Tchékhov glanced at his watch. When Anton was sick as a child, or profoundly unhappy, he had played with a small oblong fragment of mirror to dart “sun hares” across the ceiling and on the faded paper of the wall.
In the bright rays of the gaslamp the glass watch-lens sent out spinning discs of light on the carriage ceiling.
He repeated under his breath his childhood’s secret chant : “The hare dances at night to seduce the moon.” He had believed then that a selenogamous marriage was the fate of a poet, and his destiny was to be a flamen devoted to his muse.
He sighed, and wrote : “It usually takes as much time to feel happy as to wind up one’s watch.”
He wound up his watch.
In those pages of his journal where he entered his imprest accounts, D-r Tchékhov drew a new line, and itemised his latest expenses – viz the handout to a battalion commander besieged by creditors.
“In Act I,” he wrote, “a respectable man, ‘X’, borrows a hundred roubles from ‘A’, and in the course of all four acts he does not pay it back.”
He smiled, and added : “To make an enemy is to lend a man money, and ask it of him again.”
To be spared the out-go, the yawning byurokrat then crossed out “expenses, sundry” and wrote “expenses, general”.
The landscape flowing by looked inane.
When he thought of the General’s penury Anton reckoned he had gone some way to make up the ullage.
The General had played him for a fool.
The dark bulk of the General’s lofty quadrilateral fort disappeared below the treeline.
On balance, Anton felt sorry for the General whose domain had shrunk to a second-rate boarding school and four mountain batteries quartered in a snowbound cantonment patrolling a forgotten frontier.
Anton gazed at the way the land tumbled, and saw the trees were planted anyhow, stupidly ; a land where prospered only zastoi — stagnation, stupidity and mediocrity.
“The story I have begun,” he scribbled in a draft letter to Nicholai, “is a work de longue haleine — as complicated as it is deeply tedious.”
He sighed. “At this moment I see no good reason to live,” he confided to his brother, “but then I remembered an editor had commissioned a magazine article on the poor schools and I recognised that I could not die issueless.”
The carriage lamp burned as fitfully as his own restlessness.
His hæmmorhoids were afire with a formicary itching which circled his arse like a ring-burner.
He had added to his knowledge of enemata by experimenting with variants of Ivanishche’s instillation of opium and myrrh tinctures which had succeeded only in acting upon his guts like evacuants ; purgations each more dreadful than the last.
To his remaining ampoule he sought relief ; and within the space of a few moments the allumé eyes of the unrepentant meconophagist had undergone their customary pupillary changes.
At a level-crossing a team of oxen hauling coal slackened their pace.
His stomach warmed and the abdominal spasms ceased.
There remained a sickly, sticky sensation in his gullet, however, which was clearly the consequence of too much smoking so he swallowed a linctus of barbitonum – a hypnotic drug – he had mixed with drops of antitussive opianine.
He gazed from the window and scanned the horizon through a pair of opera glasses.
The landscape flowing by looked phantasmagorical.
A fantaziya.
(He wrote,“And I dreamt that, as it were, I considered reality was a dream, and the dream was a reality.”)
In many respects, he considered, the fact that the symptoms of a sufferer from tuberculosis are similar to the signs of morphinism should be regarded by fellow addicts as fortunate indeed.
The similarities — the brittle nails, the axillary sweating, the dry heat in other regions, the weight loss, his fluctuating temperature night and day — had conveniently veiled his drug dependency from the prying intrusions of overofficious busybodies at the medical faculty in the past.
“I am a superfluous man ; only the healthy and strong will remain,” he wrote. “Nature is straining to rid herself of debilitated organisms and those she doesn’t need . . . famines, typhus, diphtheria — kholera, tuberkulez, skarlatina — an epidemic whose only cure is a course of the natural sciences. But Death defies the doctor. For how can a doctor prevail over disease when his own brother is reluctant to change is underpants.”
Since his sojourn in the fort his fæces had turned black, a sign which indicated, he believed, not only the presence of stomach blood as “coffee-grounds” in his stools but melæna wrought by an overdose of bismuth.
He examined the granulating abscess on his lower left femur and removed an incrustation. To his surprise when he looked for the formerly sloughy floor he saw the lesion had healed to a healthy new pink carapace.
“Cicatrix manet. Spasi'bo za poda'rok, Vańuška!” He laughed. “Thanks for the timely gift of spurious health, old man.”
Only one thought reconciled Tchékhov to the old feldsher : just as the Prince had suffered from the rascal’s ignorance, so perhaps Anton was benefiting from one of his mistakes.
“The hour is late afternoon and dark,” he wrote. “Only the evening will show what day it has been.”
He turned the page, and resumed writing.
“I think more and more of death. I dreamt that Court kammerjunkers were present at the opening of my grave, and I was preserved like a saint, the skin uncrackt, the odour sweet. Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the thought that you might live forever and never die. To live one must have something to hang on to. In this country only the body works, not the spirit.”
Above the rattle of the wheels, at the head of the train, he heard the melodiya of Mariya singing.
The ballada told of dukes and counts, like those in novels, not ordinary people. The song was not sensual but yearning ; a romanticheskoye yearning to rhyme Ideal and Love with Repentance and purest Sacrifice.
Mariya sang with a pathos to capture men’s souls, and on his lips he tasted the sacrament of that first warm kiss which had melted his heart.
Ahead of him, her singing faded.
He wanted to race and overtake her, and it seemed to him as if it were life itself he wanted to overtake, that life which one cannot bring back or overtake or catch, just as one cannot overtake one’s own shadow.
“To die innominate, unperpetuated — as the Great Anon — should be our early resolve,” he continued.
When he thought of his death he would recall the words of Cato ; for he would rather people should enquire why he had not a tablet erected to his memory, than why he had.
He unfolded his travelling rug, bunched his coat into a pillow, and laid his head in readiness for rest.
“Nevertheless, the power and salvation of a people lie in its intelligentsyia, in the intellectuals who think honestly, feel, and can work.”
A laconic smile lurked under his beard.
“At my death destroy these notebook writings as the demented ramblings of a drivelling scribbler, one of the cackling literati.”
There was no doubt but that he meant it.
“In truth, it seems to me that we uncultured, worn-out, money-grubbing people, banal in speech, stereotyped in intentions, have grown quite mouldy, and while we intellectuals are rummaging among old rags and, according to the old Russian custom, biting one another, there is boiling up around us a life we neither know nor notice. The dawn of a new life is breaking. Great events will take us unawares, and we shall turn into sinister old men and women ; and we shall be the first who, in that hatred of that new dawn, will calumniate it.”
He closed his eyes.
He could not forget the Prince monumentalised in the snow.
He could not forget Mariya imperatrix.
Her vivacious amoral'nyi smile.
He thought of her complex gamey odour of hairwash and perfumery.
“Essentially this chronicle of woe is crude and meaningless. Romantic love, like Mariya’s song appears as meaningless as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people.”
He opened his eyes and reread the scrap of paper on which he had copied the Prince’s love letter.
He shook his head in wonderment.
That the Prince had truly loved Mariya there could be no doubt. For Anton had preserved the scrap like holy writ.
No love letter should be read au pied de la lettre.
Just as D-r Tchékhov had struggled to find a way to conclude his Report to the General ; so the Prince had striven in the composition of his duplicitous last words.
As regards the psychogenesis of the Prince’s neuroses, the psycho-analytical school would continue to proffer the glib formula, “morbid anxiety and depressiya mean unsatisfied love.”
But was this diagnosis wholly true when Anton applied it to himself?
When depersonalisation was manifest, as was the case of the Prince, sometimes, the subjects of these inner stresses or mental conflicts, instead of feeling that they themselves are changed, discover their outer world appears different.
But surely derealisation was the very condition which sustained the writer’s inner life — was its essence?
There was no denying that the opium-eating scribbler shared many of the textbook symptoms — and perceptions.
“Subjects of depersonalisation appear different from what they used to be ; strange, lifeless, detached, automatic. In derealisation, the outer world looks dead or macabre. Such subjects exhibiting manic-depressive psychoses (melankholiya) must be regarded as suicide risks.”
Definitely spot on! Korsakov knew his stuff all right!
The ends of each pencil (there were five) he had found in the Prince’s study were, like the cadet’s finger nails, chewed to the quick.
The hands were crossed when Anton had last seen them.
For repose in his coffin, the bodkin-women had removed the Prince’s gloves.
Anton dwelt on the darker purposes of such women, prodding and dosing young wronged girls with filthy homegrown deobstruents.
He prayed Mariya had remained faithful to her promise.
At last, he sank into a deep opiated sleep and dreamt of Goshen — a great shining celestial city — velikii gorod — and dreamt he was a thief of the back streets who collects coins and collar studs from the pavement with tarred shoe-soles to evade detection.
He could not wait to be enclosed once more within the white heart of Moscow.
•
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
