second troika, also at top speed; we veer right, it veers left. 'We're colliding' flashes in my head. One instant and a crashing sound, the horses entangle in a black mass, my cart is on its rear, I tumble to the ground all my suitcases and bundles on top of me. I leap up and see a third troika. My mother must have been praying for me last night. If I had been asleep or the third troika had come straight after the second I'd have been crushed to death or crippled… I feel a complete loneliness that I have never known before. It took a week to reach Tomsk: this time the flooded Tom held him up. It was the coldest May in Siberia for almost forty years. Not a leaf on the birches, not a blade of grass on the ground, and three inches of snow. Only flocks of geese and ducks heralded spring. At Tomsk Anton recuperated for a week. He wrote at length to his family: there were no murders in Siberia; men did not beat their wives;
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'even' the Jews and Poles were decent farmers; the beds were soft, the rooms were clean. The bread and the salty soup of half-cooked duck innards, however, unsettled Anton's stomach.
Anton mentioned the crash that nearly killed him. He told 'sweet Misha' it was as well he had declined his offer of company. In Tomsk, before the even worse overland stage - noo miles to Irkutsk - he ordered a wickerwork superstructure for his cart. The streets were swamped with mud; there was only one bathhouse. Chekhov was the first traveller of the season, and in central Siberia travellers on pleasure were objects of curiosity and hospitality. Sitting in his hotel room, writing to Suvorin, Anton was interrupted by a man in uniform with long moustaches, Arshaulov, police chief of Tomsk. They got talking: the police chief ordered vodka. Anton read Arshaulov's literary efforts and wrote him a letter of recommendation to Suvorin.
Arshaulov took Anton around the brothels of Tomsk. They got back to the hotel at two in the morning. The experience had not been gratifying: 'Tomsk is a boring, drunken town; no beautiful women at all, Asiatic lawlessness. The only notable thing about this town is that governors die.' For the return journey travellers in Tomsk advised an American boat via San Francisco and New York, rather than the austerity of the Russian Voluntary Fleet.
On 21 May Anton left Tomsk, in company. Three army officers -two lieutenants and a military doctor - travelling east by sledge on official business offered to share expenses with Anton. They were rough, sometimes obnoxious company, but they gave the novice traveller confidence. One of them, Lieutenant von Schmidt, had been sent to Siberia (where he was to have a successful career) for beating up his batman. Garrulous and abusive, he may have inspired some of the features of Lieutenant Soliony in Three Sisters - the most Siberian of Chekhov's plays. Von Schmidt took to Anton (and later wrote him an apologetic letter): he suggested Anton find himself female company: 'I can't,' he [Chekhov] said, 'I have a bride in Moscow.' Then after a short silence he added in an odd voice, as if thinking aloud: 'Only I doubt if I'll be happy with her - she's too beautiful.'12 Lika was on Anton's mind. He was to tell his host on Sakhalin, Bulgar-evich, that he planned to marry. His letters to Lika constantly invent
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little tasks for her, he enquires after her admirers, he teases her by proxy. But Lika, or as Anton now called her Jamais, did not write. She was being escorted by the flautist Ivanenko and by Anton's younger brothers - none of whom Anton took seriously enough to feel jealousy. Through the Chekhovs, however, Lika knew Sofia Kuvshinnikova and her lover, Levitan. Of all Chekhov's circle Levitan was the most irresistible womanizer, and gave Anton cause to fear for Lika's fidelity.
The Chekhov family scattered all over Russia as soon as Anton was away. It was as if in Anton they had lost their centre of gravity. School ended in May: Masha and her mother stayed with the Lintvariovs, taking a wreath for Kolia's grave. Misha went with them but the very next day left for Taganrog. After his return to Luka, Masha would venture with Natalia Lintvariova for a month in the Crimea. Pavel too was on the move, to stay with Aleksandr's family in Petersburg and even to travel with Aleksandr to Finland.
The Chekhov family had shrunk to just Masha, Anton and their parents. Neither parent was sure that Anton would return. The 'chest of drawers' house seemed absurdly large, and the family surrendered the tenancy: they would look for new quarters in September. Vania had, again by bad luck, lost his job, and could find a post only in the peat bogs of Vladimir province, 150 miles from Moscow. Misha from September would be a tax inspector 200 miles south of Moscow. Aunt Fenichka was only just alive.
Ivanenko wrote to Anton at the end of May: his letter reached Sakhalin months later, so that Anton did not realize how badly his family coped without him. Masha and Evgenia fell ill with distress.13
The move to the country was joyless. Masha found herself in love with George Lintvariov and her feelings unreciprocated. Worse, Misha had quarrelled with the Lintvariovs. Masha, nevertheless, had to stay there all May.14
By the end of May, when Misha had returned from Taganrog, Masha set off with her friend 'Natashevu' Lintvariova for a happy month, free of parents and brothers, in the Crimea. On 20 June she wrote to Pavel: 'Thanks to Antosha, I'm very happy to be in such a wonderful fairy tale place. I had a telegram from Irkutsk asking me not to grudge the money, that he's well and rich. Thanks to him I have many friends in Yalta.'
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ANNA'S I) li PKLERINAGE Others were unhappy. Vania was angry that Misha had abandoned Evgenia for Taganrog, and he reported to Masha on Lika: She is obeying her mama and stays home, not leaving the house after six. Amazing… Things are bad with her, she has no job… I want to drag Lika off to the Sparrow Hills, but doubt she will submit: she is awfully obstinate. Kuvshinnikova left with Levitan 4 days ago for the Volga. Lika had given up her dreams of being an actress and singer. She was shortly to take up work as a clerk in Moscow's town council offices. Far worse, however, was the plight of Ezhov. He wrote on 10 June: My wife Liudia died on 3 June at 4.30 a.m. I don't know where you are, Anton, but I'm in the cold tundra and there's not a spark of hope of my life being happy or making sense. Liudia loved me like nobody else. My tiny successes were happiness for her. On the evening before she died her face was worn out with disease, and she never took her loving eyes off me as if asking, 'Save me, save me!' Letters reached Anton too slowly to be worth answering and he stoically accepted his inability to help or console his correspondents. The telegraph linked Europe and Siberia, but the Chekhovs were too thrifty to send telegrams, however much Anton begged them to do so. (He was sparing himself, however, the expense of telegrams.) Anna Suvorina telegraphed to the river boat Anton was catching in eastern Siberia, discreetly but flirtatiously encoding Anton as Mikita and herself as Marina: HUSBAND ODESSA WHAT CAN I SAY GLAD YOUR SUCCESS GRIEVE YOU NOT HERE WHO PROMISED WRITE GOD HELP YOU MIKITA NO HAPPINESS FOR YOU MARINA. After 400 miles Anton reached the banks of the Yenisei. At Krasnoyarsk, mountainous forests replaced the desolation of the Siberian plains. The road was atrocious: hemmed in by hills, the driver could not avoid the ruts and holes. It took two weeks to reach Irkutsk, the capital of Siberia. All roads ended. Anton put his cart up for sale. He stayed at Irkutsk a week, drawing money, writing letters. He liked the city- 'just like Europe' - but his companions were spending his money as well as their own on drink. They sickened him. Anton pined. He
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thought again of buying a ranch; he longed for female company, and wrote to Masha: I must be in love with Jamais [Lika], since I dreamt of her last night. Compared with these Siberian Parashas [the name also means chamber pot], all these whorefaces that don't know how to dress, sing or laugh, our Jamais, Drishka and Gundasikha [Lika, Daria Musina-Pushkina, Olga Kundasova] are queens. Siberian ladies, married or not, are frozen fish. You'd have to be a walrus or a seal to have fun with them. Irkutsk was hard to leave. When they finally reached Lake Baikal, the ferry had gone. Anton complained: We searched the village all evening to buy a chicken, but didn't find one. But there is vodka! Russians are terrible pigs. If you ask why they don't eat meat or fish, they explain that there is no transport, roads are bad etc., but there's as much vodka as you like even in the remotest villages. The next day Anton spotted smoke from the funnel of a small boat; after appalling discomfort it disembarked them on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal. A week later, on 20 June, Chekhov, Homo sachaliensis as he now called himself, made Sretensk and boarded the Ermak an hour before it departed. Relief - no more rutted mud tracks - made Anton euphoric.
On the Ermak Anton read his telegrams from the Suvorins; he was free of Lieutenant von Schmidt, there was a washroom (where the crew's pet fox watched the passengers' ablutions). He gazed at the wild shores of the
