Tarabukin’s fourth point turned out to be his longest. By
developing the ideas of Alexander Veselovsky on historical poetics and Vladimir Propp on the morphology of the folk-tale—while polemicizing with them at the same time—the
researcher transferred conversation about the resemblance
of the general’s and Zhloba’s texts into the realm of the
correlation of motifs. To Tarabukin’s misfortune (and,
admittedly, the attendees’, too), he got bogged down in
clarifying the reasons he agreed and disagreed with his
predecessors. Tarabukin understood well that these details were unnecessary but drifted further and further away from the topic of common motifs, even as he strove with all his might to return to it.
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The speaker’s—and the audience’s—anxiety increased
with every minute. With bated breath, the whole audience
followed his tragic floundering in the maelstrom of scholarly thought, but there was no life ring. They did not want to
throw it from the presidium; it could not be thrown from
the audience. The cannery workers (the portion of the
audience sympathizing most with Tarabukin) were ready
to applaud, but the speaker needed to stop or at least pause for them to do so. He did not stop. Shrinking his head into his shoulders, he spoke ever faster and less distinctly, as if he hoped to find in his flow of speech some magic word
that would crush his opponents for good.
When Tarabukin looked up from the lectern, he saw
Grunsky’s all-forgiving eyes. Baikalova was pensively examining her fingernails. This was the final blow for the speaker and he burst into tears. Thunderous applause rang out in
the hall. Everyone headed off for lunch.
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The cannery director headed up the column of people
exiting the theater. After chasing off the factory employees who had begun attaching themselves to the column, he led
the researchers to Cafeteria No. 8 on Lenin Street, where
lunch had been set for the conference’s participants and
guests. Grunsky walked to the director’s right, Baikalova to his left. The director’s arms were flung half-open, as if
welcoming a speedy oncoming wind; this kept making the
edges of his jacket flap against the co-chairs, who were
trying not to fall behind him. The column’s leading edge
was moving through the middle of Lenin Street, a pedestrian area, splitting the oncoming walkers into two even groups
that flowed around the column. Everyone in the city knew
the cannery director. Even from afar, pedestrians yielded
the road to him and his scholars, regardless of their attitude toward his wares, which spawned controversy.
Inside the cafeteria, there was a smell of bleach and
unappetizing food that had been eating into the establish-
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only worsened the situation. They added a sickening,
sweetish undertone without removing the old smell.
The positioning of the rectangular tables reminded
Solovyov of his old school cafeteria. A paper tablecloth
covered each table, which seated four. Solovyov had already started sitting down at one but then, at the last minute, he noticed Dunya waving to him from the other end of the
room. She was standing by a big oak table that was unlike
the others. Solovyov hesitated for a moment then walked
toward her. As a member of the conference’s organizing
committee, Dunya had been seated at the same table as the
cannery director, Grunsky, Grunsky’s secretary, Baikalova, and a man with crossed eyes. Dunya had decided to invite
her new acquaintance.
Tarabukin was the last to enter the cafeteria. After
finishing his presentation, he had initially entertained no thoughts of food. Tarabukin had categorically refused to
go to the cafeteria with everyone. He walked down to the
parterre, collapsed in a fourth-row seat, and sat there
motionless for a few minutes. But he began to feel hungry
after calming down a little so, after some hesitation, decided to go to the cafeteria anyway.
Right from the start, it looked to him as if there were no empty places; Tarabukin felt like nobody was expecting him.
His tortuous decision to come to lunch had suddenly turned out to have unwelcome results for everyone, effectively
rendering it ridiculous. His tragic figure in the doorway made everyone fall silent.
‘As might have been expected, there aren’t any places,’
Tarabukin said quietly.
It turned out, however, there were still empty places at
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three tables. As Tarabukin (who was a little flustered) was choosing where to sit, the cannery director rose a little
and—pressing his necktie to his stomach—loudly invited
the latecomer to his table. The invitation was accepted.
Tarabukin proudly straightened his shoulders and began
shuffling over to the director’s table.
Women from the cannery helped the cafeteria workers
carry lunches to the tables. They built pyramids of dishes on flowered plastic trays, lifted them in one sharp motion, and, weighted down, transported them through the dining
hall. They placed them on the corner of a table and neatly unloaded them with help from those sitting at the table.
The soup and main course were served in identical dishes
inscribed SocNutr. The dessert was in cups with the same inscription; the handles were broken to stave off theft. The handles of the aluminum spoons had been twisted into
spirals for the same reason. The fork handles had no spirals since they had been brought from the cannery for the conference (forks were not used in Cafeteria No. 8). As it happened, there were no knives, even at the cannery.
Despite the uniform crockery, the meal service was not
identical for all attendees. Solovyov noticed that at his table (unlike at the others), some olives stuffed with shrimp had appeared and there was black caviar gleaming bashfully from a SocNutr salad dish with chipped edges. Dunya caught Solovyov’s gaze and, barely perceptibly, mimed a sigh. As
someone clued-in, she knew there was no equality in the
world.
‘I’d like to introduce you to Valery Leonidovich,’ said
Grunsky, turning to the cannery director. ‘He’s one of the managers at the Solovyov Foundation.’
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The director stopped spreading caviar on his bread and
looked at Valery Leonidovich.
‘And I’d like to introduce Solovyov himself,’ said Dunya,
with a smile.
‘At such a young age . . .’ began the director, but then he suddenly went silent and finished spreading his bread with caviar.
‘Why was the conference moved from Yalta to Kerch,
anyway?’ Baikalova asked Valery Leonidovich. ‘After all, Yalta is the general’s city.’
Grunsky rolled his eyes, unnoticed by Baikalova. The<
br />
same expression flashed across his secretary’s face; he was a young man with dark hair parted down the middle.
‘What, don’t you like it here?’ asked the director, making a showy gesture at the table.
‘I’ll answer your question about why it was moved,’ said
Tarabukin. ‘The Fund simply didn’t have enough money
for Yalta.’
Valery Leonidovich rubbed the end of his nose. He
seemed to think it unnecessary to comment on Tarabukin’s
statement. One of his eyes was directed at Baikalova, the
other at the cannery director. It felt to Tarabukin as if they were not even looking at him. The reality of things was
rather different.
‘Really, where, as a matter of fact, can that money come
from?’ Tarabukin went on, his fury growing. ‘Where, I ask
you, can it come from, if the Foundation’s renting half a
palace in the center of Petersburg? If the salaries for people who help scholarship are the sort even a Nobel laureate wouldn’t dream of ? Mind you, I’m only speaking right now
about the legal side of their activities . . .’
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Tarabukin had switched to an impassioned whisper and
everyone sitting at the table stopped eating at once.
‘Forgive me, what’s your name?’ Valery Leonidovich
asked Tarabukin. Baikalova and the cannery director simul-
taneously introduced themselves by name and patronymic.
Grunsky’s secretary giggled.
‘Valery Leonidovich asked for Nikandr Petrovich’s name
and patronymic,’ said Dunya, unperturbed.
‘Nikandr Petrovich,’ said Valery Leonidovich, ‘do me a
favor: never count someone else’s money. Never. That can
end badly.’
‘Are you threatening me?’ Tarabukin asked slowly.
Those sitting at the neighboring tables began turning
around. Valery Leonidovich’s eyes diverged to opposite ends of the room. Grunsky’s secretary sighed and served himself more shrimp-stuffed olives.
‘A young person’s body needs shrimp,’ said Grunsky.
‘Are you really Solovyov?’ asked the cannery director.
‘I really am,’ said Solovyov.
He felt Dunya step on his foot under the table. The
director pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it to Solovyov.
‘You don’t regret that the conference is taking place in
Kerch?’
‘No,’ said Solovyov, ‘I don’t regret it.’
There was still an hour and a half of free time remaining
after lunch. Dunya suggested to Solovyov that they go to
Mount Mithridat. Dunya thought it should be interesting
for him, as a historian. Solovyov nodded pensively.
They walked up the mountain along dusty little streets
that had a slummy look. A foot could slip easily on the
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roadway’s loose cobblestones, and Dunya nearly fell once.
She linked her arm through Solovyov’s after that. The
trees ended with the last buildings, the cobblestones
underfoot changed to crushed limestone, and, gradually,
the road turned into a path. Solovyov thought they were
wading in a sea of wormwood that hung over the road.
A petrified, motionless sea. There was something biblical
in that image that did not correspond to post-lunch strolls, and he tried to free himself from Dunya’s arm without
being noticed. Dunya, however, noticed, but didn’t let on
to Solovyov.
Dunya was talking about the city of Pantikapaion and
King Mithridates. She was unexpectedly fervent in describing Pantikapaion’s vexed relationship with the superpower of
his time. They approached the ruins of Mithridates’s palace.
A large lizard was sitting on a chunk of a column.
‘After his own son betrayed him, Mithridates ordered a
slave to stab him with a sword.’
Dunya made a dramatic stabbing lunge and the displeased
lizard crawled down onto the ground. It did not like the
sharp motions.
Solovyov sat down on one of the chunks of the ruins. It
was hot. Warmed air was rising, visibly, over other chunks.
It seemed to Solovyov that those hazy-transparent streams
were ancient history that had lingered in some inconceivable way until his arrival but were now evaporating from the
remnants of rock, under the heat of the sun. Might
Mithridates have placed his palm on this column? In the
evening, when the sea was already blowing cool air and the column was still warm? After ordering everyone to leave—
concubines, bathhouse attendants, and bodyguards—did it
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really matter who? And then he himself would place his
palm on this column and stand there? And sense its porous
surface? And admire the fading strait? Looking out at where the sun turns into the sea, not tearing himself away until his eyes began to smart? Of course he might have. How,
then, does his history differ from the general’s history? Both fought in Crimea. Neither could hold on to Crimea.
Everyone falls into exactly the same traps.
The evening session bore a very promising title: ‘The
Other General.’ Grunsky and Baikalova co-chaired again,
this time sitting side-by-side in identical chairs. The throne and the previous scenery were gone from the stage. Instead of a medieval castle, a tavern on the Lithuanian border now swayed slightly behind the co-chairs’ backs. The cannery
director thought this backdrop acclimated the audience to
the session’s informal character.
As he announced the first paper, academician Grunsky
expressed the hope that the post-lunch presentations would offer a fresh view of the question and that generaliana might possibly become a new word. The academician
likened blind following of a source to splitting hairs and pledged his support to everyone unafraid of breaking with tradition. In passing, he recalled Prof. Nikolsky’s (Solovyov winced) proposed classification of researchers—offered in his Archivists and Orators—and declared Nikolsky’s approach methodologically unsound. After condemning traditionalism as a phenomenon, the chair turned over the floor
to a presenter with the surname Kvasha. As Kvasha was
coming on stage, Baikalova said she endorsed her
colleague’s remarks and expressed certainty that the venerable scholar’s nontraditional orientation might be a good
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stimulus for many young people dedicating themselves to
science. The audience looked spontaneously at Grunsky’s
secretary.
‘That’s in revenge for the throne,’ Dunya whispered to
Solovyov.
Kvasha was already standing at the lectern. He had dark
skin and closely cut hair; he was fairly gloomy. After asking to be forgiven for playing with words, he began by saying
that his innovation—the paper was called ‘General Larionov as Holy Fool’—had its own tradition. Needless to say, he
was referring to Alexander Ya. Petrov-Pokhabnik’s article,
�
��The General’s Holy Foolishness’, published back in 1932 in The Phenomenology of Holy Foolishness.
This article listed some of the general’s traits and actions that did not fit with the usual accepted notions of army life overall, or with the officer corps’ upper echelon, in particular.
Among other things, there were references to the general’s recurrent conversations with horses, his pathological (in the author’s opinion) passion for railroad transport, and also the four birds (crane, raven, swallow, and starling) that lived in the general’s train car, something witnesses had confirmed; some were cited in Alexei Ravenov’s article ‘The Blue Train Carriage.’ Beyond those facts, there were also veiled allusions regarding certain allegedly strange orders from the
general immediately before the Reds captured Yalta. Nothing concrete was said about these orders except that Larionov’s subordinates were extraordinarily surprised to hear them.
It was apparently at this time that the term ‘holy fool’ was first applied to the general.
Kvasha began his criticism of Petrov-Pokhabnik’s work
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managed to ascertain that before Petrov-Pokhabnik evacu-
ated from Crimea, he had been registered as holding the
position of stableman (Kvasha was of the opinion that this may explain Petrov-Pokhabnik’s jealousy toward the general’s conversations with horses, as well as his obvious distaste for railroad transport) in the army entrusted to the general, after which, following his move from Constantinople to
Prague, he made a living writing out clean copies of works by the Prague Linguistic Circle. Having grown accustomed
to the process of making copies, Petrov-Pokhabnik himself
did not even realize he was writing his first paper on the informational structure of sentences, evoking Roman
Jakobson’s unfeigned amazement. Petrov-Pokhabnik was
forced to leave the circle in the early 1930s as a result of his openly Saussurean understanding of the problems of
synchrony and diachrony. Members of the circle were
prepared to forgive him anything at all, just not following Ferdinand de Saussure.
It was during that same period—while making a clean
Solovyov and Larionov Page 26