Амор Тоулз: A Gentleman in Moscow

On the copper flashing of the sill . . .

“Ah, yes,” acknowledged the Count. “I suppose there’s to be none of that.”

If the Count were to close his eyes and roll to the wall, was it possible that he could return to his bench just in time to remark, What a lovely coincidence , when the three young ladies from Filippov’s happened by?

Without a doubt. But imagining what might happen if one’s circumstances were different was the only sure route to madness.

Sitting upright, the Count put the soles of his feet squarely on the uncarpeted floor and gave the compass points of his moustaches a twist.

On the Grand Duke’s desk stood a champagne flute and a brandy snifter. With the lean uprightness of the former looking down upon the squat rotundity of the latter, one could not help but think of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on the plains of the Sierra Morena. Or of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck in the shadows of Sherwood Forest. Or of Prince Hal and Falstaff before the gates of—

But there was a knock at the door.

The Count stood and hit his head against the ceiling.

“One moment,” he called, rubbing his crown and rummaging through his trunk for a robe. Once suitably attired, he opened the door to find an industrious young fellow standing in the hall with the Count’s daily breakfast—a pot of coffee, two biscuits, and a piece of fruit (today a plum).

“Well done, Yuri! Come in, come in. Set it there, set it there.”

As Yuri arranged the breakfast on top of the trunk, the Count sat at the Grand Duke’s desk and penned a quick note to one Konstantin Konstantinovich of Durnovksi Street.

“Would you be so kind as to have this delivered, my boy?”

Never one to shirk, Yuri happily took the note, promised to relay it by hand, and accepted a tip with a bow. Then at the threshold he paused.

“Shall I . . . leave the door ajar?”

It was a reasonable question. For the room was rather stuffy, and on the sixth floor there was hardly much risk of one’s privacy being compromised.

“Please do.”

As Yuri’s steps sounded down the belfry, the Count placed his napkin in his lap, poured a cup of coffee, and graced it with a few drops of cream. Taking his first sip, he noted with satisfaction that young Yuri must have sprinted up the extra three flights of stairs because the coffee was not one degree colder than usual.

But while he was liberating a wedge of the plum from its pit with his paring knife, the Count happened to note a silvery shadow, as seemingly insubstantial as a puff of smoke, slipping behind his trunk. Leaning to his side in order to peer around a high-back chair, the Count discovered that this will-o’-the-wisp was none other than the Metropol’s lobby cat. A one-eyed Russian blue who let nothing within the hotel’s walls escape his notice, he had apparently come to the attic to review the Count’s new quarters for himself. Stepping from the shadows, he leapt from the floor to the Ambassador, from the Ambassador to the side table, and from the side table to the top of the three-legged bureau, without making a sound. Having achieved this vantage point, he gave the room a good hard look then shook his head in feline disappointment.

“Yes,” said the Count after completing his own survey. “I see what you mean.”

The crowded confusion of furniture gave the Count’s little domain the look of a consignment shop in the Arbat. In a room this size, he could have made do with a single high-back chair, a single bedside table, and a single lamp. He could have made do without his grandmother’s Limoges altogether.

And the books? All of them! he had said with such bravado. But in the light of day, he had to admit that this instruction had been prompted less by good sense than by a rather childish impulse to impress the bellhops and put the guards in their place. For the books were not even to the Count’s taste. His personal library of majestic narratives by the likes of Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy had been left behind in Paris. The books the bellhops had lugged to the attic had been his father’s and, devoted as they were to studies of rational philosophy and the science of modern agriculture, each promised heft and threatened impenetrability.

Without a doubt, one more winnowing was called for.

So, having broken his fast, bathed, and dressed, the Count went about the business. First, he tried the door of the adjacent room. It must have been blocked on the inside by something quite heavy, for under the force of the Count’s shoulder it barely budged. In the next three rooms, the Count found flotsam and jetsam from floor to ceiling. But in the last room, amidst tiles of slate and strips of flashing, an ample space had been cleared around a dented old samovar where some roofers had once taken their tea.

Back in his room, the Count hung a few jackets in his closet. He unpacked some trousers and shirts into the back right corner of his bureau (to ensure that the three-legged beast wouldn’t topple). Down the hall he dragged his trunk, half of his furniture, and all of his father’s books but one. Thus, within an hour he had reduced his room to its essentials: a desk and chair, a bed and bedside table, a high-back chair for guests, and a ten-foot passage just wide enough for a gentleman to circumambulate in reflection.

With satisfaction the Count looked toward the cat (who was busy licking the cream from his paws in the comfort of the high-back chair). “What say you now, you old pirate?”

Then he sat at his desk and picked up the one volume that he had retained. It must have been a decade since the Count had first promised himself to read this work of universal acclaim that his father had held so dear. And yet, every time he had pointed his finger at his calendar and declared: This is the month in which I shall devote myself tothe Essays of Michel de Montaigne! some devilish aspect of life had poked its head in the door. From an unexpected corner had come an expression of romantic interest, which could not in good conscience be ignored. Or his banker had called. Or the circus had come to town.

Life will entice, after all.

But here, at last, circumstance had conspired not to distract the Count, but to present him with the time and solitude necessary to give the book its due. So, with the volume firmly in hand, he put one foot on the corner of the bureau, pushed back until his chair was balanced on its two rear legs, and began to read:

By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End

The commonest way of softening the hearts of those we have offended, when, vengeance in hand, they hold us at their mercy, is by submission to move them to commiseration and pity. However, audacity and steadfastness—entirely contrary means—have sometimes served to produce the same effect. . . .

It was at Idlehour that the Count had first formed the habit of reading in a tilted chair.

On those glorious spring days when the orchards were in bloom and the foxtails bobbed above the grass, he and Helena would seek out a pleasant corner to while away the hours. One day it might be under the pergola on the upper patio and the next beside the great elm that overlooked the bend in the river. As Helena embroidered, the Count would tilt back his chair—balancing himself by resting a foot lightly on the lip of the fountain or the trunk of the tree—in order to read aloud from her favorite works of Pushkin. And hour upon hour, stanza upon stanza, her little needle would go round and round.

“Where are all those stitches headed?” he would occasionally demand at the end of a page. “Surely, by now, every pillow in the household has been graced by a butterfly and every handkerchief by a monogram.” And when he accused her of unwinding her stitches at night like Penelope just so that he would have to read her another volume of verse, she would smile inscrutably.