LIVADIA
Only yesterday, after going to the Post Office, I walked past a neighboring pension, on the corner of a street I never took, and caught sight of someone spying on me from behind the lace curtains. I glanced their way again today and the lights were on—a bright yellow bulb was shining through the curtain. Both times I thought I saw a woman silhouetted there, a flowered dressing gown. It’s not easy to conceal a butterfly net, I thought, to hide the fact that I was here to do a job, to capture a rare specimen, a yazikus. I hardly looked like someone who would chase butterflies for fun, with the casual way I dressed, the baggy linen pants I wore at the beach after swimming in the afternoon, the comfy leather sandals, the flowered Hawaiian shirts (which had come back into style again this year). Nor did I have the solemn air of an amateur entomologist, Stockis, for example—no, my unenthusiastic grip on the handle of the net betrayed me as your basic fortune hunter. Maybe someone was staking out this pension, hoping to get a tip-off from my face—a pleased or satisfied look—the signal to follow me up the same path. But a woman? I had just gotten a package from Vladimir Vladimirovich, the correspondence of Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, so that’s what I was reading this afternoon on the veranda, when I reread a letter written in Florence and dated November 21 that revived all my troubling suspicions. I looked over at that window again. Whoever was watching me turned out the light to make it easier.
Von Meck, the rich widow of a mining engineer—who made his fortune by an infallible route, building a railroad between Kiev and Moscow (and most likely between Kiev and Simferopol too, the line that still brought mail to Crimea, carrying my packages of books from Vladimir Vladimirovich)—was an ardent fan of Tchaikovsky’s music, called it first class and him a “brilliant composer,” in a letter on November 24, 1878 (“It is impossible to compare you to anyone else. All one can say is that you possess the best of the best composers … I do not have the slightest doubt, you are a brilliant composer,” was what she wrote). Once they had exchanged their first letters of admiration and appreciation, the widow bestowed an annual pension on the composer, six thousand rubles with only one condition, that they never meet, hardly a problem. But in 1878 when von Meck and Tchaikovsky had been corresponding for two years, they found themselves in Florence at the same time. He was staying in the Villa Oppenheim, she in the Villa Bonciani, a few blocks from Peter Ilyich, neighbors. It was pure chance that they were both in Florence, and von Meck’s presence put Tchaikovsky in a panic. They might run into each other at any moment, out for a stroll. Frantic, he wrote to his brother: “Nadezhna Filaretevna was at the theater too and this limited my movements, which have been limited by her proximity anyway. I constantly have the feeling that she wants to see me. Every day I think I see her walk by my villa, stopping to try and catch sight of me.”
I imagine that V. is the woman spying on me. She hadn’t gone to Siberia. She had hidden in the crowd in the Maritime Terminal in Odessa, and later watched me board the ferry. A plane or train had taken her to Simferopol, and from there to Livadia. Then she had started watching me go out each morning, and writing me letters. She had invented the story of the trip home—it was just a form of punishment that she was imposing. None of her letters had a return address in the lower right-hand corner of the envelope, where it is usually written in Russia. Instead, there was a big bold capital Z covering that space, the red stamp used when someone leaves it blank, someone passing through a city, with no permanent address. Hiding in the house next door was a strange way to atone for her guilt. She would live so close, a few steps away, from the person who had rescued her from captivity, from the Turks, but she would not approach him until she was sure her letters had produced the desired effect, when I had formed a completely false impression of her. I was positive that V. had come. Four letters were enough to prepare me.
The next day I went to the neighboring pension. I stood under that window, staring intently at her curtains, lilies worked in tulle. No one seemed to be home. I asked Kuzmovna who lived there, in that room, in the other pension: “a divorcée,” she said, “an older woman.” Who I finally saw, coming out with a bicycle, gripping the handlebar. She must have lost her honor long ago (a summer romance) and decided to stay on, for the pleasant climate and closeness to Kazan and Ekaterimburgo.
V. could arrive at any moment, I had to be ready to meet her.