A Gentleman in Moscow

Ascending, Alighting

At two o’clock, when Marina answered her office door to find the Count at the threshold in the company of a little girl with a rag doll gripped tightly by the neck, she was so surprised her eyes almost came into alignment.

“Ah, Marina,” said the Count, raising his eyebrows meaningfully. “You remember Nina Kulikova? May I present her daughter, Sofia. She will be staying with us in the hotel for a bit. . . .”

As a mother of two, Marina did not need the Count’s signal to tell her that something weighty had occurred in the life of the child. But she could also see that the girl was curious about the whirring sound coming from the other end of the room.

“What a pleasure to meet you, Sofia,” she said. “I knew your mother well when she was just a few years older than you are now. But tell me: Have you ever seen a sewing machine?”

Sofia shook her head.

“Well then. Come and let me show you one.”

Offering Sofia her hand, Marina led the girl to the other side of the room, where her assistant was mending a royal blue drape. Dropping down so that she would be at Sofia’s level, Marina pointed to various parts of the machine and explained their use. Then, asking the young seamstress to show Sofia their collection of fabrics and buttons, she came back to the Count with an expression of inquiry.

In a hushed voice, he quickly recounted the events of the previous day.

“You can see the predicament that I’m in,” concluded the Count.

“I can see the predicament that Sofia is in,” corrected Marina.

“Yes. You’re absolutely right,” the Count admitted contritely. Then, just as he was about to continue, he had a notion—a notion so inspired, it was incredible he hadn’t thought of it before. “I came, Marina, to see if you’d be willing to watch Sofia for an hour while I am at the Boyarsky’s daily meeting. . . .”

“Of course I will,” said Marina.

“As I say, I came with that intention. . . . But as you have so rightly pointed out, it is Sofia who deserves our support and consideration. And watching you together just now, seeing your instinctive tenderness, and seeing the way that she felt instantly at ease in your company, it was suddenly so obvious that what she needs, especially at this juncture in her life, is a mother’s touch, a mother’s way, a mother’s—”

But Marina cut him off. And from the bottom of her heart, she said:

“Do not ask that of me, Alexander Ilyich. Ask it of yourself.”

I can do this, said the Count to himself as he skipped up the stairs to the Boyarsky. After all, it was really just a matter of making some minor adjustments—a rearranging of some furniture and a shifting of some habits. Since Sofia was too young to be left alone, he would eventually need to find someone who could sit with her while he was at work. For tonight, he would simply request an evening off, suggesting that his tables be divided between Denis and Dmitry.

But in an extraordinary example of a friend anticipating the needs of a friend, when the Count arrived at the meeting of the Triumvirate a few minutes late, Andrey said:

“There you are, Alexander. Emile and I were just discussing that Denis and Dmitry can share your tables tonight.”

Collapsing into his chair, the Count let out a sigh of relief.

“Perfect,” he said. “By tomorrow, I shall have come up with a longer-term solution.”

The chef and the maître d’ looked at the Count in confusion.

“A longer-term solution?”

“Weren’t you splitting my tables so that I could be free for the evening?”

“Free for the evening!” gasped Andrey.

Emile guffawed.

“Alexander, my friend, it’s the third Saturday of the month. You’ll be expected in the Yellow Room at ten. . . .”

Mein Gott, thought the Count. He had completely forgotten.

“. . . What’s more, the GAZ dinner is in the Red Room at half past seven.”

The director of Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod, the state’s leading automotive manufacturing agency, was hosting a formal dinner to commemorate their fifth anniversary. In addition to key staff members, the event was to be attended by the Commissar of Heavy Industry, and three representatives of the Ford Motor Company—who didn’t speak a word of Russian.

“I shall see to it personally,” said the Count.

“Good,” said the maître d’. “Dmitry has already set up the room.”

Then he slid two envelopes across the table to the Count.

In accordance with Bolshevik custom, the tables in the Red Room had been laid out in the shape of a long U with chairs arranged on the outer perimeter—such that all the men seated could watch the head of the table without craning their necks. Satisfied that the settings were in order, the Count turned his attention to the envelopes that Andrey had given him. Unsealing the smaller of the two, he removed the seating chart, which had presumably been prepared in some office in the Kremlin. Then he opened the larger envelope, spilled out the place cards, and began positioning them accordingly. Having circled the table a second time in order to double-check the precision of his own execution, the Count stuffed the two envelopes into the pocket of his pants—only to discover another envelope. . . .

Removing the third envelope, the Count considered it with a furrowed brow. That is, until he turned it over and saw the willowy script.

“Great Scott!”

According to the clock on the wall, it was already 3:15.

The Count dashed out of the Red Room, down the hall, and up a flight of stairs. Finding the door to suite 311 ajar, he slipped inside, closed the door, and crossed the grand salon. In the bedroom, a silhouette turned from the window as her dress fell to the floor with a delicate whoosh.

The Count replied with a slight cough.

“Anna, my love . . .”

Noting the expression on the Count’s face, the actress pulled her dress back up toward her shoulders.

“I’m terribly sorry, but due to a confluence of unexpected events, I am not going to be able to keep our appointment today. In fact, for related reasons, I may need to ask a small favor. . . .”

In the fifteen years that they had known each other, the Count had only asked Anna for one favor, and that had weighed less than two ounces.

“Of course, Alexander,” she replied. “What is it?”

“How many suitcases do you travel with?”

A few minutes later, the Count was hurrying down the staff stairwell—two Parisian traveling cases in hand. With renewed respect, he thought of Grisha and Genya and all their predecessors. For though Anna’s cases had been fashioned from the finest materials, they seemed to have been designed without the slightest consideration for having to be carried. The little leather handles were so small one could barely slip two fingers through them; and the cases’ dimensions were so generous that at every step they banged from the banister into one’s knee. How could the bellhops possibly manage to carry these things around so effortlessly? And often with a hatbox thrown in for good measure!

Arriving at the subfloor, the Count pushed his way through the staff doors into the laundry. In the first suitcase, he stowed two sheets, a bedcover, and a towel. In the second, he packed a pair of pillows. Then back up six flights he went, banging his knees at every turn of the belfry stairs. In his room, he unloaded the linens and then went down the hall to get a second mattress from one of the abandoned rooms.

This had seemed an excellent idea to the Count when it had struck him, but the mattress was decidedly against it. When he bent over to lift the mattress from the bedsprings, it crossed its arms, held its breadth, and refused to budge. When he managed to get it upright, it immediately flopped over his head, nearly knocking him off his feet. And when he’d finally dragged it down the hall and flumped it in his room, it spread out its limbs, claiming every spare inch of the floor.

This will not do, thought the Count with his hands on his hips. If he left the mattress there, how were they to move about? And he certainly wasn’t going to drag it in and out of the room on a daily basis. But in a flash of inspiration, the Count was reminded of that morning sixteen years before, when he had consoled himself that living in this room would provide the satisfactions of traveling by train.

Yes, he thought. That is it, exactly.

Lifting the mattress onto its edge, he leaned it against the wall and warned it to stay put, if it knew what was good for it. Then he took Anna’s suitcases and ran down four flights to the pantry of the Boyarsky, where the canned tomatoes were stored. With an approximate height of eight inches and a diameter of six, they were perfectly suited to the task. So having lugged them back upstairs (with a healthy measure of huffing and puffing), he stacked, hoisted, pulled, and perched until the room was ready. Then, having returned Anna’s cases, he dashed down the stairs.

When the Count arrived at Marina’s office (more than an hour late), he was relieved to find the seamstress and Sofia seated on the floor in close consultation. Bounding up, Sofia held out her doll, which was now in a royal blue dress with little black buttons down the front.

“Do you see what we made for Dolly, Uncle Alexander?”

“How lovely!”

“She is quite a seamstress,” said Marina.

Sofia hugged Marina and then skipped into the hall with her newly attired companion. The Count began to follow his charge, but Marina called him back.

“Alexander: What arrangements have you made for Sofia while you are at work tonight . . . ?”

The Count bit his lip.

“All right,” she said. “I will stay with her this evening. But tomorrow, you need to find someone else. You should speak with one of the younger chambermaids. Perhaps Natasha. She is unmarried and would be good with children. But you have to pay her a reasonable wage.”

“Natasha,” confirmed the Count with gratitude. “I’ll speak to her first thing tomorrow. And a reasonable wage, absolutely. Thank you so much, Marina. I’ll send you and Sofia dinner from the Boyarsky around seven; and if last night is any indication, she will be sound asleep by nine.”

The Count turned to go, then turned back again.

“And, I’m sorry about earlier. . . .”

“It’s all right, Alexander. You were anxious because you haven’t spent time with children before. But I am certain that you are up to the challenge. If you are ever in doubt, just remember that unlike adults, children want to be happy. So they still have the ability to take the greatest pleasure in the simplest things.” By way of example, the seamstress placed something small and seemingly insignificant in the Count’s hand with an assurance and a few words of instruction.

As a result, when the Count and Sofia had climbed the five flights back to their rooms and she had turned her deep blue gaze of expectation upon him, the Count was ready.

“Would you like to play a game?” he asked.

“I would,” she said.

“Then come this way.”

With a touch of ceremony, the Count ushered Sofia through the closet door into the study.

“Ooo,” she said as she emerged on the other side. “Is this your secret room?”

“It is our secret room,” the Count replied.

Sofia nodded gravely to show that she understood.

But then children understand the purpose of secret rooms better than they understand the purpose of congresses, courtrooms, and banks.

Somewhat shyly, Sofia pointed at the painting.

“Is that your sister?”

“Yes. Helena.”

“I like peaches too.” She ran a hand along the coffee table. “Is this where your grandma had tea?”

“Exactly.”

Sofia nodded gravely again.

“I am ready for the game.”

“All right then. Here’s how we play. You will go back into the bedroom and count to two hundred. I shall remain in order to hide this within the boundaries of the study.” Then, as if from thin air, the Count produced the silver thimble that Marina had given him. “Sofia, you do know how to count to two hundred?”

“No,” she admitted. “But I can count to one hundred twice.”

“Well done.”

Sofia exited through the closet, pulling the door shut behind her.

The Count glanced about the room in search of an appropriate spot—one that would prove reasonably challenging for the child without taking unfair advantage of her age. After a few minutes of consideration, he approached the little bookcase and carefully placed the thimble on top of Anna Karenina; then he took a seat.

At the count of two hundred, the closet door opened a crack.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“Indeed, I am.”

When Sofia came in, the Count expected her to scamper about the room willy-nilly, looking every which way. Instead, she remained in the doorway and quietly, almost unsettlingly, studied the room from quadrant to quadrant. Upper left, lower left, upper right, lower right. Then without a word, she walked straight to the bookcase and picked the thimble off the top of Tolstoy. This had occurred in less time than it would have taken for the Count to count to one hundred once.

“Well done,” said the Count, not meaning it. “Let’s play again.”

Sofia handed the Count the thimble. But as soon as she left the room, the Count chastised himself for not having considered his next hiding place before initiating the second round. Now he had only two hundred seconds to find a suitable spot. As if to unnerve him further, Sofia began counting so loudly that he could hear her through the closed closet door.

“Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three . . .”

Suddenly it was the Count who was scampering about willy-nilly and looking every which way—discarding this spot for being too easy and that spot for being too hard. In the end, he tucked the thimble under the handle of the Ambassador—on the other side of the room from the bookcase.

When Sofia returned, she followed the same procedure as before. Although, as if anticipating the Count’s petty little trick, this time she began her survey in the corner opposite from where she had found the thimble in the first round. It took her all of twenty seconds to pluck it from its hiding place.

Clearly, the Count had underestimated his adversary. But by placing the thimble in such low locations, he had been playing to Sofia’s natural strengths. In the next round, he would take advantage of her limitations by hiding it six or seven feet off the ground.

“Again?” he said with the smile of a fox.

“It’s your turn.”

“What’s that?”

“It is your turn to look, and my turn to hide.”

“No, you see, in this game I always do the hiding and you always do the hunting.”

Sofia studied the Count as her mother would have.

“If you always do the hiding and I always do the hunting, then it wouldn’t be a game at all.”

The Count frowned at the indisputability of this point of view. And when she held out her hand, he dutifully placed the thimble in her palm. As if this turnabout weren’t enough, when he reached for the doorknob, she tugged at his sleeve.

“Uncle Alexander, you won’t peek, will you?”

Won’t peek? The Count had a mind to say a word or two about the integrity of the Rostovs. Instead, he composed himself.

“No, Sofia. I will not peek.”

“You promise . . . ?”

. . .

“I promise.”

The Count went out into the bedroom muttering something about his word being his bond and never having cheated at cards or welched on a wager, and then he began to count. As he proceeded past 150, he could hear Sofia moving around the study, and when he reached 175, he heard a chair being pushed across the floor. Well aware of the difference between a gentleman and a cad, the Count counted until the room fell silent—that is, all the way to 222.

“Ready or not,” he called.

When he came into the room, Sofia was sitting in one of the high-back chairs.

With a bit of theatricality, the Count put his hands behind his back and circled the room while saying hmmm. But after two circuits, the little silver thimble had yet to reveal itself. So he began to search a bit more in earnest. Taking a page from Sofia’s book, he divided the room into quadrants and reviewed them systematically, but to no avail.

Recalling that he had heard one of the chairs being moved, and accounting for Sofia’s height and arm extension, the Count estimated that she could have reached a spot at least five feet off the ground. So, he looked behind the frame of his sister’s portrait; he looked under the mechanics of the little window; he even looked above the doorframe.

Still no thimble.

Occasionally, he would look back at Sofia in the hopes that she would give herself away by glancing at her hiding place. But she maintained an infuriatingly disinterested expression, as if she hadn’t the slightest awareness of the hunt that was underway. And all the while, swinging her little feet back and forth.

As a student of psychology, the Count decided he must attempt to solve the problem from his opponent’s point of view. Just as he had wanted to take advantage of her limited height, perhaps she had taken advantage of his stature. Of course, he thought. The sound of moving furniture didn’t have to mean that she was climbing up on a chair; it could have been her pulling something aside in order to hide something beneath it. The Count dropped to the floor and crawled like a lizard from the bookcase to the Ambassador and back again.

And still she sat there swinging her little feet.

The Count stood to his full height, banging his head against the slope of the ceiling. What’s more, his kneecaps hurt from the hardwood floor, and his jacket was covered in dust. Suddenly, as he looked a little wildly around the room, he became aware of a quietly encroaching eventuality. It was slinking slowly toward him like a cat across the lawn; and the name of this cat was Defeat.

Could it be?

Was he, a Rostov, preparing to surrender?

Well, in a word: Yes.

There were no two ways about it. He had been bested and he knew it. Naturally, there would have to be a word or two of self-recrimination, but first he cursed Marina and the alleged pleasures of simple games. He breathed deeply and exhaled. Then he presented himself to Sofia as General Mack had presented himself to Napoleon, having let the Russian army slip through his grasp.

“Well done, Sofia,” he said.

Sofia looked directly at the Count for the first time since he’d come into the room.

“Are you giving up?”

“I am conceding,” said the Count.

“Is that the same as giving up?”

. . .

“Yes, it is the same as giving up.”

“Then you should say so.”

Naturally. His humiliation must be brought to its full realization.

“I give up,” he said.

Without a hint of gloating, Sofia accepted his surrender. Then she jumped off her chair and walked toward him. He stepped a little out of her way, assuming that she must have hid the thimble somewhere in the bookcase. But she didn’t approach the bookcase. Instead, she stopped in front of him, reached into his jacket pocket, and withdrew the thimble.

The Count was aghast.

In fact, he actually sputtered.

“But, but, but, Sofia—that’s not fair!”

Sofia studied the Count with curiosity.

“Why is it not fair?”

Always with that damnable Why.

“Because it’s not,” replied the Count.

“But you said we could hide it anywhere in the room.”

“That’s just it, Sofia. My pocket wasn’t in the room.”

“Your pocket was in the room when I hid the thimble; and it was in the room when you hunted. . . .”

And as the Count gazed into her innocent little face, it all became clear. He, a master of nuance and sleight of hand, had been played at every turn. When she had called him back to insist he not peek and had so sweetly tugged at his sleeve, that was a ploy to mask the slipping of the thimble into his pocket. And the moving of the furniture as the two-hundredth second approached? Pure theater. A ruthless case of dissembling. And even as he searched, there she sat, clutching her little Dolly in its bright blue dress, without ever once betraying her wiles.

The Count took one step back and bowed at the waist.

At six o’clock, having descended to the ground floor to deliver Sofia into Marina’s care, returned up to the sixth floor to retrieve Sofia’s doll, and then down to the ground floor to deliver it, the Count proceeded to the Boyarsky.

Apologizing to Andrey for being late, he quickly assessed his team, reviewed the tables, adjusted the glasses, aligned the silver, took a peek at Emile, and finally gave the signal that the restaurant could be opened. At half past seven, he went to the Red Room to oversee the GAZ dinner. Then at ten, he headed down the hall to where the doors of the Yellow Room were being guarded by a Goliath.

Ever since 1930, the Count and Osip had been dining together on the third Saturday of the month in order to further the former Red Army colonel’s understanding of the West.

Having dedicated the first several years to a study of the French (covering their idioms and forms of address, the personalities of Napoleon, Richelieu, and Talleyrand, the essence of the Enlightenment, the genius of Impressionism, and their prevailing aptitude for je ne sais quoi), the Count and Osip spent the next few years studying the British (covering the necessity of tea, the implausible rules of cricket, the etiquette of foxhunting, their relentless if well-deserved pride in Shakespeare, and the all-encompassing, overriding importance of the pub). But more recently, they had shifted their attention to the United States.

To that end, tonight on the table beside their nearly empty plates were two copies of Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America. Osip had been somewhat intimidated by its length, but the Count had assured him that there was no better text with which to establish a fundamental understanding of American culture. So, the former colonel had burned the midnight oil for three weeks and arrived in the Yellow Room with the eagerness of the well-prepared schoolboy at his baccalaureate. And having seconded the Count’s fondness for summer nights, echoed his compliments on the sauce au poivre, and shared his appreciation of the claret’s nose, Osip was itching to get down to business.

“It is indeed a lovely wine, a lovely steak, and a lovely summer night,” he said. “But shouldn’t we be shifting our attention to the book?”

“Yes, certainly,” said the Count, setting down his glass. “Let us turn our attention to the book. Why don’t you start us off. . . .”

“Well, first I’d have to say that it’s no Call of the Wild.”

“No,” said the Count with a smile. “It is certainly no Call of the Wild.”

“And I have to admit, that while I appreciated de Tocqueville’s attention to detail, on the whole I found the first volume, on the Americans’ political system, rather slow in going.”

“Yes.” The Count nodded sagely. “The first volume may well be characterized as detailed to a fault. . . .”

“But the second volume—on the characteristics of their society—I found to be absolutely fascinating.”

“In that, you are not alone.”

“In fact, right from the first line . . . Wait. Where is it? Here we are: There is not, I think, a single country in the civilized world where less attention is paid to philosophy than in the United States. Ha! That should tell us a thing or two.”

“Quite so,” said the Count with a chuckle.

“And here. A few chapters later, he singles out their unusual passion for material well-being. The minds of Americans, he says, are universally preoccupied with meeting the body’s every need and attending to life’s little comforts. And that was in 1840. Imagine if he had visited them in the 1920s!”

“Ha. Visited them in the 1920s. Well put, my friend.”

“But tell me, Alexander: What are we to make of his assertion that democracy is particularly suited to industry?”

The Count leaned back in his chair and moved about his utensils.

“Yes. The question of industry. That is an excellent place to dig in, Osip. Right at the heart of it. What do you make of it?”

“But I was asking what you made of it, Alexander.”

“And you shall hear what I think without fail. But as your tutor, I would be remiss were I to skew your impressions before you had the chance to formulate them yourself. So let us begin with the freshness of your thoughts.”

Osip studied the Count, who in turn reached for his glass of wine.

“Alexander . . . You have read the book. . . .”

“Of course I have read the book,” confirmed the Count, putting down his glass.

“I mean, you have read both volumes—to the very last page.”

“Osip, my friend, it is a fundamental rule of academic study that whether a student has read every word of a work matters less than whether he has established a reasonable familiarity with its essential material.”

“And to which page does your reasonable familiarity extend in this particular work?”

“Ahem,” said the Count, opening to the table of contents. “Let me see now. . . . Yes, yes, yes.” He looked up at Osip. “Eighty-seven?”

Osip considered the Count for a moment. Then he picked up de Tocqueville and hurled him across the room. The French historian crashed headfirst into a framed photograph of Lenin leaning over a podium—shattering the glass and falling to the floor with a thud. The door to the Yellow Room flew open and the Goliath leapt inside with his firearm drawn.

“Gadzooks!” exclaimed the Count, raising his hands above his head.

Osip, on the verge of commanding his bodyguard to shoot his tutor, took a deep breath, then simply shook his head.

“It’s all right, Vladimir.”

Vladimir nodded once and returned to his station in the hall.

Osip folded his hands on the table and looked at the Count, waiting for an explanation.

“I am so sorry,” the Count said in genuine embarrassment. “I meant to finish it, Osip. In fact, I had cleared my calendar today in order to read the rest, when . . . circumstances intervened.”

“Circumstances.”

“Unexpected circumstances.”

“What sort of unexpected circumstances?”

“A young lady.”

“A young lady!”

“The daughter of an old friend. She appeared out of the blue, and will be staying with me for a spell.”

Osip looked at the Count as if dumbfounded, then let out a laugh.

“Well, well, well. Alexander Ilyich. A young lady staying with you. Why didn’t you say so. You are utterly absolved, you old fox. Or at least, mostly so. We shall have our de Tocqueville, mind you; and you shall read every last page. But for now, don’t let me keep you another second. It’s not too late for some caviar in the Shalyapin. Then you can whisk her to the Piazza for a little dancing.”

“Actually . . . she’s a very young lady.”

. . .

“How young a lady?”

“Five or six?”

“Five or six!”

“I’d say almost certainly six.”

“You are hosting an almost certainly six-year-old.”

“Yes . . .”

“In your room.”

“Precisely.”

“For how long?”

“A few weeks. Maybe a month. But no more than two . . .”

Osip smiled and nodded his head.

“I see.”

“To be perfectly honest,” the Count admitted, “so far her visit has been a little disruptive to the daily routine. But that’s to be expected, I suppose, given that she has only just arrived. Once we’ve made some minor adjustments and she has had a chance to acclimatize, then everything should go back to running without a hitch.”

“Without a doubt,” agreed Osip. “In the meantime, don’t let me keep you.”

Promising to read his de Tocqueville by their very next meeting, the Count excused himself and slipped out the door while Osip picked up the claret. Finding the bottle empty, he reached across the table for the Count’s unfinished glass and poured it into his.

Did he remember those days when his children were almost certainly six? When there was a pitter-pat in the hallways an hour before dawn? When every object smaller than an apple was nowhere to be found, until it was right underfoot? When books went unread, letters unanswered, and every train of thought was left incomplete? He remembered them as if they were yesterday.

“Without a doubt,” he said again with a smile on his face: “Once they have made some minor adjustments, everything should go back to running without a hitch . . .”

The Count was generally of a mind that grown men should not run in hallways. But when he left Osip it was nearly eleven, and he had already taken ample advantage of Marina’s good nature. So, making an exception just this once, he sprinted down the hall, around the corner, and ran smack into some fellow with a ragged beard who was pacing at the top of the stairs.

“Mishka!”

“Ah. There you are, Sasha.”

The instant the Count recognized his old friend, his first thought was that he would have to send him on his way. What else was he to do? There were no two ways about it.

But when he got a good look at Mishka’s face, he could tell that this was impossible. Something of significance had clearly occurred. So, instead of sending him on his way, the Count led him back up to his study where, having taken a seat, Mishka turned his hat in his hands.

“Weren’t you scheduled to arrive in Moscow tomorrow?” the Count ventured after a brief silence.

“Yes,” said Mishka with a careless wave of his hat. “But I came a day early at Shalamov’s request. . . .”

An acquaintance from their university days, Viktor Shalamov was now the senior editor at Goslitizdat. It was his idea to have Mishka edit their forthcoming volumes of Anton Chekhov’s collected letters—a project that Mishka had been slaving over since 1934.

“Ah,” said the Count brightly. “You must be nearly done.”

“Nearly done,” Mishka repeated with a laugh. “You’re quite right, Sasha. I am nearly done. In fact, all that remains is to remove a word.”

Here is what had unfolded:

Early that morning, Mikhail Mindich had arrived in Moscow on the overnight train from Leningrad. With the galleys on their way to the printer, Shalamov had said he wanted to take Mishka to the Central House of Writers for a celebratory lunch. But when Mishka arrived in the publisher’s reception room shortly before one o’clock, Shalamov asked him to come back to his office.

Once they were settled, Shalamov congratulated Mishka on a job well done. Then he patted the galleys that, as it turned out, were not on their way to the printer, but were lying right there on the editor’s desk.

Yes, it was a job of nuance and erudition, Shalamov said. A paragon of scholarship. But there was one small matter that needed to be addressed before printing. It was an elision in the letter of the sixth of June 1904.

Mishka knew the letter well. It was the bittersweet missive written by Chekhov to his sister, Maria, in which he predicts his full recovery just a few weeks before his death. During typesetting, a word must have been dropped—which just shows that no matter how many times you review a galley, you will never catch every flaw.

“Let’s see to it,” said Mishka.

“Here,” said Shalamov, rotating the galley so that Mishka could review the letter for himself.

Berlin,

June 6, 1904

Dear Masha,

I am writing you from Berlin. I’ve been here a whole day now. It turned very cold in Moscow and even snowed after you left; the bad weather must have given me a cold, I began having rheumatic pains in my arms and legs, I couldn’t sleep at night, lost a great deal of weight, had morphine injections, took thousands of different kinds of medicine, and recall with gratitude only the heroin Altschuller once prescribed for me. Nonetheless, toward departure time I began to recover my strength. My appetite returned, I began giving myself arsenic injections, and so on and so forth, and finally on Thursday I left the country very thin, with very thin, emaciated legs. I had a fine, pleasant trip. Here in Berlin, we’ve taken a comfortable room in the best hotel. I am very much enjoying the life here and haven’t eaten so well and with such an appetite in a long time. The bread here is amazing, I’ve been stuffing myself with it, the coffee is excellent, and the dinners are beyond words. People who have never been abroad don’t know how good bread can be. There’s no decent tea (we have our own kind) and none of our hors d’oeuvres, but everything else is superb, even though it’s cheaper here than in Russia. I’ve already put on weight, and today, despite the chill in the air, I even took the long ride to the Tiergarten. And so you can tell Mother and anyone else who’s interested that I’m on my way to recovery or even that I’ve already recovered . . . Etc., etc.

Yours,

A. Chekhov

Mishka read the passage once, then read it again while calling up in his mind’s eye an image of the original letter. After four years, he knew most of them by heart. But as hard as he tried, he could not identify the discrepancy.

“What is missing?” he asked, at last.

“Oh,” said Shalamov, in the tone of one who suddenly understands a simple misapprehension between friends. “It is not that something is missing. It is that something must be taken out. Here.”

Shalamov reached across the desk in order to point to the lines in which Chekhov had shared his first impressions of Berlin, but particularly his praise for their amazing bread, and his observations that Russians who hadn’t traveled had no idea how good bread could be.

“This part should be taken out?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“As in stricken.”

“If you wish.”

“And why, might I ask?”

“In the interests of concision.”

“So it is to save paper! And once I have taken out this little passage of the sixth of June, where shall you have me put it? In the bank? In a dresser drawer? In Lenin’s tomb?”

As Mishka had been relating this exchange to the Count, his voice had grown increasingly loud, as if with a renewed sense of outrage; but then he suddenly fell silent.

“And then Shalamov,” he continued after a moment, “this Shalamov from our youth, he tells me that I can shoot the passage from a cannon for all he cares, but it must be taken out. So do you know what I did, Sasha? Can you even imagine?”

One might well draw the conclusion, that a man prone to pacing is a man who will act judiciously—given the unusual amount of time he has allocated to the consideration of causes and consequences, of ramifications and repercussions. But it had been the Count’s experience that men prone to pace are always on the verge of acting impulsively. For while the men who pace are being whipped along by logic, it is a multifaceted sort of logic, which brings them no closer to a clear understanding, or even a state of conviction. Rather, it leaves them at such a loss that they end up exposed to the influence of the merest whim, to the seduction of the rash or reckless act—almost as if they had never considered the matter at all.

“No, Mishka,” the Count admitted with some sense of foreboding. “I can’t imagine. What did you do?”

Mishka ran a hand across his forehead.

“What is a man supposed to do when confronted with such madness? I struck the passage out. Then I walked from the room without a word.”

Upon hearing this denouement, the Count felt a great sense of relief. Were it not for the defeated appearance of his old friend, he might even have smiled. For one must admit, there was something genuinely comic about the circumstances. It could have been a tale from Gogol with Shalamov playing the part of a well-fed privy councillor impressed by his own rank. And the offending passage, hearing of its pending fate, could have climbed out a window and escaped down an alley never to be heard from again—that is, until it reappeared ten years later on the arm of a French countess, wearing a pince-nez and the Légion d’honneur.

But the Count maintained a solemn expression.

“You were perfectly right,” he consoled. “It was just a matter of a few sentences. Fifty words out of a few hundred thousand.”

The Count pointed out that on the balance, Mikhail had so much to be proud of. An authoritative collection of Chekhov’s letters was long overdue. It promised to inspire a whole new generation of scholars and students, readers and writers. And Shalamov? With his long nose and little eyes, the Count had always found him to be something of a ferret, and one mustn’t let a ferret spoil one’s sense of accomplishment, or one’s cause for celebration.

“Listen, my friend,” the Count concluded with a smile, “you arrived on the overnight train and missed your lunch. That’s half the problem right there. Go back to your hotel. Take a bath. Have something to eat and a glass of wine. Get a good night’s sleep. Then tomorrow night, we shall meet at the Shalyapin as planned, raise a glass to brother Anton, and have a good laugh at the ferret’s expense.”

In this manner, the Count attempted to comfort his old friend, buoy his spirits, and move him gently toward the door.

At 11:40, the Count finally descended to the ground floor and knocked at Marina’s.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” he said in a whisper when the seamstress answered the door. “Where is Sofia? I can carry her upstairs.”

“There’s no need to whisper, Alexander. She’s awake.”

“You kept her up!”

“I didn’t keep anybody anything,” Marina retorted. “She insisted upon waiting for you.”

The two went inside, where Sofia was sitting on a chair with perfect posture. At the sight of the Count, she leapt to the floor, walked to his side, and took him by the hand.

Marina raised an eyebrow, as if to say: You see . . .

The Count raised his own eyebrows, as if to reply: Imagine that . . .

“Thank you for dinner, Aunt Marina,” Sofia said to the seamstress.

“Thank you for coming, Sofia.”

Then Sofia looked up at the Count.

“Can we go now?”

“Certainly, my dear.”

When they left Marina’s, it was obvious enough to the Count that little Sofia was ready for bed. Without letting go of his hand, she led him straight to the lobby, onto the elevator, and pressed the button for the fifth floor with the command of Presto. When they reached the belfry, rather than asking to be carried, she practically dragged him up the last flight of stairs. And when he introduced her to the ingenious design of their new bunk bed, she barely took notice. Instead, she hurried down the hall to brush her teeth and get into her nightgown.

But when she returned from the bathroom, instead of slipping under the covers, she climbed onto the desk chair.

“Aren’t you ready for bed?” the Count asked in surprise.

“Wait,” she replied, putting up a hand to silence him.

Then she leaned a little to her right in order to look around his torso. Mystified, the Count stepped aside and turned—just in time to see the long-strided watchman of the minutes catch up with his bowlegged brother of the hours. As the two embraced, the springs loosened, the wheels spun, and the miniature hammer of the twice-tolling clock began to signal the arrival of midnight. As Sofia listened, she sat perfectly still. Then, with the twelfth and final chime, she leapt down from the chair and climbed into bed.

“Goodnight, Uncle Alexander,” she said; and before the Count could tuck her in, she had fallen fast asleep.

It had been a long day for the Count, one of the longest in memory. On the verge of exhaustion, he brushed his teeth and donned his pajamas almost as quickly as Sofia had. Then, returning to their bedroom, he put out the light and eased himself onto the mattress under Sofia’s bedsprings. True, the Count had no bedsprings of his own, and the stacked tomato cans barely suspended Sofia’s bed high enough for him to turn on his side; but it was a decided improvement upon the hardwood floor. So, having lived a day that his father would have been proud of, and hearing Sofia’s delicate respirations, the Count closed his eyes and prepared to drift into a dreamless sleep. But, alas, sleep did not come so easily to our weary friend.

Like in a reel in which the dancers form two rows, so that one of their number can come skipping brightly down the aisle, a concern of the Count’s would present itself for his consideration, bow with a flourish, and then take its place at the end of the line so that the next concern could come dancing to the fore.

What exactly were the Count’s concerns?

He was worried about Mishka. Although he had been genuinely relieved to discover that his friend’s distress stemmed from the elision of four sentences on the three-hundredth page of the third volume, he couldn’t help but feel with a certain sense of foreboding that the matter of the fifty words was not entirely behind them. . . .

He was worried about Nina and her journey east. The Count had not heard much about Sevvostlag, but he had heard enough about Siberia to comprehend the inhospitability of the road that Nina had chosen for herself. . . .

He was worried about little Sofia—and not simply over the cutting of her meat and the changing of her clothes. Whether dining in the Piazza or riding the elevator to the fifth floor, a little girl in the Metropol would not go unnoticed for long. Though Sofia was only staying with the Count for a matter of weeks, there was always the possibility that, before Nina’s return, some bureaucrat would become aware of her residency and forbid it. . . .

And finally, in the interests of being utterly forthright, it should be added that the Count was worried about the following morning—when, having nibbled her biscuit and stolen his strawberries, Sofia would once again climb into his chair and look back at him with her dark blue eyes.

Perhaps it is inescapable that when our lives are in flux, despite the comfort of our beds, we are bound to keep ourselves awake grappling with anxieties—no matter how great or small, how real or imagined. But in point of fact, Count Rostov had good reason to be concerned about his old friend Mishka.

When he left the Metropol late on the night of the twenty-first of June, Mikhail Mindich followed the Count’s advice to the letter. He went straight to his hotel, bathed, ate, and tucked himself in for a good night’s sleep. And when he awoke, he looked upon the events of the previous day with more perspective.

In the light of morning, he saw that the Count was perfectly right—that it was only a matter of fifty words. And it was not as if Shalamov had asked him to cut the last lines of The Cherry Orchard or The Seagull. It was a passage that might have appeared in the correspondence of any traveler in Europe and that Chekhov himself had, in all probability, composed without a second thought.

But after dressing and eating a late breakfast, when Mishka headed to the Central House of Writers, he happened to pass that statue of Gorky on Arbatskaya Square, where the brooding statue of Gogol once had stood. Other than Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky had been Mishka’s greatest contemporary hero.

“Here was a man,” said Mishka to himself (as he stood in the middle of the sidewalk ignoring the passersby), “who once wrote with such fresh and unsentimental directness that his memories of youth became our memories of youth.”

But having settled in Italy, he was lured back to Russia by Stalin in ’34 and set up in Ryabushinsky’s mansion—so that he could preside over the establishment of Socialist Realism as the sole artistic style of the entire Russian people. . . .

“And what has been the fallout of that?” Mishka demanded of the statue.

All but ruined, Bulgakov hadn’t written a word in years. Akhmatova had put down her pen. Mandelstam, having already served his sentence, had apparently been arrested again. And Mayakovsky? Oh, Mayakovsky . . .

Mishka pulled at the hairs of his beard.

Back in ’22, how boldly he had predicted to Sasha that these four would come together to forge a new poetry for Russia. Improbably, perhaps. But in the end, that is exactly what they had done. They had created the poetry of silence.

“Yes, silence can be an opinion,” said Mishka. “Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn’t be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.”

With that, Mishka turned his back on Maxim Gorky and the Central House of Writers, and he went instead to the offices of Goslitizdat. There, he mounted the stairs, brushed past the receptionist, and opened door after door until he found the ferret in a conference room, presiding over an editorial meeting. In the center of the table were platters of cheese and figs and cured herring, the very sight of which, for some unaccountable reason, filled Mishka with fury. Turning from Shalamov in order to see who had barged through the door were the junior editors and assistant editors, all young and earnest—a fact that only infuriated Mishka more.

“Very good!” he shouted. “I see you have your knives out. What will you be cutting in half today? The Brothers Karamozov?”

“Mikhail Fyodorovich,” said Shalamov in shock.

“What is this!” Mishka proclaimed, pointing to a young woman who happened to have a slice of bread topped with herring in her hand. “Is that bread from Berlin? Be careful, comrade. If you take a single bite, Shalamov will shoot you from a cannon.”

Mishka could see that the young girl thought he was mad; but she put the piece of bread back on the table nonetheless.

“Aha!” Mishka exclaimed in vindication.

Shalamov rose from his chair, both unnerved and concerned.

“Mikhail,” he said. “You are clearly upset. I would be happy to speak with you later in my office about whatever is on your mind. But as you can see, we are in the midst of a meeting. And we still have hours of business to attend to. . . .”

“Hours of business. Of that I have no doubt.”

Mishka began ticking off the rest of the day’s business, and with each item he picked up a manuscript from in front of one of the staff members and flung it across the room in Shalamov’s direction.

“There are statues to be moved! Lines to be elided! And at five o’clock, you mustn’t be late for your bath with comrade Stalin. For if you are, who will be there to scrub his back?”

“He’s raving,” said a young man with glasses.

“Mikhail,” Shalamov pleaded.

“The future of Russian poetry is the haiku!” Mishka shouted in conclusion, then, with great satisfaction, he slammed the door on his way out. In fact, so satisfying was this gesture that he slammed every door that stood between him and the street below.

And what, to borrow a phrase, was the fallout of that?

Within a day, the gist of Mishka’s comments were shared with the authorities; within a week, they were set down word for word. In August, he was invited to the offices of the NKVD in Leningrad for questioning. In November, he was brought before one of the extrajudicial troikas of the era. And in March 1939, he was on a train bound for Siberia and the realm of second thoughts.

The Count was presumably right to be concerned for Nina, though we will never know for certain—for she did not return to the Metropol within the month, within the year, or ever again. In October, the Count made some efforts to discover her whereabouts, all of them fruitless. One assumes that Nina made her own efforts to communicate with the Count, but no word was forthcoming, and Nina Kulikova simply disappeared into the vastness of the Russian East.

The Count was also right to worry that Sofia’s residency would be noted. For not only was her presence remarked, within a fortnight of her arrival a letter was sent to an administrative office within the Kremlin stating that a Former Person living under house arrest on the top floor of the Metropol Hotel was caring for a five-year-old child of unknown parentage.

Upon its receipt, this letter was carefully read, stamped, and forwarded to a higher office—where it was counterstamped and directed up another two floors. There, it reached the sort of desk where with the swipe of a pen, matrons from the state orphanage could be dispersed.

It just so happened, however, that a cursory examination of this Former Person’s recent associates led to a certain willowy actress—who for years had been the reputed paramour of a round-faced Commisar recently appointed to the Politburo. Within the walls of a small, drab office in an especially bureaucratic branch of government, it is generally difficult to accurately imagine the world outside. But it is never hard to imagine what might occur to one’s career were one to seize the illegitimate daughter of a Politburo member and place her in a home. Such initiative would be rewarded with a blindfold and a cigarette.

As a result, only the most discreet inquiries were made. Indications were obtained that this actress had in all likelihood been in a relationship with the Politburo member for at least six years. In addition, an employee of the hotel confirmed that on the very day the young girl arrived at the hotel, the actress was also in residence. As such, all of the information that had been gathered in the course of the investigation was placed in a drawer under lock and key (on the off chance it might prove useful one day). While the pernicious little letter that had launched the inquiry in the first place was set on fire and dropped in the waste bin where it belonged.

So yes, the Count had every reason to be concerned about Mishka, Nina, and Sofia. But did he have cause to be anxious about the following morning?

As it turned out, once they had made their beds and nibbled their biscuits, Sofia did climb up into the desk chair; but rather than stare at the Count expectantly, she unfurled a litany of additional questions about Idlehour and his family, as if she had been composing them in her sleep.

And in the days that followed, a man who had long prided himself on his ability to tell a story in the most succinct manner with an emphasis on the most salient points, by necessity became a master of the digression, the parenthetical remark, the footnote, eventually even learning to anticipate Sofia’s relentless inquiries before she had the time to phrase them.

Popular wisdom tells us that when the reel of our concerns interferes with our ability to fall asleep, the best remedy is the counting of sheep in a meadow. But preferring to have his lamb encrusted with herbs and served with a red wine reduction, the Count chose a different methodology altogether. As he listened to Sofia breathing, he went back to the moment that he woke on the hardwood floor, and by systematically reconstructing his various visits to the lobby, the Piazza, the Boyarsky, Anna’s suite, the basement, and Marina’s office, he carefully calculated how many flights of stairs he had climbed or descended over the course of the day. Up and down he went in his mind, counting one flight after another, until with the final ascent to the twice-tolling clock he reached a grand total of fifty-nine—at which point he slipped into a well-deserved sleep.