Free The Summer Guest by Alison Anderson

inferior to Turgenev.
    You know it by heart! Seagull, right?
    Act Two, yes. Some of it. It was the way we learned languages back then, wasn’t it, by rote. Remember Lyudmila Nikolayevna, with that stick she had to scan the meter? Tovarishchi! Vnimanye!
    My God! I still know that poem by Pushkin we had to learn. I felt rebellious at the time, but now I’m glad.
    Go on, then.
    Ana cleared her throat and recited the poem in a hushed voice, while Yves listened thoughtfully and chimed in at one point. When she had finished, he looked at her and said, To get back to my initial misunderstanding—you should translate Chekhov.
    But there are literally hundreds of translations already. Where’s the glory in that?
    Ana, you’re not doing it for the glory. There’s never any glory for any of us, you know that. You would do it for the love of it, no?
    I would hope to.
    You could find something he wrote during that period, and it could be published along with Zinaida Mikhailovna’s diary. Write to the publisher.
    That’s what I thought, briefly, but they’re hopeless. They don’t answer my emails.
    Don’t let that stop you. Try anyway.
    There is talk of a novel . . . I mean, Chekhov refers to writing one, starting one, already in what I’ve translated so far. But I have no idea if it exists.
    Yves scraped pensively with a small spoon at what was left of the crème brûlée, then looked up, spoon paused in midair. Imagine, Ana, he said, sighing, if you could translate that novel. It would be perfect.
    But Yves, if he did write one, where is it? Chekhov never finished a novel. Published a novel. That we know of.
    He paused, licked his spoon. Are you sure?
    Well, as sure as anyone else. I haven’t finished the journal, so I don’t know—
    How did the publisher find this thing?
    I don’t know. I have a file in Word, that’s all, typed by someone called Olga Ivanova. I suppose there’s a Russian edition planned as well.
    Perhaps they also have Chekhov’s novel.
    Don’t be absurd.
    Why absurd? Stranger things have happened. Remember the Némirovsky manuscript in the suitcase in the Paris attic? Maybe they found your two manuscripts together, the diary and the novel, in an attic in Saint Petersburg. Or Moscow. Or Kiev. Or Smolensk. Don’t you love the sound of it, Smolensk? Sma -lyensk.
    Ana was briefly and irrationally thrilled by the way he said your two manuscripts, but she felt she had to be skeptical. I don’t think Chekhov went to Sma- lyensk .
    On his trip to Sakhalin, then, maybe he left the manuscript in Irkutsk or Krasnoyarsk. Or Blagoveshchensk.
    You’re making fun, Yves. You didn’t know Chekhov never wrote a substantial novel, and yet you remember his itinerary across Siberia?
    Idle curiosity and a love of geography. And words. In Chekhov’s letters, there’s one sent from Blagoveshchensk. That’s where hemet the Japanese whore who says “ts!” It’s priceless. Who could ever forget a Japanese whore who says “ts!”
    She said “ts” because she couldn’t pronounce Blagoveshchensk.
    They laughed quietly, happily, a small rush of complicity, then Yves said, Keep reading, Nastyenka. I’ll bet you anything— I’ll bet you a live mongoose there’s a novel for you in there somewhere.
    On the bus home, what Yves had said kept chiming, a silly refrain, but as insistent as an earworm: I’ll bet you a live mongoose there’s a novel for you in there somewhere.
    What would I do with a live mongoose? she mused. They’re nasty creatures, anyway, what could have possessed Anton Pavlovich to adopt one? The pleasure of proving others wrong? To show them that they are not such nasty creatures after all, that they can form attachments to human beings and make unusual pets?
    But if there were a novel, the mongoose would be for Yves. Let him worry about its angry little teeth. Ana