There was always a special smell in Leeza’s house at Easter. It was the smell of sacredness and celebration, joy and gifts. It joined the aromas of farmer’s cheese, fresh dough, and—for some reason—incense. There was no church near the station so to Solovyov, Leeza’s house seemed like a place of worship at Easter. Remembering the smell, Solovyov thought that the general’s son might just have shown up at the station at Easter. That would definitely explain why he had stayed here.
Solovyov went into Leeza’s room. He extended his hand to the shelf over the desk and pulled out a book at random. It was the previous year’s directory for college applicants. Solovyov sat on the bed and leafed through it carefully. There were no indications in the directory about which institution Leeza planned to attend. There was not one dog-eared page or one checkmark in the margins to be found. To Solovyov’s chagrin, Leeza was very neat.
He found a packet of small notebooks in one of the desk drawers. These were his own school notebooks from various years, from the very first, with large handwriting that still lacked a slant, to his sloppy ones just before graduating. Solovyov lowered himself onto the chair and began examining Leeza’s collection sheet by sheet. After suddenly going still over a fifth-grade essay, he observed a wet drop spread on the rough paper and absorb the blueness of the ink.
Solovyov himself did not know why he was continuing these searches. He had already been sitting in Leeza’s house for more than three hours but had not run across anything that might give him an idea about where to find her. Solovyov had realized long ago that he would learn nothing new here about either Leeza or her father. He was simply going through Leeza’s papers and touching her books, and that calmed him.
He discovered a folder of paper airplanes in the bookcase. They were airplane notes he had sent to her over the fence. In a past life. Early in the mornings: the lines were blurry in places from dew. Of course he could have said everything over the fence but he preferred airmail. He liked to write and liked to watch his words soar up into the air. And she had saved all that. Where should he look for her now?
Solovyov caught himself thinking that Filipp Larionov interested him less as the general’s son than as Leeza’s father. He would have liked to see him again, place him alongside Leeza, delight in their kinship, and be amazed at how Leeza, who was infinitely loved and essential to him, had come out of the ancient Larionov line.
Leeza had not come out of the Larionov line. More accurately, she was from the Larionov line, but from a different one. Larionov’s line had no connection to her. That realization came about with no transition whatsoever, all at once, like distant lightning. Filipp, the general’s son, was not Larionov. The information written down in Zoya’s apartment resurfaced in Solovyov’s memory in all its obviousness. General Larionov and Varvara Petrovna Nezhdanova had not officially registered their marriage. Filipp, their son together, was Nezhdanov.
Solovyov left for Petersburg the next day. As he closed up his house, he thought that he was closing it forever. He tried not to look back. He took the rest of the Kerch canned goods to Yegorovna. She cried again. Solovyov cried, too, because this parting with Yegorovna was also forever. As he went outside, without the canned goods, he recognized the burden he had been carrying in his bag. And he smiled.
What had dawned on him belatedly in Leeza’s house did not drive him to despondency. Oddly enough, it was even a relief. Leeza’s ties to the general’s line—and Solovyov felt this ever more distinctly with each minute—had carried a heavy weight. That connection had been lending Leeza a certain excess worth that she did not need. She was his love, his forgotten and rediscovered joy. He knew he had to search for her.
16
When Solovyov arrived in Petersburg, he realized autumn had set in. Autumn was reflected in the windows at the Tsarskoye Selo train station, it called out here and there in the porters’ voices, and drifted along a platform in the form of a forgotten newspaper. The coming of autumn would not have been so obvious if there had been rain. But a feeble and irrevocably autumnal sun was shining. No doubt remained that summer was already over here.
The joy of return enveloped Solovyov. He inhaled the biting Petersburg air and sensed it was exactly what he had been lacking. He walked along Gorokhovaya Street to the Fontanka River and turned right. Cold air wafted off the dark water. Ripples coated the river. Solovyov noticed he was the only person wearing a short-sleeved shirt.
Solovyov lived on the city’s Petrograd Side. As already stated, he rented a room on Zhdanovskaya Embankment that Prof. Nikolsky had found for him through acquaintances. The professor had explained that the embankment had nothing to do with Soviet politician Andrei Zhdanov. It received its name from the Zhdanovka River, which immortalized clerks by the name of Zhdanov, former owners of these lands. For its part, the surname Zhdanov dates back to the word zhdan, denoting a long-awaited child. With the addition of the negative particle ne, the word nezhdan denoted (correspondingly) an unawaited child. By all indications, a distant ancestor of Filipp Nezhdanov was such a child. Solovyov was thinking about that as he entered the archway of house No. 11 on Zhdanovskaya Embankment.
House No. 11 was special. This was manifested not only in the grandiose Stalin-era Empire style of its architecture: the workshop for engineer Mstislav Sergeyevich Los, a character in Alexei Tolstoy’s (1882–1945) novel Aelita, was located in the building’s courtyard. Los, who planned to fly to Mars, was seeking a travel companion. Tolstoy had lived right here, too, on Zhdanovskaya Embankment, in house No. 3. He had taken up residence near author Fyodor Sologub (1863–1927) and was not planning to fly anywhere, having recently returned from abroad.
House No. 11 was constructed in 1954. It stood on the same spot as the building and courtyard that Tolstoy described. Thus (Solovyov reasoned as he walked up the stairs) the fantasy writer’s work took into consideration the actual particularities of the previous building No. 11. Given Alexei Tolstoy’s death in 1945, the book did not take into consideration the peculiarities of the current No. 11. In that sense, the fictional make-believe in Aelita corresponded to actual life in the 1920s more than to the objective reality of the 1990s. Solovyov’s next conclusion: the border between make-believe and reality disappears when time is taken out of the equation. He wiped his feet on the mat and shut the door behind him.
Solovyov lived in a two-room apartment. This was a happy version of a communal apartment: given its small population, it had not been reduced to a complete wreck. Additional happiness lay in the fact that Solovyov’s flatmate hardly lived here. Once every two or three months he would arrive suddenly from somewhere like Murmansk or Syktyvkar and then leave just as suddenly a few days later. His girlfriends came to see him on those days, though Solovyov saw them only in passing, too, when they ran from the next room to the shower late at night, wrapped in towels.
The apartment had windows on both sides of the building: they looked out over the courtyard (including part of Ofitsersky Lane) and the embankment. The windows in the kitchen and his flatmate’s room looked into the courtyard. Solovyov’s room (and this was its amazing quality) had a view of the Zhdanovka River, a small chunk of Petrovsky Island with the Petrovsky Stadium, and, further, beyond the trees on the island, the Malaya Neva River. In Solovyov’s opinion, the stadium spoiled the picture a lot, but nothing could be done about that.
The stadium did not just ruin the view. It complicated life. Existence near the stadium had its own shadowy and (in many of the courtyard’s secluded corners) damp sides, because fans of the Zenith football team urinated with reckless abandon. They urinated under the archway, in the entryways, and by the fences; they urinated during matches, whether the main team or the reserves were playing; and before and after matches. They urinated as if Zenith were the champion although the team was not even in the top three at the time.