Solovyov did not like the obelisks. They quickly became ramshackle: the paint peeled off and the iron rusted. Little by little, their fastening pins were exposed and the obelisks began listing, expressing their hollow essence. They produced an unattractive tinny sound when touched.
Wooden crosses were another matter. Solovyov regarded those differently. Crosses were not set in mortar. They were dug into neat round pits and the earth around them was stamped on for a long time; there was no waiting for it to settle. Little Solovyov saw in that motion—which was un-cemetery-like and even similar to a dance—a lightness that partially reconciled him with life beyond the grave. Finally, he even told Leeza that he would like to lie beneath a cross rather than beneath a heavy monument. Leeza agreed. She did add, though, that a person feels nothing in the grave. But she agreed.
Solovyov remembered how his mother had been buried. How she had been lowered into a frozen wintery grave. How they could not pull out the ropes, which got caught under the coffin, and how people looked at them, with regret, from a clay heap. Nobody wanted to crawl into a grave at Kilometer 715 for the ropes. They simply tossed in the ends, which hit the coffin like sonorous gray icicles.
When they returned from the cemetery, Solovyov told Leeza that while they were warm his mother was in an icy grave. Leeza responded again that dead people feel nothing in graves, but that did not reassure Solovyov. He could not fall asleep. Leeza sat at the head of his bed all night while he thought about how his mother must be cold in the grave. Especially considering her high temperature during her last days.
That was the day he grasped the true essence of the cemetery. He began fearing that his grandmother might be carried off there on a morning just as cold and that the cemetery would accept her with the very same hospitality. He was frightened because his world was unraveling. Slipping away, like sand through his fingers, and nothing could be done about it. Even so, he still did not consider himself mortal at that time.
The realization that he would die came to him one summer day. After making love in the forest, he and Leeza went to the cemetery. Their feet stepped lightly on moss, where pine cones crunched from time to time. They sat on one of the metal fences and Solovyov asked, ‘Do you understand that we’ll die in the end, too?’
Leeza looked at him in surprise. She nodded.
‘Well, I just figured it out now.’
‘After we did… that?’
‘I don’t know… we do that all the time but it occurred to me now.’
Why had they gone to the cemetery after that?
Solovyov stood at the graves of his mother and grandmother. They were essentially one grave, inside the same metal fence, under the same cross. The two small mounds had even merged into one during the years that had passed. Solovyov placed the gladiolus right by the cross and made a few cautious motions with the hoe. The grass at the cemetery pulled out more easily than the grass in the yard at his house. This grass had grown in the shade and did not have resilience or an abundance of sun. Clump after clump fell under Solovyov’s hoe with a short, rich sound. The graves were revealed little by little: their joining turned out to be imagined. The mound on his mother’s grave was slightly higher because soil had been added at various times.
Solovyov often went to his mother’s grave during the first year after her death. Whispering, he would tell her about everything that had happened that day and ask for advice. He had done that during her life, too, after his mother had stopped speaking with him, as punishment for bad behavior. She would keep silent until the moment he asked her advice. Agonized, Solovyov thought up questions and asked them with a serious look. Not sensing a ploy (or perhaps sensing a ploy), his mother would answer. But only while she was alive. She did not answer a single one of his questions after her death.
Although Solovyov continued telling her about everything, over time it worked out that he went to see her ever less frequently, and there were ever more events in his life. He gasped for breath, both from the abundance of events and because they remained unspoken. Feeling indebted to his mother, he attempted to at least tell her the essential things, but here, too, his debt grew with unbelievable speed. He realized he was hopelessly behind.
‘You can’t tell a life, Mama,’ he whispered to her once and burst into tears.
He told her nothing after that. He consoled himself with the thought that she knew everything anyway. The year his mother died, Solovyov attempted to imagine her in the grave. When spring came, he thought ground water had permeated her coffin and his mother was lying in a cold bath. In the summer, he was already certain her skin had turned black and her eyes had fallen in. He tried—but failed—not to think about the short white worms he had seen on animal corpses. A year and a half later, after the earth on the grave mound had abruptly settled, he guessed that the coffin’s lid had rotted and fallen in. Several years later, Solovyov began to feel better when, according to his notions, only a skeleton remained in the grave.
The Solovyov who was tossing weeded grass over the fence did not yet know that it lay ahead for him to find General Larionov’s notebook, in which all the stages of the human body’s decomposition were listed in detail—from cyanotic spots to a fully bared skeleton. Some of the listings came about as a result of the general’s note-taking on specialized literature regarding exhumation and postmortems. Most of the notes were based on his personal experience and reflected what he saw on his rounds of the battlefield. Since the battles did not cease for days, sometimes not even for weeks, the corpses turned out to have decomposed to varying degrees before the burial team’s arrival. This significantly increased the general’s research base.
Solovyov recited a prayer for the repose of the soul. In his memory, he always heard the prayer as recited by his grandmother, so it was strange for him to hear his own voice now. The wind stirred in the crowns of the pine trees. The grave by which Solovyov was standing was the only one in the cemetery that was cared for.
When he came home, he put the hoe in the shed but then he stopped in the doorway. He went back, took the hoe, and left the yard. He walked along the fence and stopped by the neighboring gate. This was Leeza’s yard. It was difficult to open the gate: Leeza’s yard was just as overgrown as Solovyov’s, though she had left only a little over a year ago. Solovyov fought his way to her front steps with no less frenzy than he had come to his own on the first day, though this time he was armed with a tool.
The key to Leeza’s house was hidden in the same place as the key to his house, behind the door jamb. Solovyov sensed an unlived-in smell in the house as soon as he entered. More accurately, the absence of a smell. That had never happened in this house. It always smelled of something here, most often of food. Leeza’s mother had loved to cook. She made beef stroganoff, turkey in cream sauce and French-style meat, things that nobody else made around here. People at Kilometer 715 ate filling meals but they lacked delicacies.