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.
“Didn’t I repair a pair of your pants just last week?”
“I was spying with Nina again,” he explained. “From the balcony of the ballroom.”
The seamstress looked at the Count with one eye expressing consternation and the other disbelief.
“If you’re going to clamber about with a nine-year-old girl, then why do you insist upon wearing pants like those?”
The Count was a little taken aback by the seamstress’s tone.
“When I dressed this morning, it was not my plan to go clambering about. But either way, I’ll have you know that these pants were custom-made on Savile Row.”
“Yes. Custom-made for sitting in a sitting room, or drawing in a drawing room.”
“But I have never drawn in a drawing room.”
“Which is just as well, since you probably would have spilled the ink.”
As Marina seemed neither particularly shy nor delightful that day, the Count offered her the bow of one who would now be on his way.
“Oh, enough of that,” she said. “Behind the screen and off with your pants.”
Without another word the Count went behind the dressing screen, stripped to his shorts, and handed Marina his pants. From the ensuing silence, he could tell that she had found her spool, licked her thread, and was carefully directing it through the eye of the needle.
“Well,” she said, “you might as well tell me what you were doing up in the balcony.”
So, as Marina began stitching the Count’s pants—the laying of locomotive tracks writ small, if you will—he described the Assembly and all his various impressions. Then, almost wistfully, he noted that even as he was seeing the intractability of social conventions and the human tendency to take itself too seriously, Nina was becoming enthralled by the Assembly’s energy and its sense of purpose.
“And what is wrong with that?”
“Nothing, I suppose,” admitted the Count. “It’s just that only a few weeks ago, she was inviting me to tea in order to ask about the rules of being a princess. . . .”
Handing the Count’s pants back over the screen, Marina shook her head like one who must now deliver a hard truth to an innocent of mind.
“All little girls outgrow their interest in princesses,” she said. “In fact, they outgrow their interest in princesses faster than little boys outgrow their interest in clambering about.”
When the Count left Marina’s office with a thanks, a wave, and the seat of his pants intact, he practically fell over one of the bellhops, who happened to be standing outside the door.
“Excuse me, Count Rostov!”
“That’s quite all right, Petya. No need to apologize. It was my fault, I’m sure.”
The poor lad, who looked positively wide-eyed, hadn’t even noticed that he’d lost his cap. So, picking it up from the floor and placing it back on the bellhop’s head, the Count wished him God’s speed in his business and turned to go.
“But my business is with you.”
“With me?”
“It is Mr. Halecki. He wishes to have a word. In his office.”
No wonder the lad was wide-eyed. Not only had the Count never been summoned by Mr. Halecki, in the four years that he had been in residence in the Metropol he had not seen the manager on more than five occasions.
For Jozef Halecki was one of those rare executives who had mastered the secret of delegation—that is, having assigned the oversight of the hotel’s various functions to capable lieutenants, he made himself scarce. Arriving at the hotel at half past eight, he would head straight to his office with a harried expression, as if he were already late for a meeting. Along the way, he would return greetings with an abbreviated nod, and when he passed his secretary he would inform her (while still in motion) that he was not to be disturbed. Then he would disappear behind his door.
And what happened once he was inside his office?
It was hard to tell, since so few had ever seen it. (Although, those who had caught a glimpse reported that his desk was impressively free of papers, his telephone rarely rang, and along the wall was a burgundy chaise with cushions that were deeply impressed. . . .)