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the kitchen and other common areas. From the general’s
point of view, Umansky’s striving for outer cleanliness and orderliness compensated, to some degree, for his inner
impurity.
The general considered Umansky a scoundrel and did
not particularly hide that. At the same time, there was also a sort of sentimental shading in his attitude toward Umansky.
This manifested itself in full measure later, when the general expressed regret that the room next door had been freed
up prematurely. As far as Umansky went, it was flattering
for him to live in the same apartment as someone so famous.
Although he was once tempted to expand his living space
by arresting the general and his wife, to the Political
Directorate employee’s credit, his taste for good company
prevailed in his soul over strictly mercenary interests.
It emerged years later, though, that before Umansky’s
best feelings triumphed over his worst feelings, he had, in fact, made a move to free up the apartment. A certain
mysterious power, however, had hindered an arrest of the
general that time, too. Moreover, during the course of his attempt, Umansky also determined that Larionov, whom
he had thought to be unemployed, was on the books at the
Museum of City History as a consultant and was even
receiving a salary.
Knowing better than anyone that the general hardly left
the apartment (his strolls along the jetty were the exception), Umansky made quick work of sending an inquiry to the
Museum of City History regarding the former general’s
employment activities and the nature of his consultations.
Unexpectedly, the answer came from Umansky’s own depart-
ment and, judging from the tone, it assumed no further
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questions. Umansky stopped there: he was a pragmatist and
essentially it was not his calling to be a spiteful person. He decided that in the long run he could find another apartment elsewhere but would not be able to find another general.
Motivated by those considerations, he even attempted to
gain the general’s favor. It is interesting that the general, who had narrowed his social circle to an absolute minimum, also conversed with Umansky from time to time. Being
people of polar opposite temperaments and convictions,
there is no doubt they interested one another. They discussed tactics for close combat and the admissibility of the Brest peace, the expediency of women serving in the army and
the work of field kitchens during the autumn-winter period, and, in moments when the general was in a philosophical
mood, the moral problematics of Dead Souls, which Nikolai Gogol called a poem.
Life close to the general seemed so edifying for Umansky
that it distracted him from the apartment question for a
while. The Political Directorate employee even initially had doubts when the opportunity came up, by chance, to move
into his own well-appointed apartment. After his superior, Grigory G. Piskun, announced to him that everyone housed
on an entire floor had been shot to improve conditions for his subordinate, Umansky thought it awkward not to move
into the vacated apartment. After receiving the housing
assignment, he arranged a farewell banquet at his former
place of residence and did not begrudge the Political
Directorate’s stupendous special supplies.
The banquet exceeded all expectations, both in terms of the quantity of refreshments and, so to say, its degree of farewell-ness. There was an unexpected ring at the door as the event 580VV_txt.indd 125
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was coming to a close, and the apartment filled with operatives in their leather jackets. Recognizing the arrivals as his co-workers, the man of the hour felt touched, thinking this was an ingenious form of congratulations that befitted the department; he offered drinks to the arrivals. When he was knocked to the floor and held face down, he remarked to
those in attendance that the joke had gone too far, but nobody laughed in response. Contrary to Umansky’s expectations, his removal from the apartment was not accompanied by merri-ment, nor was his shooting, which was carried out in a most serious manner a week after his arrest.
It later became known that the direct reason for Umansky’s arrest turned out to be the ladies he brought home from
the embankment. The vigilant Komsomol women—who
had been rejected by the person under investigation—sent
signals regarding those visits. After the very first face-to-face questioning with some of the ladies (as well as with the
Komsomol women), Umansky admitted that his sexual liai-
sons were indiscriminate and repented sincerely. His
statement that—despite an abundance of casual relations—
the Political Directorate was the only organ that he,
Umansky, was genuinely dedicated to, was also entered into the record of his interrogation.
The problem, however, was not with the ladies from the
embankment. It lay in the fact that during a rare visit of foreign vessels to Yalta, those ladies had managed to converse with a crew that had come ashore and allegedly conveyed
information of state importance overseas. It was also established that the indiscriminate sexual liaisons were shams, intended in the capacity of cover, and the female citizens who visited Umansky were actually nothing more than
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intermediaries between him and eleven foreign spies (investigators determined that eleven people had visited Umansky).
Umansky began by objecting that his liaisons were indis-
criminate but not shams (this, by the way, was confirmed
by all eleven females involved) and that the only thing that had reached him via an intermediary turned out to be
gonorrhea (medical documentation was presented), but that
was no help. Crushed by the gravity of the evidence, the
suspect confessed in short order to everything he was being incriminated of and, to the pleasant surprise of the investigation, even added several hitherto unknown episodes.
In those days, General Larionov and Varvara Petrovna
awaited arrest, too: in the eyes of the investigators, the fact that the general was Umansky’s neighbor should, in and of
itself, have become one of the most important proofs of
Umansky’s guilt. But that did not happen. This is all
explained by the fact that Umansky’s superior, Piskun—who
had initially favored him and even vacated a large, well-appointed apartment for him—had been severely criticized by
his own wife at one time. She had pointed out the fact that the living conditions of his subordinate, Umansky, now
surpassed Piskun’s own. Shaken by that fact, Piskun began
seeking a way out of the situation that had arisen. Their
establishment’s code of honor did not assume the direct
reallocation of living space, so Piskun decided to execute Umansky. Only after that—in light of the uselessness of so much living space for a man who had been shot—did Piskun
consider it possible to move into the apartment given to
Umansky. Under those conditions, neither the room
belonging to the general nor the general himself was of
interest to Pisku
n.
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Umansky’s mother came to Yalta not long after he was
shot; oddly enough, she had come from the city of Uman.
She packed her son’s things into three canvas cases then
piled everything that would not fit on a huge velvet tablecloth and knotted its corners together in pairs. The general helped her to the bus station. Carrying one case in his hand, he pushed the neighbors’ pram, with the velvety bundle on
top. Umansky’s mother carried the other two (lighter) cases.
Poplar leaves showered down on them as they walked along
Moscow Street on that sunny October morning in 1934.
Umansky’s mother set the cases on the ground from time
to time and caught her breath. During one of those rests,
the woman said she had never approved of her son belonging to the Political Directorate and tenderly recalled the time when he had been a well-known card shark in Uman. That
sort of activity seemed more lucrative and not as dangerous, despite regular beatings.
In the early 1970s, that autumn farewell merged in the
general’s memory with another, which was also autumnal,
but occurred much later and became a typical case of déjà
vu (which is, essentially, what permitted those events to
blend). Surprisingly, the general could name 1958 as the
year for this farewell but could not recollect the circum-
stances attending it. He even cited the name of the lady he was seeing off: her name was Sofia Christoforovna
Pospolitaki. The general was carrying a suitcase and pushing a pram then, too, but there was a child this time. Contrasting with the child’s complete silence, the pram’s springs
produced a piercing, almost hysterical, screech. Sofia
Christoforovna was embarrassed about this unpleasant
sound, even though she was not producing it. She shrank
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her head into her shoulders with a confused smile. Contrary to the chronology, the general sometimes thought he was
accompanying Umansky’s mother again on this second occa-
sion, when she was taking her small son, who had not yet
been shot, away from Yalta and out of harm’s way.
Whose child was this? According to the general’s recol-
lections, the child could not have belonged to Sofia
Christoforovna, due to her age. All the general could assert with veracity was that the child was not his. Poplar leaves fell on them on Moscow Street, too. A gust of wind blew
several leaves under the collar of Sofia Christoforovna’s
between-season coat. The general stopped and extracted
the leaves out from under her collar and Sofia Christoforovna thanked him, with unexpected duration and warmth. The
general found it difficult to say who this lady was and why, exactly, he was seeing her off.
This circumstance prompted him to think that the
majority of events in his long life had managed to repeat
themselves. And not just once. In order that they not merge completely, the general decided to return to the work he
had abandoned as a historian.
‘That,’ said Zoya, ‘was precisely when he began dictating
a continuation of his memoirs to my mother.’
Umansky’s room sat unoccupied after he was shot.
Piskun’s actions with regard to his colleague had been so
rapid that there had just not been enough time to take the latter off the housing registry. Responsible tenant Larionov’s payments had shielded the housing office workers from
seeing the bloody, truly Shakespearean drama that had
played out between the two Chekists. The housing office
simply had not learned about the death of the man from
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the city of Uman. Now, by a strange confluence of circum-
stances, the executed Umansky, who had been a big fan of
Nikolai Gogol during his lifetime, had turned into a dead soul himself, freeing the general from the threat of someone else being moved in. Umansky’s silent otherness in the
housing office’s lists went on for an entire twelve years—
right up until the post-war housing audit in 1946, which is when the person who later became Ivan Kolpakov’s father
moved into the apartment.
The general’s son was born in an apartment lacking
flatmates. It will evidently never be known now if it was
the fact of the apartment freeing up that inspired the general to have a child or circumstances of a more personal character (according to rumor, Varvara Petrovna was infertile until
she was thirty). Princess Meshcherskaya was of the opinion that the general had simply not wanted to have a child
previously because of his uncertainty about remaining alive.
The thought of possible arrest sat so firmly in his head that even after marrying Varvara Petrovna in 1924 (this was done secretly) the general did not consider registering their relationship officially with the Soviet authorities, so as not to subject her to danger. On the other hand—and here Shulgin
practically refuted the princess’s point of view—why should the general’s perspective on his future have changed at that particular time, in the mid-thirties? An unbiased analysis of the sociopolitical situation did not give even the slightest grounds for that.
Whatever the case, the child appeared. When the general
greeted Varvara Petrovna in the lobby at the maternity
hospital, he examined the dirty-yellow floor tiles with
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bleach, came laden with something unbearably Soviet and
devoid of human qualities. The general attempted to
remember the smells in the military hospitals he had seen—
of course bleach had been used to clean there, too, what
else did they have for cleaning?—but for some reason the
smell was not as oppressive. Sisters of mercy, their hair
gathered under white kerchiefs with a red cross in the
middle, walked inaudibly from bed to bed.
Glass doors that had lost their transparency (from
haphazard whitewash smudges) opened. The first to exit
was a fat nurse with a parcel tied in blue ribbon. Varvara Petrovna looked bashfully out at her husband from behind
the nurse’s back. The general took the parcel from the nurse and peered at it. He looked long and hard, as if attempting to read the infant’s future fate in his wrinkled and almost hideous face.
‘He looks like you,’ said the nurse, interpreting his gaze in her own way. ‘Couldn’t resemble you more.’
The general silently held out fifty rubles for her. He had been told the day before that medical personnel should be
properly thanked: fifty rubles for a boy, thirty for a girl. Talk of equal rights was still out of the question back in 1936.
No, the boy did not resemble him. More specifically, his
features—the form of his nose, line of his lips, and shape of his eyes—thoroughly reflected the general’s, but this
outward likeness only emphasized the full degree of their
overall dissimilarity. This was how wax figures of the greats have nothing in common with their originals precisely
because they do not convey what is m
ost important: their
enormous force field. The general showed no interest what-
soever when his wax figure was put on display at Madame
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Tussaud’s museum years later. After absentmindedly
glancing at the photograph they sent him, the general placed it in some book or other and forgot about it forever. The
wax copy could not surprise him. He saw it in his own son
for many years.
They named the boy Filipp. He was born during a time
when, in the general’s opinion, it would be better not to be born a man. In the grand scheme of things, it was better
not to be born at all.
‘A time of servitude,’ the general defined it in brief,
pushing Filipp’s pram uphill, along Botkinskaya Street.
This was the very same pram, the neighbors’, in which
Umansky’s things had been delivered to the bus station.
The neighbors had handed over the pram to the general’s
family for good, in commemoration of the arrival of the
general’s firstborn. By the time of the handover, the pram had a thoroughly museum look but, then again, the
general was already a museum consultant at the time.
Given the state of things, the general found no reason to refuse the gift.
The general neatly cut four narrow strips from his mili-
tary map case and used them to replace worn-out straps in
the pram’s inner workings. He sewed a new canopy from
a duffel bag of the thinnest calfskin and attached its edges to the pram’s metal frame.
‘That’s not a pram,’ Tsilya Borisovna Prozument, an
employee at the milk kitchen, would repeat. ‘It’s a master-piece of applied art.’
They respected the general at the milk kitchen. They
gave him the very best milk, called him papochka and Varvara Petrovna mamochka, and the general liked that. For their 580VV_txt.indd 132
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part, the employees at the milk kitchen liked that a genuine combat general was doing such civilian things. In that they saw the symbol of something they themselves were unable
to express thoroughly, getting by (and what would you say
about a general like that?) with only rhetorical questions and interjections.
Solovyov and Larionov Page 14