So perfect was the combination that upon finishing, the Count was tempted to crank the crank, quarter the apple, dole out the biscuits, and enjoy his breakfast all over again.
But time and tide wait for no man. So, having poured the remnants of the coffee from its pot, the Count brushed the biscuit crumbs from his plate onto the window ledge for his feathered friend. Then he emptied the little pitcher of cream into a saucer and turned toward the door with the intention of placing it in the hall—and that was when he saw the envelope on the floor.
Someone must have slipped it under his door in the middle of the night.
Setting the saucer down for his one-eyed friend, he picked up the envelope and discovered that it had an unusual feel, as if something quite different than a letter had been enclosed. On the back, it bore the dark blue moniker of the hotel, while on the front, in place of a name and address, was written the query: Four o’clock?
The Count sat on his bed and took the last sip of coffee. Then he tucked the point of his paring knife under the envelope’s flap, slit it from corner to corner, and gazed within.
“Mon Dieu,” he said.
Arachne’s Art
History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says. The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow.
There on the third of January 1928, the historians tell us, was the launch of the First Five-Year Plan—that initiative which would begin the transformation of Russia from a nineteenth-century agrarian society into a twentieth-century industrial power. There on the seventeenth of November 1929, Nikolai Bukharin, founding father, editor of Pravda, and last true friend of the peasant, was outmaneuvered by Stalin and ousted from the Politburo—clearing the way for a return to autocracy in all but name. And there on the twenty-fifth of February 1927, was the drafting of Article 58 of the Criminal Code—the net that would eventually ensnare us all.
There on the twenty-seventh of May, or there on the sixth of December; at eight or nine in the morning.
There it was, they say. As if—like at the opera—a curtain has closed, a lever has been pulled, one set has been whisked to the rafters and another has dropped to the stage, such that when the curtain opens a moment later the audience will find itself transported from a richly appointed ballroom to the banks of a wooded stream. . . .
But the events that transpired on those various dates did not throw the city of Moscow into upheaval. When the page was torn from the calendar, the bedroom windows did not suddenly shine with the light of a million electric lamps; that Fatherly gaze did not suddenly hang over every desk and appear in every dream; nor did the drivers of a hundred Black Marias turn the keys in their ignitions and fan out into the shadowy streets. For the launch of the First Five-Year Plan, Bukharin’s fall from grace, and the expansion of the Criminal Code to allow the arrest of anyone even countenancing dissension, these were only tidings, omens, underpinnings. And it would be a decade before their effects were fully felt.
No. For most of us, the late 1920s were not characterized by a series of momentous events. Rather, the passage of those years was like the turn of a kaleidoscope.
At the bottom of a kaleidoscope’s cylinder lie shards of colored glass in random arrangement; but thanks to a glint of sunlight, the interplay of mirrors, and the magic of symmetry, when one peers inside what one finds is a pattern so colorful, so perfectly intricate, it seems certain to have been designed with the utmost care. Then by the slightest turn of the wrist, the shards begin to shift and settle into a new configuration—a configuration with its own symmetry of shapes, its own intricacy of colors, its own hints of design.
So it was in the city of Moscow in the late 1920s.
And so it was at the Metropol Hotel.
In fact, if a seasoned Muscovite were to cross Theatre Square on the last day of spring in 1930, he would find the hotel much as he remembered it.
There on the front steps still stands Pavel Ivanovich in his greatcoat looking as stalwart as ever (though his hip now gives him some trouble on foggy afternoons). On the other side of the revolving doors are the same eager lads in the same blue caps ready to whisk one’s suitcases up the stairs (though they now answer to Grisha and Genya rather than Pasha and Petya). Vasily, with his uncanny awareness of whereabouts, still mans the concierge’s desk directly across from Arkady, who remains ready to spin the register and offer you a pen. And in the manager’s office, Mr. Halecki still sits behind his spotless desk (though a new assistant manager with the smile of an ecclesiast is prone to interrupt his reveries over the slightest infraction of the hotel’s rules).
In the Piazza, Russians cut from every cloth (or at least those who have access to foreign currency) gather to linger over coffee and happen upon friends. While in the ballroom, the weighty remarks and late arrivals that once characterized the Assemblies now characterize Dinners of State (though no one with a penchant for yellow spies from the balcony anymore).
And the Boyarsky?
At two o’clock its kitchen is already in full swing. Along the wooden tables the junior chefs are chopping carrots and onions as Stanislav, the sous-chef, delicately debones pigeons with a whistle on his lips. On the great stoves, eight burners have been lit to simmer sauces, soups, and stews. The pastry chef, who seems as dusted with flour as one of his rolls, opens an oven door to withdraw two trays of brioches. And in the center of all this activity, with an eye on every assistant and a finger in every pot, stands Emile Zhukovsky, his chopping knife in hand.
If the kitchen of the Boyarsky is an orchestra and Emile its conductor, then his chopping knife is the baton. With a blade two inches wide at the base and ten inches long to the tip, it is rarely out of his hand and never far from reach. Though the kitchen is outfitted with paring knives, boning knives, carving knives, and cleavers, Emile can complete any of the various tasks for which those knives were designed with his ten-inch chopper. With it he can skin a rabbit. He can zest a lemon. He can peel and quarter a grape. He can use it to flip a pancake or stir a soup, and with the stabbing end he can measure out a teaspoon of sugar or a dash of salt. But most of all, he uses it for pointing.
“You,” he says to the saucier, waving the point of his chopper. “Are you going to boil that to nothing? What are you going to use it for, eh? To pave roads? To paint icons?
“You,” he says to the conscientious new apprentice at the end of the counter. “What are you doing there? It took less time for that parsley to grow than for you to mince it!”
And on the last day of spring? It is Stanislav who receives the tip of the knife. For in the midst of trimming the fat from racks of lamb, Emile suddenly stops and glares across the table.
“You!” he says, pointing the chopper at Stanislav’s nose. “What is that?”
Stanislav, a lanky Estonian who has dutifully studied his master’s every move, looks up from his pigeons with startled eyes.
“What is what, sir?”
“What is that you’re whistling?”
Admittedly, there has been a melody playing in Stanislav’s head—a little something that he had heard the night before while passing the entrance of the hotel’s bar—but he had not been conscious of whistling it. And now that he faces the chopper, he cannot for the life of him remember what the melody was.
“I am not certain,” he confesses.
“Not certain! Were you whistling or weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir. It was I who must have been whistling. But I assure you it was just a ditty.”
“Just a ditty?”