Solovyov and Larionov

by Eugene Vodolazkin

  Unlike his father, Filipp began talking at an early age.

  Even so, almost nothing that Filipp said when he was very

  small (admittedly, just like later) lingered in witnesses’

  memories. By contrast, the general’s spirited silence was

  more eloquent. Out of fairness, it is worth noting that Filipp was also not very eager to use his ability to speak, despite having acquired it early. Filipp’s speech primarily boiled down to naming objects he needed but since his require-ments were always surprisingly few, his sentences came out sounding correspondingly spare.

  Filipp was not a stupid child. When necessary, he dealt

  with the complexest of tasks, in both school and nonschool contexts. The main difference between him and his father

  was that there were very few tasks on this Earth that he

  recognized as necessities. Everything the general did during his life was a necessity for him—he simply had no other

  reasons for his activeness. What (as Dupont asked in her

  day) transformed can into must in the general’s life, what forged that life into a continuous chain of necessities? A sense of duty? Ambition? A thirst for activity? All those

  qualities taken together, defined as a life force? This (asserted Dupont) was in the general. And this was not (asserted

  Zoya) in Filipp.

  After some consideration, Filipp’s mother signed up the

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  taught to pick up stamps with tweezers but no interest in

  stamp collecting sprang up in him.

  ‘It develops a child,’ Varvara Petrovna loved to repeat.

  ‘It envelops a child,’ the general once said.

  To the general, collecting stamps seemed like a wretched

  matter. Filipp stopped going to the stamp collecting club.

  At his mother’s insistence, Filipp enrolled in the corre-

  spondence program at the Institute of Light Industry after he graduated from high school. Light industry was not

  Filipp’s calling and had never been an area of interest for him. (It remains unknown if there was ever an area of

  interest for him.) At the same time, Filipp had never

  displayed any particular dislike of light industry (he heard an airiness in the very definition of light industry) and he was not against taking courses at the institute.

  Filipp worked as a laboratory technician at the Magarach

  Institute when he was a correspondence student. After

  finishing his higher education, he became a senior laboratory technician. Although Filipp’s career growth stopped there, he had acquired a genuine passion for the first time in his life: the degustation of wine. Those who explain this passion as an elemental inclination toward alcoholism are not completely correct. In a certain sense, this point of view is based on a statement from the general himself, who once suggested that alcoholism is the lot of low-energy people. This was said in another regard, without specific explanations of what ought to be understood as energy, but the phrase was used

  concerning the general’s son after some time had passed.

  In actuality, Filipp’s initial passion truly was degustation.

  After several years working at Magarach, he could effort-

  lessly not only determine, by taste, any brand of Crimean

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  wine and its harvest year, but also name the exact place

  where the vine was located on the mountain’s incline. His

  degustation sessions were imprinted on the memory of

  Magarach Institute employees. As one memoir reported, he

  would swirl the wine with a light wrist motion and observe its slow, thick flow along the sides of the glass while telling of the variety’s characteristics.

  It was he who was invited to the most crucial Crimean

  degustations. Filipp’s soft-spokenness and his long, melancholic fingers made an indelible impression on the Party

  elite. And though the high-placed guests also asked to have a bottle or two of Stolichnaya (out of foresight, these were kept in the refrigerator, along with brined cucumbers) set out for when they heard stories about the Golitsyn wine

  cellars, that did not diminish their respectful regard for the taster’s knowledge.

  Filipp truly did take to the bottle. Needless to say, that did not happen instantaneously, as some individual employees of the Magarach Institute were inclined to assert. These

  assertions are explainable because they were fundamentally an attempt to separate the concepts of degustation and

  alcoholism and, thus, defend the uniform’s honor. By

  naming 1965 as the date of the senior laboratory technician’s slide into alcoholism, they turn a blind eye to the fact that his consumption of alcohol had, wrote one insider, obviously gone beyond the boundaries of degustation even

  before 1965. It is another matter entirely that this particular year turned out to be a fateful year in the history of Filipp’s fall: Varvara Petrovna died in 1965. She was the only person who had been restraining Filipp at the precipice that had

  long loomed.

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  His relationship toward his father was respectful but could not be called love. Meaning, perhaps, that it was love, but a love that preferred not to meet with its object, inasmuch as possible. Filipp avoided contact with his father from a very early age. The general had never been rough with his

  son and had not even raised his voice at him, but that fact had not made their relationship any warmer.

  Freud played no part here. If Filipp was jealous of his

  father’s attachment to anyone, it was most likely to fate, which distributes such unequal gifts to people close to one another. He felt like a shadow of his father, and that annoyed him. Abstracting oneself from Filipp’s personal defining

  traits, it is appropriate to ask: was it possible at all to love a person like the general? Varvara Petrovna considered it

  possible.

  In the end, things even worked out that the general spent

  his nights in one room and Varvara Petrovna and her son in another. From the perspective of housing permits, this division seemed impeccable. The Kolpakov family lived in one

  room, the general in another, and in the third were Varvara Petrovna and Filipp, whose father was never officially determined. Nevertheless, even an official determination of

  paternity would never have canceled out the striking dissimilarity between the general and his son.

  Varvara Petrovna’s death caused yet more estrangement

  between them. Now, they almost never communicated.

  Filipp locked himself in his room when he came home from

  work. One could gauge what happened in the room only

  by his departures for the bathroom during the night: there was paralytic shuffling of feet and spasmodic groping at the whitewashed walls in the hallway. Nothing was known,

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  either, about what happened when he was at work, though

  his early returns home on cold days evoked constant and

  unvarying questions from the Kolpakov family. From time

  to time, acquaintances told the general that his son had

  been sitting for long periods on benches at the former Tsar’s Garden. That he was standing on the little bridge over the Uchan-su River, leaning heavily on the railing, or simply

  dozing at the bus station snack bar. The general w
ould nod silently in reply. When he ran into his son on the embankment during daytime hours, he realized Filipp was no longer working anywhere. Filipp refused the help (including

  money) that the general offered. Eventually, he disappeared.

  What was later called a disappearance was most likely

  an unexpected departure. During the general’s usual outing to the jetty (everyone knew very well what time that was), Filipp showed up at the apartment with a large suitcase.

  According to Kolpakov, who had recently finished his army

  service, it was a typical demob suitcase, with aluminum

  stars fastened to it, a decal of an unknown beauty (made

  in the GDR), and sweeping letters that indicated the air

  force. According to Kolpakov, Filipp was absolutely sober.

  He spent no more than a half-hour in the room then left

  with his own suitcase (purchased, in Kolpakov’s opinion, at the Yalta flea market), locking the door of his room with

  a key and saying nothing. Nobody saw him after that.

  ‘No, people saw him,’ Zoya corrected herself after

  pausing. ‘He came over soon after the general’s death. They looked at him like he was from Mars.’

  Filipp’s room was vacant for several years, until his

  absence was officially determined. The general had no rights to the room: his marriage to Varvara Petrovna was not

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  registered and Filipp had not even used his name. According to a decision at Yalta’s city hall, the vacant room was given to Nina Fedorovna. The housing commission that came to

  assume the room used the word emptied. When they forced open the door Filipp had locked, the meaning of the word

  became apparent to its full extent. It turned out that behind the door there were no books, no furniture, not even any

  flower pots. There was nothing at all in the room.

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  8

  Solovyov’s doorbell rang at eight o’clock the next morning.

  It was Zoya.

  ‘It’s Saturday,’ she said. ‘I’m going to the beach. Want to come with me?’

  Solovyov could not wake up at all. It seemed like he kept

  having a strange, perhaps not completely seemly, dream, in which either Zoya or Leeza Larionova was waking him up

  early in the morning . . .

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Leeza Larionova really had woken him up when he was

  young, and he had liked that. She would appear soundlessly, like the first snow, which betrayed its own arrival by imparting a certain glow to a room and an improbable whiteness to the ceiling. She would close the door behind her and look at him silently. He would wake up from that gaze.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  He was planning to invite Zoya to have some breakfast

  and was about to put on the teakettle but Zoya said they

  could have breakfast at the beach. She even refused to sit down and half-smiled as she observed Solovyov hastily

  tucking his shirt into his shorts.

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  At the beach they bought a few hot savory pastries—

  chebureki— and two bottles of cola. They settled on their towels and began their breakfast. The chebureki turned out to be so hot—and greasy, too—that Solovyov froze in a

  position of bewildered expectation, his back straightened, and making a helpless gesture. The fatty liquid oozed

  through his fingers and disappeared into the pebbles,

  steaming. Zoya took some tissues out of her bag and wiped

  Solovyov’s hands, one finger at a time, unhurried, then

  showed him how to hold a cheburek properly. She was never at a loss, this Chekhov Museum employee, even in the most

  complex of situations.

  But the cola was cold, very cold. And not fatty. Solovyov

  placed the neck of the bottle to his mouth and observed the cola’s vortex-like motion inside the bottle. What seethed right in front of Solovyov’s own eyes blended with the surf, even seeming larger and more significant than the surf, and it

  entered his parched throat as if it were the Black Sea’s most festive wave. He drank the whole bottle without stopping.

  After breakfast, there was swimming. As they approached

  the water (Zoya took Solovyov by the hand), they took

  several steps in the foam of a departing wave and walked

  into the approaching wave. The feeling of the first time did not leave Solovyov. Surprised at his own recklessness, he

  followed Zoya into the deep water. His froggish flailing was no match for the rhythmic smoothness of Zoya’s motions,

  but he was swimming even so, and he was swimming

  without anyone’s help.

  Zoya’s obvious superiority did not dishearten Solovyov;

  on the contrary, it probably attracted him. It might even

  have aroused him a little. In the end, superiority in the

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  watery element really indicates nothing; everything could

  take a completely different turn on solid ground anyway.

  But every bar set higher than his own gave rise to Solovyov’s competitive interest, and that interest (as he pondered the matter in hindsight) had been lacking in his relationship

  with Leeza. Why had Leeza been embarrassed about her

  merits?

  The sun was no longer a morning sun and it stood,

  unmoving, somewhere over the central part of the beach,

  burning full blast. Zoya took out some thin lotion that

  squeezed out on Solovyov’s scorching back with a snorting

  sound. An instant later, he sensed it spreading concentrically along his neck, shoulder blades, and lower back. The lotion’s cool freshness was becoming a quality of Zoya’s fingers.

  ‘You know, I keep thinking about what the general

  dictated to my mother. You must want to find that?’

  She had switched to the informal you. And so naturally.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Zoya’s fingers were massaging Solovyov’s thighs. He felt

  his legs shuddering, involuntarily, in time with Zoya’s

  motions. It felt to him as if the whole beach was enviously following along with his pleasure, not allowing him to

  receive that pleasure to its full extent.

  ‘Those sheets of paper couldn’t have just vanished

  without a trace. This doesn’t hurt?’ He sensed the rhythm

  of Zoya’s hands somewhere a little below his knee. ‘I think I even know where they could be.’

  Zoya held her pause. Solovyov turned, grasping that a

  continuation would not follow in the same breath.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At Kozachenko’s. Those dung beetles were digging up

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  everything they could while my mother was busy having

  me at the maternity hospital.’

  The Kozachenko couple rolling a ball of manure popped

  up in Solovyov’s consciousness: sheets of the general’s

  memoirs, stuck to the sides of the ball, flashed through his mind. Zoya thought the younger Kozachenko would not

  give up those sheets very easily. Not because he needed

  them (what, after all, could he have done with them?) but

  because of the unshakable inherited rule not to let out of one’s hands anything that had ever falle
n into them.

  Now Zoya—they had left the beach and were walking

  slowly along Botkinskaya Street—had a plan. Solovyov

  looked from time to time at the museum employee’s

  jet-black hair, which was tangled after swimming; he was

  discovering her for himself all over again. Absolutely nothing Chekhovian remained in what she was proposing. Zoya

  thought the only chance of obtaining the manuscript from

  Taras Kozachenko was to conduct a secret search of his,

  Taras’s, room. Zoya leaned on Solovyov’s shoulder as she

  shook beach pebbles out of her sandal.

  ‘But maybe,’ Solovyov was awkwardly supporting Zoya

  by the waist, ‘. . . maybe we should start by actually asking Taras?’

  ‘No way. Then he’ll bury that manuscript once and for

  all and we’ll never see it again. Our strength is in him not knowing what, exactly, we’re going to look for.’

  Solovyov looked at Zoya with doubt; his gaze did not

  escape her.

  ‘This was dreamt up for your sake, after all . . .’

  Solovyov felt that in full. Lagging a half-step behind Zoya, his shoulders grazed against willow branches that drooped

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  almost to the sidewalk and he thought about the unpredict-

  ability of a historian’s work.

  When they reached her house, she asked him to come

  inside. All the residents were present on Saturday. Besides Taras, Yekaterina Ivanovna Kolpakova was standing in the kitchen: Solovyov had only heard about her up until now. Despite Galina Artemovna (Taras’s mother) poisoning Yekaterina Ivanovna’s husband; despite his cheating on Yekaterina Ivanovna with

  that very same Kozachenko woman and his murder of Petr

  Terentyevich, Taras’s father; and despite, finally, Galina Artemovna ending her life as a result of all those events . . .

  The relationships among those still alive were completely

  calm. Their relationships could even be called amicable, to that certain degree possible under communal apartment

  conditions.

  Among Russian people, a vendetta ceases just as suddenly,

  and without motivation, as it begins. Hostility fades in a chain of uninteresting events, just as an echo fades in a sultry Crimean pine forest and just as graves fade in the tall weeds of Russian cemeteries. Yekaterina and Taras frequently went to Yalta’s cemetery together, which was notable, even by