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the boardinghouse exhausted but fulfilled, happy inside. I would read his books by a blazing wick till midnight. His Confession moved me greatly, as did ‘What I Believe,’ where – with astonishing simplicity – he says what he thinks.
    Who is Christ? This question has preoccupied Tolstoy for many decades. He answers, ‘He is who he says he is: the Son of God, the Son of Man, the truth and the life.’ But he is not God. That is the essential mistake made by our church theologians. What Christ gave us was a way of understanding our lives in a perspective that cannot be destroyed by death. It is the fear of death that hangs like a buzzard over mankind’s head, a perpetual torment. As Leo Nikolayevich has said, one should whisk that fear away. Say, ‘Be gone, buzzard!’ And then comes freedom.
    As a token of my faith, I have forsaken women. True, I am not a handsome man. I am small. But my hands are a doctor’s hands: delicate and fine. I stitch and cut. I bandage and assuage. I am a doctor. Though I am hardly an old man, not having yet passed fifty, I am quite bald, and this seems to offend many women. My beard, which I trim each morning, seems to grow whiter by the month. But I have fire. There is a fire in my head, in my heart. I am in love with God. I can feel the fire of God in my soul. I am part of him. I am God, as everyone is God who recognizes the God within himself.
    I can even recognize a bit of God in Goldenweiser, that fraud and mountebank, that pianist and Jew. Why Leo Nikolayevich allows that man to hang about this house, to play his piano, to eat at his table and walk beside him in the orchard, defeats my understanding. The superiority of the Slavic race to the Israelites has always been known. As a man of science, I cannot fail to observe the colossal sequence of defeats that the Jews have sustained. Wherever they go, they are suspect. They fester and grow in almost any soil. Leo Nikolayevich does not understand about Jews.
    But every man has his blind spots. Leo Nikolayevich is not God. Nevertheless, I love him. I love him completely. I cannot believe my luck, that each day of my life since I came here six years ago, in 1904, has been spent here beside him. I have thus been privileged to listen to his words. I write them all down. I have mastered a kind of shorthand, so I rarely miss anything important.
    It can be quite annoying at lunch or dinner, however. Sofya Andreyevna teases me for writing under the table whenever Leo Nikolayevich speaks. She shouts, ‘Dushan Petrovich, you’re scribbling again! Naughty, naughty!’
    I have an excellent memory, however – a gift from God. Each night, before sleeping, I settle down at my little deal table and recall his words, working from notes gathered during the day. I take great care not to embellish what he says. The words of Leo Nikolayevich need no improvement! Each pause, each gesticulation and aside – all perfect. And it’s all there, in my diary. Word for word – a permanent record. My gift to humanity.
    Apart from the annoyance of Sofya Andreyevna, my life here has been pleasantly routine. I spend each morning, while Leo Nikolayevich is writing, in the village. An isba has been converted into a surgery for my use, and I see a dozen or so patients there every day. Whooping cough, bad throats, intestinal obstructions, fevers, measles, consumption, venereal diseases. Cases of hysteria. Lice. I see everything. But I love our Russian peasants. They are the soul of endurance. They are simple and God loving. God fearing. This is why Leo Nikolayevich loves them, and why I do, although most of them are pathetically superstitious. They do not understand that I represent the science of medicine. What I practice is not magic. For magic, I direct them to the monastery outside Tula. Let the monks heal you, I say, if you don’t believe in my methods. Not one of them has yet taken me up on this offer.
    Today was a special day. Against Sofya Andreyevna’s