The Count rearranged his fork and knife, which had somehow become misaligned.
“I may have heard something from someone,” he said noncommittally.
“Papa. I am not afraid of performing with the orchestra before an audience.”
“Can you be so sure?”
“Positively.”
“You have never performed in a hall as large as the Palais Garnier. . . .”
“I know.”
“And the French are notoriously exacting as an audience. . . .”
Sofia laughed again.
“Well, if you’re trying to set me at ease, you’re not doing a very good job of it. But honestly, Papa, feelings of anxiety have nothing to do with my decision.”
“Then what?”
“I simply don’t want to go.”
“How could you not want to go?”
Sofia looked down at the table and moved her own silver.
“I like it here,” she said at last—gesturing to the room and, by extension, the hotel. “I like it here with you.”
The Count studied his daughter. With her long black hair, fair skin, and dark blue eyes, she seemed serene beyond her years. And therein, perhaps, lay the problem. For if serenity should be a hallmark of maturity, then impetuousness should be a hallmark of youth.
“I want to tell you a different story,” he said, “a story that I am sure you have never heard. It took place in this very hotel some thirty years ago—on a snowy night in December, much like this one. . . .”
And the Count went on to tell Sofia about the Christmas that he had celebrated with her mother in the Piazza in 1922. He told her about Nina’s hors d’oeuvre of ice creams, and her reluctance to sit in scholarly rows, and her argument that if one wished to broaden one’s horizons, one would best be served by venturing beyond the horizon.
The Count suddenly grew somber.
“I fear I have done you a great disservice, Sofia. From the time you were a child, I have lured you into a life that is principally circumscribed by the four walls of this building. We all have. Marina, Andrey, Emile, and I. We have ventured to make the hotel seem as wide and wonderful as the world, so that you would opt to spend more time in it with us. But your mother was perfectly right. One does not fulfill one’s potential by listening to Scheherazade in a gilded hall, or by reading the Odyssey in one’s den. One does so by setting forth into the vast unknown—just like Marco Polo when he traveled to China, or Columbus when he traveled to America.”
Sofia nodded in understanding.
The Count continued.
“I have had countless reasons to be proud of you; and certainly one of the greatest was the night of the Conservatory competition. But the moment I felt that pride was not when you and Anna brought home news of your victory. It was earlier in the evening, when I watched you heading out the hotel’s doors on your way to the hall. For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
“If I am to play the piano in Paris,” said Sofia after a moment, “I only wish that you could be there in the audience to hear me.”
The Count smiled.
“I assure you, my dear, were you to play the piano on the moon, I would hear every chord.”
Achilles Agonistes
Greetings, Arkady.”
“Greetings to you, Count Rostov. Is there something I can do for you this morning?”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could you spare a bit of stationery?”
“Certainly.”
Standing at the front desk, the Count penned a one-sentence note under the hotel’s moniker and addressed the envelope in an appropriately slanted script; he waited until the bell captain was otherwise occupied, casually crossed the lobby, slipped the note onto the bell captain’s desk, and then headed downstairs for his weekly visit to the barber.
It had been many years since Yaroslav Yaroslavl had worked his magic in the barbershop of the Metropol, and in the interim any number of successors had attempted to fill his shoes. The most recent fellow—Boris Something-or-other-ovich—was perfectly qualified to shorten a man’s hair; but he was neither the artist nor the conversationalist that Yaroslav had been. In fact, he went about his business with such mute efficiency, one suspected he was part machine.
“Trim?” he asked the Count, wasting no time with subjects, verbs, or the other superfluities of language.
Given the Count’s thinning hair and the barber’s predisposition to efficiency, a trim might take all of ten minutes.
“Yes, a trim,” said the Count. “But perhaps a shave as well. . . .”
The barber furrowed his brow. The man in him, no doubt, was inclined to point out that the Count had obviously shaved a few hours before; but the machinery in him was so finely tuned, it was already putting down the scissors and reaching for the shaving brush.
Having whipped a sufficient lather, Boris dabbed it on those areas of the Count’s face where whiskers would have been had the Count been in need of a shave. He sharpened one of his razors on his strop, leaned over the chair, and with an unflinching hand shaved the Count’s right upper cheek in a single pass. Wiping the blade on the towel at his waist, he then leaned over the Count’s left upper cheek, and shaved it with equal alacrity.
At this rate, fretted the Count, he’ll be done in a minute and a half.
Using a bent knuckle, the barber now raised the Count’s chin. The Count could feel the metal of the razor make contact with his throat. And that’s when one of the new bellhops appeared in the door.
“Excuse me, sir.”
“Yes?” said the barber with his blade held fast at the Count’s jugular.
“I have a note for you.”
“On the bench.”
“But it is urgent,” said the young man with some anxiety.
“Urgent?”
“Yes, sir. From the manager.”
The barber looked back at the bellhop for the first time.
“The manager?”
“Yes, sir.”
After an extended exhalation, the barber removed the blade from the Count’s throat, accepted the missive, and—as the bellhop disappeared down the hall—slit the envelope open with his razor.
Unfolding the note, the barber stared at it for a full minute. In those sixty seconds, he must have read it ten times over because it was composed of only four words: Come see me immediately!
The barber exhaled again then looked at the wall.
“I can’t imagine,” he said to no one. Then having thought it over for another minute, he turned to the Count: “I must see to something.”
“By all means. Do what you must. I am in no hurry.”
To underscore his point, the Count leaned back his head and closed his eyes as if to nap; but when the barber’s footsteps had receded down the hall, the Count leapt from the chair like a cat.
When the Count was a young man, he prided himself on the fact that he was unmoved by the ticking of the clock. In the early years of the twentieth century, there were those of his acquaintance who brought a new sense of urgency to their slightest endeavor. They timed the consumption of their breakfast, the walk to their office, and the hanging of their hat on its hook with as much precision as if they were preparing for a military campaign. They answered the phone on the first ring, scanned the headlines, limited their conversations to whatever was most germane, and generally spent their days in pursuit of the second hand. God bless them.