A Gentleman in Moscow (8 page)

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

“Marvelous,” said the Count.

O
h, come along.”

“I'd rather not.”

“Don't be such a fuddy-duddy.”

“I am not a fuddy-duddy.”

“Can you be so sure?”

“A man can never be entirely sure that he is not a fuddy-duddy. That is axiomatic to the term.”

“Exactly.”

In this manner, Nina coerced the Count to join her on one of her favorite excursions: spying from the balcony of the ballroom. The Count was reluctant to accompany Nina on this particular journey for two reasons. First, the ballroom's balcony was narrow and dusty, and to stay out of sight one was forced to remain hunched behind the balustrade—a decidedly uncomfortable position for a grown man over six feet tall. (The last time the Count had accompanied Nina to the balcony, he had torn the seam of his pants and it took three days for him to lose the crick in his neck.) But second, this afternoon's gathering was almost certain to be another Assembly.

Over the course of the summer, the Assemblies had been occurring at the hotel with increasing frequency. At various times of day, small groups of men would come barreling through the lobby, already gesticulating, interrupting, and eager to make their points. In the ballroom, they would join their brethren milling shoulder to shoulder, every other one of them puffing on a cigarette.

As best as the Count could determine, the Bolsheviks assembled whenever possible in whichever form for whatever reason. In a single week, there might be committees, caucuses, colloquiums, congresses, and conventions variously coming together to establish codes, set courses of action, levy
complaints, and generally clamor about the world's oldest problems in its newest nomenclature.

If the Count was reluctant to observe these gatherings, it was not because he found the ideological leanings of the attendees distasteful. He would no sooner have crouched behind a balustrade to watch Cicero debating Catiline, or Hamlet debating himself. No, it was not a matter of ideology. Simply put, the Count found political discourse of any persuasion to be tedious.

But then, wasn't that exactly what a fuddy-duddy would argue . . . ?

Needless to say, the Count followed Nina up the stairs to the second floor. Having skirted the entrance to the Boyarsky and ensured the coast was clear, they used Nina's key to open the unmarked door to the balcony.

Down below, a hundred men were already in their chairs and another hundred were conferring in the aisles as three impressive fellows took their seats behind a long wooden table on the dais. Which is to say, the Assembly had nearly Assembled.

As this was the second of August and there had already been two Assemblies earlier that day, the temperature in the ballroom was 91˚. Nina skirted out behind the balustrade on her hands and knees. When the Count bent over to do the same, the seam in the back of his pants gave way again.

“
Merde
,” he muttered.

“Shh,” said Nina.

The first time the Count had joined Nina on the balcony, he couldn't help but feel some astonishment at how profoundly the life of the ballroom had changed. Not ten years before, all of Moscow society would have been gathered in their finery under the grand chandeliers to dance the mazurka and toast the Tsar. But after witnessing a few of the Assemblies, the Count had come to an even more astonishing conclusion: that despite the Revolution, the room had barely changed at all.

At that very moment, for example, two young men were coming through the doors looking game for the fray; but before exchanging a word with a soul, they crossed the room in order to pay their respects to an old man seated by the wall. Presumably, this elder had taken part in the 1905 revolution, or penned a pamphlet in 1880, or dined with Karl
Marx back in 1852. Whatever his claim to eminence, the old revolutionary acknowledged the deference of the two young Bolsheviks with a self-assured nod of the head—all the while sitting in the very chair from which the Grand Duchess Anapova had received the greetings of dutiful young princes at her annual Easter Ball.

Or consider the charming-looking chap who, in the manner of Prince Tetrakov, was now touring the room, shaking hands and patting backs. Having systematically made an impression in every corner—with a weighty remark here and a witty remark there—he now excused himself “for just a moment.” But once through the door, he will not reappear. For having ensured that everyone in the ballroom has noted his attendance, he will now head off to an altogether different sort of Assembly—one that is to take place in a cozy little room in the Arbat.

Later, no doubt, some dashing young Turk who is rumored to have Lenin's ear will make a point of arriving when the business of the evening is nearly done—just as Captain Radyanko had when he had the ear of the Tsar—thus exhibiting his indifference to the smaller conventions of etiquette while reinforcing his reputation as a man with so much to attend to and so little time to attend to it.

Of course, there is now more canvas than cashmere in the room, more gray than gold. But is the patch on the elbow really that much different from the epaulette on the shoulder? Aren't those workaday caps donned, like the bicorne and shako before them, in order to strike a particular note? Or take that bureaucrat on the dais with his gavel. Surely, he can afford a tailored jacket and a creased pair of pants. If he is wearing this ragged fare, it is in order to assure all assembled that he too is a hardened member of the working class!

As if hearing the Count's thoughts, this Secretary suddenly rapped his gavel on the tabletop—calling to order the Second Meeting of the First Congress of the Moscow Branch of the All-Russian Union of Railway Workers. The doors were closed, seats were taken, Nina held her breath, and the Assembly was underway.

In the first fifteen minutes, six different administrative matters were raised and dispensed with in quick succession—leading one to imagine that this particular Assembly might actually be concluded before one's back gave out. But next on the docket was a subject that proved more
contentious. It was a proposal to amend the Union's charter—or more precisely, the seventh sentence of the second paragraph, which the Secretary now read in full.

Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence—one that was on intimate terms with the comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard. For its apparent purpose was to catalog without fear or hesitation every single virtue of the Union including but not limited to: its unwavering shoulders, its undaunted steps, the clanging of its hammers in summer, the shoveling of its coal in winter, and the hopeful sound of its whistles in the night. But in the concluding phrases of this impressive sentence, at the very culmination as it were, was the observation that through their tireless efforts, the Railway Workers of Russia “facilitate communication and trade across the provinces
.
”

After all the buildup, it was a bit of an anticlimax, conceded the Count.

But the objection being raised was not due to the phrase's overall lack of verve; rather it was due to the word
facilitate
. Specifically, the verb had been accused of being so tepid and prim that it failed to do justice to the labors of the men in the room.

“We're not helping a lady put on her jacket!” someone shouted from the rear.

“Or painting her nails!”

“Hear, hear!”

Well, fair enough.

But what verb would better express the work of the Union? What verb would do justice to the sweaty devotion of the engineers, the unflagging vigilance of the brakemen, and the rippling muscles of those who laid the tracks?

A flurry of proposals came from the floor:

To spur.

To propel.

To empower.

The merits and limitations of each of these alternatives were hotly debated. There were three-pointed arguments counted out on fingertips, rhetorical questions, emotional summations, and back-row catcalls punctuated by the banging of the gavel—as the ambient temperature of the balcony rose to 96˚.

Then, just as the Count began to sense some risk of riot, a suggestion came from a shy-looking lad in the tenth row that perhaps
to
facilitate
could be replaced with
to enable and ensure
. This pairing, the lad explained (while his cheeks grew red as a raspberry), might encompass not only the laying of rails and the manning of engines, but the ongoing maintenance of the system.

“Yes, that's it.”

“Laying, manning, and maintenance.”

“To enable and ensure.”

With hearty applause from every corner, the lad's proposal seemed to be barreling toward adoption as quickly and dependably as one of the Union's locomotives barrels across the steppe. But just as it was nearing its terminus, a rather scrawny fellow in the second row stood. Such a wisp of a man was he that one wondered how he had secured a position in the Union in the first place. Once he had the attention of the room, this back-office clerk or accountant, this All-Russian pusher of pencils, asserted in a voice as tepid and prim as the word
facilitate
: “Poetic concision demands the avoidance of a pair of words when a single word will suffice.”

“What's that?”

“What did he say?”

Several stood up with the intention of grabbing him by the collar and dragging him from the room. But before they could get their hands on him, a burly fellow in the fifth row spoke without rising to his feet.

“With all due respect to
poetic concision
, the male of the species was endowed with a pair when a single might have sufficed.”

Thunderous applause!

The resolution to replace
facilitate
with
enable
and
ensure
was adopted by a unanimous show of hands and a universal stomping of feet. While in the balcony, a private acknowledgment was made that perhaps political discourse wasn't always so dull, after all.

At the conclusion of the Assembly, when the Count and Nina had crawled off the balcony and back into the hallway, the Count felt quite pleased with himself. He felt pleased with his little parallels between the respect-payers, back-patters, and latecomers of the present and those of the past. He also had a whole host of entertaining alternatives to the phrase
enable
and ensure
ranging from
bustle and trundle
to
carom and careen
. And when Nina inevitably asked what he thought of the day's debate, he was going to reply that it was positively Shakespearean. Shakespearean, that is, in the manner of Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing
. Much ado about nothing, indeed. Or so the Count intended to quip.

But by a stroke of luck, he didn't get the chance. For when Nina asked what he thought of the Assembly, unable to wait even a moment for his impressions, she barreled ahead with her own.

“Wasn't that fascinating? Wasn't it fantastic? Have you ever been on a train?”

“The train is my preferred means of travel,” said the Count, somewhat startled.

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Mine as well. And when you have traveled by train, have you watched the landscape rolling past the windows, and listened to the conversations of your fellow passengers, and drifted off to the clacking of the wheels?”

“I have done all of those things.”

“Exactly. But have you ever, for even one moment, considered how the coal finds its way into the locomotive's engine? Have you considered in the middle of a forest or on a rocky slope how the tracks came to be there in the first place?”

The Count paused. Considered. Imagined. Admitted.

“Never.”

She gave him a knowing look.

“Isn't it astounding.”

And when seen in that light, who could disagree?