I said, “Tolstoy says a woman can never hurt you the same way twice.”
“You think that’s true, Dad”
“Yes,” I said finally, “I believe it is.”
With a swift but circumspect movement, Natasha came nearer, still kneeling, and carefully taking his hand she bent her face over it and began kissing it, softly touching it with her lips.
“Forgive me!” she said in a whisper, lifting her head and glancing at him. “Forgive me!”
“I love you,” said Prince Andrei.
W
riters sleep better if they trick themselves into believing that the great masterpieces of literature were written in old-age homes—by the grey and the venerable, in other words. Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) confessed to a reporter that he’d ruined an afternoon for himself (possibly his life, he joked) when, on one imprudent occasion, he did some elementary math and discovered how old his favourite writers had been when they produced their chef d’oeuvres. I did the same thing myself a while ago and I now share his dismay: Virginia Woolf, only forty-two when she wrote Mrs. Dalloway; F. Scott Fitzgerald, an unforgivable twenty-nine with The Great Gatsby. Joyce’s Ulysses (punishingly dull but nevertheless—) thirty-nine. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was forty-one when he finished War and Peace, arguably the greatest novel ever written, after which, instead of taking a Caribbean vacation, he launched into an obsessive study of ancient Greek and then took up the bicycle. (Russ Meyer, by the way, was the same age when he finished Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill.)When I finished War and Peace, I had a hell of a tan and I wanted (a lifetime bad habit) to keep the party going. I came back to Toronto and one of the first things I did was to buy a no-nonsense hardback of Anna Karenina. But it didn’t work this time. Something was different; I couldn’t engage; the novel didn’t block out the dozen worries that nibbled at my attention. I thought it was the book. It was as if—and I’m not convinced this isn’t the truth—Tolstoy had used all his favourite characters in W&P and was now working through the “B” list. After a hundred or so pages, I put the book aside. And that’s where it stayed for seven years, until 1992.
I was greyer, fatter, and witnessing, with escalating upset, the death of a love affair. Another love affair. (Love, I’ve learned, is a living creature and when it’s dying, like an animal too weak to care who feeds it, the signs are unmistakable.) X and I spoke to each other with excessive caution, the way people speak who have lost their natural ease with each other, a mother tongue that somehow the two of you have forgotten.
