Back in ’22, how boldly he had predicted to Sasha that these four would come together to forge a new poetry for Russia. Improbably, perhaps. But in the end, that is exactly what they had done. They had created the poetry of silence.
“Yes, silence can be an opinion,” said Mishka. “Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn’t be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.”
With that, Mishka turned his back on Maxim Gorky and the Central House of Writers, and he went instead to the offices of Goslitizdat. There, he mounted the stairs, brushed past the receptionist, and opened door after door until he found the ferret in a conference room, presiding over an editorial meeting. In the center of the table were platters of cheese and figs and cured herring, the very sight of which, for some unaccountable reason, filled Mishka with fury. Turning from Shalamov in order to see who had barged through the door were the junior editors and assistant editors, all young and earnest—a fact that only infuriated Mishka more.
“Very good!” he shouted. “I see you have your knives out. What will you be cutting in half today? The Brothers Karamozov?”
“Mikhail Fyodorovich,” said Shalamov in shock.
“What is this!” Mishka proclaimed, pointing to a young woman who happened to have a slice of bread topped with herring in her hand. “Is that bread from Berlin? Be careful, comrade. If you take a single bite, Shalamov will shoot you from a cannon.”
Mishka could see that the young girl thought he was mad; but she put the piece of bread back on the table nonetheless.
“Aha!” Mishka exclaimed in vindication.
Shalamov rose from his chair, both unnerved and concerned.
“Mikhail,” he said. “You are clearly upset. I would be happy to speak with you later in my office about whatever is on your mind. But as you can see, we are in the midst of a meeting. And we still have hours of business to attend to. . . .”
“Hours of business. Of that I have no doubt.”
Mishka began ticking off the rest of the day’s business, and with each item he picked up a manuscript from in front of one of the staff members and flung it across the room in Shalamov’s direction.
“There are statues to be moved! Lines to be elided! And at five o’clock, you mustn’t be late for your bath with comrade Stalin. For if you are, who will be there to scrub his back?”
“He’s raving,” said a young man with glasses.
“Mikhail,” Shalamov pleaded.
“The future of Russian poetry is the haiku!” Mishka shouted in conclusion, then, with great satisfaction, he slammed the door on his way out. In fact, so satisfying was this gesture that he slammed every door that stood between him and the street below.
And what, to borrow a phrase, was the fallout of that?
Within a day, the gist of Mishka’s comments were shared with the authorities; within a week, they were set down word for word. In August, he was invited to the offices of the NKVD in Leningrad for questioning. In November, he was brought before one of the extrajudicial troikas of the era. And in March 1939, he was on a train bound for Siberia and the realm of second thoughts.
The Count was presumably right to be concerned for Nina, though we will never know for certain—for she did not return to the Metropol within the month, within the year, or ever again. In October, the Count made some efforts to discover her whereabouts, all of them fruitless. One assumes that Nina made her own efforts to communicate with the Count, but no word was forthcoming, and Nina Kulikova simply disappeared into the vastness of the Russian East.
The Count was also right to worry that Sofia’s residency would be noted. For not only was her presence remarked, within a fortnight of her arrival a letter was sent to an administrative office within the Kremlin stating that a Former Person living under house arrest on the top floor of the Metropol Hotel was caring for a five-year-old child of unknown parentage.
Upon its receipt, this letter was carefully read, stamped, and forwarded to a higher office—where it was counterstamped and directed up another two floors. There, it reached the sort of desk where with the swipe of a pen, matrons from the state orphanage could be dispersed.
It just so happened, however, that a cursory examination of this Former Person’s recent associates led to a certain willowy actress—who for years had been the reputed paramour of a round-faced Commisar recently appointed to the Politburo. Within the walls of a small, drab office in an especially bureaucratic branch of government, it is generally difficult to accurately imagine the world outside. But it is never hard to imagine what might occur to one’s career were one to seize the illegitimate daughter of a Politburo member and place her in a home. Such initiative would be rewarded with a blindfold and a cigarette.
As a result, only the most discreet inquiries were made. Indications were obtained that this actress had in all likelihood been in a relationship with the Politburo member for at least six years. In addition, an employee of the hotel confirmed that on the very day the young girl arrived at the hotel, the actress was also in residence. As such, all of the information that had been gathered in the course of the investigation was placed in a drawer under lock and key (on the off chance it might prove useful one day). While the pernicious little letter that had launched the inquiry in the first place was set on fire and dropped in the waste bin where it belonged.
So yes, the Count had every reason to be concerned about Mishka, Nina, and Sofia. But did he have cause to be anxious about the following morning?
As it turned out, once they had made their beds and nibbled their biscuits, Sofia did climb up into the desk chair; but rather than stare at the Count expectantly, she unfurled a litany of additional questions about Idlehour and his family, as if she had been composing them in her sleep.
And in the days that followed, a man who had long prided himself on his ability to tell a story in the most succinct manner with an emphasis on the most salient points, by necessity became a master of the digression, the parenthetical remark, the footnote, eventually even learning to anticipate Sofia’s relentless inquiries before she had the time to phrase them.
Popular wisdom tells us that when the reel of our concerns interferes with our ability to fall asleep, the best remedy is the counting of sheep in a meadow. But preferring to have his lamb encrusted with herbs and served with a red wine reduction, the Count chose a different methodology altogether. As he listened to Sofia breathing, he went back to the moment that he woke on the hardwood floor, and by systematically reconstructing his various visits to the lobby, the Piazza, the Boyarsky, Anna’s suite, the basement, and Marina’s office, he carefully calculated how many flights of stairs he had climbed or descended over the course of the day. Up and down he went in his mind, counting one flight after another, until with the final ascent to the twice-tolling clock he reached a grand total of fifty-nine—at which point he slipped into a well-deserved sleep.
Addendum
Uncle Alexander . . . ?”
. . .
“Sofia . . . ?”
. . .
“Are you awake, Uncle Alexander?”
. . .
“I am now, my dear. What is it?”
. . .
. . .
“I left Dolly in Aunt Marina’s room . . .”
. . .
. . .
“Ah, yes . . .”
1946
On Saturday, the twenty-first of June 1946, as the sun rose high over the Kremlin, a lone figure climbed slowly up the steps from the Moskva River embankment, continued past St. Basil’s Cathedral, and made his way onto Red Square.