revolvers. But don’t worry. I am not through yet. I still have something to attend to. In fact, that is why I slipped into the city: to visit the library for a little project that I am working on. . . .”
With a sense of relief, the Count recognized the old spark in Mishka’s eye—the one that inevitably flashed before he threw himself headlong into a scrape.
“Is it a work of poetry?” asked the Count.
“Poetry? Yes, in a manner of speaking, I suppose it is. . . . But it is also something more fundamental. Something that can be built upon. I’m not ready to share it just yet; but when I am, you shall be the first.”
By the time they came out of the office and the Count led Mishka to the back stair, the kitchen was in full swing. On the counter were onions being minced, beets being sliced, hens being plucked. From the stove where six pots simmered, Emile signaled to the Count that he should wait a moment. After wiping his hands on his apron, he came to the door with some food wrapped in brown paper.
“A little something for your journey, Mikhail Fyodorovich.”
Mishka looked taken aback by the offering, and for a moment the Count thought his friend was going to refuse it on principle. But Mishka thanked the chef and took the parcel in hand.
Andrey was there too now, to express his pleasure at finally meeting Mishka and to wish him well.
Having returned the sentiments, Mishka opened the door to the stairwell, but then paused. Having taken a moment to look over the kitchen with all of its activity and abundance, to look from gentle Andrey to heartfelt Emile, he turned to the Count.
“Who would have imagined,” he said, “when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.”
At 7:30 that evening, when the Count entered the Yellow Room, Osip tamped out his cigarette and leapt from his chair.
“Ah! Here you are, Alexander. I thought a quick trip to San Franchesko was in order. We haven’t been back in a year. Get the lights, will you?”
As Osip hurried to the back of the room, the Count absently took his seat at the table for two and put his napkin in his lap.
. . .
“Alexander . . .”
The Count looked back.
“Yes?”
“The lights.”
“Oh. My apologies.”
The Count rose, switched off the lights, and lingered by the wall.
. . .
“Are you going to take your seat again?” asked Osip.
“Ah, yes. Of course.”
The Count returned to the table and sat in Osip’s chair.
. . .
“Is everything all right, my friend? You do not seem yourself. . . .”
“No, no,” assured the Count with a smile. “Everything is excellent. Please proceed.”
Osip waited for a moment to be sure, then he threw the switch and hurried back to the table as the grand old shadows began to flicker on the dining room wall.
Two months after what Osip liked to refer to as “The de Tocqueville Affair,” he had appeared in the Yellow Room with a projector and an uncensored print of A Day at the Races. From that night onward, the two men left the tomes of history on the bookshelves where they belonged and advanced their studies of America through the medium of film.
Osip Ivanovich had actually mastered the English language right down to the past perfect progressive as early as 1939. But American movies still deserved their careful consideration, he argued, not simply as windows into Western culture, but as unprecedented mechanisms of class repression. For with cinema, the Yanks had apparently discovered how to placate the entire working class at the cost of a nickel a week.
“Just look at their Depression,” he said. “From beginning to end it lasted ten years. An entire decade in which the Proletariat was left to fend for itself, scrounging in alleys and begging at chapel doors. If ever there had been a time for the American worker to cast off the yoke, surely that was it. But did they join their brothers-in-arms? Did they shoulder their axes and splinter the doors of the mansions? Not even for an afternoon. Instead, they shuffled to the nearest movie house, where the latest fantasy was dangled before them like a pocket watch at the end of a chain. Yes, Alexander, it behooves us to study this phenomenon with the utmost diligence and care.”