‘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?