Chekhov’s Confession
Even if he was only staying one night as the guest of Madame G, Anton Chekhov’s arrival in our town created a sensation. The man, like the weather when he arrived, was a mixture of playful spring winds and lingering grey winter. Of our famous prose masters, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Gogol, he was the easiest to swallow thanks to his scientific precision and ironic understatement. Of course, he was a doctor, so he was trained to be clinical, giving readers the satisfactory sensation of peeking at them, not being preached at or lectured. Likewise, in person he seemed to vacate himself when he looked at you, his eyes uncontaminated by prejudice, filling up only with the inventory of what he took in: your skin colour, the cant of your shoulders, the bulge at your waist, all the things that he ended up putting into his stories, making “characters” out of mere words, confecting a moral likeness out of physical descriptions and behavioural propensities.
Those of us who thought about it—not to call us the intelligentsia—believed he couldn’t have come to our town only to call on Madame G, a well-regarded but insecure widow rich enough to live in Moscow but too frightened of finding herself adrift there, lost in the never-ending controversies about the Tsar, reform, the anachronism of the nobility, and, of course, our particular scandal whose echoes and humiliation surely were the real occasion of the renowned author’s visit.
He was a man for whom two plus two equals four. We could count, too. So let’s add it up: The first two were these: 1) Chekhov had come to Skotoprigonyevsk, and 2) he recently had published his book about the penal island off the coast of Siberia, Sakhalin. The second two were these: 1) Chekhov must have encountered Dmitri Karamazov on Sakhalin, or some trace of him, and 2) Chekhov must be visiting us to learn more about the Karamazov saga (beyond Dostoevsky’s version) or possibly tell us something about Dmitri, including mention of his brother Alexei, also known as Alyosha, and Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlov, otherwise called Grushenka, who had followed him to Sakhalin
In a town like ours, with a past like ours, we could all be considered fools. The Karamazov scandal certainly made us look that way. All of Mother Russia had born witness to Dmitri’s trial and conviction for murdering his father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov (a good candidate for parricide, by the way—coarse enough to think he could lure Grushenka away from Dmitri with a mere 3,000 rubles and yet educated enough to quote Schiller; father as well to the brilliant but brittle Ivan, who went mad arguing Dmitri’s innocence) and father, as well, to the angelic Alyosha, a man—let’s face it—who lived through the whole scandal denying his Karamazov blood: how could Alyosha be that good? He was like a postulate, a theorem, not a man. No wonder Father Zossima sent him packing from the monastery (he needed more grit in his soul).
And yet I don’t know that it can be said that any of us, the Karamazovs included, truly qualify as fools, not unless all of humanity fits that bill—a possibility Chekhov countenances in his writings yet seems disinclined to concede even after his horrendous visit to Sakhalin, the pit of all pits. He is a moralist, not a misanthrope. But I digress, lacking Chekhov’s concision. I had it when I said two plus two equals four. That was Chekhovian, but now listen to me dither. What am I afraid of? Well, I know what it is: the whole business of Lise Khokhlakov, who was in love with Aloysha from childhood and yet self-destructively determined to mock and spoil that love because she didn’t know how to grow up and neither did he, the two of them afraid of one another in their very different ways—his being shyness, hers being devilishness. The last we saw of her in Dostoevsky’s book she was slamming a door on her fingers to hurt herself. Not a pretty sight but not made up. Dostoevsky delineated her perversity to a T. And she remained in our town, aside from the reclusive Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtsev, the one remaining person who truly played a significant role in the Karamazov fiasco, sorely afflicted with an illness that incapacitated her ability to eat. We didn’t need Chekhov to diagnose her. We have our own doctors—Gruber, for one—and knew what the problem was called: anorexia. The anorexic is a frozen personality, a personality that wishes to stop life. Yet once Lise had gotten old enough, she’d go to dinner parties and sit through them in near silence and not eat, or take tiny bites, pleading indigestion, or fullness, or fatigue, but never complain or express any emotion whatsoever. Given her obvious distress, this made everyone uncomfortable, but that’s what she wanted, I believe—to make sure we saw her suffering without offering us any way to ameliorate it, to burden our souls with whatever sense of loss Alyosha’s departure burdened hers.
So along with the rest of us, Lise unfortunately was invited to Madame G’s to dine and speak with the great author and listen to his experiences and impressions. These were divulged after dinner over coffee and liquor. Having been amused by the lot of us showing him our bright side and chattering like squirrels all through the meal (all of us, except Lise), it was the guest of honour’s turn to reciprocate. We sat around in Madame G’s famous “oval,” a mixture of overstuffed chairs, settees, and an artfully arranged divan, Lise somewhat protectively situated to Madame G’s left, Chekhov to her right, and were full of the expectation one has in the presence of a writer—that he would have seen things we had never seen, thought things we had never thought, and know exactly how to express them.
Chekhov did not disappoint us. He was so kind that he actually began by saying he had come to our town to apologize and repay us what he called a “debt.” (In the Lord’s prayer, “debt” also can be translated as “trespass,” and I actually think that would be a better word in this case, but Chekhov said “debt.)
“As you may know,” he began, “I went to Sakhalin to examine its conditions, which I have described in my book, which might have been better written by Dante or Swift, I admit. High up off the coast of easternmost Siberia, Sakhalin is a thin-soiled island with a foggy, mosquito-infested climate that is frigid during the long winters and infernal in the summers. Stated succinctly, it is an upside-down hell that reforms no one, only coarsens them. It’s a slave society, though its profits in coal, some fish, lumber and sable pelts are pitiful. I might add Voltaire to my list of alternative authors, punishing him with the obligation of describing the worst of all possible worlds—a world of coastal swamps, rocky uplands, shackled men who sleep head to foot on planks in sweat-soaked clothing, smugglers who poison everyone with their vile vodka and girls who live as prostitutes from age twelve until their early death.
“It’s all there in travelogue form, reinforced by the results of the census I took, all except one story I did not tell because it would have knocked my narrative topsy-turvy and more importantly because to tell it would be to confess I committed a crime, which, if it is a crime against anyone, I suppose is a crime against you.”
The twelve of us gathered in Madame G’s parlour either blanched or blushed when Chekhov said this. Madame G’s wrinkled visage flushed somewhat feverishly while the utterly engrossed Lise, I noticed, grew chalkier than normal. Chekhov was in earnest, and of course this must mean—the very word “crime” must mean—that he was on the precipice of a descent into the Karamazovs and about to take us with him.
He said he met all kinds of wretches and scoundrels on Sakhalin—after all, only the worst miscreants are sent the farthest away from civilization—and then one day in the Dui region, where there are coal seams along the wind-bitten coast, he observed a tall, rail-thin man in his early thirties carrying a bowl in which sloshed a bluish fluid that in fact was milk. This man was Alyosha Karamazov—he said so directly in answer to Chekhov’s questionnaire, adding also that he was a free man; he lived in a settlement one verst east of Dui that went by the name of The Crease; he was 32; his religious persuasion was Molokan (of this a bit more later); he was born where we know him to have been born; he had arrived in Sakhalin in 1882; his principal occupation was animal husbandry; he was literate; he was not married but lived with a woman (Grushenka!); he received no assistance from the prison; and at the moment he was pursuing his principal social duty (self-imposed) of offering the people he met a ladle of milk.
Now I must digress a moment. It has to do with Lise and the Molokans, not that they had anything to do with one another until that very moment, but the seed conjoining them was planted in the obvious anguish in her face upon hearing about Alyosha’s mission of offering the world sustenance. That was torture to her, as Chekhov, along with the rest of us, clearly noted. Who were these Molokans? I’ll tell you. The Molokans formed a heretical sect that more or less eschewed participation in the rites of the Church and drank only milk on more than two hundred fast days a year. You could call them our Russian Lutherans—they gathered around their own council of elders in prayer, they had their Bible, and they had this obsession with milk. You can be sure there weren’t any Molokans Skotoprigonyevsk, but in a place like Sakhalin, perhaps the minimal requirements of Molokanism were just the thing: a religious practice designed for the wilds of both nature and the soul.
“Milk!” Chekhov exclaimed, compassionately overlooking Lise’s anguish and enriching his discourse with a literary flourish. “Immediately I recalled Lady Macbeth’s meditation on her weak-kneed spouse: ‘Yet do I fear thy nature/It is too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.’ So I accepted his milk, just a sip, and then stood watching him dispense the remainder to others, including several clamouring women, children, and old men.
“He knew I knew his story. All he had had to do was pronounce that last name of his, and it was as though the whole drama were printed on him, his face and clothes covered with it, as if he were a newspaper or even a book in a man’s form.
“So what had happened to him since his father’s death and brother’s conviction? I will summarize because many of you, if not all, have some familiarity with the details: initially he thought he could quickly rush Dmitri’s beloved Grushenka to him in Sakhalin and then return to look after his sick brother Ivan, but the journey to Sakhalin is always difficult, and on arrival, what did Alyosha find? The kind of place Ivan brooded about endlessly, and reinforced with his dark parable, ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ a place where ‘anything is permitted,’ a hell that eradicated dreams of a better afterlife because its horrors made everyone there want to die soon and die forever.”
Caught up again in the grotesqueries of this never-ending Karamazov saga, we, Chekhov’s auditors, wanted to die, too. Really, the mood in the room swooned. In his writings he always managed to excavate some tenderness or poignancy from even the dreariest human disaster, but not now. All was bleakness.
Chekhov went on: When Alyosha and Grushenka arrived in Sakhalin from Nikolyevsk, they discovered that Dmitri was labouring in the Dui coal mines but that he could live with them, albeit in shackles, if they could find adequate housing … and if, of course, Dmitri would consent to leaving the prison under this arrangement.
Here Chekhov delved deeper into aberrant psychology than in anything he ever wrote, although his insight, to be sure, was grounded in nothing more than Karamazovian reality.
Dmitri did not wish to leave the prison, its dampness, its foul odors, its insects and wretched food. He had been there seven months by the time the other two arrived and morally accommodated himself to a state of masochistic wretchedness. This was the wild, orgiastic Dmitri turned inside out. Here was a proud, intelligent man whose pride and intelligence oppressed and ravaged him. All day he worked in a seam of coal (it is better to think of it this way than to dignify the place with the term “mine”) seven feet wide, seven feet high and five hundred feet deep in a cliff. What he picked loose, he put on a sledge and dragged out to the opening. That was the only time he saw daylight, if there was any daylight in the persistent coastal fog that smothered Dui at least half the year. All the prisoners did this work, making between ten and thirteen sledge journeys per day. At day’s end, they trudged back to the prison, or to ramshackle family wards in decrepit buildings, or to little huts in places like The Crease, where they collapsed in exhaustion. Some weren’t shackled, but Dmitri, being a parricide who always struck back at the peasant prisoners who constantly provoked him, definitely was.
So Alyosha told Chekhov that Dmitri was a kind of madman when he and Grushenka arrived—mad with self-loathing and mad because for seven months he had held one thought to his breast like a dagger, namely that Grushenka would never come to Sakhalin, or if she did, she would come attached to Alyosha. This was his first thought when he saw them. “They’re lovers! Guilty lovers!”
Dmitri therefore would not join them in the hut they built in The Crease. He screamed and cursed at them. He forbade their visits. He spat at them. This was a man who once had squandered 1500 rubles in a night of carousing, hiring a whole village to bear witness to his lust for life. Of course he was a man-child when he did these things, but in fact he remained a man-child now, crushed by melancholy. What he wanted, he said, was for Alyosha and Grushenka to form a union. This is how he put it—“Be a union yourselves! Abandon me! I will not survive twenty years of this hell!”
Unfortunately, there was no possible way that such a union could not already have occurred to Alyosha and Grushenka. First, they were both young and still healthy. Second, they had overcome massive difficulties in crossing Siberia to reach Sakhalin and been forced on many nights to huddle together in rail stations, on the decks of ships, in wagons, and on the fringes of roads and paths, hiding under bushes, sheltering themselves in copses of firs, nestling tight under ledges.
Once between Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk, they were set upon by thieves who attempted to rape Grushenka. She saved herself with the long pin of a brooch, sticking it into one assailant’s Adam’s apple. Alyosha, seizing the chance to free himself from the other assailant, then felled him with a stone, more or less as Dmitri was said to have felled their father with the infamous pestle, and perhaps with the same result. That is what Alyosha feared, but of course they fled and could not know whether the man actually died, making Aloysha a murderer, too.
Chekhov was saying, in effect, that Dmitri had grounds for his jealousy. What is a Karamazov if not appallingly perceptive? They all, even the old man, put their fingers on the most delicate issues as if by preternatural instinct. So when Alyosha and Grushenka appeared, Dmitri instantly knew that she would sacrifice anything for him except Alyosha, who now was a citizen, or perhaps inmate, of her soul.
Pausing to catch his breath, surely not to find the right words, Chekhov said the very baldness of these characters distressed them. “I write in a minor key, I think in minor keys. But these people—”
“All major keys.”
Who said that? My God, it was Lise, the queerest mixture of what I would call misery and mayhem in her eyes. Again more than one of us wished she didn’t always accept invitations, pressing her knobby figure into our midst. Death shouldn’t wear dresses and jewelry and fix its hair and come to parties; death should be still.
“Exactly,” Chekhov agreed. “They were strong, dominant, full-featured and obstinate.”
So Dmitri stayed in the prison and Alyosha and Grushenka moved into their hovel plunged so deep into poverty that they found themselves eating salted wood one day.
“Salted wood!” Pyotr Petrovich exclaimed on our collective behalf.
Chekhov peered over his pince-nez at Pyotr Petrovich and nodded. He hadn’t misspoken, nor did he misspeak when he said Grushenka left the hovel that very night—the night of the salted wood—and returned the next day with a turnip and an egg.
Alyosha, having lain awake in misery, was appalled. He wouldn’t eat this feast. They fought. She smashed the turnip and egg into his face.
“‘I gave my body for this! You will eat it!’ she cried. ‘Didn’t Christ give his body, too? Don’t you eat that too?’”
She had become what most women in Sakhalin become, a prostitute. No one who knew that she had been the old merchant Samsonov’s kept girl could have been surprised by this, but the word “prostitute” certainly had never been uttered in Madame G’s parlour, and I did feel that Chekhov was taking some advantage of us. He knew he was on the edge of shattering our composure, yet he persisted, twisting us more in the direction of the Karamazovs, who appalled us, than in the direction of some of his finer creations, the baffled protagonists in his stories who accidentally sneezed and sprayed a general’s bald head or poignantly and unexpectedly suffered attacks of childhood memories that brought them to their knees.
With no regard for our moral sensibilities, then, Chekhov went on, his voice very fine but persistent, penetrating, and disconcerting: “Grushenka was a buxom woman, as I am sure some of you recall, and she specialized in servicing the prison authorities, the higher military officers, and town officials. ‘I am no Stinking Lizaveta,’ she would say. ‘If I have a baby, I’ll throw it into the sea, I’ll do what you did to that thief who tried to rape me—crush its skull.’ She said this to provoke Alyosha, of course, but even so, a hungry man eventually will eat. As more and more food appeared—the bread, the scraps of venison, the eggs, and then the milk—Alyosha could not resist …”
It was not clear whether the milk or the cow came first. Did Alyosha take spiritual refuge with some little group of Molokans and begin drinking milk with them, or did Grushenka spot a cow she could buy and inadvertently transform Alyosha into a Molokan? Chekhov did say there were numerous Molokan communities scattered about Sakhalin, but his focus in this tale wasn’t on them, it was on Grushenka, Alyosha and Dmitri, and, for the moment, on the cow, who became, naturally, cows in the plural, the least practical, most exotic animal to possess in Dui for lack of pasturage, meaning that Grushenka had to provision them with hay or silage. But through cunning, high prices, sometimes withholding herself from a certain client until he added gifts and favours to her compensation, Grushenka generated sufficient funds to sustain a rough-looking old bull and four cows, who in turn produced calves, who either were spared to become milk cows themselves or sold at exorbitant prices for consumption.
By the time Chekhov reached Sakhalin ten years later, Grushenka rarely prostituted herself, Dmitri remained in the prison but had graduated to the status of coal loader on the docks (dumping and arranging the stuff on barges or filling the coal bins in navy ships), and Alyosha had used his milk to draw a substantial following into what he called the wreckage of his faith. In their persons—in contrast to their behaviour and routines which were comparable in their monotony to an ant walking on an apple trying to find out where it ended—Chekhov said he found Dmitri as taciturn and twisted as an old boot, Alyosha desperate for but afraid of real conversation, and Grushenka enveloped in a hauteur of honesty underscored by smoldering anger and steely self- discipline.
Having said this, Chekhov then frightened us by pausing to ask if he might speak frankly. What a question! None of us could have been as frank as he had been in the preceding hour. It wasn’t our practice; it was beyond our abilities. If we had a motto, it would have been (especially since the Karamazov affair), “Let the truth not be known!” And why not? Who knew the truth? What truth? We could look one another in the eye for decades without confessing a thing because we didn’t know how. But here you had the restrained, ironical Chekhov in an extraordinary mood taunting us more or less as the banal devil taunted poor Ivan in Dostoevsky’s book, a devil susceptible to headaches! What could we say? No, please don’t be frank? Make something up, you’re so good at that, but spare us the truth? Oh no, with the exception of Lise (I can’t describe to you the intensity of her concentration; it’s beyond me) the lot of us murmured our assent—Go on! Go on! —which was as insincere as a schoolboy thanking a schoolmaster for a birching. And so Chekhov did go on:
“Grushenka took the position that until Dmitri was free and restored and whole within himself, she would indulge in liberties with Alyosha. ‘And if that’s the gossip you’ve heard,’ she said to me, ‘it’s true. I can’t resist, and he can’t resist, either. We are awful human beings, as this confirms. We came out here as fools, we lied to ourselves that we could help redeem Mitya, and now we sink our milk-fed bodies in sin.”
Sin. The word and the deeds that justified it shook our foundations. Yet Chekhov still went on:
“Alyosha looked at her as she spoke with the palest of gazes, a gaze hooded over with shame. Dmitri was there, too. He sat in his shackles on the floor, a bowl of milk in one hand and a piece of bread in the other. ‘It’s all my fault,’ he said. Well, to look at him, one could imagine he was right. His years in the mines and on the docks had made him a brute of a blackened wretch. Somehow he’d broken his nose; it was humped in the middle. He’d lost a front tooth. His clothes were woven soot. He spat black sputum between his feet. Didn’t give a damn. His fault? Who could deny him? On he blustered: ‘The fact that I am not guilty for murdering my father doesn’t matter. It’s my fault that we’re here. She’s become a whore because of me, and he’s become an angelic procurer. The sight of them stabs my eyes. I sleep on my plank in the prison to get away from them. I beat men who offend me because I’d like to beat these two as well. She has walked right past me into the superintendent’s quarters, given him his half hour, and walked back out—not just for the money but to provoke me, to force me to plead with her to stop, but I won’t! No, sir. Let her couple with the superintendent or Alyosha or her bull out there. It’s all the same to me.’”
There were women present—Frau Hoffmeister, Baroness V, I could go on—who had every excuse to get up and leave. But the devil had us. We were no longer where we were—Madame G’s parlour with its silk lampshades and yellow walls—but in that hut on Sakhalin with its low ceiling, single window, absence of redeeming icons (Molokans abstain from icons to the degree they gorge on milk), straw pallet where Aloysha slept, and brass bed with its plump duvet where Grushenka slept.
Even he was trapped there! Chekhov, I mean. You could see it in his face, the distress, the need for what shall we say, solidarity? Redemption? Pick the word yourself. He told us he had gone to Sakhalin somewhat out of boredom, somewhat out of curiosity, somewhat as a scientist, but not as a reformer trying to develop his platform and not as a writer of imaginative fantasies too wretched to be swallowed as fact. In other words, he wanted to be dispassionate, an observer, a bookkeeper, if you will, ergo his silly census (I thought it was silly, anyway, as if the authorities don’t know well enough whom they have imprisoned there and all that). But he was being pulled on stage. Let’s put it that way. The playwright was becoming actor. He said this in more or less just those words, quite chagrined.
“I found myself exactly in the position I’ve navigated around all my life: contemplating horrors and wanting to do something about them—not just describe them, not just dose them with morphine—but make them different, tear them out by the roots. So I heard myself step out from the shadows of my selves as scientist and author and say, exactly as his brother Ivan would have said: ‘All right, Dmitri, if everything is all the same to you, then wouldn’t it also be the same if the three of you escaped?’
“They knew my name but didn’t really know who I was, and the mistrust on Sakhalin is as hard as diamonds. All three of them suffered from it. Why should Dmitri, or any of them, go for my bait? They would be risking dire consequences. Perhaps worse, they would be abandoning the moral hell they now called home.
“Grushenka said, ‘What do you know about escaping this island?’
“I told her I had studied it and enumerated it. ‘There is walking across the ice to the north in winter or rowing across the De Kastri Bay narrows in the summer or bribing your way into the hold of a ship whenever you can.’
“‘Do you think we don’t know that?’ Dmitri asked.
“‘What I think is that despite what you may know you are here,’ I said.
“‘It’s God’s plan,’ Alyosha said.
“‘Rubbish,’ Grushenka said.
“‘Your own little Molokan prophet tells us all to flee Russia now,’ Dmitri said to Alyosha.
“‘He’s only one silly boy,’ Alyosha said.
“‘Who wasn’t one boy once?’ Dmitri asked. ‘You? Me? Jesus Christ?’”
Chekhov said, “Grushenka shook out her abundant chocolate brown hair at me, as if to say, ‘See me? I can live in hell. Why should I risk leaving it?’ I knew I couldn’t argue with her. I knew I must focus on Dmitri, the lowest and yet most powerful of the three—the first cause, if you will.
“‘Where does this boy say to go?’ I asked.
“‘He doesn’t have to,’ Dmitri said. He looked at Grushenka. Astonishingly, he had a glint of humour in his eye. ‘You could take along the cat you keep between your legs but not your cows.’
“She laughed. Alyosha and I cringed.”
We all cringed.
“Dmitri continued, ‘You go to the place where everyone goes who is fed up with Russia, Europe, all of history.’
“‘America,’ Alyosha murmured.
“I said, ‘I have heard talk of escapes on American whaling ships but have not been able to document it.
“‘Because anyone who succeeds never returns and anyone who fails dies,’ Grushenka said.
“‘Freedom either way,’ Dmitri said, clearly moved by the idea. ‘No more coal. Oh, God, God,’ he moaned and began to weep, holding up his gnarled, blackened hands and staring at them with pity and grief, pity for himself, grief for them all.
“Grushenka sought to intervene, speaking disdainfully. ‘We’ve thought about this, my friend. We’re not stupid. The American boats come north following the whales. We don’t have to see the boats, only the whales spouting, to know they’re out there. Go back to Russia and hide and worry; but find your way to America, and what do the Americans care? But how does one get to the whaling ships?’”
Chekhov said he could smell the odor of fear and desire in that fetid hut. He felt himself becoming these three lost souls, wanting to share their suffering, wanting to smash it, and this is what he personally had to confess to us. Our town had been the scene of the Karamazov crime; its stain clung to us like an ineradicable birthmark; thereafter we’d been mocked and belittled, the laughingstock of Russia. But Chekhov could not bear the continuing punishment being meted out in recompense for the evil done to us; it was too much, too awful. Asking our forgiveness, he said that he had told the three wretches that an island is also the water that makes it an island. Therefore he could secure a boat on the pretence that in his study of the island, he must examine the fish in the surrounding sea—which in fact he had done when they spawned up Sakhalin’s rivers—and also the whales. He said he didn’t even stop to ask himself what in the devil he was doing, not only proposing to break the law but also possibly inviting Dmitri, Grushenka and Alyosha to die.
“‘And?’ Grushenka asked me.
“‘And I could smuggle you on board with me and we could head for an American whaler, which I would compensate for taking you away.’”
With that startling proposal, the conversation came to an inconclusive end. Dmitri scuttled back to the prison for the night. Chekhov returned to his lodging with the deputy warden. An agreement was reached that in two days, they would meet again.
“Well, I didn’t want that meeting to occur, but exactly two days later, it did,” Chekhov said.
Surprisingly, Alyosha spoke first, decisively and clearly. What made this so? Chekhov did not know. His eyes grazing Lise’s face as lightly and quickly as a tennis ball skimming across the grass, he only said it was humbling to listen to the blade thin man speak as if he were used to giving orders all his life. Somehow Alyosha had taken charge of himself; somehow he’d grown up.
“‘We would not want your direct involvement in our escape, but there is a small fishing boat that ties up along the docks where Mitya works that you could arrange to be provisioned for the reasons you stated. And then on the eve of your departure, you could change your mind, and we could sneak aboard and take the boat ourselves.’”
“‘He’ll be our anchor,” Grushenka snickered, pointing at Dmitri’s shackles.
“‘No, there will be a metal saw and pry bar on the boat for the good doctor’s anatomical investigations into the life forms of the sea,’ Alyosha said, ‘and water, lots of it, and bread and dried beef.’”
“‘But no milk,’ Dmitri said.
“‘Yes, milk!’ Alyosha cried.
“‘And my two best dresses and hats,’ Grushenka said. ‘With Alyosha who learned to sail his little dingy on the lake back home as our helmsman and Dmitri who knows every sign of storm and turbulence in the waters he’s been staring at all these years as our navigator, and me as captain, the deciding vote. And…’”
Chekhov said to us, “I listened to them in true wonder. They talked more and more quickly, their minds made up, dangers be damned, interrupting one another, thrashing past another. What I was witnessing reminded me of one of the most incredible forces of nature I have ever seen, and I saw it right there on Sakhalin. Every summer a fish called Keta—a kind of Russian salmon—seethes up the Dui and other rivers along Sakhalin’s steep coast to spawn. The waters churn with thousands of these fish struggling to return to their place of birth where the males will excrete their sperm upon the eggs excreted by the females. This process exhausts the fish; it bruises them; the males grow so gaunt that their teeth protrude, facilitating fighting for the right to take their place in the streambed where the female has nestled in to drop their eggs. Literally on the verge of death, these scabrous, abscessed, half-fleshless fish then are netted to make vile fish stew for prisoners all over the island.”
The thought of actual escape unleashed a similar frenzy in Dmitri, Grushenka, and Alyosha.
“I could feel it throughout their cramped hovel. I could see it in the rims of Alyosha’s eyes, Grushenka’s haughty smile, Dmitri’s fiddling with his shackles. For more than ten years, they had not permitted themselves this fantasy. Now it was everything to them. Grushenka spoke of staying in a hotel—she didn’t know where, somewhere in America, who cared?—with a grand bathtub, carpets, and maids to make up the beds every morning with the freshest, finest sheets.
“‘We have money,’ she told me. ‘Look!’ She held out a wad of rubles. ‘Thirty-three thousand, eh? I’ll give you the money to hire the captain and mate and stock the boat. Here, what will it take? A thousand? Two? Take three thousand rubles, it’s our lucky number. Tell the captain you plan to be out at sea a whole week and let him keep your fee and goods when you cancel out—all of it, the whole amount!’”
The sight of the money stunned the men. Chekhov said that in its multicoloured glitter—just paper but smooth and silken—they saw the heartbreaking degradation of Grushenka’s prostitution, the multitude of men she’d fondled and fleeced in ten years. The look of death, a Keta’s death, darkened their faces. Suddenly they were half-expired and lifeless. Grushenka grew furious.
“‘What, do you think you’re more entitled to remorse than I am? What choice did I have? It’s not blood money, it’s freedom! Ten times the money your father dandled to lure me into his bed!’ she cried, throwing the money in the air so that the entire shack was littered with rubles.”
I don’t know if anyone other than Chekhov could have recounted this outrageous scene more effectively. Dostoevsky was good at making things up, but this was real—real in Chekhov’s laconic, mortified tone; real in his obvious sense of personal incrimination and remorse; real in the horrible rictus of Lise’s mortified mouth.
“‘Now listen to me,” Grushenka scolded her distraught crew. ‘If I say we make for an American whaling ship, we make for it. If I don’t like its looks, we don’t. If I have to service the captain, I service the captain. Whatever they tell you to do, you do—scrub, cook, boil whale flesh, whatever it is! And, you sir, let me tell you how this will be,’ she said, addressing me. ‘Walk down to the docks the night before you sail and say it’s all off but you’re paying full wages anyway. Give that miserable captain a bottle of vodka. Invite him to come drink it with you. Later that night we will slip on board and go south, exactly where they won’t follow us, and make for La Perouse Strait. After that, how long can it take? The whales are up here now, the boats will be too.”
Chekhov said that what they counted on was night, fog and misdirection, and on the night in question, they appeared to have all three variables in their favour. He said also that he had promised them he would make no attempt to say goodbye to them or witness their departure—which would be as much for his safety as theirs.
“But I was like a Keta myself,” he confessed. “Once I had committed to this scheme, it mesmerized me. The whole week that I spent hiring my captain and mate and arranging for our provisions, I thought about Grushenka, Alyosha and Dmitri and nothing else. I was swimming upstream against all probabilities wildly, furiously. I overcame objections, I finagled special supplies, I prattled about my scientific objectives, talked about Darwin, Humboldt, Goethe, all the great naturalists. Then the night before the sail, I went to the captain, and said, after all, I couldn’t go through with it—did not have time. Of course he became enraged, but he calmed down soon enough when I ceded him all our supplies, agreed to pay what I’d promised, and added another hundred rubles for his trouble.”
So Chekhov retreated from the docks, inviting the captain and the night watchman to come to share a bottle of vodka with him, and when his companions were well soused, he broke away, saying he must have a walk to calm down after having such a good time.
As a rule, he told us, Dui is never noisy. There are three sounds—the shackles, the sea, and the wind. That’s all. On this night, however, there were only two, since the one prisoner up and about, Dmitri, was being carried on a plank with his shackles muffled in rags, Alyosha at one end of the plank, Grushenka at the other. Hiding in a copse of pines, Chekhov saw them make their way through the fog and silently slipped after them. At the dock they lowered Dmitri down into the boat. For a brief moment the purling fog gave Chekhov a glimpse of Alyosha untying the ropes at the stern and Grushenka doing the same at the bow. Then there was a new sound like the soft whirring of insects. This was the chain amidships being cut through. Chekhov stood at the dock’s end listening to it as if it were a bit of Chopin, delicate and yet swelling. He couldn’t see a thing and wondered which of them had the metal saw blade in hand.
Chekhov chuckled, caught his breath a moment, and then said to us, “You see, I’m more passionate than I ever imagined. That sweet, rasping, humming sound almost swept me off my feet. It’s the last detail I possibly could have captured on that pitch black foggy night, and I drank it in with my ears, and when it stopped, I knew they were gone, forever gone.”
Of course, no one suspected Chekhov. It was said that Dmitri the dock rat and Grushenka the wily whore and Alyosha the clever fool must have watched the fishing boat being readied, and they planned on stealing it even before Chekhov decided to abandon his expedition. And yet his conscience gnawed at him, so he took advantage of his acquaintance with Madame G and rendered his confession in a way that perhaps only a writer can do, making his audience feel so involved in his crime that the matter of forgiveness became an afterthought and not even that. What was there to forgive? They were out of our lives, headed in another direction or to the bottom of the sea. We congratulated him; we thanked him; and of course, we were relieved, almost giddy, that this Karamazov saga was finally come to an end.
All of us, that is, except Lise Khokhlakov, poor woman. Clearly she kept on thinking about what we had heard and just as clearly she kept feeling it, prickly and painful, in her difficult heart. She wasn’t done with the Karamazovs at all, certainly not with Alyosha—neither Dostoevsky nor Chekhov nor the two of them combined could make her give him up. For when we all had headed home, you see, and Chekhov surely was fast asleep in Madame G’s guest room, exhausted with his effort and dreaming no doubt of his own escape back to his estate, or the Crimea, or wherever he could now permanently forget our town, Lise Khokhlakov bid her maid goodnight, waited a few minutes, and then slipped down the rear stairs at the back of the house, carrying a single candle in her hands.
Reaching the pantry, she went to the cupboard and took out a glass and placed it on the table. Then she went to the oak ice box and pulled open its heavy sawdust-filled door and took out a pitcher of milk and filled the glass, before which she sat—she, the glass of milk, the candle, and the pitcher all contemplating one another as it were. Very slowly, she then took one sip of milk and another and another. These sips were so infinitesimal as to be easily confused with nothing more than the saliva in her mouth, mere traces of moisture, really, although milk, of course, has a drier quality than saliva and leaves a bit of an aftertaste. This does not seem to bother most babies, milk being the primordial food. But there are adults who cannot tolerate milk, who get cramps and gas from it or begin to wheeze when they drink it, develop hives and even vomit. In my opinion, Lise knew she was going to vomit. She sat there sipping and sipping the milk because she wanted to experience that blank moment of involuntary regurgitation, that ghastly near loss of consciousness, and perhaps also, despite her weakened condition, the immense power of her abdomen, thorax, and throat contracting violently and painfully, almost asphyxiating her, her vocal chords generating an explosive gagging sound, her whole body growing damp with perspiration, her lungs straining and heart pounding as she struggled for air. Then she folded her arms on the tabletop and rested her head on them, milk spattered everywhere, the glass knocked over, the candle still burning, and slept.
The will of spawning fish is great, I would agree, but so is the will of a woman obsessed by the memory of a boy she loved and hated when she was young.
