Евгений Водолазкин - Solovyov and Larionov

The woman in charge of culture in Yalta knew how to listen. She took in all Solovyov’s stories, remaining both kindly and impassive. A restrained smile never left her face. When her guest’s eloquence finally ran dry, she responded with a full speech that, as became clear right away, had arrived too late.

From her explanations, it followed that Nina Fedorovna Akinfeeva—the woman who helped Larionov in the last years of his life—came to Yalta once a year, for the anniversary of the general’s death. Nina Fedorovna came to the jetty (the functionary released one of her gelatinous arms and pointed toward the window) and sat there for a few hours in honor of the general. She then disappeared for points unknown and returned to Yalta again the next year.

‘Yesterday was the day the general died,’ said the woman.

Her breasts hung for a short moment, then froze in place again on her arm, as if in compensation for Akinfeeva’s traveling nature. Solovyov was upset. He told his conversation partner that he had been a few dozen meters from Nina Fedorovna (how simple were the names of secrets!) but had not risked approaching her with wet splotches on his shorts and so had run off to change his clothes and then… The young man punched his knee in annoyance and apologized right then and there. The punch and the apology were both accepted with identical degrees of good will.

After allowing the Petersburger to vent his emotions completely, the representative of culture in Yalta announced the following important fact. Despite her unestablished place of residence, Nina Fedorovna Akinfeeva had not refused housing space (26.2 square meters) in Yalta but had registered her daughter there: Zoya Ivanovna Akinfeeva, born in 1976, unmarried, and a correspondence student at the Simferopol Pedagogical Institute.

‘Ivanovna is an invented patronymic,’ smiled the plump woman. ‘Nobody has seen that Ivan.’

Judging from the girl’s dark complexion, it might just happen that he was not an Ivan at all. Making up for her own long silence, the senior employee gave an account of the Akinfeev family’s history.

In the early 1970s, a new resident, Nina F. Akinfeeva, moved into the communal apartment where General Larionov lived (how can that be? he lived in a communal apartment?!) Authorization for the room was issued from the city’s housing stock and allotted through the Anton Chekhov Museum, where Akinfeeva, who needed housing, was employed. By the time the new resident moved in, the general had long been a widower. Here, the storyteller tactfully fell silent.

Solovyov knew from Dupont’s book about the death of the general’s wife in the mid-sixties. Lacking specific information about this woman, the French researcher had alluded to her rather briefly. The general’s son was discussed even more briefly; the scholarly lady had not managed to trace his fate after he came of age. The Yalta civil servant had managed to trace his fate, though, if only partially. After resting her unblinking gaze on Solovyov, she announced that the general’s only son had taken to drinking and left home. She just could not remember if the son had taken to drinking first and then left home or vice versa, meaning taken to drinking after leaving home. Even in the absence of chronological clarity, however, both facts were at hand and both induced the storyteller’s agitation. She stopped smiling, leaned back in her chair, and mechanically adjusted the straps of her brassiere under her blouse. Solovyov began to think he was watching some sort of old movie, though he could not remember how the movie ended.

In the early 1970s, Nina Fedorovna Akinfeeva was around forty and she, like the general, was completely alone. After moving into the communal apartment, Nina Fedorovna unexpectedly acquired a reason to exist. The general became the object of her reverence and care, occupying all her thoughts, energies, and time. She took to reading books about the anti-Communist White Movement. They powerfully crowded out the Chekhov studies that had once occupied an exceptional position in her consciousness. Little by little, Nina Fedorovna’s museum colleagues began to notice, alarmed, that Anton P. Chekhov was no longer at the center of her interests.

It is difficult to say what, exactly, served as the reason for the museum employee’s spiritual regeneration. Did her vanity play a role here (residence in the same communal apartment as a great person), or was it the opposite, meaning pity (residence of a great person in a communal apartment)? Was this the influence of the magnetic qualities of the general himself, a person who at one time commanded armies and was most likely capable of subordinating a lonely museum worker to his will? And, finally, was there, behind everything that happened, a banal communal apartment dalliance, as some of the employees at the Chekhov Museum were inclined to think (this opinion was reinforced by hints of their colleague’s unpredictable temperament)? This, however, should be qualified by saying that other museum workers categorically rejected the possibility of a dubious relationship with the elderly general. In the course of discussions that arose spontaneously, the supposition was expressed that Nina Fedorovna might just as successfully have developed a similar relationship with Anton Chekhov.

The following notable fact testifies, circumstantially, to the bond between these two lonely people being purely platonic. One fine morning (after numerous years of selfless service to the general), Nina Fedorovna embraced the object of her reverence and ran out of the house without saying a word. She returned about three weeks later in an unrecognizable condition. Her face was all scratched and her clothing was torn. The fugitive was breathing heavily. She brought with her the scent of the forest and cheap cigarettes, and a devastated bankbook. The general welcomed her without a single question. Several weeks later she burst into sobs and confessed to the general that she was pregnant. The general, sitting in his chair, lifted his head. Nina Fedorovna placed her trembling fingers into his extended hand, and he silently squeezed them.

Nobody, including the museum and the cultural department that administers it, ever learned what thickets had attracted Nina Fedorovna during her days of flight. Innate energy that had awakened within the museum worker drove her toward continuing the human race and threw her into the embrace of something age-old, savage, and natural. The museum’s management saw this particular case as unprecedented as well as unworthy of imitation. Considering, however, that Nina Fedorovna had become pregnant on the very brink of the conclusion of her child-bearing years (it was emphasized in the trade union’s character reference that this was the last chance for the member of the museum’s collective) material assistance in the amount of seventy-five rubles was allocated to her. The fallen employee was also presented with The Stone Foot , a poetry collection by Grigory V. Ursulyak, the museum’s director. The museum did not regret the assistance afterwards. Years later, when Akinfeeva left Yalta for points unknown, her daughter replaced her in that institution of enlightenment.

Life did not change a bit in the communal apartment after that. Nina Fedorovna returned to the responsibilities that she had previously chosen to take upon herself. Every day (in the early morning, and sometimes in the evening) she accompanied the general to the jetty, carrying his folding chair and awning behind him. The time after the onset of darkness was devoted to preparing his memoirs. The general had previously written them himself but was forced to set them aside after the age of eighty, when his hand took on a mind of its own. New opportunities opened up for the general when a helper appeared in his life. He began dictating his recollections.