The Lemon Table

  He had assumed she would play the female lead, Natalya Petrovna, the married woman who falls in love with her son’s tutor. Instead, she chose to be Natalya’s ward Verochka, who, in the way of plays, also falls in love with the tutor. The production opened; he came to Petersburg; she called on him in his rooms at the Hotel de l’Europe. She had expected to be intimidated, but found herself charmed by the “elegant and likeable grandpa” that she discovered. He treated her like a child. Was this so surprising? She was twenty-five, he was sixty.

  On the 27th of March he went to a performance of his play. Despite hiding in the depths of the director’s box, he was recognized, and at the end of the second act the audience started calling his name. She came to take him onstage; he refused, but took a bow from the box. After the next act, he went to her dressing-room, where he grasped her hands and examined her beneath the gaslight. “Verochka,” he said. “Have I really written this Verochka? I never paid her much attention when I was writing. The focal point of the play for me was Natalya Petrovna. But you are the living Verochka.”

  2

  THE REAL JOURNEY

  So did he fall in love with his own creation? Verochka onstage beneath the floodlight, Verochka offstage beneath the gaslight, his Verochka, now prized the more for having been overlooked in his own text thirty years earlier? If love, as some assert, is a purely self-referring business, if the object of love is finally unimportant because what lovers value are their own emotions, then what more appropriate circularity than for a dramatist to fall in love with his own creation? Who needs the interference of the real person, the real her beneath the sunlight, the lamplight, the heart-light? Here is a photo of Verochka, dressed as for the schoolroom: timid and appealing, with ardour in her eyes and an open palm denoting trust.

  But if this confusion occurred, she incited it. Years later, she wrote in her memoirs, “I did not play Verochka, I performed a sacred rite . . . I felt quite distinctly that Verochka and I were the same person.” So we should be forgiving if “the living Verochka” was what first moved him; what first moved her was perhaps something else that didn’t exist— the author of the play, now himself long gone, thirty years away. And let’s also remember that he knew this would be his last love. He was an old man now. He was applauded wherever he went as an institution, the representative of an era, someone whose work was done. Abroad, they hung gowns and ribbons on him. He was sixty, old by choice as well as fact. A year or two earlier, he had written: “After the age of forty there is only one word to sum up the basis of life: Renunciation.” Now he was half as old again as that defining anniversary. He was sixty, she was twenty-five.

  In letters, he kissed her hands, he kissed her feet. For her birthday, he sent a gold bracelet with their two names engraved inside. “I feel now,” he wrote, “that I love you sincerely. I feel that you have become something in my life from which I shall never be parted.” The phrasing is conventional. Were they lovers? It seems not. For him, it was a love predicated upon renunciation, whose excitements were called if-only and what-might-have-been.

  But all love needs a journey. All love symbolically is a journey, and that journey needs bodying forth. Their journey took place on the 28th of May 1880. He was staying on his country estate; he pressed her to visit him there. She couldn’t: she was an actress, at work, on tour; even she had things that must be renounced. But she would be travelling from Petersburg to Odessa; her route could take her through Mtsensk and Oryol. He consulted the timetable for her. Three trains left Moscow along the Kursk line. The 12:30, the 4 o’clock, and the 8:30: the express, the mail, and the slow train. Respective arrivals at Mtsensk: 10 in the evening, 4:30 in the morning, and 9:45 in the morning. There was the practicality of romance to be considered. Should the beloved arrive with the post, or on the railway’s equivalent of the red-eye? He urged her to take the 12:30, redefining its arrival more exactly to 9:55 p.m.

  There is an ironic side to this precision. He was himself notoriously unpunctual. At one time, affectedly, he carried a dozen watches on his person; even so, he would be hours late for a rendezvous. But on May the 6th, trembling like a youth, he met the 9:55 express at the little station of Mtsensk. Night had fallen. He boarded the train. It was thirty miles from Mtsensk to Oryol.

  He sat in her compartment for those thirty miles. He gazed at her, he kissed her hands, he inhaled the air she exhaled. He did not dare to kiss her lips: renunciation. Or, he tried to kiss her lips and she turned her face away: embarrassment, humiliation. The banality too, at his age. Or, he kissed her and she kissed him back as ardently: surprise, and leaping fear. We cannot tell: his diary was later burned, her letters have not survived. All we have are his subsequent letters, whose gauge of reliability is that they date this May journey to the month of June. We know that she had a travelling companion, Raisa Alexeyevna. What did she do? Feign sleep, pretend to have sudden night vision for the darkened landscape, retreat behind a volume of Tolstoy? Thirty miles passed. He got off the train at Oryol. She sat at her window, waving her handkerchief to him as the express took her on towards Odessa.

  No, even that handkerchief is invented. But the point is, they had had their journey. Now it could be remembered, improved, turned into the embodiment, the actuality of the if-only. He continued to invoke it until his death. It was, in a sense, his last journey, the last journey of the heart. “My life is behind me,” he wrote, “and that hour spent in the railway compartment, when I almost felt like a twenty-year-old youth, was the last burst of flame.”

  Does he mean he almost got an erection? Our knowing age rebukes its predecessor for its platitudes and evasions, its sparks, its flames, its fires, its imprecise scorchings. Love isn’t a bonfire, for God’s sake, it’s a hard cock and a wet cunt, we growl at these swooning, renouncing people. Get on with it! Why on earth didn’t you? Cock-scared, cuntbolted tribe of people! Hand-kissing! It’s perfectly obvious what you really wanted to kiss. So why not? And on a train too. You’d just have to hold your tongue in place and let the movement of the train do the work for you. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack!

  When did you last have your hands kissed? And if you did, how do you know he was any good at it? (Further, when did anyone last write to you about kissing your hands?) Here is the argument for the world of renunciation. If we know more about consummation, they knew more about desire. If we know more about numbers, they knew more about despair. If we know more about boasting, they knew more about memory. They had foot-kissing, we have toe-sucking. You still prefer our side of the equation? You may well be right. Then try a simpler formulation: if we know more about sex, they knew more about love.

  Or perhaps this is quite wrong, and we mistake the gradations of courtly style for realism. Perhaps foot-kissing always meant toe-sucking. He also wrote to her: “I kiss your little hands, your little feet, kiss everything you will allow me to kiss, and even that which you will not.” Isn’t this clear enough, to both writer and recipient? And if so, then perhaps the converse is also true: that heart-reading was just as coarsely practised then as it is now.

  But as we mock these genteel fumblers of a previous era, we should prepare ourselves for the jeers of a later century. How come we never think of that? We believe in evolution, at least in the sense of evolution culminating in us. We forget that this entails evolution beyond our solipsistic selves. Those old Russians were good at dreaming a better time, and idly we claim their dreams as our applause.

  While her train continued towards Odessa, he spent the night at a hotel in Oryol. A bipolar night, splendid in his thoughts of her, miserable because this prevented him from sleeping. The voluptuousness of renunciation was now upon him. “I find my lips murmuring, ‘What a night we should have spent together!’ ” To which our practical and irritated century replies, “Take another train then! Try kissing her wherever it was you didn’t!”

  Such action would be far too dangerous. He must preserve the impossibility of love. So he offers her an extravagant if-only. He co
nfesses that as her train was about to leave he was suddenly tempted by the “madness” of abducting her. It was a temptation he typically renounced: “The bell rang, and ciao, as the Italians say.” But think of the newspaper headlines if he had carried out his momentary plan. “SCANDAL AT ORYOL RAILWAY STATION,” he delightedly imagines to her. If only. “An extraordinary event took place here yesterday: the author T—, an elderly man, was accompanying the celebrated actress S—, who was travelling to Odessa for a brilliant season in the theatre there, when, just as the train was about to pull out, he, as though possessed by the Devil in person, extracted Madame S—through the window of her compartment and, overcoming the artiste’s desperate efforts, etc., etc.” If only. The real moment—the possible handkerchief being waved at the window, the probable station gaslight falling on the whitened crest of an old man—is rewritten into farce and melodrama, into journalese and “madness.” The alluring hypothetical does not refer to the future; it is safely lodged in the past. The bell rang, and ciao, as the Italians say.

  He also had another tactic: that of hurrying on into the future in order to confirm the impossibility of love in the present. Already, and without “anything” having happened, he is looking back on this would-have-been something. “If we meet again in another two or three years, I shall be an old, old man. As for you, you will have entered definitively upon the normal course of your life and nothing will remain of our past . . .” Two years, he thought, would turn an old man into an old, old one; while “normal life” is already waiting for her in the banal yet timely shape of an officer of hussars, clanking his spurs offstage and snorting like a horse. N. N. Vsevolozhsky. How useful the thunderous uniform was to the gauntly bent civilian.

  We should not, by this point, still be thinking of Verochka, the naïve, unfortunate ward. The actress who embodied her was robust, temperamental, bohemian. She was already married, and seeking a divorce to acquire her hussar; she would marry three times in all. Her letters have not survived. Did she lead him on? Was she a little in love with him? Was she, perhaps, more than a little in love with him, yet dismayed by his expectation of failure, his voluptuous renunciations? Did she, perhaps, feel just as trapped by his past as he did? If love for him had always meant defeat, why should it be any different with her? If you marry a foot-fetishist, you shouldn’t be surprised to find him curled up in your shoe-cupboard.

  When he recalled that journey in letters to her, he made oblique references to the word “bolt.” Was this the lock on the compartment, on her lips, on her heart? Or the lock on his flesh? “You know what the predicament of Tantalus was?” he wrote. The predicament of Tantalus was to be tortured in the infernal regions by endless thirst; he was up to his neck in water, but whenever he bent his head to drink, the river would run away from him. Are we to conclude from this that he tried to kiss her, but that whenever he advanced, she retreated, withdrawing her wet mouth?

  On the other hand, a year later, when everything is safe and stylized, he writes this: “You say, at the end of your letter, ‘I kiss you warmly.’ How? Do you mean, as you did then, on that June night, in the railway compartment? If I live a hundred years I will never forget those kisses.” May has become June, the timid suitor has become the recipient of myriad kisses, the bolt has been slid back a little. Is this the truth, or is that the truth? We, now, would like it to be neat then, but it is rarely neat; whether the heart drags in sex, or sex drags in the heart.

  3

  THE DREAM JOURNEY

  He travelled. She travelled. But they did not travel; never again. She visited him at his estate, she swam in his pond—“the Undine of Saint Petersburg” he called her— and when she left he named the room in which she had slept after her. He kissed her hands, he kissed her feet. They met, they corresponded until his death, after which she protected his memory from vulgar interpretation. But thirty miles was all they travelled together.

  They could have travelled. If only . . . if only.

  But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past conditional.

  She was about to marry for the second time. N. N. Vsevolozhsky, officer of hussars, clank, clank. When she asked his opinion of her choice, he declined to play. “It is too late to ask for my opinion. Le vin est tiré—il faut le boire.” Was she asking him, artist to artist, for his view of the conventional marriage she was about to make to a man with whom she had little in common? Or was it more than this? Was she proposing her own if-only, asking him to sanction the jilting of her fiancé?

  But Grandpa, who himself had never married, declines either to sanction or applaud. Le vin est tiré—il faut le boire. Does he have a habit of lapsing into foreign phrases at key emotional moments? Do French and Italian provide the suave euphemisms which helps him evade?

  Of course, if he had encouraged a late withdrawal from her second marriage, that would have let in too much reality, let in the present tense. He closes it off: drink the wine. This instruction given, fantasy can resume. In his next letter, twenty days later, he writes, “For my part, I am dreaming about how good it would be to travel about—just the two of us—for at least a month, and in such a way that no one would know who or where we were.”

  It is a normal dream of escape. Alone together, anonymous, time on one’s hands. It is also, of course, a honeymoon. And where would the sophisticated artistic class go for their honeymoon if not to Italy? “Just imagine the following picture,” he teases. “Venice (perhaps in October, the best month in Italy) or Rome. Two foreigners in travelling clothes—one tall, clumsy, white-haired, long-legged, but very contented; the other a slender lady with remarkable dark eyes and black hair. Let us suppose her contented as well. They walk about the town, ride in gondolas. They visit galleries, churches, and so on, they dine together in the evening, they are at the theatre together—and then? There my imagination stops respectfully. Is it in order to conceal something, or because there is nothing to conceal?”

  Did his imagination stop respectfully? Ours doesn’t. It seems pretty plain to us in our subsequent century. A crumbling gentleman in a crumbling city on a surrogate honeymoon with a young actress. The gondoliers are splishsploshing them back to their hotel after an intimate supper, the soundtrack is operetta, and we need to be told what happens next? We are not talking about reality, so the feebleness of elderly, alcohol-weakened flesh is not an issue; we are very safely in the conditional tense, with the travelling rug tucked round us. So . . . if only . . . if only . . . then you would have fucked her, wouldn’t you? No denying it.

  Elaborating the Venice honeymoon fantasy with a woman still between husbands has its dangers. Of course, you have again renounced her, so there is small risk that by exciting her imagination you might find her outside your front door one morning, perched on a travelling trunk and coyly fanning herself with her passport. No: the more real danger is of pain. Renunciation means the avoidance of love, and hence of pain, but even in this avoidance there are traps. There is pain to be had, for instance, in the comparison between the Venetian capriccio of your respectful imagination and the impending reality of her getting disrespectfully fucked on her actual honeymoon by an officer of hussars, N. N. Vsevolozhsky, who is as unfamiliar with the Accademia as he is with the unreliabilities of the flesh.

  What heals pain? Time, the old wiseacres respond. You know better. You are wise enough to know that time does not always heal pain. The conventional image of the amatory bonfire, the eyeball-drying flame which dies to sad ashes, needs adjusting. Try instead a hissing gas-jet that scorches if you will but also does worse: it gives light, jaundicing, flat-shadowed and remorseless, the sort of light that catches an old man on a provincial platform as the train pulls out, a valetudinarian who watches a yellow window and a twitching hand withdraw from his life, who walks after the train a few paces as it curves into invisibility, who fixes his eye upon the red lamp of the guard’s wagon, holds on that until it is less than a ruby planet in the night sky, then turns awa
y and finds himself still beneath a platform lamp, alone, with nothing to do except wait out the hours in a musty hotel, convincing himself he has won while knowing truly that he has lost, filling his sleeplessness with cosy if-onlys, and then return to the station and stand alone once more, in a kinder light but to make a crueller journey, back along those thirty miles he had travelled with her the previous night. The passage from Mtsensk to Oryol, which he will commemorate for the rest of his life, is always shadowed by that unrecorded return from Oryol to Mtsensk.

  So he proposes a second dream journey, again to Italy. By now she is married, a change of status which is not an interesting subject for discussion. Drink the wine. She is going to Italy, perhaps with her husband, though travelling companions are not enquired after. He approves the journey, if only because it lets him offer her an alternative; not a rivalrous honeymoon this time, but a trip back in the painless past conditional. “I spent ten of the most delightful days in Florence, many, many years ago.” This use of time anaesthetizes pain. It was so many, many years ago that he was then “still under forty”—before the basis for life became renunciation. “Florence left on me the most fascinating and poetic impression—even though I was there alone. What it would have been like, had I been in the company of a woman who was understanding, good and beautiful— that above all!”