The Wuff With The Smooth: A dog in Moscow

“We don’t know how a man or his achievements will be perceived three generations from now, any more than we know what his great-great-grandchildren will be having for breakfast on a Tuesday in March. Because when Fate hands something down to posterity, it does so behind its back.”

– Amor Towles, ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

A Gentleman in Moscow is one of my favourite books. In fact, I find it so much aligned to my tastes that I have read the novel three times and I wouldn’t rule out a fourth – or a fifth, for that matter.

An outlandish but very believable tale of a man who is forced to spend the rest of his life in a luxury hotel, it is at once witty and wise and wonderful.

The man at the centre of the story, one Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is possibly the most underrated hero in literary history and certainly the most likeable.

And it is over the Count’s shoulder that we, the reader, experience his trials and tribulations within the bounds of the Metropol Hotel in the centre of Moscow.

Last week though, I was thinking about that quote above, “when Fate hands something down to posterity, it does so behind its back,” after the dog had found it necessary to eat the slug pellets I’d put out into the flower bed.

“Little did I know,” I said aloud.

Because when Fate was handing both myself and posterity a pup called Waffle, his bearing, personality and proclivity for being a fool, were shielded from view behind that back.

In other words, all these characteristics were unknown and only to be revealed in time.

And so, when the dog commits treasonous acts such as eating slug pellets and then a belly-full of grass and then enters the house only to chunder the whole green bolus of disaster onto the kitchen tiles, I am prone to speculating as to Fate’s penchant for taking sides against me.

And yet, that Gentleman in Moscow had a view on that very topic. It went like this: “Fate does not take sides. It is fair-minded and generally prefers to maintain some balance between the likelihood of success and failure in all our endeavours.”

Is that so? Then let us compromise by saying that Fate must have a very healthy sense of humour.

Our gentleman friend adds, “Fate would not have the reputation it has, if it simply did what it seemed it would do.”

Certainly and by extension, my dog’s own reputation is being built, incident by incident, on what he perhaps should not do.

Over the three readings of the book, I have discovered that the work is littered with great crumbs of wisdom, morsels of morality which, Hanzel-and-Gretel-like, tend to lead the way to a destination of sorts.

Some weeks ago I wrote about Waffle being a teacher and that his lessons, whilst fraught with frustration and inconvenience (like having to clean up grassy puke), can only be appreciated when there is acceptance on my part that he is who he is and that inconvenience is part of the journey.

The Count suggests…

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka – and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

Does that mean that cleaning the grassy puke or worrying about Waffle’s health after he consumed slug pellets are what matters most because, in a way, these are the incidents whereby we care for our pets.

There is a lot to be gleaned from A Gentleman in Moscow but most importantly, there is a lot to be savoured and enjoyed. Amor Towles’s prose is as elegant as a rose and the book is permeated with a subtle humour and interspersed with beautiful wisdom. The Count is also a magnificent gourmand, which helps in the overall picture.

However, as much as Waffle and I clash with one another, one bad tempered and the other rolling on instinct, I have to remember that a great lesson lies at the heart of this story of a man under life-long house arrest in a single building. As well as summing up the Count’s entire predicament, it translates to all situations in life. To boot, this motto – for that is what it is – doesn’t require Fate to be on your side, nor does it matter if Fate is handing bombs down to both you and posterity behind its back.

The wisdom is this…

“If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”