Solovyov and Larionov

13

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 establishment’s walls for decades. Spray cans of air freshener that were used at the factory director’s request (the cafeteria workers pointed them at the artificial flowers on the table) 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 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.’

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 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…’

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 simultaneously 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 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 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 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 by offering details from the author’s biography. Kvasha had managed to ascertain that before Petrov-Pokhabnik evacuated 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 copy of a collection of articles, The Phenomenology of Holy Foolishness—that the former stableman would prepare and submit his piece about the general for the collection. As a person who gave his all to his material, Petrov-Pokhabnik himself began holyfooling it a bit, too. He would walk Prague’s streets barefoot in any season—something people there still recall—and shock passers-by with announcements about how there had simply not been any truly scientific studies of holy foolishness until his. Sometimes he tossed stones at the windows of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

Oddly enough, Kvasha’s primary grievance with his predecessor was that he did not understand the phenomenology of holy foolishness. His predecessor’s infatuation with holy fools’ external attributes (this infatuation manifested itself, among other things, in the curses Petrov-Pokhabnik addressed to his opponents) meant he could not gain genuine insight into holy foolishness as an occurrence. From Kvasha’s point of view, by focusing on the eccentric side of the matter, Petrov-Pokhabnik did not discern the foremost aspect of holy foolishness: the spiritual sense.

Alongside this was the Prague researcher’s misunderstanding of several Church Slavonic texts. After all, noted the unrelenting Kvasha, Petrov-Pokhabnik’s previous line of work did not assume his familiarity with Church Slavonic. Kvasha himself knew the language perfectly, which allowed him to not only quote Church Slavonic texts with ease but also to fully understand them. After briefly touching upon the history of the study of holy foolishness as a whole, referencing myriad articles from around the world, Kvasha appealed for the most important points to be stressed, and then moved on to examine an issue related to the general.

Kvasha did not deny elements of holy foolishness in the general’s behavior. Beyond that, he showed—basing his discussion on research into the hagiography of holy fools—that the general’s contemporaries’ recollections about him were often rooted in ancient Russian examples. For the presenter, one of the key points of this juxtaposition was the description of holy foolishness as being dead for the world. ‘“The hagiographical hero”,’ Kvasha read, bringing his glasses to his eyes to read from Tatyana Rudi’s ‘On the Topic of the Hagiography of Holy Fools’, ‘withdraws from the everyday situation, from life in his “native” society, and shifts into another society or—from the point of view of that previous society—into an “alien” one, as if he has ceased to exist for it (the previous society) and has thus shifted within it to the status of “dead”.’ After finishing the quotation from Rudi’s article, the researcher offered eloquent examples of how the general left his society.

First and foremost, he addressed statements about the birds staying in the train car with the general and mentioned, as a parallel, a story (from the Kiev Caves Patericon) about Isaac of the Kiev Caves, in which an incident with a raven served to push Isaac into becoming a holy fool. The presenter, however, answered in the negative regarding whether the general’s holy foolishness began with the appearance of the aforementioned birds in the train car.

Continuing the avian theme, Kvasha also recalled parallels that were closer to the general, both in terms of time and line of work. He had in mind facts from the biography of Russian Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov, who did not consider it disgraceful to crow like a rooster in cases of objective necessity. And so, after announcing for all to hear that he would attack the Poles under Kosćiuszko’s command at the first rooster’s crowing, he misled them (the Poles). In fact, the field marshal himself cock-a-doodle-doo’d that evening, without waiting for the morning roosters. He also flapped his arms against his sides, striving for an external resemblance to a bird. His troops marched out at twilight and thoroughly routed the enemy. Under more tranquil circumstances, the great commander was known to wake his soldiers with a cock-a-doodle-doo.

Beyond that—and this was the closest parallel to the general’s behavior—at Great Lent, Suvorov ordered that one room in his house be strewn with sand, then he arranged potted firs and pines there and let in birds. The birds were released into the wild after Easter, upon the arrival of warm weather.

Needless to say, the presenter mentioned the general’s infamous conversations with horses, something Petrov-Pokhabnik had examined in his day, too. Kvasha considered his predecessor’s coverage of this topic detailed but tendentious.

Kvasha also acknowledged that the general’s ride on a cart with a load of sand along the frozen Sivash was not exactly traditional for the upper echelons of the officer corps. Despite the ride being explainable—to verify the ice’s strength—the method itself could not but provoke questions.

In working with materials from the Crimean Agricultural Archive, Kvasha was also able to discover a statement about how the general ordered soldiers and officers to help peasants plow the land in their free time away from battle. As grounds for this order, he cited the expropriation of the peasants’ horses for the cavalry, which obliged the army to at least help them (the peasants), if only in this way. Irritated by having to fulfill functions not appropriate for them, according to the discovered document, the officers ‘indulged in grumbling.’ All that reconciled them with the strange order was that the general personally harnessed himself up and pulled a plow, accompanied by a tiller of the land who smiled, bewildered. In analyzing the fact that he had cited, the presenter cautioned attendees against considering this a complex form of Tolstoyism. Despite the special places in Lev Tolstoy’s writings for both the horse theme ( Strider, The Story of a Horse) and the railroad theme ( Anna Karenina), the writer’s position on religious issues was not close to the general’s. It is well known, too, that Lev Tolstoy’s tilling of the land did not mean he foresaw the human being replacing the horse.

Amidst the extensive material that drew Kvasha’s scrutiny, there was a special place for the famous instance when the general was being photographed in a coffin. Going against long-standing research traditions, the presenter was not inclined to explain that action simply with the general’s eccentricity. From Kvasha’s point of view, in this instance, the general’s striving for the dead world received one of its most visible expressions. The presenter also reminded his listeners that some saints chose a coffin as their permanent residence.

In Kvasha’s opinion, this intense attention to the theme of death was a distinguishing feature for the general. As a component of his profession, death, it seemed, needed to become a customary thing for him (‘Although can one grow accustomed to death?’ Kvasha asked, taking his gaze away from the lectern for a moment) and, in some sense, workaday. That is likely how things were during the general’s service in the active army. His—if it could be expressed this way—liveliest interest in death began manifesting itself after the Civil War, and only grew over the years.

The general gathered information about the lives but, even more meticulously, the deaths of his fellow pupils, brothers-in-arms, and even enemies, at least those who did not leave him indifferent. He even created two folders, accordingly labeling them Living and Dead. One of the folders—the choice depended on the state of the person of interest to the general—held a sheet with basic information about each person’s life or death. The Living folder was initially unbelievably plump, while the Dead folder seemed nearly weightless. The situation changed over time. The general was forced, ever more frequently, to transfer sheets from one folder to the other. This continued until only one lone sheet remained in the Living folder. That was the sheet titled General Larionov.

And then the general began to doubt the accuracy of the records he had kept. He lost faith that he was the only one alive and all the others had died. This appeared illogical. ‘Why,’ noted the general on the sole remaining sheet, ‘am I, who should have been shot back in 1920, alive, but those whom nobody had planned to shoot are dead?’ The situation seemed so provocative to him that he transferred all the sheets from the Dead folder into the Living folder. After a pause, he put his own sheet in the Dead folder. Only that way—Kvasha raised his gaze to the audience again—was it possible not to allow the living and the dead to mix.

The researcher also examined, apart from the other proceedings, two oral stories about the general taken down by a folklore expedition in the Crimean village of Izobil’noe. The first told how, allegedly, the general took Perekop without the permission of Anton Denikin, Commander-in-Chief of the White Army, and sent Denikin a telegram with the following content: ‘Glory to God, glory to us, Perekop’s captured, it’s here with us.’ The second story described a Christmas dinner that took place in the commander-in-chief’s Sevastopol headquarters. In answer to Denikin’s question about why General Larionov, who was sitting at the table, was not eating, the general replied, ‘It’s Lent, dear father, one mustn’t eat before the first star.’ Purportedly, Denikin ordered right then and there that the general be awarded a star.

Kvasha’s paper subjected the stories to criticism, both from a factological perspective and for the handling of information sources. In brief, that boiled down to the following:

1) the commander-in-chief during the period under examination was no longer Anton Denikin but Baron Petr Wrangel;

2) General Larionov had not taken Perekop but had, rather, defended it; and

3) stories about Alexander Suvorov were precursor texts for both accounts.

In the initial story about the dispatch in verse form, it was not Perekop under discussion but the Turkish fortress Turtukai; additionally, the letter was addressed to none other than Field Marshal Petr Rumyantsev. In the story about the star being awarded, Suvorov was addressing not Petr Wrangel (and certainly not Anton Denikin) but Catherine the Great, accordingly calling her ‘dear mother’. For Kvasha, the most interesting aspect in both folkloric pieces seemed to be that folk art made no distinctions whatsoever between Generalissimo Suvorov and General Larionov. The researcher called that circumstance ‘symptomatic’.

In concluding his paper, Kvasha lamented that, other than Petrov-Pokhabnik’s vague allusions, there was nothing known about the general’s strange actions during the time Yalta was surrendered. The presenter called on his colleagues to make every effort to ascertain what actions might have been under discussion. From his point of view, clarifying those circumstances would not only add color to the portrait of the general, but might also shed light on the question that still remained unanswered: how, as a matter of fact, had the general remained alive?

Kvasha appeared to want to add something but Grunsky was tapping on the microphone. Kvasha tossed up his hands, put his papers in a folder, and calmly (by comparison with Tarabukin, at any rate) descended from the stage. Kvasha’s conflict-free departure heartened Grunsky, who announced the next paper and called on the presenter to stick to the schedule. Everyone understood that the moderator’s stern tone referred to the previous presenter.

Solovyov listened inattentively to this paper and the next. His head had begun to ache. Likely from an abundance of impressions that day, he thought. Or was it from the outing to the scorching Mount Mithridates (sun stroke)? Striving to grasp what exactly the presenter wanted to say increased the ache, extended it, and forced him to feel every brain cell.

‘The operation’s name was signifying,’ said the presenter, Kholin.

The presenter’s exceedingly soft voice and inability to speak directly into the microphone did not encourage focus. The discussion concerned operation Foxhole, something Solovyov himself had studied a little. Kholin quoted the operation’s English-language name, the one Larionov used with western envoys. Before the Reds’ decisive storm of Perekop, the general had ordered two additional rows of trenches be dug, as if the quantity might still change something.

‘So these trenches replace the fighting spirit that I need, but my army has lost!’ the general shouted to the shovelers.

He was walking along the defensive lines and earth was scattering out from under his boots into the freshly dug trenches.

‘I want to lie down in your trench, so everyone will leave me in peace!’ the general shouted in another place.

The shovelers did not know that was the general’s old dream. They silently went about their work, puzzled as to why he needed such a big trench in this case.

‘The name of the operation was signifying,’ Kholin repeated. ‘If you divide the word Foxhole in two, you’ll understand what the general wanted to say.’

Kholin observed, not without pleasure, as the whispers of everyone reading at once ran through the audience.

‘It was as if,’ said the presenter, waving his hands but still speaking quietly, away from the microphone, ‘the general was saying goodbye with that word, that he would survive.’

The audience absorbed this for an inadmissibly long time.

‘The key word is whole,’ said a smiling Kholin. ‘He was saying that he was a sly fox and would escape whole.’

The whispering gradually transformed into a buzz. With a bob of his head, the presenter returned some unruly hair to its place. Baikalova wrote something on a piece of paper and showed it to Grunsky. Grunsky read what she had written, moving his index finger from one word to another. Twice. He shrugged.

‘But the second part of the word,’ the concerned Baikalova said into the microphone, ‘I mean, in “foxhole”, it would be “hole”, with just an “h”, which means a pit. So it’s not “whole” with the “w” for entire… I did study English…’

Kholin leaned on the lectern and his head twitched toward his shoulder. His face expressed nothing but fatigue. He smoothed his hair and slowly began shifting his papers on the lectern. Baikalova rose from her place and looked questioningly at the presenter.

After a silence, Kholin said, almost as silently, ‘I will verify your information.’

Solovyov felt like getting some fresh air. To do that, he would have to give an excuse to Dunya but did not know what to say. In any case, he had missed the transition to a new presenter and now it would be awkward to leave. Solovyov was annoyed at his own indecision. Alex Schwartz, a gender studies specialist from Boston, was speaking. She spoke Russian in a pleasant masculine baritone. She selected her words carefully, preferring infinitive verb forms and nouns in the nominative case. Solovyov’s headache kept worsening.

Schwartz began her report on the general with a detailed story about famous ‘cavalry maiden’, Nadezhda Andreevna Durova (1783–1866). The American researcher reminded attendees that it was not easy for women to make their way into the Russian Army at the turn of the nineteenth century. A woman’s lot was considered to be needlework (Schwartz demonstrated several motions for embroidery). The kitchen (cutting imaginary vegetables). Bed (motions of horseback riding).

But. Young Nadezhda had trouble with needlework. Lace. To tear (miming). To ruin (miming). To tangle (miming). Schwartz read a quotation from Durova’s book The Cavalry Maiden: ‘“These two so very contradictory feelings,”’ Schwartz quoted Durova, ‘“love for one’s father and repugnance for one’s sex—perturbed my soul with identical force and so, with a firmness and constancy very uncommon for someone my age, I devoted myself to contemplating a plan for leaving the realm to which nature and customs assigned the female sex.”’

For her upbringing, the girl was sent to flank hussar Astakhov. He taught her to wield a saber (miming). To shoot (miming, with onomatopoeia). To ride horses (miming, same as bed). Noticing that Baikalova had stood up, the presenter addressed her with a calming gesture: ‘Are you interested in how this all ties in with the general?’

‘I am,’ said Baikalova.

Schwartz came out from behind the lectern, approached Baikalova, and half-embraced her. ‘It’s just the general was a woman. Like Nadezhda Andreevna. Like you and me. You not know?’

Baikalova preferred to keep silent. She was, after all, still in Schwartz’s embrace.

‘Why Zhloba not shoot him?’

‘Why?’ Grunsky asked, cautious.

‘He knew general’s secret. Loved him.’

Solovyov got up and began making his way to the exit, not looking at anyone. Only when he was out in the fresh evening breeze did he sense that his shirt was wet with sweat. He undid two or three buttons and unstuck his shirt from his chest. Dunya came up behind him and placed her chin on his shoulder, ‘Shall we go?’

Solovyov moved his shoulder, barely noticeably, ‘I have a headache.’

‘I have aspirin in my room,’ she rubbed her nose against his neck.

Solovyov was looking at the Chaika department store, staring. ‘My head aches because of you.’

Dunya did not say a word. She turned and vanished behind the theater’s columns. Solovyov headed slowly toward his hotel.