Tarabukin poured himself some water from a pitcher as he finished excerpt No. 19. He drank thirstily and with a light moan, like a person who still has a lot left to say. Grunsky sensed the speaker’s frame of mind and stood up from his chair: this was an eloquent appeal to finish up. These gestures were inaccessible for Baikalova, who was lodged in her throne and limited to ostentatious glances at her watch. Tarabukin had been standing half-facing the co-chairs but now quickly turned in the opposite direction, toward the second-tier loge (left side), and began expounding on the results of his intertextual analysis.
And those results—paradoxical to the highest degree!—consisted of the following.
First. The events described by the general (1888) preceded, chronologically, what Zhloba (1920) recounted. That said, however, the time when Zhloba prepared his report preceded the time when the general created his memoirs (presumably the late 1950s to the early 1960s).
Second. Notwithstanding the obvious resemblance of the chosen compositions, textual borrowing from either author could not be ascertained. Further. From the scholar’s point of view, there was not even a hint of one author being familiar with the other’s text.
Third. Both texts were also impossible to trace back to a common source because, despite their closeness, they recount (and here the speaker pounded his fist on the lectern) different events.
Tarabukin poured from the pitcher again. Standing as before, with his back to the co-chairs and his side to the audience, he proceeded with the second glass. The noise of Tarabukin’s deep swallows rang from the hall’s loudspeakers, sounding like a gigantic metronome. Grunsky, who had just sat down, stood again and tapped at the microphone.
‘We have a schedule to keep,’ said Baikalova, in order not to yield the initiative to the academician.
Powerless to ignore what was happening, Tarabukin turned sharply toward the co-chairs and grazed the pitcher with his elbow. After a slow-motion, almost infinite moment of flight, the pitcher shattered to smithereens on the stage.
‘I understand,’ said Tarabukin, quietly but tragically, ‘that standing between a person and his lunch is a thankless matter but I still have a fourth point. And I ask that it be heard out.’
Grunsky and Baikalova stared wordlessly at the same point in the distance, as if they were in the finale of some sort of play. The falling pitcher had drawn them together a little. Both they and the audience members understood it was best to hear everything the speaker had to say. Grunsky sat down, in a clear expression of submissiveness.
Tarabukin’s fourth point turned out to be his longest. By developing the ideas of Alexander Veselovsky on historical poetics and Vladimir Propp on the morphology of the folk-tale—while polemicizing with them at the same time—the researcher transferred conversation about the resemblance of the general’s and Zhloba’s texts into the realm of the correlation of motifs. To Tarabukin’s misfortune (and, admittedly, the attendees’, too), he got bogged down in clarifying the reasons he agreed and disagreed with his predecessors. Tarabukin understood well that these details were unnecessary but drifted further and further away from the topic of common motifs, even as he strove with all his might to return to it.
The speaker’s—and the audience’s—anxiety increased with every minute. With bated breath, the whole audience followed his tragic floundering in the maelstrom of scholarly thought, but there was no life ring. They did not want to throw it from the presidium; it could not be thrown from the audience. The cannery workers (the portion of the audience sympathizing most with Tarabukin) were ready to applaud, but the speaker needed to stop or at least pause for them to do so. He did not stop. Shrinking his head into his shoulders, he spoke ever faster and less distinctly, as if he hoped to find in his flow of speech some magic word that would crush his opponents for good.
When Tarabukin looked up from the lectern, he saw Grunsky’s all-forgiving eyes. Baikalova was pensively examining her fingernails. This was the final blow for the speaker and he burst into tears. Thunderous applause rang out in the hall. Everyone headed off for lunch.
13
The cannery director headed up the column of people exiting the theater. After chasing off the factory employees who had begun attaching themselves to the column, he led the researchers to Cafeteria No. 8 on Lenin Street, where lunch had been set for the conference’s participants and guests. Grunsky walked to the director’s right, Baikalova to his left. The director’s arms were flung half-open, as if welcoming a speedy oncoming wind; this kept making the edges of his jacket flap against the co-chairs, who were trying not to fall behind him. The column’s leading edge was moving through the middle of Lenin Street, a pedestrian area, splitting the oncoming walkers into two even groups that flowed around the column. Everyone in the city knew the cannery director. Even from afar, pedestrians yielded the road to him and his scholars, regardless of their attitude toward his wares, which spawned controversy.
Inside the cafeteria, there was a smell of bleach and unappetizing food that had been eating into the establishment’s walls for decades. Spray cans of air freshener that were used at the factory director’s request (the cafeteria workers pointed them at the artificial flowers on the table) only worsened the situation. They added a sickening, sweetish undertone without removing the old smell.
The positioning of the rectangular tables reminded Solovyov of his old school cafeteria. A paper tablecloth covered each table, which seated four. Solovyov had already started sitting down at one but then, at the last minute, he noticed Dunya waving to him from the other end of the room. She was standing by a big oak table that was unlike the others. Solovyov hesitated for a moment then walked toward her. As a member of the conference’s organizing committee, Dunya had been seated at the same table as the cannery director, Grunsky, Grunsky’s secretary, Baikalova, and a man with crossed eyes. Dunya had decided to invite her new acquaintance.
Tarabukin was the last to enter the cafeteria. After finishing his presentation, he had initially entertained no thoughts of food. Tarabukin had categorically refused to go to the cafeteria with everyone. He walked down to the parterre, collapsed in a fourth-row seat, and sat there motionless for a few minutes. But he began to feel hungry after calming down a little so, after some hesitation, decided to go to the cafeteria anyway.
Right from the start, it looked to him as if there were no empty places; Tarabukin felt like nobody was expecting him. His tortuous decision to come to lunch had suddenly turned out to have unwelcome results for everyone, effectively rendering it ridiculous. His tragic figure in the doorway made everyone fall silent.