Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey

Author:Ceridwen Dovey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713065
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A Terrarium of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf, on opening the box sent from Russia containing me, immediately sensed I was in pain and quickly figured out what to do about it. She gave me a warm salt bath daily to treat my infected shell, and fed me only water and fresh greens for weeks. She understood that my shell is a living and very sensitive part of my body, not anything like the fingernails of humans, and she was horrified that somebody had been stupid enough to carve words into it, across the bumps and scutes. In the box I’d travelled in, she found a single clue to my origins: a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s short story ‘Strider: The Story of a Horse’, in Russian.

An émigré friend of hers eventually translated it, and discovered it was not in fact Tolstoy’s story told from the point of view of Strider the horse, but the prison diary of Alexandra, who had been arrested and imprisoned several times since the Russian Revolution, and had asked her husband to smuggle her diary out of the country using me as a decoy. Rolled up and tucked under my infected shell was a note from Alexandra to Virginia in English, saying how much she admired her writing and begging her to care for both me and her diary until she could escape from Russia.

Alexandra’s husband – without knowing that it would hurt me – had decided to have some of the great Tolstoy’s words carved into the living tissue of my shell, in the hope it would give me a degree of notoriety in London and thus ensure my survival (and that of Alexandra’s diary), and in that his instinct was right. Virginia set me up in pride of place in her living room in Bloomsbury, and soon everybody she and her husband, Leonard, knew was stopping by to meet me, Tolstoy’s tortoise, with the great man’s reported deathbed words translated and carved on my back: I love many things, I love all people.

On discovering me in the box, Virginia had done what she usually did when she encountered a new phenomenon – in this case, a live tortoise – and went to the literature. She took out every book on tortoises she could find in the library, and read choice tidbits aloud to Leonard after dinner in the evening. With great good humour, he endured many monologues from her about the miracles of tortoise reproduction: how a female tortoise has absolute control over her own reproductive processes and can decide when to fertilise her egg (male sperm can survive in her body for as long as two years until she might elect to use it); if she changes her mind once the egg is fertilised, she can reabsorb it or hold off laying it until the time is right. Virginia was also greatly amused by the female tortoise’s general indifference to the lovemaking exertions of the male. One of the books included a naturalist’s description of

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