A Gentleman in Moscow

Achilles Agonistes

Greetings, Arkady.”

“Greetings to you, Count Rostov. Is there something I can do for you this morning?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could you spare a bit of stationery?”

“Certainly.”

Standing at the front desk, the Count penned a one-sentence note under the hotel’s moniker and addressed the envelope in an appropriately slanted script; he waited until the bell captain was otherwise occupied, casually crossed the lobby, slipped the note onto the bell captain’s desk, and then headed downstairs for his weekly visit to the barber.

It had been many years since Yaroslav Yaroslavl had worked his magic in the barbershop of the Metropol, and in the interim any number of successors had attempted to fill his shoes. The most recent fellow—Boris Something-or-other-ovich—was perfectly qualified to shorten a man’s hair; but he was neither the artist nor the conversationalist that Yaroslav had been. In fact, he went about his business with such mute efficiency, one suspected he was part machine.

“Trim?” he asked the Count, wasting no time with subjects, verbs, or the other superfluities of language.

Given the Count’s thinning hair and the barber’s predisposition to efficiency, a trim might take all of ten minutes.

“Yes, a trim,” said the Count. “But perhaps a shave as well. . . .”

The barber furrowed his brow. The man in him, no doubt, was inclined to point out that the Count had obviously shaved a few hours before; but the machinery in him was so finely tuned, it was already putting down the scissors and reaching for the shaving brush.

Having whipped a sufficient lather, Boris dabbed it on those areas of the Count’s face where whiskers would have been had the Count been in need of a shave. He sharpened one of his razors on his strop, leaned over the chair, and with an unflinching hand shaved the Count’s right upper cheek in a single pass. Wiping the blade on the towel at his waist, he then leaned over the Count’s left upper cheek, and shaved it with equal alacrity.

At this rate, fretted the Count, he’ll be done in a minute and a half.

Using a bent knuckle, the barber now raised the Count’s chin. The Count could feel the metal of the razor make contact with his throat. And that’s when one of the new bellhops appeared in the door.

“Excuse me, sir.”

“Yes?” said the barber with his blade held fast at the Count’s jugular.

“I have a note for you.”

“On the bench.”

“But it is urgent,” said the young man with some anxiety.

“Urgent?”

“Yes, sir. From the manager.”

The barber looked back at the bellhop for the first time.

“The manager?”

“Yes, sir.”

After an extended exhalation, the barber removed the blade from the Count’s throat, accepted the missive, and—as the bellhop disappeared down the hall—slit the envelope open with his razor.

Unfolding the note, the barber stared at it for a full minute. In those sixty seconds, he must have read it ten times over because it was composed of only four words: Come see me immediately!

The barber exhaled again then looked at the wall.

“I can’t imagine,” he said to no one. Then having thought it over for another minute, he turned to the Count: “I must see to something.”

“By all means. Do what you must. I am in no hurry.”

To underscore his point, the Count leaned back his head and closed his eyes as if to nap; but when the barber’s footsteps had receded down the hall, the Count leapt from the chair like a cat.

When the Count was a young man, he prided himself on the fact that he was unmoved by the ticking of the clock. In the early years of the twentieth century, there were those of his acquaintance who brought a new sense of urgency to their slightest endeavor. They timed the consumption of their breakfast, the walk to their office, and the hanging of their hat on its hook with as much precision as if they were preparing for a military campaign. They answered the phone on the first ring, scanned the headlines, limited their conversations to whatever was most germane, and generally spent their days in pursuit of the second hand. God bless them.

For his part, the Count had opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed. Not only was he disinclined to race toward some appointed hour—disdaining even to wear a watch—he took the greatest satisfaction when assuring a friend that a worldly matter could wait in favor of a leisurely lunch or a stroll along the embankment. After all, did not wine improve with age? Was it not the passage of years that gave a piece of furniture its delightful patina? When all was said and done, the endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and the catching of trains), probably could have waited, while those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention.

Cups of tea and friendly chats! the modern man objects. If one is to make time for such idle pursuits, how could one ever attend to the necessities of adulthood?

Luckily, the answer to this conundrum was provided by the philosopher Zeno in the fifth century B.C. Achilles, a man of action and urgency, trained to measure his exertions to the tenth of a second, should be able to quickly dispense with a twenty-yard dash. But in order to advance a yard, the hero must first advance eighteen inches; and in order to advance eighteen inches, he must first advance nine; but to advance nine, he must first advance four and a half, and so on. Thus, on his way to completing the twenty-yard dash, Achilles must traverse an infinite number of lengths—which, by definition, would take an infinite amount of time. By extension (as the Count had liked to point out), the man who has an appointment at twelve has an infinite number of intervals between now and then in which to pursue the satisfactions of the spirit.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

But ever since Sofia returned home that night in late December with word of the Conservatory’s tour, the Count had had a very different perspective on the passage of time. Before they’d even finished celebrating the news, he’d calculated that less than six months remained before she was scheduled to depart. One hundred and seventy-eight days, to be exact; or 356 chimings of the twice-tolling clock. And in that brief span, there was so much to be done. . . .

Given the Count’s membership as a younger man to the ranks of the purposefully unrushed, one might have expected the ticking of this clock to buzz around his ears like a mosquito in the night; or prompt him, like Oblomov, to turn on his side and face the wall in a state of malaise. But what occurred was the opposite. In the days that followed, it brightened his step, sharpened his senses, and quickened his wits. For just like the rousing of Humphrey Bogart’s indignation, the clock’s ticking revealed the Count to be a Man of Intent.

In the last week of December, one of the Catherines the Count had retrieved from the Grand Duke’s desk was brought by Vasily to the basement of TsUM and cashed in for store credit. With the proceeds, the concierge purchased a small tan valise along with other necessities of travel, such as a towel, soap, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. These were wrapped in festive paper and presented to Sofia on Christmas Eve (at midnight).

Per Director Vavilov, Sofia’s performance of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto was to be the penultimate piece on the program, followed by a violin prodigy’s performance of a Dvorak concerto, both with full orchestra. The Count had no doubt that Rachmaninov’s Second was well within Sofia’s grasp; but even Horowitz had his Tarnowsky. So in early January, the Count hired Viktor Stepanovich to help her rehearse.

In late January, the Count commissioned Marina to fashion a new dress for the concert. After a design meeting that included Marina, Anna, and Sofia—and which, for some incomprehensible reason, excluded the Count—Vasily was dispatched back to TsUM for a bolt of blue taffeta.

Over the years, the Count had done an adequate job of teaching Sofia the rudiments of conversational French. Nonetheless, beginning in February, father and daughter set aside games of Zut in order to review the more practical applications of the French language while they awaited their appetizers.

“Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur, avez-vous l’heure, s’il vous plaît?”

“Oui, Mademoiselle, il est dix heures.”

“Merci. Et pourriez-vous me dire où se trouvent les Champs-Élysées?”

“Oui, continuez tout droit dans cette direction.”

“Merci beaucoup.”

“Je vous en prie.”

Early in March, for the first time in years, the Count visited the Metropol’s basement. Passing by the furnace and electrical rooms, he made his way to the little corner where the hotel stowed those items left behind by guests. Kneeling before the shelf of books, he scanned the spines, paying special attention to those little red volumes with gold lettering: the Baedekers. Naturally enough, the majority of travel guides in the basement were dedicated to Russia, but a few were for other countries, having presumably been discarded at the end of an extended tour. Thus, scattered among the abandoned novels, the Count discovered one Baedeker for Italy; one for Finland; one for England; and, finally, two for the city of Paris.

Then on the twenty-first of March, the Count penned the slanted one-sentence insistence under the hotel’s moniker, slipped it on the bell captain’s desk, went on his weekly visit to the barber, and waited for the note to arrive. . . .

Having poked his head into the hallway in order to watch Boris mount the stairs, the Count closed the barbershop door and turned his attention to Yaroslav’s renowned glass cabinet. At the front of the cabinet were two rows of large white bottles bearing the insignia of the Hammer and Sickle Shampoo Company. But behind these soldiers in the fight for universal cleanliness, all but forgotten, was a selection of the brightly colored bottles from the old days. Taking out several of the shampoo bottles, the Count surveyed the tonics, soaps, and oils—but couldn’t find what he was looking for.

It must be here, he thought.

The Count began moving the bottles about like chess pieces—to see what was hiding behind what. And there, tucked in the corner behind two vials of French cologne, covered in dust, was that little black bottle that Yaroslav Yaroslavl had referred to with a wink as the Fountain of Youth.

The Count put the bottle in his pocket, reloaded the cabinet, and closed its doors. Scurrying back into his chair, he smoothed his smock and leaned back his head; but even as he closed his eyes, he was struck by the image of Boris slitting open the envelope with his razor. Leaping again from the chair, the Count snatched one of the spares from the counter, slipped it into his pocket, and resumed his place—just as the barber came through the door grumbling about fools’ errands and wasted time.

Upstairs in his room, the Count put the little black bottle at the back of his drawer then sat at his desk with the Paris Baedeker. Consulting the table of contents, he turned to the fiftieth page, where the section on the 8th arrondissement began. Sure enough, before the descriptions of the Arc de Triomphe and the Grand Palais, of the Madeleine and Maxim’s, was a thin paper foldout with a detailed map of the neighborhood. Taking Boris’s razor from his pocket, the Count used the edge to cut the map cleanly from its guide; then with a red pen he carefully drew a zigzagging line from the Avenue George V to Rue Pierre Charron and down the Champs-Élysées.

When he was done with the map, the Count went to his study and retrieved his father’s copy of Montaigne’s Essays from the bookcase where it had resided in comfort ever since Sofia had liberated it from under the bureau. Taking the book back to the Grand Duke’s desk, the Count began turning through the pages, stopping here and there to read the passages his father had underlined. As he was lingering over a particular section in “Of the Education of Children,” the twice-tolling clock began to signal the hour of noon.

One hundred and seventy-three chimings to go, thought the Count.

Then issuing a sigh, he shook his head, crossed himself twice, and with Boris’s razor began removing the text from two hundred pages of the masterpiece.