A Novel of Anton Chekhov - Blog Tour and Book Excerpt for "The White Deer"

BOOK EXCERPT

When we were still children and it was raining, Petya and I stayed in the kitchen. Aniuta would clear spots for us at a rough wood table, place a lamp between us, and we would draw pictures.

It was apparent right away that Petya had a talent for drawing. I would often put my pencil down and watch him, awestruck, as he drew. Sometimes I lay my head on my arms on the table, watched the movements of his pencil and listened to its soft breathing as it grazed the dry paper. From that angle I could see the circle of concentration around him. It reminded me of a halo on an icon. Slowly, whatever he was envisioning began to appear on the blank sheet of paper, becoming more and more dimensional.

Even when we were small Petya had a strange, source-less maturity. Of course I couldn’t articulate that back then. He knew himself in some way that I didn’t know myself. His drawings somehow showed that, too. They were textured with so much dimension. He could see whatever he was drawing in his own memory; he needed no models.

He defied everything I’d been taught about servants. How could a lesser being, as I was always being told servants were, draw and focus the way he did? How could someone less human than me observe the world with such intensity?

When we were seven or eight, he told me a story about a tiny girl who married a grasshopper. One day the girl was seen making her way through tall blades of grass, her face streaming with tears. She climbed on the back of a blackbird who flew away with her. Petya did not know why the girl had escaped. He had fallen asleep when his aunt was telling the story. She had left Volkhov the next day so we never found out what happened. The two of us tried to imagine why the tiny girl ran away.

I had watched, mesmerized, as with an astonishing precision, Petya drew a large grasshopper. When it was finished he held it up for me to look at. I recoiled at the eyes, two bald globes covered all over with minute, barely visible squares, a smeared dot in the center of each eye.

He looked at his own drawing in horror, as if it had come from somewhere else and not through him. Always reticent, he asked me, “Why would she have married him?”

I could still hear the sound of his quiet, low-pitched voice as he asked the question.

It was terrifying how alive the grasshopper was, so alive it was threatening. Petya and I looked at one another and a chill seized my back and shoulders. I was afraid the enormous insect would hop off the page, so I asked him to put the drawing outside in the grass. We both knew that day, watching from the kitchen door as the rain blurred the image and darkened the paper, that Petya had a gift. It was not my gift. It was his, but he included me in it somehow. In some way, we shared it, or he shared it with me. Maybe because he was afraid, as I was afraid, and it was better that there were two of us.

Aniuta kept icons in a small dark alcove room near the stove, the faces of saints quivering and shifting in candlelight. Since the first time we came into the kitchen together, Petya expressed awe of the little room. He stood at the doorway staring in. That day after he’d drawn the grasshopper and put it out in the rain, he went in that little room for the first time and I followed. The room was so small I had to stand behind him. Being very near him in the trembling candlelight I’d felt breathless. I was so close I could smell him, a soft defused scent of hay or dried grass and something else, which I decided was the wind, which his clean muslin shirt had likely hung out in to dry. I breathed Petya in, filled with elation. I thought I might float upwards.

After we stepped out of the room, Petya drew Theotokis, the holy mother with her sacred little boy. He didn’t draw her in the stiff manner of the old icon itself, but lovely and soft in her veil and garments, she and her little boy of human proportions. And Petya’s Theotokis had compassionate eyes, not the cold vacant ones you saw in the stiff figure of the usual icon. After that day he drew Theotokis repeatedly. And I used to think his Theotokis looked like his own mother, a quiet woman who worked as a seamstress, embroidering dinner napkins or the collars of shirts. His saints all had the faces of real people from his life. They were not stiff unfeeling figures. Not flat and without dimension. Sometimes he drew St. Nicholas of Winter, who, in his eyes, looked like our servant, Nickander, who’d been a teenager when we were children, a very large man even in his adolescence, with a wide, kind face. Sometimes he drew St. Ambrose with his gray double-pointed beard, always with the face of his father, Fyodor. But mostly, besides drawing horses and a certain linden tree, he drew Theotokis with his mother’s face.