The Count was generally of a mind that grown men should not run in hallways. But when he left Osip it was nearly eleven, and he had already taken ample advantage of Marina’s good nature. So, making an exception just this once, he sprinted down the hall, around the corner, and ran smack into some fellow with a ragged beard who was pacing at the top of the stairs.
“Mishka!”
“Ah. There you are, Sasha.”
The instant the Count recognized his old friend, his first thought was that he would have to send him on his way. What else was he to do? There were no two ways about it.
But when he got a good look at Mishka’s face, he could tell that this was impossible. Something of significance had clearly occurred. So, instead of sending him on his way, the Count led him back up to his study where, having taken a seat, Mishka turned his hat in his hands.
“Weren’t you scheduled to arrive in Moscow tomorrow?” the Count ventured after a brief silence.
“Yes,” said Mishka with a careless wave of his hat. “But I came a day early at Shalamov’s request. . . .”
An acquaintance from their university days, Viktor Shalamov was now the senior editor at Goslitizdat. It was his idea to have Mishka edit their forthcoming volumes of Anton Chekhov’s collected letters—a project that Mishka had been slaving over since 1934.
“Ah,” said the Count brightly. “You must be nearly done.”
“Nearly done,” Mishka repeated with a laugh. “You’re quite right, Sasha. I am nearly done. In fact, all that remains is to remove a word.”
Here is what had unfolded:
Early that morning, Mikhail Mindich had arrived in Moscow on the overnight train from Leningrad. With the galleys on their way to the printer, Shalamov had said he wanted to take Mishka to the Central House of Writers for a celebratory lunch. But when Mishka arrived in the publisher’s reception room shortly before one o’clock, Shalamov asked him to come back to his office.
Once they were settled, Shalamov congratulated Mishka on a job well done. Then he patted the galleys that, as it turned out, were not on their way to the printer, but were lying right there on the editor’s desk.
Yes, it was a job of nuance and erudition, Shalamov said. A paragon of scholarship. But there was one small matter that needed to be addressed before printing. It was an elision in the letter of the sixth of June 1904.
Mishka knew the letter well. It was the bittersweet missive written by Chekhov to his sister, Maria, in which he predicts his full recovery just a few weeks before his death. During typesetting, a word must have been dropped—which just shows that no matter how many times you review a galley, you will never catch every flaw.
“Let’s see to it,” said Mishka.
“Here,” said Shalamov, rotating the galley so that Mishka could review the letter for himself.
Berlin,
June 6, 1904
Dear Masha,
I am writing you from Berlin. I’ve been here a whole day now. It turned very cold in Moscow and even snowed after you left; the bad weather must have given me a cold, I began having rheumatic pains in my arms and legs, I couldn’t sleep at night, lost a great deal of weight, had morphine injections, took thousands of different kinds of medicine, and recall with gratitude only the heroin Altschuller once prescribed for me. Nonetheless, toward departure time I began to recover my strength. My appetite returned, I began giving myself arsenic injections, and so on and so forth, and finally on Thursday I left the country very thin, with very thin, emaciated legs. I had a fine, pleasant trip. Here in Berlin, we’ve taken a comfortable room in the best hotel. I am very much enjoying the life here and haven’t eaten so well and with such an appetite in a long time. The bread here is amazing, I’ve been stuffing myself with it, the coffee is excellent, and the dinners are beyond words. People who have never been abroad don’t know how good bread can be. There’s no decent tea (we have our own kind) and none of our hors d’oeuvres, but everything else is superb, even though it’s cheaper here than in Russia. I’ve already put on weight, and today, despite the chill in the air, I even took the long ride to the Tiergarten. And so you can tell Mother and anyone else who’s interested that I’m on my way to recovery or even that I’ve already recovered . . . Etc., etc.
Yours,
A. Chekhov Mishka read the passage once, then read it again while calling up in his mind’s eye an image of the original letter. After four years, he knew most of them by heart. But as hard as he tried, he could not identify the discrepancy.
“What is missing?” he asked, at last.
“Oh,” said Shalamov, in the tone of one who suddenly understands a simple misapprehension between friends. “It is not that something is missing. It is that something must be taken out. Here.”
Shalamov reached across the desk in order to point to the lines in which Chekhov had shared his first impressions of Berlin, but particularly his praise for their amazing bread, and his observations that Russians who hadn’t traveled had no idea how good bread could be.
“This part should be taken out?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“As in stricken.”
“If you wish.”
“And why, might I ask?”
“In the interests of concision.”
“So it is to save paper! And once I have taken out this little passage of the sixth of June, where shall you have me put it? In the bank? In a dresser drawer? In Lenin’s tomb?”
As Mishka had been relating this exchange to the Count, his voice had grown increasingly loud, as if with a renewed sense of outrage; but then he suddenly fell silent.
“And then Shalamov,” he continued after a moment, “this Shalamov from our youth, he tells me that I can shoot the passage from a cannon for all he cares, but it must be taken out. So do you know what I did, Sasha? Can you even imagine?”
One might well draw the conclusion, that a man prone to pacing is a man who will act judiciously—given the unusual amount of time he has allocated to the consideration of causes and consequences, of ramifications and repercussions. But it had been the Count’s experience that men prone to pace are always on the verge of acting impulsively. For while the men who pace are being whipped along by logic, it is a multifaceted sort of logic, which brings them no closer to a clear understanding, or even a state of conviction. Rather, it leaves them at such a loss that they end up exposed to the influence of the merest whim, to the seduction of the rash or reckless act—almost as if they had never considered the matter at all.
“No, Mishka,” the Count admitted with some sense of foreboding. “I can’t imagine. What did you do?”
Mishka ran a hand across his forehead.
“What is a man supposed to do when confronted with such madness? I struck the passage out. Then I walked from the room without a word.”
Upon hearing this denouement, the Count felt a great sense of relief. Were it not for the defeated appearance of his old friend, he might even have smiled. For one must admit, there was something genuinely comic about the circumstances. It could have been a tale from Gogol with Shalamov playing the part of a well-fed privy councillor impressed by his own rank. And the offending passage, hearing of its pending fate, could have climbed out a window and escaped down an alley never to be heard from again—that is, until it reappeared ten years later on the arm of a French countess, wearing a pince-nez and the Légion d’honneur.
But the Count maintained a solemn expression.