A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

  “At whose request?” the chef asked.

  The Bishop turned his gaze from Andrey to Emile and was clearly struck by the chef’s transformation. He seemed to waver.

  “At whose request?” the chef repeated.

  Without taking his eyes off the Bishop, Emile suddenly reached for his chopper.

  “At whose request!”

  When Emile took a step forward while raising his chopping arm high above his head, the Bishop grew as white as the haddock. Then the kitchen door was swinging on its hinge and the Bishop was nowhere to be seen.

  Andrey and the Count turned their gaze from the door to Emile. Then in wide-eyed amazement, Andrey pointed a delicate finger at Emile’s raised hand. For in the heat of outrage, the chef had grabbed not his chopper but a celery stalk, whose little green fronds now trembled in the air. And to a man, the Triumvirate burst into laughter.

  At one in the morning, the conspirators took their seats. On the table before them were a single candle, a loaf of bread, a bottle of rosé, and three bowls of bouillabaisse.

  After exchanging a glance, the three men dipped their spoons into the stew in unison, but for Emile, the gesture was a sleight of hand. For when Andrey and the Count raised their spoons to their mouths, Emile let his hover above his bowl—intent upon studying his friends’ expressions at the very first taste.

  Fully aware that he was being watched, the Count closed his eyes to attend more closely to his impressions.

  How to describe it?

  One first tastes the broth—that simmered distillation of fish bones, fennel, and tomatoes, with their hearty suggestions of Provence. One then savors the tender flakes of haddock and the briny resilience of the mussels, which have been purchased on the docks from the fisherman. One marvels at the boldness of the oranges arriving from Spain and the absinthe poured in the taverns. And all of these various impressions are somehow collected, composed, and brightened by the saffron—that essence of summer sun which, having been harvested in the hills of Greece and packed by mule to Athens, has been sailed across the Mediterranean in a felucca. In other words, with the very first spoonful one finds oneself transported to the port of Marseille—where the streets teem with sailors, thieves, and madonnas, with sunlight and summer, with languages and life.

  The Count opened his eyes.

  “Magnifique,” he said.

  Andrey, who had put down his spoon, brought his elegant hands together in a respectful show of silent applause.

  Beaming, the chef bowed to his friends and then joined them in their long-awaited meal.

  Over the next two hours, the three members of the Triumvirate each ate three bowls of the bouillabaisse, each drank a bottle of wine, and each spoke openly in turn.

  And what did these old friends talk about? What did they not talk about! They talked of their childhoods in St. Petersburg, Minsk, and Lyon. Of their first and second loves. Of Andrey’s four-year-old son and Emile’s four-year-old lumbago. They spoke of the once and the was, of the wishful and the wonderful.

  Rarely awake at this hour, Emile was in an unprecedented state of euphoria. As youthful stories were told, he laughed so heartily that his head rolled on his shoulders, and the corner of his napkin was raised to his eyes twice as often as it was raised to his lips.

  And the pièce de résistance? At three in the morning, Andrey referred briefly, offhandedly, almost parenthetically to his days under the big top.

  “Eh? What’s that? Under what?”

  “Did you say ‘the big top’?”

  Yes. In point of fact: the circus.

  Raised by a widowed father who was prone to drunken violence, at the age of sixteen Andrey had run away to join a traveling circus. It was with this troupe that he had come to Moscow in 1913 where, having fallen in love with a bookseller in the Arbat, he had bid the circus adieu. Two months later, he was hired as a waiter at the Boyarsky, and he had been there ever since.

  “What did you do in the circus?” asked the Count.

  “An acrobat?” suggested Emile. “A clown?”

  “A lion tamer?”

  “I juggled.”

  “No,” said Emile.

  In lieu of a response, the maître d’ rose from the table and gathered three of the unused oranges from the countertop. With the fruit in his hands, he stood perfectly erect. Or rather, he stood at a slight tilt induced by the wine, a sort of 12:02. Then after a brief pause, he set the spheres in motion.

  In all honesty, the Count and Emile had been skeptical of their old friend’s claim; but as soon as he began, they could only wonder that they had not guessed at it before. For Andrey’s hands had been crafted by God to juggle. So deft was his touch that the oranges seemed to move of their own accord. Or better yet, they moved like planets governed by a force of gravity that simultaneously propelled them forward and kept them from flinging off into space; while Andrey, who was standing before these planets, seemed to be simply plucking them from their orbits and releasing them a moment later to pursue their natural course.

  So gentle and rhythmic was the motion of Andrey’s hands that one was at constant risk of falling under hypnosis. And, in fact, without Emile or the Count noticing, another orange had suddenly joined the solar system. And then with a courtly flourish, Andrey caught all four spheres and bowed at the waist.

  Now it was the Count and Emile’s turn to applaud.

  “But surely, you didn’t juggle oranges,” said Emile.

  “No,” Andrey admitted, as he carefully returned the oranges to the counter. “I juggled knives.”

  Before the Count and Emile could express their disbelief, Andrey had taken three blades from a drawer and set them in motion. These were no planets. They spun through the air like the parts of some infernal machine, an effect that was heightened by the flashes of light from whenever the candle’s flame was reflected on the surface of the blades. And then, just as suddenly as the knives had been set in motion, their hilts were fixed in Andrey’s hands.

  “Ah, but can you do four of those?” teased the Count.

  Without a word, Andrey moved back toward the knife drawer; but before he could reach inside, Emile had risen to his feet. With the expression of a boy enthralled by a street magician, he shyly stepped from the crowd and held out his chopper—that blade which had not been touched by another human hand in almost fifteen years. With an appropriate sense of ceremony, Andrey bowed from the waist to accept it. And when he set the four knives in motion, Emile leaned back in his chair and with a tear in his eye watched as his trusted blade tumbled effortlessly through space, feeling that this moment, this hour, this universe could not be improved upon.

  At half past three in the morning, the Count swayed up the stairs, veered to his room, lurched through his closet, emptied his pockets onto the bookcase, poured himself a brandy, and with a sigh of satisfaction dropped into his chair. While from her place on the wall, Helena took him in with a tender, knowing smile.

  “Yes, yes,” he admitted. “It is a little late, and I am a little drunk. But in my defense, it has been an eventful day.”

  As if to make his point, the Count suddenly rose from his chair and tugged at one of the folds of his jacket.

  “Do you see this button? I’ll have you know that I sewed it on myself.” Then dropping back in his chair, the Count picked up his brandy, took a sip, and reflected. “She was perfectly right, you know. Marina, I mean. Absolutely, positively, perfectly right.” The Count sighed again. Then he shared with his sister a notion.

  Since the beginning of storytelling, he explained, Death has called on the unwitting. In one tale or another, it arrives quietly in town and takes a room at an inn, or lurks in an alleyway, or lingers in the marketplace, surreptitiously. Then just when the hero has a moment of respite from his daily affairs, Death pays him a visit.

  This is all well and good, allowed the Count. Bu
t what is rarely related is the fact that Life is every bit as devious as Death. It too can wear a hooded coat. It too can slip into town, lurk in an alley, or wait in the back of a tavern.

  Hadn’t it paid such a visit to Mishka? Hadn’t it found him hiding behind his books, lured him out of the library, and taken his hand on a secluded spot overlooking the Neva?

  Hadn’t it found Andrey in Lyon and beckoned him to the big top?

  Emptying his glass, the Count rose from his chair and stumbled into the bookcase as he reached for the brandy.

  “Excusez-moi, monsieur.”

  The Count poured himself a tad, just a drop, no more than a sip, and fell back into his seat. Then waving a finger gently in the air, he continued:

  “The collectivization of collectives, Helena, and the dekulaking of kulaks—in all probability, these are quite probable. They’re even likely to be likely. But inevitable?”

  With a knowing smile, the Count shook his head at the very sound of the word.

  “Allow me to tell you what is inevitable. What is inevitable is that Life will pay Nina a visit too. She may be as sober as St. Augustine, but she is too alert and too vibrant for Life to let her shake a hand and walk off alone. Life will follow her in a taxi. It will bump into her by chance. It will work its way into her affections. And to do so, it will beg, barter, collude, and if necessary, resort to chicanery.

  “What a world,” the Count sighed at last, before falling asleep in his chair.

  On the following morning, with his eyes a little blurry and his head a little sore, the Count poured a second cup of coffee, settled himself in his chair, and leaned to his side in order to retrieve Mishka’s letter from his jacket.

  But it wasn’t there.

  The Count distinctly remembered tucking the letter in the inside pocket when he was leaving the lobby the day before; and it had definitely been there when he had repaired the button in Marina’s office. . . .

  It must have fallen out, he thought, when he draped the jacket over the back of Anna’s chair. So, after finishing his coffee, the Count went down to suite 311—only to find the door open, the closets empty, and the bottom of the dustbins bare.

  But Mishka’s half-read letter had not fallen from the Count’s jacket in Anna’s room. Having emptied his pockets at half past three, when the Count had stumbled reaching for the brandy, he had knocked the letter into the gap between the bookcase and the wall, where it was destined to remain.

  Though perhaps this was just as well.

  For while the Count had been so moved by Mishka’s bittersweet walk along Nevsky Prospekt and his romantic lines of verse, the lines of verse were not written by Mishka at all. They were from the poem that Mayakovsky had delivered while standing on his chair back in 1923. And what had prompted Mishka to quote them had nothing to do with the day that Katerina had first taken his hand. What had prompted the citation, and the writing of the letter, for that matter, was the fact that on the fourteenth of April, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet laureate of the Revolution, had shot himself through the heart with a prop revolver.

  Addendum

  On the morning of the twenty-second of June, even as the Count was looking through his pockets for Mishka’s letter, Nina Kulikova and her three confederates were boarding a train headed east for Ivanovo full of energy, excitement, and a clear sense of purpose.

  Since the launch of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, tens of thousands of their comrades in the urban centers had been working tirelessly to build power stations, steel mills, and manufacturing plants for heavy machinery. As this historic effort unfolded, it would be essential for the country’s grain-producing regions to do their part—by meeting the increased demand for bread in the cities with leaps in agricultural production.

  But to pave the way for this ambitious effort, it was deemed necessary to exile a million kulaks—those profiteers and enemies of the common good, who also happened to be the regions’ most capable farmers. The remaining peasants, who viewed newly introduced approaches to agriculture with resentment and suspicion, proved antagonistic to even the smallest efforts at innovation. Tractors, which were meant to usher in the new era by the fleet, ended up being in short supply. These challenges were compounded by uncooperative weather resulting in a collapse of agricultural output. But given the imperative of feeding the cities, the precipitous decline in the harvest was met with increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint.

  In 1932, the combination of these intractable forces would result in widespread hardship for the agricultural provinces of old Russia, and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine.*

  But, as noted, all of this was still in the offing. And when Nina’s train finally arrived in the far reaches of Ivanovo, where the fields of young wheat bent in the breeze for as far as the eye could see, she was almost overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape, and by the sense that her life had just begun.

  1938

  An Arrival

  Let us concede that the early thirties in Russia were unkind.

  In addition to starvation in the countryside, the famine of ’32 eventually led to a migration of peasants to the cities, which, in turn, contributed to overcrowded housing, shortages of essential goods, even hooliganism. At the same time, the most stalwart workers in the urban centers were wearying under the burden of the continuous workweek; artists faced tighter constraints on what they could or could not imagine; churches were shuttered, repurposed, or razed; and when revolutionary hero Sergei Kirov was assassinated, the nation was purged of an array of politically unreliable elements.

  But then, on the seventeenth of November 1935, at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites, Stalin himself declared: Life has improved, comrades. Life is more joyous. . . .

  Yes, generally speaking such a remark falling from the lips of a statesman should be swept from the floor with the dust and the lint. But when it fell from the lips of Soso, one had good reason to lend it credence. For it was often through secondary remarks in secondary speeches that the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party signaled the shifts in his thinking.

  In point of fact, a few days before giving this speech, Soso had seen a photograph in the Herald Tribune of three healthy young Bolshevik girls standing before a factory gate—dressed in the tunic and kerchief long favored by the Party. Normally, such a picture would have warmed the cockles of his heart. But in the context of the Western press, it struck the Secretary of Secretaries that this simple attire might suggest to the world that after eighteen years of Communism, Russian girls still lived like peasants. Thus, the fateful sentences were slipped into the speech—and the direction of the country veered.

  For upon reading in Pravda that life had improved, the attentive apparatchiks understood that a turning point had been reached—that given the Revolution’s unqualified success, the time had come for the Party not only to countenance but to encourage a little more glamour, a little more luxury, a little more laughter. Within a matter of weeks, the Christmas tree and Gypsy music, both long in exile, were given a warm welcome home; Polina Molotova, wife of the foreign minister, was entrusted with the launch of the first Soviet perfumes; the New Light Factory (with the help of some imported machinery) was charged with producing champagne at the rate of ten thousand bottles a day; members of the Politburo traded in their military uniforms for tailored suits; and those hardworking girls exiting their factories were now encouraged to look not like peasants, but like the girls along the Champs-Élysées.*

  So, not unlike that fellow in Genesis who said Let there be this, or Let there be that, and there was this or that, when Soso said Life has improved, comrades, life—in fact—improved!

  Case in point: At this very moment, two young ladies are strolling down Kuznetsky Most wearing brightly colored dresses fitted at the waist and hemmed at the calf. One of them even sports a yellow hat with a brim that sl
opes seductively over a long-lashed eye. With the rumble of the brand-new Metro underfoot, they pause before three of the great windows at TsUM, the Central Universal Department Store, which respectively showcase a pyramid of hats, a pyramid of watches, and a pyramid of high-heeled shoes.

  Granted, the girls still live in crowded apartments and wash their pretty dresses in a common sink, but do they look through the store’s windows with resentment? Not in the least. With envy, perhaps, or wide-eyed wonder, but not resentment. For the doors of TsUM are no longer closed to them. Having long served foreigners and high Party officials, the store had been opened to the citizenry in ’36—as long as they could pay the cashier in foreign currencies, silver, or gold. In fact, on TsUM’s lower level there is a nicely appointed office where a discreet gentleman will give you store credit for half the value of your grandmother’s jewelry.

  You see? Life is more joyous.

  So, having admired the contents of the windows and imagined the day when they too might have an apartment with closets in which to stow their hats, watches, and shoes, our fetching pair resumes their stroll, all the while chatting about the two well-connected young men they are on their way to meet for dinner.

  At Teatralny Proyezd, they wait at the curb for a break in the flow of automobiles. Then skipping across the street, they enter the Metropol Hotel where, as they pass the concierge’s desk en route to the Piazza, they are admired by a distinguished-looking man with a touch of gray in his hair. . . .

  “Ah, the end of spring,” observed the Count to Vasily (who was sorting through the night’s reservations). “By the hems of the skirts on those young ladies, I’d wager it must be almost 70˚ along Tverskaya, despite being seven o’clock at night. In another few days, the boys will be stealing posies from the Alexander Gardens and Emile will be scattering peas across his plates. . . .”