It did not take long for Frederick to find a job commensurate with his skills and experience. In 1903, he began to work as a maître d’hôtel at Aquarium, an entertainment garden occupying several park-like acres just west of Triumphal Square, at what is now 16 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street. Aquarium was a focal point of Moscow’s lively nightlife for a clientele drawn from the more genteel and prosperous classes of society, especially those who were not put off by the frivolous nature of the garden’s entertainments. It retained its aquatic name even after the fountains, grottoes, and artificial streams flowing into a pond with goldfish that had existed there in 1898 were long forgotten.
Frederick’s employer, Charles Aumont, was a Frenchman. He had rebuilt the garden in a style intended to make visitors feel that they were arriving somewhere grand and magicaclass="underline" a giant white colonnade topped with sculptures greeted them at the entrance, and a marble staircase bathed in electric light led into the garden. A magnificent building decorated with carved cupolas, columns, and arches meant to evoke a Moorish palace housed a restaurant on the left. In the depths of the garden was a spacious concert stage. Bands in pavilions played fashionable tunes; people strolled along gravel walkways among trees strung with bright lights; vendors offered snacks and souvenirs from booths; barkers invited passersby to try their hand at bowling and other games. The garden provided a chance to get away from the noise and bustle of the city streets, to see and to be seen, to have some fun, perhaps to enjoy a brief flirtation or even a dalliance. A modest fee allowed a customer to enter the Aquarium grounds at dusk and to stay there until the garden closed in the early morning.
More expensive tickets gave entry to a large enclosed theater on the grounds that featured lavish productions of fashionable operettas and comedies imported directly from Vienna, Paris, London, and Berlin. The subjects were invariably lighthearted, the plots quick-paced, and the humor often risqué. The theater’s private rooms were also available, curtained in a way that shielded those inside from public view but not from the stage. In the early 1900s, the most famous customer for these was the biggest name in Moscow—Grand Duke Sergey, the tsar’s uncle and the city’s governor-general. Younger grand dukes sat openly in first-row orchestra seats. After the performance at the enclosed theater was over, patrons could continue their evening by moving to the “café chantant.” This was a different, open-air theater that included a restaurant where customers would sit at small tables facing a stage and order food and drink while they watched, or ignored, a variety show of twenty or thirty acts in quick succession—everything from trained animals to acrobats to operatic singers.
Aumont was a very successful, talented, and ruthless businessman, and Frederick learned a great deal from him (including how not to behave). For owners of establishments like Aquarium, sales of food and especially of drink were major components of their income, and cynical observers of Moscow nightlife often complained that the variety shows were really just magnets for successful restaurants. The managers of the gardens certainly did what they could to link the two. Many of the song and dance acts featured attractive young women whose primary talent was projecting their allure to a largely male audience. But the enticements did not stop there. According to the norms of the time, a client seated in the restaurant who was particularly taken with a performer—and who had the money and the courage—could send her an invitation to join him at his table after she had taken her turn onstage.
The exploitation of chorus girls and other female performers was one area where Aumont sinned but Frederick did not. Frederick became personally involved in the fate of one such young woman in 1903. Natalia Trukhanova was a sweet-faced actress with dreamy eyes and a voluptuous figure who aspired to a career on the stage of the celebrated Moscow Art Theater, which had recently launched Chekhov’s plays and had become the center of a revolution in Russian theatrical practice. But she did not succeed, was in desperate need of money, and—following a friend’s advice—applied for a job at Aquarium. Aumont liked her and hired her on the spot to perform in light comedies. He also offered her a monthly salary that exceeded her wildest dreams and, glossing over some of the fine print, urged her to sign a contract at their first meeting.
She did not realize what she had gotten herself into until she finished her first performance and was preparing to go. Her costar ran into her dressing room and began to upbraid her in a loud, harsh tone for not knowing the ropes: “Have you lost your wits? They’re going to start asking for you in the private rooms any second! And you want to relax? You want to earn your bread without working? No, missy! That won’t work here! Please be so kind as to sit and wait in your dressing room until you’re called. One of the maîtres d’hôtel will fetch you.” A few minutes later, one of them did appear—“the negro Thomas” as Trukhanova referred to him. He announced very politely that a party was asking for her in private room 18 and that everyone there was entirely decent and sober. She obediently followed Frederick to the door, and thus began what she called her yearlong “path of sorrow,” working every night like a “real geisha.”
Her fate would have been worse were it not for Frederick and the other maîtres d’hôtel, who looked out for her like “tender nursemaids,” as she put it. Trukhanova described how, whenever she was entertaining customers in a private room, one of the maîtres d’hôtel would take care to place a bottle of her “personal” champagne in front of her. This was actually a rather foul-tasting mixture of mineral water colored with tea, but it looked like the real thing and allowed her to avoid drinking anything alcoholic. And if a client happened to pour some wine or liquor into her glass, the maître d’hôtel who was keeping an eye on the room would immediately swoop in and remove it. Trukhanova reciprocated and won the affection of the Aquarium’s restaurant staff by donating her commissions to the general pool for tips. Her distaste for her work was so strong that she would also not keep anything that her clients bought for her and saw “every flower, every piece of fruit” as “defiled.” Frederick noticed this and remembered it in a way that touched her deeply. On New Year’s Day, January 1, 1904, he presented her with an enormous bouquet from the grateful staff and began his speech by announcing: “Not a single one of these flowers comes from the restaurant, and the ribbon is… straight from Paris!”
The success that Frederick quickly achieved at Aquarium made it seem as if he had become master of his own fate by settling in Russia. But there were subterranean historical forces at work in his adopted country, even if they were initially hardly noticeable to people like him caught up in their daily lives. They erupted for the first time scarcely five years after he arrived and did so with a violence that would show the fragility of the life he had built for himself—indeed, the fragility of his whole surrounding world.