but particularly his praise for their amazing bread, and his observations that Russians who hadn’t traveled had no idea how good bread could be.
“This part should be taken out?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“As in stricken.”
“If you wish.”
“And why, might I ask?”
“In the interests of concision.”
“So it is to save paper! And once I have taken out this little passage of the sixth of June, where shall you have me put it? In the bank? In a dresser drawer? In Lenin’s tomb?”
As Mishka had been relating this exchange to the Count, his voice had grown increasingly loud, as if with a renewed sense of outrage; but then he suddenly fell silent.
“And then Shalamov,” he continued after a moment, “this Shalamov from our youth, he tells me that I can shoot the passage from a cannon for all he cares, but it must be taken out. So do you know what I did, Sasha? Can you even imagine?”
One might well draw the conclusion, that a man prone to pacing is a man who will act judiciously—given the unusual amount of time he has allocated to the consideration of causes and consequences, of ramifications and repercussions. But it had been the Count’s experience that men prone to pace are always on the verge of acting impulsively. For while the men who pace are being whipped along by logic, it is a multifaceted sort of logic, which brings them no closer to a clear understanding, or even a state of conviction. Rather, it leaves them at such a loss that they end up exposed to the influence of the merest whim, to the seduction of the rash or reckless act—almost as if they had never considered the matter at all.
“No, Mishka,” the Count admitted with some sense of foreboding. “I can’t imagine. What did you do?”
Mishka ran a hand across his forehead.
“What is a man supposed to do when confronted with such madness? I struck the passage out. Then I walked from the room without a word.”
Upon hearing this denouement, the Count felt a great sense of relief. Were it not for the defeated appearance of his old friend, he might even have smiled. For one must admit, there was something genuinely comic about the circumstances. It could have been a tale from Gogol with Shalamov playing the part of a well-fed privy councillor impressed by his own rank. And the offending passage, hearing of its pending fate, could have climbed out a window and escaped down an alley never to be heard from again—that is, until it reappeared ten years later on the arm of a French countess, wearing a pince-nez and the Légion d’honneur.
But the Count maintained a solemn expression.
“You were perfectly right,” he consoled. “It was just a matter of a few sentences. Fifty words out of a few hundred thousand.”
The Count pointed out that on the balance, Mikhail had so much to be proud of. An authoritative collection of Chekhov’s letters was long overdue. It promised to inspire a whole new generation of scholars and students, readers and writers. And Shalamov? With his long nose and little eyes, the Count had always found him to be something of a ferret, and one mustn’t let a ferret spoil one’s sense of accomplishment, or one’s cause for celebration.
“Listen, my friend,” the Count concluded with a smile, “you arrived on the overnight train and missed your lunch. That’s half the problem right there. Go back to your hotel. Take a bath. Have something to eat and a glass of wine. Get a good night’s sleep. Then tomorrow night, we shall meet at the Shalyapin as planned, raise a glass to brother Anton, and have a good laugh at the ferret’s expense.”
In this manner, the Count attempted to comfort his old friend, buoy his spirits, and move him gently toward the door.
At 11:40, the Count finally descended to the ground floor and knocked at Marina’s.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” he said in a whisper when the seamstress answered the door. “Where is Sofia? I can carry her upstairs.”
“There’s no need to whisper, Alexander. She’s awake.”
“You kept her up!”
“I didn’t keep anybody anything,” Marina retorted. “She insisted upon waiting for you.”
The two went inside, where Sofia was sitting on a chair with perfect posture. At the sight of the Count, she leapt to the floor, walked to his side, and took him by the hand.
Marina raised an eyebrow, as if to say: You see . . .
The Count raised his own eyebrows, as if to reply: Imagine