‘I have no more strength,’ Solovyov finally said.
They landed on some sort of beach. Even after the front of the boat had knocked into the pebbles, Solovyov still could not believe this was the end of their sail. He sat, bent, with his hands on the oars, and could not find the strength within to go ashore. With Zoya’s help—he was no longer shy of his condition—he jumped heavily over the side and took a few strides through the surf.
Zoya attempted to push the boat away from the shore but it came right back. She took the boat by the remnants of the chain and led it to the breakwater. The current was different there. Rocking forlornly by the concrete wall, the boat began slowly drifting toward the open sea.
There were lounge chairs visible under a beach awning. Without saying a word, Solovyov wandered to the closest chair. He was out like a light before he had a chance to collapse onto it.
The beach caretaker woke them up in the morning. He shook Solovyov by the shoulder and told someone (Zoya?) that vacationers would be coming here after breakfast at the guesthouse.
‘What guesthouse?’ Solovyov asked in a silent whisper.
He pulled his T-shirt, with brown spots from his bloody palms, out from under his head.
‘Blue Wave,’ said the caretaker.
Zoya was sitting on the next lounge chair, hugging her knees. Solovyov went to the water and rinsed off.
About fifteen minutes later, they were already on the highway, where they boarded a shuttle van to Yalta. Solovyov fell asleep right away when he got home and slept until evening. When he woke up, he could not believe what had happened during the night. On his first attempt to get out of bed, he realized it was all true. He got up on the second attempt.
His primary thought was about the text. Which had been procured with such difficulty and which he had never even glanced at. From the bag with the break-in tools he extracted a crumpled plastic folder, pierced in ten places. The papers inside were in a lamentable state.
That was not his primary source of distress, though. There were only three sheets of paper. They contained a detailed explanation of what comprised the unseemly behavior of Baroness von Kruger, who had dinner at The Bear restaurant with her four former husbands. All the baroness’s husbands turned out to be officers. The general’s relative was uncommonly consistent in her passions. Detailed descriptions were made of the husbands, down to their military ranks and places of service. In the general’s final edits to the text, there were notes in the margin with the years of death and places of interment (they were buried in various locations) for each of the participants at the infamous luncheon. In touching briefly on the menu, the general highlighted in particular that there were oysters and—naturally—oyster knives on the table. ‘Do officers of today’s army,’ the general asked rhetorically, ‘know what an oyster knife is?’ The general offered no answer in the initial text, but gave one in the margins of the final version: ‘No.’
The text they had discovered said nothing about other events. There was no need to assume a possible continuation of the memoirs. The text ended in the middle of the page, under which there was a date (13/07/74) and the laconic ‘Dictated by me. Gen. Larionov.’ What had compelled Taras to keep these three particular sheets of paper at work? Perhaps that was the most enigmatic aspect of the whole matter.
12
Solovyov headed to the conference the next morning. Zoya saw him off at the bus station. She went to the museum after putting Solovyov on the Simferopol trolleybus. They had called Zoya the night before and insistently requested she show up at work. They had few employees and some were on vacation, so there was nobody to tell visitors about Chekhov.
The trip to Kerch was not short. Crimea, which had formerly seemed small to Solovyov, was revealing previously unaccounted for expanses that required time to cross. Discoveries of this sort, thought the drowsy Solovyov, were what distinguished field research from office work. He fell asleep somewhere near the Nikitsky Botanical Garden. The trolleybus was already driving through Simferopol when he opened his eyes.
Solovyov had a snack in Simferopol. He bought a smoked chicken leg at the station and ate it without bread, washing it down with cold beer. It was delicious, if unrefined. He wiped his hands and mouth with a napkin. He tossed the bone to a dog that came to him; there are lots of stray dogs in southern cities. He took his unfinished beer bottle and headed for the platform. There was about an hour until the next local train to Kerch.
There were already people on the platform. Two women with children. Wearing cotton dresses that had wilted in the heat. One wearing a bucket hat, the other a straw hat that had slid back. Both with suitcases. Solovyov sat down on a bench, took a swig from the bottle, and set it alongside his foot. A peasant man with a sack on his shoulder. It was immediately obvious he was a peasant. A woman collecting bottles. A plastic bag in one hand, a stick in the other, to check the rubbish bins. Dark blue eyelids. Crimson lips. The tanned skin of a person who spent all her time outside.
‘May I have the bottle?’
Solovyov nodded. The lady swished what was left at the bottom of the bottle and pressed it to her mouth. She sat down on Solovyov’s bench (the bottle was sent into the bag with a clink). Leaned against the back. Pulled a cigarette butt out of the bin and lit it with delight.
A piglet hopped out of the peasant’s sack, squealed, and began running around the platform. It was afraid to jump down. The peasant (they are capable of this) caught the piglet without losing his dignity. Put it in the sack and tied it. Lit a cigarette.
‘And that’s the end of democracy,’ said the bottle collector. She was not addressing anyone in particular.
The local train somehow pulled up almost unnoticed. It was old, its paint had peeled in the sun, and there was plywood where the glass had been smashed. Everybody boarded except the bottle collector. She continued sitting on the bench; this platform was her workplace. Maybe her home, too. The carriage began to move and she disappeared. Forever, thought Solovyov, as he fell sleep. Forever…
He woke up about an hour later and fell back to sleep. He thought he would never catch up on his sleep after the night in Alupka. That night, he had borrowed his own strength from the coming month and was now slowly paying it back. The palms of his hands (Zoya had smeared them with sea buckthorn oil the night before) hurt as before. And Zoya could not come with him. He caught himself thinking he was glad about that.
The owner of the piglet was sitting across from Solovyov. Solovyov observed as the sack squirmed despondently on the floor; he sympathized with the piglet. The peasant was looking out the window, lost in thought (or not thinking about anything?) There was something wood-like, cracked, in the peasant’s face. It radiated motionlessness. The age-old motionlessness of the Russian peasantry, decided the young historian. That was what made the gaze so sustained, intent, and absent.
Solovyov was housed in the Hotel Crimea. The hotel’s gray granite exterior presented a restrained solemnity from the late 1950s. This was apparently the city’s main hotel. And the first hotel in Solovyov’s life. He received his key from a sleepy woman at the reception desk (‘a porter,’ Solovyov whispered, since this was how he wanted to picture things).
‘Close the window at night,’ said the woman. ‘Cats jump into the rooms.’
‘Cats?’
After crossing the lobby, he turned and said, ‘I love cats.’
But the woman was no longer there.
Solovyov went up to the second floor. The keyring was weighted down by a vaguely pear-shaped wooden fob, making it difficult to turn the key in the lock. Within the lock, Solovyov overcame (pressing firmly into the door) some sort of impediments invisible to the world. Dull scraping and the pear thudding against the door accompanied whatever happened inside the lock.