The physician Stepan Olegovich Dmitriev was returning from a Siberian penal colony where, his letters said, he would have been more useful in a priest’s robes than with stethoscope and mercury. Dusty and bruised from two months’ travel, he arrived home to Moscow shortly before Easter, 1892, to discover an empty, cold apartment and an envelope addressed in the hand of his friend and colleague, Anton Chekhov, the author of The Duel.
Dmitriev had forewarned Elena Petrovna of his return, but the only sign of his wife was cold ashes in the grate. Reaching for his paper knife to open his friend’s letter, Dmitriev noticed several ink spills on the desk blotter and remembered he had written to Anton Pavlovich from Siberia, promising to read Chekhov’s latest story on his journey home. However, “The Butterfly” was divided across two issues, and Elena Petrovna’s letter containing the second part had missed his departure. The conclusion of the story was lost somewhere between Moscow and Irkutsk.
On his hard and icy journey, Dmitriev had many times turned the pages of North and stopped at “The Butterfly”. He had nothing better to do than read it, nothing except sit on a hard bench scratching his flea bites, closing his ears against the creaking of the cart. His failure to keep his promise appalled Dmitriev, but that was nothing to the misery of reading the complication, only to be denied the satisfaction of the climax.
At his desk Dmitriev spread three prescription slips in front of him, licking his thumb to separate the papers. Several friends lived nearby and kept up with the latest publications. Carrying his messages, he went down to the street and whistled at the youth in the shabby cap who lingered on the steps of his building. Dmitriev fished a few kopecks from his waistcoat pocket and threw them for the youth to catch. “Wait for their replies,” Dmitriev growled, handing over the notes. Bowing to collect the coins, the youth looked up with an infuriating smirk. He should have chosen another boy, Dmitriev reflected as he climbed the stairs. This one was always on the doorstep, no doubt awaiting Elena Petrovna, hoping for a smile, a generous glance.
The youth returned an hour later and let himself into the apartment. He placed the magazine on the table in front of the fire and lingered beside the armchair as Dmitriev read his friends’ replies, which the youth had slipped into the pages of North.
“Yes?” Dmitriev said.
The youth wore the same contemptuous expression. He tapped North. “I can read, you know,” the boy said.
“Can you now? Let me fetch you a kopeck.”
The boy held out his hand and flinched as Dmitriev raised his palm. Screwing his cap in his fists, the boy left the room walking backwards, his eyes darting to the bedroom door, no doubt hoping for a glimpse of Dmitriev’s wife.
Dmitriev picked up his envelopes. Under the letter from Chekhov, he had found a second, from a beautiful sculptress whose husband had died under Dmitriev’s care the previous autumn. He had opened neither while waiting, hesitating over which was the more urgent. Now he opened the letter from the widow. In careful, childlike script, she wished him all grace and good health and offered her forgiveness for her husband’s death. I know you did everything you could, she wrote. I do not blame you in the slightest. She repeated the sentiment near the end. It was God himself who made me a widow. I know you gave everything in your power.
He picked up Anton Pavlovich’s letter, but set it aside and instead took up the edition of North which his travel case had rendered dog-eared and dirty. He turned to Chekhov’s story, but this too he set down again. There was a decanter of port on the drinks trolley, which Dmitriev had left before his long journey, a custom he’d developed since Elena Petrovna despised port. He was pleased that the decanter had survived his absence, and now he brought it to the fireplace, with one of the fine crystal glasses Elena Petrovna’s uncle had given for their wedding. He drank a small measure, poured another, and settled down to read.
The first paragraphs made Dmitriev chuckle. The story was about a doctor, happily married to a woman who moved in artistic circles. “Wait until Lenochka reads this,” Dmitriev said to himself, refilling his glass. “She’ll laugh her cheeks red.”
By the time he picked up the conclusion of “The Butterfly”, however, Dmitriev was pulling the hairs from his beard. His good humour had vanished, and his fingers shivered as if the blood had fled his extremities and was gathering to reinforce his heart. His shaking hand lifted the decanter and found it empty.
When Elena Petrovna returned home late that evening, smelling of vodka and burnt tallow, Dmitriev was drunk. He had removed from the wall a ceremonial duelling pistol that had belonged to a cousin of his, a youth of twenty who’d fallen through ice near Petersburg and either frozen to death in the lake or drowned.
“I hope that’s not for either of us,” Elena Petrovna said, taking in the empty decanter, the slivers of magazine paper that littered the hearth and clung to the bars of the fire. Dmitriev hoped she hadn’t noticed the fragments of cut crystal among the coals.
“I must murder a man,” Dmitriev said unhappily, leaning his temple against the muzzle of the pistol. Elena Petrovna removed the gun and tipped it out onto the desk. A ball and powder fell onto the leather.
“You’re a medical man, not a barbarian,” she said, tutting, allowing Dmitriev to clutch her waist and kiss her wrists. “I’ve been listening to the dreariest poem of Fet’s. All leaves and forests, like a grandmother’s letter.” She pushed his head away. Two dark circles dampened her skirt. “Won’t you pull yourself together? I can’t come home to a weeping husband.”
“You haven’t seen it,” Dmitriev said.
“Seen what? You’ve lost your mind, is that it? The Siberian cold has finally cracked you?”
“We’re ruined, both of us,” Dmitriev said. He bent for a torn sheet that had fallen to the floor and thrust it at his wife. “He’s ruined us.”
“Ruined?” Elena Petrovna said with a chuckle. Her eye, scanning the page, slowed. “A coincidence, that’s all I can see. How many doctors does Anton Pavlovich know? You forget he’s a doctor himself. What does it matter, anyway, if he bases his character on his old friend Stepan Olegovich? A compliment, if nothing else.”
“You’re there too,” Dmitriev said, mastering his dismay. “Lenochka, I cannot believe that you have ever, in my long periods of work outside Moscow, done me any disrespect. And yet he calls you… He suggests…”
To his horror, Dmitriev’s wife laughed. “But I haven’t given you any disgrace, Stepan Olegovich. You know that as well as I do. So how can this man insult me?”
“And yet he has,” Dmitriev said, gesturing at the ashes among the burning coals.
“This?” Elena Petrovna threw the page she was holding into the grate. “You must go and speak to him, Styopa. You are a rational man. This can all be straightened out in an hour.”
“You’re right,” Dmitriev said, doubtful, “I know you’re right.” He wiped his eyes and crossed to the desk, where he swept the powder into his palm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is no kind of reunion.”
“All the same,” Elena Petrovna said, “it is a reunion. Come, darling one. Tell me about Siberia. Was it as monstrous as before?”
Later that night, Dmitriev returned to his desk. It was the doctor’s idea that he would visit Chekhov’s apartment the following afternoon, and it was for the purpose of writing a reply that he tore the seal of his friend’s letter. But the contents dismayed him. Anton Pavlovich had left his apartment on Malaya Dmitrovka, the letter said, indeed he had left Moscow entirely, sinking a fortune into a country estate, where your friend and colleague would be delighted to welcome your visit, Stepan Olegovich, should you find it in your heart to make the journey.
At once Dmitriev composed a reply, his fingers still shaking from port and rage. The guttering candle gave a fragile light, spewing black smoke. Elena Petrovna’s snores from the adjoining bedroom accompanied the scratching of Dmitriev’s nib. Before long, he too was drifting into sleep and when he awoke, his cheek clinging to the blotter, the doctor found he held in one hand an envelope addressed in unsteady pen he scarcely recognised as his own, and in the other the polished walnut grip of the ancient duelling pistol.
{~~~}
The week that passed before Dmitriev took the train from Moscow to his friend’s estate did nothing to cool his fury. At the long Easter service, he heard several whispers about a scandal of a married woman and an artist, and at a drinks party he found himself in conversation near a loud matron in heavy rouge and furs, who wanted to shoot “that great pander, Anton Chekhov.” Chekhov, the woman said, had raided his latest story from the adventures of her youth.
Addressing himself coldly to the woman, Dmitriev asked her, “Do you know Anton Pavlovich?”
“Not myself, no,” the woman said. “But he must have heard about me from our acquaintances in common.” She wore several crosses on chains, and reminded Dmitriev of those devout women who call themselves criminals for the slightest crime of imagination. It disgusted him the way the matron seemed to boast of her insult when his own wife only laughed and denied any offence. This encounter was a morsel he chewed over again and again on the rattling train, while he debated what to do with the pistol, which he had thrust into his travelling case at the last possible moment before departure, so that Elena Petrovna did not notice and stop him, and which he could not now easily lose.
Dmitriev was met at the station by an inane peasant in a poorly made cart, drawn by a mare that had barely survived winter. It was a long drive to the estate, and the oval wheels and pitted country lane jostled Dmitriev painfully. The driver would pat the mare and address her in his thick accent, “Easy now, Anna Petrovna. Take care, Anna Petrovna,” in which Dmitriev heard each time the mocking echo of his own wife’s name.
It was a relief to stand on the verandah of the rough wooden house that was his destination, watching the cart retreat through an avenue of trees towards the road, listening to the chattering birds, the rustling of leaves, the ripples of fish in the dirty pond which lay in front of the house. Two men were at work digging up paving stones in the garden, and Dmitriev recognised Chekhov’s brother, Mikhail. The older man with a long beard, who never stopped humming to himself, must be the father. Through the window of a barn, Dmitriev caught sight of a rudimentary stove tended by a woman in an apron, Anton Pavlovich’s sister, Mariya.
Dmitriev sat himself in a wicker armchair and awaited his friend’s return. The family were too busy at chores to greet him, but Mikhail did look up from his stones and wave at the verandah. A magazine had been left discarded on a chair, and reaching for it, Dmitriev was startled by a distant explosion. It was a rifle shot from the direction of the meadows beyond the lime trees. He opened the magazine and discovered another story of Chekhov’s, which Dmitriev felt too bitter to read.
As the sun drew towards the tops of the trees, two figures appeared in the meadow, trudging through the mud. Dmitriev at once identified the taller man as Chekhov and sprang to his feet, though his host was still far from the house. Pacing the verandah, Dmitriev tried to make out what the men carried over their shoulders, some variety of game he guessed from the guns they balanced on their elbows. Dmitriev held his case in his fists, cursing himself for locking it on the train. At the door to the kitchen, Mariya appeared carrying a samovar on a metal tray. She seemed alarmed to see Dmitriev, and the tray rattled as she carefully carried it up the half-laid path. Nodding her head in greeting, she said, “We did not expect you, Stepan Olegovich.”
“But I wrote to Anton Pavlovich a week ago,” Dmitriev said.
“That explains it then. The demands of the estate are great, and Antosha has become neglectful. My brother at least sent the driver?”
“He did.”
“Then there’s no harm,” Mariya said, smiling. “Let me fetch another cup.”
The two huntsmen were now entering the garden, arguing playfully. Dmitriev could just catch that the other man had seen a play in Moscow which he felt to be a work of genius, for which Chekhov was mocking him. Spying Dmitriev, Chekhov stopped walking, shedding his rifle and a small bird he was carrying. Setting off at a sprint, his face overwhelmed with joy, Anton Pavlovich leapt onto the verandah and grasped his friend’s shoulders, saying, “You? Here? What am I dreaming, or is it really so?”
Being shaken by his friend so violently and with such obvious delight caused Dmitriev some panic. Wasn’t he carrying a pistol in his case? Hadn’t he come to Melikhovo to confront Chekhov? But he remembered his Hippocratic Oath, and saw that Elena Petrovna was right. Sinking into the armchair, Dmitriev scarcely noticed the arrival of the other man, a lean youth with a dark beard and melancholy eyes, until Anton Pavlovich said, “But you know Levitan?”
The pair shook hands. “My pleasure,” the other man said, with severity.
“But you know his work?” Chekhov said. “Levitan paints landscapes, the countryside, the spirit of the earth. But Stepan Olegovich, you look pale, was the journey a bad one?”
“Not at all,” Dmitriev said. “I’m still not recovered from Siberia.”
“This place will restore you,” Chekhov said, coughing as he filled the teacups. “I myself had influenza all winter, two months without relief. I’m hardly over it.”
They drank, and the host and the painter debated an event from their hunt, addressing themselves to Dmitriev as judge. Levitan had shot a snipe, wounding its wing. Chekhov had rescued the injured bird from a pond.
“It looked at me like I was its lord and master,” Anton Pavlovich said, “and this madman stands there saying, ‘Kill it, kill it, h-hit it on the h-head, I can’t bear to look.”
“W-what is a bird without a wing?” Levitan said. “For what life would you spare such a creature?”
“An intelligent bird,” Chekhov said. “The way it gazed at me, as if it understood exactly my dilemma. And this man wants me to bash its brains with the butt-end of my gun.”
Dmitriev looked toward the garden, wishing the other men would join. But Chekhov’s relations had left their work and had gone somewhere else, no doubt leaving their brother to his guests. “Did you put it from its misery?” Dmitriev asked.
“As if he had a choice,” Levitan said. “H-he blames me, but we’ll eat snipe for supper all the same.” He drained his glass and stood up. “Absurd, isn’t it? The things a man will feel shame for.”
“What does he mean by that, I wonder?” Chekhov said as Levitan disappeared indoors. Coughing, Chekhov slid into the painter’s chair and said, “I’d have thought your wife would have wanted to make the most of your return to Moscow, Dmitriev, after so long away.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“No, nothing, nothing. Shall I pour more tea?”
“She is going to her uncle’s estate, the textile merchant,” Dmitriev said, holding out his cup. He’d detected performance in Chekhov’s joyful greeting. Now, Anton Pavlovich was mocking him. “But I am dying to talk about your story in North,” he said.
Chekhov dropped Dmitriev’s cup to the tray, spilling the steaming tea. He raised his hands as if he meant to wring Dmitriev’s neck, but it was his own throat Anton Pavlovich grasped, massaging his carotids as if attempting to ease his fingers under a noose. He coughed nervously.
“Please, keep your voice down. I have succeeded in distracting our friend, but at any moment his suspicions could return.”
“Our friend?” Dmitriev said. Was this another of Chekhov’s games, an attempt to placate him?
“Yes, Levitasha. The business with the snipe, he intends to punish me, you see. Vengeance, would you believe it? Over something completely negligible, a silly sketch.”
“My apologies, Anton Pavlovich,” Dmitriev said. “I am not following…”
“The painter in North, the lover of my butterfly. Levitan has taken offence. As if half the painters in Moscow don’t have mistresses. Under the skin, as you and I know, Dmitriev, what is there to tell one man from another? We doctors need have no illusions.” Chekhov chuckled, but this caused him another fit of coughing.
“You are not over your influenza.”
“It’s close to beaten,” Chekhov said. “With the spring, and this clean country air, it cannot chase me much longer.” He beat his sternum with his fist. “But come, let me show you the house. You’ll forgive its rough state. And then I must retire to my writing desk to earn a few kopecks, or my family will have no bread this winter.”
{~~~}
On a cot in the corridor that night, Dmitriev lay awake, shivering, disturbed by the coughing that seemed to echo through the bones of the house. He had drunk the old man’s homemade liqueurs at dinner, distracting himself from Chekhov’s father’s relentless religious humming. The corridor was draughty and gave him little warmth under the winter covers, which crackled with hardened dirt.
It was the pistol that kept Dmitriev from sleeping. To have brought a gun to Melikhovo, where guns were plentiful as was typical in every country estate, struck the doctor more than ever as an act of madness. If the pistol were found in Dmitriev’s possession, the only assumption would be the correct one, that Chekhov’s latest story had created a motive. Hadn’t Anton Pavlovich said something similar, that a gun must always have a purpose? No, Dmitriev decided, throwing off the bedcovers and feeling around the rough boards for his boots. He must rid himself of the weapon.
The moon gave only a murky light to the shadows as he felt his way to the door and out into the damp air, the pistol wrapped inside his coat. Dmitriev peered across the lawn, debating whether he needed light. He didn’t want to lose his way in strange countryside at night, but set against that was the possibility a lantern might be noticed. Then how would he explain himself, skulking in the dark with a pistol like a common burglar?
He felt his way across the garden, tripping on the corners of paving stones and the divots in the dirt road. He had in mind to conceal the pistol in the wood which lay beyond the meadow, where he imagined it would not be discovered. But the going was hard on the mud, where stalks of old hay scratched his ankles and invisible wings buzzed his face. He saw his mistake. Second only to being caught with a pistol would be for a strange pistol to appear in a bush in daylight, demanding explanation. Perhaps the suspicion would fall on the painter, but Levitan would know the truth and could accuse Dmitriev in turn. At once it seemed obvious that the gun could disappear without difficulty into the dirty pond beside the house, where it would tarnish quickly into a rusted artefact, harmless if discovered.
Stumbling through a dark thicket that hid between the lime trees, Dmitriev became aware of a glint ahead. In the direction he believed was the house, he saw the moon reflected amber in some muddy stream. That must be the pond, he thought, but stopped in fright when the moon, which had lain rippling, turned and cast a glow across a breadth of water, revealing the verandah fifty arshins to the left.
It was a lantern. Somebody had followed Dmitriev, perhaps Chekhov himself, a thought which chilled the doctor, that Chekhov had divined from Dmitriev’s demeanour this exact course of action. Retreating, Dmitriev’s temple crashed against a branch. He gave a muffled cry of terror.
“Wh-who’s there?” called a soft voice, and the beam swung towards the trees.
Caught, shielding his eyes, holding the pistol in his belt, Dmitriev staggered down an unseen bank towards the figure, who was calling, “Who’s there? Is that you, Misha?”
“Who is it?” Dmitriev whispered. “Who’s shining this light to blind me?”
The lantern turned, revealing Levitan.
“I thought you were Anton Pavlovich,” Dmitriev said. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see the pond,” Levitan said, his voice boyish, as if caught in the act of stealing apples. “It was a s-silly idea.”
“No, please,” Dmitriev said, understanding he was lost. These artists could excuse anything with a few words, I was inspired to look at a pond, Anton Pavlovich, that is why I was creeping about in the dark, but what’s my excuse, Dmitriev thought. A mere doctor roaming the night with a pistol. At once, an idea occurred to him. “You must be wondering why I’m out here, Isaac Ilyich.”
“It’s that damn snipe,” Levitan said. “It did it to taunt me, I’m certain. My shot was true but at the last moment it spun away. Never mind it could make no difference, it was that creature’s fate to die. But then Anton Pavlovich with his w-w-weeping…”
“I have been wanting to speak with you, Isya,” Dmitriev said. “It’s my reason for coming to Melikhovo, in fact.” They were standing beside each other, and by the glimmering light he saw Levitan’s confusion. “The fact is, Moscow’s talking about you.”
“Talking?” Levitan said, directing the lantern across the water towards the house, catching dark wings of shadow.
“You do Anton Pavlovich a great honour, shooting his game and sharing his table. His latest story—”
“You see me in it?”
“All of Moscow sees you in it, Isya. They call our host a criminal to transcribe your life for his own ends. They say you deserve satisfaction. But of course, it’s not cowardice to keep out of petty games of honour.”
He felt the painter stiffen. “It is a work of fiction,” Levitan said. “Where do you hear this?”
“From my mistress,” Dmitriev said, surprised at his creativity. “You see, Isya, there are no secrets between us. It was another unfaithful wife who told her, but where the women hear it, I cannot say.”
“Chekhov is like a brother to me,” Levitan said. “What’s done cannot be helped.”
“Then I have my answer,” Dmitriev said. “I came here to offer my support, should you desire it.”
“You don’t mean… as s-second?” Levitan’s wide eyes darted between the house and Dmitriev. “This is madness, you can’t mean—” Levitan, stepping backwards, found the slope of the bank.
“Careful, Isya,” Dmitriev said, catching Levitan by the elbow. “Here, let me show you. Lower your lantern. You see?” Dmitriev opened his coat. “Not here,” Dmitriev hissed. The painter had reached for the gun. “But you’re shaking, Levitan. Let’s go inside.”
Dmitriev began to walk, and after several paces, the other man followed. They passed the pond in silence, the swinging lantern making shadows into creatures that reared across the lawn and swallowed Dmitriev into their darkness. His heart beat rapidly and he gripped the smooth wood, his fingertips touching the cold metal barrel. Dmitriev could sense the change in the painter from his footsteps, his resignation to necessity.
“What, after all, have I really done?” Dmitriev whispered to himself, entering the garden. The feeling was no different to caring for an incurable man, shepherding him towards his end. Imagining the letter he would write Elena Petrovna, Dmitriev remembered what Anton Pavlovich said: that a gun once shown must eventually fire.
A barrage of coughs broke the stillness, echoed by a shout of the old man’s prayer. The lantern’s shadows moved back and forth over the house where Chekhov slept. Inside, nothing woke him, not the coughing nor the pain. But the father was singing again, a holy song, a lullaby. Medicine to keep the evil one from the door, a balm to bring peace to his son’s tormented dreams.
Thanks for reading One More Draft! Pocket Lint is a nutritious weekly serial, fortified with trivia and nonsense, now available in a convenient fictional wrapper. If you didn’t enjoy this post, be sure to miss the complete Pocket Lint Archive, and do comment and share to help others avoid my work.
Until next week, with warmth and gratitude,
LW
Ah, beware the writer, the thief! A very fine and richly imagined piece, not a word out of place. x
It begins as a story… but something in it doesn’t stay contained.