Амор Тоулз - A Gentleman in Moscow

The advantages of having such a power can be rattled off for you by any child of ten. Whether slipping past dragons, eavesdropping on intriguers, and sneaking into treasuries, or plucking a pie from the pantry, knocking the cap off a constable, and lighting the schoolmaster’s coattails on fire, suffice it to say that a thousand tales have been told in acknowledgment of invisibility’s bounty.

But the tale that has less often been told is the one in which the spell of invisibility is cast upon the unknowing hero in the form of a curse. Having lived his life in the heat of battle, at the crux of conversation, and in the twentieth row with its privileged view of the ladies in the loges—that is, in the very thick of things—suddenly, he finds himself invisible to friend and foe alike. And the spell that had been cast over the Count by Anna Urbanova in 1923 was of this very sort.

On that fateful night when the Count had dined with the enchantress in her suite, she presumably had the power to render him invisible on the spot. Instead, to toy with his peace of mind, she had cast her spell to manifest itself over the course of a year, bit by bit.

In the weeks that followed, the Count suddenly noticed that he was disappearing from view for a few minutes at a time. He could be dining in the Piazza when a couple would approach his table with the clear intention of taking it as their own; or he could be standing near the front desk when a harried guest would nearly knock him off his feet. By winter, those prone to greet him with a wave or a smile often failed to see him until he was ten feet away. And now a year later? When he crossed the lobby, it often took a full minute for his closest friends to notice that he was standing right in front of them.

“Oh,” said Vasily, returning the telephone receiver to its cradle. “Excuse me, Count Rostov. I didn’t see you there. How can I be of service?”

The Count gave the concierge’s desk a delicate tap.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where Nina is?”

In asking Vasily for Nina’s whereabouts, the Count was not making a passing inquiry of the first chap he happened to meet; for Vasily had an uncanny awareness of where people were at any given time.

“She is in the card room, I believe.”

“Ah,” said the Count with a knowing smile.

Turning about, he walked down the hall to the card room and quietly opened the door, assuming he would find four middle-aged ladies exchanging cookies and profanities over tricks of whist—as an attentive spirit held her breath in a cupboard. Instead, he found the object of his search sitting at the card table alone. With two stacks of paper in front of her and a pencil in hand, she appeared the very model of scholastic enthusiasm. The pencil was moving so brightly it looked like an honor guard—parading across the page with its head held high then pivoting at the margin to make the quick march back.

“Greetings, my friend.”

“Hello, Your Countship,” Nina replied without looking up from her work.

“Would you like to join me for an excursion before dinner? I was thinking of visiting the switchboard.”

“I’m afraid I can’t at the moment.”

The Count claimed the seat opposite Nina as she put a completed sheet of paper on one stack and took a fresh sheet of paper from the other. Out of habit, he picked up the deck of cards that sat on the corner of the table and shuffled it twice.

“Would you like to see a trick?”

“Some other time, perhaps.”

Neatening the deck, the Count replaced it on the table. Then he picked up the topmost sheet from the stack of completed papers. In carefully aligned columns, he found all of the cardinal numbers from 1,100 to 1,199. In accordance with some unknown system, thirteen of the numbers had been circled in red.

Needless to say, the Count was intrigued.

“What are we up to here?”

“Mathematics.”

“I see you are addressing the subject with vigor.”

“Professor Lisitsky says that one must wrestle with mathematics the way that one wrestles with a bear.”

“Is that so? And which species of bear are we wrestling with today? More polar than panda, I suspect.”

Nina looked up at the Count with her glint-extinguishing stare.

The Count cleared his throat and adopted a more serious tone.

“I take it the project involves some subset of integers. . . .”

“Do you know what a prime number is?”

“As in two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen . . . ?”

“Exactly,” said Nina. “Those whole numbers that are indivisible by any number other than one and itself.”

Given the dramatic manner with which she had said indivisible , one might have imagined Nina was speaking of the impregnability of a fortress.

“At any rate,” she said, “I am making a list of them all.”

“Them all!”

“It is a Sisyphean task,” she admitted (though with an enthusiasm that prompted one to wonder if she had a complete command of the term’s etymology).

She pointed to the already inscribed pages on the table.

“The list of prime numbers begins with two, three, and five, as you say. But prime numbers grow increasingly rare the larger they become. So it is one thing to land upon a seven or eleven. But to land upon a one thousand and nine is another thing altogether. Can you imagine identifying a prime number in the hundreds of thousands . . . ? In the millions . . . ?”

Nina looked off in the distance, as if she could see that largest and most impregnable of all the numbers situated on its rocky promontory where for thousands of years it had withstood the onslaughts of fire-breathing dragons and barbarian hordes. Then she resumed her work.

The Count took another look at the sheet in his hands with a heightened sense of respect. After all, an educated man should admire any course of study no matter how arcane, if it be pursued with curiosity and devotion.

“Here,” he said in the tone of one chipping in. “This number is not prime.”

Nina looked up with an expression of disbelief.

“Which number?”

He laid the paper in front of her and tapped a figure circled in red.

“One thousand one hundred and seventy-three.”

“How do you know it isn’t prime?”

“If a number’s individual digits sum to a number that is divisible by three, then it too is divisible by three.”

Confronted with this extraordinary fact, Nina replied:

“ Mon Dieu .”

Then she leaned back in her chair and appraised the Count in a manner acknowledging that she may have underestimated him.

Now, when a man has been underestimated by a friend, he has some cause for taking offense—since it is our friends who should overestimate our capacities. They should have an exaggerated opinion of our moral fortitude, our aesthetic sensibilities, and our intellectual scope. Why, they should practically imagine us leaping through a window in the nick of time with the works of Shakespeare in one hand and a pistol in the other! But in this particular instance, the Count had to admit he had little grounds for taking offense. Because, for the life of him, he could not imagine from what dark corner of his adolescent mind this extraordinary fact had materialized.

“Well,” said Nina, pointing to the stack of completed papers in front of the Count. “You’d better hand me those.”

Leaving Nina to her work, the Count consoled himself that he was to meet Mishka for dinner in fifteen minutes; and besides, he had yet to read the daily papers. So, returning to the lobby, he picked up a copy of Pravda from the coffee table and made himself comfortable in the chair between the potted palms.

After scanning the headlines, the Count delved into an article on a Moscow manufacturing plant that was exceeding its quotas. He then read a sketch on various improvements in Russian village life. When he shifted his attention to a report on the grateful schoolchildren of Kazan, he couldn’t help but remark on the repetitiveness of the new journalistic style. Not only did the Bolsheviks seem to dwell on the same sort of subject matter day to day, they celebrated such a narrow set of views with such a limited vocabulary that one inevitably felt as if one had read it all before.