Solovyov and Larionov
Page 18
same time, the elder Larionovs, who held dear their repu-
tation as liberals, allowed no direct condemnation of the baroness and when in public even remarked along the lines
that what was happening with the baroness only empha-
sized her exactitude and maximalism.
The fact that Baroness von Kruger gathered all four
husbands together and had dinner with them at a restaurant called The Bear became a critical point in the Larionovs’
relationship with their relative. Larionov’s mother burst into tears upon learning that news and said she would not allow the baroness in their home. At the meek objections of
Larionov’s father, who held that such a meeting could not
make their relative’s quadruple-marriage situation any
worse, Larionov’s mother shouted, ‘How can you not under-
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stand that this is absolutely, simply shockingly unseemly?!’
The cadet, who had witnessed the scene, mentally swore
to himself not to do anything of the kind. For many years, the notion of shocking actions was, for Larionov, linked to that very incident.
‘To that very inci––’ is, if one is absolutely precise, the end of the manuscript that reached Solovyov. The page to
which ‘. . . dent’ was carried was missing and thus, in some sense, the full word was reconstructed. Solovyov looked
through all the pages again. There was no doubt: the manu-
script was incomplete. He thought about how it held a huge value even though it was incomplete, since any publication of new information about the general’s childhood years . . .
Even so, his primary feeling was disappointment. During
the time he was reading the manuscript, Solovyov had
managed to get used to its completeness, rather he had not allowed the possibility that it was incomplete. With its
sudden cut-off, it was as if Solovyov had slipped from the height of happiness where he had initially found himself.
‘There it is,’ thought the historian as he stood, ‘ingratitude.’
His legs had fallen asleep from sitting still and he had difficulty negotiating the several steps that led to the top of the embankment.
Solovyov bought a plastic folder at a kiosk, placed the
manuscript inside, and set off aimlessly along the embank-
ment. He skirted the Oreanda Hotel and ended up by the
monument to Maxim Gorky. He could not remember
anything the general had said about Gorky, though he
certainly had said something about him . . . Gorky was
standing in his peasant shirt and tar-blackened boots. The 580VV_txt.indd 163
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road behind him divided in two: an upper road and a lower
road. Not a word on the marble pedestal indicated what
awaited the traveler. Along which road, one might ask,
would Gorky himself have traveled? After choosing the
lower, Solovyov remembered, word for word, the general’s
statement about the writer: ‘He is walking along a down-
ward path’ (1930). This was truly a Yaltan image. Other
than the embankment, all the city’s paths led downward.
There was a café at the end of the lower, tree-lined path (interwoven acacia branches, a thick shadow). They served
cold kvass soup as a first course and rice pilaf as the second.
The pilaf was nothing special but the soup was wonderful.
Solovyov ordered another serving of soup instead of
dessert and ate it slowly. Very slowly, the way one eats
something that cannot go cold. He was sitting on a covered veranda, watching the tablecloth and a mysterious potted
plant flutter in a refreshing wind. Solovyov ate the soup; his free hand rested on a cool metal railing. Beyond the
railing—with no transition whatsoever—there began the
huge blue sea.
He did not return home until after dark. The doorbell
rang about fifteen minutes after his arrival. Solovyov was not expecting anyone. Knowing that one should exercise
caution in southern cities in the evenings, he asked, ‘Who’s there?’
‘Zoya.’
Solovyov could not have confused that voice with any
other. Zoya truly was standing outside the door. She had
changed out of the gauzy, sheer dresses he had seen on her all these days and into blue jeans and a light-colored T-shirt.
A gym bag hung on her shoulder. Solovyov stepped aside
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and Zoya came in, unhurried. There was something in her
new guise that made her look like a camper, but there was
no doubt that it became her. She even sat down as people
sit at a train station, placing the bag on her knees and pulling her crossed feet under the chair.
‘How’s the manuscript?’ Zoya asked. ‘Were your hopes
justified?’
‘It turned out to be incomplete . . . it cuts off in the
middle of a word, can you believe it?’
‘Is that right?’
Zoya unzipped the bag with a slow, somehow even sleepy
motion.
‘That manuscript’s still very important,’ said Solovyov,
checking himself. ‘I couldn’t have dreamt of a stroke of luck like that.’
‘Well then, we’ll look more,’ said Zoya, extracting a huge bunch of grapes. ‘We need to find it in its entirety.’
‘Need to? But where?’
‘We have to think.’
A two-liter plastic bottle appeared on the table right after the grapes. Contrary to the inscription on the label, it was certainly not Pepsi-Cola sloshing inside. The dense, wavy
flow along the bottle’s walls attested to the nobleness of the beverage. Just as a person’s breeding can be sensed by a very first motion.
‘It’s Massandra wine, Nesterenko brought it,’ said Zoya,
nodding at the bottle. ‘His sister works at the winery.’
There were no wine glasses to be found in the apartment
so Solovyov brought two faceted glasses from the kitchen.
He held the massive bottle with both hands as he poured the wine. The wine came out in irregular glugs, yielding from
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time to time to air that wanted to enter. The bottle seemed like a living being to Solovyov. It grunted, as if offended, when it inhaled. Its plastic sides trembled spasmodically under the young man’s hands. He set the bottle on the floor after pouring half a glass each for himself and Zoya. The vessel turned out to be disproportionally large for the table where they were sitting, and even the faceted glasses lacked the power to ease that contrast.
‘To the success of our searches,’ said Zoya.
The wine’s unusual properties stunned Solovyov. Its full
body and bouquet reminded him of a liqueur, but still it
remained wine. After drinking some, Solovyov imagined
what the contents of amphorae had been like. He sensed
the flavor of a nectar he had read about when studying
ancient sources. The young historian had no doubt that the ancients had extolled this very liquid. It was this very liquid the Greek gods had tasted during their rare forays into the Northern Black Sea Region.
Zoya saw that he liked the wine. She herself was drinking
it in small swallows, first as a lady, an
d, second, as a person spoiled by a divine beverage. Plucking off the grapes, Zoya brought them to her mouth without hurrying, then placed
them between her front teeth. The grapes held that position for a few moments, offering a demonstration of both the
elegant form of Zoya’s teeth and their whiteness. Then the grapes disappeared in her mouth and rolled around behind
her cheeks for a while. The Petersburg researcher found
this transfer of grapes erotic but could not bring himself to say anything aloud. Solovyov’s helper was, without a
doubt, a connoisseur of the grape.
‘Taras knows we were in his room today.’ Zoya did not
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change her pose or stop eating grapes as she announced
this. ‘Yekaterina Ivanovna told him everything.’
Solovyov leaned against the back of the chair. The
old-fashioned lampshade was stratifying in their faceted
glasses, blending its dark-pink light with the wine’s burgundy color.
‘How will you . . .’ Solovyov took hold of his glass (the
colors disconnected again). ‘How will you go home now?’
Zoya shrugged. ‘Who the hell knows what that Taras
will do? You can never guess what to expect from someone
timid like that.’ Zoya plucked yet another grape. ‘They told me he was beside himself.’
‘You can’t go home today. Stay with me.’
The grape in her teeth stayed there longer than usual
and Solovyov knew Zoya was smiling.
‘I think that would look strange. No. I’ll crash at the train station today and tomorrow the whole thing will be
forgotten. Everything gets forgotten in the end.’
‘You’re spending tonight at my place.’
Zoya fell silent. She took a sip of wine and used an easy
football-like motion to roll a stray grape along the table.
They could hear nocturnal cars driving past outside the
window, on the former Autskaya Street. The shaven-headed
Crimean elite was racing around at high speed in imported
cars with blinding headlights. The baleful sighs of a trolleybus were occasionally audible when silence set in. The
trolleybus would slow down, its crossbars clicking some-
where up among the junctions of the overhead wires, and
then the vehicle would gather speed again. Cafeteria
workers—tired and untalkative, with bulging shopping bags
at their feet—were riding the dimly lighted trolleybus. Young 580VV_txt.indd 167
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Yaltan ladies, their faces made up, were riding. Veterans of various wars, intoxicated by alcohol, were riding; they had put on their medals beforehand so the police would not
beat them. The veterans swayed along when the trolleybus
turned and their decorations produced a quiet, melodic
jingle.
Zoya went to bed on the couch, Solovyov on a folding
cot. The only sheets (the same ones Solovyov had been
sleeping on) were given to her. Zoya herself expressed readiness to accept them. The guest also assigned sleeping spots.
Solovyov was fairly happy that everything was resolving
itself without his involvement. Even so, when Zoya flicked the light switch, it was not without sadness that he acknowledged he had assumed events might develop differently. But it turned out this assumption of his was unacceptable for
the girl from the Chekhov Museum.
‘Good night.’ There was the sound of a T-shirt being
pulled off.
‘Good night.’
Lying in the dark, Solovyov listened, futilely, for Zoya’s breathing. The silence in the room felt unnatural to him.
He thought that perhaps Zoya was purposely not moving
because she was listening for him. He was afraid even to
inhale loudly: the fold-out bed let out a savage screech at the slightest motion. He did not know what time it was,
though all he would have to do to find out was turn toward the lighted electronic clock. But Solovyov did not turn. He was afraid even to open his eyes.
When he opened them, the room turned out to be less
dark. Meaning not absolutely dark. Whether it was the
moon or the coming dawn, the outlines of objects could
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be seen fairly clearly. The bottle’s silhouette on the table.
An uneaten bunch of grapes resembling Mount Ayu-Dag.
The glisten of Zoya’s belt buckle on the chair. Solovyov
caught his breath: that glisten intensified his feelings to their limit, just as the motion of a train had in another time.
Perhaps even more strongly. He tried to figure out if Zoya was sleeping. Her head was dark on the white spot of a
pillow; her arms were behind the back of her head. Nobody
sleeps like that . . . The fold-out bed squeaked as Solovyov touched the bottom of his belly and sensed moisture.
Whether Zoya was sleeping or not—for some reason,
Solovyov did not doubt this—she was lying there completely naked.
Cool air was beginning to waft through the open window.
That meant it really was dawn.
‘I’m cold,’ Zoya said, as calmly as if she were continuing a conversation.
‘I can close the window,’ said Solovyov, not moving.
‘I’m cold.’
In that repetition there was no apparent point and there
was no intonation—there was nothing there but rhythm.
Solovyov recognized that rhythm flawlessly. With a feline
motion, he leapt off the fold-out bed without a single squeak.
He went over to Zoya’s bed and pressed his legs into her.
He felt Zoya’s hair on his damp skin. A moment later he
was lying next to her.
‘Hold on . . .’
As if out of nowhere, she took a condom and placed it
in Solovyov’s hot hand. As he put on the condom, Solovyov
had no time to be properly surprised that it had appeared.
A second later, Zoya’s legs had entwined behind his back
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with unexpected strength. This was no comparison for
Leeza’s bashful love. There had never before been such
energy, flexibility, and passion in his life. Never before had Solovyov felt such powerlessness over his body. Never
before had the image of a boat amid waves been so close
for him. That image was the last thing that flashed through Solovyov’s mind before his final plunge into the abyss. A
hurricane had been hiding behind the museum employee’s
outward phlegmatism.
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The next morning (which began late), they realized that this was the day Solovyov had promised to read his paper about
General Larionov. The reading was to be held at Zoya’s
house. Despite recent events, Zoya thought the reading was appropriate; this puzzled even the lecturer himself. He was even more surprised that evening when he was coming into
the entryway of the communal apartment and ran straight
into Taras. Taras was absolutely calm, even courteous. He
was the first to greet the guest, after which he backed away, toward the kitchen, and continued standing there, leaning
&
nbsp; against the general’s cabinet. He was not invited to hear
the paper.
The attendees were the same as the first time: the princess plus Shulgin and Nesterenko. It occurred to Solovyov that
the fact of the powerful Nesterenko’s presence might also
be restraining Taras from repeating yesterday’s hysterics. In any case (Taras’s face expressed its usual shyness), Zoya’s neighbor was fully able to calm down naturally. Solovyov
himself gradually calmed down, too. Coming here was not
nearly as simple for him as he had led Zoya to believe that morning.
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Solovyov felt a sudden awkwardness as he took the text
of his prepared paper from the folder; this time, the feeling was not related to Taras. What Solovyov wanted to report
could not appear either important or even worthy of atten-
tion for the group that had gathered. All his findings and corrections regarding the Crimean operations seemed like
utter pointlessness by comparison with what they knew
about the general. But it was too late to retreat. So Solovyov began his reading.
Strictly speaking, this was not even a reading. When he
sensed that method of delivering the material was out of
place here, the young historian switched to telling a story; this was close to the text of his paper but did not lack for improvisation. This was happening for the first time in his scholarly life. It was not that he could not render his
previous papers without reading aloud—every phrase of
what he had written was just right and he knew the texts
by heart. The academic honor code mandated speaking
from a prepared text. The folder of papers lying on a lectern was the first, albeit most approximate, attestation of a
report’s scholarliness. It was as if all further qualities of what was pronounced did not exist without the written
text. Solovyov knew of only one exception: a paper that
Prof. Nikolsky had read at a conference lectern, in a monotone, sentence after sentence, from sheets containing
nothing but caricatures sketched with a ballpoint pen. It
was Prof. Nikolsky who had forbidden Solovyov from
speaking without a written text.
Solovyov did not even glance down as he turned page
after page of his paper. A feeling of flight had seized him, almost the same as that first ride on a bicycle. He recalled 580VV_txt.indd 172