The Gromekos were cultivated people, hospitable, and great connoisseurs and lovers of music. They gathered company at their home and organized evenings of chamber music at which piano trios, violin sonatas, and string quartets were performed.
In January of 1906, soon after Nikolai Nikolaevich’s departure abroad, the next of these chamber concerts on Sivtsev Vrazhek was to take place. They planned to perform a new violin sonata by a beginner from Taneev’s school and a Tchaikovsky trio.
Preparations began the day before. Furniture was moved to free the concert hall. In the corner a tuner produced the same note a hundred times and then spilled out the beads of an arpeggio. In the kitchen fowl were plucked, greens were washed, mustard was beaten with olive oil for sauces and dressings.
In the morning Shura Schlesinger, Anna Ivanovna’s bosom friend and confidante, came to bother them.
Shura Schlesinger was a tall, lean woman with regular features and a somewhat masculine face, which gave her a slight resemblance to the sovereign, especially in her gray lambskin hat, which she wore cocked and kept on when visiting, just barely lifting the little veil pinned to it.
In periods of sorrow and care, the conversations between the two friends afforded them mutual relief. The relief consisted in Shura Schlesinger and Anna Ivanovna exchanging biting remarks of an ever more caustic nature. A stormy scene would break out, quickly ending in tears and reconciliation. These regular quarrels had a tranquilizing effect on both women, like leeches on the bloodstream.
Shura Schlesinger had been married several times, but she forgot her husbands immediately after the divorce and attached so little significance to them that there was in all her habits the cold mobility of the single woman.
Shura Schlesinger was a Theosophist,19 but at the same time she had such excellent knowledge of the course of the Orthodox services that even when toute transportée,* in a state of complete ecstasy, she could not help prompting the clergy on what they should say or sing. “Hear me, O Lord,” “again and oftentimes,” “more honorable than the cherubim”—her husky, broken patter could be heard escaping her all the time.
Shura Schlesinger knew mathematics, Hindu mysticism, the addresses of the most important professors of Moscow Conservatory, who was living with whom, and, my God, what did she not know? Therefore she was invited as an arbiter and monitor in all serious situations in life.
At the appointed hour the guests began to arrive. Adelaïda Filippovna came, Gintz, the Fufkovs, Mr. and Mrs. Basurman, the Verzhitskys, Colonel Kavkaztsev. It was snowing, and when the front door was opened, the tangled air raced past, all as if in knots from the flitting of big and little snowflakes. Men came in from the cold, their deep rubber boots flopping loosely on their feet, affecting one after the other to be absent-minded, clumsy fellows, while their wives, freshened by the frost, the two upper buttons of their fur coats undone, their fluffy kerchiefs pushed back on their frosty hair, were, on the contrary, images of the inveterate rogue, perfidy itself, not to be trifled with. “Cui’s nephew,” the whisper went around, on the arrival of a new pianist, invited to the house for the first time.20
From the concert hall, through the opened side doors at both ends, they could see a laid table, long as a winter road, in the dining room. The eye was struck by the bright sparkle of rowanberry vodka in bottles with granular facets. The imagination was captivated by little cruets of oil and vinegar on silver stands, and the picturesqueness of the game and snacks, and even the napkins folded in little pyramids that crowned each place setting, and the almond-scented blue-violet cineraria in baskets seemed to excite the appetite. So as not to delay the desired moment of savoring earthly food, they turned as quickly as possible to the spiritual. They sat down in rows in the hall. “Cui’s nephew”—the whispering was renewed when the pianist took his place at the instrument. The concert began.
The sonata was known to be dull and forced, cerebral. It fulfilled expectations, and moreover proved to be terribly drawn out.
During the intermission there was an argument about it between the critic Kerimbekov and Alexander Alexandrovich. The critic denounced the sonata, and Alexander Alexandrovich defended it. Around them people smoked and noisily moved chairs from place to place.
But again their gazes fell upon the ironed tablecloth that shone in the next room. Everyone suggested that the concert continue without delay.
The pianist glanced sidelong at the public and nodded to his partners to begin. The violinist and Tyshkevich swung their bows. The trio burst into sobs.
Yura, Tonya, and Misha Gordon, who now spent half his life at the Gromekos’, were sitting in the third row.
“Egorovna’s making signs to you,” Yura whispered to Alexander Alexandrovich, who was sitting directly in front of him.
On the threshold of the hall stood Agrafena Egorovna, the Gromeko family’s old, gray-haired maid, and with desperate looks in Yura’s and equally resolute nods in Alexander Alexandrovich’s direction, gave Yura to understand that she urgently needed the host.
Alexander Alexandrovich turned his head, looked at Egorovna reproachfully, and shrugged his shoulders. But Egorovna would not calm down. Soon an exchange started between them, from one end of the hall to the other, as between two deaf-mutes. Eyes turned towards them. Anna Ivanovna cast annihilating glances at her husband.
Alexander Alexandrovich stood up. Something had to be done. He blushed, quietly went around the room by the corner, and approached Egorovna.
“Shame on you, Egorovna! Really, what’s this sudden urgency? Well, be quick, what’s happened?”
Egorovna started whispering something to him.
“From what Montenegro?”
“The hotel.”
“Well, what is it?”
“He’s wanted without delay. Somebody’s dying there.”
“So it’s dying now. I can imagine. Impossible, Egorovna. They’ll finish playing the piece, and I’ll tell him. It’s impossible before.”
“They’re waiting from the hotel. And the cab, too. I’m telling you, somebody’s dying, don’t you understand? An upper-class lady.”
“No and no again. Look, five minutes is no big thing.”
With the same quiet step along the wall, Alexander Alexandrovich returned to his place and sat down, frowning and rubbing the bridge of his nose.
After the first part, he went up to the performers and, while the applause thundered, told Tyshkevich that they had come for him, there was some sort of unpleasantness, and the music would have to be stopped. Then, holding up his palms to the hall, Alexander Alexandrovich silenced the applause and said loudly:
“Ladies and gentlemen. The trio must be interrupted. Let us express our sympathy with Fadei Kazimirovich. There is some trouble. He is forced to leave us. In such a moment, I do not wish to leave him alone. My presence may prove necessary. I will go with him. Yurochka, go, my dear boy, tell Semyon to come to the front porch, he’s been harnessed up for a long time. Ladies and gentlemen, I am not saying good-bye. I beg you all to stay. My absence will be brief.”
The boys begged Alexander Alexandrovich to let them ride with him through the night frost.
21
Despite the restoring of the normal flow of life, there was still shooting here and there after December, and the new fires, of the sort that always happened, looked like the smoldering remains of the earlier ones.