Амор Тоулз - A Gentleman in Moscow

Having paid their respects to the Countess, Mishka and Alexander would head out the terrace doors in search of Helena. Sometimes they would find her under the pergola overlooking the gardens and sometimes under the elm tree at the bend in the river; but wherever they found her, at the sound of their approach she would look up from her book and offer a welcoming smile—not unlike the one captured in this portrait on the wall.

With Helena, Alexander was always his most outlandish, claiming as he collapsed on the grass that they had just met Tolstoy on the train; or that he had decided after careful consideration to join a monastery and take an eternal vow of silence. Immediately. Without a moment’s delay. Or, as soon as they’d had lunch.

“Do you really think that silence would suit you?” Helena would ask.

“Like deafness suited Beethoven.”

Then, after casting a friendly glance at Mishka, Helena would laugh, look back at her brother, and ask, “What is to become of you, Alexander?”

They all asked that question of the Count. Helena, the Countess, the Grand Duke. What is to become of you, Alexander? But they asked it in three different ways.

For the Grand Duke the question was, of course, rhetorical. Confronted with a report of a failed semester or an unpaid bill, the Grand Duke would summon his godson to his library, read the letter aloud, drop it on his desk, and ask the question without expectation of a response, knowing full well that the answer was imprisonment, bankruptcy, or both.

For his grandmother, who tended to ask the question when the Count had said something particularly scandalous, What is to become of you , Alexander? was an admission to all in earshot that here was her favorite, so you needn’t expect her to rein in his behavior.

But when Helena asked the question, she did so as if the answer were a genuine mystery. As if, despite her brother’s erratic studies and carefree ways, the world had yet to catch a glimpse of the man he was bound to become.

“What is to become of you, Alexander?” Helena would ask.

“That is the question,” the Count would agree. And then he would lie back in the grass and gaze thoughtfully at the figure eights of the fireflies as if he too were pondering this essential enigma.

Yes, those were Elysian days, thought Mishka. But like Elysium they belonged in the past. They belonged with waistcoats and corsets, with quadrilles and bezique, with the ownership of souls, the payment of tribute, and the stacking of icons in the corner. They belonged in an age of elaborate artifice and base superstition—when a lucky few dined on cutlets of veal and the majority endured in ignorance.

They belong with those, thought Mishka, as he turned his gaze from Helena’s portrait to the nineteenth-century novels that lined the familiar little bookcase. All those adventures and romances spun in the fanciful styles that his old friend so admired. But here, on top of the bookcase in its long narrow frame, was a genuine artifact—the black-and-white photograph of the men who signed the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War.

Mishka picked up the picture and surveyed the visages, sober and assured. Standing in formal configuration, the Japanese and Russian delegates all wore high white collars, moustaches, bow ties, and expressions suggestive of some grand sense of accomplishment—having just concluded with the stroke of a pen the war that their likes had started in the first place. And there, just left of center, stood the Grand Duke himself: special envoy from the court of the Tsar.

It was at Idlehour in 1910 that Mishka first witnessed the Rostovs’ long-standing tradition—of gathering on the tenth anniversary of a family member’s death to raise a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Two days after the Count and he had arrived for their holiday, the guests began to appear. By four in the afternoon the drive was lined with surreys, britzkas, droshkies, and gigs from Moscow and St. Petersburg and all the neighboring districts. And when the family gathered in the hall at five, it was the Grand Duke who was given the honor of raising the first glass in memory of the Count’s parents, who had died just hours apart.

What a formidable figure the Grand Duke had been. Seemingly born in full dress, he rarely sat, never drank, and died on the back of his horse on the twenty-first of September 1912—ten years ago to the day.

“He was a right old soul.”

Mishka turned to find the Count standing behind him with two Bordeaux glasses in hand. “A man of another time,” Mishka said, not without reverence, returning the picture to its shelf. Then the bottle was opened, the wine was poured, and the two old friends raised their glasses on high.

“What a group we have gathered, Sasha. . . .”

Having toasted the Grand Duke and reminisced of days gone by, the old friends shifted their attention to the upcoming congress of RAPP, which turned out to be the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.

“It will be an extraordinary assembly. An extraordinary assembly at an extraordinary time. Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Mayakovksy, Mandelstam—the sort of writers who not long ago couldn’t have dined at the same table without fear of arrest—will all be there. Yes, over the years they have championed their differing styles, but in June they will gather to forge novaya poeziya , a new poetry. One that is universal, Sasha. One that doesn’t hesitate and needn’t kowtow. One that has the human spirit as its subject and the future as its muse!”

Just before uttering his first One that , Mishka had leapt to his feet and now paced the Count’s little study from corner to corner, as if formulating his ideas in the privacy of his own apartment.

“You remember, no doubt, that work by the Dane Thomsen. . . .”

(The Count did not remember that work by the Dane Thomsen. But he would no sooner have interrupted Mikhail on his feet than Vivaldi on his violin.)

“As an archeologist, when Thomsen divided the ages of man into Stone, Bronze, and Iron, naturally enough, he did so in accordance with the physical tools that defined each epoch. But what of man’s spiritual development? What of his moral development? I tell you, they progressed along the very same lines. In the Stone Age, the ideas in the caveman’s head were as blunt as the club in his hand; they were as rough as the flint from which he struck a spark. In the Age of Bronze, when a canny few discovered the science of metallurgy, how long did it take for them to fashion coins, crowns, and swords? That unholy trinity to which the common man was enslaved for the next one thousand years.”

Mishka paused to consider the ceiling.

“Then came the Age of Iron—and with it the steam engine, the printing press, and the gun. Here was a very different trinity, indeed. For while these tools had been developed by the Bourgeoisie to further their own interests, it was through the engine, the press, and the pistol that the Proletariat began to free itself from labor, ignorance, and tyranny.”

Mishka shook his head in appreciation of either history’s trajectory or his turns of phrase.

“Well, my friend, I think we can agree that a new age has begun: the Age of Steel. We now have the ability to build power stations, skyscrapers, airplanes.”

Mishka turned to the Count.

“You have seen the Shukhov Radio Tower?”

The Count had not.

“What a thing of beauty, Sasha. A two-hundred-foot structure of spiraling steel from which we can broadcast the latest news and intelligence—and, yes, the sentimental strains of your Tchaikovsky—into the home of every citizen within a hundred miles. And with each one of these advances, the Russian morality has been keeping step. In our time, we may witness the end of ignorance, the end of oppression, and the advent of the brotherhood of man.”