Table for Two

by Amor Towles

It didn’t take long for the citizens of Moscow to realize that if you had no choice but to stand in line, then Pushkin was the man to stand next to. Graced with a gentle disposition, he was never boorish or condescending, neither full of opinions nor full of himself.

The human race is famously adaptive, but there is nothing that a human will adapt to more quickly than an improved standard of living.

But it had become increasingly clear that Pushkin had merely seemed that way. Once her husband had been freed by Bolshevism from the quasi-serfdom of the old regime, he had been revealed as a man of considerable talents; and not only did he help wives and widows obtain their necessities, he had virtually adopted a whole generation of orphans and turned them into productive citizens!

was a common misconception—or so her thought process unfolded—that Communism guaranteed an identical life for all. What Communism actually guaranteed is that in place of lineage and luck, the State would determine who should get what after taking careful account of the greater good. From this simple principle, it followed that a comrade who plays a greater role in attaining the greater good

Now, of all the lines in Moscow, the line that was the most elusive, the most daunting, the most insurmountable was the one that led to the Agency of Expatriate Affairs—that department in which one applied for an exit visa from Russia.