Solovyov and Larionov

15

Solovyov arrived in the regional capital early in the morning. They told him he would be unable to reach the Kilometer 715 station by rail. Even local trains no longer stopped there. Solovyov took a bus.

The bus was old, just like in his childhood. Solovyov had not even seen vehicles like this in Petersburg. When the bus went over potholes, it shook for a long time, convulsively, as if it had an asthmatic cough. When the doors opened at the stops, the bus made a sound like glass being pressed. Solovyov got out at the village where his school was. He would need to go the rest of the way on foot.

Solovyov began heading along the familiar road but then he stopped, turned, and walked briskly toward the school. A padlock hung on the front door. Summer vacation, Solovyov remembered. It was vacation. He walked up to one of the windows and pressed his forehead to the glass. The Russian literature room developed, hazily, behind poplars reflected in the glass. The seats were flipped up. Any answer began with those seats clattering; it ended with clattering, too.

‘Why is the military trilogy titled The Living and the Dead? So…’ and the teacher’s finger would search the list in the grade book, ‘Solovyov!’

Solovyov’s seat flipped up. In actuality, the general had only two folders. When he learned that everyone he had attended school with had died, he transferred them from the Dead folder to the Living folder. And that was that. Would Solovyov himself have done the same? That was another question entirely. But his classmates’ absence behind the desks gaped. It was like death. Worse than death because in their distinct absence, his classmates were simulating their existence somewhere (most likely not far away). Their shadows were visiting the glass factory. Or a cowshed penetrated by drafts. Maybe the tractor-repair station that served local collective farms.

‘Whose side is the author of And Quiet Flows the Don on? Does anyone have any thoughts in that regard?’

Nobody did. They did not know for certain whose side the author was on. Or who, basically, the author was. The grade books and textbooks were on the teacher’s desk. There were fat folders on the Materials for Distribution shelf. Were there any Living and Dead folders there? Did the school maintain records like that?

Without even realizing it himself, Solovyov had walked to the library. He stood on the front steps for a few minutes. What could he even begin talking about with Nadezhda Nikiforovna? He could tell her about what happened yesterday. Or maybe a week ago. It was impossible to tell a life. Several years in Petersburg had changed him a lot but to her he was his previous self. Previous. Solovyov felt awkward remembering his childhood dreams. He decided not to go in.

He went in anyway. A young woman was sitting in Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s place. Solovyov did not know her.

‘Would you like to register?’ she asked.

‘I’m already registered.’

The woman nodded, unsure, and Solovyov realized she had not been here long. There was no cameo ring on her hand. There was a small ring with an emerald. It would not make a good sound when touching a shelf. Just a quiet plasticky sound.

‘What are you interested in?’

Solovyov was interested in where Nadezhda Nikiforovna was, but he did not say that.

‘Do you have Captain Blood: His Odyssey?’

Solovyov waited for her to vanish behind the cabinets before he left the library on tiptoe. He was afraid the new employee would announce Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s death to him as she handed him the book.

He walked toward the forest; the Kilometer 715 station lay beyond it. In the woods, he was surprised that the formerly two-lane road was in disrepair and had narrowed, transforming into a path. The ferns beside the road, which always used to be trampled and stunted, had grown tall. They swayed in a warm breeze that carried the smell of the collective farm. Solovyov and Leeza had walked to school along this road. Very few people walked along it now, that was obvious.

Solovyov could walk here with his eyes closed. He could easily repeat all the words he and Leeza had said in this forest. He remembered precisely, down to every fir tree he saw, what had been said where. Or rather he had forgotten, but he remembered when he saw the trees. It seemed to him that at one time he had left those words to hang here, and now he was simply gathering them from the fluffy boughs as he walked along.

Solovyov was thinking about what Leeza would say when they met. He sensed his own guilt for his silence but his feeling for her was so complete that he was experiencing no fear at all before their meeting. The ardor that was rising in waves within Solovyov’s chest was capable of—he had no doubt of this—melting away both his guilt and her possible feeling of offense. Possible. Deep down, Solovyov did not even think that Leeza might be offended at him.

The forest became sparser and Solovyov saw the first houses: his and Leeza’s houses. The road led to them. In another minute or two, four more houses came into view on the right, and the station platform was on the left. Solovyov noticed there was no longer a Kilometer 715 sign on the platform. None of the passengers on long-distance trains could now learn exactly what station they were riding through.

Solovyov began walking more slowly as he left the woods. The path disappeared completely right at his house. Tall grass wound around his legs and caught in the buckles on his sandals. It was attempting to hold him there. To prevent his unexpected return. What awaited him beyond the tightly drawn, sun-faded curtains? He stopped and looked at his house. He had not been here for six years.

The little gate would not open; Solovyov had to climb over it. When he found himself on the other side of the gate, he began pulling up the grass and thistle that had grown between the bricks in the path. Solovyov stomped on the thistle then took the broken stalks with two fingers and carefully tossed them aside.

Once he was able to open the gate, Solovyov dragged his bag into the yard. The yard had turned into a jungle. The plants stood as motionlessly as if they were in a photograph, and even the freight train passing by (his feet sensed the earth’s trembling) did not disturb their peace. Solovyov remembered a children’s book, The Land of the Dense Grasses. He had read it on the recommendation of Nadezhda Nikiforovna, who might also have turned to grass. Solovyov trampled tall, fragile August stems as he made his way to the front steps. The dandelions’ white parachutes flew out from under his feet.

Wild cherry was growing on the front steps. It had fought its way through separated boards and had already spread its branches to the railing. Solovyov touched the sapling’s trunk, drawing his index finger along it. The trunk was soft and smooth, as if it had been polished. Quiet set in after the train left. This was full, absolute quiet; anything further would be non-existence. Solovyov sensed himself growing into nature. His house and yard had already become nature. His turn was coming now. Solovyov pulled out the sapling with one tug and felt like a killer. He understood he had no other option.

Solovyov fumbled behind the door jamb and took out a key. He did this before he remembered this was where the key lay. His hand remembered this motion. The key worked. At first it spun emptily, unable to handle the lock’s rusted mechanism, but then a familiar click sounded on the second rotation and the door creaked open.

He entered a chilly dimness. Everything remained the same as on the day he left. Everything but this: the ideal cleanliness found only in abandoned houses. Solovyov had left hastily six years ago. He was going to take his entrance exams and packed up a suitcase, just tossing aside unnecessary things. Leeza stopped him when he began stuffing everything into cabinets. She said she would tidy it all up. She looked at him, half-sitting on the windowsill. Solovyov remembered the motion of her fingers, touching the boards on the windowsill one by one, as if they were playing a piece nobody could hear.

He walked into the room and drew open the drapes. There were neither spiders nor cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling (they had been swept away by a twig broom wrapped in gauze). Because there were no flies. Solovyov realized that when a fly flew in from outside, buzzing. It was the only living being he had encountered thus far at Kilometer 715. The fly flitted uncertainly around spots on the tablecloth that had not come out in the laundry and then flew over to the doorknob.

A sturdy rag looped around the knobs on both sides of the door: Solovyov’s grandmother had tied rags on the doors so they closed firmly and would not blow open in a draft. She had placed cardboard under wobbling table legs. Glued strips of newspaper to cracks in the glass. This was the inventiveness of old age. The resourcefulness of debility. Of an overall debility, of an inability to change anything in life. When Solovyov left the house after his grandmother’s death, he was leaving that inescapability, too. He was afraid he would inherit it, too, along with the house.

There was a sound of shuffling shoes on the front steps. They were purposely loud, striving to attract attention. That was superfluous in the ongoing quiet. Solovyov turned slowly, ‘Yegorovna!’

‘You came back, my dear one…’

Taking tiny steps, Yegorovna walked into the room and pressed herself against Solovyov. Awkwardly, without bending, he caught her with his arm and felt an old person’s cool tears running down his neck.

‘How’s life treating you, Yegorovna?’

‘Life?’ she pulled away, puzzled and almost offended.

‘We’re living it out! Yevdokia Firsova and I. Remember Yevdokia?’ Her chin, fuzzy with little gray hairs, began trembling. ‘We’re the two waiting for death. Just two at the whole station.’

‘Yegorovna, but where’s Leeza’?

‘Leeza…’ Yegorovna stopped crying, and that was even more frightening for Solovyov. ‘So, Leeza left. Her mother died and then she left. What, you didn’t know?’

‘Where’d she go?’

‘God only knows, probably went to college, like you. A year ago. Maybe more than a year.’

Yegorovna took a rag out of her pocket and blew her nose, ‘Leeza’s mother was very sick so she took care of her. Then when her mother died, I wanted to bathe the deceased for her but Leeza did it herself. Bathed her herself. Buried her here with us. And then Leeza packed up and left…’

Yegorovna was making her way out. She went down the front steps, moving her hands along the railings, but her monotone still sounded. From somewhere far away, tailing off, Yegorovna continued telling Solovyov about Leeza, whom he seemed to have lost forever. Solovyov lowered himself onto his grandmother’s bed and his head sank into a huge feather pillow. It was too much.

The room went dark abruptly after the sky darkened. A vine on the window frame began fluttering and a weightless flower that had been lying by an icon floated down, right onto Solovyov. A lightning bolt struck somewhere far away, beyond the forest. Thunder merged with the sound of a passing train. After the train was gone, he could hear heavy raindrops drumming on the canopy over the front steps.

Solovyov no longer understood if he was watching a thunderstorm as he had done in his childhood or if he was dreaming a thunderstorm while lying on his grandmother’s bed. Or if he was actually in his childhood, lying on his grandmother’s bed and watching a thunderstorm. Bolts of lightning flashed outside the window, in the gap between the half-closed drapes. An oil lamp’s jittery flame was reflected on the ceiling. His grandmother was bowing in prayer, touching the floor. Leeza was standing in the doorway and smiling. She placed a finger to her lips. Water streamed down her hair. This was not a dream. Leeza truly had come. She had drawn closer to Solovyov and was holding his hand.

Solovyov opened his eyes. Yegorovna was sitting on the edge of the bed.

‘It’s potatoes and mushrooms. Eat it while it’s hot.’

She held out a tin dish for him.

‘Thank you.’

He sat up on the bed, looking senselessly at Yegorovna’s back. Leeza was not here. He had woken up with that sense and now could not get used to it. Leeza was not here.

‘It’ll get cold,’ said Yegorovna. She was already at the door.

Solovyov nodded and took the spoon Yegorovna had brought. He had not eaten potatoes with a spoon for a long time so it initially seemed as though the dream was continuing. But the dream had gone.

After his nap, he felt like washing. He went to the well, lowered a pail on the well sweep, and attempted to collect some water. The bottom fell out of the pail when Solovyov raised it, disappearing into the depths with a matte gleam. He found another pail in the shed and fastened it to the well sweep with wire. He collected some water, washed, and tasted the water. The water was just as fresh as when he was a child.

The sun peeked out again and Solovyov was surprised at the length of this day. Its length and variety. It was a quiet summer evening, the kind when he and Leeza would often sit on the front steps. Sometimes go for walks. They could walk on the only street, on the platform, in the forest, or in the cemetery. There were no other places for walks at Kilometer 715. Solovyov put on a fresh T-shirt. He went over to the cabinet with the mirror and combed his hair. He was ready to leave the house.

The street greeted him with absolute quiet. Even these six houses comprising the street had lived their own lives at one time. Their life had not been turbulent, it had simply been life, with shouting over fences, dogs barking, roosters crowing, and the sounds of transistor radios. Now, though, there was nothing but the sound of leaves. The rustle of grass. This was life after a nuclear explosion.

Solovyov stopped next to the platform. In the tall grass, the steps leading to the platform could be divined by their railing. A young rowan tree was growing in the controller’s booth, where his mother had once stood. Groping for the steps with his foot, Solovyov clambered onto the platform. The grass was a little lower there, growing in intricate patterns that stretched along cracks in the asphalt. Solovyov walked over to a bench. In the strictest sense of the word, this was only a halfbench. One of its three cast-iron sections was lying on its side, covered with broken slats. He sat down cautiously on the part that remained standing. Leaned against the back. Closed his eyes.

If he imagined it was his mother in the controller’s booth instead of the rowan tree (the rails had quietly begun humming) and if he imagined the bench was whole and Leeza was sitting on it (he was still not opening his eyes), then what was happening might be declared a quiet summer evening from his childhood. The rumbling of the rails was inaccessible to the untrained ear. This was not yet a rumbling, it was the soundless tension of metal prepared to carry a train that was still far away. But Solovyov heard it. He even knew which train it was. The 20:32. Moscow–Sochi.

Oddly enough, it truly was the Moscow–Sochi train. Despite all the changes in schedules and in the country in general, it passed through the station at exactly 20:32. In actuality, Solovyov was not surprised. Even if attempts had been made to tinker with the schedule, there would have been an obvious need to revert to 20:32. There was no better time to transit through the Kilometer 715 station.

Freshness blew from the woods surrounding the station. Mowed grass on the railroad bed gave off a refined, slightly sharp aroma. That blended with the smell of railroad ties warmed by the sun. With the whisper of a weeping willow over the platform. This tree had grown as if out of nowhere; nobody saw where it began. Its roots were lost below, in the tall grass. Maybe it had no roots at all. It did not even have a trunk: there was only a crown over the platform.

Leeza announced the trains that passed through. She announced them by placing her palms together like a little boat and pressing them against the sides of her nose: it came out like a microphone, only quieter. They had heard announcements like this in the regional capital; nothing was announced at the Kilometer 715 station. Solovyov gave permission for the trains to proceed through the station. Copying his mother’s motion, he lifted the baton with his right hand. He looked through the train just as tiredly. After some time, he achieved the same kind of look from Leeza. Everybody passing through should know this work was just a routine for them.

Solovyov was still sitting with his eyes closed at 20:32. As the train approached, he thought that Leeza had managed to announce it after all. He was sure she was sitting next to him on the bench at 20:32. That his mother was standing in the controller’s booth. She could not help but be there at that time.

They all needed to pull themselves together. To exhale and not move. This instant would remain if they did not frighten it away. Just as there was a moment when it is important for someone wounded in battle not to die. After prevailing over those critical seconds, the body accustoms itself to life once again. That was what the person who turned out to be Leeza’s grandfather had said. If Solovyov behaved himself properly here, on the platform, life would again find its past. Catch hold of it. What had seemed dead would suddenly discover its own pulse and the three of them would return home together: Solovyov, his mother, and Leeza. Everything happening later—the deaths of his mother and grandmother, his departure, studying at the university—would turn out to be a misunderstanding, an impetuous departure from this evening’s coziness.

They would return home. His mother (the clang of the valve on the gas tank) would put on the teakettle. Pour water into a basin and make him rinse off his feet. On the bottom there would be a triangular spot where the enamel was chipped. He would put a cork sailboat in the basin. His grandmother would read aloud from Robinson Crusoe. Leeza would take her cup in both hands. He would slowly move the water around the basin with his feet. The sailboat would begin rocking on the waves. A diesel locomotive whistle would sound somewhere in the distance. No, of course they would not return. Not Leeza. Solovyov raised his eyes toward the controller’s booth. And especially not his mother. The wind from a passing locomotive engulfed him. The 21:47, St. Petersburg–Kislovodsk. The train had gone through unannounced.

Only after turning on the light in the entryway did Solovyov realize it was already dark. He boiled the vermicelli he had brought with him and opened yet another can of food. It was goby fish in tomato sauce again. It seemed almost absurd that they were here. The gobies looked at Solovyov with sadness, making him feel even more unhappy. Moths were beating against the kitchen window. Their wings never stopped working as they clutched convulsively at the frame, rose along the glass, and slid down again.

Solovyov went into his own room, the one he had occupied after his mother’s death. Compared with the overall order in the house, his room constituted an exception. It was not exactly untidy, it was closer to ‘untouched’. something that immediately caught the eye. A Russian language textbook lay open by a bed leg. The cover faced upwards, just as he had left it on the morning of his departure. Solovyov crouched and picked up the book. Tried to close it. It would not close; it could only be pressed shut. With difficulty. With the unyieldingness of a stiffened body. He laid the book on the desk and it opened to the previous page again. The use of ‘not’ with verbs was what had interested him that morning. Always written as two words. What an idiot, thought Solovyov; he slowly stretched out on the bed. The bed squeaked, as usual. He pulled off his T-shirt and jeans, and threw them on the floor. He clasped the pillow with both arms and buried his face in it. Ceasing to exist.

Solovyov awoke from the jingling of bed knobs at the head of the bed. An endless freight train was passing through outside his window. It went slowly, waiting for the far signal to change. Wearily sat for a bit on the railroad tracks.

Solovyov’s whole body sensed its vibration. His arms were still embracing the pillow. He was curled around a balled-up blanket. One freight train replaced the other, heading in the opposite direction; this one went noticeably faster. It continued accelerating, drawing the rhythm of its wheels to the boundaries of the possible. A long time ago, Solovyov and Leeza had listened to that rhythm together. The rumble broke off at its upper limit. The sound of the departing train seemed like an echo in the sudden quiet. Solovyov settled in on his back. He felt a sticky dampness when he pulled the blanket out from under himself.

Solovyov headed for the cemetery early the next morning. On his shoulder he carried a small hoe that he had found in the shed. In his hand was an inexplicably persistent gladiolus that had sprouted in what used to be the flowerbed. The cemetery was in the forest, about twenty minutes from home. It was difficult to divine the road that led there.

Solovyov remembered the first funeral he had seen. He was surprised that people scattered flowers in front of the coffin the whole way. He had seen the men from the station who were carrying the coffin step on crimson aster heads; he thought he could hear them crunch. He had stopped and watched as the procession moved further away. Leeza stayed and stood alongside him. Once everyone had disappeared into the forest, he and Leeza began picking up the flowers. Many of the flowers turned out to be intact. Some did not even have road dust on them. Solovyov’s grandmother would not allow them to keep the flowers in the house; that bouquet upset her very much then.

Solovyov and Leeza went to the cemetery often, especially in summer. They would sit on narrow memorial benches and on stone pedestals warmed by the diffused forest sun. Sometimes (balancing) on metal fences painted to look like silver. Leeza’s white legs would be crisscrossed with pink streaks after sitting on the metal fences.

Crosses stood on the graves; sometimes there were iron obelisks with stars. Monuments were a rarity at the cemetery. They were trucked in from other places, carefully carried around the graves, and set in mortar, with a trowel tapping from all sides. This installation method evoked respect. There was something real and kindred in the name of that action itself, in the trowel tapping or in driving a cigarette butt into crumbly clay. And they were not installed immediately after the funeral but later on, after a year or two, once the ground had settled.

One time a monument with a poetry inscription was installed at the cemetery. It was on the grave of a station chief who had fallen under the Moscow–Sevastopol express train. Solovyov liked the text very much:

Because of the collective signature under the text, Solovyov thought for a long time that the management of the railroad hub had written the beautiful poetry. As was clarified later, however, out of everything that was carved into that slab, the only words belonging to the railroad workers (other than the signature) were ‘We mourn’. While studying in Petersburg, Solovyov learned that poet Semyon Nadson (1862–1887) was the author of those lines that had remained in his memory. Be that as it may, the day the monument was installed, Solovyov told Leeza that in the event of death he would want to have the same kind of monument, with poetry carved into it, installed at his grave. Solovyov said: in the event of death. In the depths of his childish soul, he did not allow such an event.

Solovyov did not like the obelisks. They quickly became ramshackle: the paint peeled off and the iron rusted. Little by little, their fastening pins were exposed and the obelisks began listing, expressing their hollow essence. They produced an unattractive tinny sound when touched.

Wooden crosses were another matter. Solovyov regarded those differently. Crosses were not set in mortar. They were dug into neat round pits and the earth around them was stamped on for a long time; there was no waiting for it to settle. Little Solovyov saw in that motion—which was un-cemetery-like and even similar to a dance—a lightness that partially reconciled him with life beyond the grave. Finally, he even told Leeza that he would like to lie beneath a cross rather than beneath a heavy monument. Leeza agreed. She did add, though, that a person feels nothing in the grave. But she agreed.

Solovyov remembered how his mother had been buried. How she had been lowered into a frozen wintery grave. How they could not pull out the ropes, which got caught under the coffin, and how people looked at them, with regret, from a clay heap. Nobody wanted to crawl into a grave at Kilometer 715 for the ropes. They simply tossed in the ends, which hit the coffin like sonorous gray icicles.

When they returned from the cemetery, Solovyov told 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 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 understand 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 grandmother. 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.

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 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 specialized 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.

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 the 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. Solovyov lowered himself onto the chair and began examining 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 apartment 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.