Anton went for a last carriage ride through Moscow's streets. He told Masha that he feared spinal tuberculosis. Olga also wrote to Masha: she now doubted that Anton would be able to travel. To relieve the muscle pain Taube administered aspirin and quinine and Olga injected arsenic. She could spare only a few minutes a day
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for the theatre. In Yalta Masha despaired and confided in Misha: 'My heart aches. Something is going to happen to him. The Yalta doctors say he would be better off staying in Yalta. Olga was very harsh to me and I could hardly see Antosha at all, I didn't dare go into his room.'80 Misha offered Masha cliches: 'Where there is hope, even a weak ray of it, not all is lost.' He hoped to bring his family to Yalta, while Anton was away, for a holiday.
Olga was impatient to leave: she was now injecting Anton with morphine. She blamed their new flat, where the heating boiler had broken down, for his rheumatic pains. On 3 June, as Gorky prepared to sue Adolf Marx for publishing Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard too early (the litigation would prove abortive), the Chekhovs left for Berlin.
In Berlin Olga's brother Volodia, now a singer, was waiting for them. So was Gorky's rejected wife, Ekaterina, with her children. Anton wrote to Masha, more gently than before, and thanked Altshuller. Here, at the Savoy, he could enjoy coffee. On 6/19 June Anton was treated to a carriage drive to the Zoo; he was introduced to Iollos, the correspondent for Sobolevsky's Russian Gazette -'interesting, agreeable and infinitely obliging,' Anton reported to Masha. Iollos was to be the Chekhovs' guardian angel in Germany. On 7/20 June a leading Berlin specialist, Professor Ewald, forewarned by Taube, visited the hotel. Ewald examined Anton, shrugged his shoulders and left the room without a word. 'I cannot forget Anton's smile, gentle, cooperative, somehow embarrassed and dismayed,' Olga recalled. Ewald was appalled at the idea of a dying man being shunted across Europe.
Iollos wrote to Sobolevsky 'Chekhov's days are numbered, he is terribly emaciated… cough, breathlessness, a high temperature, he cannot climb stairs.' The Chekhovs crossed Germany by train to Badenweiler. Here they settled in the best hotel, the Romerbaden. Anton seemed to improve. After two days, however, the hotel asked the Chekhovs to move: Anton's cough distressed the other guests. They settled in a small pension, the Villa Frederika. Anton wrote to Dr Kurkin that he was now bothered only by emphysema and thinness, and was desperate to escape the tedium of his life in Badenweiler and flee to Italy. Dr Schworer, who attended Anton, was married to a Russian, a
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I.OVi; AND DKA'I'H Zhivago, whom Olga had known in her school days. He was a considerate doctor, but to Anton's dismay offered the same advice as Dr Taube. Again, coffee was forbidden. Anton sunned himself on a chaise longue and had massages. To his mother he wrote that he would be well in a week. Masha wrote to him of her distress: 'Vania came down on his own. We wept when he said… that he couldn't sleep at night, because he kept seeing your sickly image.' Olga dutifully sent Masha regular bulletins and on 13/26 June hinted at the likelihood of Anton's dying: I beg you, Masha, don't lose control, don't cry, mere is notbing dangerous, but it is very grave. Both of us knew we could hardly expect complete recovery. Take it like a man, not a woman. As soon as Anton feels a little better I shall do everything I can to come home quickly. Yesterday he was so out of bream that I didn't know what to do, I galloped for the doctor. The doctor says that because his lungs are in such a bad way, his heart is doing double the work it should, and his heart is by no means strong. He gave him oxygen, injected camphor, we have drops to give him and ice to put on his heart. At night he dozed upright and I made him a mountain of pillows, then injected morphine twice and he went to sleep properly lying down… Of course don't let Anton sense from your letters mat I have been writing to you, or that will torment him… I don't mink your mama should be told that he is not getting well, or put it gently, don't upset her… Anton has been dreaming of coming home by sea, but mat is impossible… I have just been to Freiburg, he ordered me to get him a light-coloured flannel suit… If Taube had hinted that something could happen to his heart, or mat the process was not stopping, I'd never have decided to go abroad. To Evgenia Olga praised the food, the beds, the landlord, the weather, so cheerfully that cousin Georgi congratulated Anton on his full recovery, even though Dr Altshuller had just told Georgi: 'They've taken a year off his life. They'll have destroyed Chekhov.'81 Once more Anton appeared to pick up. While Olga went thirty miles to Basle to have her teeth crowned, Anton proudly came down to the dining room. To a young colleague, Dr Rossolimo, Anton wrote ironically: 'I just have shortness of breath and serious, probably incurable, idleness.' Olga told Nemirovich-Danchenko the bald truth:
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Anton is sun-tanned, but feels bad. His temp, all time, today even in the morning it was 38.10. Nights are agony. He can't breathe or sleep… You can imagine his mood… He never complains.82 Sometimes Anton forgot about death. He devised a subject for a play: passengers on an ice-bound ship. Olga took him on carriage rides around Badenweiler. He envied on behalf of the Russian peasant the German peasant's prosperity. In the evenings Olga translated the newspapers: he was pained by the Schadenfreude of the German press at Russia's defeats in the war with Japan.
Villa Frederika was boring and dark, with monotonous food. The Chekhovs moved to the Hotel Sommer, where Anton watched people coming and going to the post office from a sun-drenched balcony. Two Russian students staying in Badenweiler offered to help. Anton discussed summoning a dentist and sent Masha instructions on writing cheques and gardening. Masha could no longer bear the wait. On 28 June she and Vania, using cousin Georgi's 50 per cent discount, took a Black Sea boat to Batum, for ten days in the Georgian spa of Borjomi. A Yalta seamstress kept Evgenia company.
On 27 June/10 July 1904 Olga wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko: 'He is losing weight. He lies down all day. He feels very miserable. A change is taking place in him.' Schworer let him drink coffee and administered oxygen and digitalis, while Olga injected morphine. Anton warned Masha 'the only treatment for breathlessness is not to move', but still made Olga fetch his new suit from Freiburg.
A letter came from Potapenko in San Moritz: 'I stretch out my hand and squeeze yours.' Anton, however, was locked in his own racing mind. He improvised a story. Diners in a hotel wait for dinner, not knowing that the cook has vanished. At 2.00 a.m. on 2/15 July, he awoke delirious, despite a dose of chloral hydrate. He raved of a sailor in danger: his nephew Kolia. Olga sent one of the Russian students to fetch the doctor and ordered ice from the porter. She chopped up a block of ice and placed it on Anton's heart. Dr Schworer came and sent the two students for oxygen. Anton protested that an empty heart needed no ice and that he would die before the oxygen came. Schworer gave him an injection of camphor.
German and Russian medical etiquette dictated that a doctor at a colleague's deathbed, when all hope was gone, should offer cham594
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pagne.'(Schworer felt Anton's pulse and ordered a bottle. Anton sat up and loudly proclaimed 'Ich sterbe' [I'm dying]. He drank, murmured 'I haven't had champagne for a long time,' lay down on his left side, as he always had with Olga, and died without a murmur, before she could reach the other side of the bed.
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DR SCHWORER, his wife and the Russian students did all they could to help Olga. The consul came down from Baden-Baden. Olga's sister-in-law Elli and Sobolevsky's correspondent Iollos took the train from Berlin. Anton's body lay all day in the hotel room. Telegrams were sent to every close relative, except Anton's aunt Aleksandra. Olga wrote about Anton's last hours to her mother. The first letter of condolence came. Dunia Efros, Chekhov's first fiancee, staying by the Vierwaldstattersee, opened a French newspaper: 'What horror, what grief,' she wrote. Olga's telegram to Vania was forwarded to the Caucasian resort of Borjomi. It read, 'Anton quietly passed away from weakness of heart. Tell mother and Masha carefully.' Vania and Masha were 500 miles from Yalta. Masha wired the boat at Batum. The captain delayed sailing until the bug-ridden overnight train from Borjomi had brought Chekhov's brother and sister. The same day, 3 July 1904, Misha and Aleksandr, independently, instructed by Suvorin, left Petersburg. In Yalta the telegrams were no secret. Bells tolled; posters went up all over town announcing a requiem mass in Autka, by the Chekhov house. Evgenia alone was kept in the dark until her family had gathered. On the boat from Batum a woman came up to Masha and gave her an icon of the Virgin.
Olga presumed that she would bury Anton in Germany and return to Russia alone, but a flurry of telegrams
