The Book of Anna Read online

  THE BOOK OF ANNA

  THE BOOK OF ANNA

  (Karenina’s Novel)

  Carmen Boullosa

  Translated by Samantha Schnee

  First English-language edition published 2020

  Copyright © 2016 by Carmen Boullosa

  Translation © 2020 by Samantha Schnee

  Book design by Sarah Miner

  Author photograph © Javier Narváez Estrada

  Translator photograph © Anita Staff

  Front cover photographs from early twentieth-century Russia, public domain

  First published in Spanish as El libro de Ana by

  Ediciones Siruela (Madrid) and Alfaguara (Mexico City)

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Boullosa, Carmen, author. | Schnee, Samantha, translator.

  Title: The book of Anna : (Karenina’s novel) / Carmen Boullosa ; translated by Samantha Schnee.

  Other titles: Libro de Ana. English

  Description: First English-language edition. | Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2020. | First published in Spanish as El libro de Ana (Ediciones Siruela and Alfaguara, 2016)

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019028600 (print) | LCCN 2019028601 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895774 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781566895859 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917-1921—Fiction. | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction)

  Classification: LCC PQ7298.12.O76 L4313 2020 (print) | LCC PQ7298.12.O76 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028600

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028601

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  27 26 25 24 23 22 21 201 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

  “Tell me the truth: why does the woman in your short story kill herself?”

  “Oh! You’d have to ask her.”

  “And you can’t do that?”

  “That’s as impossible as asking a question of an image in a dream.”

  —FELISBERTO HERNÁNDEZ

  On the road to redemption,

  light doesn’t cease throbbing.

  I believe in love because I’m never satisfied.

  It’s my wild heart

  that arrives in the nick of time.

  —GUSTAVO CERATI

  Any woman who spent her whole life with Tolstoy certainly deserves a good measure of sympathy.

  —SUSAN JACOBY

  Her occupations are, firstly, writing…. She is writing a children’s book and does not speak of it to anyone, but she read it to me and I showed the manuscript to Vorkuyev…. You know, the publisher…. He is an expert, and says it is a remarkable work.

  …

  She rose and took up a book bound in morocco-leather.

  “Let me have it, Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuyev, pointing to the book. “It is well worth it.”

  “Oh no, it is so unfinished!”

  —LEO TOLSTOY,

  Anna Karenina (Part 7, Chapters IX–X)

  Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, 1918

  CONTENTS

  An Explanation of What This Book Is About

  PART ONE: ANNA’S SERGEI AND ANYA’S CITY

  St. Petersburg, Saturday, January 8, 1905

  1. On the Heels of Clementine, the Anarchist

  2. Claudia and Sergei

  3. Clementine Defends Herself

  4. To the Concert

  5. The Tsar’s Letter

  6. In the Theater

  7. What Giorgi, the Karenins’ Coachman, Did

  8. Intermission at the Concert

  9. Near the Port

  10. More Specifics about Sergei

  11. Kapitonich, Hall Porter at the Karenin Palace

  12. Claudia and Sergei at Table

  13. Aleksandra and Volodin Go to the Haven

  14. Our Moment of Greatness

  15. With Father Gapon

  16. Clementine, in Pursuit of the Night

  17. In the Karenin Palace Kitchen

  18. We’ll Give Our Lives!

  19. The Karenins Take Dinner

  PART TWO: BLOODY SUNDAY

  Sunday, January 9, 1905

  20. Anya Karenina without Aleksandra

  21. The Karenins’ Reply to the Tsar

  22. Piotr

  23. The Three Women

  24. Claudia’s Impatience

  25. Unexpected Guests at the Karenin Palace

  26. What on Earth Was the Tsar Thinking?

  27. Back in the Karenin Palace Kitchen

  28. The Reverend’s Beard

  PART THREE: KARENINA’S PORTRAIT

  Three months later

  29. Karenina’s Portrait

  30. About Clementine

  31. The Critics Examine the Portrait

  32. Vladimir

  33. The Reason for the Proposed Purchase

  34. The Portrait Departs

  35. Between the Dream and the Battleship Potemkin

  36. Claudia’s Regrets

  37. In Claudia’s Hands

  PART FOUR: THE BOOK OF ANNA

  No date or place

  38. An Opium-Infused Fairy Tale: The Book of Anna by Anna Karenina

  PART FIVE: FINALE

  St. Petersburg, June 1905

  39. After Reading

  40. The Plot

  41. The Boxes

  42. Anya Karenina

  43. The Wind

  An Explanation of What This Book Is About

  In his novel Anna Karenina, Tolstoy tells us that his lead character authored a book of the highest quality. Vorkuyev, a publisher, tells her he wants to print it. (“Let me have it, Anna Arkadyevna…. It is well worth it.”) But Anna considers it a draft. (“Oh no, it is so unfinished!”)

  After this passage, Tolstoy never mentions Anna’s book again.

  What he doesn’t tell us is that Karenina continues to work on her manuscript. The few mornings she’s in the right state of mind, she begins making minor corrections. Then it becomes her companion at all hours, even in her opium-filled nights. Eventually she rewrites it from beginning to end.

  Anna left two books, then: the one her contemporaries knew about, and the one that was with her to the end. The night before her fall she was still rewriting it.

  This is the story of how Karenina’s revised version—presented here for the first time—was rescued from oblivion, in 1905, in St. Petersburg, at the dawn of the Russian Revolution.

  PART ONE

  ANNA’S SERGEI AND ANYA’S CITY

  St. Petersburg, Saturday, January 8, 1905

  1. On the Heels of Clementine, the Anarchist

  A stone’s throw from the majestic avenue known as Nevsky Prospekt, handsome Clementine hurries along, wrapped in a cloak that, in her haste, has slipped down to reveal a glimpse of her pink dress and something she’s carrying in her arms. She notices a vigilant gendarme and slows down as she approaches him, changing her demeanor, whispering a lullaby, “sh-sh-sh-sh.” The policeman hears her but doesn’t look over, there are so many poor souls carrying around babes in arms, these women mean nothing to him. He’s under orders to keep a strict watch, and that doesn’t include meddling in the affairs of starving mothers.

  Clement
ine’s head is covered by a garment she’s cut and sewn with her own hands; it protects her neck and matches her striking cape, made from the scraps of different pelts. She pauses to glance at a poorly produced notice; the printers have joined the strike too: “It is forbidden to gather in the streets with intent to disturb the peace, upon pain of death.”

  She hastens along, thinking, They’ve just posted it! And then, This doesn’t bode well, not well at all! She picks up her pace.

  She arrives at the kiosk of the tram that crosses the frozen Neva. She asks for a round-trip ticket.

  “It’s the last run of the day, ma’am, it’s going out and coming right back.”

  Clementine hesitates.

  “Don’t waste my time, ma’am. Round trip?”

  “Can I use the other half of the ticket later?”

  “Of course!”

  “It’s cheaper if I buy a round trip?”

  “Why’re you asking if you already know?”

  “Then give me a round trip.”

  Clementine walks down the jetty repeating “sh-sh-sh,” her lullaby; she hands half her ticket to the young man standing at the door of the tram, boards, and takes the last seat on the right. The driver (and ticket salesman) boards last. The young man standing at the door of the tram shouts, “See you tomorrow!” The tram begins to move.

  They cross over the Neva and stop at the mouth of one of the river’s tributaries, at the Alexander jetty. The passengers get off, except Clementine. The driver glances at her out of the corner of his eye, impatiently. Since Clementine hasn’t budged, he turns to look at her, hands on his hips. Without moving from her seat, Clementine, bundled in her cloak, says:

  “I’m not getting off. I forgot something, I have to go back.”

  “Women!” mutters the driver. “Ma’am, these are no times to be throwing money away! Especially not for people such as yourself! What a waste…. Think of your child, ma’am!”

  Clementine nods, with an aggrieved expression.

  “You’re absolutely right.”

  The driver repeats:

  “I told you, there are no more runs today, this is the last one.”

  “What else can I do? I have to go back. Here, take my ticket!” Clementine moves as if to get out of her seat. The driver declines, waving both hands.

  “Don’t give me a thing. Let’s just pretend you didn’t take this trip, don’t get off….”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “Don’t open your mouth, ma’am, don’t say another word, don’t test my patience. Just stay put.”

  Grumbling who knows what between gritted teeth, the man adjusts the collar of his coat and steps off this old workers’ tram. He closes the door behind him.

  Clementine settles in her seat. She shudders with nerves; she tries to shake them off. Beneath her cape she removes something from the bundle in her arms—the one she’s been carrying like a baby. It’s a homemade bomb. She carefully slides it down her torso, past her hips, her right leg, setting it gently beneath her seat, in between her feet. She stays hunched over, hiding the bomb with her cloak.

  The driver opens the tram door and steps into his compartment, where he checks the tickets of the passengers as they board one by one until the tram is full. They set off.

  They return to the jetty on the south bank of the river. The moment they arrive, the passengers rush to get off. Clementine leans over farther, remaining in her seat. Her hands beneath her cloak, she pulls the fuse of the bomb and pushes it to the back corner of the tram. She rises, adjusts her cloak, and, pretending to embrace what remains of her dummy babe, gets off the tram, the last passenger to disembark. The driver closes the tram door, and, striding briskly past her, he leaves the jetty, heading east.

  The wind is ferocious, carrying sharp blades of snow. Clementine walks westward, each step longer than the last. As she moves farther away from the jetty, her expression changes from one of self-satisfied cunning to the anxiety of flight. She presses ahead, resisting the impulse to look back, listening closely. Her demeanor continues to change: from anxiety to fear, from fear to excitement, to impatience, to despair, to anger.

  “Nothing!” she mutters. “It didn’t explode! What hopeless idiots we are! It was supposed to explode in sixty seconds, it’s already been …” She doesn’t finish her sentence, filled with rage. She raises the bundle in her arms (the dummy babe) to her neck, pulling her cloak around her. She continues walking. From the direction of the jetty, she hears a faint noise. Like an old man farting—the drawn-out, muffled sound of malfunction—it’s an absurd explosion, nothing like the burst of gunpowder Clementine hoped to hear and that would have blown the tram and the jetty to smithereens, splintering the rails and the frozen Neva. No one will rush to see what the noise was.

  An interminable moment later, she hears something that can’t be described as even a tiny explosion, like the sound of a rag doll falling from a shelf. Clementine leaves the vicinity of the river with long, hurried strides, her expression one of wild-eyed despair. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the notice that caught her attention, the one forbidding demonstrations. Again she sees the gendarme who heard her hushing her pretend child, and again she whispers “sh-sh-sh” as she passes by him steadily; she doesn’t break into a run. A few steps later, she changes her “sh-sh-sh” to a popular tune. She pauses. That good-for-nothing bomb will be the end of me! she thinks, and she picks up her pace.

  2. Claudia and Sergei

  Claudia enters the dining room with short, quick steps, shaking her skirt with one hand. As she walks, her smiling gaze flits across the room, from a piece of furniture, to an object, to another, playfully, without stopping. She comes to a halt, settles her gaze on Sergei for a few moments, and says:

  “What’s all the commotion?”

  In this household they breathe happiness; it’s everywhere you look. The dining room, arranged with the same care as the rest of the home, is comfortable and charming. But Sergei is sitting at the table, looking pained. His movements are tense; he’s on tenterhooks. He responds to Claudia’s sweet gaze by nearly jumping out of his chair, catlike, scowling angrily in ill-tempered silence.

  “All right, all right,” Claudia says, trying to calm him. “It is what it is, it was what it was; as they say, forget about it.”

  She notices a streak of flour on her skirt, tries to brush it off, and says offhandedly:

  “We need to leave promptly at seven, on the dot.”

  Sergei hasn’t heard a word since she asked him what the commotion was. Why am I so worried? The question echoes in his head. So worried, so worried. He lets this thought repeat three or four times and replies violently, “Claudine, you don’t seem to understand: I’m not upset. Good God! Consider one simple thing: The scandal. The scandal! I won’t be able to bear it. But I can’t say no…. The request comes straight from the tsar’s desk…. I can already see myself in chains on the Solovetsky Islands…. I’d rather have the shackles than the scandal!”

  “The Solovetsky Islands! Don’t be ridiculous! We’re not living in the times of Ivan the Terrible.”

  “They’re worse than that! I’ll face opprobrium, and … !”

  “Sergei, Sergei, calm down, Sergei …”

  “Even worse!”

  “We’re going to dress formally and leave at 7:10 on the dot, like the English.” She’s changed the time of departure; it doesn’t matter to her, and Sergei, wrapped up in his own world, doesn’t notice.

  “The scandal! I can’t anger the tsar…. But if I accept: The scandal! I can’t bear it.”

  “What scandal? There’s nothing scandalous about behaving like the English. Well, there’s Afghanistan….” She refrains from the tirade she’s about to deliver to Sergei because she realizes what he’s just said. “Anger the tsar? Why would he be angry with you?” She barely manages to stop herself from saying it in time; she knows her husband would explode, and she closes her eyes so they don’t betray her. “Don’t even think about
rejecting his request!”

  “Behaving like the English? What on earth are you talking about, Claudine? You can’t listen to what I’m saying for more than two minutes?”

  “Sergei, my love,” she feigns patience; the softness of her voice infuriates Sergei.

  “Don’t start with your ‘my loves.’ Don’t you dare ‘my love’ me!” He’s livid. He doesn’t have outbursts like this with anyone except his wife.

  “I don’t know what to do with you, Sergei. Sergei, Sergei,” Claudia lets her soft gaze rest on him, but he doesn’t notice because he’s staring out the window. He breathes deeply; he wants to calm down. He’s so angry, he can’t see a thing. Claudia lets her gaze follow his out the window, where bright snow falls like tiny diamonds. “Sergei, Sergei,” she keeps repeating, without paying him any attention, enjoying the silent dazzle of the flakes.

  Before she finishes her rosary of Sergeis, he mutters, voice still choked by anger, jaw set, hands in fists, “It’s not my problem…. Don’t you see? Don’t you realize?” And he adds, as if to himself, “You can’t, because you’re so stubborn, or unfeeling. Like the English! How could you say such a thing? It’s the last straw!”

  Claudia doesn’t hear the rest. The joy of seeing the light refracted in the snow is like an electric charge: intense, lightning quick, and uncomfortable, too, because of its inopportune timing.

  In less time than it takes to describe this sensation, Claudia has moved on, slipped out into the kitchen, where she knows she should return.

  The yeast that has been in her family for generations has turned a strange color, which worries the cook, Lantur (who knows where her name comes from). Lantur had shown “Young Claudia” the tray of dough, waving her flour-covered hands and dirtying Claudia’s dress. Lantur expected Claudia to respond as she usually did, dismissing her concerns, saying, “It’s nothing, Lantur, nothing, back to work!” But instead Claudia’s expression had changed when she looked at the dough, and though she tried to compose herself (“I’m going to look in on Sergei, I’ll be right back”), when she rushed out as quickly as she had rushed in, it was clear that the dough boded ill: “Now we’re in trouble.”