A Gentleman in Moscow (40 page)

Alexander,

What a pleasure meeting you tonight. As I mentioned, I am headed home for a spell. In the meantime, I thought you could make good use of this. You might pay special attention to the contents in the uppermost sleeve, as I think you will find it very apropos of our chat.

With warm regards till next we meet,
Richard Vanderwhile

Throwing the clasps, the Count opened the lid of the case. It was a portable phonograph. Inside there was a small stack of records in brown paper sleeves. Per Richard's suggestion, the Count singled out the uppermost disc. On the label at the center, it was identified as a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall in New York.

The Count had seen Horowitz perform in Moscow in 1921, less than four years before the pianist traveled to Berlin for an official concert—with a wad of foreign currency tucked in his shoes. . . .

At the back of the case, the Count found a small compartment in which the electrical cord was folded away. Unraveling it, he plugged the player into the wall socket. He removed the record from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable, threw the switch, cued the needle, and sat back on Sofia's bed.

At first, he heard muted voices, a few coughs, and the last rustling of
an audience settling in; then silence; then heartfelt applause as the performer presumably took the stage.

The Count held his breath.

After the trumpets sounded their first martial notes, the strings swelled, and then his countryman began to play, evoking for the American audience the movement of a wolf through the birches, the wind across the steppe, the flicker of a candle in a ballroom, and the flash of a cannon at Borodino.

O
n the twenty-third of June at four in the afternoon, Andrey Duras was riding the bus back to his apartment in the Arbat, having taken advantage of his day off to visit Sofia at First Municipal Hospital.

The next day, he looked forward to reporting at the daily meeting of the Triumvirate that she was in good spirits. Housed in a special wing of the hospital, she had a private room full of sunlight, and constant attention from a battalion of nurses. Emile would be pleased to learn that his cookies were well received and that Sofia promised to send word the minute she had run out. While for his part, Andrey had brought a book of adventure stories that had always been a favorite of his son's.

At Smolenskaya Square, Andrey gave his seat to an older woman. He would be disembarking in a few blocks anyway—to get some cucumbers and potatoes at the peasant market in the square. Emile had given him half a pound of minced pork, and he was going to make kotlety for his wife.

Andrey and his wife lived in a narrow four-story apartment building in the middle of the block. Theirs was one of the smallest of the sixteen apartments, but they had it to themselves. At least, for now.

Having completed his errand at the market, Andrey climbed the stairs to the third floor. As he passed the other doors along the hallway, he could smell onions being sautéed in one apartment and hear voices on the radio in another. Shifting the bag of groceries to his left arm, he took out his key.

Letting himself inside, Andrey called out to his wife, though he knew she wouldn't be home. She would be waiting in line at the new milk store that had opened in a decommissioned church on the other side of the neighborhood. She said the milk there was fresher and the line was shorter, but Andrey knew this wasn't true. Like so many others, she went there
because the small chapel at the back of the church had a mosaic of
Christ and the Woman at the Well
that no one had bothered to dismantle; and the women who waited in line for their milk were willing to hold your place while you slipped away to pray.

Andrey carried his groceries into the little room overlooking the street, which served as both kitchen and sitting room. On the small counter he laid out the vegetables. After washing his hands, he washed the cucumbers and sliced them. He peeled the potatoes and put them in a pot of water. He mixed the meat from Emile with chopped onion, formed the kotlety, and covered them with a towel. He put the frying pan on the stove and poured in some oil, for later. Having cleared off the counter, he washed his hands again, set the table, and then went down the hallway with the intention of lying down. But without quite thinking about it, he passed their bedroom door and went into the next room.

Many years before, Andrey had visited Pushkin's apartment in St. Petersburg—the one where he'd lived in his final years. The rooms of the apartment had been preserved just as they'd been on the day the poet died. There was even an unfinished poem and pen sitting on the desk. At the time, standing behind the little rope and gazing at the poet's desk, Andrey had thought the whole venture rather preposterous—as if by keeping a few belongings in place, one might actually protect a moment from the relentless onslaught of time.

But when Ilya, their only child, was killed in the Battle of Berlin—just months before the end of the war—he and his wife had done the same thing: leaving every blanket, every book, every piece of clothing exactly where it had been on the day that they'd received the news.

Initially, Andrey had to admit, this had been a great comfort. When he was alone in the apartment, he would find himself visiting the room; and when he did so, he could see from the depression on the bed where his wife must have been sitting while he was at work. Now, though, he worried that this carefully preserved room had begun to sustain rather than alleviate their grief; and he knew the time had come for them to rid themselves of their son's belongings.

Though he knew this, he didn't raise the matter with his wife. For he also knew that soon enough, someone in the building would draw the attention of the housing authorities to their son's death; then they would
be moved to an even smaller apartment or required to take in a stranger, and life would reclaim the room as its own.

But even as he had this thought, Andrey walked over to the bed and smoothed out the blankets where his wife had been sitting; and only then, did he turn out the
light.

I
n the blink of an eye.”

That was how, on the twenty-first of June, Count Alexander Rostov summed up his daughter's journey from thirteen to seventeen, when Vasily remarked on how much she had grown.

“One moment she is scampering up and down the stairwells—a veritable gadabout, a gadfly, a ne'er-do-well—and the next, she is a young woman of intelligence and refinement.”

And this was largely true. For if the Count had been premature in characterizing Sofia as demure when she was thirteen, he had perfectly anticipated her persona on the cusp of adulthood. With fair skin and long black hair (but for the white stripe that fell from the spot of her old injury), Sofia could sit for hours listening to music in their study. She could stitch for hours with Marina in the stitching room, or chat for hours with Emile in the kitchen without shifting once in her chair.

When Sofia was just five, the Count had assumed, naively perhaps, that she would grow up to be a dark-haired version of her mother. But while Sofia shared Nina's clarity of perception and confidence of opinion, she was entirely different in demeanor. Where her mother was prone to express her impatience with the slightest of the world's imperfections, Sofia seemed to presume that if the earth spun awry upon occasion, it was generally a well-intentioned planet. And where Nina would not hesitate to cut someone off in midassertion in order to make a contrary point and then declare the matter decided once and for all, Sofia would listen so attentively and with such a sympathetic smile that her interlocutor, having been given free rein to express his views at considerable length, often found his voice petering out as he began to question his own premises. . . .

Demure. That was the only word for it. And the transition had occurred in the blink of an eye.

“When you reach our age, Vasily, it all goes by so quickly. Whole seasons seem to pass without leaving the slightest mark on our memory.”

“How true . . . ,” agreed the concierge (as he sorted through an allotment of tickets).

“But surely, there is a comfort to be taken from that,” continued the Count. “For even as the weeks begin racing by in a blur for us, they are making the greatest of impressions upon our children. When one turns seventeen and begins to experience that first period of real independence, one's senses are so alert, one's sentiments so finely attuned that every conversation, every look, every laugh may be writ indelibly upon one's memory. And the friends that one happens to make in those impressionable years? One will meet them forever after with a welling of affection.”

Having expressed this paradox, the Count happened to look across the lobby, where Grisha was lugging the luggage of one guest toward the front desk as Genya lugged the luggage of another toward the door.

“Perhaps it is a matter of celestial balance,” he reflected. “A sort of cosmic equilibrium. Perhaps the aggregate experience of Time is a constant and thus for our children to establish such vivid impressions of this particular June, we must relinquish our claims upon it.”

“So that they might remember, we must forget,” Vasily summed up.

“Exactly!” said the Count. “So that they might remember, we must forget. But should we take umbrage at the fact? Should we feel shortchanged by the notion that their experiences for the moment may be richer than ours? I think not. For it is hardly our purpose at this late stage to log a new portfolio of lasting memories. Rather, we should be dedicating ourselves to ensuring that
they
taste freely of experience. And we must do so without trepidation. Rather than tucking in blankets and buttoning up coats, we must have faith in them to tuck and button on their own. And if they fumble with their newfound liberty, we must remain composed, generous, judicious. We must encourage them to venture out from under our watchful gaze, and then sigh with pride when they pass at last through the revolving doors of life. . . .”

As if to illustrate, the Count gestured generously and judiciously toward the hotel's entrance, while giving an exemplary sigh. Then he tapped the concierge's desk.

“By the way. Do you happen to know where she is?”

Vasily looked up from his tickets.

“Miss Sofia?”

“Yes.”

“She is in the ballroom with Viktor, I believe.”

“Ah. She must be helping him polish the floors for an upcoming banquet.”

“No. Not Viktor Ivanovich. Viktor Stepanovich.”

“Viktor Stepanovich?”

“Yes. Viktor Stepanovich Skadovsky. The conductor of the orchestra at the Piazza.”

If in part, the Count had been trying to express to Vasily how in our golden years a passage of time can be so fleet and leave so little an impression upon our memory, that it is almost as if it never occurred—well then, here was a perfect example.

For the three minutes it took the Count to travel from a delightful conversation at the concierge's desk to the ballroom, where he had grabbed a scoundrel by the lapels, had also passed in the blink of an eye. Why, it had passed so quickly, that the Count did not remember knocking the luggage from Grisha's grip as he marched down the hall; nor did he remember throwing open the door and shouting
Aha!
; nor yanking the would-be Casanova up off the loveseat, where he had intertwined his fingers with Sofia's.

No, the Count did not remember any of it. But to ensure a celestial balance and the equilibrium of the cosmos, this moustachioed scoundrel in evening clothes was sure to remember every single second for the rest of his life.

“Your Excellency,” he implored, as he dangled in the air. “There has been a terrible misunderstanding!”

Looking up at the startled face above his fists, the Count confirmed that there had been no misunderstanding. It was definitely the very same fellow who waved his baton so blithely on the bandstand in the Piazza. And though he apparently knew how to produce an honorific in a timely fashion, he was clearly as villainous a viper as had ever slithered from the underbrush of Eden.

But whatever his level of villainy, the current situation did pose a quandary. For once you have hoisted a scoundrel by the lapels, what are you to do with him? At least when you have a fellow by the scruff of the neck, you can carry him out the door and toss him down the stairs. But when you have him by the lapels, he isn't so easy to dispense with. Before the Count could solve his conundrum, Sofia expressed a conundrum of her own.

“Papa! What are you doing?”

“Go to your room, Sofia. This gentleman and I have a few matters to discuss—before I give him the drubbing of a lifetime.”

“The drubbing of a lifetime? But Viktor Stepanovich is my instructor.”

Keeping one eye on the scoundrel, the Count glanced at his daughter with the other.

“Your what?”

“My instructor. He is teaching me piano.”

The so-called instructor nodded four times in quick succession.

Without releasing his hold on the cad's lapels, the Count leaned his head back so that he could study the
mise-en-scène
with a little more care. Upon closer inspection, the loveseat the two had been sitting on did, in fact, appear to be the bench of a piano. And in the spot where their hands had been intertwined there was an orderly row of ivory keys.

The Count tightened his grip.

“So that's your game, is it? Seducing young women with jitterbugs?”

The so-called instructor looked aghast.

“Absolutely not, Your Excellency. I have never seduced a soul with a jitterbug. We have been playing scales and sonatas. I myself trained at the Conservatory—where I received the Mussorgsky Medal. I only conduct in the restaurant in order to make ends meet.” Taking advantage of the Count's hesitation, he gestured toward the piano with his head. “Let us show you. Sofia, why don't you play the nocturne that we have been practicing?”

The nocturne . . . ?

“As you wish, Viktor Stepanovich,” Sofia replied politely, then turned to the keyboard in order to arrange her sheet music.

“Perhaps . . . ,” the instructor said to the Count with another nod toward the piano. “If I could just . . .”

“Oh,” said the Count. “Yes, of course.”

The Count set him back on the ground and gave his lapels a quick brushing.

Then the instructor joined his student on the bench.

“All right, Sofia.”

Straightening her posture, Sofia laid her fingers on the keys; then with the utmost delicacy, she began to play.

At the sound of the first measure, the Count took two steps back.

Were those eight notes familiar to him? Did he recognize them in the least? Why, he would have known them if he hadn't seen them in thirty years and they happened to enter his compartment on a train. He would have known them if he bumped into them on the streets of Florence at the height of the season. In a word, he would have known them anywhere.

It was Chopin.

Opus 9, number 2, in E-flat major.

As she completed the first iteration of the melody in a perfect pianissimo and transitioned to the second with its suggestion of rising emotional force, the Count took another two steps back and found himself sitting in a chair.

Had he felt pride in Sofia before? Of course he had. On a daily basis. He was proud of her success in school, of her beauty, of her composure, of the fondness with which she was regarded by all who worked in the hotel. And that is how he could be certain that what he was experiencing at that moment could not be referred to as pride. For there is something knowing in the state of pride.
Look
, it says,
didn't I tell you how special she is? How bright? How lovely? Well, now you can see it for yourself.
But in listening to Sofia play Chopin, the Count had left the realm of knowing and entered the realm of astonishment.

On one level he was astonished by the revelation that Sofia could play the piano at all; on another, that she tackled the primary and subordinate melodies with such skill. But what was truly astonishing was the sensitivity of her musical expression. One could spend a lifetime mastering the technical aspects of the piano and never achieve a state of musical expression—that alchemy by which the performer not only comprehends the sentiments of the composer, but somehow communicates them to her audience through the manner of her play.

Whatever personal sense of heartache Chopin had hoped to express through this little composition—whether it had been prompted by a loss of love, or simply the sweet anguish one feels when witnessing a mist on a meadow in the morning—it was right there, ready to be experienced to its fullest, in the ballroom of the Hotel Metropol one hundred years after the composer's death. But how, the question remained, could a seventeen-year-old girl achieve this feat of expression, if not by channeling a sense of loss and longing of her own?

As Sofia began the third iteration of the melody, Viktor Stepanovich looked over his shoulder with his eyebrows raised, as if to say:
Can you believe it?
Have you ever in all your years even imagined?
Then he quickly looked back to the piano and dutifully turned the page for Sofia almost in the manner of an apprentice turning the page for his master.

After the Count had led Viktor Stepanovich into the hall, where they could confer for a moment in private, he returned to the ballroom. Finding Sofia still at the piano, he took a seat at her side with his back to the keys.

They were both silent.

“Why didn't you tell me you were studying piano?” the Count asked after a moment.

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” she said. “For your birthday. I didn't mean to upset you. I'm so sorry if I did.”

“Sofia, if anyone should be apologizing, it should be me. You have done nothing wrong. On the contrary. That was wonderful—and unambiguously so.”

Sofia blushed and looked down at the keyboard.

“It is a lovely composition,” she said.