was employed. By the time the new resident moved in, the
general had long been a widower. Here, the storyteller
tactfully fell silent.
Solovyov knew from Dupont’s book about the death of
the general’s wife in the mid-sixties. Lacking specific information about this woman, the French researcher had alluded to her rather briefly. The general’s son was discussed even more briefly; the scholarly lady had not managed to trace
his fate after he came of age. The Yalta civil servant had managed to trace his fate, though, if only partially. After resting her unblinking gaze on Solovyov, she announced
that the general’s only son had taken to drinking and left home. She just could not remember if the son had taken
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taken to drinking after leaving home. Even in the absence
of chronological clarity, however, both facts were at hand and both induced the storyteller’s agitation. She stopped
smiling, leaned back in her chair, and mechanically adjusted the straps of her brassiere under her blouse. Solovyov began to think he was watching some sort of old movie, though
he could not remember how the movie ended.
In the early 1970s, Nina Fedorovna Akinfeeva was around
forty and she, like the general, was completely alone. After moving into the communal apartment, Nina Fedorovna
unexpectedly acquired a reason to exist. The general became the object of her reverence and care, occupying all her
thoughts, energies, and time. She took to reading books
about the anti-Communist White Movement. They power-
fully crowded out the Chekhov studies that had once
occupied an exceptional position in her consciousness. Little by little, Nina Fedorovna’s museum colleagues began to
notice, alarmed, that Anton P. Chekhov was no longer at
the center of her interests.
It is difficult to say what, exactly, served as the reason for the museum employee’s spiritual regeneration. Did her
vanity play a role here (residence in the same communal
apartment as a great person), or was it the opposite, meaning pity (residence of a great person in a communal apartment)?
Was this the influence of the magnetic qualities of the
general himself, a person who at one time commanded
armies and was most likely capable of subordinating a lonely museum worker to his will? And, finally, was there, behind everything that happened, a banal communal apartment
dalliance, as some of the employees at the Chekhov Museum
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of their colleague’s unpredictable temperament)? This,
however, should be qualified by saying that other museum
workers categorically rejected the possibility of a dubious relationship with the elderly general. In the course of discussions that arose spontaneously, the supposition was expressed that Nina Fedorovna might just as successfully have developed a similar relationship with Anton Chekhov.
The following notable fact testifies, circumstantially, to the bond between these two lonely people being purely
platonic. One fine morning (after numerous years of selfless service to the general), Nina Fedorovna embraced the object of her reverence and ran out of the house without saying
a word. She returned about three weeks later in an unrecog-nizable condition. Her face was all scratched and her
clothing was torn. The fugitive was breathing heavily. She brought with her the scent of the forest and cheap cigarettes, and a devastated bankbook. The general welcomed her
without a single question. Several weeks later she burst into sobs and confessed to the general that she was pregnant.
The general, sitting in his chair, lifted his head. Nina
Fedorovna placed her trembling fingers into his extended
hand, and he silently squeezed them.
Nobody, including the museum and the cultural depart-
ment that administers it, ever learned what thickets had
attracted Nina Fedorovna during her days of flight. Innate energy that had awakened within the museum worker drove
her toward continuing the human race and threw her into
the embrace of something age-old, savage, and natural. The museum’s management saw this particular case as unprecedented as well as unworthy of imitation. Considering,
however, that Nina Fedorovna had become pregnant on the
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very brink of the conclusion of her child-bearing years (it was emphasized in the trade union’s character reference
that this was the last chance for the member of the muse-
um’s collective) material assistance in the amount of
seventy-five rubles was allocated to her. The fallen employee was also presented with The Stone Foot, a poetry collection by Grigory V. Ursulyak, the museum’s director. The museum
did not regret the assistance afterwards. Years later, when Akinfeeva left Yalta for points unknown, her daughter
replaced her in that institution of enlightenment.
Life did not change a bit in the communal apartment after
that. Nina Fedorovna returned to the responsibilities that she had previously chosen to take upon herself. Every day (in the early morning, and sometimes in the evening) she accompanied the general to the jetty, carrying his folding chair and awning behind him. The time after the onset of darkness was devoted to preparing his memoirs. The general had previously written them himself but was forced to set them aside after the age of eighty, when his hand took on a mind of its own.
New opportunities opened up for the general when a helper
appeared in his life. He began dictating his recollections.
Just before giving birth, Nina Fedorovna asked the general what she should name the child.
‘Name her Zoya,’ said the general.
It remained unknown whether he was emphasizing the
life-affirming meaning of what had happened—in keeping
with the name, Zoya—or was simply oriented to the church
calendar, with its saints’ days. The woman was only asking what to name the baby if it was a boy but the general replied that it would be a girl.
She was taken to the maternity hospital a few days later.
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After ordering that a small icon of Saint Panteleimon be
removed from the windowsill, the head doctor—in light of
the arriving patient’s age—made the decision to perform a
caesarean section. During the entire nine months of her
pregnancy Nina Fedorovna had feared childbirth complica-
tions and her anxieties, sadly, were warranted.
The complications were brought on by forceps that were
forgotten in the birthing mother’s belly during the operation.
The doctors must, however, be given credit. When they heard complaints of sharp pain in the abdominal cavity, they flawlessly chose, from an abundance of possibilities, (the nurse who forgot the forceps made the diagnosis), the correct
reason, which essentially ensured the success of the second operation, too.
Nina Fedorovna left the hospital about twenty days later.
When she crossed the apartment threshold with Zoya, who
was wearing a pink ribbon, the general was already gone.
He had die
d.
Solovyov looked into the cultural worker’s bottomless
eyes. A deep knowledge of the city’s cultural life and a
willingness to share that knowledge were discernible there.
Sympathy for the fate of General Larionov and those around him was also apparent. At the same time—Solovyov’s
conversation partner expressed this with a deep sigh—the
Yalta City Executive Committee’s influence on human fates
had it limitations.
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5
After lunch, Solovyov headed to the Chekhov Museum. He
climbed up a long, winding lane, crossing from one sidewalk to the other, seeking out the shade. The ascent reminded him of scholarly work, which—as he had already managed to
comprehend—never moves in a straight line. Its trajectory is unpredictable and describing the research requires inserting a hundred vignettes. Any research is like the motion of a dog following a scent. The motion is chaotic (outwardly) and
sometimes reminiscent of spinning in place, but it is the only possible path to a result. It is essential for research to check its own rhythm against the rhythm of the material under
study. If they resonate with one another and if their pulses beat in time, then research is ending and fate is beginning.
Thus spoke Prof. Nikolsky.
Finally, Solovyov saw what he was looking for. Before
him lay a small square that—amidst all Yalta’s develop-
ment—reminded him of a crater after an explosion. A group
of hideous bronze figures was arranged along its perimeter, depicting, according to the sculptor, Chekhov’s most famous characters. The sculptures, however, did not seem to insist on having any direct relationship with Chekhov. Seemingly
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too shy to walk right up to the writer’s house, they huddled forlornly by the trees that framed the square.
The museum itself consisted of a concrete administrative
building and an elegant cottage from the beginning of the
century (this was Chekhov’s house). Inside the concrete
structure, Solovyov asked for Zoya Ivanovna. They looked
at him with curiosity and made a telephone call. Solovyov
stepped outside for some air while he waited for Zoya
Ivanovna. A few minutes later, the Chekhov garden’s little gate clanged and a young woman appeared. The honey-colored tone of her skin and dark hair left no doubt: this was Zoya Ivanovna. It was her patronymic that had been
called into question at Yalta’s city hall. There was something multi-ethnic about her, of the carnival in Rio—most definitely not Chekhovian. Her face was imperturbable.
She was wearing a gauzy, nearly immaterial dress, flus-
tering the young researcher. Distracted, he began telling her about his study of General Larionov, for some reason
alluding, again, to graduate student Kalyuzhny. Angry with himself, he switched abruptly to an analysis of mistakes in Dupont’s book and unexpectedly finished with Prof.
Nikolsky’s response to the Latvian veterans.
‘Would you like me to show you the museum?’ Zoya
asked sternly.
‘I’d like that,’ said Solovyov.
He followed Zoya (‘just don’t call me Ivanovna!’),
mechanically copying her light, feline gait. How could her father have been an ‘Ivan’ . . .
It was cool inside the Chekhov house. Solovyov mentally
thanked Russian literature as he went inside, out of the
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house reflected something invigorating, some sort of well-
spring source of the country’s literature. He liked that phrase and so uttered it for Zoya.
‘Unfortunately,’ and here she touched the wall with her
palm, ‘it wasn’t only cool here in the summer.’
Zoya told him the house was also impossible to heat
properly in winter. It was put up by a Moscow architect
who was unfamiliar with Yalta’s climactic peculiarities and so was, consequently, incapable of building anything satis-factory here. Zoya’s slender fingers slid prettily along the wallpaper’s rhombuses. The portrayal of a boundless Russia systematically ruined by Moscow served as the backdrop to
her story. She had a grateful listener in the Petersburger Solovyov.
The tour turned out to be very detailed. The museum
guest visited all the rooms in the Chekhov house, even the ones not usually intended for visits. He was permitted to
lift the telephone receiver in which Lev Tolstoy’s voice was once heard, calling Chekhov from Gaspra. In the bedroom,
he touched bed linens embroidered with the laundry’s mark
ACh. With the look of an illusionist pulling the final and most beautiful dove out of a hat, Zoya sat him down next
to her on the writer’s bed. Solovyov forgot about Chekhov
entirely while sitting on the museum exhibit. His tour
guide’s dark body, which shone through the whiteness of
her dress, commanded his attention.
Then they went out to the garden (out to the garden,
Solovyov whispered). Walking past bamboo planted by
Chekhov, Zoya led her visitor to two benches that formed
a right angle in the very corner of the garden. At Zoya’s
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on a bench, as if they were in negotiations. Solovyov
explained again the aim of his stay in Yalta, this time more calmly and lucidly.
Zoya listened to him, almost leaning against the back of
the bench but not quite resting against it. Solovyov recalled that in the cadet corps this was customarily done to improve one’s posture. He reported on his trip to Yalta’s City Hall, too, though he kept quiet about the details relating to Zoya personally. At the story about Nina Fedorovna’s return from the maternity hospital, Zoya interrupted him, ‘His room
was completely ransacked when my mother and I came
home. The new resident greeted us wearing the general’s
slippers.’
Zoya turned out to be very observant for a person who
was wearing a newborn’s pink ribbon when she arrived.
The Kozachenko family had moved into the general’s
room. They were not Yaltans. The Kozachenkos had landed
themselves in the Russian Riviera from some remote place or other; they were from around either Ternopol or Lvov.
On its own, life in the middle of nowhere was probably
incapable of prying them from that spot: that life did not burden them. As it happened, Petr Terentyevich Kozachenko, a civil defense specialist, had taken ill with tuberculosis, an uncharacteristic illness for specialists like him; it was even a bit bohemian.
While undergoing treatment in Alupka, Petr Terentyevich
managed to determine that the Magarach Wine Institute in
Yalta had an urgent need for a specialist of his type. He was accepted quickly after offering his services and returned to his historical motherland as an employee of the wine institute. Petr Terentyevich’s new employment turned out to be
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completely unexpected for his family. His wife, Galina
Artemovna, was astounded at her husband’s abuse of power
&nb
sp; and flat-out refused to move. In the family scene that
followed, she inserted their son, Taras, between herself and Petr Terentyevich. Pointing at Taras, she accused Petr
Terentyevich of irresponsibility. Ten-year-old Taras looked off to the side, plentiful soundless tears rolling down his cheeks.
It is possible that Petr Terentyevich might have backed
down (meaning he very likely would have backed down)
under different circumstances, but the struggle over the
move seemed like an unexpected struggle for his very life.
He exhibited an inflexibility that did not really typify his relationship with his wife. He had his name removed from
government registries (for which his wife cursed him, daily), resigned from his previous job, and anxiously groped at the lymph nodes around his armpits.
Galina Artemovna, who had already mourned her husband
mentally, even before his Crimean trip (she regarded his
illness in all seriousness), was perplexed by Petr Terentyevich’s obstinacy. The hope of maintaining the housing that was
provided to him as a civil defense representative (and,
according to rumors, an employee of certain other govern-
ment agencies), reconciled her to her husband’s possible
death. Frightened by his feverishness to move, she stealthily clarified her right to their aforementioned living space and bitterly established that in the event of her husband’s death or departure, the real estate would automatically return to the government. Galina Artemovna’s stance softened as a
result. She preferred departure to death.
The Kozachenko family initially received only a room in
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a dormitory through the Magarach Wine Institute. Vexed,
Petr Terentyevich began seeking out support from other
government agencies and even offered to compile reports
regarding intellectual ferment within the establishment that had hired him. Those government agencies reacted fairly
listlessly. According to information from senior employees who had contact with Petr Terentyevich, all that was
fermenting at the Magarach Institute was young Massandra
wine. The intellects at the institute resided in a state of complete serenity. In and of itself, however, Petr Terentyevich’s vigilance was acknowledged as laudable and so, as a form
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