Ode
to Anton
by
Bruce Costello
There is a farting old man lying in my bed who was once my lover.
After breakfast, I will prepare the garden for winter. Then I will come
inside for a cup of tea and yell:
‘Get up, you lazy bugger!’
‘Don’t be like that, please,’ Marcus will reply.
…
My name was once Elizabeth Cunliffe, preceded by ‘Associate Professor’
and followed by an alphabet. I taught Russian language and literature at a
leading university. I was an acclaimed authority on the short fiction of Dr Anton
Chekhov. I lectured for a year at Moscow State University and visited the
Chekhov estate at Melikhovo, which the Soviets had turned into a museum.
I sat in awe at the desk where Anton wrote short stories by night, and I
explored the district where he doctored gratis to the peasants during the day.
…
Anton would have loved our story. Pretty junior lecturer from the
Russian Department meets distinguished Professor of Philosophy. His lovemaking
is slow and thoughtful. His proposal is prefaced with a well-chosen quotation
from Lucretius: ‘We are each of us angels with only one wing….’ It is only
one-half the original. She embraced him and said yes. They marry. Years pass.
He has a stroke. She gives up her academic career which is at its height and
retires to nurse him at home.
Now her name is Lizzie, preceded by ‘hey’ and followed by a demand.
…
When we met, I was twenty-five and Marcus a young fifty. He drove a
Rolls Royce, spoke Greek and German and knew Aristotle backwards, inside out
and upside down.
Now he walks with a frame, rots in bed till midday and jokes that he
does his best a posteriori thinking on the
lavatory.
Marcus can still talk, though not to me. He has a friend, an eminent
philosopher with a formidable reputation, a colossal beard and an impressive
snort. The man visits often, squats on the bed beside Marcus and the two argue,
correcting each other’s use of quantifiers, and disambiguating statements where
the intended meaning is perfectly plain. They burst into quotations.
One shouts ‘Hobbes was right when he said, “The life of man is solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”’
The other replies, waving his arms, ‘but remember Hegel’s words “The owl
of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”’
And I stay in the garden, fretting over Marcus’s damaged wing and its
impact on my life.
…
Anton, you died young, bless you. Only forty-four when consumption took
you from the world. God, I’d love to have known you, to have sat with you in a
garden and talked about life.
You knew the misery of old men. Like your dying Bishop, distant from his
fellows, desperate for a comforting hand, held in awe by his timid mother. And
your illustrious medical lecturer, close to death, struggling with a
mean-spirited wife, yearning to connect with his grasshopper daughter.
And you knew about marriage. What was it you wrote in your notebook? ‘If
you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry?’
…
I click my shears. Favourite rose first. Miracle of the summer past,
with velvet petals deeply mauve, almost black, and rich in aroma. Snip. Snip.
Snip.
Anton, you loved your gardens. Their beauty was your consolation in a
troubled world. You designed and yourself planted the grounds at Melikhovo —
and worried who would tend them after you were gone.
A gooseberry bush would be nice in this sunny corner. I will dig in
compost and manure.
Tell me, who is the man who vegetates in my bed, slopping tea and
talking about antinomies and antitheses? What does he feel?
Oh, Anton, you who observed people with the objective eye of a doctor
but saw into their souls like an artist…tell me about my husband. I know his
face, his voice, his moods — but nothing of what’s inside him, his feelings,
his thoughts. His sense of himself or me, or of him and me.
And this, tell me. How does Marcus feel when he stares into the hollow
face of death? And watches his life slipping away from him? And me?
…
I throw down my shovel and go indoors. We must talk.
Marcus is sprawled on the couch, his thin frame twisted, an imploring
look on his gaunt face.
‘Please,’ he mutters, ‘sit with me for a while.’
Aversion arises, like reflux in my throat. It’s all gone too far. It’s
too late.
‘Gooseberries,’ I think, and step back, ready to retreat to the garden.
He grabs my arm with his bony hand, pulls himself to his feet, presses
his face to mine and shouts: ‘Please Lizzie. I want to know what’s happening! I
am dying alone! Tell me how you feel!’
I stare at his contorted face. His lips are stretched so tight they have
almost disappeared. I take his hand and attempt a smile.
‘“What fine weather today,”’ I murmur. ‘“Can’t choose whether
to take
tea or to hang myself.”’
‘Eh?’
‘You heard me.’
‘Another Chekhov quotation?’ he asks. The left side of his face warps
into a half grin.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘A lesser known. And what of you? How do you feel?’
‘Me? I feel, ah…. “like a donkey with a stick in my mouth and a carrot
up my arse.”’ He bellows with laughter.
‘Aristotle?’
‘No, Chekhov! Got ya!’
‘Crazy old bugger.’
I whack my husband playfully, take his arm and help him into the garden.
We sit together in silence on a macrocarpa bench.
From my new gooseberry patch wafts a pleasant scent of compost and
manure and freshly dug earth.
“Ode
to Anton” originally appeared in Turbine/Kapohau, the Journal of the International Institute
of Modern Letters, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, in 2012.
