“On the contrary. I found them to be the perfect height. But tell me, my friend, what brings you to Moscow?”
“Nominally, Sasha, I am here to help plan the inaugural congress of RAPP, which is to be held in June. But of greater consequence . . .”
Here Mishka reached into a shoulder satchel and produced a bottle of wine with an image of two crossed keys embossed in the glass above the label.
“I hope I am not too late.”
The Count took the bottle in hand. He ran his thumb over the surface of the insignia. Then he shook his head with the smile of the deeply moved.
“No, Mishka. As always, you are right on time.” Then he led his old friend through his jackets.
As the Count excused himself to rinse a pair of glasses from the Ambassador, Mishka surveyed his friend’s study with a sympathetic gaze. For the tables, the chairs, the objets d’art, he recognized them all. And well he knew that they had been culled from the halls of Idlehour as reminders of Elysian days.
It must have been in 1908 that Alexander began inviting him to Idlehour for the month of July. Having traveled from St. Petersburg by a series of consecutively smaller trains, they would finally arrive at that little halt in the high grass on the branch line, where they would be met by a Rostov coach-and-four. With their bags on top, the driver in the carriage, and Alexander at the reins, they would charge across the countryside waving at every peasant girl until they turned onto the road lined with apple trees that led to the family seat.
As they shed their coats in the entry hall, their bags would be whisked to the grand bedrooms of the east wing, where velvet cords could be pulled to summon a cold glass of beer, or hot water for a bath. But first, they would proceed to the drawing room where—at this very table with its red pagoda—the Countess would be hosting some blue-blooded neighbor for tea.
Invariably dressed in black, the Countess was one of those dowagers whose natural independence of mind, authority of age, and impatience with the petty made her the ally of all irreverent youth. She would not only abide, but enjoyed when her grandson would interrupt polite conversation to question the standing of the church or the ruling class. And when her guest grew red and responded in a huff, the Countess would give Mishka a conspiratorial wink, as if they stood arm in arm in the battle against boorish decorum and the outmoded attitudes of the times.
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 Chateauneuf-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!”