As if to make his point, the Count suddenly rose from his chair and tugged at one of the folds of his jacket.
“Do you see this button? I’ll have you know that I sewed it on myself.” Then dropping back in his chair, the Count picked up his brandy, took a sip, and reflected. “She was perfectly right, you know. Marina, I mean. Absolutely, positively, perfectly right.” The Count sighed again. Then he shared with his sister a notion.
Since the beginning of storytelling, he explained, Death has called on the unwitting. In one tale or another, it arrives quietly in town and takes a room at an inn, or lurks in an alleyway, or lingers in the marketplace, surreptitiously. Then just when the hero has a moment of respite from his daily affairs, Death pays him a visit.
This is all well and good, allowed the Count. But what is rarely related is the fact that Life is every bit as devious as Death. It too can wear a hooded coat. It too can slip into town, lurk in an alley, or wait in the back of a tavern.
Hadn’t it paid such a visit to Mishka? Hadn’t it found him hiding behind his books, lured him out of the library, and taken his hand on a secluded spot overlooking the Neva?
Hadn’t it found Andrey in Lyon and beckoned him to the big top?
Emptying his glass, the Count rose from his chair and stumbled into the bookcase as he reached for the brandy.
“Excusez-moi, monsieur.”
The Count poured himself a tad, just a drop, no more than a sip, and fell back into his seat. Then waving a finger gently in the air, he continued:
“The collectivization of collectives, Helena, and the dekulaking of kulaks—in all probability, these are quite probable. They’re even likely to be likely. But inevitable?”
With a knowing smile, the Count shook his head at the very sound of the word.
“Allow me to tell you what is inevitable. What is inevitable is that Life will pay Nina a visit too. She may be as sober as St. Augustine, but she is too alert and too vibrant for Life to let her shake a hand and walk off alone. Life will follow her in a taxi. It will bump into her by chance. It will work its way into her affections. And to do so, it will beg, barter, collude, and if necessary, resort to chicanery.
“What a world,” the Count sighed at last, before falling asleep in his chair.
On the following morning, with his eyes a little blurry and his head a little sore, the Count poured a second cup of coffee, settled himself in his chair, and leaned to his side in order to retrieve Mishka’s letter from his jacket.
But it wasn’t there.
The Count distinctly remembered tucking the letter in the inside pocket when he was leaving the lobby the day before; and it had definitely been there when he had repaired the button in Marina’s office. . . .
It must have fallen out, he thought, when he draped the jacket over the back of Anna’s chair. So, after finishing his coffee, the Count went down to suite 311—only to find the door open, the closets empty, and the bottom of the dustbins bare.
But Mishka’s half-read letter had not fallen from the Count’s jacket in Anna’s room. Having emptied his pockets at half past three, when the Count had stumbled reaching for the brandy, he had knocked the letter into the gap between the bookcase and the wall, where it was destined to remain.
Though perhaps this was just as well.
For while the Count had been so moved by Mishka’s bittersweet walk along Nevsky Prospekt and his romantic lines of verse, the lines of verse were not written by Mishka at all. They were from the poem that Mayakovsky had delivered while standing on his chair back in 1923. And what had prompted Mishka to quote them had nothing to do with the day that Katerina had first taken his hand. What had prompted the citation, and the writing of the letter, for that matter, was the fact that on the fourteenth of April, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet laureate of the Revolution, had shot himself through the heart with a prop revolver.
Addendum
On the morning of the twenty-second of June, even as the Count was looking through his pockets for Mishka’s letter, Nina Kulikova and her three confederates were boarding a train headed east for Ivanovo full of energy, excitement, and a clear sense of purpose.
Since the launch of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, tens of thousands of their comrades in the urban centers had been working tirelessly to build power stations, steel mills, and manufacturing plants for heavy machinery. As this historic effort unfolded, it would be essential for the country’s grain-producing regions to do their part—by meeting the increased demand for bread in the cities with leaps in agricultural production.
But to pave the way for this ambitious effort, it was deemed necessary to exile a million kulaks—those profiteers and enemies of the common good, who also happened to be the regions’ most capable farmers. The remaining peasants, who viewed newly introduced approaches to agriculture with resentment and suspicion, proved antagonistic to even the smallest efforts at innovation. Tractors, which were meant to usher in the new era by the fleet, ended up being in short supply. These challenges were compounded by uncooperative weather resulting in a collapse of agricultural output. But given the imperative of feeding the cities, the precipitous decline in the harvest was met with increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint.
In 1932, the combination of these intractable forces would result in widespread hardship for the agricultural provinces of old Russia, and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine.*
But, as noted, all of this was still in the offing. And when Nina’s train finally arrived in the far reaches of Ivanovo, where the fields of young wheat bent in the breeze for as far as the eye could see, she was almost overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape, and by the sense that her life had just begun.
1938
An Arrival
Let us concede that the early thirties in Russia were unkind.
In addition to starvation in the countryside, the famine of ’32 eventually led to a migration of peasants to the cities, which, in turn, contributed to overcrowded housing, shortages of essential goods, even hooliganism. At the same time, the most stalwart workers in the urban centers were wearying under the burden of the continuous workweek; artists faced tighter constraints on what they could or could not imagine; churches were shuttered, repurposed, or razed; and when revolutionary hero Sergei Kirov was assassinated, the nation was purged of an array of politically unreliable elements.
But then, on the seventeenth of November 1935, at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites, Stalin himself declared: Life has improved, comrades. Life is more joyous. . . .
Yes, generally speaking such a remark falling from the lips of a statesman should be swept from the floor with the dust and the lint. But when it fell from the lips of Soso, one had good reason to lend it credence. For it was often through secondary remarks in secondary speeches that the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party signaled the shifts in his thinking.