also tasked me with getting close to Feltrinelli to see what we might find out—about the book’s publication and distribution, about the publisher’s relationship with Pasternak.
I took a copy of Il dottor Živago and ran my fingers across its glossy cover: a design of white, pink, and blue scribbles hovering above a tiny sleigh making its way to a snow-covered cottage.
“An American who reads Italian?” a man standing on the other side of the book pyramid asked. “How fetching.” He wore an ivory tuxedo with a black pocket square and tortoiseshell glasses with frames too small for his broad face.
“No.” In truth, I could read Italian and was conversationally fluent. When I was young, back before I’d changed my name from Forelli to Forrester, my grandmother had lived with our family. First generation Italian American, Nonna spoke hardly a word of English—just yes, no, stop it, and leave me be—and I learned how to converse with her over card games of Scopa and Briscola.
“Why take a book you can’t read?” His accent was hard to place. Italian, but a practiced Italian. He either wasn’t Italian or was attempting a Florentine dialect to appear posher than he was.
“I love a first edition,” I said. “And a good party.”
“Well, if you need help reading it…” He tipped his glasses downward, and I noticed a small red mark on the bridge of his nose.
“I might just take you up on that.”
He waved a waiter over and handed me a glass of Prosecco without taking one for himself.
“Nothing for the toast?”
“I’m afraid I must go,” he said, and touched my arm. “If you ever get a spot on that pretty gown of yours, look me up back in Washington. I own a dry cleaning business and we can get any spot out, I assure you. Ink, wine, blood. Anything.” He turned and left, a copy of Il dottor Živago tucked under his arm.
KGB? MI6? One of our own? I looked around to see if anyone had noticed the strange interaction as Feltrinelli clinked his glass with a spoon. The publisher stepped atop an overturned wooden crate as if about to make a stump speech. Had he brought the crate himself for the effect? Or had the hotel provided it? Regardless, the look fitted him.
“I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone for being here tonight on this momentous occasion,” he began, reading from a piece of paper he’d pulled from his pocket. “Over a year ago, the winds of fate brought me Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece. I wish those very winds could be here to celebrate with us tonight, but alas, they cannot.” He grinned and a few people in the audience laughed. “When I first held this novel in my hands, I could not read one word of it. The only Russian word I know is Stolichnaya.” More laughter. “But my dear friend Pietro Antonio Zveteremich”—he pointed to a sweater-vested man puffing on a pipe toward the back of the crowd—“told me that to not publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture. But even before he read it, I knew just by holding it in my hands that it was special.” He dropped the piece of paper he was reading from and let it flutter to the ground. “So I took a chance. It would be months before Pietro would complete his translation and I could finally read these words.” He held up Zhivago. “But when I did, the Russian master’s words burned themselves into my heart forever, as I’m sure they will into yours.”
“Hear, hear!” someone called out.
“I never intended to be the first to bring this work to an audience,” Feltrinelli continued. “It was my intention to secure the foreign rights after it was published in its native land. But of course life doesn’t always go according to plan.”
A woman at Feltrinelli’s feet raised her glass. “Cin cin!”
“I’ve been told it would be a crime to publish this work. I’ve been told that to publish this book would be the end of me.” He looked around the room. “But I hold in my heart the truth Pietro spoke when he first read it, that not to publish this novel would be an even greater crime. Of course, Boris Pasternak himself asked that I delay publication. I told him that there was no time to waste, that I needed to bring his words to the world posthaste. And I did.” The crowd erupted. “Please raise your