A Gentleman in Moscow (26 page)

The chef wasted no time on salutations. Instead, without pausing his chopper, he tilted his head toward the little table, which had been moved from his office into the kitchen and which had been waiting patiently to be set.

But first things first.

Carefully, the Count removed the little cordial glass from his back pocket and placed it on the counter.

“Ah,” said the chef, wiping his hands on his apron.

“Is it enough?”

“It is only meant to be a hint. An aside. An innuendo. If it is the real thing, it should be plenty.”

Emile dipped his pinkie in the absinthe and gave it a lick.

“Perfect,” he said.

Selecting an appropriate tablecloth from the linen closet, the Count unfurled it with a snap and let it billow to the table. As he set the places, the chef began to whistle a tune and the Count smiled to realize it was the very same song that he had heard in the Shalyapin regarding the absence of bananas. As if on cue, the door to the back stair opened and in rushed Andrey with a pile of oranges about to tumble from his arms. Reaching Emile's side, he bowed at the waist and spilled them onto the counter.

With the instincts of convicts who discover the gates of their prison open, the individual oranges rolled in every direction to maximize their chances of escape. In a flash, Andrey had extended his arms in a grand circumference to fence them in. But one of the oranges dodged the maître d's reach and shot across the counter—headed straight for the absinthe! Dropping his chopper, Emile lunged and plucked the glass from the counter in the nick of time. The orange, which was gaining in confidence, dashed behind the fennel, jumped from the counter, thudded to the floor, and made a break for the exit. But at the last moment, that door that separated Emile's kitchen from the rest of the world swung inward, sending the orange spinning back across the floor in the opposite direction—while in the doorway stood the Bishop.

The three members of the Triumvirate froze.

Advancing two paces north by northwest, the Bishop took in the scene.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said in his friendliest tone. “What brings you all to the kitchen at this hour . . . ?”

Andrey, who'd had the presence of mind to step in front of the simmering pot, gestured with a hand toward the food on the counter.

“We are taking inventory.”

“Inventory . . . ?”

“Yes. Our quarterly inventory.”

“Of course,” the Bishop replied with his ecclesiastical smile. “And at whose request are you taking a quarterly inventory . . . ?”

As this exchange between the Bishop and the maître d' unfolded, the Count noticed that Emile, who had grown pale at the inward swinging of the door, was regaining his color second by second. It had begun with a slight pinkness of the cheeks when the Bishop had crossed the threshold. It turned to rose when the Bishop asked
What brings you all to the
kitchen . . . ?
But when he asked
At whose request . . . ?
the chef's cheeks, neck, and ears took on a purple of such moral indignation, it made one wonder if the presence of a question mark in his kitchen was itself a capital crime.

“At whose request?” the chef asked.

The Bishop turned his gaze from Andrey to Emile and was clearly struck by the chef's transformation. He seemed to waver.

“At whose request?” the chef repeated.

Without taking his eyes off the Bishop, Emile suddenly reached for his chopper.

“At whose request!”

When Emile took a step forward while raising his chopping arm high above his head, the Bishop grew as white as the haddock. Then the kitchen door was swinging on its hinge and the Bishop was nowhere to be seen.

Andrey and the Count turned their gaze from the door to Emile. Then in wide-eyed amazement, Andrey pointed a delicate finger at Emile's raised hand. For in the heat of outrage, the chef had grabbed not his chopper but a celery stalk, whose little green fronds now trembled in the air. And to a man, the Triumvirate burst into laughter.

At one in the morning, the conspirators took their seats. On the table before them were a single candle, a loaf of bread, a bottle of rosé, and three bowls of bouillabaisse.

After exchanging a glance, the three men dipped their spoons into the stew in unison, but for Emile, the gesture was a sleight of hand. For when Andrey and the Count raised their spoons to their mouths, Emile let his hover above his bowl
—
intent upon studying his friends' expressions at the very first taste.

Fully aware that he was being watched, the Count closed his eyes to attend more closely to his impressions.

How to describe it?

One first tastes the broth—that simmered distillation of fish bones, fennel, and tomatoes, with their hearty suggestions of Provence. One then savors the tender flakes of haddock and the briny resilience of the mussels, which have been purchased on the docks from the fisherman. One marvels at the boldness of the oranges arriving from Spain and the absinthe
poured in the taverns. And all of these various impressions are somehow collected, composed, and brightened by the saffron—that essence of summer sun which, having been harvested in the hills of Greece and packed by mule to Athens, has been sailed across the Mediterranean in a felucca. In other words, with the very first spoonful one finds oneself transported to the port of Marseille—where the streets teem with sailors, thieves, and madonnas, with sunlight and summer, with languages and life.

The Count opened his eyes.

“
Magnifique
,” he said.

Andrey, who had put down his spoon, brought his elegant hands together in a respectful show of silent applause.

Beaming, the chef bowed to his friends and then joined them in their long-awaited meal.

Over the next two hours, the three members of the Triumvirate each ate three bowls of the bouillabaisse, each drank a bottle of wine, and each spoke openly in turn.

And what did these old friends talk about? What did they
not
talk about! They talked of their childhoods in St. Petersburg, Minsk, and Lyon. Of their first and second loves. Of Andrey's four-year-old son and Emile's four-year-old lumbago. They spoke of the once and the was, of the wishful and the wonderful.

Rarely awake at this hour, Emile was in an unprecedented state of euphoria. As youthful stories were told, he laughed so heartily that his head rolled on his shoulders, and the corner of his napkin was raised to his eyes twice as often as it was raised to his lips.

And the
pièce de résistance
? At three in the morning, Andrey referred briefly, offhandedly, almost parenthetically to his days under the big top.

“Eh? What's that? Under what?”

“Did you say ‘the big top'?”

Yes. In point of fact: the circus.

Raised by a widowed father who was prone to drunken violence, at the age of sixteen Andrey had run away to join a traveling circus. It was with this troupe that he had come to Moscow in 1913 where, having fallen in love with a bookseller in the Arbat, he had bid the circus
adieu
. Two
months later, he was hired as a waiter at the Boyarsky, and he had been there ever since.

“What did you do in the circus?” asked the Count.

“An acrobat?” suggested Emile. “A clown?”

“A lion tamer?”

“I juggled.”

“No,” said Emile.

In lieu of a response, the maître d' rose from the table and gathered three of the unused oranges from the countertop. With the fruit in his hands, he stood perfectly erect. Or rather, he stood at a slight tilt induced by the wine, a sort of 12:02. Then after a brief pause, he set the spheres in motion.

In all honesty, the Count and Emile had been skeptical of their old friend's claim; but as soon as he began, they could only wonder that they had not guessed at it before. For Andrey's hands had been crafted by God to juggle. So deft was his touch that the oranges seemed to move of their own accord. Or better yet, they moved like planets governed by a force of gravity that simultaneously propelled them forward and kept them from flinging off into space; while Andrey, who was standing before these planets, seemed to be simply plucking them from their orbits and releasing them a moment later to pursue their natural course.

So gentle and rhythmic was the motion of Andrey's hands that one was at constant risk of falling under hypnosis. And, in fact, without Emile or the Count noticing, another orange had suddenly joined the solar system. And then with a courtly flourish, Andrey caught all four spheres and bowed at the waist.

Now it was the Count and Emile's turn to applaud.

“But surely, you didn't juggle oranges,” said Emile.

“No,” Andrey admitted, as he carefully returned the oranges to the counter. “I juggled knives.”

Before the Count and Emile could express their disbelief, Andrey had taken three blades from a drawer and set them in motion. These were no planets. They spun through the air like the parts of some infernal machine, an effect that was heightened by the flashes of light from whenever the candle's flame was reflected on the surface of the blades. And then, just as
suddenly as the knives had been set in motion, their hilts were fixed in Andrey's hands.

“Ah, but can you do four of
those
?” teased the Count.

Without a word, Andrey moved back toward the knife drawer; but before he could reach inside, Emile had risen to his feet. With the expression of a boy enthralled by a street magician, he shyly stepped from the crowd and held out his chopper—that blade which had not been touched by another human hand in almost fifteen years. With an appropriate sense of ceremony, Andrey bowed from the waist to accept it. And when he set the four knives in motion, Emile leaned back in his chair and with a tear in his eye watched as his trusted blade tumbled effortlessly through space, feeling that this moment, this hour, this universe could not be improved upon.

At half past three in the morning, the Count swayed up the stairs, veered to his room, lurched through his closet, emptied his pockets onto the bookcase, poured himself a brandy, and with a sigh of satisfaction dropped into his chair. While from her place on the wall, Helena took him in with a tender, knowing smile.

“Yes, yes,” he admitted. “It is a little late, and I am a little drunk. But in my defense, it has been an eventful day.”

As if to make his point, the Count suddenly rose from his chair and tugged at one of the folds of his jacket.

“Do you see this button? I'll have you know that I sewed it on myself.” Then dropping back in his chair, the Count picked up his brandy, took a sip, and reflected. “She was perfectly right, you know. Marina, I mean. Absolutely, positively, perfectly right.” The Count sighed again. Then he shared with his sister a notion.

Since the beginning of storytelling, he explained, Death has called on the unwitting. In one tale or another, it arrives quietly in town and takes a room at an inn, or lurks in an alleyway, or lingers in the marketplace, surreptitiously. Then just when the hero has a moment of respite from his daily affairs, Death pays him a visit.