The general stopped next to a cadet who had been killed, a boy of around sixteen. The collar of his military overcoat had caught on the wire’s barb, not allowing him to fall. The general straightened the cadet’s collar as if this were a real inspection. The collar looked almost natural now: it was raised all around. The cadet’s cheek and chin had been torn off: he had fallen on the wire face-first before being suspended by his collar. He continued pressing the pliers in his right hand.
The general immediately recognized the person standing beside the cadet. He could not help but recognize him, despite not having seen him in decades. He remembered his voice as deliberately quiet and remembered his gaze as condescending. That gaze was now more likely one of surprise. It was a one-eyed gaze because this man had no second eye. A bloody hollow gaped in its place. The general remembered the winter Petersburg night, the vodka in the tavern. The sense of weightlessness, the coziness of people who had escaped everyone. The intense unity of co-conspirators. The unbearable shame of one who had neglected his duty. Before him stood Lanskoy.
Lanskoy stood, his head pressed to a post. Both his arms were cast upon the wire. The general thought they hung with genuine lifelessness. There was something reminiscent of a puppet theater. Of a puppet conversing with a spectator. The comparison appeared to the general to be improper but precise.
What could Lanskoy tell the public? That he was a hero? That he despised death and threw himself on the wire? But that would be an untruth… Lanskoy despised life and threw himself on the wire. That was probably the reason he had gone to the Reds. The general walked right up to Lanskoy and attempted to close his only eye. His eyelashes fell with a barely audible crunch but the eye would not close. The general embraced Lanskoy. He pressed himself to his intact cheek. A tear ran down Lanskoy’s cheek and froze in place. It was the general’s tear.
‘Bury him,’ ordered the general.
His troops left almost soundlessly. The squeak of boots, muffled by gusts of wind. A farewell symphony, it occurred to the general. The only difference being, he thought, that his people were not extinguishing the fires: the number of campfires needed to remain the same, unlike in Joseph Haydn’s version. A reduction in the number of performers should not be revealed to the viewer too early. That was the essence of the general’s composition.
He approached one of the fires. Kologrivov, a captain in the medical services, was maintaining the fire. The captain was one of those who was staying on Perekop until the end.
‘Good day, Your Excellency,’ said Kologrivov, standing at attention before the general.
‘At ease, Captain.’
He sat across from Kologrivov. He pushed a log that had burned through on one side closer to the center of the fire.
‘The transition from life to death interests me,’ said the general.
‘It is, Your Excellency, inevitable.’
Patches of light from the fire changed the color and contours of Kologrivov’s face.
‘I do know that. How does it happen?’
‘There are two ways: natural and unnatural. Natural…’
‘Natural isn’t a threat to us now,’ the general interrupted. ‘Tell me about the second way. Let’s go.’
He took Kologrivov by the elbow and led him to the wire. As they walked past the staff tent, the general took the kerosene lantern that hung there. A broad but dim circle now preceded their motion.
The attackers had managed to upend one of the supports at the part of the barrier they had reached. It hung on the wire, almost touching the ground. Three bodies hung alongside it. They belonged to Red cadets (no longer belonged, thought the general). The bodies of several more cadets lay on the ground. Things had come to single combat in this defense sector.
The general cast light on one of the bodies on the wire. Somehow, this body was hanging particularly inconsolably: arms spread, head nearly touching the ground. Kologrivov took the dead man’s shoulder and turned him on his back. With a squeak, the two other bodies began swaying.
‘Aorta chopped in two,’ Kologrivov said, showing it on the corpse. ‘More than one liter of blood flowed out.’
‘More than one? How much is that?’ asked the general. ‘Three? Five? Ten?’
‘A person has only five or six liters of blood. At least two and a half flowed out of him.’
The general directed the lantern at the ground underneath the wire. It was crimson. The blood had frozen as it flowed out. In concentric circles. Like lava. It was still warm in the body but had frozen on the ground.
‘Blood is a special liquid tissue,’ said Kologrivov. ‘It moves through the circulatory vessels of the living body.’
‘What does this body lack for being alive?’ asked the general.
‘Blood, I suppose. Approximately two and a half liters. I’ll use this opportunity to point out that one-thirteenth of the weight of the human body is blood.’
‘One can come to understand the combined action of the organs, but for me that still doesn’t add up to life,’ said the general. He outlined a circle with the lantern. ‘Life as such.’
‘And one hundred grams of blood contains approximately seventeen grams of hemoglobin.’
‘But even if you gave that cadet two and a half liters of blood, he still wouldn’t come back to life.’
‘He wouldn’t come back to life,’ said Kologrivov. He crouched in front of one of those lying on the ground. ‘And this person was struck on the skull by a saber. Shine the light, Your Excellency… As I thought, the right temporal lobe is cut in two.’
‘You’ve explained the causes of their deaths but I still have no clarity,’ agonized the general, seeking the right words. ‘Maybe the whole trouble is that you haven’t explained the causes of their life to me.’
‘A person’s life is inexplicable. Only death is explicable,’ said Kologrivov. He stroked the dead man’s hair, which stood like wire. ‘The saber entered about five centimeters into the temporal lobe. In my view, he had no chance. It’s interesting that the right temporal lobe is responsible for libido, sense of humor, and memory of events, sounds, and images.’
‘Does that mean that when the soldier was dying he no longer remembered events, sounds, or images?’
‘He did not even have a sense of humor. And his libido was missing. This death belongs in the “unnatural” category.’
A cannon struck somewhere in the distance; indistinctly, as if groggy. Its echo rolled through the sky and went quiet.
‘Come to think of it,’ said the general, ‘who among us knows what’s natural and what’s not?’
‘I’ll note, à propos, that the human brain weighs an average of 1,470 grams.’
‘Maybe death is natural if it comes to a person in the prime of his life?’
‘And has a volume of 1,456 cubic centimeters.’
‘Maybe there’s a certain logic to death at that highest point?’
‘And it consists of eighty percent water. That’s just for your information.’
‘Then why bother to wait for the point when the body’s becoming decrepit and almost disintegrated?’
The captain stood up.
‘Because, Your Excellency, by then nobody begrudges the loss of the body, when it’s like that.’
The general looked closely at Kologrivov. He walked over to him and embraced his shoulders.
‘Well, of course: death comes only to a person’s body. I’d simply forgotten the most important part.’
18
Solovyov continued searching for Leeza. The unexpected complications he ran into at the university had not stopped him, although they had made him more cautious. The scholar realized that direct contact with women possessing a surname dear to him harbored its own dangers. He had already made paper-based correspondence a top priority in his appeals to other educational institutions because he was able to analyze the responses carefully and keep personal communications with the Larionovas to a minimum.