and passed the leftovers on to rank-and-file Red Armymen.
Those entering the city praised the kumys, though they
noted its sharp taste. Only Kun did not praise the kumys.
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Surprised by his silence, Zemlyachka asked if he liked the kumys. Still on his horse, Kun vomited in answer and stated that this was because he was not accustomed to it. Zhloba
jokingly proposed that Kun have his stomach pumped in
the city hospital. Everyone laughed so as not to offend
Zhloba. Kun blushed and said he was planning to inspect
the hospital anyway. Zemlyachka recommended that he
record how much blood was in stock. Seeing a shoe shiner,
Kun asked the advance guard to wait while he had his spat-
tered boots cleaned. In addition to the kumys, remnants of beet salad and poorly chewed veal were apparent on his
boots. Zhloba’s boots were not dirty but he dismounted to
have his shined, too.
General Larionov was having his boots shined, too. This
was happening at the other end of the city, by the St.
Theodor Tiron Church. The mezzanine of the Chekhov
house was visible about a hundred paces from the church.
Maria Pavlovna Chekhova was opening the shutters. As he
watched how deftly the brush moved in a shoe shiner’s
hands, the general said, ‘Chekhov died only sixteen years
ago but an entirely new epoch has arrived.’
The roadway was being repaired not far from the church.
The knocking of wooden tampers, which pressed the paving
stones, spread over Autskaya Street. The stones were laid
in a fan shape on a sand foundation. The wind was tearing
the last leaves from the trees in a front yard. Blackened and crumpled, they rolled along the brand-new paving stone,
settling in a gutter.
The general stopped next to one of the houses as he
walked down Autskaya Street. The biting November wind
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and in a little flapping runner rug that had been flung on the fence. It was quiet in the house. They were playing chess there. Two men sitting on bentwood chairs were considering positions on the board. Their words were inaudible. Their
calm could be sensed. A woman with a pail came down the
front steps. She went behind the corner of the house and
the general could no longer see her. He heard when the
well’s door was set aside and the chain began unwinding.
The gurgly dipping, the unhurried path up, the knock of
the full pail against the well house. The general pressed his cheek to the fence. It was warm, rough wood. The woman
wiped her feet and went out on the porch. Poured some
water into a tank. Someone began coughing behind a
curtain. The bell-like ring of the tank and the patter of
water on the bottom of the basin. Everything was authentic, nothing was superfluous: a thin trill at the beginning (a little hysterically), then calmed and muted as it filled. The distant bark of dogs. The general was not worried about this house.
He turned on Botkinskaya Street and went to the pier
by Alexander Square. Thick snow had begun to fall. It was
wet and not even cold. The sea whipped against the embank-
ment’s stones. There was no ice in the sea but it was
hopelessly wintry, from the distant breakers to the splashes that spread in the snow. The pier’s pilings were entwined
in its gray strands. The general sniffed the air—only the
winter sea smelled like this.
He stopped by the gate at the Tsar’s Garden when he
caught sight of the musicians. Pensive, he admired how the snow was coating them, to musical accompaniment. The
general put all his money—several million—in the open
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too. The case gradually filled with snow and multicolored
bills that had not yet managed to become old: the snow and the bills already had the same approximate value.
The general picked up another million on the sidewalk
by the Frantsia Hotel and gave it to the porter. A horsecab driver bowed to him from the coachman’s seat. The wheels
turned snow into water to the sound of wet clopping; black furrows stretched sloppily behind the horsecab. A small dark blue spot was forming on the leaden sky. This was the
unpredictable Yalta weather. The snowstorm had begun to
subside.
The sun peeked out as the general approached the jetty.
He stopped, closed his eyes, and the skin of his face felt the sun’s warmth. After standing like that for a bit, he turned onto the jetty. The snow that had fallen on the concrete
was melting at full speed. The general slowly walked the
rest of the way to the lighthouse. A small tree was growing out of a crack in its base. The tree’s leaves had fallen so it was difficult to tell what kind of tree it was. The general laid his palm on the base’s dirty-gray stones. They were
beginning to warm up, barely enough to feel. This was like a return to life. The general closed his eyes again and
imagined it was now summer. The sounds of the sea
muffling what might have carried from the embankment.
The wheels of coaches, shouts of kvass sellers, cries of
children. Rustling of palms. Hot weather.
He opened his eyes and saw people walking toward him.
They were walking unhurriedly, even somehow peaceably:
Zemlyachka, Kun, and a group of sailors. Their faces were
not triumphant; they were most likely preoccupied.
Expecting a ploy, they were not taking their eyes off the
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edge of the jetty where the general stood. Those walking
realized that the general was one step from the irretrievable and they feared that step. They feared the general would
take it on his own.
They exchanged a few words as they drew closer. They
were not looking in the general’s direction at all now. Their hearts were jumping out of their chests. Zemlyachka was
striding ahead of them all. She was holding her half-fastened leather coat with her hand and its hem flapped in the wind.
Kun walked a little behind her, his boots cleaned to a shine.
His wooden gait gave away his flatfootedness. There was
an extinguished cigarette between his teeth. He kicked
pebbles as he walked but there was nothing carefree in that.
Or in the sailors’ feline movements. Those walking were
genuine hunters and could not hide that.
The general did not move. He was half-sitting on the
base of the lighthouse and watching seagulls stroll along
the jetty. They were letting out shrill sounds that were
sometimes similar to a duck’s quacking, sometimes to a
child’s screech. The seagulls were searching for something among the wet rocks. They groomed their feathers and
raised their heads, pensively examining a sea entirely lacking ships. Never before had they seen a sea like that. The seagulls did not even fly off when the group of people walking along the jetty neared
the general. They were not afraid of people.
Zemlyachka was the first to approach the general. She
neared him without rushing but it was noticeable even
under her leather coat how quickly her breasts were
moving. As before, the general was half-sitting on the base of the lighthouse, leaning on his hands. Those walking
smelled of horse sweat and unwashed human bodies. The
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sailors froze, awaiting an order. Kun spat out the cigarette butt. Zemlyachka took out her pen knife and silently drove it into the back of the general’s hand. She was overrun
with feelings.
A bell struck on Polikurovsky Hill. It was ringing in the
St. John Chrysostom bell tower. Zemlyachka and Kun were
arguing about something in undertones. The sailors observed the general moving his lips, barely noticeably, and they felt sympathy toward him. His hand was still lying on the base
of the lighthouse. A crimson dribble wound through cracks
in the rocks. Zemlyachka was insisting that his execution
had to be agonizing. Kun objected that the execution should demonstrate the humanism of Soviet power. The striking
bell muted Zemlyachka’s reply. Its sound floated over the
sea, filling Yalta’s entire bay. When the argument was over, they led the general to the outer side of the jetty. They
placed him on the edge and tied a piece of debris from an
anchor to his feet.
‘Shoot for the stomach, not the heart,’ Kun advised the
sailors. ‘Then he’ll be able to drown after he’s shot, too.’
The sailors nodded.
‘I’ll be the one to shoot,’ said Zemlyachka. ‘In the groin.’
The sailors nodded again. Far below, brown seaweed
undulated in time with the waves. The water had turned
emerald green under the bright sun. It no longer had a
repulsive wintry look and it seemed warm from a distance.
The general decided to look straight ahead so as not to feel dizzy. He could see part of the embankment behind the
sailors’ heads. Coaches were driving and people were
walking. The embankment continued to live its own life
but that life was no longer the general’s life; they were
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separated by a short strip of water and a group standing
on the jetty. Yalta’s cozy amphitheater towered over the
embankment. Smoke stretched from the chimneys of some
houses. It was rising toward the sky and mixing with clouds at the very top of Ai-Petri. The sailors stepped aside.
Nothing else blocked the marvelous picture. The clouds
seemed motionless but in actuality they were not. They
were slowly drifting toward Ai-Petri. This became particu-
larly noticeable when the shadow of a large triangular cloud began moving along the peak. The cloud itself still did not touch the peak. It was moving more slowly than its shadow.
When Zemlyachka’s leather coat appeared in front of the
general, he thought the cloud would not moor at the peak
during his lifetime. That it could have hurried up if, of
course, all its spectators were equally important to it. But the cloud was not hurrying. It was obviously imitating the cloud the future military commander had seen from deep
within Vorontsov Park in 1889. At approximately 3:00 in
the afternoon, when his father, who was keen on
photography, decided to take his picture. That time was
considered the best for taking a photograph. The sun was
still bright but the shadows had already settled prettily on the grass. The boy was standing in a glade between
Lebanese cedars. The camera was on a cumbersome
wooden stand located a little way below, on a walkway. His father had shortened the legs of the stand so the boy would be photographed against the backdrop of Ai-Petri. A drag-onfly froze uneasily over the camera. It was not flying out of the lens; it simply hovered in one place. Its wings were indiscernible and seemed like a light thickening of air. His father needed that peak, suffused with sun, but the shadow 580VV_txt.indd 399
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of a cloud had already appeared on it. His father kept
looking out from under the black cloth but the cloud was
not thinking about moving. Only its shadow was migrating.
It was creeping ever closer to Ai-Petri, depriving the peak of its last signs of luminescence. Zemlyachka energetically shook her right wrist. Larionov had been posed just as
carefully in 1889 as now. Only then he was standing with
his back to Ai-Petri. He had been watching the cloud then, looking around the entire time. He saw cedar branches
rocking slightly in the wind. Felt the mountain’s icy freshness mixing with the aromas of the park among the cedar
branches. The boy inhaled that air and his nostrils moved.
Caterpillars hung down from trees on thin threads; some
were transforming into butterflies. The shrubs were scat-
tered with ripe red berries. Cones dropped slowly from
cedar crowns. The cones hit, muted, against the grass,
stirring up grasshoppers who jumped together like foun-
tains, then they bounced several times before falling still.
The cones had been changing places, unnoticed, when he
had turned around. An ant crawled along his knee.
Zemlyachka raised the hand with the revolver. The general
attempted to see himself from a distance but the image
turned out to be a negative. A shot rang out from the
opposite side of the jetty. The seagulls began taking off with a shriek but came right back down. The general turned his head and saw Zhloba. Zhloba’s meager gestures asked
Kun and Zemlyachka to approach him. Zemlyachka
expressed dissatisfaction, like a person who has been interrupted at the most interesting part. She jabbed the revolver in the general’s direction but Zhloba shook his head in the negative. As if foreseeing disappointment, Kun and
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Zemlyachka were in no hurry to make their way to Zhloba.
The sailors took sunflower seeds from their pockets and
tossed them to the gulls. They liked observing the gulls
beating each other with their wings in their struggle for
the seeds. Zhloba’s conversation with his comrades-in-arms turned out to be anything but simple. Isolated exclamations that the wind carried, and their gestures, spoke to that.
Zhloba took a paper folded into quarters from his map
case. He unfolded it, showed it to both his conversation
partners in turn, and placed it back in the case. The sailors laughed about the birds’ basic instincts. This spectacle enno-bled them in some way. Zhloba was, perceptibly, beginning
to lose patience. He took out the paper once again, pressed it up against Bela Kun’s face and held it like that for several seconds. Bela Kun did not resist. Zemlyachka turned around abruptly and left the jetty. The men went after her. The
general’s gaze followed them but not one of them turned
around. The sailors understood nothing. After tossing the
rest of the seeds to the seagulls, they began trudging uncertainly after their commanders. One of them returned,
untied the general’s feet, and bolted off to catch up
to the others. The general took several steps away from the edge.
The wind was intensifying. The general flung open his
overcoat to greet the wind, just as people greet someone
they already said goodbye to for the last time, someone
who brings joy by simply existing. The general looked at
the sun without squinting. Tears welled up from rays that
were still bright but already orange. The sun was hanging
over the other side of the embankment, illuminating masses of ice that had frozen on the streetlamps after the night’s storm. They glistened like a dazzling Christmas garland.
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The size of the sun exceeded the boundaries of what is
reasonable. Jolting as it moved, the sun disappeared behind the mountain at unexpected speed. The sun was setting in
his presence.
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AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S
Although Solovyov and Larionov is Eugene Vodolazkin’s debut novel, it’s the third of his books that I’ve translated for Oneworld. Like Eugene’s Laurus and The Aviator, Solovyov and Larionov is a complex novel, both in terms of language, since the narrative voice is very defined, and content, which blends two time periods and includes a fair bit of history.
Those complexities mean that Eugene’s patient help—
reading my manuscript, answering my questions, and simply
being his usual humorous and thoughtful self—was more
necessary than ever. The three novels fit together so beautifully, forming a sort of triptych, that each one is my favorite in its own right.
Part of the fun of Solovyov and Larionov is in the details, which Eugene cleverly plants throughout the novel so they
can come together at the end of the book. Eugene often
refers to me as his co-author and this book gave me more
opportunities than Laurus and The Aviator, thanks to several passages that we changed significantly, often because translated humor and irony just aren’t very funny when they
have to be explained. (Fortunately, nearly all Eugene’s humor and irony translates very nicely into English.) I also adapted 580VV_txt.indd 403
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Oneworld, Many Voices
Solovyov and Larionov Page 42