Solovyov glanced at the librarian—she was laughing. There sure were all kinds of librarians.
‘Do you happen to know where that researcher might have gone?’ Solovyov asked them both.
Murat shrugged.
‘Most likely for lunch,’ said the librarian. ‘She left her bag here.’
Solovyov stopped as he was nearing the institute café and heard Tina Zhuk’s voice. Ultimately, he was not sure he needed to meet with the Moscow researcher. But he went in anyway.
Solovyov saw Tina first. She was sitting and telling a story at a table with an institute guard and two women who worked in the modern history department. The women were laughing hard. Judging from their faces, the history was extremely modern. The guard was sitting half-facing Tina and listening with dignity, as befit a strong person. Every now and then, he brushed crumbs off his camouflage uniform.
The Moscow researcher was drinking tea at the next table. She was the only person in the café that Solovyov did not know. She was around fifty. Wearing a sleeveless jacket. There was an unmotivated bow on her head. When Solovyov approached her table, she herself asked if he was Solovyov. Solovyov confirmed it. The researcher gave her name as Olga Leonidovna (an invitation to sit down) and said she worked at the Rumyantsev Library. She had brought him some materials about the Civil War.
‘I left them in the reading room,’ Olga Leonidovna smiled. ‘I’ll just finish my tea, okay?’
‘No rush.’
Solovyov smiled, too. Essentially, the bow suited her.
‘Leeza Larionova sent them for you. As I understand it, you must know her.’
A chair pulled away from the next table and Solovyov felt like the chair’s motion was floating in his eyes now.
‘And I have mine with me, too, by the way,’ said the guard, standing up.
He straightened his pants and winked at everyone there. Tina Zhuk’s other two neighbors got ready to go after him. A window floated slowly along the wall.
‘You saw Leeza in Moscow?’
‘She and I work in the same department at the library.’
‘And… how is she?’
‘She applied to the philology department last year but didn’t get in. She was working at some factory…’
‘They say it costs eight thousand green ones to get into college in Moscow,’ said Tina Zhuk. ‘Minimum.’
Olga Leonidovna looked at Tina with surprise.
‘She obviously didn’t have eight thousand.’
‘Obviously,’ said Tina, putting on lipstick in front of a little mirror, then standing up. ‘Greetings, everybody.’
The reading room was empty but Olga Leonidovna switched to a whisper.
‘This year Leeza was accepted at the correspondence course division and got a job with us. She sorts through the new acquisitions in the Manuscript Department.’ She pulled a plump folder out of a plastic bag and extended it to Solovyov. ‘It’s a photocopy. A certain something that arrived recently for the collection.’
‘Thank you.’
Leeza had held this folder in her hands. Leeza.
Solovyov left the institute and went to the train station. He boarded a trolleybus but then got out at the very first stop and returned to the institute. In the clerical office, he requested a referral letter for the Rumyantsev Library. Just in case. When he got to the station, he learned that the earliest train was leaving in three hours; he bought a ticket. This was a very early train that arrived in Moscow at 4:30 in the morning; the library opened at nine. But Solovyov preferred waiting in Moscow to waiting in Petersburg. Inactivity felt intolerable to him now. On top of that, waiting in Moscow was waiting near Leeza.
At home, Solovyov tossed the most necessary items into a bag. He thought for a moment, then also put in the folder he had received: he had not even had a chance to open it yet. In memory of his trip to Crimea, he took a can of food. Meat he had bought at a nearby store. For an instant, he had the feeling he was leaving forever. Solovyov looked around. He had everything he needed. He shut the door hard and turned the key in the lock twice. It sounded like two distant gunshots in the echoing stairwell. Like an echo of Solovyov’s decisive actions. The clanking of the key had its own significance, even a point of no return, inasmuch, needless to say, as that descriptor could be attached to a key. Solovyov caught a taxi outside. He rode up to the station a half-hour before the train’s departure.
He went into the entrance hall and bought a newspaper. As he left the entrance hall, he put it in a trash bin. He took the can from his bag and gave it to a pauper. Went out to the platform. Under bright spotlights, pipes on the carriages were belching smoke. Or steam. Most likely steam: it disappeared instantly over the carriages’ roofs, which glistened with ice. Conductors wearing black felt boots stood by the carriage doors. They blew into their mittens from time to time, pressing their lips to their wrists. Sometimes knocking one felt boot against another with a muffled sound. Solovyov showed his ticket and went to his compartment. He greeted the three women who were already sitting there. They answered in chorus. It was nice for him that they were women, not men. The train began moving.
Only after Solovyov had climbed up to the top bunk did he remember the folder. He went back down, got the folder, and crawled back up with it. He turned on the lamp over his head. After getting used to the dim lighting, he opened the folder. He was flabbergasted.
After everything he had heard during the day, he had found something now that was capable of stunning him. There, in the poorly lighted bunk, Solovyov held in his hands the end of the general’s memoirs. He could recognize that handwriting in any lighting. Yes, he was stunned. But not surprised.
In the folder was a photocopy of the notebook Filipp had taken at one time and which had suddenly surfaced in the form of a new acquisition for the library. It remained unclear if it had been acquired from Filipp, where Filipp himself was, and whether he was still on the face of the Earth at all. There were no library markings on the manuscript at all other than the call number.
It was a thick notebook with graph paper. It was too large to copy with facing pages, so each page was copied individually, making for many sheets. Strictly speaking, the notebook could have fit the copier with the pages facing, albeit without the margins: from time to time, the general had made markings in the margins (which he had neatly ruled in pencil). Judging from the various shades of ink, the markings were made at different times. The general had obviously reread his writings more than once and left remarks and additions. ‘Dead.’ Or: ‘Still alive.’ Or (facing the words ‘It was cold’): ‘It was not so much cold as damp.’
It was not so much cold as damp when the remnants of the White Army rolled off toward Chongar. The bulk of the troops had already left Perekop a few days before and were now being loaded onto transports in the ports. The cavalry that remained on the Perekop Peninsula had covered their retreat. The cavalry then held on there until the general received a report one night that his troops were already in the ports. The cavalry soundlessly left Perekop that same night.
The heavy weapons had been disabled. They had removed the locks and left them in position. They had not extinguished their campfires, which Captain Kologrivov’s detachment was to watch over until morning. These 150 volunteers had offered to remain until morning. They covered the retreat of Perekop’s last defenders.
They led the horses by their bridles for the first several hundred meters. They saddled them before reaching Armyansk and the cavalry moved off at a trot. In the vicinity of Dzhelishay, a small number of the troops turned toward Yevpatoria and the rest continued on toward Yalta and Sevastopol. As he ascended Chongarsky Pass, the general was thinking of those who remained on Perekop. In his mind he asked their forgiveness.