Solovyov and Larionov

9

The general’s parents sent him to the Second Cadet Corps at the age of ten. We will acknowledge the anachronism of the previous sentence and leave it at that. In some sense, he was already a general as a ten-year-old because strictly (although nonhistorically) speaking, he was always a general. Who could have dared imagine him as anything other than a general? Dupont had already posed that question in her day. And—in the article ‘This Is Not Today’s Tribe’—she answered in her characteristically uncompromising manner: nobody.

In dictating to Nina Fedorovna his recollections of the years of his life at the Second Corps, the general emphasized that the gold stitching on the black uniforms at that educational institution was somewhat thinner than in other corps (the First, the Nikolaevsky, and even the Alexandersky, for example), not to mention that the trousers for the Second Corps’ cadets, unlike those for many other corps, were dark blue, not black. The general also pointed out that later, when weapons handling was introduced in the combatant companies, the Second Corps was given the right to carry dragoon sabers on sword belts as the guards did.

They rose early, at six in the morning. To a horn. That was fine in summer, during the white nights, but it was intolerable in winter. In summer, the future general rose a half hour before reveille so he could greet the horn fully conscious, in order not to let it horn in on his sweetest morning dreams. That did not work out in winter. He could not bear to leave a bed warmed during the night and plunge into the bedroom’s penetrating cold. The temperature never rose above ten degrees there, that was the rule. In the late nineteenth century, it was not recommended that young men sleep in warm quarters.

They washed in cold water to the waist and that was a little worse than the horn. They went out on the platz in just woolen jackets. In any weather. It is possible that this Spartan training drew cadet Larionov’s attention to King Leonidas’s feat. The opposite, however, cannot be ruled out, either: that the Spartan king’s feat reconciled Larionov to such a harsh routine. What does remain a fact is that both the Spartan training, and the cadet’s extensive familiarity with the course of battle, came in very, very handy for him during his mature years.

When he walked outside for morning formations, Larionov would try not to notice the snowflakes melting underneath his collar. He thought about how the Spartans—who, generally speaking, were connoisseurs of difficulty—did not have a problem like the Russian cold. Larionov would lift his head from time to time and look at his classmates huddled in the darkness of the December platz. They were small, not awake, and covered in bits of ice. In the glint of the gaslights, only the insignias on their hats, polished to glimmering, and their red noses, were visible. Their eyes watered from the prickly morning wind and from sleep that had not passed. The difficulties did not break them. On the contrary, they nourished them, tempering body and spirit. They grew into strong fellows and genuine officers. ‘They have all died,’ the general wrote over one line.

Cadet Lanskoy had a special place in the general’s life at that time. The general obviously singled out this handsome and, judging from the description, arrogant boy in his reminiscences. Cadets Larionov and Lanskoy stuck together for several years. Their relations were not friendship in the usual sense. Lanskoy did absolutely nothing to bring about or, later, strengthen those relations. His contribution to the friendship was that he permitted himself to be admired.

In some certain way, Lanskoy was worth admiring. He was possibly the best student of all, without making visible efforts. He pronounced his answers softly and even, somehow, condescendingly. This annoyed the teachers, but there was nothing to find fault in. His audacity was reckless. On a dare, he swam under the ice of the Zhdanovka River, from one hole in the ice to another. Despite very strict rules, he sometimes left the corps’ billeting before bedtime and returned toward morning, through the window.

One time, cadet Larionov escaped with him. After changing into civilian clothes, they rambled around snow-covered Petersburg for half the night. Larionov felt absolutely wretched about it. Violating discipline felt like genuine betrayal to him. He himself would have been hard pressed to say what, exactly, he had betrayed, but he had no doubt that betrayal had come to pass. Around 2:30, the cadets dropped in at a tavern and ordered a half-glass of vodka each. They managed to return unnoticed that night but in the morning Larionov, who had never before been sick, got sick. His temperature rose. He was hit with the chills. Tears streamed from his eyes. They were tears of repentance but nobody knew that. Nobody but Lanskoy. He visited Larionov at the infirmary on the third day and said, ‘Larionov, you’re a decent person. You’re sick from violating the routine. You shouldn’t have escaped with me.’

Cadet Larionov expected his friend to visit him again but that did not happen. After Larionov’s release from the infirmary, Lanskoy greeted him from afar. Larionov nodded and did not even approach him. They fell out of touch after graduating from the corps.

The majority of subjects (other than languages) were taught at the corps by military men. Cadets were supposed to have six lessons a day, followed by horseback riding and drill training. At first, riding devoured almost all Larionov’s attention. It is likely that this is the age that should be considered the beginning of the general’s long conversations with horses, something referred to in the literature (such as cavalry commander Semyon Budyonny’s A Good Attitude Toward Horses) multiple times.

After familiarizing himself with the events at Thermopylae, tactics became another of the boy’s favorite subjects. When he read those lines, Solovyov recalled a pencil sketch of a battle map that he had discovered in a Petersburg archive. By comparing the document with analogous sketches—at least eighteen battle maps of Thermopylae are attributed to cadet Larionov—it was possible to prove, without a doubt, that it belonged to the future general. The particular interest of that discovery consisted not only in the drawing being the earliest of those known but also that Leonidas himself was depicted in the upper right-hand corner of the sheet, in a general’s epaulets and with a two-headed eagle on his chest.

Among non-military subjects, Larionov liked dance. Considering the child’s overall mentality, this passion might appear somewhat unexpected, but that was only at first glance. Unlike their successors, in those days Russian officers loved to dance and did so capably. The Russian officers’ corps was very refined. Their well-balanced development—this was exactly what the cadets of the Second Corps were striving for—supposed more than manliness. It supposed elegance, too.

On top of all that, the cadet’s attitude toward dance was affected by a statement from the corps’ charter that had been framed and placed in the dance hall. According to Gurkovsky’s The Cadet Corps of the Russian Empire, the note held that the system for teaching dance was developed by a French dance school and took into consideration grace and beauty as well as the human body’s possibilities for expressing itself, both when resting and when moving. This text was the first to direct Larionov’s attention to the human figure’s plentiful possibilities.

The child also had a weakness for extracurricular reading. A housefather conducted this, reading classic Russian literature aloud to his charges. After noting Larionov’s interest in reading—as well as the cadet’s exemplary pronunciation—the housefather often instructed the boy to read aloud. The elderly soldier would sit in a corner of the classroom, cover his eyes with his hand, and listen to his pupil’s reading. He would bob his head approvingly in time with the reading, which would have given the impression of absorbed attention had the bobbing not been implausibly rhythmic. Sometimes a faint whistle would sound from his inflated nostrils, through a brush of coarse hair. They read Pushkin’s Poltava, Lermonotov’s Borodino, and Gogol’s Taras Bulba, but everyone especially liked Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors.

The whistling would cease at the first lines of the Zhukovsky. Absolute silence, though, came with a later stanza: ‘Our Figner, dressed as an old man, enters / The enemy camp in the dead of night; / Steals like a shadow among their tents, / Sees everything there with his sharp eyes…’ Over all, just ‘Our Figner, dressed as an old man’ would have been enough, on its own, to attract attention, pronounced as it was almost as one word. And he was stealing in, too, among tents…

In 1894, Larionov allegedly read aloud the short story ‘Surgery’, which his father had brought for him. Accustomed to Russian classics, the housefather woke up but did not interrupt the cadet. The housefather liked the story, thanks to his own experience in dentistry. Upon learning that Chekhov was the author of the work, he wrote a letter to Lev Tolstoy, asking him if Anton Chekhov was a classic. Tolstoy did not answer. It should be concluded from this that in 1894 Chekhov was not yet a classic. Construction had not even begun on his Yalta home.

The reading repertoire for the wards of the Second Cadet Corps was not limited to the aforementioned works, however. Under their mattresses, hiding from their housefather’s eyes, were novels by Madame Genlis, verses from

Mister Barkov, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? —all copied out in the cadets’ distinct hands. When the elderly general recalled those years, he expressed admiration in the fact of copying Chernyshevsky’s novel. It was not just the copying but also the very reading of that thing that seemed like some sort of feat to him. From the memoirist’s point of view, Russian letters had never generated a more helpless text.

The old housefather discovered those books during an inspection of the cadets’ bedroom. After lengthy convincing by his students, he left them Madame de Genlis. In the end, he even agreed to turn a blind eye to Barkov. But he simply could not reconcile himself with Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s work: the very mention of that surname sent him into a fit of rage. He threatened to expel from the corps and court martial the boy who had copied the novel. His identity could not be established then (it is possible that nobody wanted to), but the general knew it well. He considered it possible to mention only eight decades later, when there was no longer any threat to the copyist. He was cadet Lanskoy.

The housefather’s reaction was explainable. The Second Cadet Corps felt a share of responsibility in everything concerning Chernyshevsky. He had entered the corps as a tutor in 1853, while preparing his master’s dissertation. It is unlikely that this particular circumstance served as the beginning of all his troubles, but speaking purely chronologically—there is no getting around this—that circumstance preceded his troubles. Temporal as well as spatial patterns were later established, too.

Colonel Pazukhin, the ballistics instructor, drew wide-spread attention to the fact that the key points in the city for this writer and democrat fell along a single straight line. The Second Cadet Corps (place of work) → No. 7, Zhdanovskaya Embankment (place of residence) → Peter and Paul Fortress (place of imprisonment) → Mytinskaya Square (place of mock civil execution). In becoming familiar with these patterns, cadet Larionov could not have known that, by virtue of the connectedness of everything on earth, historian Solovyov—a researcher studying General Larionov’s battles with the consequences of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s work—would rent a room on that very same straight line (No. 11, Zhdanovskaya Embankment). This method for structuring thoughts, which was far from simple, forced Solovyov to tear himself away from the text and look at the sail of a distant yacht. A moment later he was reading again.

Entering the corps did not at all signify that the future general was isolated from the outside world. After passing an exam for his ability to salute and stand at attention, he was granted the right to go outside. Like cadets of other corps, the wards of the Second Corps had but one limitation: they were prohibited from walking on the sunny side of Nevsky Prospekt. It is possible that this prohibition was seen as a part of their Spartan education, as a necessary measure for acquainting the cadets with the shady side of life.

Sometimes the cadets were taken to the theater. These outings were a real holiday for them. Their time did not yet possess contemporary entertainment opportunities. Theater, which has now receded into the realm of the elite, was at the vanguard of the nineteenth century’s entertainment industry. As a means for education, theater was considered a mixed blessing or—depending upon the type of show—even dangerous. The theater was closed for Great Lent.

At the cadet corps, the preferred theater was the Alexandrinsky and the preferred show was Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Storm. According to the future general’s calculations, the cadets went to see The Storm sixteen times during his years of schooling. Such an obvious preference for one play over all others was explained by the housefather’s personal biases. His sympathy for Katerina manifested itself so visibly at the theater that those around him would begin to turn to look at him. From the very first line of the show, the aging soldier would sit, grasping at the armrests of his seat. Indignant at Boris’s spinelessness, he would crumple his peaked army cap and hit himself on the knee with it. During Kabanikha’s monologues, he would lift his own huge fist and, slowly, with a despairing grimace, sink it into the loge’s raspberry-colored velvet. When Katerina said, ‘Why is it that people can’t fly!’ the housemaster’s facial features would collapse immediately and he would cover his face with his hands, then begin sobbing as loudly as if he were baying. The civilian audience, who had already long been looking into the hall rather than the stage, would fall silent in respect. They were shaken by the Russian Army’s sentimentality.

Larionov returned home during school vacations. Oddly enough, his parents’ attempts to spoil the child brought him no joy whatsoever. He visited sweet shops primarily out of filial obedience and, to the surprise of those around him, did not exhibit his previous enjoyment when washing down airy éclairs with orangeade. It seemed to him (and this was the whole point) that with conduct such as this, he was betraying the Spartan ideals he had adopted, that each outing to an establishment of this sort nullified his months of drill training, washing with ice-cold water, and wakeups before the morning horn. All that reconciled the cadet with visits to the sweet shop was that, generally speaking, the food at the corps was pretty good. According to those in command, food limitations were not part of a Spartan-style education. Future officers needed to eat well.

Larionov’s parents’ non-military conversations seemed strange to the boy. He heard vagary and something unconvincing in the tone of their conversations, though the topics under discussion agitated him very much at the time, despite (or perhaps because of?) their civilian nature. And so the cadet recalled discussions of the life philosophy of their distant relative Baroness von Kruger, who had entered into marriage four times. They had talked about the baroness in the family before, too, but this grew more frequent when she entered into new marriages. At the same time, the elder Larionovs, who held dear their reputation as liberals, allowed no direct condemnation of the baroness and when in public even remarked along the lines that what was happening with the baroness only emphasized her exactitude and maximalism.

The fact that Baroness von Kruger gathered all four husbands together and had dinner with them at a restaurant called The Bear became a critical point in the Larionovs’ relationship with their relative. Larionov’s mother burst into tears upon learning that news and said she would not allow the baroness in their home. At the meek objections of Larionov’s father, who held that such a meeting could not make their relative’s quadruple-marriage situation any worse, Larionov’s mother shouted, ‘How can you not understand that this is absolutely, simply shockingly unseemly?!’

The cadet, who had witnessed the scene, mentally swore to himself not to do anything of the kind. For many years, the notion of shocking actions was, for Larionov, linked to that very incident.

‘To that very inci—’ is, if one is absolutely precise, the end of the manuscript that reached Solovyov. The page to which ‘…dent’ was carried was missing and thus, in some sense, the full word was reconstructed. Solovyov looked through all the pages again. There was no doubt: the manuscript was incomplete. He thought about how it held a huge value even though it was incomplete, since any publication of new information about the general’s childhood years…

Even so, his primary feeling was disappointment. During the time he was reading the manuscript, Solovyov had managed to get used to its completeness, rather he had not allowed the possibility that it was incomplete. With its sudden cut-off, it was as if Solovyov had slipped from the height of happiness where he had initially found himself. ‘There it is,’ thought the historian as he stood, ‘ingratitude.’ His legs had fallen asleep from sitting still and he had difficulty negotiating the several steps that led to the top of the embankment.

Solovyov bought a plastic folder at a kiosk, placed the manuscript inside, and set off aimlessly along the embankment. He skirted the Oreanda Hotel and ended up by the monument to Maxim Gorky. He could not remember anything the general had said about Gorky, though he certainly had said something about him… Gorky was standing in his peasant shirt and tar-blackened boots. The road behind him divided in two: an upper road and a lower road. Not a word on the marble pedestal indicated what awaited the traveler. Along which road, one might ask, would Gorky himself have traveled? After choosing the lower, Solovyov remembered, word for word, the general’s statement about the writer: ‘He is walking along a downward path’ (1930). This was truly a Yaltan image. Other than the embankment, all the city’s paths led downward.

There was a café at the end of the lower, tree-lined path (interwoven acacia branches, a thick shadow). They served cold kvass soup as a first course and rice pilaf as the second. The pilaf was nothing special but the soup was wonderful. Solovyov ordered another serving of soup instead of dessert and ate it slowly. Very slowly, the way one eats something that cannot go cold. He was sitting on a covered veranda, watching the tablecloth and a mysterious potted plant flutter in a refreshing wind. Solovyov ate the soup; his free hand rested on a cool metal railing. Beyond the railing—with no transition whatsoever—there began the huge blue sea.

He did not return home until after dark. The doorbell rang about fifteen minutes after his arrival. Solovyov was not expecting anyone. Knowing that one should exercise caution in southern cities in the evenings, he asked, ‘Who’s there?’

‘Zoya.’

Solovyov could not have confused that voice with any other. Zoya truly was standing outside the door. She had changed out of the gauzy, sheer dresses he had seen on her all these days and into blue jeans and a light-colored T-shirt. A gym bag hung on her shoulder. Solovyov stepped aside and Zoya came in, unhurried. There was something in her new guise that made her look like a camper, but there was no doubt that it became her. She even sat down as people sit at a train station, placing the bag on her knees and pulling her crossed feet under the chair.

‘How’s the manuscript?’ Zoya asked. ‘Were your hopes justified?’

‘It turned out to be incomplete… it cuts off in the middle of a word, can you believe it?’

‘Is that right?’

Zoya unzipped the bag with a slow, somehow even sleepy motion.

‘That manuscript’s still very important,’ said Solovyov, checking himself. ‘I couldn’t have dreamt of a stroke of luck like that.’

‘Well then, we’ll look more,’ said Zoya, extracting a huge bunch of grapes. ‘We need to find it in its entirety.’

‘Need to? But where?’

‘We have to think.’

A two-liter plastic bottle appeared on the table right after the grapes. Contrary to the inscription on the label, it was certainly not Pepsi-Cola sloshing inside. The dense, wavy flow along the bottle’s walls attested to the nobleness of the beverage. Just as a person’s breeding can be sensed by a very first motion.

‘It’s Massandra wine, Nesterenko brought it,’ said Zoya, nodding at the bottle. ‘His sister works at the winery.’

There were no wine glasses to be found in the apartment so Solovyov brought two faceted glasses from the kitchen. He held the massive bottle with both hands as he poured the wine. The wine came out in irregular glugs, yielding from time to time to air that wanted to enter. The bottle seemed like a living being to Solovyov. It grunted, as if offended, when it inhaled. Its plastic sides trembled spasmodically under the young man’s hands. He set the bottle on the floor after pouring half a glass each for himself and Zoya. The vessel turned out to be disproportionally large for the table where they were sitting, and even the faceted glasses lacked the power to ease that contrast.

‘To the success of our searches,’ said Zoya.

The wine’s unusual properties stunned Solovyov. Its full body and bouquet reminded him of a liqueur, but still it remained wine. After drinking some, Solovyov imagined what the contents of amphorae had been like. He sensed the flavor of a nectar he had read about when studying ancient sources. The young historian had no doubt that the ancients had extolled this very liquid. It was this very liquid the Greek gods had tasted during their rare forays into the Northern Black Sea Region.

Zoya saw that he liked the wine. She herself was drinking it in small swallows, first as a lady, and, second, as a person spoiled by a divine beverage. Plucking off the grapes, Zoya brought them to her mouth without hurrying, then placed them between her front teeth. The grapes held that position for a few moments, offering a demonstration of both the elegant form of Zoya’s teeth and their whiteness. Then the grapes disappeared in her mouth and rolled around behind her cheeks for a while. The Petersburg researcher found this transfer of grapes erotic but could not bring himself to say anything aloud. Solovyov’s helper was, without a doubt, a connoisseur of the grape.

‘Taras knows we were in his room today.’ Zoya did not change her pose or stop eating grapes as she announced this. ‘Yekaterina Ivanovna told him everything.’

Solovyov leaned against the back of the chair. The old-fashioned lampshade was stratifying in their faceted glasses, blending its dark-pink light with the wine’s burgundy color.

‘How will you…’ Solovyov took hold of his glass (the colors disconnected again). ‘How will you go home now?’

Zoya shrugged. ‘Who the hell knows what that Taras will do? You can never guess what to expect from someone timid like that.’ Zoya plucked yet another grape. ‘They told me he was beside himself.’

‘You can’t go home today. Stay with me.’

The grape in her teeth stayed there longer than usual and Solovyov knew Zoya was smiling.

‘I think that would look strange. No. I’ll crash at the train station today and tomorrow the whole thing will be forgotten. Everything gets forgotten in the end.’

‘You’re spending tonight at my place.’

Zoya fell silent. She took a sip of wine and used an easy football-like motion to roll a stray grape along the table. They could hear nocturnal cars driving past outside the window, on the former Autskaya Street. The shaven-headed Crimean elite was racing around at high speed in imported cars with blinding headlights. The baleful sighs of a trolleybus were occasionally audible when silence set in. The trolleybus would slow down, its crossbars clicking somewhere up among the junctions of the overhead wires, and then the vehicle would gather speed again. Cafeteria workers—tired and untalkative, with bulging shopping bags at their feet—were riding the dimly lighted trolleybus. Young Yaltan ladies, their faces made up, were riding. Veterans of various wars, intoxicated by alcohol, were riding; they had put on their medals beforehand so the police would not beat them. The veterans swayed along when the trolleybus turned and their decorations produced a quiet, melodic jingle.

Zoya went to bed on the couch, Solovyov on a folding cot. The only sheets (the same ones Solovyov had been sleeping on) were given to her. Zoya herself expressed readiness to accept them. The guest also assigned sleeping spots. Solovyov was fairly happy that everything was resolving itself without his involvement. Even so, when Zoya flicked the light switch, it was not without sadness that he acknowledged he had assumed events might develop differently. But it turned out this assumption of his was unacceptable for the girl from the Chekhov Museum.

‘Good night.’ There was the sound of a T-shirt being pulled off.

‘Good night.’

Lying in the dark, Solovyov listened, futilely, for Zoya’s breathing. The silence in the room felt unnatural to him. He thought that perhaps Zoya was purposely not moving because she was listening for him. He was afraid even to inhale loudly: the fold-out bed let out a savage screech at the slightest motion. He did not know what time it was, though all he would have to do to find out was turn toward the lighted electronic clock. But Solovyov did not turn. He was afraid even to open his eyes.

When he opened them, the room turned out to be less dark. Meaning not absolutely dark. Whether it was the moon or the coming dawn, the outlines of objects could be seen fairly clearly. The bottle’s silhouette on the table. An uneaten bunch of grapes resembling Mount Ayu-Dag. The glisten of Zoya’s belt buckle on the chair. Solovyov caught his breath: that glisten intensified his feelings to their limit, just as the motion of a train had in another time. Perhaps even more strongly. He tried to figure out if Zoya was sleeping. Her head was dark on the white spot of a pillow; her arms were behind the back of her head. Nobody sleeps like that… The fold-out bed squeaked as Solovyov touched the bottom of his belly and sensed moisture. Whether Zoya was sleeping or not—for some reason, Solovyov did not doubt this—she was lying there completely naked.

Cool air was beginning to waft through the open window. That meant it really was dawn.

‘I’m cold,’ Zoya said, as calmly as if she were continuing a conversation.

‘I can close the window,’ said Solovyov, not moving.

‘I’m cold.’

In that repetition there was no apparent point and there was no intonation—there was nothing there but rhythm. Solovyov recognized that rhythm flawlessly. With a feline motion, he leapt off the fold-out bed without a single squeak. He went over to Zoya’s bed and pressed his legs into her. He felt Zoya’s hair on his damp skin. A moment later he was lying next to her.

‘Hold on…’

As if out of nowhere, she took a condom and placed it in Solovyov’s hot hand. As he put on the condom, Solovyov had no time to be properly surprised that it had appeared.

A second later, Zoya’s legs had entwined behind his back with unexpected strength. This was no comparison for Leeza’s bashful love. There had never before been such energy, flexibility, and passion in his life. Never before had Solovyov felt such powerlessness over his body. Never before had the image of a boat amid waves been so close for him. That image was the last thing that flashed through Solovyov’s mind before his final plunge into the abyss. A hurricane had been hiding behind the museum employee’s outward phlegmatism.