I just skimmed the book again over the last several days and discovered a couple of new highlights I had missed before:
Very very early in the book, when Alexander has just been relocated to his 100-square-foot room on the sixth floor, he begins to read Montaigne’s essays. The first one he reads is called, “By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End,” and it discusses how to “soften the hearts of those we have offended” by “audacity and steadfastness.” This is what the Count’s behavior winds up being, and it annoys the Russian government no end!
It was right at the end of Book II that Alexander decides not to kill himself, when the handyman’s bees produce honey with the taste of the apples. And it’s right after that decision, in the last two paragraphs of Book II, that Alexander decides to be of service by waiting tables. "The following evening at six, when the Boyarsky opened, the Count was the first one through its doors. ‘Andrey,’ he said to the maitre d’. ‘Can you spare a moment . . . ?’ " And then at the beginning of Book III, he’s a waiter.
It is also in the same paragraph that he returns the gold coin he had had in his pocket (to pay the undertaker) to the leg of the desk, “where it would remain untouched for another twenty-eight years.” I am still somewhat confused about how the money thing happened – right before he intends to kill himself, he settles his accounts, through the Greek fellow – but later, when he figures out how to help Sofia leave, “for the first time in almost thirty years [he] opened one of the hidden doors in the legs of the Grand Duke’s desk.” So I’m not sure how the gold coins were turned into paying his expenses during the ensuing years, but again – I’m being too practical!
And finally, I totally missed this little twist the first time: “The Count was also right to worry that Sofia’s residency would be noted… . . Within a fortnight of her arrival a letter was sent to an administrative office within the Kremlin stating that a Former Person living under house arrest on the top floor of the Metropol Hotel was caring for a five-year-old child of unknown parentage.” The Kremlin winds up leaving the child alone because they think the child is Anna’s and is the illegitimate daughter of some member of the Politburo with whom Anna had a liaison! I thought that was hysterical.