Solovyov and Larionov

4

Historian Solovyov appeared on the Yalta beach twenty years after General Larionov’s death. Solovyov’s first encounter with the sea did not proceed at all like the future military commander’s. Solovyov came to the sea as an adult, so carefree rolling around in the waves seemed indecorous to him. The researcher had also had the chance to familiarize himself with the corresponding part of the general’s memoirs before making his appearance at the beach and the very fact of that reading would not have permitted him to do—as if for the first time—everything the young Larionov had permitted himself. Undoubtedly, contrivance and even a certain derivativeness would have shone through any attempt of the sort. As Prof. Nikolsky’s student, Solovyov essentially thought that no events whatsoever repeat themselves because the totality of conditions that led to them in the first instance never repeats. It should come as no surprise that attempts to mechanically copy some past action or other usually evoked protestation in the researcher and struck him as cheap simulations.

Solovyov’s behavior differed strikingly from Larionov’s. The young historian took a towel from his rucksack and spread it on the warm evening pebbles. After taking off his shorts and T-shirt, he laid them neatly on the towel, stood up straight, and was immediately acutely aware of his own undressedness. Each hair on Solovyov’s skin—which was untanned and visible to all—sensed a caressing Yalta breeze. Solovyov knew this was exactly how people went around on the beach but he did not know what to do with himself. He pressed his arms instinctively to his torso, his shoulders slouched, and his feet sunk conspicuously into the pebbles. Solovyov had not just come to visit the sea for the first time: he had never in his life been on any sort of beach, either.

Making a concerted effort, he headed stiffly toward the water. The pebbles, which the waves had polished to shining, became surprisingly hard and sharp under the soles of Solovyov’s bare feet. He tottered, shifting from one half-bent foot to another as he balanced his arms in the air and desperately bit his lower lip. This helped him reach the spot where the waves were already rolling in. This sparkling area only seldom remained dry, during the brief instant between ebbing and incoming waves. Even in that instant, though, he could see that it was covered with small, fine stones that were turning to sand, which the sea carried away. Standing here was thoroughly enjoyable.

Solovyov went still when he felt the water’s milk-warm touch. This was comparable to his experience the first time Leeza Larionova’s lips touched him. Standing in water up to his ankles, Solovyov no longer knew which of those touches made a greater impression on him. He felt dizzy when he looked at the two light swirls of water by his feet. Solovyov took several steps forward so he could stay on his feet. Now he was standing in water up to his knees. The waves around him were no longer seething, they were shifting instead with unfathomable motions akin, perhaps, to the play of muscles under skin. Here—a few steps from the surf where the sea was beating itself into froth and spray behind his back—there was not even a trace of that hysteria. The sea was greeting Solovyov with a powerful rhythm of rising and dropping, and with the calm inquisitiveness of its depths. Solovyov stopped when the water reached his chest. He did not know how to swim.

As has already been noted, there were no bodies of water at Kilometer 715. The adolescent’s imagination was fed by books about nautical adventures and by radio shows (an old wall radio was the only form of mass media in the Solovyov home). Station Kilometer 715’s strictly continental location only stoked that imagination. Why did Solovyov not become a sailor? He himself could not have given a precise answer. Yes, his love for the sea and everything connected with the sea was infinite, but even so… We could approach the explanation from another angle. There exist people who possess the gift of contemplation. They are not inclined to interfere with the course life takes and do not create new events, because they believe there are already enough events in the world. They see their role as comprehending what has already taken place. Might that attitude toward the world be what begets genuine historians?

Oddly enough, contemplativeness was characteristic of General Larionov to a certain degree, too. This manifested itself, perhaps, in a special way, and not all at once, but let us ask ourselves the question: are there many generals who are known to be contemplative? Basically, no, there are not many. In essence, a general’s task is contrary to contemplation. But seeing the commander’s fogged-over eyes and seeing how, in the middle of a seething battle, his gaze hardens at the most distant point of the landscape—that place where you can no longer track down even the enemy’s rear guard—well, anyone seeing a general like that would think that he was a contemplative person.

That is what those who accompanied General Larionov on the Crimean campaign in 1920 thought, too. The abrupt pensiveness that seized him, both during the breaks between battles and during the course of battles, was noticed not just by his brothers in arms: it often became a topic for discussion, too. Needless to say, these discussions carried the highest degree of confidentiality and were told only in the discussants’ memoirs (the general was not the sort of person to permit himself to be discussed so unceremoniously), but they existed, which means there was a reason the conversations came about.

For many who had the opportunity to observe the general in 1920, Larionov made the impression of someone who was pensive and even slightly aloof. That impression was all the more unexpected since nothing of the sort had been noticed about him during his previous campaigns. To the contrary: he embodied action and decisiveness. In fact, those were the very qualities that had made him a general.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that not everyone noticed, to an equal degree, the change that took place with the general in 1920. Numerous memoirists thus seem to rely on later impressions and when they underscore the general’s aloofness, they are obviously exaggerating the degree of his condition in 1920. Some agree, a bit uncertainly, with the descriptions, almost out of politeness, saying that the facts could not be denied in 1920, either, in light of the general’s later mentality. By reconciling various testimony, as Vladimir Blagoi does in his article ‘Pensiveness: His Special Friend,’ all that can be established with veracity is that General Larionov had revealed a certain contemplativeness by 1920. This quality developed as the years passed, eventually leading to the general’s utter engrossment with the sea.

What ended General Larionov’s activity became the beginning of historian Solovyov’s activity. A contemplative relationship with the sea did not permit the latter to master one single maritime profession. He was afraid that if his relationship with the sea was too close, that could lead to disappointment and force him to fall out of love with the watery element. Standing up to his chest in water, the young researcher experienced doubts (in view of his unstable position, this could also be called wavering) as to whether he and the object of his love were engaged in relations that were too intimate.

Apart from this wavering, which was completely new to him, the Petersburg graduate student asked himself yet again about the correctness of his chosen research topic; though in some sense the topic had been chosen for him. He had asked Prof. Nikolsky this same question at one time, when Nikolsky first proposed he work on land-based topics.

‘No matter what a person studies, above all he is studying himself,’ the professor said enigmatically. ‘Keep in mind, young man, that accidental topics do not exist.’

The words left the professor’s lips in a shell of cigarette smoke. The words’ very tangible appearance, coupled with his teacher’s wisdom, played their role because Solovyov decided not to insist on a nautical topic and threw all his passion into researching continental events. After the suggestion to conduct his graduate work on the fate of General Larionov, Solovyov went to see Prof. Nikolsky again and asked him the old question about the choice of topic. The old man no longer smoked because his doctor had forbidden it. Otherwise, though, his answer was the same as several years before.

Was Solovyov studying himself by studying General Larionov’s fate? This was yet another difficult question the historian posed to himself. Sensing that he was beginning to freeze in the water, he knew he lacked the time to resolve the question now. Beyond that, the bather’s motionless standing in the water had already attracted the attention of the few people remaining on the beach. Solovyov decided to leave the question open; he began slowly moving toward shore.

The researcher’s body had taken on a cyanotic tinge and was covered with goosebumps because he had stayed in the water so long. His awkward inhibitedness before bathing had given way to something altogether mechanical that had no relation to walking. Not one of Solovyov’s joints would bend, and only by force of will did the young man move his body in the direction of his towel. Solovyov felt much better after drying off. Neither the sea nor the air were cold that evening. Motionlessness (it occurred to Solovyov) is very unhealthy for a person.

The sun was no longer on the beach. Yalta’s beaches are surrounded by mountains from the west, so the sun disappears fairly early. It sets beyond the mountain ranges, but for a long time its diffused light still streams over the quieting sea, the stalls for changing clothes, and seagulls pecking at watermelon rinds. The city beach after six in the evening is a peculiar beach. Its colors are dim, shot through with the yellowness of a vanishing sun, just as it shoots through black-and-white photographs of beaches in bygone years. Maybe, Solovyov asked himself, the Yalta beach in evening is actually a remnant of what the young Larionov saw? Or perhaps this was the beach the juvenile Larionov saw, only now, years later, through the depths, as it were, of decades?

Solovyov had forgotten to bring dry underwear with him so he had to put on his shorts right over his wet swimsuit. He was, after all, a person without the slightest bit of beach experience. After Solovyov sat down to buckle his sandals, the contour of his swimsuit developed on the back of his shorts, as if on wrinkled photographic paper. He, however, was unable to see that. He picked up his rucksack and pensively headed in the direction of the embankment.

As he walked along the waterline, Solovyov looked up and slowed his pace in surprise. Someone was sitting at the very end of the jetty in a chair that closely resembled the one he had seen in the photograph. That someone was a lady. And though the distance did not allow Solovyov to make out all the details, it was obvious that the lady was getting on in years. She was sitting motionless, like Larionov, with her legs crossed, and the breeze was lightly stirring the hem of her long dress. This woman undeniably knew the value of effective poses.

Solovyov was initially moved to approach the woman, but he did not make that move. He could not imagine what he could ask her or how to begin speaking with her. He did not even have a notion of how one should approach ladies like her. Should one immediately kiss her hand or was it enough to bow slightly? It was entirely possible that this case called for a smart clicking of the heels along with a simple tilt of the head. Solovyov might have decided to draw nearer to the unknown woman but when he wiped his sweaty hands on his shorts, he discovered that they, for their part, were wet, too. By now, the trace of the swimsuit had also managed to make its mark distinctly in the front. His clothing, frivolous in the first place and now dampened besides, excluded any possibility of introducing himself to her. After wavering for an instant, Solovyov dashed home to change his clothes.

The stairs were so surprised as he flew up that they managed not to produce a sound, whereas the key, slipping along the plate nailed around the keyhole, produced an inconceivable scrape. After managing to unlock the door, Solovyov flung his rucksack into the corner, tossed off his shorts and swimsuit, and left the house a second later wearing white, completely dry, pants.

He had hurried in vain. Even from the embankment, it was obvious that the jetty was deserted. Continuing to walk by force of inertia, Solovyov was puzzled that an older lady in such a long dress could have slipped away in such a short time. And with a chair, too. Now he was not even certain he had seen her. Solovyov stopped. Today was August 2, the day on which General Larionov had died. The date had arisen just as suddenly as the unknown woman on the jetty. Had she truly been sitting there? In a certain sense, it would have been simpler for Solovyov to regard her appearance as an optical illusion. At least that would have been less upsetting. Considering the date of the incident, Solovyov preferred in the end to give it a metaphysical explanation. He resolved to consider what he had seen to be the general’s spirit visiting the jetty.

Solovyov decided to stroll along the famous Yalta embankment before returning home. Twilight was falling and the first lights were burning on the embankment. These were old-fashioned streetlamps, in the spirit of the thirties through the fifties, with domed globes sprouting from sprawling cast-iron branches. Though not an admirer of the fanciful Soviet Empire style, Solovyov nevertheless had an interest in it, almost a fondness for it. Buildings in that style, which simultaneously resembled nothing but were reminiscent of everything on Earth, had outlived their empire. From time to time, guesthouses, camps for Young Pioneers, and centers for artists gazed out of the coastline’s greenery, looking like elders who had lost their way. These were the last structures initiated into the secrets of labor union leisure, and they alone remembered steelmakers’ placid benders, procedure nurses’ hale and hearty voices, and party activists’ laborious orgasms. The full complement of people who had filled those walls had departed for nonexistence, just as everyone who had made their way into the aging General Larionov’s peripheral vision—policemen wearing white shirts secured with belts, medal-wearers in defiantly wide pants, sellers of hot spiced honey drinks, Pioneer-camp counselors, hip dressers, and ex-cons—had departed from the Yalta embankment, heading in the same direction.

When he looked at objects characteristic of the epoch, Solovyov often yearned for times he had not seen; this surprised even him. He did not aspire to live in those times and he did not consider them either gentle or even interesting, but still he felt a yearning. There was not, however, any reason for this feeling to surprise the young man; this was a yearning over something other, a burning desire to make it his own, because that something other was now forever deprived of those who had known it at one time as their own. Unaware of this, Solovyov experienced the paternal feeling of the historian who has adopted another time.

As he walked along the embankment, Solovyov observed its reflection in the meek sea. Neon signs, amusement rides, and streetlamps quivered in the evening’s ripples, and were occasionally severed by boats, with the penetrating sounds of karaoke in the background. Awaiting him under fabric awnings were vendors of ice cream, popcorn, and glowing bracelets. Photographers with apathetic monkeys on leashes waved to him from beneath palm trees. Waitresses in black skirts and see-through snow-white blouses greeted him at every restaurant. Solovyov certainly liked the south but he was a reserved young man. He did not visit one single restaurant or purchase one single glowing bracelet.

Solovyov stopped at the Central Grocery and bought a stick of cured sausage. After some thought, he also bought bread, cheese, butter, olives, and two bottles of beer. Instead of walking home along the embankment, he took a quiet parallel street: Chekhov Street. Past the Lutheran church. Past an unusual building in the Mauritanian style. Past an adult store covered over in red paper. Being an adult, Solovyov wavered by the store but quickly pulled himself together and walked on by. Visiting that sort of establishment was a pursuit he considered unworthy of a historian. Back at home, Solovyov first washed his hands. After the stuffy, hot street air, the water felt unexpectedly cold. It flowed from the tap with a pressure surprising for the south, as if it were the Uchan-su Waterfall, which was unknown to Solovyov, though while on the embankment he had received several invitations for excursions to see it. After drying his hands with a holey but clean towel, he got down to eating.

Solovyov’s dip in the sea and walk had given him a healthy appetite. He ate up one little sandwich after another, washing them down with unrefrigerated local beer. The radio he’d switched on was broadcasting local advertisements. It hung on the wall like a black formless box and offered ( rototillers for sale, reasonable prices) large non-resort objects rather like itself. It spoke in an aging female voice with a barely detectable southern Russian accent. The radio in Solovyov’s house at the Kilometer 715 station had spoken in roughly the same voice. Only occasionally (when leading morning exercises and reading the national news) did it shift to shameless Moscow tones. It even looked roughly the same: ebony and clumsy; sometimes speaking, sometimes singing. The main thing was that it was never silent.

Solovyov began the next morning with a visit to Yalta’s Executive Committee. He set off for No. 1 Soviet Square with his graduate student identification. A calm, plump woman with a large bust met him at the Cultural Department. She sat in front of Solovyov, positioning her bust on her arms and her arms on the table. The firmness of her position, apparently reflecting the positions culture had conquered in Yalta, was pacifying. Solovyov forgot all his prepared phrases and stated the aim of his visit in an informal manner. The plump woman did not interrupt. After some thought, he told the story about his studies of the general and—surprising himself—even about graduate student Kalyuzhny, whose dreamy inaction had cleared the way to these studies for Solovyov.

The woman in charge of culture in Yalta knew how to listen. She took in all Solovyov’s stories, remaining both kindly and impassive. A restrained smile never left her face. When her guest’s eloquence finally ran dry, she responded with a full speech that, as became clear right away, had arrived too late.

From her explanations, it followed that Nina Fedorovna Akinfeeva—the woman who helped Larionov in the last years of his life—came to Yalta once a year, for the anniversary of the general’s death. Nina Fedorovna came to the jetty (the functionary released one of her gelatinous arms and pointed toward the window) and sat there for a few hours in honor of the general. She then disappeared for points unknown and returned to Yalta again the next year.

‘Yesterday was the day the general died,’ said the woman.

Her breasts hung for a short moment, then froze in place again on her arm, as if in compensation for Akinfeeva’s traveling nature. Solovyov was upset. He told his conversation partner that he had been a few dozen meters from Nina Fedorovna (how simple were the names of secrets!) but had not risked approaching her with wet splotches on his shorts and so had run off to change his clothes and then… The young man punched his knee in annoyance and apologized right then and there. The punch and the apology were both accepted with identical degrees of good will.

After allowing the Petersburger to vent his emotions completely, the representative of culture in Yalta announced the following important fact. Despite her unestablished place of residence, Nina Fedorovna Akinfeeva had not refused housing space (26.2 square meters) in Yalta but had registered her daughter there: Zoya Ivanovna Akinfeeva, born in 1976, unmarried, and a correspondence student at the Simferopol Pedagogical Institute.

‘Ivanovna is an invented patronymic,’ smiled the plump woman. ‘Nobody has seen that Ivan.’

Judging from the girl’s dark complexion, it might just happen that he was not an Ivan at all. Making up for her own long silence, the senior employee gave an account of the Akinfeev family’s history.

In the early 1970s, a new resident, Nina F. Akinfeeva, moved into the communal apartment where General Larionov lived (how can that be? he lived in a communal apartment?!) Authorization for the room was issued from the city’s housing stock and allotted through the Anton Chekhov Museum, where Akinfeeva, who needed housing, was employed. By the time the new resident moved in, the general had long been a widower. Here, the storyteller tactfully fell silent.

Solovyov knew from Dupont’s book about the death of the general’s wife in the mid-sixties. Lacking specific information about this woman, the French researcher had alluded to her rather briefly. The general’s son was discussed even more briefly; the scholarly lady had not managed to trace his fate after he came of age. The Yalta civil servant had managed to trace his fate, though, if only partially. After resting her unblinking gaze on Solovyov, she announced that the general’s only son had taken to drinking and left home. She just could not remember if the son had taken to drinking first and then left home or vice versa, meaning taken to drinking after leaving home. Even in the absence of chronological clarity, however, both facts were at hand and both induced the storyteller’s agitation. She stopped smiling, leaned back in her chair, and mechanically adjusted the straps of her brassiere under her blouse. Solovyov began to think he was watching some sort of old movie, though he could not remember how the movie ended.

In the early 1970s, Nina Fedorovna Akinfeeva was around forty and she, like the general, was completely alone. After moving into the communal apartment, Nina Fedorovna unexpectedly acquired a reason to exist. The general became the object of her reverence and care, occupying all her thoughts, energies, and time. She took to reading books about the anti-Communist White Movement. They powerfully crowded out the Chekhov studies that had once occupied an exceptional position in her consciousness. Little by little, Nina Fedorovna’s museum colleagues began to notice, alarmed, that Anton P. Chekhov was no longer at the center of her interests.

It is difficult to say what, exactly, served as the reason for the museum employee’s spiritual regeneration. Did her vanity play a role here (residence in the same communal apartment as a great person), or was it the opposite, meaning pity (residence of a great person in a communal apartment)? Was this the influence of the magnetic qualities of the general himself, a person who at one time commanded armies and was most likely capable of subordinating a lonely museum worker to his will? And, finally, was there, behind everything that happened, a banal communal apartment dalliance, as some of the employees at the Chekhov Museum were inclined to think (this opinion was reinforced by hints of their colleague’s unpredictable temperament)? This, however, should be qualified by saying that other museum workers categorically rejected the possibility of a dubious relationship with the elderly general. In the course of discussions that arose spontaneously, the supposition was expressed that Nina Fedorovna might just as successfully have developed a similar relationship with Anton Chekhov.

The following notable fact testifies, circumstantially, to the bond between these two lonely people being purely platonic. One fine morning (after numerous years of selfless service to the general), Nina Fedorovna embraced the object of her reverence and ran out of the house without saying a word. She returned about three weeks later in an unrecognizable condition. Her face was all scratched and her clothing was torn. The fugitive was breathing heavily. She brought with her the scent of the forest and cheap cigarettes, and a devastated bankbook. The general welcomed her without a single question. Several weeks later she burst into sobs and confessed to the general that she was pregnant. The general, sitting in his chair, lifted his head. Nina Fedorovna placed her trembling fingers into his extended hand, and he silently squeezed them.

Nobody, including the museum and the cultural department that administers it, ever learned what thickets had attracted Nina Fedorovna during her days of flight. Innate energy that had awakened within the museum worker drove her toward continuing the human race and threw her into the embrace of something age-old, savage, and natural. The museum’s management saw this particular case as unprecedented as well as unworthy of imitation. Considering, however, that Nina Fedorovna had become pregnant on the very brink of the conclusion of her child-bearing years (it was emphasized in the trade union’s character reference that this was the last chance for the member of the museum’s collective) material assistance in the amount of seventy-five rubles was allocated to her. The fallen employee was also presented with The Stone Foot, a poetry collection by Grigory V. Ursulyak, the museum’s director. The museum did not regret the assistance afterwards. Years later, when Akinfeeva left Yalta for points unknown, her daughter replaced her in that institution of enlightenment.

Life did not change a bit in the communal apartment after that. Nina Fedorovna returned to the responsibilities that she had previously chosen to take upon herself. Every day (in the early morning, and sometimes in the evening) she accompanied the general to the jetty, carrying his folding chair and awning behind him. The time after the onset of darkness was devoted to preparing his memoirs. The general had previously written them himself but was forced to set them aside after the age of eighty, when his hand took on a mind of its own. New opportunities opened up for the general when a helper appeared in his life. He began dictating his recollections.

Just before giving birth, Nina Fedorovna asked the general what she should name the child.

‘Name her Zoya,’ said the general.

It remained unknown whether he was emphasizing the life-affirming meaning of what had happened—in keeping with the name, Zoya—or was simply oriented to the church calendar, with its saints’ days. The woman was only asking what to name the baby if it was a boy but the general replied that it would be a girl.

She was taken to the maternity hospital a few days later. After ordering that a small icon of Saint Panteleimon be removed from the windowsill, the head doctor—in light of the arriving patient’s age—made the decision to perform a caesarean section. During the entire nine months of her pregnancy Nina Fedorovna had feared childbirth complications and her anxieties, sadly, were warranted.

The complications were brought on by forceps that were forgotten in the birthing mother’s belly during the operation. The doctors must, however, be given credit. When they heard complaints of sharp pain in the abdominal cavity, they flawlessly chose, from an abundance of possibilities, (the nurse who forgot the forceps made the diagnosis), the correct reason, which essentially ensured the success of the second operation, too.

Nina Fedorovna left the hospital about twenty days later. When she crossed the apartment threshold with Zoya, who was wearing a pink ribbon, the general was already gone. He had died.

Solovyov looked into the cultural worker’s bottomless eyes. A deep knowledge of the city’s cultural life and a willingness to share that knowledge were discernible there. Sympathy for the fate of General Larionov and those around him was also apparent. At the same time—Solovyov’s conversation partner expressed this with a deep sigh—the Yalta City Executive Committee’s influence on human fates had it limitations.