivan went to their room and began dismantling their iron bed. The bed was heavy and old and the bolts rusty, and this work took them the best part of half an hour.
They carried the bed into their sitting room and reassembled it, dragged their mattress on to it and then laid on clean sheets and pillow cases and woollen blankets from their blanket chest. While Ivan banked up the stove, Anna set a night table by the bed and a chamber pot underneath it. She put a jug of water and a bowl and some linen towels on the night table. She said to Ivan: ‘I wish I had some violets to put in a little vase for him.’
‘Never mind that,’ said Ivan Ozolin. ‘Now you must come with me and we’ll carry him across the tracks. Only twenty-nine minutes before the Dankovo train.’
When they got back to the waiting room, Tolstoy was sleeping. His daughter, too, had gone to sleep kneeling on the hard floor, with her head lying on the bench, near her father’s muddy boots. Dushan Makovitsky kept a lonely vigil at their side and seemed very relieved to see Ivan return with Anna Borisovna.
‘Good people,’ he said in a whisper. ‘You can’t know how grateful I am. You must understand that this is a terrible business. Terrible beyond imagining. Count Tolstoy left his home in secret two nights ago. He left because his wife had made his life unbearable. He left to try to find peace, far away from the Countess. But he lives in mortal fear of being followed, of his whereabouts being discovered by her. So secrecy is vital. You understand? Nobody but you must know that he’s here.’
Ivan and Anna nodded. Ivan murmured that of course they understood, and would respect the need for concealment. But he nevertheless felt himself go cold with sudden terror. He looked down at the old man. Surely he – who must by now be in his eighties – would have preferred to live out his last years peacefully on his estates, and yet he’d run away in the middle of an October night! What marital persecutions had pushed him to make this extraordinary decision? If this was what marriage had done to someone as wise as Leo Tolstoy – to the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina – what might it eventually do to him, the humble stationmaster of Astapovo?
He glanced up at the waiting room clock. Seventeen minutes remained before the arrival of the Dankovo train.
‘We should hurry,’ he said. ‘Everything is prepared.’
Now, as darkness came down, the great writer Leo Tolstoy was undressed tenderly by his daughter, who put a clean nightshirt on him and combed his hair and beard and helped him to lie down in the iron bed. He was very tired and weak, but he knew that he was in a strange place and Ivan and Anna, working next door in their small kitchen, heard him say to his daughter: ‘Sasha, I know I’m ill. I suppose I could be dying. So I want you to send a telegram to Vladimir Chertkov and ask him to come here. Send it tonight.’
‘Yes, all right, Papa. But if Mama finds out that you sent for Chertkov and not for her—‘
‘I can’t help it. To see her face would kill me! I can’t set eyes on her ever again. I can’t. But I must see Chertkov. There’s all the wretched business of my will and my copyrights to settle …’
‘All of that was sorted out, Father. Vladimir and I know your wishes; that all the copyrights are willed to me and I authorise that your works are to be made available to the Russian people, free of any charge …’
‘Yes. But Vladimir is to be the executor. Only him. Not you, not Tanya, not any of my good-for-nothing sons. Vladimir Chertkov alone will decide what’s to be published and by whom and when … both the fiction and all the other work … and the diaries your mother tried to steal …’
‘He knows. You’ve been through it a hundred times.’
‘No, we haven’t been through it a hundred times. And I want him here, Sasha! Don’t argue with me! Arguments give me a pain in my heart. Where’s Dushan?’
‘Dushan’s sleeping, Papa. In the waiting room. He hasn’t slept for thirty hours …’
Then, as Ivan and Anna tugged out their few pieces of good china and Anna began to wash these, they heard the sound of wailing and it reminded them both of the noise that a wolf can make when it finds its leg caught in a trap. Ivan stared helplessly at his wife. He wished he could summon up some terrible joke to crack, as a weapon against the wolf-howls coming from next door, but he just couldn’t think of one.
‘Try to stop crying, Papa,’ they heard Sasha say. ‘It really does no good. I’m going to send the telegram to Vladimir now. Then I’ll be back and we’ll see whether you can eat something.’
The front door of their cottage opened and closed. The Ozolins knew they were alone in their house with Leo Tolstoy. They thought of the long night ahead, with no bed to sleep on. But it was almost time for the 5.18 train from Tula, so Ivan Ozolin tugged on his overcoat and gloves and took down his red and green flags and went out by the back door. Anna Borisovna dried the china slowly. After a few minutes, she heard the weeping diminish, breath by breath, as though the weeper had just become exhausted with it.
The following morning, under a blank grey sky, Vladimir Chertkov arrived on the 9.12 train from Moscow. He was a good-looking man in his fifties with a well-trimmed brown beard. When Sasha greeted Chertkov on the Dankovo platform, Ivan Ozolin heard him say: ‘Where in heaven’s name have I come to? There’s nothing here.’
They had to wait for the Dankovo-bound train to leave before they could cross the tracks to the cottage. Ivan Ozolin had hoped to accompany them. He felt that, at last, his own life was bound up with something important and he didn’t want to miss a moment of it. But when the steam from the departed train cleared, he saw that Sasha and Chertkov were already walking away from him over the rails, so he stood there and let them go, while he slowly folded up his green flag.
Then he caught sight of Dmitri Panin running in an agitated way along the Smolensk platform, waving a telegram in his hand. As Chertkov and Sasha passed him, Dmitri stopped and hesitated, but then hurried on to the end of the platform and began beckoning frantically to Ivan Ozolin. In the sunless morning, Dmitri’s face appeared as red as a beet.
‘Look at this!’ he gasped, when Ivan reached him. ‘It’s from Countess Tolstoy – to her husband! What in the world is going on?’
Ivan seized the telegram and read: We know where you are. Arriving with Andrei, Ilya, Tanya and Mikhail tonight. Special Pullman train from Tula. Signed: Your loyal wife, Countess Sonya Andreyevna Tolstoya.
‘Ivan,’ said Dmitri. ‘Tell me what the hell is happening …’
‘All right, all right,’ said Ivan. ‘It’s too late for secrecy now, if she knows where he is.’
‘But how did she find out? You didn’t send a message, did you?’
‘Me? Message to who?’
‘Somebody must have sent a message. How could it have got out except via your telegraph office?’
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 someone this news.’
When Ivan Ozolin went into the dark living room of the cottage, he saw by the soft candlelight a scene which 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, with theirs. 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 beautiful 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. Luckily, 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 little rows, Ivan passed the telegram to Chertkov and heard his gasp of horror as he took in the news of the Countess’s arrival.
‘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 in.’
‘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 Dushan 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 angrily 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 and he didn’t want that disturbed.
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 grownup 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 gourmandise 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 only calmed 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 hiccuped. 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.
Ivan carried the infusion into the living room, which was very dark, the candles having burnt 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 early 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 forever whatever you think it teaches you.’
Now, the two waiting rooms, the station buffet, the two 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 hiccuping in Ivan Ozolin’s iron bed. Dmitri, made faint by cigarette smoke, noise and rudeness, struggled on at his post. To the front of his guichet Ivan Ozolin stuck a notice that 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.
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.
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 despatched 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 some time 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.’
‘Erm … 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 the world – 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 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.’
The priest 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.
And, in the iron bed in Ivan Ozolin’s living room, the last hours of Tolstoy’s life began to slip slowly by. His temperature wavered between 102.5 and 104. He was unconscious most of the time, yet bouts of hiccuping still tormented him. It grew very dark in the room, owing to a shortage of candles. In this fetid darkness, Ivan Ozolin was asked to come and prop up the bed itself, where one of the bolts had sheered off, under the weight of ‘holy family’ constantly sitting or leaning on the mattress. All he could find to use was a pile of bricks and he inserted these 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 November 7th, Countess Tolstoy 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 blood-stained 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 the body of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy away. 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.
When the train had finally gone, Ivan Ozolin felt very tired and yet strangely triumphant, as though he himself had achieved victory over something that had always eluded him. He wanted to savour this victory for a little while, so he went into the now deserted station buffet and ordered a tot of vodka and a slice of cinnamon cake and sat at one of the tables with his eyes closed and his heart beating with a steady and beautiful rhythm. He knew there were many tasks still to be done; he shouldn’t remain sitting like this for long, but he felt so unbelievably elated and happy that it was tempting to order a second vodka and a second slice of cake …
He was on his third vodka and his third slice when Dmitri came into the buffet with a telegram. ‘I just took this down,’ said Dmitri, whose habitually red face, Ivan noticed, looked suddenly pale. ‘It’s from your wife.’
Ivan Ozolin reached up and took the telegram and read: Women, too, have the right to escape. I am leaving you, Ivan Andreyevich. I hope to start a flower shop in Tula. Please do not follow me. Signed: Your unhappy wife, Anna Borisovna Ozolina.
Ivan re-read this message several times, while Dmitri stood by him, with his arms hanging limply by his sides.
‘What do you make of it?’ said Dmitri at last.
‘Well,’ said Ivan, ‘she was always fond of flowers, especially violets.’
‘But why would she leave you, Ivan?’
‘Because she’s tired of my jokes. I don’t blame her at all.’
Dmitri sat down. He yawned. He said in a melancholy voice that History had come to them and taken up residence and was now leaving again. He asked Ivan what he planned to do once they found themselves quite alone once more.
Ivan thought about this question for a long time and then he said, ‘The woods can look very beautiful at this time of year. I thought I might go mushroom picking.’