A Gentleman in Moscow (32 page)

“No, Mishka,” the Count admitted with some sense of foreboding. “I can't imagine. What did you do?”

Mishka ran a hand across his forehead.

“What is a man supposed to do when confronted with such madness? I struck the passage out. Then I walked from the room without a word.”

Upon hearing this denouement, the Count felt a great sense of relief. Were it not for the defeated appearance of his old friend, he might even have smiled. For one must admit, there was something genuinely comic about the circumstances. It could have been a tale from Gogol with Shalamov playing the part of a well-fed privy councillor impressed by his own rank. And the offending passage, hearing of its pending fate, could have climbed out a window and escaped down an alley never to be heard from again—that is, until it reappeared ten years later on the arm of a French countess, wearing a pince-nez and the
Légion d'honneur
.

But the Count maintained a solemn expression.

“You were perfectly right,” he consoled. “It was just a matter of a few sentences. Fifty words out of a few hundred thousand.”

The Count pointed out that on the balance, Mikhail had so much to be proud of. An authoritative collection of Chekhov's letters was long overdue. It promised to inspire a whole new generation of scholars and students, readers and writers. And Shalamov? With his long nose and
little eyes, the Count had always found him to be something of a ferret, and one mustn't let a ferret spoil one's sense of accomplishment, or one's cause for celebration.

“Listen, my friend,” the Count concluded with a smile, “you arrived on the overnight train and missed your lunch. That's half the problem right there. Go back to your hotel. Take a bath. Have something to eat and a glass of wine. Get a good night's sleep. Then tomorrow night, we shall meet at the Shalyapin as planned, raise a glass to brother Anton, and have a good laugh at the ferret's expense.”

In this manner, the Count attempted to comfort his old friend, buoy his spirits, and move him gently toward the door.

At 11:40, the Count finally descended to the ground floor and knocked at Marina's.

“I'm so sorry I'm late,” he said in a whisper when the seamstress answered the door. “Where is Sofia? I can carry her upstairs.”

“There's no need to whisper, Alexander. She's awake.”

“You kept her up!”

“I didn't keep anybody anything,” Marina retorted. “She insisted upon waiting for you.”

The two went inside, where Sofia was sitting on a chair with perfect posture. At the sight of the Count, she leapt to the floor, walked to his side, and took him by the hand.

Marina raised an eyebrow, as if to say:
You see . . .

The Count raised his own eyebrows, as if to reply:
Imagine that
 . . .

“Thank you for dinner, Aunt Marina,” Sofia said to the seamstress.

“Thank you for coming, Sofia.”

Then Sofia looked up at the Count.

“Can we go now?”

“Certainly, my dear.”

When they left Marina's, it was obvious enough to the Count that little Sofia was ready for bed. Without letting go of his hand, she led him straight to the lobby, onto the elevator, and pressed the button for the fifth floor with the command of
Presto
. When they reached the belfry, rather than asking to be carried, she practically dragged him up the last flight of stairs. And when he introduced her to the ingenious design of their new bunk
bed, she barely took notice. Instead, she hurried down the hall to brush her teeth and get into her nightgown.

But when she returned from the bathroom, instead of slipping under the covers, she climbed onto the desk chair.

“Aren't you ready for bed?” the Count asked in surprise.

“Wait,” she replied, putting up a hand to silence him.

Then she leaned a little to her right in order to look around his torso. Mystified, the Count stepped aside and turned—just in time to see the long-strided watchman of the minutes catch up with his bowlegged brother of the hours. As the two embraced, the springs loosened, the wheels spun, and the miniature hammer of the twice-tolling clock began to signal the arrival of midnight. As Sofia listened, she sat perfectly still. Then, with the twelfth and final chime, she leapt down from the chair and climbed into bed.

“Goodnight, Uncle Alexander,” she said; and before the Count could tuck her in, she had fallen fast asleep.

It had been a long day for the Count, one of the longest in memory. On the verge of exhaustion, he brushed his teeth and donned his pajamas almost as quickly as Sofia had. Then, returning to their bedroom, he put out the light and eased himself onto the mattress under Sofia's bedsprings. True, the Count had no bedsprings of his own, and the stacked tomato cans barely suspended Sofia's bed high enough for him to turn on his side; but it was a decided improvement upon the hardwood floor. So, having lived a day that his father would have been proud of, and hearing Sofia's delicate respirations, the Count closed his eyes and prepared to drift into a dreamless sleep. But, alas, sleep did not come so easily to our weary friend.

Like in a reel in which the dancers form two rows, so that one of their number can come skipping brightly down the aisle, a concern of the Count's would present itself for his consideration, bow with a flourish, and then take its place at the end of the line so that the next concern could come dancing to the fore.

What exactly were the Count's concerns?

He was worried about Mishka. Although he had been genuinely
relieved to discover that his friend's distress stemmed from the elision of four sentences on the three-hundredth page of the third volume, he couldn't help but feel with a certain sense of foreboding that the matter of the fifty words was not entirely behind them. . . .

He was worried about Nina and her journey east. The Count had not heard much about Sevvostlag, but he had heard enough about Siberia to comprehend the inhospitability of the road that Nina had chosen for herself. . . .

He was worried about little Sofia—and not simply over the cutting of her meat and the changing of her clothes. Whether dining in the Piazza or riding the elevator to the fifth floor, a little girl in the Metropol would not go unnoticed for long. Though Sofia was only staying with the Count for a matter of weeks, there was always the possibility that, before Nina's return, some bureaucrat would become aware of her residency and forbid it. . . .

And finally, in the interests of being utterly forthright, it should be added that the Count was worried about the following morning—when, having nibbled her biscuit and stolen his strawberries, Sofia would once again climb into his chair and look back at him with her dark blue eyes.

Perhaps it is inescapable that when our lives are in flux, despite the comfort of our beds, we are bound to keep ourselves awake grappling with anxieties—no matter how great or small, how real or imagined. But in point of fact, Count Rostov had good reason to be concerned about his old friend Mishka.

When he left the Metropol late on the night of the twenty-first of June, Mikhail Mindich followed the Count's advice to the letter. He went straight to his hotel, bathed, ate, and tucked himself in for a good night's sleep. And when he awoke, he looked upon the events of the previous day with more perspective.

In the light of morning, he saw that the Count was perfectly right—that it was only a matter of fifty words. And it was not as if Shalamov had asked him to cut the last lines of
The Cherry Orchard
or
The Seagull
. It was a passage that might have appeared in the correspondence of any traveler in Europe and that Chekhov himself had, in all probability, composed without a second thought.

But after dressing and eating a late breakfast, when Mishka headed to the Central House of Writers, he happened to pass that statue of Gorky on Arbatskaya Square, where the brooding statue of Gogol once had stood. Other than Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky had been Mishka's greatest contemporary hero.

“Here was a man,” said Mishka to himself (as he stood in the middle of the sidewalk ignoring the passersby), “who once wrote with such fresh and unsentimental directness that his memories of youth became
our
memories of youth.”

But having settled in Italy, he was lured back to Russia by Stalin in '34 and set up in Ryabushinsky's mansion—so that he could preside over the establishment of Socialist Realism as the sole artistic style of the entire Russian people. . . .

“And what has been the fallout of that?” Mishka demanded of the statue.

All but ruined, Bulgakov hadn't written a word in years. Akhmatova had put down her pen. Mandelstam, having already served his sentence, had apparently been arrested again. And Mayakovsky? Oh, Mayakovsky . . .

Mishka pulled at the hairs of his beard.

Back in '22, how boldly he had predicted to Sasha that these four would come together to forge a new poetry for Russia. Improbably, perhaps. But in the end, that is exactly what they had done. They had created the poetry of silence.

“Yes, silence can be an opinion,” said Mishka. “Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn't be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.”

With that, Mishka turned his back on Maxim Gorky and the Central House of Writers, and he went instead to the offices of
Goslitizdat
. There, he mounted the stairs, brushed past the receptionist, and opened door after door until he found the ferret in a conference room, presiding over an editorial meeting. In the center of the table were platters of cheese and figs and cured herring, the very sight of which, for some unaccountable reason, filled Mishka with fury. Turning from Shalamov in order to see who had barged through the door were the junior editors and assistant editors, all young and earnest—a fact that only infuriated Mishka more.

“Very good!” he shouted. “I see you have your knives out. What will you be cutting in half today?
The
Brothers Karamozov
?”

“Mikhail Fyodorovich,” said Shalamov in shock.

“What is
this
!” Mishka proclaimed, pointing to a young woman who happened to have a slice of bread topped with herring in her hand. “Is that bread from Berlin? Be careful, comrade. If you take a single bite, Shalamov will shoot you from a cannon.”

Mishka could see that the young girl thought he was mad; but she put the piece of bread back on the table nonetheless.

“Aha!” Mishka exclaimed in vindication.

Shalamov rose from his chair, both unnerved and concerned.

“Mikhail,” he said. “You are clearly upset. I would be happy to speak with you later in my office about whatever is on your mind. But as you can see, we are in the midst of a meeting. And we still have hours of business to attend to. . . .”

“Hours of business. Of that I have no doubt.”