by Amor Towles
“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.”
Mishka began ticking off the rest of the day’s business, and with each item he picked up a manuscript from in front of one of the staff members and flung it across the room in Shalamov’s direction.
“There are statues to be moved! Lines to be elided! And at five o’clock, you mustn’t be late for your bath with comrade Stalin. For if you are, who will be there to scrub his back?”
“He’s raving,” said a young man with glasses.
“Mikhail,” Shalamov pleaded.
“The future of Russian poetry is the haiku!” Mishka shouted in conclusion, then, with great satisfaction, he slammed the door on his way out. In fact, so satisfying was this gesture that he slammed every door that stood between him and the street below.
And what, to borrow a phrase, was the fallout of that?
Within a day, the gist of Mishka’s comments were shared with the authorities; within a week, they were set down word for word. In August, he was invited to the offices of the NKVD in Leningrad for questioning. In November, he was brought before one of the extrajudicial troikas of the era. And in March 1939, he was on a train bound for Siberia and the realm of second thoughts.
The Count was presumably right to be concerned for Nina, though we will never know for certain—for she did not return to the Metropol within the month, within the year, or ever again. In October, the Count made some efforts to discover her whe
reabouts, all of them fruitless. One assumes that Nina made her own efforts to communicate with the Count, but no word was forthcoming, and Nina Kulikova simply disappeared into the vastness of the Russian East.
The Count was also right to worry that Sofia’s residency would be noted. For not only was her presence remarked, within a fortnight of her arrival a letter was sent to an administrative office within the Kremlin stating that a Former Person living under house arrest on the top floor of the Metropol Hotel was caring for a five-year-old child of unknown parentage.
Upon its receipt, this letter was carefully read, stamped, and forwarded to a higher office—where it was counterstamped and directed up another two floors. There, it reached the sort of desk where with the swipe of a pen, matrons from the state orphanage could be dispersed.
It just so happened, however, that a cursory examination of this Former Person’s recent associates led to a certain willowy actress—who for years had been the reputed paramour of a round-faced Commisar recently appointed to the Politburo. Within the walls of a small, drab office in an especially bureaucratic branch of government, it is generally difficult to accurately imagine the world outside. But it is never hard to imagine what might occur to one’s career were one to seize the illegitimate daughter of a Politburo member and place her in a home. Such initiative would be rewarded with a blindfold and a cigarette.
As a result, only the most discreet inquiries were made. Indications were obtained that this actress had in all likelihood been in a relationship with the Politburo member for at least six years. In addition, an employee of the hotel confirmed that on the very day the young girl arrived at the hotel, the actress was also in residence. As such, all of the information that had been gathered in the course of the investigation was placed in a drawer under lock and key (on the off chance it might prove useful one day). While the pernicious little letter that had launched the inquiry in the first place was set on fire and dropped in the waste bin where it belonged.
So yes, the Count had every reason to be concerned about Mishka, Nina, and Sofia. But did he have cause to be anxious about the following morning?
As it turned out, once they had made their beds and nibbled their biscuits, Sofia did climb up into the desk chair; but rather than stare at the Count expectantly, she unfurled a litany of additional questions about Idlehour and his family, as if she had been composing them in her sleep.
And in the days that followed, a man who had long prided himself on his ability to tell a story in the most succinct manner with an emphasis on the most salient points, by necessity became a master of the digression, the parenthetical remark, the footnote, eventually even learning to anticipate Sofia’s relentless inquiries before she had the time to phrase them.
Popular wisdom tells us that when the reel of our concerns interferes with our ability to fall asleep, the best remedy is the counting of sheep in a meadow. But preferring to have his lamb encrusted with herbs and served with a red wine reduction, the Count chose a different methodology altogether. As he listened to Sofia breathing, he went back to the moment that he woke on the hardwood floor, and by systematically reconstructing his various visits to the lobby, the Piazza, the Boyarsky, Anna’s suite, the basement, and Marina’s office, he carefully calculated how many flights of stairs he had climbed or descended over the course of the day. Up and down he went in his mind, counting one flight after another, until with the final ascent to the twice-tolling clock he reached a grand total of fifty-nine—at which point he slipped into a well-deserved sleep.
Addendum
Uncle Alexander . . . ?”
. . .
“Sofia . . . ?”
. . .
“Are you awake, Uncle Alexander?”
. . .
“I am now, my dear. What is it?”
. . .
. . .
“I left Dolly in Aunt Marina’s room . . .”
. . .
. . .
“Ah, yes . . .”
1946
On Saturday, the twenty-first of June 1946, as the sun rose high over the Kremlin, a lone figure climbed slowly up the steps from the Moskva River embankment, continued past St. Basil’s Cathedral, and made his way onto Red Square.
Dressed in a ragged winter coat, he swung his right leg in a small semicircle as he walked. At another time, the combination of the ragged coat and hobbled leg might have made the man stand out on such a bright summer day. But in 1946, there were men limping about in borrowed clothes in every quarter of the capital. For that matter, they were limping about in every city of Europe.
That afternoon, the square was as crowded as if it were a market day. Women in floral dresses lingered under the arcades of the old State Department Store. Before the gates of the Kremlin, schoolboys climbed on two decommissioned tanks as soldiers in white fitted jackets standing at regular intervals watched with their hands clasped loosely behind their backs. And from the entrance of Lenin’s tomb snaked a line 150 citizens long.
The man in the ragged coat paused for a moment to admire the orderly behavior of his far-flung countrymen waiting in the queue. At the front stood eight Uzbeks with drooping moustaches dressed in their best silk coats; then came four girls from the east with long braids and brightly embroidered caps; then ten muzhiks from Georgia, and so on, and so on—one constituency waiting patiently behind the next to pay their respects to the remains of a man who died over twenty years before.
If we have learned nothing else, the lone figure reflected with a crooked smile, at least we have learned to stand in line.
To a foreigner, it must have seemed that Russia had become the land of ten thousand lines. For there were lines at the tram stops, lines before the grocer, lines at the agencies of labor, education, and housing. But in point of fact, there were not ten thousand lines, or even ten. There was one all-encompassing line, which wound across the country and back through time. This had been Lenin’s greatest innovation: a line that, like the Proletariat itself, was universal and infinite. He established it by decree in 1917 and personally took the first slot as his comrades jostled to line up behind him. One by one every Russian took his place, and the line grew longer and longer until it shared all of the attributes of life. In it friendships were formed and romances kindled; patience was fostered; civility practiced; even wisdom attained.
If one is willing to stand in line for eight hours to purchase a loaf of bread, the lone figure thought, what is an hour or two to see the corpse of a hero free of charge?
Passing the spot where Kazan Cathedral had once seen fit to stand, he turned right and walked on; but as he entered Theatre Square he came to a stop. For as his gaze moved from the Palace of Unions, to the Bolshoi, to the Maly Theatre, and finally to the Metropol Hotel, he had to marvel to find so many of the old facades unspoiled.
Five years before to the day, the Germans had launched Operation Barbarossa—the offensive in which more than three million soldiers deployed from Odessa to the Baltic crossed the Russian frontier.
When the operation commenced, Hitler estimated the Wehrmacht would secure Moscow within four months. In fact, having captured Minsk, Kiev, and Smolensk, by late October the German forces had already advanced nearly six hundred miles and were approaching Moscow from the north and south in a classic pincer formation. Within a matter of days, the city would be in range of their artillery.
By this time, a measure of lawlessness had broken out in the capital. The streets were crowded with refugees and deserters who were sleeping in makeshift encampments and cooking looted food over open fires. With the relocation of the seat of government to Kuybyshev underway, the sixteen bridges of the city were mined so that they could be demolished on a moment’s notice. Columns of smoke rose above the Kremlin walls from the bonfires of classified files, while in the streets municipal and factory workers, who had not been paid in months, watched with seasoned foreboding as the eterna
lly lit windows of the old fortress began to go dark one by one.
But on the afternoon of the thirtieth of October, an observer—standing in the very spot where our ragged itinerant now stood—would have witnessed a bewildering sight. A small cadre of laborers under the direction of the secret police were carrying chairs out of the Bolshoi on their way to the Mayakovsky Metro Station.
Later that night, the full membership of the Politburo assembled on the platform, one hundred feet below the surface of the city. Safe from the reach of German artillery, they took their seats at nine o’clock at a long table lined with food and wine. Shortly thereafter, a single train pulled into the station, its doors opened, and out stepped Stalin in full military dress. Assuming his rightful position at the head of the table, Marshal Soso said that his purpose in convening the Party leadership was twofold. First, it was to declare that while those assembled were welcome to make their way to Kuybyshev, he, for one, had no intention of going anywhere. He would remain in Moscow until the last drop of Russian blood had been spilled. Second, he announced that on the seventh of November the annual commemoration of the Revolution would be celebrated on Red Square as usual.
Many Muscovites would come to remember that parade as something of a turning point. To hear the heart-swelling sound of “The Internationale” to the accompaniment of fifty thousand boots while their leader stood defiant on the rostrum bolstered their confidence and hardened their resolve. On that day, they would recall, the tide decidedly turned.
Others, however, would point to the seven hundred thousand soldiers whom Soso had held in reserve in the Far East and who, even as the celebration was taking place, were being spirited across the country to Moscow’s aid. Still others would note that it snowed on twenty-eight of the thirty-one days that December, effectively grounding the Luftwaffe. It certainly didn’t hurt that the average temperature fell to minus 20˚—a climate as alien to the Wehrmacht as it had been to the forces of Napoleon. Whatever the cause, although it took Hitler’s troops just five months to march from the Russian frontier to the outskirts of Moscow, they would never pass through the city’s gates. Having taken over one million prisoners and one million lives, they would begin their retreat in January 1942, leaving the city surprisingly intact.
