1818

[alley_skywalker]

1818.

Dolokhov doesn’t need to open Galia’s letter to know what it will say. Toto needs a proper tutor. He’s six and far too old for a nanny. He also knows that she is right. His son needs a tutor. He needs to learn French, and literature and mathematics. Dolokhov can show him some things but he’s not a teacher. He doesn’t have the patience or talent for it.

 

But he wants to get a good tutor. And the process takes time. Time is something he has had little of. The new house and rapidly growing estate take all his attention these days. It’s a good thing, in a way. It takes his mind off his grief. The last few years had been one loss after another. His mother’s death and Galia’s unexpected marriage to an officer she had nursed back to heath during the war had suddenly left him all alone with his son. Prince Vasily’s sudden death and the inheritance he left his (illegitimate) grandson, had provided a sudden respite. He hadn’t thought twice before selling the Moscow house, acquiring some land and moving out into the country.

There was nothing and no one left in either Moscow or Petersburg for him.

 You should write to Prince Hippolyte, Galia’s letter says. Dolokhov makes a face. She’s right, as always, but he doesn’t want to.

 The warm summer breeze makes the light-cream curtains on the study window balloon like sails on open water. A fly buzzes quietly in the corner, hovering over a potted plant. Dolokhov looks up from the stack of papers and correspondence on his desk and leans back in the chair, watching his son.

 Toto sits on the floor of the study arranging neat lines of toy soldiers, trying to replicate what Dolokhov had showed him the night before. He lines up the toy cannons, claps his hands to imitate a shot, and knocks over a row of toy soldiers. “Victoria!”

 Dolokhov laughs.

 Toto looks up, wide-eyed and gives him a sheepish look. He knows he’s not supposed to shout when Papa is working.

 He looks like his mother. He looks like his uncle.

 Dolokhov stands and walks over to the boy. Toto follows him with his eyes, uncertainly. Dolokhov holds out a hand. “Come, Anatole. I want to show you something.” Anatole takes his hand and stands, eyes curious.

 ‘What?”

 “You’ll see.”

 They go to Dolokhov’s bedroom, to an old chest at the back wall which is never used. Dolokhov unlocks the bottom most drawer and takes out an officer’s parade uniform cap. The fabric is smooth and still bright. It had hardly been worn. Anatole – Kuragin – had forgotten it at his place one night and never came back for it and Dolokhov had eventually forgotten that he had it.

 Until he found it again after the war, with Anatole’s nephew, who bore his name in memoriam, cradled in his arms.

 Dolokhov puts the cap on Toto’s head – it’s somewhat too big for him – and salutes. Anatole grins and salutes back, a childish imitation of his father’s gesture, a mirror image, though Toto looks almost nothing like him. He has Dolokhov eyes but in everything else, he is very much a Kuragin. He looks just like Anatole did as a child.

 It’s bittersweet.

 “Papa, will I be an officer one day?”

 “If you’d like.” He isn’t sure if he wants Anatole to be an officer. But all the Dolokhov men had served. Civilians were always treated with a patronizing sort of air in families like his. He doesn’t know how to reconcile that with the fear of possible losing his son.

 “Will I be like my uncle?”

 Dolokhov laughs and scoops him up. Toto grabs onto the cap so that it doesn’t fly off his head. “I don’t know,” Dolokhov says truthfully and holds him close. There were things he had hated about Anatole; things that had frustrated him in Helene, though he had loved them both to distraction. And yet… “You will be yourself.”

 And all the force of my best memories combined.