Oysters

Eight times in his 15-page story “The Beginning of an Idea,” the late John McGahern inserts these sentences, always italicized:

“The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July.”

Their author is Eva Lindberg, an unhappy theater director who wishes to write a novel or play about Chekhov’s life. The oyster anecdote is true but she never moves beyond those 32 words. She alludes to “Oysters,” a story Chekhov wrote in 1884, 20 years before his death, and which McGahern paraphrases. A man recalls an event that occurred in Moscow when he was 8 years old. He and his father are starving. They stand in front of a restaurant, the father working up the courage to beg. The boy sees a sign inside printed with the word “Oysters.” He asks what it means and his delirious father gives a confused explanation. The boy concludes an oyster is a monstrous frog. The father begs for money from “two gentlemen in top hats,” and the boy repeats “Oysters!” The men are amused and, in a hallucinatory scene, take the boy into the restaurant and buy him a plate of oysters for 10 rubles. Chekhov writes:

“I sat at a table and ate something slimy, salt with a flavour of dampness and mouldiness. I ate greedily without chewing, without looking and trying to discover what I was eating. I fancied that if I opened my eyes I should see glittering eyes, claws, and sharp teeth.”

The boy is so hungry and ignorant, he chews on the oyster shells and the crowd in the restaurant laughs at the spectacle. He passes out and wakes up thirsty in bed. His father is raving. He passes out again, wakes, and here are the story’s final words:

“At midday I was awakened by thirst, and looked for my father: he was still walking up and down and gesticulating.”

That’s it. Chekhov leaves everything in suspension, unresolved. We’re left to wonder what happened to the father and how the boy survived to tell his story. Eva is attracted to the story for the ironic symmetry it lends her two sentences about Chekhov’s body in the oyster wagon. She seems unmoved by the horror and comedy of the starving father and son, and the amusement they provide the diners in the restaurant. Eva is having an unhappy affair with a married man who likes his vodka -- aren’t they always unhappy? She quits the theater, resolves to dedicate herself to writing the Chekhov book, and a friend loans her a house in Spain. On the train she observes the sea from her compartment:

“At least it would not grow old. Its tides would ebb and flow, it would still yield up its oyster shells long after all the living had become the dead.”

I won’t spoil the ending though nothing good, of course, happens. Eva writes nothing. Oysters, their taste and smell, the idea of oysters – vulnerable living things encased in shells – are never far away. Eva remains self-involved and self-destructively credulous. In the end she peers out a train window, looking for a wagon with Oysters chalked on it. All she sees is an old Spanish woman in a black shawl “smiling on her.”

I thought again of McGahern’s story while reading Sakhalin Island. Even when engaged in medical inspections in the penal colony, gathering data for his reports, or enduring the tedium of travel, Chekhov is telling stories. On a ship he goes below deck and meets his fellow passengers. Among them is a woman not at all like Eva:

“Our lady travelling companion, the wife of a naval officer, had fled Vladivostok, having taken fright at the cholera there, and now, somewhat reassured, was returning. She had an enviable disposition. The very slightest reason was enough for her to go off in fits of the most unaffected, bubbling and joyous laughter, till her side ached, till she was in tears; she would begin to tell you something in her regional burring accent, and suddenly the laughter and gaiety would come gushing up like a fountain, and, looking at the lady, I would begin to laugh as well…”

Randall Jarrell might have had Chekhov, one of his favorite writers, in mind when he wrote: “Man is the animal that likes narration.”