There did exist, however, a positive side to the general’s predilection. Constrained by the lack of railroad track, General Larionov actively worked toward its construction. Even in his pre-Crimean period, he put together a narrow-gauge railroad in the forest near Kiev, as a test. He entered Crimea’s railway history first and foremost as the person who built a fully fledged railroad bed from Dzhankoy to Yushun.
The general’s childhood impressions turned out to be so strong that he even chose an armored carriage as his place of residence in Crimea. A host of legends has formed about that carriage, but all that is known and confirmed documentarily is that it was home to four birds (a crane, a crow, a raven, and a starling) and that Alexander Vertinsky visited the hospitable carriage and sang the well-known anti-war song ‘I Don’t Know Who Needs That And Why’ for the general. According to Alexei Ravenov’s In the Blue Train Carriage, those present said General Larionov’s distinctive, unearthly gaze was noticeable even then; it was reflected, in particular, in the photograph from 1964 that reminded historian Solovyov of his deceased mother’s gaze.
Solovyov thought back to that gaze yet again as he was speeding past railroad crossings, booths, and controllers with batons. He was standing by an open train window, the curtain flittering to his right like a bird that had been shot. Sunlight illuminated waves of fine hair along his arm, which felt the window frame’s metallic coolness. Solovyov thought the hairs were coarsening in the sweltering August wind, that their bright glistening was a sign of a gradual transformation to copper. He pressed his lips to the hairs for a minute, as if to assess their wiriness, but they turned out to be surprisingly soft.
Solovyov was a most genuine passenger of long-distance trains. He drank tea from a glass in a metal holder without pulling out the spoon, went to the lavatory with a towel on his shoulder, and sauntered around stations in a Petersburg University T-shirt. But the important thing was that he was riding in a compartment carriage for the first time in his life. After closing the compartment door for the night, he took a passing, admiring glance at his reflection in the mirror. The bulbs from the light in the lower bunk were reflected behind his back, too, as were some bottles with little plastic cups on them, a taciturn gentleman in a tracksuit, and two young female students. In short, there was everything that created the railroad’s aching coziness; a brief unity before parting forever. As he lay down in his upper bunk, Solovyov enjoyed listening to the students’ whispers. He did not even notice himself falling asleep.
He was awoken by light falling across his face. The train was standing still. Solovyov’s window was under a station streetlamp. Slowly, so as not to awaken the sleepers, he lowered the snug-fitting window and a warm, night breeze wafted into the compartment. A central Russian breeze, it abstractly occurred to Solovyov, who did not know where the train had stopped. The name of the deserted station was hidden in the darkness: apparently, it was a lone streetlamp burning in the window. But the lack of people in that expanse was illusory. In the depths of the station, where window glass meekly gleamed against the building’s dark contours, a quiet conversation was taking its course between two people. After sliding into the shaded part of his bunk, Solovyov discerned their unmoving figures on a bench, facing one another. He saw, in their bentness and in their chins that rested on their hands, something extraordinarily familiar that he could not, however, call to mind.
They were having a conversation that was utterly connected to the place in which the train was standing. The people they were naming were undoubtedly known only here and the details mentioned were also not likely to be understood without the preliminaries of living here a long time, but even so, Solovyov was unable to shake off an agonizing sense of déjà vu. In an attempt to determine where he had seen these same figures, Solovyov recalled all the stations and substations he had ever traveled through, but nothing similar came to mind. It turned out that situations varied at each of the stations he had seen. There were completely different people sitting everywhere (and even, perhaps, at the very same time), and it followed from that, in turn, that if the train were to stop at one hundred stations during the night, he would hear one hundred different stories. The diversity of existence made his head spin.
Meanwhile, the talkers fell silent. The one sitting on the right took out cigarettes, which he shared with his conversation partner. Two small fires appeared in the dark, one after the other, bringing to mind the lights at a crossing.
‘That’s all crap,’ said the one sitting on the left.
Solovyov suddenly recalled where he’d seen figures like these. They were chimeras from Notre-Dame Cathedral, on the cover of a history textbook.
The train arrived in Simferopol at three o’clock the following afternoon. It was raining in the Crimean capital. The rain had most likely just begun—steam was still rising from the hot pavement. Solovyov purchased a trolleybus ticket to Yalta after a short wait at the ticket window. He decided to travel between the two cities using this unusual trolleybus connection, perhaps the only one in the world. The route from Simferopol to Yalta had surprised even General Larionov in his time: he lived to see the launch of the trolleybus route, and, by then, nothing had surprised him in a long time. His fantasies, which were historically limited to the railroad, had never hinted at the possibility of an intercity connection of this sort.
The general remembered carriage connections (the office was located on the first floor of the Oreanda Hotel) perfectly, just as he remembered carriages with rubber tires and the changing of horses in Alushta. He did not immediately grasp why the trolleybus had become a replacement for all that. He was soberly aware that, unlike the railroad, a trolleybus line was not suitable for transferring heavy armaments or any significant number of troops. Even so, despite the absence of strategic significance for the trolleybus line, the general began regarding the innovation fairly positively after all and rode the trolleybus to Gurzuf one spring.
After the trolleybus had driven up, Solovyov settled into a window seat in the back row, in keeping with the ticket he had purchased. Passengers entered through the front door and heaped their luggage up on the back platform, resting it against a door that was not open for boarding. The passengers on the trollybus were almost entirely vacationers. They reclined noisily in their seats and wiped away sweat with the edges of their T-shirts. The only exception, by all indications, was a workingman with a girl who was about ten. They sat near Solovyov and had almost no belongings.
Despite the rain, the stuffiness had not subsided. It eased only when the trolleybus left the city and worked up a speed that was unexpected for such a vehicle. As if on command, the florid nylon curtains were pulled out the windows and knocked against the glass from the other side. This synchronized flapping lent the trolleybus a festive, somehow even nuptial, look. As the trolleybus climbed Chongarsky Pass, the workingman’s daughter began feeling nauseous. Her father took a match out of a box and suggested she put it in her mouth. This folk remedy proved ineffective. The little girl looked at the match, then at the calloused fingers extracting it from the box, and vomited.
The weather changed completely after Chongarsky Pass. The rain clouds remained beyond the northern side of the ridge and the sun beat through the windshield of the trolleybus as it began its careful descent along the winding mountain road. Nature did everything it could to stun Solovyov that day. The sun, which replaced the rain so suddenly, was not simply shining in a flawlessly blue sky. Both the sun and the sky were reflected, mirror-like, somewhere far below, like an unending mosaic that shimmered through the cypress trees floating in the windows. That was how Solovyov saw the sea for the first time.