The Count laughed with his mouth thrown wide open. Finally his spirits were liberated from the oppression that had scratched at his breast for over a week. Searing it with cold, the wind whipped over his bare face, not yet covered as it would come to be in a few years by his prodigious beard. A large cap of leather and fur covered his head. He held his head high despite the wind's assault. His eyes seemed to glint like opalescent snowflakes incandescent blue, gleaming in the winter night.
The horses were excited by the cold. Sharp, their gorgeous flanks quivered and shone in the light of the coach lanterns and under the yellow-flaming street lamps. With taut muscles, racing blood, strong sinews, and fast beating hooves, proudly they pulled the sled along Moscow's snow-covered boulevards. Sensing what manner of man they served, they swelled at the honor.
It is undoubtedly pride and vanity in me, wretch that I am, but I cannot resist enjoying how much this clip through the real streets of the real Moscow in real life on the way to the real concert hall on a real December night in the real year of 1876 is like a scene in one of my novels. My novels, my false novels -- one of those trivial passions of mine, writing books. I probe the depths of people who never existed and make them more real to millions of my countrymen than they are to themselves. Ach, I am a sorcerer, a mesmerist. I turn nothing into almost flesh when what I really mean is that flesh is nothing to begin with, and we must stop believing that it is something. I entrance them when what I wish to do with all my heart is wake them up.
And what do they live for, all those who read my books? They live for nothing, for the devouring of their pleasures in order to make themselves feel all the more the illusion of flesh as something real. They live to avoid the one thing that we are alive to confront, the one true thing that life brings to us, the awareness of death. Instead of concentrating on the meaning of death we are haunted by the desires of life, tormented by the wishes of the flesh, the flesh -- when all the flesh really needs, in truth, is to be subdued. Subdued, even if it means summoning such intense resistance that one feels as if one were actually being beaten!
The coachman stopped in front of the great gold and black marble façade of the Hall of Music and Tolstoy removed the astrakhan rug covering his lap and his legs and jumped down from the troika refusing the aid of the liveried footman waiting in attendance at the curb. His high polished black boots contrasted with the gleaming fresh white snow they settled upon, and the Count took a great gust of air into his powerful lungs and said to his friend Strakhov who had come to meet him, releasing it, Well Mikhael Ivanovich, we shall see just what sort of tunesmith this Tchaikovsky of yours is.
You are your usual gruff self, Lev Nikolaievich, but I have little doubt that that other man that dwells within your breast with whom you are always struggling will be moved even to tears before this night is out and will find that tender spot even in that stern and puritanical disposition of yours. Mark my words, he added, grinning at Tolstoy and taking him into a modified bear hug, pressing his formidable bulk to his own. He gripped Tolstoy to him by the shoulder.
It was at that moment that the green and mountainous landscape of the Caucasus appeared to Tolstoy as if he were standing on a high place overlooking the scene where he had served as a young Lieutenant in the Crimean War. Stupid, dirty, filthy things war made happen -- only to serve men's vanity! But oh, when you are in their grip, well then, those things, it is something else, even if it ought not to be.
Tchaikovsky was a handsome man with marvelous sky blue eyes, and Tolstoy noticed it right away. What did not escape his notice?
The composer bowed.
I do not know what to say Excellency except that I can only pray that you will feel that a little of that spirit that is so deeply yours has also a home in my breast. And it is my wish that my Andante will show you that.
He was tall and graceful standing to the side of a bowl of roses placed in the center of a mahogany side table. It stood against a carved and beveled mirror set within a gilded frame. The glass reached almost from the black marble floor to the painted ceiling. On that domed expanse straining fat-cheeked seraphim blew straight gold trumpets in the midst of clouds drifting across an azure sky that was shot through with rosy sunbeams; and in the center a magnificent crystal chandelier from Prague was suspended from an inverted plaster bell around which ran concentric circles of garlands of grapes molded in gilded plaster.
Indeed, indeed, Tolstoy said smiling and returning his gaze to the composer's face.
Countess Von Meck was not present, as she never was. To have destroyed her ethereal relationship with the musician that she enjoyed in their correspondence by seeing him in the flesh when she knew he was unable to reciprocate in the flesh would be folly.
But her nephew, Mathieu, an exquisite young man who dressed like he was in Paris not Moscow and carried himself with an admirable superabundance of sprezzatura was there. He was leaning, hands in pockets, against a marble pillar smiling as a young man in the uniform of the Emperor's Guard was explaining to him the morning routine for bringing the Tsar his coffee.
Several hundred other guests mingled in the lobby and then took their seats inside the theater, and hardly a one did not look at his companion and pointing to the box in the center of the loge say that was Tolstoy on the left sitting beside the composer. Nearly all would regale the boards they frequented for the next month with stories of how Tolstoy sat in that plush chamber attentive to the small orchestra and how he wept at the music.
It was an orchestra mainly of violinists, an orchestra hardly different from the ones that Haydn and Mozart wrote for.
Not one of those gross and bloated monstrosities that Beethoven, Schumann, and Berlioz mobilized, Tolstoy commented approvingly about the size of the orchestra before the concert.
But after the musicians had lifted their bows from the violins and the violas and the cellos for the last time, and after the applause had subsided, and when the valves were being pulled off the French horns, and the reeds attended to in the woodwinds, and the flutes twisted apart, and as the two men were standing outside their box unable to avoid the devotees who were coming to congratulate the composer after the performance and glance at the great writer, their own Shakespeare, Tolstoy clasped Tchaikovsky's hand in his two paws and kissed him on the neck.
Tchaikovsky blushed.
And what of Tolstoy's tears?
He had sat fiercely upright in the silk-velvet chair on which the scene of a hunt in a forest was embroidered.
The way he listened was defiantly when the music began. Then, the violins and cellos embraced and ascended into celestial and diaphanous realms where clouds float and merge and distend into nothing, into the shining azure, and all that remains is the golden fading sound of three French horns.
Without the awkwardness of an induction, Tchaikovsky was there, in the aether. Tolstoy was entranced. The melody climbed and dropped and reestablished itself. It turned in upon itself and flared out again, painfully, sweetly with the clarity of an oboe and the longing of a clarinet. It suggested its very absence by its presence, and then, after being played out was gone. It was present by its absence.
Beauty and loss are one. In this andante all the beauty there is, is here. And Tolstoy cupped his heart with the palm of his great hand. But that is not enough. It only comes from the heart that dwells in the flesh.
But there is another heart that beats not in the flesh and dwells not in mortal time. And it is that heart that is filled by this music.
Tolstoy cried because it was beautiful and because it was not enough. It was not adequate. But as art it was not inadequate, either, for it led invariably where art must, to the realm beyond itself where it could provide no enlightenment.
And he wept softly for that, as the music accompanied his tears.
Then he became quiet.
When the piece ended he looked at Tchaikovsky with a great sadness, but a wise sadness, and Tchaikovsky was aware of a desire for that man which frightened him.
Champagne, Count Bobolinsky called, and liveried servants carrying trays filled with champagne flutes passed among the congregants of the Count's drawing room.
Tell me something, Tchaikovsky said. The feeling of completeness you achieve through art and beauty, do you find that it turns very quickly into a feeling that something more, more real, more fulfilling, more adhesive to a deeper level of the soul, that something more and, yes, something that is essential is missing?
Tolstoy took from his vest pocket the handsome gold case crusted with rubies, pearls, and diamonds representing the imperial crest upon it which the Empress had sent him with a thank you note after she had finished War and Peace. He offered a cigarette to Tchaikovsky and took one for himself. Immediately, a liveried footman who had been nowhere in sight appeared with a candelabra. Tolstoy lit his cigarette after Tchaikovsky lit his, and the composer noted something like a scowl or the sign of an internal struggle contract his features. And then the disturbance seemed gone as Tolstoy released a thick cloud of strong Russian tobacco; and Tolstoy said:
You must be careful, Pyotr Ilyich. This kind of beauty only comes from the kind of struggle that ends in bed. And then there is always the tristesse that follows coitus, the disgust with oneself for having been swamped like a pig in passion.
Tchaikovsky looked seriously into the older man's eyes, a great need filling his own.
You have experienced that? he whispered.
I am a man with a man's appetite.
Yes, said Tchaikovsky. I think sometimes it would be better simply to walk into the Nevsky and not come out again. How sweetly the swirling water might quench the unfathomable thirst.
I have found myself looking too long and too longingly at long pieces of rope, Tolstoy said in response and clasped Tchaikovsky by the shoulder.
The other guests had all gone without taking leave of the two for fear of disturbing them, for they had moved their chairs to one darker corner of the long gallery, where there was hardly a candle, and both were talking intensely, gesticulating with such forceful grace that it would have been madness to intrude.
When they did leave, they walked through the still dark, early morning streets through the snow back to the rooms Tchaikovsky kept on Proveskoye Street overlooking the Nevesky's embankment.
Rosa Andreyovna had prepared the samovar; the good Russian prune rolls that Tchaikovsky liked so much were heaped up on a silver tray.
As he handed Tolstoy his tea, Tchaikovsky knew.
And what do you do, Lev Nikolaievich, when the passion is upon you?
In the past, after a great struggle with myself, I have always surrendered to it. It was inevitable. But afterwards I raked myself over the coals for the brutality of my flesh and knew that I must keep myself further away from the diabolical influence of women. Finally there was no solution but marriage.
And does it ever happen, Lev Nikolaievich, that it is not a woman who is the cause of your passion?
Tolstoy smiled.
I was very often in love with men, he said, but in those cases it was never with a passion like that, Pyotr Ilyich. When voluptuousness arises without a woman's instigation, if it is a man that stirs me in my loins and causes me to weep and to desire to kiss him, then it is something more tender, pure, and heartbreaking. It is nothing lubricious. There is a spiritual love that precedes us, and it is the curse of human weakness, our plight while alive, that through the flesh the spirit converges.
Tchaikovsky smiled.
But our flesh will not touch, Tolstoy said, taking his hand. Our passion will become a mist and irradiate the beloved spirit and make it grow wings.
Tchaikovsky reached out his other hand to Tolstoy, and the writer took it in his palm. As their skins met they exchanged something that made them feel they knew each other. They were one with each other. They were part of the same ethereal force of creation. They were masters of the trance. They could make intangible mental impulses resonate in the flesh.
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