The Count sat on his bed and took the last sip of coffee. Then he tucked the point of his paring knife under the envelope’s flap, slit it from corner to corner, and gazed within.
“Mon Dieu,” he said.
Arachne’s Art
History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says. The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow.
There on the third of January 1928, the historians tell us, was the launch of the First Five-Year Plan—that initiative which would begin the transformation of Russia from a nineteenth-century agrarian society into a twentieth-century industrial power. There on the seventeenth of November 1929, Nikolai Bukharin, founding father, editor of Pravda, and last true friend of the peasant, was outmaneuvered by Stalin and ousted from the Politburo—clearing the way for a return to autocracy in all but name. And there on the twenty-fifth of February 1927, was the drafting of Article 58 of the Criminal Code—the net that would eventually ensnare us all.
There on the twenty-seventh of May, or there on the sixth of December; at eight or nine in the morning.
There it was, they say. As if—like at the opera—a curtain has closed, a lever has been pulled, one set has been whisked to the rafters and another has dropped to the stage, such that when the curtain opens a moment later the audience will find itself transported from a richly appointed ballroom to the banks of a wooded stream. . . .
But the events that transpired on those various dates did not throw the city of Moscow into upheaval. When the page was torn from the calendar, the bedroom windows did not suddenly shine with the light of a million electric lamps; that Fatherly gaze did not suddenly hang over every desk and appear in every dream; nor did the drivers of a hundred Black Marias turn the keys in their ignitions and fan out into the shadowy streets. For the launch of the First Five-Year Plan, Bukharin’s fall from grace, and the expansion of the Criminal Code to allow the arrest of anyone even countenancing dissension, these were only tidings, omens, underpinnings. And it would be a decade before their effects were fully felt.
No. For most of us, the late 1920s were not characterized by a series of momentous events. Rather, the passage of those years was like the turn of a kaleidoscope.
At the bottom of a kaleidoscope’s cylinder lie shards of colored glass in random arrangement; but thanks to a glint of sunlight, the interplay of mirrors, and the magic of symmetry, when one peers inside what one finds is a pattern so colorful, so perfectly intricate, it seems certain to have been designed with the utmost care. Then by the slightest turn of the wrist, the shards begin to shift and settle into a new configuration—a configuration with its own symmetry of shapes, its own intricacy of colors, its own hints of design.
So it was in the city of Moscow in the late 1920s.
And so it was at the Metropol Hotel.
In fact, if a seasoned Muscovite were to cross Theatre Square on the last day of spring in 1930, he would find the hotel much as he remembered it.
There on the front steps still stands Pavel Ivanovich in his greatcoat looking as stalwart as ever (though his hip now gives him some trouble on foggy afternoons). On the other side of the revolving doors are the same eager lads in the same blue caps ready to whisk one’s suitcases up the stairs (though they now answer to Grisha and Genya rather than Pasha and Petya). Vasily, with his uncanny awareness of whereabouts, still mans the concierge’s desk directly across from Arkady, who remains ready to spin the register and offer you a pen. And in the manager’s office, Mr. Halecki still sits behind his spotless desk (though a new assistant manager with the smile of an ecclesiast is prone to interrupt his reveries over the slightest infraction of the hotel’s rules).
In the Piazza, Russians cut from every cloth (or at least those who have access to foreign currency) gather to linger over coffee and happen upon friends. While in the ballroom, the weighty remarks and late arrivals that