Евгений Водолазкин - Solovyov and Larionov

In the end, the professor did not answer. Solovyov wanted to call someone else but there was nobody else to call. He realized that when the tones inside the phone changed, as if they had tired. He kept listening to them, not wanting to put the receiver down; they sounded like signals from Mars might sound. That sort of connection was, essentially, organic at house No. 11 on Zhdanovskaya Embankment. Contact with Planet Earth was ruled out for that evening.

Prof. Nikolsky’s absence troubled Solovyov. He headed to the university in the morning and learned there that the professor was in the hospital. The dean’s office employee was reluctant to answer his question about what had happened to the professor. It was not customary to give out this sort of information.

‘Something about his lungs… They’re doing tests.’

The hospital where Prof. Nikolsky was undergoing tests was in the northern part of the city. Solovyov bought some oranges along the way. Upon reflection, he also bought some German cookies. His thought was that these foodstuffs were incapable of harming the professor’s lungs.

Solovyov had no trouble finding the pulmonary department. There was no sense of the usual stench of Russian hospitals there. Perhaps lung disease did not assume a smell. The nurse on duty was sitting in the corner of the hallway. She was noting down something in a journal, slowly tracing out letter after letter. Solovyov asked which room the professor was in. The nurse answered without raising her head. Her knitting lay next to the journal. Based on her reverie, it was clear she had only just set it aside.

‘What happened to Professor Nikolsky?’ Solovyov asked.

Her pen was moving with the placidity of a knitting needle.

‘Nothing good.’

Prof. Nikolsky had a small but private room. Nobody answered when Solovyov knocked. He pressed the door handle and cautiously opened the door a little. Prof. Nikolsky was half-lying on the bed. This was the same unusual pose the professor himself had talked about at one time, during lectures about the Petrine period. At the time, this—half-sitting (half-lying?)—was considered healthful for sleeping, so blood would not rush to the head. Prof. Nikolsky was half-lying (half-sitting?) like that in his room. His eyes were closed.

Solovyov’s purposeful gaze proved more efficacious than his knock. The professor opened his eyes. It is possible he was not even sleeping. Most likely (Solovyov grasped this from the professor’s tranquility) he had heard the knock.

Solovyov greeted him before crossing the threshold.

‘Come in, my friend.’

The professor gestured, barely noticeably, pointing to a chair beside the bed. There was a whiff of his usual goodwill in that gesture, but there was something more now, too. What Solovyov initially took for tranquility was undoubtedly something else that customary words did not fit.

‘So, I brought… here.’

Solovyov took the oranges out of the bag. When he was on his way here, he had intended to ask the professor about his health but now he could not do so. He remembered the cookies and pulled those out.

‘And these…’

Disheartened by his own eloquence, Solovyov held out the packages for the professor.

‘Thank you.’

He put the packages on the blanket. Now the packages and the blanket moved, barely noticeably, in time with Nikolsky’s breathing. His breathing—so it seemed to Solovyov, anyway—was rapid and irregular. The professor’s pale, hairless chest was visible behind baggy pajamas; a small aluminum cross shone on his chest. Solovyov thought that he had never seen the professor’s body: he did not remember seeing him without a necktie. Nikolsky took Solovyov’s hand.

‘How’s the dissertation?’

‘I’m almost finished.’

‘Good work. Bring it to me, all right?’

Solovyov’s dissertation lay in his bag. He nodded.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Not so great… But even so, better than your general.’

The professor was trying to sit up more and the oranges slid down to the edge of the bed. ‘Did you manage to find the end of his memoirs?’

‘Not yet. But I found something else.’

And Solovyov told of yesterday’s discovery. Nikolsky heard him out without interrupting.

‘The truth is more wonderful than make-believe.’

A nurse came in and held out a plastic lid with several pills for the professor. He tossed all the pills into his mouth at once with a familiar motion that even had a devil-may-care feel, then drank them down with water. This made no impression whatsoever on the nurse.

‘You know,’ said Solovyov after waiting for the door to close behind the nurse, ‘with everything almost done, right now a sort of unusual feeling has come up. Maybe it’s dissatisfaction. It’s hard for me to express…’

‘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…’