FEATURE — The bearded gentleman of sixty something seated to my left looked distinguished even in his snowsuit.
Chair lifts, like elevators, make intimate companions. If only by proximity. And if only for the time it takes you to reach the top of the mountain.
“Are you local?” I asked. “Not exactly,” he replied. “But I do have a house at the mouth of the canyon. And one in Florida and one in Philadelphia.”
“Is that where you’re from originally – Philadelphia?” I inquired, picking up an accent that didn’t exactly sound like the latter but definitely wasn’t the former.
“No, Russia,” he replied.
“What a coincidence,” I told him. “I’ve been in Moscow all week.”
“Is that so?” he asked, turning towards me, his eyes suddenly curious behind the orange tint of his goggles. “How did you manage that exactly?”
“Easy,” I told him. “It was all in my head.”
He didn’t laugh. But he did smile and nod vigorously as I explained how I’d been engrossed in Amor Towles’ book A Gentleman in Moscow.
“Oh, isn’t that the most wonderful book,” he exclaimed.
Apparently, my chairlift companion had also read and loved the Bolshevik era story of Count Alexander Illyich Rostov, an unrepentant young aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in the attic of the Metropol hotel. Just steps away from the Kremlin.
For thirty-two years, the Count lives out his life in the confines of the hotel under threat of death and under the watchful eye of informers and spies. While the Russia around him tumults under the rise of communism, war and Khrushchev, the Count finds a life – with joy, friendship and even love – from within.
Back on the chairlift, I told my companion how my family had visited St. Petersburg in the fall of 2018 – how interesting we’d found the city, and how I wished we could go back. “I’d love to see Moscow,” I told him. “Or even Nizhny Novgorod, the place of a thousand apples where the Count summered as a child.”
My new Russian friend looked at me now without the twinkle in his eye of the last several minutes. “I don’t know that place,” he said, shaking his head. “I left Russia in 1972 and I’ve never been back – and I won’t ever.”
“But isn’t Moscow worth a visit,” I asked him.
“If you’ve seen St. Petersburg, you’ve seen the best of Russia,” he replied. “But then again, if you’ve seen St. Petersburg, you’ve really just seen the best of France.”
Moving to a safer subject, I went back to the book. “Do you know what I loved most about A Gentleman in Moscow,” I rhetorically asked my Russian friend. “How the Count is still able to be the master of his domain within the hotel, even as the world is seemingly crumbling around him.”
The twinkle returned. “Yes,” the Russian replied. “On that we can agree.”
With that, we had arrived at the top of the lift. The Russian lifted the safety bar up and overhead, retrieved his poles from under leg, pushed off from his seat and as he started to ski away, called out to me: “And isn’t that a good lesson for us all today?”
Kat Dayton is a columnist for St. George News. Any opinions given are her own and not representative of St. George News staff or management.
Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.