Амор Тоулз - A Gentleman in Moscow

As if hearing the Count’s thoughts, this Secretary suddenly rapped his gavel on the tabletop—calling to order the Second Meeting of the First Congress of the Moscow Branch of the All-Russian Union of Railway Workers. The doors were closed, seats were taken, Nina held her breath, and the Assembly was underway.

In the first fifteen minutes, six different administrative matters were raised and dispensed with in quick succession—leading one to imagine that this particular Assembly might actually be concluded before one’s back gave out. But next on the docket was a subject that proved more contentious. It was a proposal to amend the Union’s charter—or more precisely, the seventh sentence of the second paragraph, which the Secretary now read in full.

Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence—one that was on intimate terms with the comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard. For its apparent purpose was to catalog without fear or hesitation every single virtue of the Union including but not limited to: its unwavering shoulders, its undaunted steps, the clanging of its hammers in summer, the shoveling of its coal in winter, and the hopeful sound of its whistles in the night. But in the concluding phrases of this impressive sentence, at the very culmination as it were, was the observation that through their tireless efforts, the Railway Workers of Russia “facilitate communication and trade across the provinces . ”

After all the buildup, it was a bit of an anticlimax, conceded the Count.

But the objection being raised was not due to the phrase’s overall lack of verve; rather it was due to the word facilitate . Specifically, the verb had been accused of being so tepid and prim that it failed to do justice to the labors of the men in the room.

“We’re not helping a lady put on her jacket!” someone shouted from the rear.

“Or painting her nails!”

“Hear, hear!”

Well, fair enough.

But what verb would better express the work of the Union? What verb would do justice to the sweaty devotion of the engineers, the unflagging vigilance of the brakemen, and the rippling muscles of those who laid the tracks?

A flurry of proposals came from the floor:

To spur.

To propel.

To empower.

The merits and limitations of each of these alternatives were hotly debated. There were three-pointed arguments counted out on fingertips, rhetorical questions, emotional summations, and back-row catcalls punctuated by the banging of the gavel—as the ambient temperature of the balcony rose to 96˚.

Then, just as the Count began to sense some risk of riot, a suggestion came from a shy-looking lad in the tenth row that perhaps to facilitate could be replaced with to enable and ensure . This pairing, the lad explained (while his cheeks grew red as a raspberry), might encompass not only the laying of rails and the manning of engines, but the ongoing maintenance of the system.

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Laying, manning, and maintenance.”

“To enable and ensure.”

With hearty applause from every corner, the lad’s proposal seemed to be barreling toward adoption as quickly and dependably as one of the Union’s locomotives barrels across the steppe. But just as it was nearing its terminus, a rather scrawny fellow in the second row stood. Such a wisp of a man was he that one wondered how he had secured a position in the Union in the first place. Once he had the attention of the room, this back-office clerk or accountant, this All-Russian pusher of pencils, asserted in a voice as tepid and prim as the word facilitate : “Poetic concision demands the avoidance of a pair of words when a single word will suffice.”

“What’s that?”

“What did he say?”

Several stood up with the intention of grabbing him by the collar and dragging him from the room. But before they could get their hands on him, a burly fellow in the fifth row spoke without rising to his feet.

“With all due respect to poetic concision , the male of the species was endowed with a pair when a single might have sufficed.”

Thunderous applause!

The resolution to replace facilitate with enable and ensure was adopted by a unanimous show of hands and a universal stomping of feet. While in the balcony, a private acknowledgment was made that perhaps political discourse wasn’t always so dull, after all.

At the conclusion of the Assembly, when the Count and Nina had crawled off the balcony and back into the hallway, the Count felt quite pleased with himself. He felt pleased with his little parallels between the respect-payers, back-patters, and latecomers of the present and those of the past. He also had a whole host of entertaining alternatives to the phrase enable and ensure ranging from bustle and trundle to carom and careen . And when Nina inevitably asked what he thought of the day’s debate, he was going to reply that it was positively Shakespearean. Shakespearean, that is, in the manner of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing . Much ado about nothing, indeed. Or so the Count intended to quip.

But by a stroke of luck, he didn’t get the chance. For when Nina asked what he thought of the Assembly, unable to wait even a moment for his impressions, she barreled ahead with her own.

“Wasn’t that fascinating? Wasn’t it fantastic? Have you ever been on a train?”

“The train is my preferred means of travel,” said the Count, somewhat startled.

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Mine as well. And when you have traveled by train, have you watched the landscape rolling past the windows, and listened to the conversations of your fellow passengers, and drifted off to the clacking of the wheels?”

“I have done all of those things.”

“Exactly. But have you ever, for even one moment, considered how the coal finds its way into the locomotive’s engine? Have you considered in the middle of a forest or on a rocky slope how the tracks came to be there in the first place?”

The Count paused. Considered. Imagined. Admitted.

“Never.”

She gave him a knowing look.

“Isn’t it astounding.”

And when seen in that light, who could disagree?

A few minutes later, the Count was knocking on the office door of Marina, the shy delight, while holding a folded newpaper at the back of his pants.

Not long ago, the Count recalled, there had been three seamstresses at work in this room, each before an American-made sewing machine. Like the three Fates, together they had spun and measured and cut—taking in gowns, raising hems, and letting out pants with all of the fateful implications of their predecessors. In the aftermath of the Revolution, all three had been discharged; the silenced sewing machines had, presumably, become the property of the People; and the room? It had been idled like Fatima’s flower shop. For those had not been years for the taking in of gowns or the raising of hems any more than they had been for the throwing of bouquets or the sporting of boutonnieres.

Then in 1921, confronted with a backlog of fraying sheets, tattered curtains, and torn napkins—which no one had any intention of replacing—the hotel had promoted Marina, and once again a trustworthy seam was being sewn within the walls of the hotel.

“Ah, Marina,” said the Count when she opened the door with needle and thread in hand. “How good to find you stitching away in the stitching room.”

Marina looked at the Count with a touch of suspicion.

“What else would I be doing?”

“Quite so,” said the Count. Then offering his most endearing smile, he turned ninety degrees, briefly lifted the newspaper, and humbly asked for her assistance.