A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

  “That’s quite all right,” said the Count, picking up a two-foot plank, setting it on end, and balancing himself on its edge.

  “Can I pour you a cup?”

  “Thank you.”

  As the coffee was being poured, the Count wondered whether this was the beginning or end of the old man’s day. Either way, he figured a cup of coffee would hit the spot. For what is more versatile? As at home in tin as it is in Limoges, coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleagured in the middle of the night.

  “It’s perfect,” said the Count.

  The old man leaned forward.

  “The secret is in the grinding.” He pointed to a little wooden apparatus with an iron crank. “Not a minute before you brew.”

  The Count raised his eyebrows with the appreciation of the uninitiated.

  Yes, in the open air on a summer night the old man’s coffee was perfect. In fact, the only thing that spoiled the moment was a humming in the air—the sort that might be emitted from a faulty fuse or a radio receiver.

  “Is that the tower?” the Count asked.

  “Is what the tower?”

  “The humming.”

  The old man looked up in the air for a moment then cackled.

  “That’ll be the boys at work.”

  “The boys?”

  The old man pointed with a thumb to the crates that compromised his view of the Bolshoi. In the predawn light, the Count could just make out a whirl of activity above them.

  “Are those . . . bees?”

  “Indeed they are.”

  “What are they doing here?”

  “Making honey.”

  “Honey!”

  The old man cackled again.

  “Making honey is what bees does. Here.”

  Leaning forward, the old man held out a roof tile on which there were two slices of black bread slathered with honey. The Count accepted one and took a bite.

  The first thing that struck him was actually the black bread. For when was the last time he had even eaten it? If asked outright, he would have been embarrassed to admit. Tasting of dark rye and darker molasses, it was a perfect complement to a cup of coffee. And the honey? What an extraordinary contrast it provided. If the bread was somehow earthen, brown, and brooding, the honey was sunlit, golden, and gay. But there was another dimension to it. . . . An elusive, yet familiar element . . . A grace note hidden beneath, or behind, or within the sensation of sweetness.

  “What is that flavor . . . ?” the Count asked almost to himself.

  “The lilacs,” the old man replied. Without turning, he pointed with his thumb back in the direction of the Alexander Gardens.

  Of course, thought the Count. That was it precisely. How could he have missed it? Why, there was a time when he knew the lilacs of the Alexander Gardens better than any man in Moscow. When the trees were in season, he could spend whole afternoons in happy repose under their white and purple blossoms.

  “How extraordinary,” the Count said with an appreciative shake of the head.

  “It is and isn’t,” said the old man. “When the lilacs are in bloom, the bees’ll buzz to the Alexander Gardens and the honey’ll taste like the lilacs. But in a week or so, they’ll be buzzing to the Garden Ring, and then you’ll be tasting the cherry trees.”

  “The Garden Ring! How far will they go?”

  “Some say a bee’ll cross the ocean for a flower,” answered the old man with a smile. “Though I’ve never known one to do so.”

  The Count shook his head, took another bite, and accepted a second cup of coffee. “As a boy, I spent a good deal of time in Nizhny Novgorod,” he recalled for the second time that day.

  “Where the apple blossoms fall like snow,” the old man said with a smile. “I was raised there myself. My father was the caretaker on the Chernik estate.”

  “I know it well!” exclaimed the Count. “What a beautiful part of the world . . .”

  So as the summer sun began to rise, the fire began to die, and the bees began to circle overhead, the two men spoke of days from their childhoods when the wagon wheels rattled in the road, and the dragonflies skimmed the grass, and the apple trees blossomed for as far as the eye could see.

  Addendum

  At the very moment that the Count heard the door to suite 208 clicking shut, Anna Urbanova was, in fact, falling asleep; but she did not sleep soundly.

  When the actress first dismissed the Count (having rolled onto her side with a languid sigh), she watched with cool pleasure as he gathered his clothes and drew the curtains. She even took some satisfaction when he paused to pick up her blouse and hang it in the closet.

  But at some point during the night, this image of the Count picking up her blouse began to trouble her sleep. On the train back to St. Petersburg, she found herself muttering about it. And by the time she returned home, it positively infuriated her. In the week that followed, if she had the slightest break in her demanding schedule, the image rushed forth, and her famous alabaster cheeks grew red with rage.

  “Who does he think he is, this Count Rostov? Pulling out chairs and whistling at dogs? Putting on airs and looking down noses, is more like it. But by what right? Who gave him permission to pick up a blouse and hang it on its hanger? If I drop my blouse on the floor, what of it? It’s my clothing and I can treat it as I please!”

  Or so she would find herself reasoning to no one in particular.

  One night, returning from a party, the very thought of the Count’s precious little gesture was so infuriating that when she undressed she not only threw her red silk gown on the floor, she instructed her staff that it was not to be touched. Each night that followed, she dumped another outfit on the floor. Dresses and blouses of velvet and silk from London and Paris, the more expensive the better. Dumped here on the bathroom floor and there by the dustbin. In a word, wherever it suited her.

  After two weeks, her boudoir began to look like an Arabian tent with fabrics of every color underfoot.

  Olga, the sixty-year-old Georgian who had met the Count at the door of suite 208 and who had faithfully served as the actress’s dresser since 1920, initially eyed her mistress’s behavior with seasoned indifference. But one night, when Anna had dropped a blue backless dress on top of a white silk gown, Olga observed matter-of-factly:

  “My dear, you are acting like a child. If you do not pick up your clothes, I shall have no choice but to give you a spanking.”

  Anna Urbanova turned as red as a jar of jam.

  “Pick up my clothes?” she shouted. “You want me to pick up my clothes? Then I shall pick them up!”

  Gathering up twenty outfits in her arms, she marched to the open window and cast them into the street below. With the greatest satisfaction, the actress watched as they fluttered and coasted to the ground. When she wheeled about to confront her dresser in triumph, Olga coolly observed how entertained the neighbors would be by this evidence of the famous actress’s petulance, then she turned and left the room.

  Switching off the lights and climbing into bed, Anna sputtered like a candle.

  “What do I care what the neighbors will say about my petulance. What do I care what St. Petersburg will say, or all of Russia!”

  But at two in the morning, having tossed and turned, Anna Urbanova tiptoed down the grand staircase, slipped out into the street, and gathered up her garments one by one.

  1924

  Anonymity

  Dreams of invisibility are as old as folklore. By means of some talisman or potion, or with the help of the gods themselves, the corporeal presence of the hero is rendered insubstantial, and for the duration of the spell he may wander among his fellow men unseen.

  The advantages of having such a power can be rattled off for you by any child of ten. Whether slipping past dragons, eavesdropping o
n intriguers, and sneaking into treasuries, or plucking a pie from the pantry, knocking the cap off a constable, and lighting the schoolmaster’s coattails on fire, suffice it to say that a thousand tales have been told in acknowledgment of invisibility’s bounty.

  But the tale that has less often been told is the one in which the spell of invisibility is cast upon the unknowing hero in the form of a curse. Having lived his life in the heat of battle, at the crux of conversation, and in the twentieth row with its privileged view of the ladies in the loges—that is, in the very thick of things—suddenly, he finds himself invisible to friend and foe alike. And the spell that had been cast over the Count by Anna Urbanova in 1923 was of this very sort.

  On that fateful night when the Count had dined with the enchantress in her suite, she presumably had the power to render him invisible on the spot. Instead, to toy with his peace of mind, she had cast her spell to manifest itself over the course of a year, bit by bit.

  In the weeks that followed, the Count suddenly noticed that he was disappearing from view for a few minutes at a time. He could be dining in the Piazza when a couple would approach his table with the clear intention of taking it as their own; or he could be standing near the front desk when a harried guest would nearly knock him off his feet. By winter, those prone to greet him with a wave or a smile often failed to see him until he was ten feet away. And now a year later? When he crossed the lobby, it often took a full minute for his closest friends to notice that he was standing right in front of them.

  “Oh,” said Vasily, returning the telephone receiver to its cradle. “Excuse me, Count Rostov. I didn’t see you there. How can I be of service?”

  The Count gave the concierge’s desk a delicate tap.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where Nina is?”

  In asking Vasily for Nina’s whereabouts, the Count was not making a passing inquiry of the first chap he happened to meet; for Vasily had an uncanny awareness of where people were at any given time.

  “She is in the card room, I believe.”

  “Ah,” said the Count with a knowing smile.

  Turning about, he walked down the hall to the card room and quietly opened the door, assuming he would find four middle-aged ladies exchanging cookies and profanities over tricks of whist—as an attentive spirit held her breath in a cupboard. Instead, he found the object of his search sitting at the card table alone. With two stacks of paper in front of her and a pencil in hand, she appeared the very model of scholastic enthusiasm. The pencil was moving so brightly it looked like an honor guard—parading across the page with its head held high then pivoting at the margin to make the quick march back.

  “Greetings, my friend.”

  “Hello, Your Countship,” Nina replied without looking up from her work.

  “Would you like to join me for an excursion before dinner? I was thinking of visiting the switchboard.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t at the moment.”

  The Count claimed the seat opposite Nina as she put a completed sheet of paper on one stack and took a fresh sheet of paper from the other. Out of habit, he picked up the deck of cards that sat on the corner of the table and shuffled it twice.

  “Would you like to see a trick?”

  “Some other time, perhaps.”

  Neatening the deck, the Count replaced it on the table. Then he picked up the topmost sheet from the stack of completed papers. In carefully aligned columns, he found all of the cardinal numbers from 1,100 to 1,199. In accordance with some unknown system, thirteen of the numbers had been circled in red.

  Needless to say, the Count was intrigued.

  “What are we up to here?”

  “Mathematics.”

  “I see you are addressing the subject with vigor.”

  “Professor Lisitsky says that one must wrestle with mathematics the way that one wrestles with a bear.”

  “Is that so? And which species of bear are we wrestling with today? More polar than panda, I suspect.”

  Nina looked up at the Count with her glint-extinguishing stare.

  The Count cleared his throat and adopted a more serious tone.

  “I take it the project involves some subset of integers. . . .”

  “Do you know what a prime number is?”

  “As in two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen . . . ?”

  “Exactly,” said Nina. “Those whole numbers that are indivisible by any number other than one and itself.”

  Given the dramatic manner with which she had said indivisible, one might have imagined Nina was speaking of the impregnability of a fortress.

  “At any rate,” she said, “I am making a list of them all.”

  “Them all!”

  “It is a Sisyphean task,” she admitted (though with an enthusiasm that prompted one to wonder if she had a complete command of the term’s etymology).

  She pointed to the already inscribed pages on the table.

  “The list of prime numbers begins with two, three, and five, as you say. But prime numbers grow increasingly rare the larger they become. So it is one thing to land upon a seven or eleven. But to land upon a one thousand and nine is another thing altogether. Can you imagine identifying a prime number in the hundreds of thousands . . . ? In the millions . . . ?”

  Nina looked off in the distance, as if she could see that largest and most impregnable of all the numbers situated on its rocky promontory where for thousands of years it had withstood the onslaughts of fire-breathing dragons and barbarian hordes. Then she resumed her work.

  The Count took another look at the sheet in his hands with a heightened sense of respect. After all, an educated man should admire any course of study no matter how arcane, if it be pursued with curiosity and devotion.

  “Here,” he said in the tone of one chipping in. “This number is not prime.”

  Nina looked up with an expression of disbelief.

  “Which number?”

  He laid the paper in front of her and tapped a figure circled in red.

  “One thousand one hundred and seventy-three.”

  “How do you know it isn’t prime?”

  “If a number’s individual digits sum to a number that is divisible by three, then it too is divisible by three.”

  Confronted with this extraordinary fact, Nina replied:

  “Mon Dieu.”

  Then she leaned back in her chair and appraised the Count in a manner acknowledging that she may have underestimated him.

  Now, when a man has been underestimated by a friend, he has some cause for taking offense—since it is our friends who should overestimate our capacities. They should have an exaggerated opinion of our moral fortitude, our aesthetic sensibilities, and our intellectual scope. Why, they should practically imagine us leaping through a window in the nick of time with the works of Shakespeare in one hand and a pistol in the other! But in this particular instance, the Count had to admit he had little grounds for taking offense. Because, for the life of him, he could not imagine from what dark corner of his adolescent mind this extraordinary fact had materialized.

  “Well,” said Nina, pointing to the stack of completed papers in front of the Count. “You’d better hand me those.”

  Leaving Nina to her work, the Count consoled himself that he was to meet Mishka for dinner in fifteen minutes; and besides, he had yet to read the daily papers. So, returning to the lobby, he picked up a copy of Pravda from the coffee table and made himself comfortable in the chair between the potted palms.

  After scanning the headlines, the Count delved into an article on a Moscow manufacturing plant that was exceeding its quotas. He then read a sketch on various improvements in Russian village life. When he shifted his attention to a report on the grateful schoolchildren of Kazan, he couldn’t help but remark on the repetitiveness of the new journalistic style. Not only did the Bolshev
iks seem to dwell on the same sort of subject matter day to day, they celebrated such a narrow set of views with such a limited vocabulary that one inevitably felt as if one had read it all before.

  It wasn’t until the fifth article that the Count realized he had read it all before. For this was yesterday’s paper. With a grunt, he tossed it back on the table and looked at the clock behind the front desk, which indicated that Mishka was now fifteen minutes late.

  But then, the measure of fifteen minutes is entirely different for a man in step than for a man with nothing to do. If for the Count the prior twelve months could be characterized politely as uneventful, the same could not be said for Mishka. The Count’s old friend had left the 1923 RAPP congress with a commission to edit and annotate a multivolume anthology of the Russian short story. That alone would have provided him with a reasonable excuse for being late; but there was a second development in Mishka’s life that earned him even more latitude with his appointments. . . .

  As a boy, the Count had a well-deserved reputation for marksmanship. He had been known to hit the schoolhouse bell with a rock while standing behind the bushes on the other side of the yard. He had been known to sink a kopek into an inkwell from across the classroom. And with an arrow and bow, he could pierce an orange at fifty paces. But he had never hit a tighter mark from a greater distance than when he noted his friend’s interest in Katerina from Kiev. In the months after the 1923 congress, her beauty became so indisputable, her heart so tender, her demeanor so kind, that Mishka had no choice but to barricade himself behind a stack of books at the old Imperial Library in St. Petersburg.

  “She’s a firefly, Sasha. A pinwheel.” Or so said Mishka with the wistful amazement of one who has been given only a moment to admire a wonder of the world.

  But then one autumn afternoon, she appeared in his alcove in need of a confidant. Behind his volumes, they whispered for an hour, and when the library sounded its closing bell, they took their conversation out onto Nevsky Prospekt and wandered all the way to Tikhvin Cemetery where, on a spot overlooking the Neva River, this firefly, this pinwheel, this wonder of the world had suddenly taken his hand.