Only the Animals Read online

  After that phase ended, Oleg became entranced with Darwin. He declared that I was not some lowly Russian tortoise but a living fossil, most ancient of all the living land reptiles, proof that animal life had started in water and moved onto land; my kind had evolved a domed shell over the eons so that predators would struggle to get their jaws around it, the shell eventually fusing with our very backbones, while we withdrew deeper and deeper within our armour to survive. This pleased Oleg as a metaphor for his own life. He read out long passages from Darwin’s notes on his expeditions, about walking for miles on the shells of live giant tortoises in the Galapagos, not once having to touch the ground for the creatures were so plentiful.

  Oleg had never been a religious hermit in the true sense of the word, but a couple of years before I ran away he began to flirt with Christianity. He couldn’t help but take everything literally, for during his lifetime as a hermit he’d had nobody else but me to filter his ideas through, no other human mind to help clarify his thoughts like butter, leaving them richer. So you can imagine how difficult things became for me when he read Leviticus 11:29 (These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind) and discovered that in early Christian art the tortoise was meant to symbolise ignorance and evil; that my slow, laborious movement across the stone floor of the Hermitage was due to the massive burden of sin I carried on my back. After surviving his first summer as a Christian, I couldn’t wait to get back into my hibernation burrow and go to sleep, but when I emerged again at the end of winter, there he was, still engrossed in the Bible. That’s when I decided I needed to get myself over to the Tolstoys.

  Her Woman Friday

  I was too late to become the great Tolstoy’s pet tortoise. When somebody finally noticed me at the bottom of the steps and I was brought inside the house and fed a bowl of milk and bread, I was disappointed to discover he had died almost three years before.

  His youngest daughter, Countess Alexandra, who had for years been his assistant and secretary, had taken to her bed to grieve after his death, and had hardly moved from there since. Her mother, Sophia, decided I should be given to Alexandra to cheer her up, and a servant was ordered to create a terrarium for me so that I could be kept in Alexandra’s bedroom. It was a thoughtfully created living space, with a water bath, a hideaway for me to sleep in at night, a sandy corner, and a stone sunbathing spot that was in just the right place to catch the sunlight as it came through the windows in the morning. The maid kept the terrarium scrupulously clean, replaced the fine-grained river sand often, and on overcast days brought me a hot water bottle made of calfskin to warm up my blood.

  Alexandra did not pay me much attention at first. She did nothing but read all day in bed. She sent her maid away whenever she arrived to groom her, and for the entire summer did not once wash, cut or brush her fair hair. I watched all this from my terrarium, and observed that every seven days her hair cleaned itself, quite miraculously – the oil at her scalp waxed then waned. She had her father’s pointy elfin ears, and they poked out from between her fallen-forward hair when she was particularly engrossed in a book. She was very thin, and ate almost nothing. When she squatted over the chamber pot I saw that her legs too were covered with fine blonde hair.

  You may think that I was dismayed at finding myself in the presence of another hermit, but to me her female solitude was so radically different from Oleg’s that I was nothing but fascinated. Until I met Countess Alexandra, I hadn’t given much thought to my own gender. In fact, for the decades I’d lived with Oleg he’d believed me to be male (tortoise gender is notoriously difficult to decipher), a misconception I’d encouraged for my own amusement by periodically mounting a large rock warmed up by the sun, pretending to believe it was a female tortoise. This had always seemed to make Oleg feel better about his own lack of carnal options.

  It took me many days of observing Alexandra to try to understand this difference in the quality of her solitude, and the best I could come up with was that hers was a political solitude, but I didn’t yet know how. She suffered from it, certainly, but not in the same way that Oleg had suffered; his state struck me in comparison as isolation, loneliness. But solitude is different, and female solitude, when it is truly chosen, can be blissful.

  Alexandra’s visitors – for there were many who wanted the privilege of her company – were turned away, told that she was still unwell, weak; they left her flowers or fresh mushrooms and whispered in an anxious way about her extreme melancholia, but there was nothing sickly about the way she read during those years in bed: she was beyond voracious, a famished reader. Whenever the maid announced a new batch of hopeful visitors, I could see Alexandra struggle with a vestigial impulse to give her energy – all of it, mental, emotional, physical – to her friends and family, as she must have done for the previous years of her existence. Her guilt at telling the maid to make excuses rose in her sharply once the door was closed (I could see her cheeks go pink with it), then this would give way to relief that she could safeguard her energy, her mindful wanderings, for just a little longer.

  I wanted to know, more than anything, what it was she was reading with such intensity, what answers she was seeking. One morning in autumn, when the maid had taken the terrarium out of the bedroom for cleaning and left me sunning myself on the floorboards, I decided to climb up to Alexandra and her books on the bed. I have the advantage of being small – the Russian tortoise is one of the smaller varieties, hence our popularity as pets – and a surprisingly good climber, and soon I had pulled myself up onto the bedspread and was stalking in my mechanical way across the quilt towards her. She looked up at the movement and – to her credit – did not jump at finding a small reptile sharing her bed. She simply watched my journey, and when I made it all the way to the pile of books I put my front legs with some effort on top of them and stuck my head out as far as I could to read the titles.

  At this she laughed, made a little warm space for me against the pillows, and began to read aloud. We didn’t stop reading even when her meals arrived on a tray. While she read, I ate what I could of her lunch and dinner to thwart her mother, who came after every meal to check if Alexandra had eaten. I knew it was bad for my liver to ingest so much cream and meat, but I didn’t care. I crouched beside her and watched the sun cross the bedspread and listened to her voice, breathed in her smell of blackcurrants and salt, yeast and orange peel. I had to concentrate hard to hear her – hearing isn’t my strong suit, but my sight and smell tell me most of what I need to know – and this is how I became acquainted with the writings of the early American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and with Alexandra’s reasons for choosing a period of solitude.

  I am aware that one person’s insights and epiphanies from unique reading journeys are not always interesting to another, just as other people’s tales about their travels mostly inspire boredom. I’ve wondered why this is for humans, and I’ve decided it has something to do with the perceived alchemical magic of the discoveries that books (or travel) enable: they are utterly private and idiosyncratic, and, to the person undergoing them, feel ordained, auspicious, designed especially for them at that particular moment in their lives. In a century during which many people have lost the religious framework of fatalism, it seems books have become signs to interpret and follow – this book has come into my life for a reason, the author is speaking to me and to me alone. And this, in a strange way, leads to people becoming evangelical about books. You must read this, they preach, forgetting that it was the way they stumbled serendipitously upon the book – finding it abandoned on the seat of a coach, or dusty in the attic, or neglected in a dark stack at the library – that was partially responsible for its powers.

  But in the days when reading aloud was the norm, this magic was shared. The words Alexandra read electrified us both, none more so than this moving passage from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech to the US House Judiciary Committee in 1892
, when she was – think of it! – seventy-six, an old woman giving an address to powerful men that she dared to title ‘The Solitude of Self’:

  In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness … To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us, we leave it alone, under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life.

  Alexandra mused to me about the meaning of this. You could fool yourself your whole life and think you’re not alone, but you will know – how clearly you will know – when you’re in pain, when you’re dying. And if a person has not been allowed, in times of solitude, to develop her mind’s many resources (intellectual, creative, emotional, spiritual) to shore herself up, to provide good company for herself, she will experience the further desolation of being alienated even from her best self. Nothing could be lonelier. On a visit to the exiled Prince Kropotkin in England, an anarchist philosopher whom Alexandra’s father had also admired, Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked how he’d endured his time in the prisons of Russia and France, and he responded that he’d tried to recall everything he’d ever read, and had reread it in his mind and heart, secure that nobody could invade the sovereignty of his thoughts.

  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.