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strength left. He tried to alternate, rowing two different ways. Moving the oars with only his arms allowed him to
rest his back. And, conversely, he could leave his arms
motionless and push the boat forward by moving his back.
This helped, but not significantly.
Solovyov rested during the intervals between large waves.
He had started to feel nauseous from exhaustion and
rocking. He felt like lying down in the bottom of the boat—
just as cadet Larionov had once felt like lying down in the bottom of a trench—and enjoying the repose. He was so
worn out that the sea’s choppiness no longer evoked his
fear. Zoya’s presence was all that prevented him from lying down.
‘I have no more strength,’ Solovyov finally said.
They landed on some sort of beach. Even after the front
of the boat had knocked into the pebbles, Solovyov still
could not believe this was the end of their sail. He sat, bent, with his hands on the oars, and could not find the strength within to go ashore. With Zoya’s help—he was no longer
shy of his condition—he jumped heavily over the side and
took a few strides through the surf.
Zoya attempted to push the boat away from the shore
but it came right back. She took the boat by the remnants
of the chain and led it to the breakwater. The current was different there. Rocking forlornly by the concrete wall, the boat began slowly drifting toward the open sea.
There were lounge chairs visible under a beach awning.
Without saying a word, Solovyov wandered to the closest
chair. He was out like a light before he had a chance to
collapse onto it.
The beach caretaker woke them up in the morning. He
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shook Solovyov by the shoulder and told someone (Zoya?)
that vacationers would be coming here after breakfast at
the guesthouse.
‘What guesthouse?’ Solovyov asked in a silent whisper.
He pulled his T-shirt, with brown spots from his bloody
palms, out from under his head.
‘Blue Wave,’ said the caretaker.
Zoya was sitting on the next lounge chair, hugging her
knees. Solovyov went to the water and rinsed off.
About fifteen minutes later, they were already on the
highway, where they boarded a shuttle van to Yalta. Solovyov fell asleep right away when he got home and slept until
evening. When he woke up, he could not believe what had
happened during the night. On his first attempt to get out of bed, he realized it was all true. He got up on the second attempt.
His primary thought was about the text. Which had been
procured with such difficulty and which he had never even
glanced at. From the bag with the break-in tools he extracted a crumpled plastic folder, pierced in ten places. The papers inside were in a lamentable state.
That was not his primary source of distress, though.
There were only three sheets of paper. They contained a
detailed explanation of what comprised the unseemly
behavior of Baroness von Kruger, who had dinner at The
Bear restaurant with her four former husbands. All the
baroness’s husbands turned out to be officers. The general’s relative was uncommonly consistent in her passions. Detailed descriptions were made of the husbands, down to their
military ranks and places of service. In the general’s final edits to the text, there were notes in the margin with the 580VV_txt.indd 212
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years of death and places of interment (they were buried
in various locations) for each of the participants at the
infamous luncheon. In touching briefly on the menu, the
general highlighted in particular that there were oysters
and—naturally—oyster knives on the table. ‘Do officers of
today’s army,’ the general asked rhetorically, ‘know what an oyster knife is?’ The general offered no answer in the initial text, but gave one in the margins of the final version: ‘No.’
The text they had discovered said nothing about other
events. There was no need to assume a possible continuation of the memoirs. The text ended in the middle of the page,
under which there was a date (13/07/74) and the laconic
‘Dictated by me. Gen. Larionov.’ What had compelled Taras
to keep these three particular sheets of paper at work?
Perhaps that was the most enigmatic aspect of the whole
matter.
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Solovyov headed to the conference the next morning. Zoya
saw him off at the bus station. She went to the museum after putting Solovyov on the Simferopol trolleybus. They had called Zoya the night before and insistently requested she show up at work. They had few employees and some were on vacation, so there was nobody to tell visitors about Chekhov.
The trip to Kerch was not short. Crimea, which had
formerly seemed small to Solovyov, was revealing previously unaccounted for expanses that required time to cross.
Discoveries of this sort, thought the drowsy Solovyov, were what distinguished field research from office work. He fell asleep somewhere near the Nikitsky Botanical Garden. The
trolleybus was already driving through Simferopol when he
opened his eyes.
Solovyov had a snack in Simferopol. He bought a smoked
chicken leg at the station and ate it without bread, washing it down with cold beer. It was delicious, if unrefined. He wiped his hands and mouth with a napkin. He tossed the
bone to a dog that came to him; there are lots of stray dogs in southern cities. He took his unfinished beer bottle and headed for the platform. There was about an hour until the next local train to Kerch.
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There were already people on the platform. Two women
with children. Wearing cotton dresses that had wilted in the heat. One wearing a bucket hat, the other a straw hat that had slid back. Both with suitcases. Solovyov sat down on a bench, took a swig from the bottle, and set it alongside his foot. A peasant man with a sack on his shoulder. It was
immediately obvious he was a peasant. A woman collecting
bottles. A plastic bag in one hand, a stick in the other, to check the rubbish bins. Dark blue eyelids. Crimson lips. The tanned skin of a person who spent all her time outside.
‘May I have the bottle?’
Solovyov nodded. The lady swished what was left at the
bottom of the bottle and pressed it to her mouth. She sat
down on Solovyov’s bench (the bottle was sent into the bag with a clink). Leaned against the back. Pulled a cigarette butt out of the bin and lit it with delight.
A piglet hopped out of the peasant’s sack, squealed, and
began running around the platform. It was afraid to jump
down. The peasant (they are capable of this) caught the
piglet without losing his dignity. Put it in the sack and tied it. Lit a cigarette.
‘And that’s the end of democracy,’ said the bottle collector.
She was not addressing anyone in particular.
The local train somehow pulled up almost unnoticed. It
was old, its paint had peeled in the sun, and there was
plywood where the glass had been smashed. Everybody
boarded except the bottle collector. She continued sitting on the bench; this platform was her workplace. Maybe her
home, too. The carriage began to move and she disappeared.
Forever, thought Solovyov, as he fell sleep. Forever . . .
He woke up about an hour later and fell back to sleep. He
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thought he would never catch up on his sleep after the night in Alupka. That night, he had borrowed his own strength
from the coming month and was now slowly paying it back.
The palms of his hands (Zoya had smeared them with sea
buckthorn oil the night before) hurt as before. And Zoya
could not come with him. He caught himself thinking he
was glad about that.
The owner of the piglet was sitting across from Solovyov.
Solovyov observed as the sack squirmed despondently on
the floor; he sympathized with the piglet. The peasant was looking out the window, lost in thought (or not thinking
about anything?) There was something wood-like, cracked,
in the peasant’s face. It radiated motionlessness. The age-old motionlessness of the Russian peasantry, decided the young historian. That was what made the gaze so sustained, intent, and absent.
Solovyov was housed in the Hotel Crimea. The hotel’s
gray granite exterior presented a restrained solemnity from the late 1950s. This was apparently the city’s main hotel. And the first hotel in Solovyov’s life. He received his key from a sleepy woman at the reception desk (‘a porter,’ Solovyov
whispered, since this was how he wanted to picture things).
‘Close the window at night,’ said the woman. ‘Cats jump
into the rooms.’
‘Cats?’
After crossing the lobby, he turned and said, ‘I love cats.’
But the woman was no longer there.
Solovyov went up to the second floor. The keyring was
weighted down by a vaguely pear-shaped wooden fob,
making it difficult to turn the key in the lock. Within the lock, Solovyov overcame (pressing firmly into the door)
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some sort of impediments invisible to the world. Dull
scraping and the pear thudding against the door accompa-
nied whatever happened inside the lock.
The door opened anyway. Solovyov looked around after
entering the small rectangular room. The window faced
what was not quite a garden: it was an ambiguous green
environment where all the objects (bed frames, bar counters, tires) served as plant stands. There really were cats strolling along a wall overgrown with ivy.
Solovyov left his things in the room and went out into
the city. He enjoyed taking a deep breath of Kerch’s evening air. The sea in Kerch was not Yalta’s resort sea. The sea was regarded completely differently here. It even smelled
different. It had an ancient port aroma that included a light tinge of decay: seaweed on the breakwaters, fish in crates, and fruit crushed during shipment.
Solovyov walked along Kerch’s main street and liked it.
‘Le . . . Street,’ he read on a half-faded sign. Some sort of French continuation might have followed that, and the street itself did seem a bit French to him. The crowns of old
acacias had intertwined over the street’s three-story houses, giving it the look of an endless gazebo. It was cool in the thick shadow that was turning to darkness. Le . . . Street.
Solovyov could guess the street’s full name.
He bought himself some yellow bird cherries. When he
saw a pump in a courtyard, he stopped there to wash them.
To do so, he had to make several motions with the pump
handle (it was cast iron with a lion on the grip) and then quickly run over to the spout and put the plastic bag of
cherries underneath. Solovyov filled the bag with water,
turned it upside-down, and released the water. The water
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disappeared through a blackened metal grate. Several cher-
ries rolled down there, too.
The cherries turned out to be delicious: ripe, but firm.
Solovyov took them in pairs, by their fused stalks, and
gently—one after another—removed them from their stalks
with his lips. He rolled the cherries in his mouth. Delighted in their form. Carefully bit into them, sensing the cherries’
special (yellow) sweetness. The flesh came away from the
pits easily and the pits moved toward his lips, as if on their own, casually jumping down into Solovyov’s palm.
It was already dark when he returned to the hotel.
Solovyov noticed some sort of motion even before turning
on the light in his room. When he flicked the switch, he
saw a cat on the windowsill. The cat neither hid nor ran.
He walked away calmly, even seeming to hesitate. If
Solovyov had addressed him, he would have stayed. His
smoke-colored tail quivered. A clump of fur, also smoke-
colored, hung on the zipper of Solovyov’s bag.
‘So you were digging around in my bag?’ Solovyov asked
and then remembered, with shame, how he himself had
dug around in Taras’s things.
The cat looked out the window with affected indifference.
He was observing Solovyov with his peripheral vision and
attempting to understand what might follow this sort of
tone. Anything at all could follow. When Solovyov took a
step toward the window, the cat jumped down from the
windowsill to the ledge.
Feeling tired after his day of travel, Solovyov decided to go to bed. He fell asleep immediately and slept dreamlessly.
A heavy slapping on the floor woke him up at dawn. He
opened one eye halfway and saw two cats next to his bed.
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Solovyov waved his arm drowsily and the cats left, in a
dignified manner. Solovyov thought that he ought to close
the window after all, but fell straight back to sleep.
Participant registration for the ‘General Larionov as Text’
conference began at nine that morning. It took place at the Pushkin Theater, a stately building with a hint of classicism, on Kerch’s central square. The city was offering the best it had for studying General Larionov as text.
Solovyov saw the registration table when he entered the
theater’s cool lobby. A young woman with red hair was
sitting on a swiveling barstool beside the table. Her nose ring sparkled dimly.
‘Solovyov, Petersburg,’ said Solovyov. He thought the
woman was no younger than thirty.
‘Wow!’ She made a full turn on the swiveling stool and
was once again face-to-face with Solovyov. ‘Dunya, Moscow.
I’ll register you, Solovyov.’
Dunya jumped down from the stool (Solovyov noticed
the same kind of stools at the bar at the other end of the lobby), marked something in her papers, and held out a
conference folder with the program. Solovyov opened the
program and walked slowly toward the auditorium.
‘Your badge,’ Dunya bleated after him.
Solovyov turned. Dunya was sitting on her stool again
and holding a nametag wi
th his surname.
‘Mi z ter, you forgot your badge,’ she said, beckoning to him. ‘I’ll pin it on for you.’
Without getting up from her stool, Dunya pinned the
nametag to Solovyov’s shirt, breathed on its plastic glossiness, and wiped it with her skirt hem. Solovyov examined
Dunya’s untanned legs for several seconds.
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‘Thank you.’
He started walking away but Dunya politely took him
by the elbow.
‘What about your folder?’
He really had left it on the table.
‘Another absent-minded professor,’ said Dunya, shaking
her head. ‘Your type needs looking after.’
Several people were already standing behind Solovyov
and he rushed to get out of their way. He glanced at the
program as he walked. His paper was set for the conference’s second—and final—day.
About forty minutes remained until the beginning of the
morning session, so Solovyov decided to go for a walk.
During that time, he managed to have a look at the Lenin
monument, the post office, and the Chaika department
store. When he returned to the theater, he saw Dunya by
the columns. She was smoking.
‘Is it time?’ Solovyov politely asked.
‘It’s time to get out of here. The opening’s the most
insipid part. That’s right, young man.’ Dunya put out her
cigarette on the column’s rough surface. ‘You’d be better
off treating a lady to coffee. I know a place nearby.’
A Volga sedan pulled up to the theater. A fat man in a
light-brown suit got out and headed toward the entrance,
tucking his shirt into his pants as he walked.
‘Local boss,’ said Dunya. ‘With a story about the cannery
that’s sponsoring us. You interested?’
Solovyov shrugged. Dunya made such a face at the word
‘cannery’ that it would have been awkward to take an interest.
As Solovyov followed the energetic Dunya, he was angry
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want to see the conference opening. In the second place
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