A Gentleman in Moscow (44 page)

“How can anyone live his life in expectation of the Latter?”

Despite having announced that he would have no more time for appointments that evening, when the Count asked this question, he was in Anna Urbanova's bed. . . .

“I know there is something quixotic in dreaming of the Former,” he continued, “but when all is said and done, if the Former is even a remote possibility, then how can one submit to the likelihood of the Latter? To do so would be contrary to the human spirit. So fundamental is our desire to catch a glimpse of another way of life, or to share a glimpse of our way of life with another, that even when the forces of the Latter have bolted the city's doors, the forces of the Former will find a means to slip through the cracks.”

The Count reached over, borrowed Anna's cigarette, and took a puff. Having thought for a moment, he waved the cigarette at the ceiling.

“In recent years, I have waited on Americans who have traveled all the way to Moscow to attend one performance at the Bolshoi. Meanwhile, our haphazard little trio in the Shalyapin will take a stab at any little bit of American music they've heard on the radio. These are unquestionably the forces of the Former on display.”

The Count took another puff.

“When Emile is in his kitchen, does he cook the Latter? Of course not. He simmers, sears, and serves the Former. A veal from Vienna, a pigeon from Paris, or a seafood stew from the south of France. Or consider the case of Viktor Stepanovich—”

“You're not going to start in on the moths of Manchester again?”

“No,” said the Count peevishly. “I am making a different point entirely. When Viktor and Sofia sit down at the piano, do they play Mussorgsky,
Mussorgsky, and Mussorgsky? No. They play Bach and Beethoven, Rossini and Puccini, while at Carnegie Hall the audience responds to Horowitz's performance of Tchaikovsky with thunderous applause.”

The Count turned on his side to study the actress.

“You're keeping unusually quiet,” he said, returning her cigarette. “Perhaps you don't agree?”

Anna took a drag and slowly exhaled.

“It's not that I disagree with you, Sasha. But I'm not so sure that one can simply dance away one's life to the tune of the Former, as you call it. Certain realities must be faced wherever you live, and in Russia that may mean a bit of bending to the Latter. Take your beloved bouillabaisse, or that ovation in Carnegie Hall. It is no coincidence that the cities from which your examples spring are port cities: Marseille and New York. I daresay, you could find similar examples in Shanghai and Rotterdam. But Moscow is not a port, my love. At the center of all that is Russia—of its culture, its psychology, and perhaps, its destiny—stands the Kremlin, a walled fortress a thousand years old and four hundred miles from sea. Physically speaking, its walls are no longer high enough to fend off attack; and yet, they still cast a shadow across the entire country.”

The Count rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

“Sasha, I know you don't want to accept the notion that Russia may be inherently inward looking, but do you think in America they are even having this conversation? Wondering if the gates of New York are about to be opened or closed? Wondering if the Former is more likely than the Latter? By all appearances, America was founded on the Former. They don't even know what the Latter is.”

“You sound as if you dreamed of living in America.”

“Everyone dreams of living in America.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous? Half of the inhabitants of Europe would move there tomorrow just for the conveniences.”

“Conveniences! What conveniences?”

Turning on her side, Anna tamped out her cigarette, opened the drawer in the bedside table, and produced a large American magazine, which, the Count noted, was rather presumptuously entitled
LIFE
. Flipping through the pages, Anna began pointing to various brightly colored photographs.
Each one seemed to show the same woman in a different dress smiling before some newfangled contraption.

“Dishwashing machines. Clothes-washing machines. Vacuum cleaners. Toasters. Televisions. And look here, an automatic garage door.”

“What is an automatic garage door?”

“It is a garage door that opens and closes itself on your behalf. What do you think of that?”

“I think if I were a garage door, I should rather miss the old days.”

Anna lit another cigarette and handed it to the Count. He took a drag and watched the smoke spiral toward the ceiling where the Muses looked down from the clouds.

“I'll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment's notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

Anna Urbanova took the cigarette from the Count's fingers, dropped it in a water glass, and kissed him on the nose.

L
ike the wheeling of the stars,” muttered the Count as he paced.

That is how time passes when one is left waiting unaccountably. The hours become interminable. The minutes relentless. And the seconds? Why, not only does every last one of them demand its moment on the stage, it insists upon making a soliloquy full of weighty pauses and artful hesitations and then leaps into an encore at the slightest hint of applause.

But hadn't the Count once waxed poetic over how slowly the stars advanced? Hadn't he rhapsodized over how the constellations seemed to halt in their course when on a warm summer's night one lay on one's back and listened for footsteps in the grass—as if nature itself were conspiring to lengthen the last few hours before daybreak, so that they could be savored to the utmost?

Well, yes. Certainly that was the case when one was twenty-two and waiting for a young lady in a meadow—having climbed the ivy and rapped on the glass. But to keep a man waiting when he is sixty-three? When his hair has thinned, his joints have stiffened, and his every breath might be his last? There is such a thing as courtesy, after all.

It must be nearly one in the morning, calculated the Count. The performance was scheduled to end by eleven. The reception by twelve. They should have been here half an hour ago.

“Are there no taxis left in Moscow? No trolley cars?” he wondered aloud.

Or had they stopped somewhere on the way home . . . ? Was it possible that in passing a café they could not resist the impulse to slip inside and share a pastry while he waited and waited and waited? Could they have been so heartless? (If so, they dare not attempt to hide the fact, for he could tell if a pastry had been eaten from a distance of fifty feet!)

The Count paused in his pacing to peek behind the Ambassador, where he had carefully hidden the Dom Pérignon.

Preparing for a
potential
celebration is a tricky business. If Fortune smiles, then one must be ready to hit the ceiling with the cork. But if Fortune shrugs, then one must be prepared to act as if this were just another night, one of no particular consequence—and then later sink the unopened bottle to the bottom of the sea.

The Count stuck his hand into the bucket. The ice was nearly half melted and the temperature of the water a perfect 50˚. If they did not return soon, the temperature would become so tepid that the bottle
belonged
at the bottom of the sea.

Well, it would serve them right.

But as the Count withdrew his hand and stood to his full height, he heard an extraordinary sound emanating from the next room. It was the chime of the twice-tolling clock. Reliable Breguet announcing the stroke of midnight.

Impossible! The Count had been waiting for at least two hours. He had paced over twenty miles. It had to be half past one. Not a minute earlier.

“Perhaps reliable Breguet was no longer quite so reliable,” muttered the Count. After all, the clock was over fifty years old, and even the finest timepieces must be subject to the ravages of Time. Cogs will eventually lose their coginess just as springs will lose their springiness. But as the Count was having this thought, through the little window in the eaves he heard a clock tower in the distance tolling once, then twice, then thrice. . . .

“Yes, yes,” he said, collapsing into his chair. “You've made your point.”

Apparently, this was destined to be a day of exasperations.

Earlier that afternoon, the Boyarsky's staff had been assembled by the assistant manager so that he could introduce new procedures for the taking, placing, and billing of orders.

Henceforth, he explained, when a waiter took an order, he would write it on a pad designed for this purpose. Leaving the table, he would bring the order to the bookkeeper, who, having made an entry in his ledger, would issue a cooking slip for the kitchen. In the kitchen, a corresponding entry would be made in the cooking log, at which point the
cooking could commence. When the food was ready for consumption, a confirmation slip would be issued by the kitchen to the bookkeeper, who in turn would provide a stamped receipt to the waiter authorizing the retrieval of the food. Thus, a few minutes later, the waiter would be able to make the appropriate notation on his notepad confirming that that dish which had been ordered, logged, cooked, and retrieved was finally on the table. . . .

Now, in all of Russia, there was no greater admirer of the written word than Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. In his time, he had seen a couplet of Pushkin's sway a hesitant heart. He had watched as a single passage from Dostoevsky roused one man to action and another to indifference—in the very same hour. He certainly viewed it as providential that when Socrates held forth in the agora and Jesus on the Mount, someone in the audience had the presence of mind to set their words down for posterity. So let us agree that the Count's concerns with this new regimen were not grounded in some distaste for pencils and paper.

Rather, it was a matter of context. For if one has chosen to dine at the Piazza, one should expect to have one's waiter leaning over the table and scratching away on his little pad. But ever since the Count had become headwaiter of the Boyarsky, its customers could expect their server to look them in the eye, answer their questions, offer recommendations, and flawlessly record their preferences—without ever taking his hands from behind his back.

Sure enough, when the new regimen was put into practice that evening, the Boyarsky's customers were shocked to find a clerk sitting at a little desk behind the maître d's podium. They were bemused to watch pieces of paper flitting about the room as if it were the floor of a stock exchange. But they were beside themselves to find their cutlets of veal and asparagus spears arriving at their table as cold as aspic.

Naturally, this would not do.

As luck would have it, in the middle of the second seating the Count noticed the Bishop stopping momentarily at the Boyarsky's door. So, having been raised on the principle that civilized men should share their concerns and proceed in the spirit of collegial common sense, the Count crossed the dining room and followed the Bishop into the hall.

“Manager Leplevsky!”

“Headwaiter Rostov,” said the Bishop, showing a hint of surprise at being hailed by the Count. “What can I do for you . . . ?”

“It's really such a small matter that I hardly wish to trouble you with it.”

“If the matter concerns the hotel, then it concerns me.”

“Just so,” agreed the Count. “Now, I assure you, Manager Leplevsky, that in all of Russia there is no greater admirer of the written word . . .” And having thus broached the subject, the Count went on to applaud the couplets of Pushkin, the paragraphs of Dostoevsky, and the transcriptions of Socrates and Jesus. Then he explained the threat that pencils and pads posed to the Boyarsky's tradition of romantic elegance.

“Can you imagine,” concluded the Count with a glint in his eye, “if when you sought your wife's hand, you had to issue your proposal with the stamp of a presiding agency, and were then required to take down her response on a little pad of paper in triplicate—so that you could give one copy to her, one to her father, and one to the family priest?”

But even as the Count was delivering this quip, he was reminded by the expression on the Bishop's face that one should generally avoid quips in which a man's marriage played a part. . . .

“I don't see that my wife has anything to do with this,” said the Bishop.

“No,” agreed the Count. “That was poorly put. What I am trying to say is that Andrey, Emile, and I—”

“So you are bringing this grievance on behalf of Maître d' Duras and Chef Zhukovsky?”

“Well, no. I have hailed you of my own accord. And it is not a grievance per se. But the three of us are dedicated to ensuring the satisfaction of the Boyarsky's customers.”

The Bishop smiled.

“Of course. And I am sure that all three of you have your own special concerns given your specific duties. But as
manager
of the Metropol, I am the one who must ensure that
every
aspect of the hotel meets a standard of perfection; and
that
requires a vigilant attention to the elimination of all discrepancies.”

The Count was confused.

“Discrepancies? What sort of discrepancies?”

“All kinds of discrepancies. One day, there may be a discrepancy between how many onions arrived in the kitchen and how many were served in the stew. On another, there may be a discrepancy between how many glasses of wine were ordered and how many poured.”

The Count grew cold.

“You are speaking of thievery.”

“Am I?”

The two men stared at each other for a moment, then the Bishop smiled narrowly.

“Given your shared dedication, please feel free to relate our conversation to Chef Zhukovsky and Maître d' Duras at your earliest convenience.”

The Count gritted his teeth.

“Rest assured, I shall do so word for word tomorrow at our daily meeting.”

The Bishop studied the Count.

“You have a daily meeting . . . ?”

Suffice it to say that at the Boyarsky's second seating, the customers were shocked, bemused, and beside themselves once again as slips of paper flew about the dining room like pheasants at the crack of a rifle. And after enduring all of that, here was the Count sitting alone in his study counting the minutes.

After drumming his fingers on the armrest of his chair, the Count rose and recommenced his pacing while humming Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 1 in C major.

“Dum de dum de dum,” he hummed.

It was a delightful composition, you had to admit, and one quite well suited to his daughter's personality. The first movement had the tempo of Sofia coming home from school at the age of ten with fifteen things to relate. Without taking the time to explain who was who or what was what, she would zip along, punctuating her report with
and then, and then, and then, and then
. In the second movement, the sonata transitioned to an andante tempo more in keeping with Sofia at seventeen, when she would welcome thunderstorms on Saturday afternoons so that she could sit in their study with a book in her lap or a recording on the phonograph. In
the third movement, with its fleet pace and pointillist style, you could almost hear her at the age of thirteen, running down the hotel's stairs, freezing on a landing momentarily to let someone pass, and then bolting brightly ahead.

Yes, it was a delightful composition. There was no debating that. But was it
too
delightful? Would it be viewed by the judges as insufficiently weighty for the times? When Sofia had selected the composition, the Count had attempted to signal his concerns diplomatically, by referring to the piece as “pleasant” and “quite diverting”; and then he had kept his peace. For it is the role of the parent to express his concerns and then take three steps back. Not one, mind you, not two, but three. Or maybe four. (But by no means five.) Yes, a parent should share his hesitations and then take three or four steps back, so that the child can make a decision by herself—even when that decision may lead to disappointment.

But wait!

What was that?

As the Count turned, the closet door swung open and Anna charged into the study, dragging Sofia behind her.

“She won!”

For the first time in twenty years, the Count let out a shout: “Ha-ha!”

He embraced Anna for delivering the news.

Then he embraced Sofia for winning.

Then he embraced Anna again.

“We're sorry we're so late,” said Anna breathlessly. “But they wouldn't let her leave the reception.”

“Don't think of it for a minute! I hadn't even noticed the time. But sit, sit, sit, and tell me everything.”

Offering the ladies the high-back chairs, the Count perched himself on the edge of the Ambassador and trained his gaze on Sofia, expectantly. Smiling shyly, Sofia deferred to Anna.