by Amor Towles
In response, Ilya hesitated.
Emile looked to the other members of the Triumvirate and rolled his eyes, as much as to say: You see what I must put up with? Then he turned back to his apprentice.
“As anyone can see, we are men with business to attend to. But apparently, you have something of such importance that you feel the need to interrupt. Well then, out with it—before we expire from anticipation.”
The young man opened his mouth, but then rather than explain himself, he simply pointed his spoon toward the kitchen. Following the direction of the utensil, the members of the Triumvirate looked through the office window and there, near the door to the back stair, stood an unfortunate-looking soul in a ragged winter coat. At the sight of him, Emile grew crimson.
“Who let him in here?”
“I did, sir.”
Emile stood so abruptly he nearly knocked over his chair. Then, just as a commander will tear the epaulettes from the shoulders of an errant officer, Emile grabbed the spoon from Ilya’s hand.
“So, you’re the Commissar of Nincompoops now, is that it? Eh? When I had my back turned, you were promoted to the General Secretary of Bunglers?”
The young man took a step back.
“No, sir. I have not been promoted.”
Emile smacked the table with the spoon, nearly cracking it in two.
“Of course you haven’t! How often have I told you not to let beggars in the kitchen? Don’t you see that if you give him a crust of bread today, there will be five of his friends here tomorrow, and fifty the day after that?”
“Yes, sir, but . . . but . . .”
“But but but what?”
“He didn’t ask for food.”
“Eh?”
The young man pointed to the Count.
“He asked for Alexander Ilyich.”
Andrey and Emile both looked to their colleague in surprise. The Count in turn looked through the window at the beggar. Then without saying a word, he rose from his chair, exited the office, and embraced this boon companion whom he had not seen in eight long years.
Though Andrey and Emile had never met the stranger, as soon as they heard his name they knew exactly who he was: the one who had lived with the Count above the cobbler’s shop; the one who had paced a thousand miles in increments of fifteen feet; the lover of Mayakovsky and Mandelstam who, like so many others, had been tried and sentenced in the name of Article 58.
“Why don’t you make yourselves comfortable,” suggested Andrey with a gesture of his hand. “You can use Emile’s office.”
“Yes,” agreed Emile. “By all means. My office.”
With his impeccable instincts, Andrey led Mishka to the chair with its back to the kitchen while Emile placed bread and salt on the table—that ancient Russian symbol of hospitality. A moment later he returned with a plate of potatoes and cutlets of veal. Then the chef and maître d’ excused themselves, closing the door so that the two old friends could speak undisturbed.
Mishka looked at the table.
“Bread and salt,” he said with a smile.
As the Count looked across at Mishka, he was moved by two contrary currents of emotion. On the one hand, there was that special joy of seeing a friend from youth unexpectedly—a welcome event no matter when or where. But at the same time, the Count was confronted by the irrefutable facts of Mishka’s appearance. Thirty pounds lighter, dressed in a threadbare coat, and dragging one leg behind him, it was no wonder that Emile had mistaken him for a beggar. Naturally, the Count had watched in recent years as age began to take its toll on the Triumvirate. He had noticed the occasional tremor in Andrey’s left hand and the creeping deafness in Emile’s right ear. He had noticed the graying of the former’s hair and the thinning of the latter’s. But with Mishka, here were not simply the ravages of time. Here were the marks of one man upon another, of an era upon its offspring.
Perhaps most striking was Mishka’s smile. In their youth, Mishka had been almost earnest to a fault and never spoke with irony. Yet when he said “bread and salt” he wore the smile of the sarcast.
“It is so good to see you, Mishka,” the Count said after a moment. “I can’t tell you how relieved I was when you sent word of your release. When did you return to Moscow?”
“I haven’t,” his friend replied with his new smile.
Upon the dutiful completion of his eight years, Mishka explained, he had been rewarded with a Minus Six. To visit Moscow, he had borrowed a passport from a sympathetic soul with a passing likeness.
“Is that wise?” the Count asked with concern.
Mishka shrugged.
“I arrived this morning from Yavas by train. I’ll be returning to Yavas later tonight.”
“Yavas . . . Where is that?”
“Somewhere between where the wheat is grown and the bread is eaten.”
“Are you teaching . . . ?” the Count asked tentatively.
“No,” Mishka said with a shake of the head. “We are not encouraged to teach. But then, we are not encouraged to read or write. We are hardly encouraged to eat.”
So it was that Mishka began to describe his life in Yavas; and as he did so, he used the first person plural so often that the Count assumed he must have moved there with a fellow inmate from the camps. But slowly, it became clear that in saying “we” Mishka had no one person in mind. For Mishka, “we” encompassed all his fellow prisoners—and not simply those he had known in Arkhangelsk. It encompassed the million or more who had toiled on the Solovetsky Islands or in Sevvostlag or on the White Sea Canal, whether they had toiled there in the twenties, or the thirties, or toiled there still.*
Mishka was silent.
“It is funny what comes to one at night,” he said after a moment. “After dropping our shovels and trudging to the barracks, we would swallow our gruel and pull our blankets to our chins eager for sleep. But inevitably some unexpected thought would come, some uninvited memory that wanted to be sized up, measured, and weighed. And many was the night I found myself thinking of that German you encountered in the bar—the one who claimed that vodka was Russia’s only contribution to the West and who challenged anyone to name three more.”
“I remember it well. I borrowed your observation that Tolstoy and Chekhov were the bookends of narrative, invoked Tchaikovsky, and then ordered the brute a serving of caviar.”
“That’s it.”
Mishka shook his head and then looked at the Count with his smile.
“One night some years ago, I thought of another, Sasha.”
“A fifth contribution?”
“Yes, a fifth contribution: The burning of Moscow.”
The Count was taken aback.
“You mean in 1812?”
Mishka nodded.
“Can you imagine the expression on Napoleon’s face when he was roused at two in the morning and stepped from his brand-new bedroom in the Kremlin only to find that the city he’d claimed just hours before had been set on fire by its citizens?” Mishka gave a quiet laugh. “Yes, the burning of Moscow was especially Russian, my friend. Of that there can be no doubt. Because it was not a discrete event; it was the form of an event. One example plucked from a history of thousands. For as a people, we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created.”
Perhaps because of his limp, Mishka no longer got up to pace the room; but the Count could see that he was pacing it with his eyes.
“Every country has its grand canvas, Sasha—the so-called masterpiece that hangs in a hallowed hall and sums up the national identity for generations to come. For the French it is Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People; for the Dutch, Rembrandt’s Night Watch; for the Americans, Washington Crossing the Delaware; and for we Russians? It is a pair of twins: Nikolai Ge’s Peter the Great Interrogating Alexei and Ilya Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son. For
decades, these two paintings have been revered by our public, praised by our critics, and sketched by our diligent students of the arts. And yet, what do they depict? In one, our most enlightened Tsar studies his oldest son with suspicion, on the verge of condemning him to death; while in the other, unflinching Ivan cradles the body of his eldest, having already exacted the supreme measure with a swing of the scepter to the head.
“Our churches, known the world over for their idiosyncratic beauty, for their brightly colored spires and improbable cupolas, we raze one by one. We topple the statues of old heroes and strip their names from the streets, as if they had been figments of our imagination. Our poets we either silence, or wait patiently for them to silence themselves.”
Mishka picked up his fork, stuck it in the untouched veal, and raised it in the air.
“Do you know that back in ’30, when they announced the mandatory collectivization of farming, half our peasants slaughtered their own livestock rather than give them up to the cooperatives? Fourteen million head of cattle left to the buzzards and flies.”
He gently returned the cut of meat to its plate, as if in a show of respect.
“How can we understand this, Sasha? What is it about a nation that would foster a willingness in its people to destroy their own artworks, ravage their own cities, and kill their own progeny without compunction? To foreigners it must seem shocking. It must seem as if we Russians have such a brutish indifference that nothing, not even the fruit of our loins, is viewed as sacrosanct. And how that notion pained me. How it unsettled me. Exhausted as I was, the very thought of it could keep me tossing until dawn.
“Then one night, he came to me in a dream, Sasha: Mayakovsky himself. He quoted some lines of verse—beautiful, haunting lines that I had never heard before—about the bark of a birch tree glinting in the winter sun. Then he loaded his revolver with an exclamation point and put the barrel to his chest. When I awoke, I suddenly understood that this propensity for self-destruction was not an abomination, not something to be ashamed of or abhorred; it was our greatest strength. We turn the gun on ourselves not because we are more indifferent and less cultured than the British, or the French, or the Italians. On the contrary. We are prepared to destroy that which we have created because we believe more than any of them in the power of the picture, the poem, the prayer, or the person.”
Mishka shook his head.
“Mark my words, my friend: We have not burned Moscow to the ground for the last time.”
As in the past, Mishka talked with a fevered intensity, almost as if he were making his points to himself. But once he had spoken his piece, he looked across the table and saw the distressed expression on the Count’s face. Then he suddenly laughed in a heartfelt manner, without bitterness or irony, and reached across the table to squeeze his old friend’s forearm.
“I see that I have unsettled you, Sasha, with my talk of revolvers. But don’t worry. I am not through yet. I still have something to attend to. In fact, that is why I slipped into the city: to visit the library for a little project that I am working on. . . .”
With a sense of relief, the Count recognized the old spark in Mishka’s eye—the one that inevitably flashed before he threw himself headlong into a scrape.
“Is it a work of poetry?” asked the Count.
“Poetry? Yes, in a manner of speaking, I suppose it is. . . . But it is also something more fundamental. Something that can be built upon. I’m not ready to share it just yet; but when I am, you shall be the first.”
By the time they came out of the office and the Count led Mishka to the back stair, the kitchen was in full swing. On the counter were onions being minced, beets being sliced, hens being plucked. From the stove where six pots simmered, Emile signaled to the Count that he should wait a moment. After wiping his hands on his apron, he came to the door with some food wrapped in brown paper.
“A little something for your journey, Mikhail Fyodorovich.”
Mishka looked taken aback by the offering, and for a moment the Count thought his friend was going to refuse it on principle. But Mishka thanked the chef and took the parcel in hand.
Andrey was there too now, to express his pleasure at finally meeting Mishka and to wish him well.
Having returned the sentiments, Mishka opened the door to the stairwell, but then paused. Having taken a moment to look over the kitchen with all of its activity and abundance, to look from gentle Andrey to heartfelt Emile, he turned to the Count.
“Who would have imagined,” he said, “when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.”
At 7:30 that evening, when the Count entered the Yellow Room, Osip tamped out his cigarette and leapt from his chair.
“Ah! Here you are, Alexander. I thought a quick trip to San Franchesko was in order. We haven’t been back in a year. Get the lights, will you?”
As Osip hurried to the back of the room, the Count absently took his seat at the table for two and put his napkin in his lap.
. . .
“Alexander . . .”
The Count looked back.
“Yes?”
“The lights.”
“Oh. My apologies.”
The Count rose, switched off the lights, and lingered by the wall.
. . .
“Are you going to take your seat again?” asked Osip.
“Ah, yes. Of course.”
The Count returned to the table and sat in Osip’s chair.
. . .
“Is everything all right, my friend? You do not seem yourself. . . .”
“No, no,” assured the Count with a smile. “Everything is excellent. Please proceed.”
Osip waited for a moment to be sure, then he threw the switch and hurried back to the table as the grand old shadows began to flicker on the dining room wall.
Two months after what Osip liked to refer to as “The de Tocqueville Affair,” he had appeared in the Yellow Room with a projector and an uncensored print of A Day at the Races. From that night onward, the two men left the tomes of history on the bookshelves where they belonged and advanced their studies of America through the medium of film.
Osip Ivanovich had actually mastered the English language right down to the past perfect progressive as early as 1939. But American movies still deserved their careful consideration, he argued, not simply as windows into Western culture, but as unprecedented mechanisms of class repression. For with cinema, the Yanks had apparently discovered how to placate the entire working class at the cost of a nickel a week.
“Just look at their Depression,” he said. “From beginning to end it lasted ten years. An entire decade in which the Proletariat was left to fend for itself, scrounging in alleys and begging at chapel doors. If ever there had been a time for the American worker to cast off the yoke, surely that was it. But did they join their brothers-in-arms? Did they shoulder their axes and splinter the doors of the mansions? Not even for an afternoon. Instead, they shuffled to the nearest movie house, where the latest fantasy was dangled before them like a pocket watch at the end of a chain. Yes, Alexander, it behooves us to study this phenomenon with the utmost diligence and care.”
So study it they did.
And the Count could confirm that Osip approached the task with the utmost diligence and care, for when a movie was playing he could hardly sit still. During the westerns, when a fight broke out in a saloon, he would clench his fists, fend off a blow, give a left to the gut, and an uppercut to the jaw. When Fyodor Astaire danced with Gingyr Rogers, his fingers would open wide and flutter about his waist while his feet shuffled back and forth on the carpet. And when Bela Lugosi emerged from the shadows, Osip leapt from his seat and nearly fell to the floor. Then, as the credits rolled, he would shake his head with an expression of moral disappointment.
“Shameful,” he woul
d say.
“Scandalous.”
“Insidious!”
Like the seasoned scientist, Osip would coolly dissect whatever they had just observed. The musicals were “pastries designed to placate the impoverished with daydreams of unattainable bliss.” The horror movies were “sleights of hand in which the fears of the workingman have been displaced by those of pretty girls.” The vaudevillian comedies were “preposterous narcotics.” And the westerns? They were the most devious propaganda of all: fables in which evil is represented by collectives who rustle and rob; while virtue is a lone individual who risks his life to defend the sanctity of someone else’s private property. In sum? “Hollywood is the single most dangerous force in the history of class struggle.”
Or so Osip argued, until he discovered the genre of American movies that would come to be known as film noir. With rapt attention he watched the likes of This Gun for Hire, Shadow of a Doubt, and Double Indemnity.
“What is this?” he would ask of no one in particular. “Who is making these movies? Under what auspices?”
From one to the next, they seemed to depict an America in which corruption and cruelty lounged on the couch; in which justice was a beggar and kindness a fool; in which loyalties were fashioned from paper, and self-interest was fashioned from steel. In other words, they provided an unflinching portrayal of Capitalism as it actually was.
“How did this happen, Alexander? Why do they allow these movies to be made? Do they not realize they are hammering a wedge beneath their own foundation stones?”
But no single star of the genre captivated Osip more than Humphrey Bogart. With the exception of Casablanca (which Osip viewed as a woman’s movie), they had watched all of Bogart’s films at least twice. Whether in The Petrified Forest, To Have and Have Not, or, especially, The Maltese Falcon, Osip appreciated the actor’s hardened looks, his sardonic remarks, his general lack of sentiment. “You notice how in the first act he always seems so removed and indifferent; but once his indignation is roused, Alexander, there is no one more willing to do what is necessary—to act clear-eyed, quick, and without compunction. Here truly is a Man of Intent.”