“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,
“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.”
“It rather makes you suspect that true belief is always false,” he said.
I nodded. “Yes, I think that’s true.”
The expression on Danforth’s face relaxed slightly, as if he’d been given a signal that it was safe to go on. “Then you are ready to hear more of my story,” he said.
“Good,” I said with an enthusiasm that surprised me. “Well, in our last episode, Anna was in league . . .”
Danforth lifted his hand in a cautionary gesture. “Anna was in league, yes.” His smile was thoroughly enigmatic. “But with whom?”
~ * ~
Orleans, France, 1939
Danforth would relive the sight of that morning on many occasions over the next sixty years. He would sometimes remember that they stood very near each other, Bannion’s entire profile visible but Anna’s face obscured by the slender trunk of the sapling in the foreground.
