Dunya’s attitude seemed too categorical to Solovyov but he kept quiet. He refused to imagine a stupid academician.
The break was ending when they returned. The theater was crowded and the attendees’ muted buzz reminded him of an intermission at an operetta. Scenery of a medieval castle in the mountains intensified that impression. The gothic scene swaying in a draft might not have fit the conference theme but the organizers thought it created a pacifying, romantic backdrop.
Solovyov could see a small fat man on the stage, to the left of the castle wall. The man stood at the chairman’s table, half-facing the auditorium, with one hand thrust in his pocket (not a flattering pose for the short-legged). Using his free hand, he carefully piled hair on his bald spot. The name card on the table said, ‘Acad. P.P. Grunsky.’ Nothing that Dunya had reported was mentioned on the card.
There was something unnatural—in the sense of theatrical—about even the conference attendees’ appearances. Despite the hot spell, they were strolling around in suits and running their hands along the lapels of their outmoded jackets again and again. This wasn’t even because of the hot spell; the suits were blatantly out of character for their owners. And for their faces, which were rough and devoid of expression. These people pressed their arms to their torsos as they walked timidly around the theater. Looked at themselves in the mirror in the foyer. Dampened their combs in the little fountain outside the theater and fixed their hair. These were cannery employees, sent by their bosses to lend the event a more mass scale. According to the conference organizers, very broad swaths of the population should hear papers about the general.
Two cannery employees approached Grunsky and asked for his autograph. This was audible thanks to the numerous microphones that equipped the stage. They were all over the place, dangling from somewhere above, like motionless black lianas. Grunsky led the requestors to the table and wearily, but with visible pleasure, signed the two programs they held out to him. This was the first time in his life he had been asked for his autograph.
Solovyov and Dunya took seats in the parterre. Solovyov removed the program from his folder. Leaning toward his shoulder, Dunya ran her fingernail along the second surname listed after the break.
‘Tarabukin’s a terrible pain but he gets a lot done. One of the few who’ll say anything relevant here. He’s sitting to my right.’
Solovyov slowly turned his head. The left-handed Tarabukin was nervously noting something in a folder of papers lying on his knees. His gnarled fingers and their countless knuckles might have made an even bigger impression than his left-handedness. Tarabukin was chewing the fingernails on his right hand and kept examining them pensively.
‘Before lunch…’ Grunsky tapped his fingernail on the microphone and the hall shook with a deep, drumming sound. ‘…we have one more paper before lunch, so I ask you to focus. The floor goes to Professor Tarakubin with the paper “Larionov and Zhloba: a Textological Collision”.’
‘Tarabukin, if you will,’ protested Tarabukin, but his voice was drowned out by the general noise.
Dunya shook with silent laughter. Meanwhile, Tarabukin was already energetically making his way to the stage. He gestured as he walked and his entire appearance expressed indignation, either from the incorrect pronunciation of his surname or the impossibility of making his way to where he was to speak.
‘Quiet, please,’ Grunsky tapped at the microphone again. ‘One more paper before lunch. The speaker prepared handouts, they’ll be distributed now.’
Tarabukin clambered up the little stairs onto the stage, continuing to gesture, and walked under the hanging microphones.
‘…ucking smarty pants, what are you talking about, handouts? In Russian…’
Tarabukin stopped short when he heard he was on the
air. Now he silently crossed the stage—small and rumpled—without a shadow of regret about what he had said. After Tarabukin had taken his place behind the lectern (at his height, he truly proved to be behind it), a heavyset woman with braids arranged on her head started making her way toward the stage. She moved slowly, placing her feet heavily on the steps, and reminding Solovyov of his high school principal, a woman nicknamed Bigfoot. Judging from the hand she extended in Grunsky’s direction, she was saying something to him, but her words were inaudible.
‘Who’s the co-chair?’ Grunsky asked again, into the microphone. ‘You’re the co-chair? Where were you before?’
The women answered him again after conquering the final stairs. The academician shrugged and glanced at the program.
‘Nobody said anything to me about co-chairing.’
The woman who had come up on stage turned to the audience and pointed out someone on the parterre for Grunsky. Despite her gait, she certainly was not Solovyov’s high school principal.
‘So, may I begin?’ Tarabukin asked sarcastically, but nobody was paying attention to him.
‘She’s corresponding member Baikalova,’ said Dunya. Her face expressed delight. ‘Fiesta with a bullfight.’
‘There’s not even a second chair here,’ said Grunsky, slightly lifting his chair by its back to illustrate. ‘I don’t know where you’ll sit.’
‘One of us should prove to be chivalrous, Petr Petrovich,’ said Baikalova.
She was already within range of the microphones. Grunsky threw up his hands, ‘Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do!’
Baikalova bowed low, from the waist, to Grunsky and turned to face the audience. Tarabukin, suffering, rolled his eyes. The cannery workers smiled shyly.
Grunsky approached the edge of the stage and signaled to someone to bring a second chair. A man in a pensioner’s shirt with patch pockets jumped out of his seat and shook it, demonstrating to Grunsky that they were fastened not only to the neighboring seats (everyone sitting in that row shook) but also to the floor. Grunsky gestured his understanding and returned to the table.
Two men in overalls hurried up the steps to the stage. They disappeared behind the curtains but reappeared a minute later, dragging a massive throne with a scraping sound. They pulled it up to the table and explained something to Grunsky, who was grasping the back of his own chair as a precaution. Grunsky nodded and showed Baikalova the throne with a gallant gesture. She sized up Grunsky with a malicious gaze and moved heavily across the stage.
Baikalova had to ascend to the throne—which did not look out of place by the castle—in a literal sense. She first climbed onto a step attached to its base and then, holding the lion heads on the armrests, clambered up to the seat, which required some effort. Since the throne was not an item envisaged for use by someone sitting at a table, it turned out to be rather high. Baikalova’s legs did not reach the floor, swinging slightly instead, like shapeless sausages, under the thin tabletop. Further beneath the tabletop—this was visible to the audience, too—the academician’s feet were moving chop-chop, as if he were in the homestretch. There was no question he had won this little competition.
‘Please, go ahead, colleague,’ said Grunsky, turning to Tarabukin.
‘Yes, do,’ said Baikalova, looking down on Grunsky.
‘Thank you very much,’ Tarabukin responded. After thinking, he uttered it in pieces. ‘Thank you. Very much.’
Leaning against the armrest furthest from Grunsky, Baikalova rested her cheek on her hand. Her lips stretched apart, forming a raspberry-colored diagonal line along her face.
Tarabukin huffily began his paper. He uttered the introductory phrases—which in and of themselves contained nothing nasty, offering a listing of sources he had used—with a bitter, almost denouncing, intonation. It was they, his sources, who took the blame for the scholar’s disrespectful treatment of the scholar. It was they who answered for his mangled surname, for his ridiculous waiting on the stage, for everything that had thrown the scholar utterly off balance. Even in this difficult frame of mind, though, the presenter spoke in particular about two sources he had studied.