A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

  To that end, tonight on the table beside their nearly empty plates were two copies of Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America. Osip had been somewhat intimidated by its length, but the Count had assured him that there was no better text with which to establish a fundamental understanding of American culture. So, the former colonel had burned the midnight oil for three weeks and arrived in the Yellow Room with the eagerness of the well-prepared schoolboy at his baccalaureate. And having seconded the Count’s fondness for summer nights, echoed his compliments on the sauce au poivre, and shared his appreciation of the claret’s nose, Osip was itching to get down to business.

  “It is indeed a lovely wine, a lovely steak, and a lovely summer night,” he said. “But shouldn’t we be shifting our attention to the book?”

  “Yes, certainly,” said the Count, setting down his glass. “Let us turn our attention to the book. Why don’t you start us off. . . .”

  “Well, first I’d have to say that it’s no Call of the Wild.”

  “No,” said the Count with a smile. “It is certainly no Call of the Wild.”

  “And I have to admit, that while I appreciated de Tocqueville’s attention to detail, on the whole I found the first volume, on the Americans’ political system, rather slow in going.”

  “Yes.” The Count nodded sagely. “The first volume may well be characterized as detailed to a fault. . . .”

  “But the second volume—on the characteristics of their society—I found to be absolutely fascinating.”

  “In that, you are not alone.”

  “In fact, right from the first line . . . Wait. Where is it? Here we are: There is not, I think, a single country in the civilized world where less attention is paid to philosophy than in the United States. Ha! That should tell us a thing or two.”

  “Quite so,” said the Count with a chuckle.

  “And here. A few chapters later, he singles out their unusual passion for material well-being. The minds of Americans, he says, are universally preoccupied with meeting the body’s every need and attending to life’s little comforts. And that was in 1840. Imagine if he had visited them in the 1920s!”

  “Ha. Visited them in the 1920s. Well put, my friend.”

  “But tell me, Alexander: What are we to make of his assertion that democracy is particularly suited to industry?”

  The Count leaned back in his chair and moved about his utensils.

  “Yes. The question of industry. That is an excellent place to dig in, Osip. Right at the heart of it. What do you make of it?”

  “But I was asking what you made of it, Alexander.”

  “And you shall hear what I think without fail. But as your tutor, I would be remiss were I to skew your impressions before you had the chance to formulate them yourself. So let us begin with the freshness of your thoughts.”

  Osip studied the Count, who in turn reached for his glass of wine.

  “Alexander . . . You have read the book. . . .”

  “Of course I have read the book,” confirmed the Count, putting down his glass.

  “I mean, you have read both volumes—to the very last page.”

  “Osip, my friend, it is a fundamental rule of academic study that whether a student has read every word of a work matters less than whether he has established a reasonable familiarity with its essential material.”

  “And to which page does your reasonable familiarity extend in this particular work?”

  “Ahem,” said the Count, opening to the table of contents. “Let me see now. . . . Yes, yes, yes.” He looked up at Osip. “Eighty-seven?”

  Osip considered the Count for a moment. Then he picked up de Tocqueville and hurled him across the room. The French historian crashed headfirst into a framed photograph of Lenin leaning over a podium—shattering the glass and falling to the floor with a thud. The door to the Yellow Room flew open and the Goliath leapt inside with his firearm drawn.

  “Gadzooks!” exclaimed the Count, raising his hands above his head.

  Osip, on the verge of commanding his bodyguard to shoot his tutor, took a deep breath, then simply shook his head.

  “It’s all right, Vladimir.”

  Vladimir nodded once and returned to his station in the hall.

  Osip folded his hands on the table and looked at the Count, waiting for an explanation.

  “I am so sorry,” the Count said in genuine embarrassment. “I meant to finish it, Osip. In fact, I had cleared my calendar today in order to read the rest, when . . . circumstances intervened.”

  “Circumstances.”

  “Unexpected circumstances.”

  “What sort of unexpected circumstances?”

  “A young lady.”

  “A young lady!”

  “The daughter of an old friend. She appeared out of the blue, and will be staying with me for a spell.”

  Osip looked at the Count as if dumbfounded, then let out a laugh.

  “Well, well, well. Alexander Ilyich. A young lady staying with you. Why didn’t you say so. You are utterly absolved, you old fox. Or at least, mostly so. We shall have our de Tocqueville, mind you; and you shall read every last page. But for now, don’t let me keep you another second. It’s not too late for some caviar in the Shalyapin. Then you can whisk her to the Piazza for a little dancing.”

  “Actually . . . she’s a very young lady.”

  . . .

  “How young a lady?”

  “Five or six?”

  “Five or six!”

  “I’d say almost certainly six.”

  “You are hosting an almost certainly six-year-old.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “In your room.”

  “Precisely.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few weeks. Maybe a month. But no more than two . . .”

  Osip smiled and nodded his head.

  “I see.”

  “To be perfectly honest,” the Count admitted, “so far her visit has been a little disruptive to the daily routine. But that’s to be expected, I suppose, given that she has only just arrived. Once we’ve made some minor adjustments and she has had a chance to acclimatize, then everything should go back to running without a hitch.”

  “Without a doubt,” agreed Osip. “In the meantime, don’t let me keep you.”

  Promising to read his de Tocqueville by their very next meeting, the Count excused himself and slipped out the door while Osip picked up the claret. Finding the bottle empty, he reached across the table for the Count’s unfinished glass and poured it into his.

  Did he remember those days when his children were almost certainly six? When there was a pitter-pat in the hallways an hour before dawn? When every object smaller than an apple was nowhere to be found, until it was right underfoot? When books went unread, letters unanswered, and every train of thought was left incomplete? He remembered them as if they were yesterday.

  “Without a doubt,” he said again with a smile on his face: “Once they have made some minor adjustments, everything should go back to running without a hitch . . .”

  The Count was generally of a mind that grown men should not run in hallways. But when he left Osip it was nearly eleven, and he had already taken ample advantage of Marina’s good nature. So, making an exception just this once, he sprinted down the hall, around the corner, and ran smack into some fellow with a ragged beard who was pacing at the top of the stairs.

  “Mishka!”

  “Ah. There you are, Sasha.”

  The instant the Count recognized his old friend, his first thought was that he would have to send him on his way. What else was he to do? There were no two ways about it.

  But when he got a good look at Mishka’s face, he could tell that this was impossible. Something of significance had clearly occurred. So, instead of sending him
on his way, the Count led him back up to his study where, having taken a seat, Mishka turned his hat in his hands.

  “Weren’t you scheduled to arrive in Moscow tomorrow?” the Count ventured after a brief silence.

  “Yes,” said Mishka with a careless wave of his hat. “But I came a day early at Shalamov’s request. . . .”

  An acquaintance from their university days, Viktor Shalamov was now the senior editor at Goslitizdat. It was his idea to have Mishka edit their forthcoming volumes of Anton Chekhov’s collected letters—a project that Mishka had been slaving over since 1934.

  “Ah,” said the Count brightly. “You must be nearly done.”

  “Nearly done,” Mishka repeated with a laugh. “You’re quite right, Sasha. I am nearly done. In fact, all that remains is to remove a word.”

  Here is what had unfolded:

  Early that morning, Mikhail Mindich had arrived in Moscow on the overnight train from Leningrad. With the galleys on their way to the printer, Shalamov had said he wanted to take Mishka to the Central House of Writers for a celebratory lunch. But when Mishka arrived in the publisher’s reception room shortly before one o’clock, Shalamov asked him to come back to his office.

  Once they were settled, Shalamov congratulated Mishka on a job well done. Then he patted the galleys that, as it turned out, were not on their way to the printer, but were lying right there on the editor’s desk.

  Yes, it was a job of nuance and erudition, Shalamov said. A paragon of scholarship. But there was one small matter that needed to be addressed before printing. It was an elision in the letter of the sixth of June 1904.

  Mishka knew the letter well. It was the bittersweet missive written by Chekhov to his sister, Maria, in which he predicts his full recovery just a few weeks before his death. During typesetting, a word must have been dropped—which just shows that no matter how many times you review a galley, you will never catch every flaw.

  “Let’s see to it,” said Mishka.

  “Here,” said Shalamov, rotating the galley so that Mishka could review the letter for himself.

  Berlin,

  June 6, 1904

  Dear Masha,

  I am writing you from Berlin. I’ve been here a whole day now. It turned very cold in Moscow and even snowed after you left; the bad weather must have given me a cold, I began having rheumatic pains in my arms and legs, I couldn’t sleep at night, lost a great deal of weight, had morphine injections, took thousands of different kinds of medicine, and recall with gratitude only the heroin Altschuller once prescribed for me. Nonetheless, toward departure time I began to recover my strength. My appetite returned, I began giving myself arsenic injections, and so on and so forth, and finally on Thursday I left the country very thin, with very thin, emaciated legs. I had a fine, pleasant trip. Here in Berlin, we’ve taken a comfortable room in the best hotel. I am very much enjoying the life here and haven’t eaten so well and with such an appetite in a long time. The bread here is amazing, I’ve been stuffing myself with it, the coffee is excellent, and the dinners are beyond words. People who have never been abroad don’t know how good bread can be. There’s no decent tea (we have our own kind) and none of our hors d’oeuvres, but everything else is superb, even though it’s cheaper here than in Russia. I’ve already put on weight, and today, despite the chill in the air, I even took the long ride to the Tiergarten. And so you can tell Mother and anyone else who’s interested that I’m on my way to recovery or even that I’ve already recovered . . . Etc., etc.

  Yours,

  A. Chekhov

  Mishka read the passage once, then read it again while calling up in his mind’s eye an image of the original letter. After four years, he knew most of them by heart. But as hard as he tried, he could not identify the discrepancy.

  “What is missing?” he asked, at last.

  “Oh,” said Shalamov, in the tone of one who suddenly understands a simple misapprehension between friends. “It is not that something is missing. It is that something must be taken out. Here.”

  Shalamov reached across the desk in order to point to the lines in which Chekhov had shared his first impressions of Berlin, but particularly his praise for their amazing bread, and his observations that Russians who hadn’t traveled had no idea how good bread could be.

  “This part should be taken out?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “As in stricken.”

  “If you wish.”

  “And why, might I ask?”

  “In the interests of concision.”

  “So it is to save paper! And once I have taken out this little passage of the sixth of June, where shall you have me put it? In the bank? In a dresser drawer? In Lenin’s tomb?”

  As Mishka had been relating this exchange to the Count, his voice had grown increasingly loud, as if with a renewed sense of outrage; but then he suddenly fell silent.

  “And then Shalamov,” he continued after a moment, “this Shalamov from our youth, he tells me that I can shoot the passage from a cannon for all he cares, but it must be taken out. So do you know what I did, Sasha? Can you even imagine?”

  One might well draw the conclusion, that a man prone to pacing is a man who will act judiciously—given the unusual amount of time he has allocated to the consideration of causes and consequences, of ramifications and repercussions. But it had been the Count’s experience that men prone to pace are always on the verge of acting impulsively. For while the men who pace are being whipped along by logic, it is a multifaceted sort of logic, which brings them no closer to a clear understanding, or even a state of conviction. Rather, it leaves them at such a loss that they end up exposed to the influence of the merest whim, to the seduction of the rash or reckless act—almost as if they had never considered the matter at all.

  “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.