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.