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.
8
Solovyov’s doorbell rang at eight o’clock the next morning.
It was Zoya.
‘It’s Saturday,’ she said. ‘I’m going to the beach. Want to come with me?’
Solovyov could not wake up at all. It seemed like he kept having a strange, perhaps not completely seemly, dream, in which either Zoya or Leeza Larionova was waking him up early in the morning…
‘Yes, I do.’
Leeza Larionova really had woken him up when he was young, and he had liked that. She would appear soundlessly, like the first snow, which betrayed its own arrival by imparting a certain glow to a room and an improbable whiteness to the ceiling. She would close the door behind her and look at him silently. He would wake up from that gaze.
‘Of course I do.’
He was planning to invite Zoya to have some breakfast and was about to put on the teakettle but Zoya said they could have breakfast at the beach. She even refused to sit down and half-smiled as she observed Solovyov hastily tucking his shirt into his shorts.
At the beach they bought a few hot savory pastries—chebureki—and two bottles of cola. They settled on their towels and began their breakfast. The chebureki turned out to be so hot—and greasy, too—that Solovyov froze in a position of bewildered expectation, his back straightened, and making a helpless gesture. The fatty liquid oozed through his fingers and disappeared into the pebbles, steaming. Zoya took some tissues out of her bag and wiped Solovyov’s hands, one finger at a time, unhurried, then showed him how to hold a cheburek properly. She was never at a loss, this Chekhov Museum employee, even in the most complex of situations.
But the cola was cold, very cold. And not fatty. Solovyov placed the neck of the bottle to his mouth and observed the cola’s vortex-like motion inside the bottle. What seethed right in front of Solovyov’s own eyes blended with the surf, even seeming larger and more significant than the surf, and it entered his parched throat as if it were the Black Sea’s most festive wave. He drank the whole bottle without stopping.
After breakfast, there was swimming. As they approached the water (Zoya took Solovyov by the hand), they took several steps in the foam of a departing wave and walked into the approaching wave. The feeling of the first time did not leave Solovyov. Surprised at his own recklessness, he followed Zoya into the deep water. His froggish flailing was no match for the rhythmic smoothness of Zoya’s motions, but he was swimming even so, and he was swimming without anyone’s help.
Zoya’s obvious superiority did not dishearten Solovyov; on the contrary, it probably attracted him. It might even have aroused him a little. In the end, superiority in the watery element really indicates nothing; everything could take a completely different turn on solid ground anyway. But every bar set higher than his own gave rise to Solovyov’s competitive interest, and that interest (as he pondered the matter in hindsight) had been lacking in his relationship with Leeza. Why had Leeza been embarrassed about her merits?
The sun was no longer a morning sun and it stood, unmoving, somewhere over the central part of the beach, burning full blast. Zoya took out some thin lotion that squeezed out on Solovyov’s scorching back with a snorting sound. An instant later, he sensed it spreading concentrically along his neck, shoulder blades, and lower back. The lotion’s cool freshness was becoming a quality of Zoya’s fingers.
‘You know, I keep thinking about what the general dictated to my mother. You must want to find that?’
She had switched to the informal you. And so naturally.
‘Yes, I do.’
Zoya’s fingers were massaging Solovyov’s thighs. He felt his legs shuddering, involuntarily, in time with Zoya’s motions. It felt to him as if the whole beach was enviously following along with his pleasure, not allowing him to receive that pleasure to its full extent.
‘Those sheets of paper couldn’t have just vanished without a trace. This doesn’t hurt?’ He sensed the rhythm of Zoya’s hands somewhere a little below his knee. ‘I think I even know where they could be.’