“As anyone can see, we are men with business to attend to. But apparently, you have something of such importance that you feel the need to interrupt. Well then, out with it—before we expire from anticipation.”
The young man opened his mouth, but then rather than explain himself, he simply pointed his spoon toward the kitchen. Following the direction of the utensil, the members of the Triumvirate looked through the office window and there, near the door to the back stair, stood an unfortunate-looking soul in a ragged winter coat. At the sight of him, Emile grew crimson.
“Who let him in here?”
“I did, sir.”
Emile stood so abruptly he nearly knocked over his chair. Then, just as a commander will tear the epaulettes from the shoulders of an errant officer, Emile grabbed the spoon from Ilya’s hand.
“So, you’re the Commissar of Nincompoops now, is that it? Eh? When I had my back turned, you were promoted to the General Secretary of Bunglers?”
The young man took a step back.
“No, sir. I have not been promoted.”
Emile smacked the table with the spoon, nearly cracking it in two.
“Of course you haven’t! How often have I told you not to let beggars in the kitchen? Don’t you see that if you give him a crust of bread today, there will be five of his friends here tomorrow, and fifty the day after that?”
“Yes, sir, but . . . but . . .”
“But but but what?”
“He didn’t ask for food.”
“Eh?”
The young man pointed to the Count.
“He asked for Alexander Ilyich.”
Andrey and Emile both looked to their colleague in surprise. The Count in turn looked through the window at the beggar. Then without saying a word, he rose from his chair, exited the office, and embraced this boon companion whom he had not seen in eight long years.
Though Andrey and Emile had never met the stranger, as soon as they heard his name they knew exactly who he was: the one who had lived with the Count above the cobbler’s shop; the one who had paced a thousand miles in increments of fifteen feet; the lover of Mayakovsky and Mandelstam who, like so many others, had been tried and sentenced in the name of Article 58.
“Why don’t you make yourselves comfortable,” suggested Andrey with a gesture of his hand. “You can use Emile’s office.”
“Yes,” agreed Emile. “By all means. My office.”
With his impeccable instincts, Andrey led Mishka to the chair with its back to the kitchen while Emile placed bread and salt on the table—that ancient Russian symbol of hospitality. A moment later he returned with a plate of potatoes and cutlets of veal. Then the chef and ma?tre d’ excused themselves, closing the door so that the two old friends could speak undisturbed.
Mishka looked at the table.
“Bread and salt,” he said with a smile.
As the Count looked across at Mishka, he was moved by two contrary currents of emotion. On the one hand, there was that special joy of seeing a friend from youth unexpectedly—a welcome event no matter when or where. But at the same time, the Count was confronted by the irrefutable facts of Mishka’s appearance. Thirty pounds lighter, dressed in a threadbare coat, and dragging one leg behind him, it was no wonder that Emile had mistaken him for a beggar. Naturally, the Count had watched in recent years as age began to take its toll on the Triumvirate. He had noticed the occasional tremor in Andrey’s left hand and the creeping deafness in Emile’s right ear. He had noticed the graying of the former’s hair and the thinning of the latter’s. But with Mishka, here were not simply the ravages of time. Here were the marks of one man upon another, of an era upon its offspring.
Perhaps most striking was Mishka’s smile. In their youth, Mishka had been almost earnest to a fault and never spoke with irony. Yet when he said “bread and salt” he wore the smile of the sarcast.
“It is so good to see you, Mishka,” the Count said after a moment. “I can’t tell you how relieved I was when you sent word of your release. When did you return to Moscow?”
“I haven’t,” his friend replied with his new smile.
Upon the dutiful completion of his eight years, Mishka explained, he had been rewarded with a Minus Six. To visit Moscow, he had borrowed a passport from a sympathetic soul with a passing likeness.
“Is that wise?” the Count asked with concern.
Mishka shrugged.
“I arrived this morning from Yavas by train. I’ll be returning to Yavas later tonight.”
“Yavas . . . Where is that?”
“Somewhere between where the wheat is grown and the bread is eaten.”
“Are you teaching . . . ?” the Count asked tentatively.
“No,” Mishka said with a shake of the head. “We are not encouraged to teach. But then, we are not encouraged to read or write. We are hardly encouraged to eat.”
So it was that Mishka began to describe his life in Yavas; and as he did so, he used the first person plural so often that the Count assumed he must have moved there with a fellow inmate from the camps. But slowly, it became clear that in saying “we” Mishka had no one person in mind. For Mishka, “we” encompassed all his fellow prisoners—and not simply those he had known in Arkhangelsk. It encompassed the million or more who had toiled on the Solovetsky Islands or in Sevvostlag or on the White Sea Canal, whether they had toiled there in the twenties, or the thirties, or toiled there still.*
Mishka was silent.
“It is funny what comes to one at night,” he said after a moment. “After dropping our shovels and trudging to the barracks, we would swallow our gruel and pull our blankets to our chins eager for sleep. But inevitably some unexpected thought would come, some uninvited memory that wanted to be sized up, measured, and weighed. And many was the night I found myself thinking of that German you encountered in the bar—the one who claimed that vodka was Russia’s only contribution to the West and who challenged anyone to name three more.”
“I remember it well. I borrowed your observation that Tolstoy and Chekhov were the bookends of narrative, invoked Tchaikovsky, and then ordered the brute a serving of caviar.”
“That’s it.”
Mishka shook his head and then looked at the Count with his smile.
“One night some years ago, I thought of another, Sasha.”
“A fifth contribution?”
“Yes, a fifth contribution: The burning of Moscow.”
The Count was taken aback.
“You mean in 1812?”
Mishka nodded.
“Can you imagine the expression on Napoleon’s face when he was roused at two in the morning and stepped from his brand-new bedroom in the Kremlin only to find that the city he’d claimed just hours before had been set on fire by its citizens?” Mishka gave a quiet laugh. “Yes, the burning of Moscow was especially Russian, my friend. Of that there can be no doubt. Because it was not a discrete event; it was the form of an event. One example plucked from a history of thousands. For as a people, we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created.”
Perhaps because of his limp, Mishka no longer got up to pace the room; but the Count could see that he was pacing it with his eyes.