you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”
Anna Urbanova took the cigarette from the Count’s fingers, dropped it in a water glass, and kissed him on the nose.
1953
Apostles and Apostates
Like the wheeling of the stars,” muttered the Count as he paced.
That is how time passes when one is left waiting unaccountably. The hours become interminable. The minutes relentless. And the seconds? Why, not only does every last one of them demand its moment on the stage, it insists upon making a soliloquy full of weighty pauses and artful hesitations and then leaps into an encore at the slightest hint of applause.
But hadn’t the Count once waxed poetic over how slowly the stars advanced? Hadn’t he rhapsodized over how the constellations seemed to halt in their course when on a warm summer’s night one lay on one’s back and listened for footsteps in the grass—as if nature itself were conspiring to lengthen the last few hours before daybreak, so that they could be savored to the utmost?
Well, yes. Certainly that was the case when one was twenty-two and waiting for a young lady in a meadow—having climbed the ivy and rapped on the glass. But to keep a man waiting when he is sixty-three? When his hair has thinned, his joints have stiffened, and his every breath might be his last? There is such a thing as courtesy, after all.
It must be nearly one in the morning, calculated the Count. The performance was scheduled to end by eleven. The reception by twelve. They should have been here half an hour ago.
“Are there no taxis left in Moscow? No trolley cars?” he wondered aloud.
Or had they stopped somewhere on the way home . . . ? Was it possible that in passing a café they could not resist the impulse to slip inside and share a pastry while he waited and waited and waited? Could they have been so heartless? (If so, they dare not attempt to hide the fact, for he could tell if a pastry had been eaten from a distance of fifty feet!)
The Count paused in his pacing to peek behind the Ambassador, where he had carefully hidden the Dom Pérignon.
Preparing for a potential celebration is a tricky business. If Fortune smiles, then one must be ready to hit the ceiling with the cork. But if Fortune shrugs, then one must be prepared to act as if this were just another night, one of no particular consequence—and then later sink the unopened bottle to the bottom of the sea.
The Count stuck his hand into the bucket. The ice was nearly half melted and the temperature of the water a perfect 50˚. If they did not return soon, the temperature would become so tepid that the bottle belonged at the bottom of the sea.
Well, it would serve them right.
But as the Count withdrew his hand and stood to his full height, he heard an extraordinary sound emanating from the next room. It was the chime of the twice-tolling clock. Reliable Breguet announcing the stroke of midnight.
Impossible! The Count had been waiting for at least two hours. He had paced over twenty miles. It had to be half past one. Not a minute earlier.
“Perhaps reliable Breguet was no longer quite so reliable,” muttered the Count. After all, the clock was over fifty years old, and even the finest timepieces must be subject to the ravages of Time. Cogs will eventually lose their coginess just as springs will lose their springiness. But as the Count was having this thought, through the little window in the eaves he heard a clock tower in the distance tolling once, then twice, then thrice. . . .
“Yes, yes,” he said, collapsing into his chair. “You’ve made your point.”
Apparently, this was destined to be a day of exasperations.
Earlier that afternoon, the Boyarsky’s staff had been assembled by the assistant manager so that he could introduce new procedures for the taking, placing, and billing of orders.