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1926 / Adieu

Summary: 1926 / Adieu

Two years later, much has changed. Outside the Metropol, statues have been replaced and streets renamed. The Boyarsky is now amply staffed with inexperienced but well-connected waiters. Marina has a toddler at home and an assistant at work. Nina is about to move with her father into a new apartment building. Abram, the rooftop handyman with whom the Count still occasionally sits down for coffee, is nearing retirement. His bees, perhaps sensing a change in regime, have disappeared from their hives.

On the day before Helena’s death anniversary, the Count slips into suite 317 for one last look, pays his bills, and lays out his burial suit. He then visits Nina one more time, indulgently watching as she experimentally tests Galileo’s and Newton’s hypotheses about dropped objects. Over a final brandy at the Shalyapin, he falls into conversation with a Brit. When the Brit wonders how the Count came to be in Paris in 1918, the Count explains: At a party in 1913, he forgave a drunk lieutenant’s debt after a card game, in order to win the attentions and favor of the party’s guest of honor, a princess the lieutenant had hoped to impress. The lieutenant was left vomiting outside while the Count romanced the Princess. The next spring, the lieutenant took revenge on the Count by courting Helena for months and then humiliating her on her birthday, by assaulting her handmaiden. After shooting the lieutenant (though not fatally, as things turned out) to avenge his sister’s honor, the Count was forced to leave the country. That is why he was in Paris, and not at his sister’s side, when she died of scarlet fever in 1916. 

Just after midnight, the Count climbs onto the roof, carrying with him a wine bottle and a glass. He raises a glass to his sister, “a life too brief, a heart too kind.” As he peers over the edge of the roof and thinks of Nina’s experiments with falling objects, however, a voice calls to him. It is Abram, urging the Count to come see something remarkable. Sighing, the Count follows Abram to their coffee nook and sees that the bees have returned. What has Abram so excited is the flavor of the honey the bees have produced: it tastes of apple blossoms. The bees were at Nizhny Novgorod.

After saying goodbye to Abram, the Count goes to bed. The following evening, he asks Andrey if he can spare a moment.

Analysis: 1926 / Adieu

In planning out this death, the Count has control over his circumstances, contrary to his purported belief in Fate. He plans exactly how he will die, pens letters, chooses a burial outfit, picks his final drink, and directs an elaborate retort in favor of aristocracy to the British person at the bar. However, the Count is so overcome by what is happening around him – the changing of street names; the erasure of the city he once knew; the changes in the Boyarsky; the loss of his friends – that he is immersed in mourning his past and is determined to go down with the ship like the Admiral. At the last moment, proving his theory connecting weather and Fate, he is saved by the miraculous journey of the bees. For if it were not for the warming of the spring weather, the bees would not have returned that night. As the Count and the handyman, Abram, watch the bees, they are described as “the inverse of stars.” Hope may not be a shining beacon of light, but even in darkness, it exists.

Previous section 1923 / An Actress, an Apparition, an Apiary; Addendum; & 1924 / Anonymity Next section 1930; Arachne’s Art; & An Afternoon Assignation

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