Solovyov and Larionov

6

The beach was already packed with people when Solovyov and Zoya arrived at around ten in the morning. They stepped carefully over extended arms, glued-on paper nose protectors, and jelly-like rear ends glistening with lotion. It was body parts that drew the eye in this crowded festival of flesh. Forcing himself to regain his focus, Solovyov noticed an empty spot by a stand with a life ring. There was just enough space for two towels. Solovyov considered it an undeniable stroke of luck that this spot was located by a ring. The means of rescue was right at hand if he found himself in a critical situation.

The life ring turned out to be unnecessary. Solovyov was surprised to discover that Zoya was a born swimming instructor. As she walked into the water with him, she ordered him to lie, stomach-down, on the sea’s surface. When Solovyov’s body—which was unaccustomed to water—slowly began sinking, Zoya lightly but confidently supported him with both arms. He felt a bit shy about being in such a strange, baby-like position in a young woman’s arms, though he could not help but admit that the training turned out to be a pleasant business.

They carefully made their way to their towels after coming out of the water. Zoya lay on her back, extending one arm along her body, and using the other to shade her eyes from the sun. Solovyov sat with his chin resting on his knees. This embryonic pose seemed ideal for an observer. The morning beach was something unprecedented for Solovyov and it evoked his curiosity.

Solovyov was very taken with the Tatar women peddling baklava and strings of nut candies on trays. They crouched next to buyers, pulling a plastic bag out from under a sash and putting a hand inside as if it were a glove, then taking their Eastern goods from a tray. Large beads of sweat glistened on their faces. The Tatar women settled up with baklava lovers, stood easily with no signs of tiredness, and continued their journey over the scorching pebbles. Their shouts, slightly muted by the tide, sounded along the entire expanse of the beach, mingling with the shouts of sellers of kvass, cola, beer, dried bream, and kebabs made of smoked whelks.

Solovyov examined the human bodies. Liberated from their clothing, almost nothing bound them and they felt no boundaries with anyone. He saw muscular types whose skin had been tanned by the sun, a result of a constant presence at the beach. Even tattoos that had been applied long, long ago, before they began to frequent the beach, were lost. These men moved toward the water with a special gait. This was the gait of the kings of the beach: torso swaying, holding their arms slightly away from their sides. When they came back onto dry land, their swimsuits clung to their bodies, clearly outlining their genitalia. Aware of this effect, the kings of the beach pulled at the waistbands of their swimsuits with two fingers, releasing them with a businesslike snap. The swim trunks immediately lost their excessive anatomism. With their merits obvious to everyone, the kings of the beach needed no additional advertising.

Alongside them—and herein lay the great equality of the beach—there hovered the possessors of flabby breasts that had been bravely liberated from swimsuits, one-size-fits-all bellies, and old women’s shapeless, ropy legs stitched with the violet threads of veins. Everything that would have given rise to protest in any other situation turned out to be permissible at the beach and, for the most part, evoked no indignation.

Solovyov leaned back and rested on his elbows. He began watching Zoya when he was certain her arm was firmly covering her eyes. His gaze slid from Zoya’s shaved armpits to her thighs, above which ran the thin line of her bikini. Solovyov lost himself admiring the barely perceptible and somehow placid movement of her belly. When he raised his eyes, he met Zoya’s gaze and smiled from the unexpectedness.

When they went back into the water, Zoya ordered Solovyov to turn on his stomach and try to make the froglike motions that she had demonstrated first. Zoya’s strong hands supported Solovyov in his froglike motion and slid along the trainee’s neck, chest, and belly, touching—anything is possible deep under water—his body’s most sensitive points from time to time. When Solovyov’s motion seemed insufficiently froglike to Zoya, she swam under him and synchronized the rhythm of their two bodies to show him how this actually looked. People standing on shore followed the lesson with undisguised interest.

Zoya’s nontraditional and perhaps even somewhat eccentric methods could not help but yield fruit. The result of their mutual efforts was that Solovyov swam several meters, experiencing the fabulous sensation of the first time.

He had experienced this sensation only twice in his life. The first incident occurred at about the age of seven, when he suddenly rode away after an exhausting lesson in riding a two-wheel bicycle: his grandmother let go of the seat by accident when she grew tired of running after him. Solovyov registered, forever, his abrupt acquisition of balance. The smooth motion while coasting, akin to soaring; the crunch of pine cones under the wheels.

He experienced the second sensation of this type at the end of the second seven-year period in his life. It concerned a realm unconnected with grandmotherly help, something of a far more delicate nature and not at all bicycle-related. Out of necessity, Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s censorship concerned only printed sources, but prohibited information had verbal distribution channels, too. Classmates supplied Solovyov with certain details about relations between the sexes, though that was all presented in the crudest, most mechanistic ways. Solovyov’s education in that regard progressed so one-dimensionally and chaotically that by the time he had a notion of the essence of the sexual act, he was somehow still unaware that children appeared as the result of those same actions.

The connection between those two phenomena ended up being thoroughly unexpected for him, even unpleasantly so. Solovyov did not much want to connect a joyous and anticipated event such as the appearance of a child with the disgusting rhythmic motions that his classmates showed him while laughing. It cannot be ruled out that, deep down in his soul, the boy platonically in love with Nadezhda Nikiforovna simply did not want to believe it. A sober look at things hinted to schoolboy Solovyov that he and Nadezhda Nikiforovna were not fated to have children in this fashion.

Solovyov was shaken by that revelation, and during a school gathering he imagined, in turn, all the parents in attendance during production of his classmates. Taking that further, he imagined the schoolteachers in the same mode, up to and including the principal ( Bigfoot was her nickname), a bulky, unsmiling woman with braids folded on her head. Based on the existence of all their children, Solovyov came to the indisputable conclusion that each of them had done that at least once in their lives. Including the principal, difficult though it was to believe. Copulation scenes more or less emerged for the rest of the teaching staff, but Solovyov’s fantasy turned out to be powerless when applied to the principal. In the end, the adolescent managed to imagine her, too, but the spectacle turned out to be ghastly. Peace of mind came only with the thought that the dreadful phenomenon had taken place one single time and would never be repeated.

After exhausting all available possibilities, Solovyov moved on to examining other people in his immediate surroundings. Now, the portraits that had been looking at him from the classroom walls for so many years captured his attention. Solovyov was a child of the late Soviet period, so there was not a broad selection at his disposal. The central, largest portrait in the classroom belonged to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). It was he who attracted the adolescent’s attention most of all.

Solovyov had to turn his head constantly to unite Lenin with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who occupied a modest spot in the classroom pantheon between Anatoly Lunacharsky and Anton Makarenko. The concluding picture turned out to be far more imaginable than that of the principal: either Solovyov’s fantasy had managed to get some rest or this was an optical effect from the convergence of distant images.

‘Did Lenin have children?’ Solovyov once asked during a biology lesson.

‘He did not,’ said the teacher. ‘But is that really a question on the subject of amphibians?’

‘Yes,’ said Solovyov.

Krupskaya’s Graves-disease profile, along with her partner’s small, spiteful motions lent the pair a defiantly amphibious look. Well, then, needless to say, they did not have children; they just made each other nauseous.

Karl Marx turned out to be the concluding entity in this portrait-driven period. No matter how Solovyov struggled, in his imagination, Marx only ever united with Friedrich Engels. Not yet suspecting the possibilities of this kind of alliance, Solovyov left the founding fathers in peace.

Solovyov acquired his own first experience of this sort in the vicinity of the Kilometer 715 station. Looking back on the circumstances of his life, that hardly seems very unexpected. The majority of what happened during Solovyov’s adolescence was tied to the station in some way or other, with the only exceptions being Solovyov’s relationship with Nadezhda Nikiforovna and his study at school, both of which took place an hour and a half’s walk from his place of residence. Needless to say, the tender experience under discussion could not have been acquired either at school or, even more so, at Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s. It was acquired in Solovyov’s home.

The house was a fairly dilapidated structure. It consisted of an entryway, a kitchen, and two small rooms adjoining the kitchen. The windows looked out on a railroad embankment that was not high but was overgrown with grass. After his mother’s death, Solovyov, who had previously been housed in the same room as his grandmother, moved into his deceased’s mother’s room. He did that from an instinctive striving to fill the emptiness that had arisen after his mother’s departure. When he entered that emptied room, he creaked the cracked floorboards and slept on his mother’s bed, making her departure seem less irrevocable to him. In the end, the room’s emptiness was partially filled because someone else, in addition to Solovyov and his grandmother, also began spending time there: Leeza Larionova.

Leeza had been at the Solovyovs’ before. She was Solovyov’s only peer in the whole area around Kilometer 715; in fact, she was the only child there besides him. When she came back from school with Solovyov she would go home to eat but would show up an hour later at the Solovyov home, where the two of them would sit down to do their homework. Leeza listened attentively to Solovyov’s reasoning when solving math problems, hardly ever contradicting him. And when Solovyov struggled, she would prompt him, timidly and often in question form, about the correct way to solve them. Sometimes it seemed to Solovyov that even in cases when he was incorrect, she wrote the same things in her notebook so as not to offend him. There was no doubt that verity was not an end, in and of itself, for Leeza.

Leeza could have been what was defined, in previous times, as the head of the class. She had a clear mind but lacked the key thing for a career as head of the class (or, admittedly, for any career): ambition.

Their shared walks to and from school were a manifestation of nothing more than ordinary neighborly relations. At least in the beginning. They had walked together since first grade. This sort of travel seemed safer to their household members. In families that lacked men (Leeza lived with her mother) the word ‘safety’ possessed special weight.

Little Solovyov was embarrassed about walking to school with Leeza. The most distressing thing about those circumstances was that he and Leeza were labeled bride and groom. This common taunt for cases like theirs was all the more hurtful for Solovyov because, of course, he secretly considered Nadezhda Nikiforovna to be his bride. The moment they neared the school, Solovyov demonstrated in every way possible that an immense distance stretched between these two people who were apparently arriving together. The future historian turned away, lagged behind, made faces behind Leeza’s back and, in brief, reached extraordinarily, extraordinarily high levels of detachment that nevertheless still allowed their shared return home.

His treatment of Leeza was especially harsh in the presence of Nadezhda Nikiforovna. True, there was nothing there that might have been deemed as not comme il faut: Solovyov knew his chosen one tolerated no brattiness. At the library, Leeza’s lot was to receive icy gazes and short answers in a scratchy voice. To Solovyov’s annoyance, Nadezhda Nikiforovna did not understand that he was making these efforts, under the circumstances, for her sake. From time to time, she herself addressed Leeza when she was waiting for Solovyov. Oddly enough, the little girl was one of Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s frequent visitors, too. Although the selection of books was not conducted as ceremoniously for Leeza as for Solovyov, Leeza read a lot. Perhaps even a little more than Solovyov himself.

By the time she was fourteen, Leeza had evolved into a nice-looking, slender young woman. She did not go to the head of the class and she had not become a beauty, either. The appearance that nature had given her—well-balanced, subtle facial features, wheat-colored hair, and gray eyes—presented vast opportunities for choosing a style. If Leeza had decided to become a beauty, a restrained drawing of her facial features would have imparted her appearance with a light impressionistic shading that striking faces lack. But that did not happen.

It would be incorrect to say that Leeza did not want to be a beauty. That would imply a certain purposeful will, a conscious position she had taken regarding the issue of beauty. Leeza conducted herself as if that realm did not exist for her. Knowing Leeza’s poverty, others offered to let her use their cosmetics, but she politely declined. Unlike other girls, who shimmered with all the colors available in the Russian provinces, Leeza was not the object of her classmates’ attention at school parties. The boys in her class preferred girls who had a look that was more mysterious and—considering the violet splotches around their eyes—slightly extraterrestrial. It was with these girls that they shared exhausting slow dances.

The thought of those dances flashed through Solovyov’s mind one time after finishing some homework (perhaps not the most arousing thing to do), when he felt a burning-hot erection and unexpectedly found himself pressing his whole body against Leeza. The unexpectedness had come about not because Solovyov had never imagined this sort of possibility. He had, in fact, imagined it: whenever his grandmother’s snoring began resounding in the next room at night, his fantasy painted this event in full detail. He distinctly sensed the touch of his own hands as if they were Leeza’s and fell still on the damp sheet after experiencing a blend of delight and shame as ancient as growing up. No, the unexpectedness was in the fact that his fantasy had never envisioned—as something real—everything he had just undertaken with Leeza. But now that had happened. Could Solovyov handle his arousal? Under certain circumstances, yes. For example, if his grandmother had been at home. But she was not there at that moment.

Sensing that he was shaking, Solovyov took Leeza’s hand and pressed it to his bulging sweatpants. He nearly lost consciousness from the forbiddenness of what was happening and from the union of such contradictory inclinations (it seemed to him that the highest degree of contradiction also begat the highest degree of the forbidden). In the remnants of his consciousness that had not yet been lost, there pulsated the thought of Leeza touching the most secret thing on earth. Never afterward did the differences between genders excite him so much: this sort of union of contradictions turned out to be an ordinary matter in adult life and it was unavoidable, too, if approached dialectically. What had once seemed so hidden and inaccessible to him turned out, on closer inspection, to be almost the most sought-after object. In presenting it so insistently to Leeza, the future scholar did not yet know about its role in the history of culture or even history as a whole. He was acting without looking back at his predecessors.

Standing right up against Solovyov, Leeza looked at him with a calm and slightly surprised gaze. As was the case with homework, it seemed that only she knew the correct solution. She truly did know it. Leeza lightly touched her lips to his and lay her head on his shoulder. Emboldened, he thrust his hand under her blouse. He touched her back, her belly, and what was below.

He was unable to undo a single one of the hooks hidden under her blouse. Leeza did this herself. Leeza also took off the rest of her clothes and obediently lay on the bed, where Solovyov had led her by the hand. He did not utter a word for the rest of that scene. Solovyov quivered for real and from just his convulsive movements (all he had managed to finish doing completely was undress), Leeza was always able to guess what was expected of her. All in all, not very much guesswork was required here.

Accompanied by the wretched squeaking of springs (that squeaking communicated the condition of his body rather precisely), he somehow perched himself on Leeza and froze. Unable to unite their two bodies from the start, he no longer understood what, exactly, to do next. Here, Leeza took matters into her own hands again. He felt himself being directed and, with the indefatigability of an athlete, began making the same motions his classmates had so repulsively shown him. He experienced an orgasm several moments later. This was his first time with a woman. And it was far more intense than riding a bicycle.

The absence of blood surprised Solovyov. When he examined the spots on the sheet after Leeza left, he was unable to find anything resembling blood. He could not even allow the thought that Leeza had already become a woman before their relationship. Solovyov knew, down to the minute, how Leeza spent her time. Leeza’s social circle was also well known to him. Properly speaking, he was that circle.

Everyone at Kilometer 715 knew there should be blood. Even Nadezhda Nikiforovna—who excised any mentions of a sex life—would leave, untouched, information about the blood that resulted on a wedding night. Perhaps her stern hand was stopped by the thought that the presence of blood could serve as an important restraining factor for anyone intending to enter into a sexual relationship. Under a worst-case development of events, meaning entering into said relationship, according to Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s reckoning, the possible absence of blood would disillusion the male entering into the relationship and deter him from repeated attempts.

As comfort for the bloodthirsty Solovyov, the sheet turned crimson during one of their subsequent lovemaking sessions, the third or fourth of their encounters when his grandmother was not at home. The previous times—Solovyov obviously did not understand this because of his lack of experience—their contact had been too convulsive and chaotic. When the unavoidable finally happened, there was so much blood that the sheet had to be washed immediately. Solovyov fetched icy water from the well and Leeza laundered the sheet, periodically blowing on her numbed fingers; there had been no time to heat the water. There was also no opportunity to legitimately dry the sheet, so it had to be put on the bed again after laundering. Only at night, after his grandmother had begun to snore, did Solovyov hang the sheet on two chairs and sleep on top of the blanket, covered by a jacket.

Their romps became regular. His grandmother’s trips out were fairly rare, so every now and then they had to switch to Leeza’s house when, needless to say, it was empty. The complication here was that Leeza’s mother, a railroad track inspector, could show up at any time. The length of an inspection was surprisingly varied and depended on her degree of tiredness, her mood, and some higher industrial considerations, the essence of which were familiar only to those in the know regarding protocols for railroad track inspectors. Neither Leeza nor Solovyov, even more so, belonged to those ranks and so several times their undertakings nearly failed. More than once they were saved by the clang of an empty pail they had inconspicuously placed by the garden gate, but it was impossible to count on such an unreliable and, even more importantly, attention-attracting method. And so they returned to Solovyov’s house.

As children of railroad workers, Solovyov and Leeza decided to make the fullest use of the railroad’s possibilities, something that is, by the way, often underrated in contemporary life. With impeccable mastery of the schedules for passenger and freight trains, they effortlessly discovered that train traffic through Kilometer 715 was nearly uninterrupted several times a day. In the most fortuitous cases, the unceasing running of trains in both directions took ten to twelve minutes. That was plenty for brief but torrid love. The din of the trains drowned out any sounds capable of arising under this sort of circumstance. First and foremost, the screeching of bedsprings. Solovyov’s grandmother was not in the habit of entering his room during their endeavors, but in crucial situations, the participants briefly used the hook on the door.

Regarding the issue of noises. Solovyov’s awareness of the female component of sex was not limited to blood. Prior to entering into sexual activity, he also already had a notion of moaning. As performed by his classmates, moaning turned out to be even less attractive than the motions they demonstrated. Be that as it may, under the sexual roles that Solovyov had adopted and delegated, Leeza was not responding to his masculine movement with feminine moaning. Having been convinced by his classmates at some point that one thing was guaranteed to evoke the other, Solovyov’s unease was no joke. After sharing his doubts with Leeza, she faintly began moaning a little. Insecurely listening to her moans, Solovyov did not find them convincing, which distressed him even more. Sometimes it even seemed to him that Leeza was moaning out of a sense of duty rather than on account of a physiological necessity to moan.

Furthermore. At times it occurred to Solovyov that Leeza was experiencing far less need than he in these forbidden and, at the very least, premature relations they had entered into. This was not just because it was never she who initiated their little madnesses (that could be written off to female shyness) but that her attitude toward coitus was passionless in some sense. Leeza never had to be persuaded and she yielded right away but she yielded: calmly, benevolently, and without Solovyov’s impatience and trembling. It seemed that in this realm, as in many others, she did not want to distress him. Generally speaking, Leeza’s conformity seemed boundless. At times, when Solovyov was especially impatient and there was no opportunity for seclusion in the offing, they made love without preparation or undressing. Leeza agreed to that, too.

Later, when he remembered these hectic relations, which were for all intents and purposes childlike, despite their adult content, Solovyov never stopped feeling surprised that Leeza did not become pregnant. All they knew about the realm of precautions was that there were safe and unsafe days in terms of conception. Leeza had won math meets so she calculated the days. As far as birth control devices went, there was no opportunity at all for young people to buy them in a place where everyone knew them. Solovyov went several times to the regional capital, where he bought condoms, sweating profusely from embarrassment. The condoms were quickly gone and a trip to the city required an entire day. The only birth control device they always had in abundance was the ability to break their embraces at the right moment. This required no small force of will and malfunctioned several times. Solovyov regarded the absence of consequences as their exceptional luck since it would have been catastrophic for both of them at Kilometer 715 if Leeza had become pregnant.

There is no doubt that the adolescents’ luck truly was exceptional. They made love constantly, not just inside but also in the open air. Sometimes Solovyov and Leeza stepped into the woods on their way home from school to indulge themselves in love, on the mosses and lichens they had just finished studying in biology. The contours of those florae were imprinted on Leeza’s pink bottom when she got up from the ground and brushed herself off. They did that more than once in the snow, too, spreading out Solovyov’s skimpy coat and melting the snow’s crust with their hot fingers. Even so, Solovyov’s room was the primary spot for their intimate relations. The association of their encounters with the train schedule not only brought about a degree of order that was rare in cases like this but also lent them an unexpected Pavlovian nuance: trains passing through the station evoked an involuntary erection for Solovyov.

Now, he sensed an erection unassociated with any railroad effect. When Solovyov opened his eyes, he knew he had just woken up. The first thing he saw was Zoya’s unblinking gaze directed at him. Solovyov turned over on his stomach. With a crocodile-like motion, he raked hot pebbles toward himself and squinted again. He realized that this time he had woken up as a person able to swim. He certainly did like Zoya.