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PART IV
The Scent of Almonds
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Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Why almonds?” I asked.
“Because that is the odor of cyanide,” Danforth said, and then he glanced around like a man either recalling the place where a murder had been committed or looking for a place where one might be carried out.
“We should leave here now, I think,” he said.
I looked toward the window. “But it’s still snowing quite hard,” I warned him.
He smiled at a young man’s alarm that an old one should venture out in such weather. “I have learned to be sure-footed,” he said. His face took on that familiar expression of an old man teaching a young one the rules of the road. “What do you think is the most important characteristic of a predator?” he asked.
I thought of the spider, still and silent in its web. “Patience,” I answered.
Danforth smiled. “Very good. And what is the prey’s most important characteristic?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
“Resignation,” Danforth said. “Which can only be achieved if the prey understands the purpose of its death.”
“You’re speaking in human terms then,” I said.
A hint of cruelty glittered in Danforth’s eyes. “I am speaking, Paul, of revenge.”
With that he rose in a way that made him seem already somewhat ghostly, a dark cloud, but a cloud nonetheless, as if he were no longer entirely alive because at his great age he was so very near to death.
“Come,” he said. “I have a quiet spot in mind.”
The spot wasn’t very far, as it turned out, though we’d accumulated a fair amount of snow on the shoulders of our coats before we got there.
“The Blue Bar,” he said with a nod to the awning up ahead. “In the Algonquin Hotel. You must have heard of the Algonquin?
“Yes, of course,” I said. “The Round Table. Those famous wits. Dorothy Parker and —”
“Yes, yes,” Danforth said sharply, as if all their worldly talk had never been worldly at all. “They were Manhattan provincials, and what could be more provincial than that?” He added a sly wink, but his tone turned somber. “Cleverness is the death of wisdom, Paul.”
We reached the bar, and rather than allowing me to do it, Danforth stepped briskly forward, opened the door, and let me enter first. It was an old man’s way of demonstrating that although he was old, he was not dependent, and I found myself admiring his determination to assert himself in such a graceful and unoffending manner.
“Thank you,” I said as I passed in front of him and gave him a courtly nod. “Most kind.”
Danforth smiled. “You are a very polite young man.” He said it as if he were suspicious of such formality, as if it were the knife inside the glove.
We took a table by the window, from which we could watch the city’s hardworking pedestrians shoulder through this inclement day in this wounded city, a scene that played in Danforth’s eyes and seemed, in the way of sorrow, to both darken and enlighten them.
“The tragic irony is that it is the people who seek heaven in the future who create hell in the present,” he said. With that, he summoned a waiter, and we each ordered a glass of wine, he a white, I a red, both whatever the house suggested.
“Tell me, Paul,” Danforth said once the waiter had departed. “Have you been to Moscow?”
“I have, actually,” I was pleased to tell him. “But a long time ago. When I was a little boy. On the grand tour I made with my grandfather. He knew the city quite well.”
“Really,” Danforth said. “Did he happen to show you the city’s swimming pool?”
“Swimming pool? No. It was the middle of winter.”
“Too bad,” Danforth said. “I don’t know this for a fact, but I can’t imagine that it isn’t the largest swimming pool in the world. And it has quite a history, that pool. Quite a story of its own.”
And then he told it.
In the summer of 1931, he said, Pravda announced that the Palace of the Soviets was to be built in Moscow. The planned physical dimensions of this palace were stupendous. It was to be six times the size of the Empire State Building, and at its completion, it would be crowned with a gigantic statue of Lenin three times as high as the Statue of Liberty. This was Stalin’s answer to capitalism, and he intended it to be a very powerful one. Equally important to this aim, the Palace of the Soviets was to be built next to the Kremlin on the huge piece of real estate at that time occupied by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, itself a monumental structure thirty stories tall with walls more than three meters thick and whose bronze cupola alone weighed 176 tons.
“All this, of course, had to be torn down before the Palace of the Soviets could be built,” Danforth said.
And so various methods for carrying out this destruction were endlessly discussed. It was even proposed that the building be bombed, but accuracy was a problem, and so during the course of a single night, a huge wooden barrier was erected around the cathedral, after which the interior of the church was stripped of a half a ton of gold, along with an incalculable treasure of diamonds, silver, topaz, amethyst, emeralds, and ornately carved enamels, all of which disappeared into government warehouses or the vaults of the Soviet secret police.
“The demolition was completed in early December,” Danforth said. “In four months one of the great architectural jewels of Moscow had been completely razed.”
Now came the construction of the Palace of the Soviets. It was to be over four hundred meters high, weigh 1.5 million tons, and enclose an area greater than the six largest skyscrapers currently towering above the streets of New York. Lenin’s gigantic statue was to crown this spectacular edifice. His index finger alone would stretch to six meters.
“But this statue never rose, nor the building to support it,” Danforth continued. “Everything sank into a morass of bad planning. The foundation was dug, but then the rains came, and then the snow, and in the spring, rivers of melting ice, and so the vast foundation filled with water. The water became infested with frogs and choked with duckweed, and worst of all, the whole disaster was now quite visible because the huge wooden fence that had concealed the earlier destruction had been dismantled by Muscovites desperate for firewood.”
“My God,” I said. “What a mess.”
“The years passed,” Danforth said. “Children fished in the depths of the old foundation. Stalin died. Khrushchev replaced him, and one day he looked out over this huge stinking lake of stagnant water and decided, Well, maybe a swimming pool.”
With that he laughed softly, but I didn’t.
“What, Paul, you find nothing funny in this tale?” Danforth asked pointedly.
“No,” I said. “No, it seems very sad to me, that people can become so deluded, destroy so wantonly out of some crazy ideology.”