Евгений Водолазкин - Solovyov and Larionov

One fine day, Ursulyak stopped by the second-hand bookstore, saw The Stone Foot on the shelf, and read the personalized inscription written in his own hand. Poet and director Ursulyak purchased his own book and gave it to Nina Fedorovna once again, pronouncing that every person should have something that cannot be sold. This was not, in fact, the first incident of the sort in his poetic practice: at second-hand bookstores, he sometimes bought up books he had once inscribed, returning them to their remiss owners with the notation Reissued . He developed a knack for determining the presence of The Stone Foot as soon as he stepped inside. Sales clerks knew that and readily took The Stone Foot on consignment.

‘Zoya, we’re closing,’ came a shout from somewhere beyond the garden.

‘We’re closing,’ Zoya corroborated sadly.

After opening the gate, she waited for her Petersburg guest to exit, then closed it with a clang already familiar to Solovyov. She entered the administrative building without saying a word. Solovyov huddled sheepishly by the gate. He had not been invited to enter the building, but nobody had said goodbye.

He did not want to be pushy. He did not want to ask if he could see Zoya home, though of course he wanted to see her home. On the other hand, it would have been strange and even disagreeable if Zoya herself had asked for that.

‘You’re still here?’ Zoya asked, though she did not look at all surprised.

Solovyov nodded and they made their way out. Zoya was not headed toward the stairs, down which Solovyov had walked from the square to the museum. After going around the corner of the administrative building, they walked out toward another gate. From that gate, a path looped between the buildings of a sanatorium and led them out.

‘And what happened to the memoirs the general dictated to Nina Fedorovna?’ Solovyov asked. ‘Were they in the general’s room, too?’

The young woman shrugged absent-mindedly. ‘Probably… it was such a mess then.’

They went down to the Uchan-su River, walked along it for about fifty meters, and ended up on a stone bridge. Leaning her elbows on the railing, Zoya observed the Uchan-su tirelessly fighting its way toward the sea, through cobblestones and chunks of wood. She looked calmly at Solovyov.

‘Are those memoirs very important to you?’

‘Yes.’

There was a small bazaar on the other shore. At Zoya’s suggestion, they bought a watermelon and took it to a nearby park. After settling on a bench, Zoya took a Swiss pocket knife from her purse. This woman always carried the essential items.

After cutting the watermelon in half, Solovyov placed one half aside, on a plastic bag. From the second half, he cut thin, neat semicircles, divided them into smaller segments, and spread them out on the same bag. There was something primordially masculine in his handling of the knife, something that was undeniably expressed in Zoya’s gaze, which was following his hands. Solovyov himself could see that he had been very deft; it surprised him a little. The watermelon was truly sweet.

‘Your mother didn’t lay claim to the general’s property?’

‘She didn’t have any official rights.’

‘But how did she keep living with the people who…’

‘…Who robbed her? It was fine. That’s life.’

Life dealt worse things, too. Nina Fedorovna found it challenging not only to lay claim to the property but even to express the offense she had felt. One could do that if seeing the offenders in court or perhaps only meeting them every now and then on the street. But having them alongside oneself every day, using a communal toilet with them, and leaving a pot of soup in a shared kitchen—that was utterly impossible. Most likely, the hurt that Nina Fedorovna felt did not so much pass as dull. The sight of the general’s various small items (many of which she had given to him) popping up with one of the couples, reignited that feeling, though, overall, it was deemed to have faded.

Moreover, oddly enough, Petr Terentyevich began striking up conversations with her in his time away from his medical procedures. After half-sitting on a kitchen table that had been handed down to him, he told Nina Fedorovna about constructing a respirator under home conditions and applying splints to bone fractures, about antibacterial injections and the effect of chlorine vapors on the upper airways. Despite having never given a gift to anyone in his life, he suddenly gave her the evacuation map for a factory that manufactured reinforced concrete as well as a model of the ventilating opening of an emergency exit that he made himself. He even wanted to give his collection of toxic agents to Nina Fedorovna for her birthday, but Galina Artemovna opposed that adamantly when, by chance, she learned of her husband’s intention. She quickly made a mental note of her husband’s contact with their female neighbor. Galina Artemovna looked upon that ironically but did not speak up at all. Sometimes she even gave the impression that this state of things suited her.

In actuality, the work-related topics that so agitated Petr Terentyevich had always left Galina Artemovna indifferent. Neither highly detailed classifications of nerve agents, which he had mastered to perfection, nor his ability to determine the type and size of a gas mask with his eyes closed made any sort of impression on her. It is possible that he turned to Nina Fedorovna—who heard him out politely—to see out what the specialist lacked in his own family. Most likely, Petr Terentyevich’s sympathy for Nina Fedorovna’s late motherhood played a role, reminding him that he and Galina Artemovna, too, had been able to have a child when they were nearly forty.

There were some pronounced changes with respect to the Kozachenko pair. This might have been characterized as estrangement, if, of course, they had been close before. But they had not been close. Definitively caught up in his illness (which was not, by all indications, as scary as the couple initially thought), Petr Terentyevich made the rounds of Yalta’s pharmacies after work. He compared medicine costs, attempting each time to ascertain their wholesale prices.

On one of those evenings, Ivan Kolpakov subjected Petr Terentyevich’s wife to an unexpected sexual advance: in his state of drunkenness, he had thought she was his own wife. Galina Artemovna’s lack of resistance confirmed his delusion and he did with his neighbor all that his modest fantasies directed. Kolpakov’s mistakes began repeating regularly after that, with the only difference being that now it was Galina Artemovna herself who prompted him with regard to little novelties she had never seen from her civil defense specialist.

Petr Terentyevich, who suspected nothing, continued his platonic relations with Nina Fedorovna. At Petr Terentyevich’s request, he was retold the play The Cherry Orchard , which vividly reminded him of his favorite Taras Shevchenko poem, ‘The Cherry Orchard by the House.’ Once he even asked Nina Fedorovna to show him the Chekhov Museum because he’d heard so much about him (Chekhov). His wife was copulating with Uncle Vanya (Kolpakov) as Petr Terentyevich stood in Chekhov’s study with a group of museum visitors. Tears in his eyes, he hearkened to the story of Chekhov’s deadly skirmish with the very same disease he had, feeling himself to be a bit like Chekhov at that moment. It is possible that in the depths of his soul, Petr Terentyevich also wanted to tell a German doctor, ‘ Doktor, ich sterbe ,’ [2] ‘Doctor, I am dying.’ (German) but there were no German doctors in his life and could not have been.

After thinking about death at the Chekhov Museum, he decided to order himself a funeral with music. This was the only thing from the realm of the beautiful that he could permit himself. In the will he had prepared, five hundred Soviet rubles from an unshared bank book was allocated specifically for that purpose. That sum seemed to him like more than enough for a performance of Chopin in the open air. And though he was not really planning to die, the instructions he had made brought a certain tragedy and loftiness into his life.