The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte

The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte

Author:Steven Conte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 4th Estate
Published: 2020-07-27T00:00:00+00:00


TWELVE

Helsinki

7 May 1967

Dear Paul,

How extraordinary it was to hear from you, and from such an unexpected source. I had thought you were probably dead. It was last September that Irina Petrovna came to me in Moscow and passed on news of your visit to Yasnaya Polyana. She had to work hard to convince me she had met you and not your ghost. Had I been able to, believe me, I would have written to you straight away, but as I will explain, it is something of a miracle I can write to you at all.

Paul Bauer. How often I’ve thought of you these last – my God! – two and a half decades. Time has mass, don’t you find, as well as duration, and those six weeks we knew each other in 1941 are among the most densely experienced of my life. Even before Irina’s visit not a month would pass without a memory of that time arising in my mind, and since September I’ve thought of it every day. Of course the war was a vivid period for all of us who lived through it, and I suppose it’s only natural that I’m haunted, as it were, by that brief time under enemy occupation. And yet I sense the same might be true for you – why else, I ask myself, would a West German citizen opt for an Intourist-supervised excursion to the Soviet Union, when presumably the Bahamas was an option, or Finland?

Not that I’m entirely surprised. Whatever else may have befallen you later in the war, you can have scarcely forgotten the maddening of Julius Metz (how exceedingly strange it is to write that name) or the deaths of your three comrades. (Their names, I regret to say, I no longer recall – so much for my supposedly excellent memory.) Was it to pay your respects that you returned to Yasnaya Polyana? ‘To the scene of the crime’, I was tempted to write, but that would be inaccurate, wouldn’t it, as I recall you behaved rather nobly there, or tried to. Do good Samaritans return to the scenes of their benignities? Perhaps you are like my late husband who once likened his compulsion to revisit Tula, his hometown, which he professed to hate, with a dog’s urge to eat its own vomit – a crude analogy, I know, but one I can’t help remembering when, under the cover of professional obligation, I sometimes go back to Yasnaya Polyana.

So how did the estate seem to you after such a long absence? Essentially unchanged, I hope, if I did my job properly when you and your comrades left, though visiting in summer is a different proposition from staying in winter, as you are in a position to know better than most. Irina confessed she didn’t recognise you, even after you introduced yourself, so I presume that, like me, you are not unchanged. Distinguished looking, is how she described you, which if I remember correctly you were already on the way to becoming in 1941.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.