Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [14]
As luck would have it, a party was just leaving and we were whisked into a small booth on the tsarist side of the dance floor. The waiters at Chernoff’s never asked for your order. They just plopped down plates of pierogies and herring and tongue. In the middle of the table, they put shot glasses and an old wine bottle filled with vodka that, despite the repeal of the Twenty-first Amendment, was still distilled in a bathtub. Tinker poured three glasses.
—I swear I’m going to find me Jesus one of these days, Eve said, knocking hers back. Then she excused herself to the powder room.
On the stage a lone Cossack accompanied himself ably on the balalaika . It was an old song about a horse that returns from war without its rider. As it approaches the soldier’s hometown, the horse recognizes the smell of the lindens, the brush of the daisies, the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer. Though the lyrics were poorly translated, the Cossack performed with the sort of feeling that can only be captured by an expatriate. Even Tinker suddenly looked homesick—as if the song described a country that he too had been forced to leave behind.
When the song was over the crowd responded with heartfelt applause; but it was sober too, like the applause for a fine and unpretentious speech. The Cossack bowed once and retired from the stage.
After looking appreciatively around the room, Tinker observed that his brother would really love this place and that we should all come back together.
—You think we’d like him?
—I think you would especially. I bet you two would really hit it off.
Tinker became quiet, turning his empty shot glass in his hands. I wondered if he were lost in thoughts of his brother or still under the spell of the Cossack’s song.
—You don’t have any siblings, do you, he said setting his glass down.
The observation caught me off guard.
—Why? Do I seem spoiled?
—No! If anything the opposite. Maybe it’s that you seem like you’d be comfortable being alone.
—Aren’t you?
—Once I was, I think. But I’ve sort of lost the habit. Nowadays, if I’m in my apartment with nothing to do, I find myself wondering who’s in town.
—Living in a henhouse, I’ve got the opposite problem. I’ve got to go out to be alone.
Tinker smiled and refilled my glass. For a moment, we were both quiet.
—Where do you go? he asked.
—Where do I go when?
—When you want to be alone.
At the side of the stage, a small orchestra had begun to assemble—taking their chairs and tuning their instruments, while having emerged from the back hall, Eve was working her way through the tables.
—Here she is, I said, standing up so that Eve could slip back into the banquette between us.
The food at Chernoff’s was cold, the vodka medicinal and the service abrupt. But nobody came to Chernoff’s for the food or the vodka or the service. They came for the show.
Shortly before ten, the orchestra began to play an intro with a distinctly Russian flavor. A spotlight shot through the smoke revealing a middle-aged couple stage right, she in the costume of a farm girl and he a new recruit. A cappella, the recruit turned to the farm girl and sang of how she should remember him: by his tender kisses and his footsteps in the night, by the autumn apples he had stolen from her grandfather’s orchard. The recruit wore more rouge on his cheeks than the farm girl, and his jacket, which was missing a button, was a size too small.
No, she replied, I will not remember you by those things.
The recruit fell to his knees in despair and the farm girl pulled his head