Larionov returned home during school vacations. Oddly enough, his parents’ attempts to spoil the child brought him no joy whatsoever. He visited sweet shops primarily out of filial obedience and, to the surprise of those around him, did not exhibit his previous enjoyment when washing down airy éclairs with orangeade. It seemed to him (and this was the whole point) that with conduct such as this, he was betraying the Spartan ideals he had adopted, that each outing to an establishment of this sort nullified his months of drill training, washing with ice-cold water, and wakeups before the morning horn. All that reconciled the cadet with visits to the sweet shop was that, generally speaking, the food at the corps was pretty good. According to those in command, food limitations were not part of a Spartan-style education. Future officers needed to eat well.
Larionov’s parents’ non-military conversations seemed strange to the boy. He heard vagary and something unconvincing in the tone of their conversations, though the topics under discussion agitated him very much at the time, despite (or perhaps because of?) their civilian nature. And so the cadet recalled discussions of the life philosophy of their distant relative Baroness von Kruger, who had entered into marriage four times. They had talked about the baroness in the family before, too, but this grew more frequent when she entered into new marriages. At the same time, the elder Larionovs, who held dear their reputation as liberals, allowed no direct condemnation of the baroness and when in public even remarked along the lines that what was happening with the baroness only emphasized her exactitude and maximalism.
The fact that Baroness von Kruger gathered all four husbands together and had dinner with them at a restaurant called The Bear became a critical point in the Larionovs’ relationship with their relative. Larionov’s mother burst into tears upon learning that news and said she would not allow the baroness in their home. At the meek objections of Larionov’s father, who held that such a meeting could not make their relative’s quadruple-marriage situation any worse, Larionov’s mother shouted, ‘How can you not understand that this is absolutely, simply shockingly unseemly?!’
The cadet, who had witnessed the scene, mentally swore to himself not to do anything of the kind. For many years, the notion of shocking actions was, for Larionov, linked to that very incident.
‘To that very inci—’ is, if one is absolutely precise, the end of the manuscript that reached Solovyov. The page to which ‘…dent’ was carried was missing and thus, in some sense, the full word was reconstructed. Solovyov looked through all the pages again. There was no doubt: the manuscript was incomplete. He thought about how it held a huge value even though it was incomplete, since any publication of new information about the general’s childhood years…
Even so, his primary feeling was disappointment. During the time he was reading the manuscript, Solovyov had managed to get used to its completeness, rather he had not allowed the possibility that it was incomplete. With its sudden cut-off, it was as if Solovyov had slipped from the height of happiness where he had initially found himself. ‘There it is,’ thought the historian as he stood, ‘ingratitude.’ His legs had fallen asleep from sitting still and he had difficulty negotiating the several steps that led to the top of the embankment.
Solovyov bought a plastic folder at a kiosk, placed the manuscript inside, and set off aimlessly along the embankment. He skirted the Oreanda Hotel and ended up by the monument to Maxim Gorky. He could not remember anything the general had said about Gorky, though he certainly had said something about him… Gorky was standing in his peasant shirt and tar-blackened boots. The road behind him divided in two: an upper road and a lower road. Not a word on the marble pedestal indicated what awaited the traveler. Along which road, one might ask, would Gorky himself have traveled? After choosing the lower, Solovyov remembered, word for word, the general’s statement about the writer: ‘He is walking along a downward path’ (1930). This was truly a Yaltan image. Other than the embankment, all the city’s paths led downward.
There was a café at the end of the lower, tree-lined path (interwoven acacia branches, a thick shadow). They served cold kvass soup as a first course and rice pilaf as the second. The pilaf was nothing special but the soup was wonderful. Solovyov ordered another serving of soup instead of dessert and ate it slowly. Very slowly, the way one eats something that cannot go cold. He was sitting on a covered veranda, watching the tablecloth and a mysterious potted plant flutter in a refreshing wind. Solovyov ate the soup; his free hand rested on a cool metal railing. Beyond the railing—with no transition whatsoever—there began the huge blue sea.
He did not return home until after dark. The doorbell rang about fifteen minutes after his arrival. Solovyov was not expecting anyone. Knowing that one should exercise caution in southern cities in the evenings, he asked, ‘Who’s there?’
‘Zoya.’
Solovyov could not have confused that voice with any other. Zoya truly was standing outside the door. She had changed out of the gauzy, sheer dresses he had seen on her all these days and into blue jeans and a light-colored T-shirt. A gym bag hung on her shoulder. Solovyov stepped aside and Zoya came in, unhurried. There was something in her new guise that made her look like a camper, but there was no doubt that it became her. She even sat down as people sit at a train station, placing the bag on her knees and pulling her crossed feet under the chair.
‘How’s the manuscript?’ Zoya asked. ‘Were your hopes justified?’
‘It turned out to be incomplete… it cuts off in the middle of a word, can you believe it?’
‘Is that right?’
Zoya unzipped the bag with a slow, somehow even sleepy motion.
‘That manuscript’s still very important,’ said Solovyov, checking himself. ‘I couldn’t have dreamt of a stroke of luck like that.’
‘Well then, we’ll look more,’ said Zoya, extracting a huge bunch of grapes. ‘We need to find it in its entirety.’
‘Need to? But where?’
‘We have to think.’
A two-liter plastic bottle appeared on the table right after the grapes. Contrary to the inscription on the label, it was certainly not Pepsi-Cola sloshing inside. The dense, wavy flow along the bottle’s walls attested to the nobleness of the beverage. Just as a person’s breeding can be sensed by a very first motion.
‘It’s Massandra wine, Nesterenko brought it,’ said Zoya, nodding at the bottle. ‘His sister works at the winery.’
There were no wine glasses to be found in the apartment so Solovyov brought two faceted glasses from the kitchen. He held the massive bottle with both hands as he poured the wine. The wine came out in irregular glugs, yielding from time to time to air that wanted to enter. The bottle seemed like a living being to Solovyov. It grunted, as if offended, when it inhaled. Its plastic sides trembled spasmodically under the young man’s hands. He set the bottle on the floor after pouring half a glass each for himself and Zoya. The vessel turned out to be disproportionally large for the table where they were sitting, and even the faceted glasses lacked the power to ease that contrast.