once characterized the Assemblies now characterize Dinners of State (though no one with a penchant for yellow spies from the balcony anymore).
And the Boyarsky?
At two o’clock its kitchen is already in full swing. Along the wooden tables the junior chefs are chopping carrots and onions as Stanislav, the sous-chef, delicately debones pigeons with a whistle on his lips. On the great stoves, eight burners have been lit to simmer sauces, soups, and stews. The pastry chef, who seems as dusted with flour as one of his rolls, opens an oven door to withdraw two trays of brioches. And in the center of all this activity, with an eye on every assistant and a finger in every pot, stands Emile Zhukovsky, his chopping knife in hand.
If the kitchen of the Boyarsky is an orchestra and Emile its conductor, then his chopping knife is the baton. With a blade two inches wide at the base and ten inches long to the tip, it is rarely out of his hand and never far from reach. Though the kitchen is outfitted with paring knives, boning knives, carving knives, and cleavers, Emile can complete any of the various tasks for which those knives were designed with his ten-inch chopper. With it he can skin a rabbit. He can zest a lemon. He can peel and quarter a grape. He can use it to flip a pancake or stir a soup, and with the stabbing end he can measure out a teaspoon of sugar or a dash of salt. But most of all, he uses it for pointing.
“You,” he says to the saucier, waving the point of his chopper. “Are you going to boil that to nothing? What are you going to use it for, eh? To pave roads? To paint icons?
“You,” he says to the conscientious new apprentice at the end of the counter. “What are you doing there? It took less time for that parsley to grow than for you to mince it!”
And on the last day of spring? It is Stanislav who receives the tip of the knife. For in the midst of trimming the fat from racks of lamb, Emile suddenly stops and glares across the table.
“You!” he says, pointing the chopper at Stanislav’s nose. “What is that?”
Stanislav, a lanky Estonian who has dutifully studied his master’s every move, looks up from his pigeons with startled eyes.
“What is what, sir?”
“What is that you’re whistling?”
Admittedly, there has been a melody playing in Stanislav’s head—a little something that he had heard the night before while passing the entrance of the hotel’s bar—but he had not been conscious of whistling it. And now that he faces the chopper, he cannot for the life of him remember what the melody was.
“I am not certain,” he confesses.
“Not certain! Were you whistling or weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir. It was I who must have been whistling. But I assure you it was just a ditty.”
“Just a ditty?”
“A little song.”
“I know what a ditty is! But under what authority are you whistling one? Eh? Has the Central Committee made you Commissar of Ditty Whistling? Is that the Grand Order of Dittyness I see pinned to your chest?”
Without looking down, Emile slams his chopper to the counter, splitting a lamb chop from its rack as if he were severing the melody from Stanislav’s memory once and for all. The chef raises his chopper again and points its tip, but before he can elaborate, that door which separates Emile’s kitchen from the rest of the world swings open. It is Andrey, as prompt as ever, with his Book in hand and a pair of spectacles resting on the top of his head. Like a brigand after a skirmish, Emile slips his chopper under the tie of his apron and then looks expectantly at the door, which a moment later swings again.
With the slightest turn of the wrist the shards of glass tumble into a new arrangement. The blue cap of the bellhop is handed from one boy to the next, a dress as yellow as a canary is stowed in a trunk, a little red guidebook is updated with the new names of streets, and through Emile’s swinging door walks Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov—with the white dinner jacket of the Boyarsky draped across his arm.
One minute later, sitting at the table in the little office overlooking the kitchen were Emile, Andrey, and the Count—that Triumvirate which met each day at 2:15 to decide the fate of the restaurant’s staff, its customers, its chickens