Solovyov and Larionov

12

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.

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 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) some sort of impediments invisible to the world. Dull scraping and the pear thudding against the door accompanied 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 disappeared through a blackened metal grate. Several cherries 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. 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 with his surname.

‘Mizter, 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.

‘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 with himself for his indecisiveness. In the first place, he did want to see the conference opening. In the second place (Solovyov suddenly realized this in all its clarity), more than anything, he felt tired of Zoya. This was the start of the second reel of some strange film he did not even seem to have agreed to be involved in.

They walked half a block and ended up in a dark vaulted basement. A chandelier shaped like a steering wheel hung from an enormous hook where the basement’s vaulted ceiling came together.

‘This little joint reminds me of “Gambrinus”,’ said Dunya.

‘I discovered it yesterday.’

Solovyov ordered two coffees with Chartreuse. The liqueur was served in faceted vodka glasses. Dunya poured half her shot into her coffee and drank the other half in one swallow.

‘When will academician Grunsky speak?’ asked Solovyov.

‘I think it’s actually right now. Alas, neither academician Likhachev nor academician Sakharov will be here today. So you can relax.’ Dunya lit a cigarette and the smoke began rising prettily toward the steering wheel. ‘I’d advise you not to get caught up in the academicians, the title has depreciated a lot. And Grunsky’s just plain stupid.’

‘Then how’d he get to be an academician?’

‘He had enough maneuverability. Connections.’ She blew out smoke in a thin stream. ‘Well, and he was brownnosing everybody in charge at the Academy.’

Dunya’s attitude seemed too categorical to Solovyov but he kept quiet. He refused to imagine a stupid academician.

The break was ending when they returned. The theater was crowded and the attendees’ muted buzz reminded him of an intermission at an operetta. Scenery of a medieval castle in the mountains intensified that impression. The gothic scene swaying in a draft might not have fit the conference theme but the organizers thought it created a pacifying, romantic backdrop.

Solovyov could see a small fat man on the stage, to the left of the castle wall. The man stood at the chairman’s table, half-facing the auditorium, with one hand thrust in his pocket (not a flattering pose for the short-legged). Using his free hand, he carefully piled hair on his bald spot. The name card on the table said, ‘Acad. P.P. Grunsky.’ Nothing that Dunya had reported was mentioned on the card.

There was something unnatural—in the sense of theatrical—about even the conference attendees’ appearances. Despite the hot spell, they were strolling around in suits and running their hands along the lapels of their outmoded jackets again and again. This wasn’t even because of the hot spell; the suits were blatantly out of character for their owners. And for their faces, which were rough and devoid of expression. These people pressed their arms to their torsos as they walked timidly around the theater. Looked at themselves in the mirror in the foyer. Dampened their combs in the little fountain outside the theater and fixed their hair. These were cannery employees, sent by their bosses to lend the event a more mass scale. According to the conference organizers, very broad swaths of the population should hear papers about the general.

Two cannery employees approached Grunsky and asked for his autograph. This was audible thanks to the numerous microphones that equipped the stage. They were all over the place, dangling from somewhere above, like motionless black lianas. Grunsky led the requestors to the table and wearily, but with visible pleasure, signed the two programs they held out to him. This was the first time in his life he had been asked for his autograph.

Solovyov and Dunya took seats in the parterre. Solovyov removed the program from his folder. Leaning toward his shoulder, Dunya ran her fingernail along the second surname listed after the break.

‘Tarabukin’s a terrible pain but he gets a lot done. One of the few who’ll say anything relevant here. He’s sitting to my right.’

Solovyov slowly turned his head. The left-handed Tarabukin was nervously noting something in a folder of papers lying on his knees. His gnarled fingers and their countless knuckles might have made an even bigger impression than his left-handedness. Tarabukin was chewing the fingernails on his right hand and kept examining them pensively.

‘Before lunch…’ Grunsky tapped his fingernail on the microphone and the hall shook with a deep, drumming sound. ‘…we have one more paper before lunch, so I ask you to focus. The floor goes to Professor Tarakubin with the paper “Larionov and Zhloba: a Textological Collision”.’

‘Tarabukin, if you will,’ protested Tarabukin, but his voice was drowned out by the general noise.

Dunya shook with silent laughter. Meanwhile, Tarabukin was already energetically making his way to the stage. He gestured as he walked and his entire appearance expressed indignation, either from the incorrect pronunciation of his surname or the impossibility of making his way to where he was to speak.

‘Quiet, please,’ Grunsky tapped at the microphone again. ‘One more paper before lunch. The speaker prepared handouts, they’ll be distributed now.’

Tarabukin clambered up the little stairs onto the stage, continuing to gesture, and walked under the hanging microphones.

‘…ucking smarty pants, what are you talking about, handouts? In Russian…’

Tarabukin stopped short when he heard he was on the

air. Now he silently crossed the stage—small and rumpled—without a shadow of regret about what he had said. After Tarabukin had taken his place behind the lectern (at his height, he truly proved to be behind it), a heavyset woman with braids arranged on her head started making her way toward the stage. She moved slowly, placing her feet heavily on the steps, and reminding Solovyov of his high school principal, a woman nicknamed Bigfoot. Judging from the hand she extended in Grunsky’s direction, she was saying something to him, but her words were inaudible.

‘Who’s the co-chair?’ Grunsky asked again, into the microphone. ‘You’re the co-chair? Where were you before?’

The women answered him again after conquering the final stairs. The academician shrugged and glanced at the program.

‘Nobody said anything to me about co-chairing.’

The woman who had come up on stage turned to the audience and pointed out someone on the parterre for Grunsky. Despite her gait, she certainly was not Solovyov’s high school principal.

‘So, may I begin?’ Tarabukin asked sarcastically, but nobody was paying attention to him.

‘She’s corresponding member Baikalova,’ said Dunya. Her face expressed delight. ‘Fiesta with a bullfight.’

‘There’s not even a second chair here,’ said Grunsky, slightly lifting his chair by its back to illustrate. ‘I don’t know where you’ll sit.’

‘One of us should prove to be chivalrous, Petr Petrovich,’ said Baikalova.

She was already within range of the microphones. Grunsky threw up his hands, ‘Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do!’

Baikalova bowed low, from the waist, to Grunsky and turned to face the audience. Tarabukin, suffering, rolled his eyes. The cannery workers smiled shyly.

Grunsky approached the edge of the stage and signaled to someone to bring a second chair. A man in a pensioner’s shirt with patch pockets jumped out of his seat and shook it, demonstrating to Grunsky that they were fastened not only to the neighboring seats (everyone sitting in that row shook) but also to the floor. Grunsky gestured his understanding and returned to the table.

Two men in overalls hurried up the steps to the stage. They disappeared behind the curtains but reappeared a minute later, dragging a massive throne with a scraping sound. They pulled it up to the table and explained something to Grunsky, who was grasping the back of his own chair as a precaution. Grunsky nodded and showed Baikalova the throne with a gallant gesture. She sized up Grunsky with a malicious gaze and moved heavily across the stage.

Baikalova had to ascend to the throne—which did not look out of place by the castle—in a literal sense. She first climbed onto a step attached to its base and then, holding the lion heads on the armrests, clambered up to the seat, which required some effort. Since the throne was not an item envisaged for use by someone sitting at a table, it turned out to be rather high. Baikalova’s legs did not reach the floor, swinging slightly instead, like shapeless sausages, under the thin tabletop. Further beneath the tabletop—this was visible to the audience, too—the academician’s feet were moving chop-chop, as if he were in the homestretch. There was no question he had won this little competition.

‘Please, go ahead, colleague,’ said Grunsky, turning to Tarabukin.

‘Yes, do,’ said Baikalova, looking down on Grunsky.

‘Thank you very much,’ Tarabukin responded. After thinking, he uttered it in pieces. ‘Thank you. Very much.’

Leaning against the armrest furthest from Grunsky, Baikalova rested her cheek on her hand. Her lips stretched apart, forming a raspberry-colored diagonal line along her face.

Tarabukin huffily began his paper. He uttered the introductory phrases—which in and of themselves contained nothing nasty, offering a listing of sources he had used—with a bitter, almost denouncing, intonation. It was they, his sources, who took the blame for the scholar’s disrespectful treatment of the scholar. It was they who answered for his mangled surname, for his ridiculous waiting on the stage, for everything that had thrown the scholar utterly off balance. Even in this difficult frame of mind, though, the presenter spoke in particular about two sources he had studied.

The first of them was General Larionov’s Notes for an Autobiography, in Dupont’s edition. Only when turning to that did Tarabukin forget the offenses committed against him. In characterizing Dupont’s publication (and speaking of it with the highest praise) the speaker switched to an unusual tone, as if he were anticipating an important statement. Which is how things turned out. What Tarabukin was thinking about was the second source he had used: a heretofore unknown report by Dmitry Zhloba about his troops’ entry into Yalta in November 1920. Tarabukin himself had found this source in the Archive of the Ministry of Defense.

But the researcher’s revelations did not just consist of that happy finding; there was more. Propelled by a sixth sense (without which, as we know, no discoveries are made), he revealed unbelievable things by juxtaposing Zhloba’s report with General Larionov’s childhood remembrances.

A first glance at Tarabukin’s materials for distribution made it obvious that the two texts were very closely connected. The texts had been created by utterly dissimilar people and they described completely different times. That is what made their resemblance so striking. An astonished buzz ran through the slightly hushed hall.

The most vivid coinciding occurrences in Zhloba’s report and the general’s recollections were in the printouts (not wishing to utter the borrowed English, handouts, he called them handgrips) that the speaker offered. Enjoying the impression he had made, Tarabukin slowly read off the first of the coinciding spots:

Corresponding member Baikalova, who had not received one of Tarabukin’s handgrips, was leaning heavily on the armrest closest to Grunsky and ostentatiously squinting to peer at the papers on the table. With exaggerated amiability, the academician pushed them in Baikalova’s direction but they remained in place. Glancing at the audience, Baikalova threw up her hands.

‘You’re sitting up too high,’ Grunsky said, also to the audience. ‘And therein lies your misfortune.’

There was absolute silence in the hall when Tarabukin moved on to read the second excerpt.

Snoring became audible in the hall when Tarabukin paused. The sounds were muted, like distant thunder, but that did not make them less apparent. Academician Grunsky put his hand to his forehead and peered out from under it at his neighbor sitting at the table. Sometimes he covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head as if lamenting the co-chair he had received. It truly was Baikalova snoring. The corresponding member had fallen asleep quickly and easily while squinting at the texts that had been distributed, and now the microphone that hung over her head was broadcasting her snoring for the audience. This was first-class snoring, with a rumble on the inhale and a whistle on the exhale. With rolling and modulation, complaints and threats, sincere sighs and mockery.

Unfortunately for Baikalova, Tarabukin could not find the example he needed and was feverishly flipping sheet after sheet. The ruthless academician took the table microphone, walked around the table on tiptoe, and brought it right to his co-chair’s nose. The hall shook with a thundering peal. The snorer awoke and looked, crazed, at the microphone the academician was extending.

‘We have a schedule to keep,’ said Baikalova in a husky voice.

With an emcee’s gesture, Grunsky pointed at Baikalova and returned to his place.

‘What a jerk,’ said Dunya, beginning to laugh.

‘I won’t…’ Tarabukin was still shifting his papers around. ‘I won’t, because of the lack of time, read all the examples, I have twenty-three of them… But excerpt No. 19… uh-huh, there it is… I’ll still cite this one.’

Tarabukin poured himself some water from a pitcher as he finished excerpt No. 19. He drank thirstily and with a light moan, like a person who still has a lot left to say. Grunsky sensed the speaker’s frame of mind and stood up from his chair: this was an eloquent appeal to finish up. These gestures were inaccessible for Baikalova, who was lodged in her throne and limited to ostentatious glances at her watch. Tarabukin had been standing half-facing the co-chairs but now quickly turned in the opposite direction, toward the second-tier loge (left side), and began expounding on the results of his intertextual analysis.

And those results—paradoxical to the highest degree!—consisted of the following.

First. The events described by the general (1888) preceded, chronologically, what Zhloba (1920) recounted. That said, however, the time when Zhloba prepared his report preceded the time when the general created his memoirs (presumably the late 1950s to the early 1960s).

Second. Notwithstanding the obvious resemblance of the chosen compositions, textual borrowing from either author could not be ascertained. Further. From the scholar’s point of view, there was not even a hint of one author being familiar with the other’s text.

Third. Both texts were also impossible to trace back to a common source because, despite their closeness, they recount (and here the speaker pounded his fist on the lectern) different events.

Tarabukin poured from the pitcher again. Standing as before, with his back to the co-chairs and his side to the audience, he proceeded with the second glass. The noise of Tarabukin’s deep swallows rang from the hall’s loudspeakers, sounding like a gigantic metronome. Grunsky, who had just sat down, stood again and tapped at the microphone.

‘We have a schedule to keep,’ said Baikalova, in order not to yield the initiative to the academician.

Powerless to ignore what was happening, Tarabukin turned sharply toward the co-chairs and grazed the pitcher with his elbow. After a slow-motion, almost infinite moment of flight, the pitcher shattered to smithereens on the stage.

‘I understand,’ said Tarabukin, quietly but tragically, ‘that standing between a person and his lunch is a thankless matter but I still have a fourth point. And I ask that it be heard out.’

Grunsky and Baikalova stared wordlessly at the same point in the distance, as if they were in the finale of some sort of play. The falling pitcher had drawn them together a little. Both they and the audience members understood it was best to hear everything the speaker had to say. Grunsky sat down, in a clear expression of submissiveness.

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.

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.