Only the Animals (14 page)

For Alexandra, whose mind had been nurtured unusually, who had been exposed – thanks to her father – to ideas and varied ways of thinking, who already had robust resources of self to draw on, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's words were reassuring. Alexandra had withdrawn into solitude to test those resources, in a sense, to know her own mettle, but there was something else quite complex at work in her decision, something she explained to me between readings. Throughout his life, but especially in his older age, her father, Count Tolstoy, had swung between the two poles of engagement and detachment. Just before his death, he had once again determined to become an ascetic – to renounce all possessions, including the family's properties and the copyright to his own great literary works – and she had helped him to leave home secretly. How was she to have known he would catch pneumonia and die in the godforsaken, freezing stationmaster's home only days later?

Worse, since his passing she had been appointed the keeper of his archive, his literary and legal guardian, for her mother had made sure that her father was not able to give up his copyright. This posed to Alexandra a terrible dilemma. She thought over and over of her father's words:
I'll go somewhere where no one can bother me … Leave me alone … I must run away, run away somewhere
. Alexandra, in turn, felt she needed to retreat from the world, to lose herself in the only asceticism she could legitimately choose – the solitude of the sickly – while she decided what to do with her life. When her mother knocked on the door, she said, ‘Leave me alone.' To herself she muttered, ‘I must run away.'

The days shortened. I sensed that my own time of temporary withdrawal from the world was upon me. I stopped eating Alexandra's meals and felt my heart rate slow down, leaving me sluggish. I struggled to join her on the bed, and when she came to investigate she found me buried head first in sand in the murkiest corner of my terrarium. The maid had a hibernation box built for me, layered with moist pumice, soil and peat moss. As soon as Alexandra placed me on top of the moss, I was possessed with the urge to dig down until I was covered and give in to the most rapturous sleepiness. She watched me burrow into oblivion, I imagine, with envy.

In March I awoke and was reinstated in Alexandra's room. I was dazed and groggy, and it took me about a month to find my bearings and feel hungry again, to really pay attention to my surroundings. Alexandra was solicitous – she bathed me to loosen a winter's worth of dirt from my body, clipped my claws, and rubbed hoof oil into my shell to make it glister. But something was wrong. I basked in the sun, stretched out flat on the floor with my head, limbs, tail all as far out of my shell as possible, and pretended to close my eyes so that I could spy on her.

The first warning sign was her hair – so clean it kept wisping out of her French braid, which itself warranted some
staring. I'd never seen her hair arranged before. Then there was her smell, which had changed to the point where I almost didn't recognise her at first, due to the soap and perfume she was using: not bad odours, but they interfered with my ability to pick up her body's scent signature. But the most obvious sign was that Alexandra no longer spent her days in bed. The windows were thrown open, the bed was made, and instead of reading books, she read long letters greedily and secretly (not reading them aloud even to me) and wrote longer replies. She encouraged me to spend time outside every day, and tried to teach me to return to her by playing the lowest note on the piano.

If I'd had the slightest doubt that her time of hibernation was over, that doubt was banished when she took me into the garden for a picnic lunch attended by dozens of her friends. The outside tables were laden with food, and she had asked the maid to put together a private feast for me: chickweed, clover, sow-thistles, goat dung, buttercups, raspberries, crushed snails, cucumber, cress. I looked up midway through my massive meal and was stunned to see Alexandra had eaten her way through an entire cherry cake and was starting on a savoury dill tart. Sitting beside her, watching her eating with gusto, was a young man in uniform who could not hide his adoration, and I knew in that instant that he was the author of the letters she had been devouring in her room. She looked at him and smiled, and he wiped a pastry crumb from her bottom lip, and I could see then that she had found her appetite again, for all sorts of things.

Later I came to understand that he was part of it, certainly, but not the whole. It was through him that she had been reawakened to her father's commitment to helping those in need, and to the twin callings of a true hermitess, for whom solitude and contemplation must lead, in the end, to engagement. War had been declared, and Alexandra knew what she needed to do in order to emulate her father's devotion to social reform, nonviolence, simplicity and service. Before the summer was over, Countess Alexandra had eloped with her lover, and when he was sent to the front, she threw herself into her work in the hospitals for wounded and dying soldiers with a passion of which her father would have been proud.

Without any bitterness on my behalf, she left me to live a comfortable decade and a half in the Tolstoy family home, cared for by the maid, skipping out on half of the misery and joy of each year through my hibernation. Until one day in 1929, when I awoke to find myself in great physical pain on a ship to London, my terrarium packed up into a box addressed to one Mrs Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, England.

A Terrarium of One's Own

Virginia Woolf, on opening the box sent from Russia containing me, immediately sensed I was in pain and quickly figured out what to do about it. She gave me a warm salt bath daily to treat my infected shell, and fed me only water and fresh greens for weeks. She understood that my shell is a living and very sensitive part of my body, not anything like the fingernails of humans, and she was horrified that somebody had been stupid enough to carve words into it, across the bumps and scutes. In the box I'd travelled in, she found a single clue to my origins: a copy of Leo Tolstoy's short story ‘Strider: The Story of a Horse', in Russian.

An émigré friend of hers eventually translated it, and discovered it was not in fact Tolstoy's story told from the point of view of Strider the horse, but the prison diary of Alexandra, who had been arrested and imprisoned several times since the Russian Revolution, and had asked her husband to smuggle her diary out of the country using me as a decoy. Rolled up and tucked under my infected shell was a note from Alexandra to Virginia in English, saying how much she admired her writing and begging her to care for both me and her diary until she could escape from Russia.

Alexandra's husband – without knowing that it would hurt me – had decided to have some of the great Tolstoy's words carved into the living tissue of my shell, in the hope it would give me a degree of notoriety in London and thus ensure my survival (and that of Alexandra's diary), and in that his instinct was right. Virginia set me up in pride of place in her living room in Bloomsbury, and soon everybody she and her husband, Leonard, knew was stopping by to meet me, Tolstoy's tortoise, with the great man's reported deathbed words translated and carved on my back:
I love many things, I love all people
.

On discovering me in the box, Virginia had done what she usually did when she encountered a new phenomenon – in this case, a live tortoise – and went to the literature. She took out every book on tortoises she could find in the library, and read choice tidbits aloud to Leonard after dinner in the evening. With great good humour, he endured many monologues from her about the miracles of tortoise reproduction: how a female tortoise has absolute control over her own reproductive processes and can decide when to fertilise her egg (male sperm can survive in her body for as long as two years until she might elect to use it); if she changes her mind once the egg is fertilised, she can reabsorb it or hold off laying it until the time is right. Virginia was also greatly amused by the female tortoise's general indifference to the lovemaking exertions of the male. One of the books included a naturalist's description of a female tortoise leisurely finishing her meal of dandelions, not noticing that a male had mounted her until he hissed and squealed (for they do squeal) his way to climax.

Not many people know this, but Leonard used a pet name for Virginia in private, learned from her siblings: Goat. Virginia's nickname for her sister was Dolphin, and Virginia's close friends were secretly delighted on receiving an animal moniker from her, for it was the ultimate sign of approval. Virginia had, as a girl, tended a small menagerie of her own that contained a mouse, a marmoset and a squirrel. Her very first published piece of writing was an obituary she wrote for the family's beloved dog, and when I arrived in her life she was working intermittently on a biography of the dog Flush, a cocker spaniel owned by the nineteenth-century poetess Elizabeth Barrett. Flush had kept Elizabeth company through her years of being an invalid and accompanied her to Italy when she eloped with Robert Browning.

Virginia liked to try out pieces from the book about Flush on me, for we quickly became close. She sensed that I didn't like it when the tone veered towards the ironic, tongue-in-cheek style that humans seem to adopt automatically when writing from the perspective of an animal. It was a cheeky book, certainly, provocative even – it fit with her desire at the time to play with the conventions of traditional biography – but that didn't mean it couldn't also be moving. Virginia had some daddy issues, but similar to Alexandra's, hers were of the best possible kind (the inspirational, the aspirational), for her father had edited the Dictionary of National Biography and he and her beautiful arty mother had always been surrounded by authors and artists. And now Virginia and Leonard were surrounded by their own most interesting contemporaries, painters and poets, and Virginia was on fire with curiosity and creativity.

I was most impressed by the passages in
Flush: A Biography
in which Virginia attempted to understand at a sensory level what it might be like for a dog to experience the world through smell. This was probably due to my own similar hierarchy of senses, with smell right at the top. She wrote the sights of Florence like no writer ever has or ever will, by imagining how they might smell to Flush the dog:

He slept in this hot patch of sun – how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade – how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony – goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window-stained tomb.

When the book was published, a few years after I arrived in London, she took me with her on her little round of public and private readings and talks. She would start off by mentioning two Russian authors she admired, the usual duo of Gogol and Tolstoy, but then she'd lighten the serious atmosphere that settled on the room when she mentioned those venerable names by asking what these two men might have in common, other than being Russian authors of proximate generations. Both of them, she would say, dared to imagine themselves into the mind of an animal; both could at one stage find no way to say what they wanted to say except by making that animal speak for them. Then she would tell the anecdote about me, her Russian tortoise – sent to her by Tolstoy's daughter, who had in fact recently escaped from Russia with her husband to settle in America – and how she often found herself wondering what stories I could tell about Tolstoy (she wasn't aware he had died before I'd joined the family). Her audience would laugh, and the scene would be set very nicely for her to read out a passage from
Flush
:
A Biography
without it seeming completely ridiculous; in her clever way, she had cleared a little space for herself in history, aligned herself with the greats in taking this risk. And with a glance at me – a kind of tribute, I'd like to think – she would read out my favourite paragraph of the whole book, a moment that does justice to both the poet Elizabeth and her dog Flush by showing them as equals in their inability ever to fully understand each other: not so different then, from a biographer trying to get into the skin of her subject.

As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I – and then each felt: But how different! Hers was the pale worn face of an invalid, cut off from air, light, freedom. His was the warm ruddy face of a young animal; instinct with health and energy. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been – all that; and he – But no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other.

Many times during my happy years with Virginia, I was grateful for the good fortune of having arrived on her doorstep and nobody else's, for this was London in the 1930s and the pet tortoise craze was in full swing. Virginia followed the travesties of the tortoise trade as they were reported in the papers: millions of us imported each year from North Africa, arriving with broken limbs and shells from being packed into crates one on top of the other; a thousand dead spur-thighed tortoises discovered in baskets on the Barking foreshore. Hardly any that survived the journey made it through their first winter in Britain. Outside schools you could buy a baby tortoise and a goldfish for sixpence, and if they both died – as was likely – you could buy another pair the next week. In any local pub, you could find pet tortoises being forced to race across the billiard tables, and given a puddle of beer to drink at the end. At the other extreme, a live tortoise forgotten by a wealthy passenger on a Paris–London flight was discovered wrapped in pink cotton wool, with emeralds and rubies cruelly encrusted in its shell.