“That was your wife on the phone, Mr. Vanderwhile. She asked me to remind you of your appointment in the morning; and to alert you that your driver is waiting outside.”
Though most of the customers in the bar had never met Mrs. Vanderwhile, she was known to be as unflappable as Arkady, as attentive as Audrius, and as aware of whereabouts as Vasily—when it came to drawing Mr. Vanderwhile’s evenings to a close.
“Ah, yes,” conceded Mr. Vanderwhile.
Agreeing that duty comes first, the Count and Mr. Vanderwhile shook hands and wished each other well till next they met.
When Richard left, the Count looked once around the room to see if there was anyone he knew, and was pleased to discover that the young architect from the Piazza was at a table in the corner, bent over his sketchbook, presumably rendering the bar.
He too, thought the Count, is one of the moths of Manchester.
When the Count was nine years old, his father had sat him down in order to explain Darwin’s theory of natural selection. As the Count listened, the essence of the Englishman’s idea seemed perfectly intuitive—that over tens of thousands of years a species would slowly evolve in order to maximize its chances of survival. After all, if the claws of the lion grow sharper, the gazelle had best grow more fleet of foot. But what had disconcerted the Count was when his father clarified that natural selection didn’t need tens of thousands of years to take place. It didn’t even need a hundred. It had been observed unfolding over the course of a few decades.
It was true, his father said, that in a relatively static environment the pace of evolution should decelerate, as individual species have little new to adapt to. But environments are never static for long. The forces of nature inevitably unleash themselves in such a manner that the necessity for adaptation will be stirred. An extended drought, an unusually cold winter, a volcanic eruption, any one of these could alter the balance between those traits that improve a species’ chance for survival and those that hinder it. In essence, this is what had occurred in Manchester, England, in the nineteenth century, when the city became one of the first capitals of the industrial revolution.
For thousands of years, the peppered moths of Manchester had white wings with black flecking. This coloring provided the species with perfect camouflage whenever they landed on the light gray bark of the region’s trees. In any generation there might be a few aberrations—such as moths with pitch-black wings—but they were snapped off the trees by the birds before they had a chance to mate.
But when Manchester became crowded with factories in the early 1800s, the soot from the smokestacks began to settle on every conceivable surface, including the bark of the trees; and the lightly speckled wings that had served to protect the majority of peppered moths suddenly exposed them remorselessly to their predators—even as the darker wings of the aberrations rendered them invisible. Thus, the pitch-black varieties that had represented less than 10 percent of the Manchester moth population in 1800, represented over 90 percent by the end of the century. Or so explained the Count’s father, with the pragmatic satisfaction of the scientifically minded.
But the lesson did not sit well with the young Count. If this could happen so easily to moths, he thought, then what was to stop it from happening to children? What would happen to him and his sister, for instance, should they be exposed to excess chimney smoke or sudden extremes of weather? Couldn’t they become victims of accelerated evolution? In fact, so disconcerted by this notion became the Count that when Idlehour was deluged by rainstorms that September, giant black moths harrowed his dreams.
Some years later, the Count would come to understand that he had been looking at the matter upside down. The pace of evolution was not something to be frightened by. For while nature doesn’t have a stake in whether the wings of a peppered moth are black or white, it genuinely hopes that the peppered moth will persist. And that is why nature designed the forces of evolution to play out over generations rather than eons—to ensure that moths and men have a chance to adapt.
Like Viktor Stepanovich, the Count reflected. A husband and father of two, he must make ends meet. So he waves his baton in the Piazza, ostensibly putting the classical repertoire behind him. Then one afternoon, when he happens to stumble upon a young pianist with promise, in what little time he has to spare, he teaches her the nocturnes of Chopin on a borrowed piano. Just so, Mishka has his “project”; and this young architect, unable to build buildings, takes pride and pleasure from the careful drafting of hotel interiors in his sketchbook.
For a moment, the Count considered going over to the young man, but he seemed to be applying his skills with such satisfaction that it would be a crime to interrupt him. So, instead, the Count emptied his glass, tapped the bar twice, and headed upstairs for bed.
Of course, the Count was perfectly right. For when life makes it impossible for a man to pursue his dreams, he will connive to pursue them anyway. Thus, even as the Count was brushing his teeth, Viktor Stepanovich was setting aside an arrangement that he had been working on for his orchestra in order to sort through the Goldberg Variations—in search of one that might be just right for Sofia. While in the village of Yavas, in a rented room not much larger than the Count’s, by the light of a candle, Mikhail Mindich was sitting hunched over a table, sewing another signature of sixteen pages. And down in the Shalyapin? The young architect continued to take pride and pleasure in his work. But contrary to the Count’s supposition, he was not adding a rendering of the bar to his collection of hotel interiors. In fact, he was working in a different sketchbook altogether.
On the first of this book’s many pages was the design for a skyscraper two hundred stories tall—with a diving board on the roof from which the tenants could parachute to a grassy park below. On another page was a cathedral to atheism with fifty different cupolas, several of which could be launched like rockets to the moon. And on another was a giant museum of architecture showcasing life-size replicas of all the grand old buildings that had been razed in the city of Moscow to make way for the new.
But at this particular moment, what the architect was working on was a detailed drawing of a crowded restaurant that looked very much like the Piazza. Only, under the floor of this restaurant was an elaborate mechanics of axles, cogs, and gears; and jutting from an outside wall was a giant crank, at the turn of which, each of the restaurant’s chairs would pirouette like a ballerina on a music box, then spin around the space until they came to a stop at an entirely different table. And towering over this tableau, peering down through the glass ceiling, was a gentleman of sixty with his hand on the crank, preparing to set the diners in motion.
1952
America
On a Wednesday evening in late June, the Count and Sofia walked arm in arm into the Boyarsky, where it was their custom to dine on the Count’s night off.
“Good evening, Andrey.”
“Bonsoir, mon ami. Bonsoir, mademoiselle. Your table awaits.”