Solovyov and Larionov

7

Zoya invited Solovyov to her place that evening. He arrived with a bouquet of flowers but knew right away that what he had presumed would happen was not to be. There, in Zoya’s room, in addition to Solovyov, was the old-fashioned gentleman he had seen the day before, as well as a thin old woman. She was wearing a black hat with the veil folded back and black mesh gloves. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang and a man with the look of a mighty warrior entered. He appeared to be over sixty. Despite his age, biceps of significant size revealed themselves under an untucked, cotton, pensioner’s sort of shirt. Solovyov thought the group seemed worthy of a painting. At first, he just could not grasp what, exactly, had gathered such dissimilar people.

General Larionov had gathered them. This became clear when Zoya introduced the attendees to one another. At first, Solovyov thought he had misheard. The old woman turned out to be Princess Meshcherskaya, although—and here, a tinge of apology could be heard in Zoya’s voice—she was not born until after the revolution.

‘That never prevented me from being a princess,’ the old woman said, before offering her hand to Solovyov.

He bent over her extended hand and felt the mesh texture of her glove on his lips. He was kissing a princess’s hand (admittedly, any lady’s hand) for the first time in his life. As was the case with the beach, no such opportunity had presented itself either in Petersburg or (even more so) near station Kilometer 715.

The two gentlemen in attendance were the children of White Guardsmen that the general had somehow saved from death. This circumstance permitted them, as they expressed it, to not only deeply revere the general but also to have been born in the first place. Based on several phrases these people uttered, Solovyov concluded that they had transferred their love for and devotion to the general on to Zoya, who was a sort of adopted daughter to the deceased, even though he had never seen her. This apparently comforting circumstance made Solovyov wary. He grew definitively upset upon remembering yesterday’s encounter with Shulgin (that turned out to be his name). Given the terms of his guardianship, something obviously taken very seriously, the chances of developing a relationship with Zoya seemed slim.

Zoya asked Solovyov to help her as she was preparing to serve tea. They went to the kitchen, where there stood a balding man, five to seven years older than Solovyov. He could not be called a fat man in the strictest sense; he was more likely flabby. Slackened. Threatening to either collapse or deflate. Somehow, he was not completely standing, but slanted, resting against a firm support behind his back. Zoya nodded at him, barely noticeably, and turned on the gas under the teakettle. Solovyov greeted him to avoid awkwardness. Answering ‘hi’ (it was quiet and perhaps even shy), the unknown man disappeared into his own room. Though they had never met, Solovyov recognized him immediately: this was Taras Kozachenko.

As they waited for the teakettle to boil, the curious Solovyov examined the spacious kitchen where the legendary general had put in an appearance every day over the course of more than half a century.

‘This was his table.’

Zoya pointed at the oilcloth-covered wooden structure that Taras had been leaning against. The oilcloth had been finely hacked up (vegetables were chopped there) and stained red from a dried sauce. Next to a glass containing wilted dill there lay a whetstone of implausible size, and behind it—as if to illustrate its capabilities—were two knives with unevenly sharpened blades. At the very corner of the table, wrapped in gauze, stood a jar of kombucha with the fungus. This was his table.

Solovyov cautiously bent back the sticky oilcloth and touched the surface of the table. He attempted to imagine the general wiping this table with a rag. And regulating the flame on a primus stove with fried eggs crackling.

‘The general hardly ever cooked,’ Zoya announced.

According to Zoya, Varvara Petrovna Nezhdanova, who was assigned housing in the general’s apartment in 1922, helped him with all his household matters. She was a quiet, terse young woman who came to Yalta from Moscow and then stayed in Yalta. After finding a job at city hall as a typist, she was given a room in the general’s building.

‘I can cook for you,’ Varvara Petrovna said one day.

‘Then cook,’ said the general.

They married two years later.

Over tea, Zoya told those in attendance about Solovyov. It turned out that Shulgin’s friend, whose surname was Nesterenko, already knew of Solovyov. When in Petersburg on business, he had gone to a conference at the Institute of Russian History and heard Solovyov’s paper that had made such a strong impression on everyone: ‘Studying the Life and Activity of General Larionov: Conclusions and Outlooks.’ Nesterenko himself had initially been upset that the young researcher’s conclusions had turned out to be far fewer than the general’s true venerators wanted. The abundance of outlooks envisioned in the paper, however, compensated for the disappointing situation in the realm of conclusions. In the final reckoning, this permitted Nesterenko to return home feeling almost uplifted.

In speaking about scholarly topics, they also recalled that the conference ‘General Larionov as Text’ was scheduled to begin a few days later, in Kerch. Neither Shulgin nor Nesterenko understood why the conference was being held in Kerch rather than Yalta. They listed, at length, grounds for why a conference devoted to the general could only be held in Yalta. Displaying unexpectedly practical thinking for a princess, Meshcherskaya suggested that hotel prices were significantly lower in Kerch. At the same time (and here the princess’s erudition in the field of semiotics manifested itself ), she was distressed to acknowledge that, unlike Yalta, Kerch was not a signifying (semiotically speaking) place in the general’s life history. In the end, it was the princess who spoke in defense of the conference’s title, parrying attacks from Shulgin and Nesterenko, who bluntly refused to imagine General Larionov in text form.

The conversation livened up even more when the attendees learned that Solovyov planned to speak at the conference. Since not everyone (notably Zoya) was able to leave Yalta during the days of the conference, they asked Solovyov to read his paper in this house. Of course, Solovyov—who pushed his cup so abruptly that a bit of tea spilled on the tablecloth—did not mind. He considered it an honor to read a paper in this company and (here was the main thing), in this house. Since he did not have the text of the paper with him at that moment (and it would have been strange if he had, confirmed the attendees), they agreed the reading would take place within the next few days. It would be difficult to dream of a reading in a more signifying place.

As for Solovyov’s potential listeners, they had things to tell, too. With the exception of Zoya, they had all known the general personally and well. The atmosphere Zoya was raised in, however, had furnished her with information about the general to such a degree that during their subsequent reminiscing about the general over tea, she permitted herself to supplement and even correct the guests’ statements. The Chekhov Museum employee’s wonderful memory made up for her absence of personal experience. Based on the stories told by the figures gathered in the general’s home that August evening, his post-revolutionary fate unfolded in the following way.

The general greeted the Reds’ arrival within the walls of his own Yalta dacha (Princess Meshcherskaya made a circular motion with her hand, indicating these very walls). This was where he lived when he did not need to stay on the armored train. The general not only avoided death in a surprising way but had not even been evicted from his home. The general was subjected to having additional residents moved into the premises.

A local Komsomol cell was stationed on the first floor of his dacha. In previous times, nobody could have thought this space capable of housing such a number of figures wearing pointy, woolen Red Army hats. They straightened their uniform shirts and saluted each other when they met by the front stoop. On the second floor, one room was assigned to the aforementioned Varvara Petrovna, another was given to the revolutionary sailor Kuzma Seregin, and a third went to the general. Since the second floor had no kitchen, a large room there was modified for the purpose.

The Larionov family built this house with gothic windows in the nineteenth century, during the mid-nineties. Despite the family’s deep army connections, the dacha was built using the labor of civilian workers who were paid, furthermore, out of the Larionovs’ own money. Like the majority of Yalta dachas, it had only two stories but each was high. When the future general stepped over the threshold, he was already at an age when the magical words art nouveau, which his mother uttered in the foyer, were not empty sounds for him. Those two French words had resounded repeatedly in Petersburg, too. They accompanied the home’s entire construction and his parents uttered them with a special sort of progressive facial expression. When showing the house to Yaltan neighbors, the general’s parents comported themselves a little like Columbus and, strictly speaking, they had a right to do so: the style was still almost undiscovered, in Yalta as well as the capital.

The style was unfamiliar to Kuzma Seregin, too, when he moved into the general’s house in 1921. Art nouveau turned out to make a dispiriting impression on this representative of the navy. For the first two days of Seregin’s stay in the house he dropped everything (he was a member of the Red Navy’s firing squad) and worked on modifying the room that had been handed down to him. After rejecting the intricate moldings on the ceiling as bourgeois excess, he chiseled them off the ceiling. He painted the oak paneling with gooey green paint and went over the oak parquet with it, too, after finding the color interesting. The general observed the clashing styles but kept calm, never once rebuking the master of firing squad matters. By comparison with changes across Russia, events in Larionov’s own house could no longer genuinely disturb him.

Being rowdy by nature, though, Seregin was a bit afraid of the general. For him, the general was a phenomenon no less alien (and perhaps even more alien) in nature than art nouveau, but he could not proceed with the general as he had with the ceiling moldings. Despite his revolutionary consciousness and propensity for cocaine, the sailor saw his neighbor first and foremost as a general.

The Red Navyman’s servile reflex was also reinforced one time after he initiated hand-to-hand combat with the general and was quickly knocked off his feet, dragged to the front steps, and dunked in a rain barrel. For some time, he tried to take it out on Varvara Petrovna, who had witnessed the event, but he dropped that, too, after seeing the general’s benevolence toward her. He did not calm down for good until he quietly enquired at his place of employment as to the prospect of the general becoming an object for the firing squad. So as not to burden his comrades with extra work, he offered to do the work independently, as a house call, so to say. He was genuinely surprised when he received a categorical refusal; he then began respecting the general even more. It was Seregin, incidentally, who was the first to ask the key question of the general’s biography: why was he not shot?

Seregin lived in the general’s house for seven years. Once caught in the vortex of the revolution, he simply could not return to a tranquil life. His revolutionary consciousness and increased consumption of cocaine pushed him toward actions and words (and words are also actions, as Lev B. Umansky, a member of the Joint State Political Directorate troika, said) that were unacceptable to the young Soviet system of political power. Seregin’s very own firing squad executed the troika’s verdict for Seregin. According to his comrades’ recollections, that was Seregin’s only consolation.

Umansky, whom the general recognized as the person who commanded the Red Armymen during Seregin’s arrest, moved into Seregin’s room. As the Red Armymen tied up the resistant tenant, Umansky checked the condition of the window frames and doors, and confirmed the exact measurements of the vacated room with Varvara Petrovna. It later emerged that Umansky, who did not yet have housing in Yalta, did this whenever he conducted an arrest. Seregin was shot on very short notice, so there is no reason to doubt that the accommodations suited him.

Umansky differed, favorably, from Seregin because he did not engage in nighttime debauchery. If he brought ladies home now and then, he made them take off their shoes and handed out slippers he had readied specially. The women were initially from the Komsomol, spirited away from the cell on the first floor. Those who slept with him thought that (as an honest person) Umansky should marry them. Without involving himself in discussion of his own honesty, he rationally announced that he simply could not marry everyone at once, despite his desire to do so.

Regular scandalous scenes on the second floor caught the attention of the cell’s leadership and they began investigating the issue of amoral behavior. Umansky, who had thoroughly chickened out, was forced to go to the cell and explain, in the presence of the Komsomol’s core membership, why marriage should be considered an obsolete phenomenon. His speech made a fairly good impression on the core membership, which was largely composed of males. The female portion of the group regarded it with more restraint but could not resolve itself to object openly.

From that day forward, the Komsomol women did not set foot in Umansky’s room. On the one hand, the young women in the cell were too offended to go up to the second floor again. On the other, upon reflection, Umansky himself decided to get by with ladies from the embankment: they may have been more distant ideologically, but they were preferable in terms of their mastery of sexual techniques. Unlike the Komsomol women, whose inflexibility thoroughly irritated Umansky, Marxist worldviews did not prevent them from kneeling when necessary.

In fact, out of everyone the general had occasion to see in a communal living situation, Umansky was not the worst neighbor. During the years Umansky was a flatmate, the potent smell of urine (which had appeared when Seregin settled into the apartment) disappeared from the bathroom. Umansky (usually in the person of one of the ladies who visited him) invariably took his turn washing the floors in the kitchen and other common areas. From the general’s point of view, Umansky’s striving for outer cleanliness and orderliness compensated, to some degree, for his inner impurity.

The general considered Umansky a scoundrel and did not particularly hide that. At the same time, there was also a sort of sentimental shading in his attitude toward Umansky. This manifested itself in full measure later, when the general expressed regret that the room next door had been freed up prematurely. As far as Umansky went, it was flattering for him to live in the same apartment as someone so famous. Although he was once tempted to expand his living space by arresting the general and his wife, to the Political Directorate employee’s credit, his taste for good company prevailed in his soul over strictly mercenary interests.

It emerged years later, though, that before Umansky’s best feelings triumphed over his worst feelings, he had, in fact, made a move to free up the apartment. A certain mysterious power, however, had hindered an arrest of the general that time, too. Moreover, during the course of his attempt, Umansky also determined that Larionov, whom he had thought to be unemployed, was on the books at the Museum of City History as a consultant and was even receiving a salary.

Knowing better than anyone that the general hardly left the apartment (his strolls along the jetty were the exception), Umansky made quick work of sending an inquiry to the Museum of City History regarding the former general’s employment activities and the nature of his consultations. Unexpectedly, the answer came from Umansky’s own department and, judging from the tone, it assumed no further questions. Umansky stopped there: he was a pragmatist and essentially it was not his calling to be a spiteful person. He decided that in the long run he could find another apartment elsewhere but would not be able to find another general.

Motivated by those considerations, he even attempted to gain the general’s favor. It is interesting that the general, who had narrowed his social circle to an absolute minimum, also conversed with Umansky from time to time. Being people of polar opposite temperaments and convictions, there is no doubt they interested one another. They discussed tactics for close combat and the admissibility of the Brest peace, the expediency of women serving in the army and the work of field kitchens during the autumn-winter period, and, in moments when the general was in a philosophical mood, the moral problematics of Dead Souls, which Nikolai Gogol called a poem.

Life close to the general seemed so edifying for Umansky that it distracted him from the apartment question for a while. The Political Directorate employee even initially had doubts when the opportunity came up, by chance, to move into his own well-appointed apartment. After his superior, Grigory G. Piskun, announced to him that everyone housed on an entire floor had been shot to improve conditions for his subordinate, Umansky thought it awkward not to move into the vacated apartment. After receiving the housing assignment, he arranged a farewell banquet at his former place of residence and did not begrudge the Political Directorate’s stupendous special supplies.

The banquet exceeded all expectations, both in terms of the quantity of refreshments and, so to say, its degree of farewellness. There was an unexpected ring at the door as the event was coming to a close, and the apartment filled with operatives in their leather jackets. Recognizing the arrivals as his co-workers, the man of the hour felt touched, thinking this was an ingenious form of congratulations that befitted the department; he offered drinks to the arrivals. When he was knocked to the floor and held face down, he remarked to those in attendance that the joke had gone too far, but nobody laughed in response. Contrary to Umansky’s expectations, his removal from the apartment was not accompanied by merriment, nor was his shooting, which was carried out in a most serious manner a week after his arrest.

It later became known that the direct reason for Umansky’s arrest turned out to be the ladies he brought home from the embankment. The vigilant Komsomol women—who had been rejected by the person under investigation—sent signals regarding those visits. After the very first face-to-face questioning with some of the ladies (as well as with the Komsomol women), Umansky admitted that his sexual liaisons were indiscriminate and repented sincerely. His statement that—despite an abundance of casual relations—the Political Directorate was the only organ that he, Umansky, was genuinely dedicated to, was also entered into the record of his interrogation.

The problem, however, was not with the ladies from the embankment. It lay in the fact that during a rare visit of foreign vessels to Yalta, those ladies had managed to converse with a crew that had come ashore and allegedly conveyed information of state importance overseas. It was also established that the indiscriminate sexual liaisons were shams, intended in the capacity of cover, and the female citizens who visited Umansky were actually nothing more than intermediaries between him and eleven foreign spies (investigators determined that eleven people had visited Umansky).

Umansky began by objecting that his liaisons were indiscriminate but not shams (this, by the way, was confirmed by all eleven females involved) and that the only thing that had reached him via an intermediary turned out to be gonorrhea (medical documentation was presented), but that was no help. Crushed by the gravity of the evidence, the suspect confessed in short order to everything he was being incriminated of and, to the pleasant surprise of the investigation, even added several hitherto unknown episodes.

In those days, General Larionov and Varvara Petrovna awaited arrest, too: in the eyes of the investigators, the fact that the general was Umansky’s neighbor should, in and of itself, have become one of the most important proofs of Umansky’s guilt. But that did not happen. This is all explained by the fact that Umansky’s superior, Piskun—who had initially favored him and even vacated a large, well-appointed apartment for him—had been severely criticized by his own wife at one time. She had pointed out the fact that the living conditions of his subordinate, Umansky, now surpassed Piskun’s own. Shaken by that fact, Piskun began seeking a way out of the situation that had arisen. Their establishment’s code of honor did not assume the direct reallocation of living space, so Piskun decided to execute Umansky. Only after that—in light of the uselessness of so much living space for a man who had been shot—did Piskun consider it possible to move into the apartment given to Umansky. Under those conditions, neither the room belonging to the general nor the general himself was of interest to Piskun.

Umansky’s mother came to Yalta not long after he was shot; oddly enough, she had come from the city of Uman. She packed her son’s things into three canvas cases then piled everything that would not fit on a huge velvet tablecloth and knotted its corners together in pairs. The general helped her to the bus station. Carrying one case in his hand, he pushed the neighbors’ pram, with the velvety bundle on top. Umansky’s mother carried the other two (lighter) cases. Poplar leaves showered down on them as they walked along Moscow Street on that sunny October morning in 1934. Umansky’s mother set the cases on the ground from time to time and caught her breath. During one of those rests, the woman said she had never approved of her son belonging to the Political Directorate and tenderly recalled the time when he had been a well-known card shark in Uman. That sort of activity seemed more lucrative and not as dangerous, despite regular beatings.

In the early 1970s, that autumn farewell merged in the general’s memory with another, which was also autumnal, but occurred much later and became a typical case of déjà vu (which is, essentially, what permitted those events to blend). Surprisingly, the general could name 1958 as the year for this farewell but could not recollect the circumstances attending it. He even cited the name of the lady he was seeing off: her name was Sofia Christoforovna Pospolitaki. The general was carrying a suitcase and pushing a pram then, too, but there was a child this time. Contrasting with the child’s complete silence, the pram’s springs produced a piercing, almost hysterical, screech. Sofia Christoforovna was embarrassed about this unpleasant sound, even though she was not producing it. She shrank her head into her shoulders with a confused smile. Contrary to the chronology, the general sometimes thought he was accompanying Umansky’s mother again on this second occasion, when she was taking her small son, who had not yet been shot, away from Yalta and out of harm’s way.

Whose child was this? According to the general’s recollections, the child could not have belonged to Sofia Christoforovna, due to her age. All the general could assert with veracity was that the child was not his. Poplar leaves fell on them on Moscow Street, too. A gust of wind blew several leaves under the collar of Sofia Christoforovna’s between-season coat. The general stopped and extracted the leaves out from under her collar and Sofia Christoforovna thanked him, with unexpected duration and warmth. The general found it difficult to say who this lady was and why, exactly, he was seeing her off.

This circumstance prompted him to think that the majority of events in his long life had managed to repeat themselves. And not just once. In order that they not merge completely, the general decided to return to the work he had abandoned as a historian.

‘That,’ said Zoya, ‘was precisely when he began dictating a continuation of his memoirs to my mother.’

Umansky’s room sat unoccupied after he was shot. Piskun’s actions with regard to his colleague had been so rapid that there had just not been enough time to take the latter off the housing registry. Responsible tenant Larionov’s payments had shielded the housing office workers from seeing the bloody, truly Shakespearean drama that had played out between the two Chekists. The housing office simply had not learned about the death of the man from the city of Uman. Now, by a strange confluence of circumstances, the executed Umansky, who had been a big fan of Nikolai Gogol during his lifetime, had turned into a dead soul himself, freeing the general from the threat of someone else being moved in. Umansky’s silent otherness in the housing office’s lists went on for an entire twelve years—right up until the post-war housing audit in 1946, which is when the person who later became Ivan Kolpakov’s father moved into the apartment.

The general’s son was born in an apartment lacking flatmates. It will evidently never be known now if it was the fact of the apartment freeing up that inspired the general to have a child or circumstances of a more personal character (according to rumor, Varvara Petrovna was infertile until she was thirty). Princess Meshcherskaya was of the opinion that the general had simply not wanted to have a child previously because of his uncertainty about remaining alive. The thought of possible arrest sat so firmly in his head that even after marrying Varvara Petrovna in 1924 (this was done secretly) the general did not consider registering their relationship officially with the Soviet authorities, so as not to subject her to danger. On the other hand—and here Shulgin practically refuted the princess’s point of view—why should the general’s perspective on his future have changed at that particular time, in the mid-thirties? An unbiased analysis of the sociopolitical situation did not give even the slightest grounds for that.

Whatever the case, the child appeared. When the general greeted Varvara Petrovna in the lobby at the maternity hospital, he examined the dirty-yellow floor tiles with disgust. Each little square of tile, along with the smell of bleach, came laden with something unbearably Soviet and devoid of human qualities. The general attempted to remember the smells in the military hospitals he had seen—of course bleach had been used to clean there, too, what else did they have for cleaning?—but for some reason the smell was not as oppressive. Sisters of mercy, their hair gathered under white kerchiefs with a red cross in the middle, walked inaudibly from bed to bed.

Glass doors that had lost their transparency (from haphazard whitewash smudges) opened. The first to exit was a fat nurse with a parcel tied in blue ribbon. Varvara Petrovna looked bashfully out at her husband from behind the nurse’s back. The general took the parcel from the nurse and peered at it. He looked long and hard, as if attempting to read the infant’s future fate in his wrinkled and almost hideous face.

‘He looks like you,’ said the nurse, interpreting his gaze in her own way. ‘Couldn’t resemble you more.’

The general silently held out fifty rubles for her. He had been told the day before that medical personnel should be properly thanked: fifty rubles for a boy, thirty for a girl. Talk of equal rights was still out of the question back in 1936.

No, the boy did not resemble him. More specifically, his features—the form of his nose, line of his lips, and shape of his eyes—thoroughly reflected the general’s, but this outward likeness only emphasized the full degree of their overall dissimilarity. This was how wax figures of the greats have nothing in common with their originals precisely because they do not convey what is most important: their enormous force field. The general showed no interest whatsoever when his wax figure was put on display at Madame Tussaud’s museum years later. After absentmindedly glancing at the photograph they sent him, the general placed it in some book or other and forgot about it forever. The wax copy could not surprise him. He saw it in his own son for many years.

They named the boy Filipp. He was born during a time when, in the general’s opinion, it would be better not to be born a man. In the grand scheme of things, it was better not to be born at all.

‘A time of servitude,’ the general defined it in brief, pushing Filipp’s pram uphill, along Botkinskaya Street.

This was the very same pram, the neighbors’, in which Umansky’s things had been delivered to the bus station. The neighbors had handed over the pram to the general’s family for good, in commemoration of the arrival of the general’s firstborn. By the time of the handover, the pram had a thoroughly museum look but, then again, the general was already a museum consultant at the time. Given the state of things, the general found no reason to refuse the gift.

The general neatly cut four narrow strips from his military map case and used them to replace worn-out straps in the pram’s inner workings. He sewed a new canopy from a duffel bag of the thinnest calfskin and attached its edges to the pram’s metal frame.

‘That’s not a pram,’ Tsilya Borisovna Prozument, an employee at the milk kitchen, would repeat. ‘It’s a master-piece of applied art.’

They respected the general at the milk kitchen. They gave him the very best milk, called him papochka and Varvara Petrovna mamochka, and the general liked that. For their part, the employees at the milk kitchen liked that a genuine combat general was doing such civilian things. In that they saw the symbol of something they themselves were unable to express thoroughly, getting by (and what would you say about a general like that?) with only rhetorical questions and interjections.

Unlike his father, Filipp began talking at an early age. Even so, almost nothing that Filipp said when he was very small (admittedly, just like later) lingered in witnesses’ memories. By contrast, the general’s spirited silence was more eloquent. Out of fairness, it is worth noting that Filipp was also not very eager to use his ability to speak, despite having acquired it early. Filipp’s speech primarily boiled down to naming objects he needed but since his requirements were always surprisingly few, his sentences came out sounding correspondingly spare.

Filipp was not a stupid child. When necessary, he dealt with the complexest of tasks, in both school and nonschool contexts. The main difference between him and his father was that there were very few tasks on this Earth that he recognized as necessities. Everything the general did during his life was a necessity for him—he simply had no other reasons for his activeness. What (as Dupont asked in her day) transformed can into must in the general’s life, what forged that life into a continuous chain of necessities? A sense of duty? Ambition? A thirst for activity? All those qualities taken together, defined as a life force? This (asserted Dupont) was in the general. And this was not (asserted Zoya) in Filipp.

After some consideration, Filipp’s mother signed up the ten-year-old for a stamp collecting club. The little boy was taught to pick up stamps with tweezers but no interest in stamp collecting sprang up in him.

‘It develops a child,’ Varvara Petrovna loved to repeat.

‘It envelops a child,’ the general once said.

To the general, collecting stamps seemed like a wretched matter. Filipp stopped going to the stamp collecting club.

At his mother’s insistence, Filipp enrolled in the correspondence program at the Institute of Light Industry after he graduated from high school. Light industry was not Filipp’s calling and had never been an area of interest for him. (It remains unknown if there was ever an area of interest for him.) At the same time, Filipp had never displayed any particular dislike of light industry (he heard an airiness in the very definition of light industry) and he was not against taking courses at the institute.

Filipp worked as a laboratory technician at the Magarach Institute when he was a correspondence student. After finishing his higher education, he became a senior laboratory technician. Although Filipp’s career growth stopped there, he had acquired a genuine passion for the first time in his life: the degustation of wine. Those who explain this passion as an elemental inclination toward alcoholism are not completely correct. In a certain sense, this point of view is based on a statement from the general himself, who once suggested that alcoholism is the lot of low-energy people. This was said in another regard, without specific explanations of what ought to be understood as energy, but the phrase was used concerning the general’s son after some time had passed.

In actuality, Filipp’s initial passion truly was degustation. After several years working at Magarach, he could effortlessly not only determine, by taste, any brand of Crimean wine and its harvest year, but also name the exact place where the vine was located on the mountain’s incline. His degustation sessions were imprinted on the memory of Magarach Institute employees. As one memoir reported, he would swirl the wine with a light wrist motion and observe its slow, thick flow along the sides of the glass while telling of the variety’s characteristics.

It was he who was invited to the most crucial Crimean degustations. Filipp’s soft-spokenness and his long, melancholic fingers made an indelible impression on the Party elite. And though the high-placed guests also asked to have a bottle or two of Stolichnaya (out of foresight, these were kept in the refrigerator, along with brined cucumbers) set out for when they heard stories about the Golitsyn wine cellars, that did not diminish their respectful regard for the taster’s knowledge.

Filipp truly did take to the bottle. Needless to say, that did not happen instantaneously, as some individual employees of the Magarach Institute were inclined to assert. These assertions are explainable because they were fundamentally an attempt to separate the concepts of degustation and alcoholism and, thus, defend the uniform’s honor. By naming 1965 as the date of the senior laboratory technician’s slide into alcoholism, they turn a blind eye to the fact that his consumption of alcohol had, wrote one insider, obviously gone beyond the boundaries of degustation even before 1965. It is another matter entirely that this particular year turned out to be a fateful year in the history of Filipp’s fall: Varvara Petrovna died in 1965. She was the only person who had been restraining Filipp at the precipice that had long loomed.

His relationship toward his father was respectful but could not be called love. Meaning, perhaps, that it was love, but a love that preferred not to meet with its object, inasmuch as possible. Filipp avoided contact with his father from a very early age. The general had never been rough with his son and had not even raised his voice at him, but that fact had not made their relationship any warmer.

Freud played no part here. If Filipp was jealous of his father’s attachment to anyone, it was most likely to fate, which distributes such unequal gifts to people close to one another. He felt like a shadow of his father, and that annoyed him. Abstracting oneself from Filipp’s personal defining traits, it is appropriate to ask: was it possible at all to love a person like the general? Varvara Petrovna considered it possible.

In the end, things even worked out that the general spent his nights in one room and Varvara Petrovna and her son in another. From the perspective of housing permits, this division seemed impeccable. The Kolpakov family lived in one room, the general in another, and in the third were Varvara Petrovna and Filipp, whose father was never officially determined. Nevertheless, even an official determination of paternity would never have canceled out the striking dissimilarity between the general and his son.

Varvara Petrovna’s death caused yet more estrangement between them. Now, they almost never communicated. Filipp locked himself in his room when he came home from work. One could gauge what happened in the room only by his departures for the bathroom during the night: there was paralytic shuffling of feet and spasmodic groping at the whitewashed walls in the hallway. Nothing was known, either, about what happened when he was at work, though his early returns home on cold days evoked constant and unvarying questions from the Kolpakov family. From time to time, acquaintances told the general that his son had been sitting for long periods on benches at the former Tsar’s Garden. That he was standing on the little bridge over the Uchan-su River, leaning heavily on the railing, or simply dozing at the bus station snack bar. The general would nod silently in reply. When he ran into his son on the embankment during daytime hours, he realized Filipp was no longer working anywhere. Filipp refused the help (including money) that the general offered. Eventually, he disappeared.

What was later called a disappearance was most likely an unexpected departure. During the general’s usual outing to the jetty (everyone knew very well what time that was), Filipp showed up at the apartment with a large suitcase. According to Kolpakov, who had recently finished his army service, it was a typical demob suitcase, with aluminum stars fastened to it, a decal of an unknown beauty (made in the GDR), and sweeping letters that indicated the air force. According to Kolpakov, Filipp was absolutely sober. He spent no more than a half-hour in the room then left with his own suitcase (purchased, in Kolpakov’s opinion, at the Yalta flea market), locking the door of his room with a key and saying nothing. Nobody saw him after that.

‘No, people saw him,’ Zoya corrected herself after pausing. ‘He came over soon after the general’s death. They looked at him like he was from Mars.’

Filipp’s room was vacant for several years, until his absence was officially determined. The general had no rights to the room: his marriage to Varvara Petrovna was not registered and Filipp had not even used his name. According to a decision at Yalta’s city hall, the vacant room was given to Nina Fedorovna. The housing commission that came to assume the room used the word emptied. When they forced open the door Filipp had locked, the meaning of the word became apparent to its full extent. It turned out that behind the door there were no books, no furniture, not even any flower pots. There was nothing at all in the room.