‘Dissatisfaction is a usual feeling. Especially when finishing work.’
Nikolsky said that somewhat sluggishly and Solovyov wondered if there had been a sedative among the tablets.
‘I had something else in mind. Dissatisfaction… with the general’s life. Maybe with life overall. Anyway, that’s pretty heavy material…’
‘No, go on.’
The professor’s hands were folded on the blanket.
‘So, imagine: there’s this general. Clever. Hero. Living legend. Then, it’s as if his fate short circuits. Darkness after a bright light. A squalid Soviet pension. A communal toilet.
Somehow, it’s even silly.’
‘Why?’
Solovyov shrugged.
‘It’s a strange thought: maybe for him it would have been better to be shot?’
The nurse came in again, this time with a syringe on a tray.
‘Turn around.’
The professor slowly turned on his side and lowered his pajama bottoms a little. Solovyov went over to the window. The street was barely visible in the November dusk. The poorly washed glass reflected only the nurse and the professor. But the professor did not know that.
‘Relax. Don’t squeeze your buttocks.’
Nikolsky began coughing uncontrollably. Something glassy clinked on the tray and the nurse left the room. Nikolsky wiped the tears that had formed in his eyes from coughing.
‘I could say that I should have died a little earlier, in some more pleasant kind of place. And not be living out my last days here…’
Solovyov wanted to object, but the professor threatened him with an index finger.
‘But I’m not going to say that. Not because I like what’s happening. It’s just that the meaning of life is not in reaching a peak. Life’s meaning is most likely in its entirety.’ He pressed his palms into the mattress and returned to a half-sitting position. ‘What does your general write about most?’
‘I don’t know. Probably about his childhood.’
‘So there you go. That’s very distant from all his victories but it’s the most important thing for him. After all, he gauged everything later based on his childhood…’ Nikolsky looked up at to Solovyov. ‘Does that seem far-fetched to you?’
Solovyov abruptly walked over to the window and sat on the window sill.
‘No, damn it… Pardon me. I suddenly realized why the two descriptions coincide… The general’s childhood reminiscences and Zhloba’s report about entering Yalta; imagine, they coincide right down to the details! I heard this during the summer, at the conference… I’ll need to check it all, but it seems like I understand…’
Nikolsky was sitting with his head tilted toward his shoulder. It seemed to Solovyov that the professor’s attention was dissipating. That impression went away when Nikolsky raised his head.
‘I was just thinking about the peak in the general’s life. Of course that’s what you found yesterday.’ (The professor had begun muttering.) ‘It works out that he lived more than half a century after that. After or as a result of that? It’s a good question. It’s probably both things…’
Solovyov saw the nurse through the door, which was ajar. She was looking sternly at him, even shaking her head. Solovyov nodded that he understood everything. He turned toward the professor to say goodbye but the professor was asleep. He was dreaming of the article, ‘Regarding a Christian Understanding of History’, that he had begun writing before ending up in the hospital. Despite the fact that the article opened with a minutely detailed examination of the category of progress, the scholar did not perceive substantial signs of progress in history. The majority of nations had periods of ascent but as a rule achieved those a) at the expense of other peoples and b) for an extremely limited time. The interaction of those rises and falls was the sum of the vectors that absorbed one another and constituted the essence of world history. It had no common vector. With this state of things, it remained unclear what historical progress, which is now taken as an axiom, was composed of. Was it in the ability—the professor dreamt of a rhetorical question—to destroy ever larger numbers of people with each century? He did not consider it necessary to answer that question, but even in his sleep he did not forget to cite studies, such as Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Meaning of History, on similar problematic issues. With this state of affairs, Prof. Nikolsky refused to assess events in world history according to their degree of progressiveness. He allowed only one single criterion for their assessment: the moral criterion. Declaring the notion of progress a fiction, the sleeping historian noted that the structure of a nation’s life is very much reminiscent of the life of an individual and that it ends in the exact same nonprogressive way: in death. This gave him grounds to move on to the problem of the correlation of history and the individual. Prof. Nikolsky preferred the question of how history allows the individual to play a role over the traditional exploration of the role the individual plays in history. In the scholar’s treatment, history, when compared with the individual, appeared as something derivative and, in a certain sense, ancillary. To him, history looked like a frame—sometimes meager, sometimes sumptuous—where the individual placed his portrait. The scholar did not propose another intended goal for history. His fingers slid, barely noticeably, along the blanket’s creases as if he were attempting to fumble for that frame. As he moved on to the next point in his article, the professor dreamt that he would very likely never finish writing it.
19
A quiet whistling began sounding at dawn. Solovyov opened his eyes a little, just the tiniest bit, so as not to let his dream slip away. He did not exclude the possibility that the whistling had been in his dream. The dream was pleasant. The dream attempted to hold on to Solovyov’s flickering eyelashes even as it receded. Solovyov could not have retold the dream; he could not remember, even roughly, what the dream had been about, though he continued to feel its mood. The mood was all that remained of the dream and Solovyov realized he had woken up. Despite the early morning hour, it was not dark in the room. Solovyov knew this light. It was the light of the first snow. The freshness of the first snow was drifting through a small open window in the kitchen.
The whistle was sounding in his waking life. It was a quiet, cautious whistling, more of an intermittent whistle. Solovyov raised himself up on his elbow and looked around. The whistling disappeared. There was nothing unusual in the room. Solovyov lay down again and the whistling resumed. He slid his feet into his slippers and went to the kitchen. He stopped in the kitchen doorway. A great titmouse was sitting on the cupboard door.
The bird was obviously watching him, though for some reason it was not facing Solovyov. Only one of its eyes was visible, lending the bird an inappropriately coquettish appearance. The bird had flown in through the high ventilation window, which had been opened for the night. Why had it not flown out through the window? Unable to find it? Or did it not want to? Solovyov thought that they might live together. He took a step toward the bird, who fluttered to the ceiling light fixture. The sound of wings was unexpectedly loud in the quiet of the kitchen. The thought even flashed through his mind that the word fluttered was onomatopoeic. This was exactly how bird wings sounded.
Solovyov shrugged and walked over to the window. A drum beat was streaming through the little window along with the frosty air. Initially it was pure rhythm, barely discernible and almost lacking sound. This rhythm was resounding from Ofitsersky Lane, just in front of the Military Space Academy. It was located in the buildings of the former Second Cadet Corps.