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.”
Mishka stopped and waved a hand in the air.
“But what of poetry? you ask. What of the written word? Well, I can assure you that it too is keeping pace. Once fashioned from bronze and iron, it is now being fashioned from steel. No longer an art of quatrains and dactyls and elaborate tropes, our poetry has become an art of action. One that will speed across the continents and transmit music to the stars!”
Had the Count overheard such a speech spilling forth from a student in a coffeehouse, he might have observed with a glint in his eye that, apparently, it was no longer enough for a poet to write verse. Now, a poem must spring from a school with its own manifesto and stake its claim on the moment by means of the first-person plural and the future tense, with rhetorical questions and capital letters and an army of exclamation points! And above all else, it must be novaya.
But as noted, these would have been the Count’s thoughts had he overheard someone else speaking. Hearing the speech spill forth from Mishka filled the Count with joy.
For it is a fact that a man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers.
For such a fellow, forget any chance of romance or professional success; those are the provenance of men in step with their times. Instead, for this fellow the options will be to bray like a mule or find what solace he can from overlooked volumes discovered in overlooked bookshops. And when his roommate stumbles home at two in the morning, he has little choice but to listen in silent mystification as he is recounted the latest dramas from the city’s salons.
This had been Mishka’s lot for most of his life.
But events can unfold in such a manner that overnight the man out of step finds himself in the right place at the right time. The fashions and attitudes that had seemed so alien to him are suddenly swept aside and supplanted by fashions and attitudes in perfect sympathy with his deepest sentiments. Then, like a lone sailor adrift for years on alien seas, he wakes one night to discover familiar constellations overhead.
And when this occurs—this extraordinary realignment of the stars—the man so long out of step with his times experiences a supreme lucidity. Suddenly all that has passed comes into focus as a necessary course of events, and all that promises to unfold has the clearest rhyme and reason.
When the twice-tolling clock struck twelve, even Mishka could see the merit in having another glass of wine; and toasts were made not only to the Grand Duke, but to Helena and the Countess, to Russia and Idlehour, to poetry and pacing, and to every other worthy facet of life that they could think of.
Advent
One evening in late December, as he was walking the hallway to the Piazza, the Count distinctly felt a gust of frozen air, despite being fifty yards from the nearest exit to the street. It brushed past him with all the freshness and clarity of a starlit winter’s night. After pausing and searching about, he realized that the draft was coming . . . from the coatroom. Which Tanya, the attendant, had left unattended. So, with a look to his left and a look to his right, the Count stepped within.
In the preceding minutes, there must have been such a rush of parties arriving for dinner that the winter air had yet to dissipate from the fabric of their coats. Here was the greatcoat of a soldier with a dusting of snow on its shoulders; here the woolen jacket of a bureaucrat still damp; and here was a black mink coat with a collar of ermine (or was it sable?) that was in all probability worn by the mistress of a commissar.
Raising a sleeve to his face, the Count could detect smoke from a fireplace and the hint of an oriental eau de cologne. Setting out from some elegant house on the Boulevard Ring, this young beauty presumably arrived in an automobile as black as her coat. Or perhaps she had opted to walk down Tverskaya Street, where Pushkin’s statue stood pensive but undaunted in the freshly fallen snow. Or better yet, she had come by sleigh with the hooves of the horses sounding on the cobbled streets and the crack of the whip matching the driver’s Hyah!
That was how the Count and his sister would brave the cold on Christmas Eve. Promising their grandmother that they would be no later than midnight, the siblings would set out on their troika into the crisp night air to call on their neighbors. With the Count at the reins and the pelt of a wolf on their laps, they would cut across the lower pasture to the village road, where the Count would call: Who shall it be first? The Bobrinskys? Or the Davidovs?
But whether they ventured to the one, the other, or somewhere else entirely, there would be a feast, a fire, and open arms. There would be bright dresses, and flushed skin, and sentimental uncles making misty-eyed toasts as children spied from the stairs. And music? There would be songs that emptied your glass and called you to your feet. Songs that led you to leap and alight in a manner that belied your age. Songs that made you reel and spin until you lost your bearings not only between the parlor and the salon, but between heaven and earth.