would be brought on a black tumbril to a scaffold. The drums rolled, the convict was lashed to a pillar, and the sentence was read out, before they were led off to prison or exile. Evgenia and uncle Mitrofan, like many citizens in provincial Russian cities, visited the prison on name days or on feast days.
Pavel's charity was limited: he merely allowed two monk-priests, ostensibly collecting alms for Mount Athos, to shelter in his yard and turned a blind eye to their drinking. Pavel was not so indulgent to his sons. Regardless of school, they were given the duties and punishments that he had endured. Latin homework could be done while keeping an eye on the shop, which was open from before dawn until well into the night. The paternal phrases which Aleksandr remembered ran: 'I had no childhood in my own childhood. Only street urchins play in the street. One beaten boy is worth two unbeaten.'
With a properly equipped shop, scales, a table and chairs for customers, shelves and cupboards everywhere, sheds and attics, Pavel tried to deal in everything. He was, surprisingly, a1* gourmet, who would dine with the devil if the food was good, and he made his own mustard. In his shop he kept the finest coffee and olive oil. Aleksandr tried to reconstruct the inventory forty years later: tea by the pound or ounce, face-cream, pen-knives, phials of castor oil, waistcoat buckles, lamp-wicks, medicinal rhubarb, vodka or San-turini wine by the glass, olive oil, 'S' Bouquet perfume, olives, grapes, marbled backing paper for books, paraffin, macaroni, laxatives, rice, Mocha coffee, tallow candles, used tea-leaves, dried and re-coloured
,M»
2 1
FA I'll I. E I I I II I MAN {bought from hotels, for servants], honey sweets and fruit-gums - next to floor polish, sardines, sandalwood, hen inj-s, canisters for paraffin or cannabis oil, flour, soap, buckwheat, home-grown tobacco, ammonia, wire mouse-traps, camphor, bay leaves, 'Leo Wissor' Riga cigars, birch brooms, sulphur matches, raisins, strychnine… cardamom, cloves, Crimean sea salt in the same niche as lemons, smoked fish and leather belts. Pavel also sold a number of medicines. One of them, called 'bird's nest', contained among other ingredients mineral oil, mercury, nitric acid, 'seven brothers blood', strychnine, and corrosive sublimate. Bought by customers for their wives, it was an abortifacient. 'That 'birds nest' probably despatched many people to the next world,' Anton remarked after finishing medical training. Serving customers vodka and sweet red Santurini wine,21 Pavel still traded unprofitably. The intense labour involved in drying out and repackaging used tea leaves was unrewarding. To important customers Pavel was servile, but when anyone complained that the tea stank of fish or the coffee of candle wax, he would publicly punch and kick the shop boys, Andriusha and Gavriusha Kharchenko. (Pavel was summoned to the Taganrog magistrate for excessive beating.) Pavel's ideas of hygiene and safety did not meet even the lax standards of the time: he assured his youngest son that flies cleared the air. When Pavel found a rat in a barrel of his olive oil, he was too honest to say nothing, too mean to pour the oil away, too lazy to boil and re-filter it. He chose consecration: Father Pokrovsky conducted a service in the shop. The incident of the drowned rat was enough to drive away the least fastidious customer, and heralded the collapse of Pavel Chekhov's Colonial Store.
FOUR
The Theatres of Life and Art
1870-3
A WELL-FITTED SHOP and a bourgeois drawing room overlooking two tree-lined avenues, soon to be lit by gas, formed the European facade of the Moiseev house. The crowded bedrooms, the sheds in the yard, the kitchen without running water, the absence of a bath, represented the Asiatic reality behind the facade. The image of a provincial home with stinking, cockroach-infested back rooms and a magnificent facade would haunt Anton's prose to his last story. The prosperous European facade was fragile, for Pavel lacked financial acumen. Within a year he had competition just across the road; he bought unsaleable wine on credit. Debts mounted, and the family fortunes turned. In September 1871 Anton's baby sister Evgenia died. Kvgenia was far more deeply affected by this than by the later deaths of three adult sons. Even sixteen years later Aleksandr remarked that his mother remembered that death 'as if it were today'.
Pavel extended his opening hours and rented a stall on the square by the new railway station. When the stall failed to cover even the costs of its paraffin lamp, he rented a stall in the new market. Worst of all, in the summer holidays he forced his sons - including the twelve-year-old Anton - to run these outposts, opening a stall at 5 a.m. and staying until midnight to return with pitiful takings.
The summer holidays gave relief in Anton's childhood: fishing the rivers and roaming the countryside were to be prerequisites of happiness in his adult life and his fiction. On Anton the sea left a mark even stronger than the countryside. Taganrog boys fished from the piles driven into the shallow bed of the unfinished port, or went west, to the stony beach of Bogudonie, known as Smuggler's Bay. Diving into the water one day, Anton cut open his head, acquiring the scar listed on his identity papers. Here he sat with his eldest brother, often next to the school inspektor Diakonov, like prey and predator visiting i:
23
I E IE E AI I III MAN
the same watering hole. They angled lor tlit- liny, edible Gobius fish. A thread was passed through the gills of each one; the chain of transfixed fish was left writhing in the water, to keep them fresh until they were taken to market. There were diversions on the way back: schoolboys would slash the sacks of Clementines or walnuts in the carts that climbed slowly from the port to the town. If the driver caught the thieves, he would lash out with his knout.22 Fishing gave Anton the stillness he desperately missed at home. More exciting sport was found on wasteland, with a school friend, Aleksandr Drossi, catching finches. (Some of the Chekhov brothers were to keep finches and songbirds, flying around their living rooms, in adult life.) The other sport was in the cemetery, whose mixture of Orthodox austerity, flamboyant Italian statuary and permanent decrepitude haunts much of Chekhov's prose. Here Anton caught tarantula spiders with a ball of wax.23
Even in boyhood the sea and the river Mius had a primarily melancholic effect on Anton, becoming memento mori in his mature stories. Writing to his patron, the novelist Grigorovich, in 1886, Chekhov would recall: When my blanket falls off me at night, I begin to dream of enormous slippery rocks, the cold autumn water, the bare shores - all this is vague, in a mist, with not a fragment of blue sky… When I run away from the river, I pass the tumbledown cemetery gates, the funerals of my schoolteachers. Anton's life broadened in the early 1870s. He explored the surroundings of the town and visited school friends and their parents. Aunt Fenichka's laissez-faire household allowed pillow fights, while the families of Taganrog's officials and merchants gave still greater relief from a grim home life. Anton now had intimations of future torments: migraine, and abdominal illness, then called 'catarrh of the stomach' or 'peritonitis', and attributed to bathing in cold water. Summer brought malarial fevers. Anton thought of diarrhoea and a constant cough as normal. Although Evgenia had shown symptoms -spitting blood, fever - Uncle Vania Morozov had already died of OA, and Aunt Fenichka suffered fits of coughing and debilitation, nobody suggested that tuberculosis might have struck Anton. For the time being, Anton's vitality fought off recurrent infection. The
1870-3
boy looked very different from the man. We know a face honed by suffering, a chest hollowed by coughing: the broad-shouldered, wide-cheeked peasant boy before the mid 1880s is a shocking contrast to the later stereotype. He was known as 'bomba' at school for his large head.
In July 1871, when Anton was eleven, an ox cart stopped at the shop: it was the engineer from Krepkaia, where grandfather Egor was employed. He had come to Taganrog to buy a piece of farm machinery. Aleksandr and Anton begged their parents to allow them to ride the ox cart and stay with their grandparents. They left in such haste that they had no protection from the rainstorms that struck the cart as it trundled over the steppe: it took two days to cover forty-five miles. Being soaked in the storm, getting lost in the reeds of a steppe lake, being berated by the drunken carter, meeting a Jewish innkeeper (whom the carter and engineer cheated) - all these incidents were transmuted sixteen years later into Chekhov's masterpiece 'Steppe'. And just as 'Steppe' climaxes in a great disillusionment when the mysterious old man who is the object of the first part of the journey turns out to be of little interest, so Aleksandr and Anton finally reached their grandfather's estate to find that he had long been posted to an outlying village, Kniazhaia, where he was hated as 'the viper'. Egor himself expressed no animation when he finally saw his grandchildren. Worse, as soon as the peasants realized that these boys were the grandchildren of the manager, they turned away and cursed them as the 'viper's' offspring. Egor and Efrosinia lived like peasants. The boys camped among the dustsheets in the house of the absentee young countess. After nearly a week, Aleksandr and Anton struck up a relationship with the blacksmith and purloined a sheet to trawl the millpond
