‘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 falclass="underline" Varvara Petrovna died in 1965. She was the only person who had been restraining Filipp at the precipice that had long loomed.