Zoya held her pause. Solovyov turned, grasping that a continuation would not follow in the same breath.
‘Where?’
‘At Kozachenko’s. Those dung beetles were digging up everything they could while my mother was busy having me at the maternity hospital.’
The Kozachenko couple rolling a ball of manure popped up in Solovyov’s consciousness: sheets of the general’s memoirs, stuck to the sides of the ball, flashed through his mind. Zoya thought the younger Kozachenko would not give up those sheets very easily. Not because he needed them (what, after all, could he have done with them?) but because of the unshakable inherited rule not to let out of one’s hands anything that had ever fallen into them.
Now Zoya—they had left the beach and were walking slowly along Botkinskaya Street—had a plan. Solovyov looked from time to time at the museum employee’s jet-black hair, which was tangled after swimming; he was discovering her for himself all over again. Absolutely nothing Chekhovian remained in what she was proposing. Zoya thought the only chance of obtaining the manuscript from Taras Kozachenko was to conduct a secret search of his, Taras’s, room. Zoya leaned on Solovyov’s shoulder as she shook beach pebbles out of her sandal.
‘But maybe,’ Solovyov was awkwardly supporting Zoya by the waist, ‘…maybe we should start by actually asking Taras?’
‘No way. Then he’ll bury that manuscript once and for all and we’ll never see it again. Our strength is in him not knowing what, exactly, we’re going to look for.’
Solovyov looked at Zoya with doubt; his gaze did not escape her.
‘This was dreamt up for your sake, after all…’
Solovyov felt that in full. Lagging a half-step behind Zoya, his shoulders grazed against willow branches that drooped almost to the sidewalk and he thought about the unpredictability of a historian’s work.
When they reached her house, she asked him to come inside. All the residents were present on Saturday. Besides Taras, Yekaterina Ivanovna Kolpakova was standing in the kitchen: Solovyov had only heard about her up until now. Despite Galina Artemovna (Taras’s mother) poisoning Yekaterina Ivanovna’s husband; despite his cheating on Yekaterina Ivanovna with that very same Kozachenko woman and his murder of Petr Terentyevich, Taras’s father; and despite, finally, Galina Artemovna ending her life as a result of all those events… The relationships among those still alive were completely calm. Their relationships could even be called amicable, to that certain degree possible under communal apartment conditions.
Among Russian people, a vendetta ceases just as suddenly, and without motivation, as it begins. Hostility fades in a chain of uninteresting events, just as an echo fades in a sultry Crimean pine forest and just as graves fade in the tall weeds of Russian cemeteries. Yekaterina and Taras frequently went to Yalta’s cemetery together, which was notable, even by Russian standards. This was not so much a triumph of reconciliation as a matter of something being convenient and perhaps even mutually beneficial for both of them. Yekaterina Ivanovna bought inexpensive begonias for the three graves and Taras brought a cart with a twenty-liter canister of water, something that was in catastrophically short supply at the cemetery. While visiting their relatives ( landsmen, as Yekaterina Ivanovna sometimes jokingly called them), they divided the begonias and the water evenly amongst the graves.
Zoya and Solovyov stayed in the kitchen after greeting the neighbors. To Solovyov’s surprise, his companion not only entered into conversation with the others but also asked him to tell them about the Hermitage—you know, what you were telling me today—after which she went to her room anyway, leaving Solovyov in the middle of the kitchen with his strange story. Taras and Yekaterina Ivanovna stood in the corner, leaning against the general’s cabinet, and were, ludicrously enough, truly prepared to take in Solovyov’s narrative. After stating that the Hermitage, along with the Louvre, is one of the leading museums in the world, Solovyov noted, unseen by his listeners, that Zoya had left her room with a finger to her lips. As Solovyov told of the number of exhibits at the Hermitage (to Yekaterina Ivanovna’s restrained moan), Zoya flattened herself against the wall and sidestepped her way to Taras’s door. Solovyov faltered from the unexpectedness. Zoya made a scary face and—making her hand into a sort of bird’s beak—gestured to the storyteller that he should not stop speaking.
If one were to stand next to each exhibit for thirty seconds (Zoya disappeared into Taras’s room) and be at the Hermitage every day from morning until evening, one would need eight years to see all the exhibits.
‘Eight?’ Yekaterina Ivanovna asked for clarification.
Zoya appeared in Taras’s doorway, noiselessly tossed up her hands, and disappeared into the depths of the room once again.
‘No fewer than eight,’ Solovyov reiterated.
Taras took a bottle of kefir from the refrigerator, shook it, and poured some into a tea bowl with chipped edges. He chose an unscathed section and pressed his puffy lips to it. Taras asked nothing about the Hermitage. He listened silently to Solovyov, licking away his broad white mustache from time to time. And Solovyov, who would never have agreed of his own free will to infiltrate Taras’s room, felt like a genuine plotter, if only because he had to conspire a story with a plot for those standing before him. His descriptions grew more emotional, evoking in his listeners interest mixed with light surprise. The surprise increased when the story suddenly cut off (Zoya had silently closed the door behind her and slipped into her room) and Solovyov vanished to Zoya’s room, saying goodbye along the way. Those who remained, standing, had the sense of something left unsaid.
‘I didn’t find the manuscript,’ said Zoya after Solovyov closed the door behind him. ‘But this turned up in a drawer.’
She twirled a ring of keys on her finger.
‘I’m sure he has the manuscript. We’ll have time to look at everything carefully on Monday, when he goes to work.’
‘Zoya…’
This turned out to be the only objection Solovyov was allowed to utter. Zoya placed her finger with the keys to his lips and peered into the hallway. Once she was certain nobody was left in the kitchen, she stole toward the front door on tiptoe and beckoned to Solovyov. Involuntarily copying Zoya’s motions, he took several steps toward the exit. He stopped between Zoya and the door. Her hand touched the massive hook hanging on an eye, attached to the side of the door that did not open. The hook readily began swinging as it slid along an indentation that had formed over the years.
‘Foucault’s pendulum,’ she whispered right into his ear. ‘I’ll take Monday off.’
Solovyov spent Sunday morning in church. This was the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which was elegant, its five cupolas towering over Kirov Street (formerly Autskaya Street). As Solovyov ascended the stone staircase, he imagined the general entering the church.
The general came here often during his trips to Yalta. In the winter of 1920, he flew up this staircase like a large bird of prey; the flaps of his military overcoat extended over the steps, his entourage dispersed at his sides. He walked a little more slowly in the summer, as if he were watching a military formation on the platz, but he saw messy columns of paupers who had flowed there from all of boundless Russia, as they did in those days. A military orderly walking a half-step behind him tossed coins to them.
It was stuffy in the church during the summer. Neither an open side door nor a flung-open window lent any coolness. Through them poured Yalta’s damp, sweltering heat, scented with acacias and the sea, and vaguely trembling over the candles’ unmoving flame. Streaks of sunlight pierced the duskiness inside the church, illuminating the large drops of sweat that flew off the priest's nose and chin with his every movement. Even the general, who usually hardly perspired, kept wiping his forehead and neck with a silk handkerchief. In those services, which were anything but simple, Larionov saw a special southern charm that consisted of the fact that, for one thing, at the end of the liturgy he would take a hundred-meter walk along Morskaya Street and find himself on an embankment that glistened in the surf and he would breathe, full-chested, after unfastening the top buttons of his service jacket.