Only the Animals

One spring morning in 1913, the tortoise Plautus wakes from her winter sleep. She decides to run away from her owner, the hermit Oleg, and present herself to the Tolstoy family next door. It takes three months for Plautus to reach the Tolstoys’ steps. Plautus is exhausted and hopes that Leo Tolstoy will want to keep her as a pet. At this point she’s in her early middle age, and her shell is still gorgeous.

As Plautus waits, she regrets leaving Oleg. He lives in a house nestled in the next-door noble family’s gardens. For 50 years, he’s been their “ornamental hermit.” The family believed he was old when they hired him, but he was only 30. Per his contract, he’s not supposed to wash or cut his hair or nails and can only say one Latin phrase: Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur, or, It is a wise man who speaks little. He’s supposed to walk the grounds when the family has guests, looking melancholy. In return, he gets food and free lodging. Now, 50 years later, the man is still there—and he’s completely insane. The family doesn’t see the irony in their ornamental hermit having become the real thing. They threaten to kick him out often, but he just replies with his Latin phrase.

In private, Oleg isn’t so wise. He copes with his solitude by reading and talking to Plautus, but his reading is arbitrary. This means that he leaps from interest to interest without internalizing anything. Early on, he becomes obsessed with the Ancient Greeks and Romans. He names Plautus about this time, after the Roman playwright. Oleg builds himself a lyre out of an old tortoise shell he found and pretends he’s Orpheus entrancing the beast (Plautus) with his playing.

Then, Oleg moves on to the argument that Aesop wasn’t Greek at all and was, instead, an Ethiopian slave. His tales, in this system, are adapted from African tales. Oleg puts coal dust on his face and tells Plautus Aesop’s tales about the tortoise. Plautus learns she has a shell because her ancestors didn’t go to Zeus’s wedding supper, so Zeus made the tortoise carry his home on his back forever. Eagles like to drop tortoises from great heights and then eat them because a tortoise long ago asked an eagle to teach him to fly.

Oleg enters a Far Eastern phase. He uses the tortoise shell for the Chinese art of divining. Rather than the shell’s cracks telling him the future, though, the shell completely breaks in half. Plautus watches warily, afraid for her life. But lucky for her, Oleg latches onto the ancient Chinese belief that the universe sits on a tortoise’s back. Even better, the Chinese believe that the tortoise is a divine animal. Next, Oleg finds Darwin. He thinks of Plautus as a living fossil and proof of evolution. Tortoises, according to Darwin, evolved a shell to protect themselves and eventually, it fused to the tortoises’ backbones.

Then, a few years before Plautus runs away, Oleg discovers Christianity. He takes everything literally, so he’s disturbed to discover that tortoises are unclean and symbolize ignorance and evil. They move slowly because they carry a huge burden of sin on their backs. Plautus goes to sleep that fall and when she wakes in the spring, Oleg is still reading his Bible. She vows to head for the Tolstoys’.

Unfortunately, when Plautus arrives at the Tolstoys’ house, Leo Tolstoy is already dead. Tolstoy’s wife, however, decides to give Plautus to her daughter, Countess Alexandra, who took to her bed to grieve. A servant comes up with a terrarium so Plautus can live in Alexandra’s bedroom, and the maid keeps the terrarium wonderfully clean and warm. Alexandra doesn’t care much about Plautus at first. She spends her days in bed, reading—and the whole first summer that Plautus is there, Alexandra doesn’t wash or brush her hair. It cleans itself every week.

Rather than being dismayed that she ended up with another hermit, Plautus is fascinated. Alexandra’s “female solitude” is so different from Oleg’s. For the first time, Plautus starts to think of her gender (Oleg believed she was male, and for her own amusement she’d occasionally mount rocks to make him feel better about not having sex himself). It takes a long time, but eventually, Plautus decides that Alexandra’s solitude is “a political solitude.” Oleg suffered from isolation, and Alexandra suffers too. But she suffers differently, and choosing to be alone can be blissful. Alexandra takes no visitors, so many people leave her flowers, believing she’s ill. But she reads voraciously and gives all her energy to her books.

One day, curious about what Alexandra is so interested in reading, Plautus climbs up onto the bed with her. Alexandra doesn’t jump when she sees Plautus on the bed, and she even laughs when Plautus tries to read the books’ titles. She picks the tortoise up, nestles her in the pillows, and starts to read aloud. Plautus eats what she can of Alexandra’s lunch when it arrives and listens intently. They’re reading Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and through her, Plautus learns why Alexandra chose her period of solitude. Plautus notes that most people aren’t interested in other people’s literary epiphanies, just like people don’t want to hear about each other’s vacations. These days, people feel like authors are speaking to them and them alone. But at the time that Alexandra read with Plautus, everyone shared in books’ magic.

Alexandra reads electrifying passages, such as one from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in 1892. The speech was titled “The Solitude of Self,” and in it, she suggested that women are like Robinson Crusoe on an island. Alexandra isn’t sure what Stanton means, but she decides that it’s impossible to ignore that women are alone. If women can develop their mind’s resources in solitude, they’ll never be alienated from themselves.  Since Alexandra grew up exposed to many different ways of thinking, this is reassuring. Plautus thinks Alexandra withdraws into solitude to test herself.

However, Alexandra also tells Plautus that Tolstoy had gone back and forth between engaging and detaching from other people. Before his death, he’d renounced all his possessions, including his literary copyrights, and Alexandra had helped him leave home secretly. She had no idea he’d die of pneumonia days later. Even worse, Alexandra now keeps her father’s archive, since her mother made sure that Tolstoy couldn’t give up his copyright. This left Alexandra with a dilemma. Her father had wanted to abandon the world, and so Alexandra chose the only kind of solitude she could, as a woman: she pretends to be sick so she can be alone. When her mother knocks on the door, Alexandra mutters to herself that she has to run away.

Fall approaches. Plautus feels herself slowing down and one day, Alexandra puts Plautus in her hibernation box. The tortoise burrows down and falls asleep until March. At that point, Plautus returns to Alexandra’s room. Alexandra cleans Plautus’s body and clips her claws, but something is wrong. Her hair is clean and braided, and now she smells of soaps and perfumes. She also no longer spends her days in bed and instead, goes outside and reads letters. Plautus confirms that Alexandra is done hibernating when the maid takes Plautus outside to join Alexandra at a party. Plautus watches Alexandra eat through cakes next to a smitten young man. Later, Plautus learns that this young man helped Alexandra remember Tolstoy’s commitment to helping needy people—and reminded her that her solitude must lead to engagement.

There’s a war going on, and Alexandra knows she needs to emulate Tolstoy’s devotion to nonviolence, social reform, and service. By the end of the summer, Alexandra elopes with her lover. She works in hospitals when he’s sent to the front and leaves Plautus to live comfortably in the Tolstoy home for the next decade. Plautus passes the years happily until 1929, when she wakes in horrible pain. She’s in a box addressed to Virginia Woolf in England.

Virginia Woolf knows Plautus is in pain the moment she opens the box. She bathes Plautus in warm salt baths and feeds her fresh food. Virginia understands that a tortoise’s shell is alive and sensitive, so she’s horrified that someone carved words in Plautus’s shell. In the box with Plautus, Virginia finds a copy of one of Tolstoy’s short stories in Russian. When a friend translates it, it turns out to be Alexandra’s prison diary—she’d been imprisoned during the Russian Revolution and asked her husband to smuggle her diary out of the country. Under Plautus’s infected shell is a note from Alexandra to Virginia, begging Virginia to care for Plautus and the diary and complimenting Virginia’s writing.

Alexandra’s husband had no idea the carving would hurt; he thought carving Tolstoy’s words into Plautus’s shell would give Plautus notoriety and ensure her survival. In a way, he was right—Virginia adores Plautus and soon, all her friends stop by to meet Plautus and reads Tolstoy’s last words: I love many things, I love all people. When Virginia opens the box and discovers Plautus, she checks out as many books on tortoises as she can. She reads bits aloud to her husband, Leonard. He listens with good humor to passages about tortoise reproduction (female tortoises decide when and if to fertilize eggs, they can choose to reabsorb fertilized eggs, and they’re indifferent to male tortoises’ overtures).

In private, Leonard calls Virginia “Goat.” Virginia calls her sister “Dolphin,” and Virginia’s friends are all delighted when they receive an animal nickname. Virginia has always loved animals—her first published writing was an obituary for the family dog. When Plautus arrives in Virginia’s life, Virginia is working on a biography about Flush, a cocker spaniel owned by Elizabeth Barrett. Virginia often reads bits of the book aloud to Plautus and senses that Plautus doesn’t appreciate the ironic style most people use to write in animals’ voices. The book is cheeky, but it’s still moving. Plautus is very impressed by the passages in which Virginia tries to understand how dogs experience the world through smell.

When Virginia finishes the book a few years later, she takes Plautus with her to her readings and lectures. She always starts by mentioning her favorite Russian authors (Gogol and Tolstoy), and then says that the two authors both dared to write from an animal’s perspective. She then tells the crowd about Plautus, mentions that Alexandra is now in America, and wonders what stories Plautus could tell about Tolstoy. (She clearly doesn’t know that Plautus missed Tolstoy by a few years.) Then, she’d read from Flush: A Biography without it seeming ridiculous. After a glance at Plautus, Virginia always reads Plautus’s favorite passage in the book. In it, she shows that Elizabeth and Flush are equally unable to understand the other—but are still connected.

Plautus is grateful to be Virginia’s pet tortoise and not someone else’s. In London in the 1930s, people want tortoises—and it’s a brutal trade. Tortoises arrive from North Africa with broken limbs and shells, and most tortoises who’ve made the journey don’t survive for more than a week. People make their tortoises race in pubs, and the authorities discover one wealthy person’s tortoise—its shell encrusted with emeralds and rubies—abandoned on a flight. But for Plautus, life is good. Virginia bans tortoiseshell objects and welcomes guests’ poems about tortoises. And the entire time, Plautus watches Woolf write, just as Flush watched Elizabeth Barrett.

This all comes to an end with the London Blitz. One moment Plautus is sunning herself; the next, she’s buried in rubble. Plautus hides in her shell, calm and assured that rescuers will find her (the Woolfs have a card pinned to the door, saying a tortoise lives there). She thinks of the rescue dogs that Virginia was so interested in and imagines them digging for her. She knows that Virginia will be desperate to get Plautus back. Somehow, the parrot next door ends up near Plautus. It’s still in its cage, alive, and repeats “This is my night out!” until it dies. Plautus remembers Virginia saying that the Nazis burn swastikas into tortoises’ backs, and her own carved shell aches.

Trapped in the rubble, Plautus thinks of Virginia feeding her flower petals according to her mood and what the flowers mean. Roses mean love, for instance, and columbines represent sadness. She remembers Virginia reading Bataille’s essay in which he said “love smells like death.” Remembering this, Plautus mentally says goodbye to Virginia. She doesn’t mourn five months later, when Virginia drowns herself—though she watches Virginia compose her final love note to Leonard.

In her will, Virginia dictates that Plautus should go to Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell. She heard that he has a small menagerie on his family’s farm and hoped Plautus would be welcome. But unfortunately, George and Plautus don’t like each other. The menagerie turns out to be two animals: a rooster named Henry Ford and a poodle named Marx, which fight constantly. Though George is one of the first to understand the evils of fascism, he’s not good company.

Now, Plautus tries to be proud that she saw George working on Animal Farm, but at the time, she’s depressed and doesn’t care. What she remembers most is the smell of potato blossoms, as George spends his time helping the Women’s Land Army girls dig potatoes. George briefly tries to train young men, but ends up wounding two trainees. To make things worse, publishers refuse to print Animal Farm, a thinly veiled critique of Stalinism. Right after the war ends, Animal Farm is published, George’s wife dies, and George decides to take Plautus “tramping.” Despite publishing Down and Out in Paris and London years ago, George still goes slumming regularly.

Disguised as the tramp Burton, George takes Plautus to a lecture by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He sits near the front with Plautus next to him—and his stench means no one sits nearby. Plautus is embarrassed, but becomes entranced as Mr. Russell talks about the moon orbiting the earth and the earth orbiting the sun. At the end of the lecture, George stands and insists it’s fake—the earth is held up by a massive tortoise. Mr. Russell has clearly heard this before and asks what the tortoise is standing on. George insists it’s “tortoises all the way down.” With a sigh, Mr. Russell dismisses the audience. Plautus is ashamed, but after this lecture, she dreams of seeing space.

Soon after this, Plautus runs away from George. She spends a number of years slumming and even spends 10 years at a wildlife park. The staff paints numbers on tortoises, but they don’t paint one on Plautus. The food is decent and Plautus lays a few eggs, but she knows her destiny is waiting. One day, she hears the park staff discussing the Cold War and the space race between the Soviets and the Americans. They’re trying to put humans on the moon. And the first “proxy astronauts” are none other than animals like dogs, fruit flies, and mice. Plautus knows she needs to get in front of the Americans or the Soviets; either would be fine, as long as they’ll send her to space.

Plautus heads for the theater district in London, where she knows she’ll at least find communists. A British playwright named Tom Stoppard adopts her. He’s working on a play about a philosopher who steps on his pet tortoise and kills him, while the philosopher’s wife watches two British astronauts land on the moon. Stoppard recognizes the carving in Plautus’s shell as Tolstoy’s last words, so he takes her to parties with him. Plautus makes a point to meet people in black turtlenecks (they’re usually communists or Americans), and one of Stoppard’s friends notices this. He also notices how intently Plautus listens to Stoppard talk about his fake television scenes. This friend successfully convinces another friend to take Plautus back to the USSR with him and present her to the Soviet Space Program. He thinks the Soviets have a better chance of winning the race.

The Soviets send animals into space constantly, but most of the animals die. The Soviets are desperate to beat the Americans and get a man on the moon. They’ve heard that the Americans sent black mice to space that returned gray—a fate that would be undesirable for humans. Plautus starts her training with the space biomedical expert, Dr. Yazdovsky. She’s pleased to be around Russians again and quickly becomes Dr. Yazdovsky’s favorite. He nicknames her Bert after an American cartoon character named Bert the Turtle. It’s a nasty cartoon—but the nickname means that Dr. Yazdovsky can sing the Bert the Turtle song whenever he sees Plautus.

Plautus hopes that Dr. Yazdovsky’s singing will get her sent to space sooner, but during the early and mid-1960s the Soviets are more interested in dogs. The American send monkeys to space, but Dr. Yazdovsky prefers small, white, female dogs. Most of the dogs tolerate the training well, though most of them also run away just before takeoff. It’s like they sense they’re going to be shot into space. Plautus watches one dog run away right before her launch. Dr. Yazdovsky panics—he’s afraid the wolves nearby will eat her, and he’s a kind man. But when the dog returns, Dr. Yazdovsky lets her lick his face and shoots her and another dog into low orbit. Later, they find the dogs dead in their capsule.

Plautus wishes she’d met Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth. She was a stray whom Dr. Yazdovsky put into Sputnik II in 1957. She was happy in space for a few hours, but then the capsule overheated and she died. Most of the dogs, like Laika, are one-way passengers. Plautus talks to the dogs who return whenever she gets the chance. She’s fascinated by solitude after spending her life with Oleg, Alexandra, Virginia, and even George—and space, to her, represents a chance to be truly alone.

Plautus offers a transcript of an interview she did with two dogs, Veterok and Ugolyok, who survived 22 days in space. Veterok says she planned to think about her work once she was in space, but she couldn’t think clearly. Ugolyok concurs; she couldn’t control her thoughts and even began to hallucinate. Veterok adds that while she was in space, she learned to empathize with Enos, the American monkey who went to space. Supposedly he went to space and did everything he was supposed to—but due to mechanical trouble, the electric pads on his feet shocked him. In the photos after he returned to Earth, Enos is angry. In space, Veterok wanted to bite someone’s face off at the thought of being punished for doing the right thing.

Plautus asks if the dogs got along in space. They didn’t; they became territorial and selfish. Then, Plautus asks if the beginning or the end of the trip was the hardest. Veterok says the middle was the worst. It was monotonous, and she was enraged. Ugolyok confirms they started to irritate each other. She doubted why she was there, and even now she struggles to take life seriously after seeing the earth looking like a colorful ball. She thought going to space would be liberating, but now everything seems like a sick joke. Finally, Plautus asks for advice for other dogs set to go to space. Veterok encourages others to think of the other dog first and to be adaptable. Ugolyok tells others to get physically and psychologically fit. Going to space won’t solve one’s personal problems, and will only make them worse.

In 1968, the engineers start to consider sending animals other than dogs to space. They decide to send a spaceship into orbit around the moon—and they decide that Plautus will go. She’s a better choice than dogs because she eats less, and Dr. Yazdovsky hopes she’ll hibernate. Plautus vows not to hibernate—she’s going to space, after all. So on September 15, 1968, Plautus takes her place in the cabin with some mealworms, two spiders, seeds, and some plants. She settles next to the porthole and feels good after her bath in iodine.

As the rocket propels the capsule, Plautus thinks of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s words and is grateful to have her own thoughts to keep her company in space. Her vision dims and she blacks out. When she comes to, she no longer feels secure. Instead, she feels like she’s been banished. She feels like the “original scapegoat” of the Bible, who carried the sins of Israel on its back. Plautus’s shell feels heavy, like she’s carrying “the weight of all human sin.” She wonders what demon is waiting for her behind the moon. 

Once the main engine cuts off, Plautus knows she’s not going to fall back to earth. She’s nearly at orbital speed, and microgravity feels awesome. She hallucinates music, vomits, and feels her blood pooling in her head and along the top of her shell. She wonders why humans see so many animals in the stars, and who joined up the first dots. For a while, Plautus doesn’t think. When she thinks again, she wonders for a long time—perhaps days—if she’s blind. She sees flashing lights, which she knows means she’s passing through radiation belts. Plautus can see the earth below, looking like a marble. There’s no tortoise underneath it.

Plautus watches a spider squeeze out of the capsule and into space. She feels like she and the spiders are just like the first humans to sail on the ocean and leave land behind. Someday, when humans arrive on Titan, they’ll find pairs of animals and one ancient Russian tortoise. The curse of Earth’s creatures, Plautus thinks, is to spread life around, and leave it behind, all while making a mess. Outside, she can smell ice. She thinks of the escaped spider and then of Darwin, noticing a tiny exotic spider hitching a ride on the Beagle. He didn’t know how hungry it was to rule a new world. Plautus watches the remaining spider spin a web.

Suddenly, Plautus feels “the solitude of death” upon her. She doesn’t know how to die, but she remembers Virginia reciting de Montaigne’s words that nature will take over and help a person die. Plautus thinks that she’s spent her life with writers who found perfect solitude in various ways. They all recognized in her the same contradictory desire: to always be left alone, but to never be let go. But she thinks that after being born, every creature on earth is homeless. As the spider’s threads thicken, Plautus thinks of Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. He’d had a fly in the cockpit with him and it gave him solace to know there was something else alive with him. Plautus and the spider circle the moon.