The Summer Guest by Alison Anderson Page B

life. Perhaps I fear, too, the flamboyance of our handsome Russian youth. I hear them shouting, singing, someone is drunk already. It is too tiresome to worry about, but something is pinching at me inside, somewhere between regret and fear.
    No doubt because of our shared profession and his, I would say, extraordinary ability to treat me as myself, I do not want to lose the special understanding I have with Anton Pavlovich. It is as if he feels more comfortable with me because I cannot see him with my eyes, so he in turn opens a door that the others keep shut: He allows me to go on being normal. That is a greatgift. Even my sisters and Mama tend to fuss over me—and I let them, at times I have no choice—but to spend even fifteen minutes talking about this or that with Anton Pavlovich sets me into the present tense I once took for granted, without the terrible weight of the future.
    June 4, 1888
    Perhaps my fears are justified after all—it has been three days now since I’ve seen Anton Pavlovich. (I write seen, but that is a convention, language does not accommodate blindness any better than the rest of nature or society does.)
    They have been swimming and fishing, says Natasha.
    It is too hot to be outdoors during the day. I spend time on the veranda, but without company, my inspiration, I am finding it hard to write. This notebook has been open on my lap for an inestimable amount of time, my hand closed stiffly around the pen. The ink dries. Mama, Elena, Pasha, Georges—all are elsewhere; Natasha is in her social world (she is learning to fish, but Anton Pavlovich tells her women don’t have the patience, although they have patience for other things, like children. And men). Only Tonya comes now and again with her heavy body to sit with me. She is more and more frightened of childbirth as the day approaches. I reassure her, point to the noisy brood of Chekhovs to show her how people come into the world to unshakable sturdiness.
    If only I could read. I used to read so much when I was alone, especially as a girl. Gogol and Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, of course, but also the foreign authors, Dickens and Balzac and Madame Sand. And lesser-known authors who wrote of adventure and travel and discovery. I read of all those foreignplaces, all those people whose lives could not be more different from our own, and I would look around Luka and know how fortunate I was. Mama’s life has been hard, but she has done her best to create a kingdom for us here. I once had the opportunity to travel to Vienna with Lyudmila Nikolayevna and her mother, but I declined, because it would have meant being away at harvesttime, and I couldn’t miss it for anything. The colors, the singing, the festivities—the same renewed each year, but always different. I went briefly to the harvest feast last year and prayed I would find the joy and renewal that had always sustained me, but the colors had faded inexorably—my vision had faded, I should say, was almost gone, and Elena led me here and there, and there were the smells and sounds, the fragrances I had grown up with, more intense than ever, but I missed the kaleidoscope of images.
    Now that I live this circumscribed existence, I tend to look back and try to determine what I miss the most, what I deemed necessary for my sustenance—even though now it is no longer necessary at all, reduced as I am to idle memories and the tedium of the waiting room.
    But let me not think of that.
    And how are you doing with the young lady from Novorossiysk? Is she legible?
    He gave a hesitant laugh. Edible, is more like it. She’s an absolute pudding.
    It was my turn to laugh. What do you mean?
    She writes well, she has promise, but she doesn’t know when to stop. She goes on and on in her descriptions—landscapes, feelings, even the family servants — until the words become as thick as jam.
    Then it doesn’t seem that she writes well after all.
    But she does!