Solovyov and Larionov

by Eugene Vodolazkin

  Leeza that while they were warm his mother was in an icy

  grave. Leeza responded again that dead people feel nothing in graves, but that did not reassure Solovyov. He could not fall asleep. Leeza sat at the head of his bed all night while he thought about how his mother must be cold in the grave.

  Especially considering her high temperature during her last days.

  That was the day he grasped the true essence of the

  cemetery. He began fearing that his grandmother might be

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  carried off there on a morning just as cold and that the

  cemetery would accept her with the very same hospitality.

  He was frightened because his world was unraveling.

  Slipping away, like sand through his fingers, and nothing

  could be done about it. Even so, he still did not consider himself mortal at that time.

  The realization that he would die came to him one

  summer day. After making love in the forest, he and Leeza

  went to the cemetery. Their feet stepped lightly on moss,

  where pine cones crunched from time to time. They sat on

  one of the metal fences and Solovyov asked, ‘Do you under-

  stand that we’ll die in the end, too?’

  Leeza looked at him in surprise. She nodded.

  ‘Well, I just figured it out now.’

  ‘After we did . . . that?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . we do that all the time but it occurred to me now.’

  Why had they gone to the cemetery after that?

  Solovyov stood at the graves of his mother and grand-

  mother. They were essentially one grave, inside the same

  metal fence, under the same cross. The two small mounds

  had even merged into one during the years that had passed.

  Solovyov placed the gladiolus right by the cross and made

  a few cautious motions with the hoe. The grass at the

  cemetery pulled out more easily than the grass in the yard at his house. This grass had grown in the shade and did not have resilience or an abundance of sun. Clump after clump

  fell under Solovyov’s hoe with a short, rich sound. The

  graves were revealed little by little: their joining turned out to be imagined. The mound on his mother’s grave was

  slightly higher because soil had been added at various times.

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  Solovyov often went to his mother’s grave during the

  first year after her death. Whispering, he would tell her

  about everything that had happened that day and ask for

  advice. He had done that during her life, too, after his mother had stopped speaking with him, as punishment for bad

  behavior. She would keep silent until the moment he asked

  her advice. Agonized, Solovyov thought up questions and

  asked them with a serious look. Not sensing a ploy (or

  perhaps sensing a ploy), his mother would answer. But only while she was alive. She did not answer a single one of his questions after her death.

  Although Solovyov continued telling her about everything,

  over time it worked out that he went to see her ever less

  frequently, and there were ever more events in his life. He gasped for breath, both from the abundance of events and

  because they remained unspoken. Feeling indebted to his

  mother, he attempted to at least tell her the essential things, but here, too, his debt grew with unbelievable speed. He

  realized he was hopelessly behind.

  ‘You can’t tell a life, Mama,’ he whispered to her once

  and burst into tears.

  He told her nothing after that. He consoled himself with

  the thought that she knew everything anyway.

  The year his mother died, Solovyov attempted to imagine

  her in the grave. When spring came, he thought ground

  water had permeated her coffin and his mother was lying

  in a cold bath. In the summer, he was already certain her

  skin had turned black and her eyes had fallen in. He tried—

  but failed—not to think about the short white worms he

  had seen on animal corpses. A year and a half later, after the earth on the grave mound had abruptly settled, he

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  guessed that the coffin’s lid had rotted and fallen in. Several years later, Solovyov began to feel better when, according to his notions, only a skeleton remained in the grave.

  The Solovyov who was tossing weeded grass over the

  fence did not yet know that it lay ahead for him to find

  General Larionov’s notebook, in which all the stages of the human body’s decomposition were listed in detail—from

  cyanotic spots to a fully bared skeleton. Some of the listings came about as a result of the general’s note-taking on special-ized literature regarding exhumation and postmortems.

  Most of the notes were based on his personal experience

  and reflected what he saw on his rounds of the battlefield.

  Since the battles did not cease for days, sometimes not even for weeks, the corpses turned out to have decomposed to

  varying degrees before the burial team’s arrival. This significantly increased the general’s research base.

  Solovyov recited a prayer for the repose of the soul. In

  his memory, he always heard the prayer as recited by his

  grandmother, so it was strange for him to hear his own

  voice now. The wind stirred in the crowns of the pine trees.

  The grave by which Solovyov was standing was the only

  one in the cemetery that was cared for.

  When he came home, he put the hoe in the shed but

  then he stopped in the doorway. He went back, took the

  hoe, and left the yard. He walked along the fence and

  stopped by the neighboring gate. This was Leeza’s yard. It was difficult to open the gate: Leeza’s yard was just as overgrown as Solovyov’s, though she had left only a little over a year ago. Solovyov fought his way to her front steps with no less frenzy than he had come to his own on the first day, though this time he was armed with a tool.

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  The key to Leeza’s house was hidden in the same place

  as the key to his house, behind the door jamb. Solovyov

  sensed an unlived-in smell in the house as soon as he entered.

  More accurately, the absence of a smell. That had never

  happened in this house. It always smelled of something

  here, most often of food. Leeza’s mother had loved to cook.

  She made beef stroganoff, turkey in cream sauce and French-style meat, things that nobody else made around here.

  People at Kilometer 715 ate filling meals but they lacked delicacies.

  There was always a special smell in Leeza’s house at

  Easter. It was the smell of sacredness and celebration, joy and gifts. It joined the aromas of farmer’s cheese, fresh

  dough, and—for some reason—incense. There was no

  church near the station so to Solovyov, Leeza’s house seemed like a place of worship at Easter. Remembering the smell,

  Solovyov thought that the general’s son might just have

  shown up at the station at Easter. That would definitely

  explain why he had stayed here.

  Solovyov went into Leeza’s room. He extended his hand

  to t
he shelf over the desk and pulled out a book at random.

  It was the previous year’s directory for college applicants.

  Solovyov sat on the bed and leafed through it carefully.

  There were no indications in the directory about which

  institution Leeza planned to attend. There was not one

  dog-eared page or one checkmark in the margins to be

  found. To Solovyov’s chagrin, Leeza was very neat.

  He found a packet of small notebooks in one of the desk

  drawers. These were his own school notebooks from various

  years, from the very first, with large handwriting that still lacked a slant, to his sloppy ones just before graduating.

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  Solovyov lowered himself onto the chair and began exam-

  ining Leeza’s collection sheet by sheet. After suddenly going still over a fifth-grade essay, he observed a wet drop spread on the rough paper and absorb the blueness of the ink.

  Solovyov himself did not know why he was continuing

  these searches. He had already been sitting in Leeza’s house for more than three hours but had not run across anything

  that might give him an idea about where to find her.

  Solovyov had realized long ago that he would learn nothing new here about either Leeza or her father. He was simply

  going through Leeza’s papers and touching her books, and

  that calmed him.

  He discovered a folder of paper airplanes in the bookcase.

  They were airplane notes he had sent to her over the fence.

  In a past life. Early in the mornings: the lines were blurry in places from dew. Of course he could have said everything over the fence but he preferred airmail. He liked to write and liked to watch his words soar up into the air. And she had saved all that. Where should he look for her now?

  Solovyov caught himself thinking that Filipp Larionov

  interested him less as the general’s son than as Leeza’s father.

  He would have liked to see him again, place him alongside

  Leeza, delight in their kinship, and be amazed at how Leeza, who was infinitely loved and essential to him, had come

  out of the ancient Larionov line.

  Leeza had not come out of the Larionov line. More

  accurately, she was from the Larionov line, but from a

  different one. Larionov’s line had no connection to her. That realization came about with no transition whatsoever, all at once, like distant lightning. Filipp, the general’s son, was not Larionov. The information written down in Zoya’s apart-580VV_txt.indd 302

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  ment resurfaced in Solovyov’s memory in all its obviousness.

  General Larionov and Varvara Petrovna Nezhdanova had

  not officially registered their marriage. Filipp, their son together, was Nezhdanov.

  Solovyov left for Petersburg the next day. As he closed

  up his house, he thought that he was closing it forever. He tried not to look back. He took the rest of the Kerch canned goods to Yegorovna. She cried again. Solovyov cried, too,

  because this parting with Yegorovna was also forever. As he went outside, without the canned goods, he recognized the

  burden he had been carrying in his bag. And he smiled.

  What had dawned on him belatedly in Leeza’s house did

  not drive him to despondency. Oddly enough, it was even

  a relief. Leeza’s ties to the general’s line—and Solovyov felt this ever more distinctly with each minute—had carried a

  heavy weight. That connection had been lending Leeza a

  certain excess worth that she did not need. She was his love, his forgotten and rediscovered joy. He knew he had to search for her.

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  When Solovyov arrived in Petersburg, he realized autumn

  had set in. Autumn was reflected in the windows at the

  Tsarskoye Selo train station, it called out here and there in the porters’ voices, and drifted along a platform in the form of a forgotten newspaper. The coming of autumn would

  not have been so obvious if there had been rain. But a feeble and irrevocably autumnal sun was shining. No doubt

  remained that summer was already over here.

  The joy of return enveloped Solovyov. He inhaled the

  biting Petersburg air and sensed it was exactly what he had been lacking. He walked along Gorokhovaya Street to the

  Fontanka River and turned right. Cold air wafted off the

  dark water. Ripples coated the river. Solovyov noticed he

  was the only person wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

  Solovyov lived on the city’s Petrograd Side. As already

  stated, he rented a room on Zhdanovskaya Embankment

  that Prof. Nikolsky had found for him through acquaint-

  ances. The professor had explained that the embankment

  had nothing to do with Soviet politician Andrei Zhdanov.

  It received its name from the Zhdanovka River, which

  immortalized clerks by the name of Zhdanov, former

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  owners of these lands. For its part, the surname Zhdanov

  dates back to the word zhdan, denoting a long-awaited child. With the addition of the negative particle ne, the word nezhdan denoted (correspondingly) an unawaited child. By all indications, a distant ancestor of Filipp

  Nezhdanov was such a child. Solovyov was thinking about

  that as he entered the archway of house No. 11 on

  Zhdanovskaya Embankment.

  House No. 11 was special. This was manifested not only

  in the grandiose Stalin-era Empire style of its architecture: the workshop for engineer Mstislav Sergeyevich Los, a character in Alexei Tolstoy’s (1882–1945) novel Aelita, was located in the building’s courtyard. Los, who planned to fly to Mars, was seeking a travel companion. Tolstoy had lived right

  here, too, on Zhdanovskaya Embankment, in house No. 3.

  He had taken up residence near author Fyodor Sologub

  (1863–1927) and was not planning to fly anywhere, having

  recently returned from abroad.

  House No. 11 was constructed in 1954. It stood on the

  same spot as the building and courtyard that Tolstoy

  described. Thus (Solovyov reasoned as he walked up the

  stairs) the fantasy writer’s work took into consideration the actual particularities of the previous building No. 11. Given Alexei Tolstoy’s death in 1945, the book did not take into consideration the peculiarities of the current No. 11. In that sense, the fictional make-believe in Aelita corresponded to actual life in the 1920s more than to the objective reality of the 1990s. Solovyov’s next conclusion: the border between

  make-believe and reality disappears when time is taken out of the equation. He wiped his feet on the mat and shut the door behind him.

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  Solovyov lived in a two-room apartment. This was a

  happy version of a communal apartment: given its small

  population, it had not been reduced to a complete wreck.

  Additional happiness lay in the fact that Solovyov’s flatmate hardly lived here. Once every two or three months he

  would arrive suddenly from somewhere like Murmansk

  or Syktyvkar and then leave just as suddenly a few days

  later. His girlfriends came to see him on those days, though Solovyov saw them only in passing, too, when they ran

 
from the next room to the shower late at night, wrapped

  in towels.

  The apartment had windows on both sides of the

  building: they looked out over the courtyard (including part of Ofitsersky Lane) and the embankment. The windows in

  the kitchen and his flatmate’s room looked into the court-

  yard. Solovyov’s room (and this was its amazing quality)

  had a view of the Zhdanovka River, a small chunk of

  Petrovsky Island with the Petrovsky Stadium, and, further, beyond the trees on the island, the Malaya Neva River. In

  Solovyov’s opinion, the stadium spoiled the picture a lot, but nothing could be done about that.

  The stadium did not just ruin the view. It complicated

  life. Existence near the stadium had its own shadowy and

  (in many of the courtyard’s secluded corners) damp sides,

  because fans of the Zenith football team urinated with

  reckless abandon. They urinated under the archway, in the

  entryways, and by the fences; they urinated during matches, whether the main team or the reserves were playing; and

  before and after matches. They urinated as if Zenith were

  the champion although the team was not even in the top

  three at the time.

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  Fans left behind heaps of rubbish: beer cans, chip bags,

  dried fish heads, corn cobs, and newspaper cones, flattened on the asphalt. All this was thickly strewn with sunflower seed hulls. The hulls swirled in light little tornados that blew off the river and rose over the roofs of building No. 11,

  Zhdanovskaya Embankment, Ofitsersky Lane, and the entire

  Petrograd side.

  Solovyov had arrived on a match day. He was not a fan

  and he regarded football matches with irritation. At the

  same time, there was something about how they took place

  that appealed to him. The roar of many thousands of fans

  at the stadium excited him: that roar was sometimes indis-

  tinct, like a distant waterfall, and sometimes explosive (after a goal). But it was always powerful.

  Solovyov sat on the windowsill and watched spectators

  disperse after the match. They flowed across the wide

  bridge over the Zhdanovka River like a viscous mass that

  could not come apart: that bridge was directly under