Alexander,
What a pleasure meeting you tonight. As I mentioned, I am headed home for a spell. In the meantime, I thought you could make good use of this. You might pay special attention to the contents in the uppermost sleeve, as I think you will find it very apropos of our chat.
With warm regards till next we meet,
Richard Vanderwhile Throwing the clasps, the Count opened the lid of the case. It was a portable phonograph. Inside there was a small stack of records in brown paper sleeves. Per Richard’s suggestion, the Count singled out the uppermost disc. On the label at the center, it was identified as a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall in New York.
The Count had seen Horowitz perform in Moscow in 1921, less than four years before the pianist traveled to Berlin for an official concert—with a wad of foreign currency tucked in his shoes. . . .
At the back of the case, the Count found a small compartment in which the electrical cord was folded away. Unraveling it, he plugged the player into the wall socket. He removed the record from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable, threw the switch, cued the needle, and sat back on Sofia’s bed.
At first, he heard muted voices, a few coughs, and the last rustling of an audience settling in; then silence; then heartfelt applause as the performer presumably took the stage.
The Count held his breath.
After the trumpets sounded their first martial notes, the strings swelled, and then his countryman began to play, evoking for the American audience the movement of a wolf through the birches, the wind across the steppe, the flicker of a candle in a ballroom, and the flash of a cannon at Borodino.
Addendum
On the twenty-third of June at four in the afternoon, Andrey Duras was riding the bus back to his apartment in the Arbat, having taken advantage of his day off to visit Sofia at First Municipal Hospital.
The next day, he looked forward to reporting at the daily meeting of the Triumvirate that she was in good spirits. Housed in a special wing of the hospital, she had a private room full of sunlight, and constant attention from a battalion of nurses. Emile would be pleased to learn that his cookies were well received and that Sofia promised to send word the minute she had run out. While for his part, Andrey had brought a book of adventure stories that had always been a favorite of his son’s.
At Smolenskaya Square, Andrey gave his seat to an older woman. He would be disembarking in a few blocks anyway—to get some cucumbers and potatoes at the peasant market in the square. Emile had given him half a pound of minced pork, and he was going to make kotlety for his wife.
Andrey and his wife lived in a narrow four-story apartment building in the middle of the block. Theirs was one of the smallest of the sixteen apartments, but they had it to themselves. At least, for now.
Having completed his errand at the market, Andrey climbed the stairs to the third floor. As he passed the other doors along the hallway, he could smell onions being sautéed in one apartment and hear voices on the radio in another. Shifting the bag of groceries to his left arm, he took out his key.
Letting himself inside, Andrey called out to his wife, though he knew she wouldn’t be home. She would be waiting in line at the new milk store that had opened in a decommissioned church on the other side of the neighborhood. She said the milk there was fresher and the line was shorter, but Andrey knew this wasn’t true. Like so many others, she went there because the small chapel at the back of the church had a mosaic of Christ and the Woman at the Well that no one had bothered to dismantle; and the women who waited in line for their milk were willing to hold your place while you slipped away to pray.
Andrey carried his groceries into the little room overlooking the street, which served as both kitchen and sitting room. On the small counter he laid out the vegetables. After washing his hands, he washed the cucumbers and sliced them. He peeled the potatoes and put them in a pot of water. He mixed the meat from Emile with chopped onion, formed the kotlety, and covered them with a towel. He put the frying pan on the stove and poured in some oil, for later. Having cleared off the counter, he washed his hands again, set the table, and then went down the hallway with the intention of lying down. But without quite thinking about it, he passed their bedroom door and went into the next room.
Many years before, Andrey had visited Pushkin’s apartment in St. Petersburg—the one where he’d lived in his final years. The rooms of the apartment had been preserved just as they’d been on the day the poet died. There was even an unfinished poem and pen sitting on the desk. At the time, standing behind the little rope and gazing at the poet’s desk, Andrey had thought the whole venture rather preposterous—as if by keeping a few belongings in place, one might actually protect a moment from the relentless onslaught of time.
But when Ilya, their only child, was killed in the Battle of Berlin—just months before the end of the war—he and his wife had done the same thing: leaving every blanket, every book, every piece of clothing exactly where it had been on the day that they’d received the news.
Initially, Andrey had to admit, this had been a great comfort. When he was alone in the apartment, he would find himself visiting the room; and when he did so, he could see from the depression on the bed where his wife must have been sitting while he was at work. Now, though, he worried that this carefully preserved room had begun to sustain rather than alleviate their grief; and he knew the time had come for them to rid themselves of their son’s belongings.
Though he knew this, he didn’t raise the matter with his wife. For he also knew that soon enough, someone in the building would draw the attention of the housing authorities to their son’s death; then they would be moved to an even smaller apartment or required to take in a stranger, and life would reclaim the room as its own.
But even as he had this thought, Andrey walked over to the bed and smoothed out the blankets where his wife had been sitting; and only then, did he turn out the light.
BOOK FOUR
1950
Adagio, Andante, Allegro
In the blink of an eye.”
That was how, on the twenty-first of June, Count Alexander Rostov summed up his daughter’s journey from thirteen to seventeen, when Vasily remarked on how much she had grown.
“One moment she is scampering up and down the stairwells—a veritable gadabout, a gadfly, a ne’er-do-well—and the next, she is a young woman of intelligence and refinement.”
And this was largely true. For if the Count had been premature in characterizing Sofia as demure when she was thirteen, he had perfectly anticipated her persona on the cusp of adulthood. With fair skin and long black hair (but for the white stripe that fell from the spot of her old injury), Sofia could sit for hours listening to music in their study. She could stitch for hours with Marina in the stitching room, or chat for hours with Emile in the kitchen without shifting once in her chair.