Zhloba began racing around after (as Kritsky so aptly put it) falling into the cul-de-sac. At first, Zhloba tried to get away from the general’s cavalry that had overtaken him, but he ran into intense machine gun fire. This is where Zhloba finally grasped that he was surrounded. He again turned his troops to meet the cavalry but that could no longer improve matters. The appearance of the legendary general heading up the attackers made a stunning impression on the Reds. They began surrendering.
Zhloba successfully boarded his armored train and began rolling north, fighting battles along the way. The armored train, accompanied by a detachment of about two hundred men, managed to leave the encirclement. This was all that remained of a cavalry corps of many thousands. Lacking troops, weapons, the armored train (which eventually had to be abandoned during the retreat), and, most importantly, horses, Zhloba fell into severe depression. All that remained at his disposal was an old airplane that he had never used in battle, for reasons of principle. Forgotten by everyone, the machine was collecting dust in a hangar outside the combat zone.
Zhloba remembered the plane. After reaching the sought-after hanger, he rolled it outside with the help of local peasants. The women hurriedly wiped down the fuselage. Someone applied strength to turn the propeller, and, to everyone’s astonishment, the motor started. The propeller rotated fitfully at first, as if it were gathering strength for each new movement of its blades. Little by little, the rotation grew uniform and the two propeller blades transformed into a large, translucent circular area. The machine jounced and snorted for several minutes but would not budge.
‘The motor’s warming up,’ the peasant men nodded knowingly.
They puffed on hand-rolled cigarettes to reconcile what was happening with their own agitated consciousness. And to attach an everyday quality to the nearness of flying technology. Using an expert motion, the aviator turned some sort of lever and the machine jerked sharply, then stopped as if it were rooted to the ground.
‘Get away!’ Zhloba yelled, almost flying out of his seat.
He placed in that shout all his hatred for his former flying classmates. All the pain of the insults he had suffered at various times. All the bitterness of the defeat that had come to him. The peasants, who were already on edge, scattered. The airplane began moving and rolled along the steppe, shuddering on the potholes. A minute later, it took off.
After circling over the disheartened witnesses to the takeoff, the plane set a southerly course, to where General Larionov’s units were finishing disarming the Red Armymen they had taken prisoner. Everything was proceeding peacefully, even somehow routinely. The regimental clerk was compiling a list of the prisoners, also indicating the types of weapon confiscated and the names of the horses. The former Red Armymen stood in a long, joyless line, waiting for the clerk to record them. After registration, they were led off in groups for lunch.
Some who were standing there lifted their heads when they heard the airplane’s motor. They all knew the general had eleven such machines in his equipment, so this must have been one of them. Nobody was concerned. The clerk dipped his pen into a spill-proof inkwell and stretched, satisfied, lacing his hands together in front of himself. Indifferently and near-sightedly, he observed the dot growing in the sky. The mere fact of flying technology no longer attracted attention in 1920.
There was something unusual in the airplane’s movement. Observed from below, its flight lacked that grand tranquility that usually accompanies large flying objects (organisms) in the air—from balloons and dirigibles to eagles and seagulls. More and more heads turned toward it. The airplane turned somersaults in the air. It resembled a fly, an angered bumblebee, or perhaps even a hummingbird.
This was not the height of aerobatics: Zhloba was extraordinarily far from even the thought of executing Nesterov’s ‘dead loop.’ This was not even a manifestation of the aviator himself being so extremely wound up, either, though the abruptness of his motions, needless to say, could not have been conducive to fluidity in flight. The reason for what occurred lay in the cables for the steering rod: they were not in working order because the machine had been in the damp hanger for so long. Need it be said that Zhloba’s affective state had not allowed him to verify their tension?
Whether it was that a wind rose or the energy of desperation that had carried Zhloba toward his flight destination, well, at some point he actually ended up over the Whites’ positions. When he saw below him the scene of his disgrace, he threw his arms on the fuselage and hung down. The airplane finally stopped jerking after losing its steering and began flying over the steppe at low altitude. Hanging over his adversary’s positions—as if he were leaning on a windowsill and conversing with someone on the street—Zhloba floated over the field kitchens, lines of prisoners, and the herds of horses they had lost. His fluttering hair and pale, unshaven face were very visible from below. Tears from the head wind glistened in his eyes. He was an ideal target. Each person standing below understood that the aeronaut was seeking death. And nobody shot at him.
On Prof. Nikolsky’s advice, Solovyov saved one of his important findings for the conclusion of his paper. During his work on the topic ‘General Larionov’s Rout of Zhloba’s Cavalry Corps,’ the young historian had decided to compile a maximally precise, inasmuch as was possible, hourly account of the activity of both commanders during the month of June 1920.
Many of Solovyov’s colleagues regarded that work as deliberately unachievable so suggested that for starters he write down his own hourly life in June (during the previous year, for example) and then later set his sights on events seventy-six years in the past. The hidden irony in that advice touched on not only the possibility of searches of this sort but also their practicability. To his colleagues, these searches seemed, to some extent, like scholarly pedantry or (this sounded more offensive) scholarly poseury. It turned out that Prof. Nikolsky was the only person who approved of the graduate student’s plans, without reservations. And that was enough.
Solovyov disagreed with his colleagues’ irony and actually did compile his own life story for June of the previous year. This proved to be completely straightforward. He spent the entire time of his final examination period—that was what fell in June—sitting in the Public Library. All his remaining actions were associated with exams. Their times were calculated easily, according to the schedule of exams and other tests he had kept. From his course on source study, the young man had internalized the idea that any piece of paper, even one of little significance, could later become an important historical source. He knew the value of documents and never threw them away.
As far as June 1920 went, that task did turn out to be more complex, though it was not at all unachievable. Solovyov first pieced together the texts from all the memoirs regarding that stretch of time. After ascertaining the basic character of General Larionov and Zhloba’s actions, the scholar moved on to highly focused archival searches. He looked through thousands of written orders, telegrams, and telephonograms from that time (frequently they specified not only the date but also the hour and minute of sending) and compiled—in spite of his colleagues’ doubts—a fairly detailed listing of what happened during the month of June. The result turned out to be stupendous.
It emerged that on the night of June 13 into 14, e.g. before the start of active military operations, General Larionov and Zhloba’s armored trains stood facing one another. This occurred on territory that was neutral at the time, namely near Gnadenfeld, a settlement of German colonists. Aided by telegrams sent by both sides, the historian managed to establish that Zhloba’s armored train arrived at 23:30 on the first track, stood there until 04:45, then headed north. The sources Solovyov used allowed him to calculate the arrival time of the general’s armored train as 23:55. It departed at 03:35, in a southerly direction. And though the number of the track where the second armored train stood is not indicated in the documents, the process of elimination managed to determine that, too: it was track No. 2. There were only two tracks at the Gnadenfeld station.