Евгений Водолазкин - Solovyov and Larionov

The general did not move. He was half-sitting on the base of the lighthouse and watching seagulls stroll along the jetty. They were letting out shrill sounds that were sometimes similar to a duck’s quacking, sometimes to a child’s screech. The seagulls were searching for something among the wet rocks. They groomed their feathers and raised their heads, pensively examining a sea entirely lacking ships. Never before had they seen a sea like that. The seagulls did not even fly off when the group of people walking along the jetty neared the general. They were not afraid of people.

Zemlyachka was the first to approach the general. She neared him without rushing but it was noticeable even under her leather coat how quickly her breasts were moving. As before, the general was half-sitting on the base of the lighthouse, leaning on his hands. Those walking smelled of horse sweat and unwashed human bodies. The sailors froze, awaiting an order. Kun spat out the cigarette butt. Zemlyachka took out her pen knife and silently drove it into the back of the general’s hand. She was overrun with feelings.

A bell struck on Polikurovsky Hill. It was ringing in the St. John Chrysostom bell tower. Zemlyachka and Kun were arguing about something in undertones. The sailors observed the general moving his lips, barely noticeably, and they felt sympathy toward him. His hand was still lying on the base of the lighthouse. A crimson dribble wound through cracks in the rocks. Zemlyachka was insisting that his execution had to be agonizing. Kun objected that the execution should demonstrate the humanism of Soviet power. The striking bell muted Zemlyachka’s reply. Its sound floated over the sea, filling Yalta’s entire bay. When the argument was over, they led the general to the outer side of the jetty. They placed him on the edge and tied a piece of debris from an anchor to his feet.

‘Shoot for the stomach, not the heart,’ Kun advised the sailors. ‘Then he’ll be able to drown after he’s shot, too.’

The sailors nodded.

‘I’ll be the one to shoot,’ said Zemlyachka. ‘In the groin.’

The sailors nodded again. Far below, brown seaweed undulated in time with the waves. The water had turned emerald green under the bright sun. It no longer had a repulsive wintry look and it seemed warm from a distance. The general decided to look straight ahead so as not to feel dizzy. He could see part of the embankment behind the sailors’ heads. Coaches were driving and people were walking. The embankment continued to live its own life but that life was no longer the general’s life; they were separated by a short strip of water and a group standing on the jetty. Yalta’s cozy amphitheater towered over the embankment. Smoke stretched from the chimneys of some houses. It was rising toward the sky and mixing with clouds at the very top of Ai-Petri. The sailors stepped aside. Nothing else blocked the marvelous picture. The clouds seemed motionless but in actuality they were not. They were slowly drifting toward Ai-Petri. This became particularly noticeable when the shadow of a large triangular cloud began moving along the peak. The cloud itself still did not touch the peak. It was moving more slowly than its shadow. When Zemlyachka’s leather coat appeared in front of the general, he thought the cloud would not moor at the peak during his lifetime. That it could have hurried up if, of course, all its spectators were equally important to it. But the cloud was not hurrying. It was obviously imitating the cloud the future military commander had seen from deep within Vorontsov Park in 1889. At approximately 3:00 in the afternoon, when his father, who was keen on photography, decided to take his picture. That time was considered the best for taking a photograph. The sun was still bright but the shadows had already settled prettily on the grass. The boy was standing in a glade between Lebanese cedars. The camera was on a cumbersome wooden stand located a little way below, on a walkway. His father had shortened the legs of the stand so the boy would be photographed against the backdrop of Ai-Petri. A dragonfly froze uneasily over the camera. It was not flying out of the lens; it simply hovered in one place. Its wings were indiscernible and seemed like a light thickening of air. His father needed that peak, suffused with sun, but the shadow of a cloud had already appeared on it. His father kept looking out from under the black cloth but the cloud was not thinking about moving. Only its shadow was migrating. It was creeping ever closer to Ai-Petri, depriving the peak of its last signs of luminescence. Zemlyachka energetically shook her right wrist. Larionov had been posed just as carefully in 1889 as now. Only then he was standing with his back to Ai-Petri. He had been watching the cloud then, looking around the entire time. He saw cedar branches rocking slightly in the wind. Felt the mountain’s icy freshness mixing with the aromas of the park among the cedar branches. The boy inhaled that air and his nostrils moved. Caterpillars hung down from trees on thin threads; some were transforming into butterflies. The shrubs were scattered with ripe red berries. Cones dropped slowly from cedar crowns. The cones hit, muted, against the grass, stirring up grasshoppers who jumped together like fountains, then they bounced several times before falling still. The cones had been changing places, unnoticed, when he had turned around. An ant crawled along his knee. Zemlyachka raised the hand with the revolver. The general attempted to see himself from a distance but the image turned out to be a negative. A shot rang out from the opposite side of the jetty. The seagulls began taking off with a shriek but came right back down. The general turned his head and saw Zhloba. Zhloba’s meager gestures asked Kun and Zemlyachka to approach him. Zemlyachka expressed dissatisfaction, like a person who has been interrupted at the most interesting part. She jabbed the revolver in the general’s direction but Zhloba shook his head in the negative. As if foreseeing disappointment, Kun and Zemlyachka were in no hurry to make their way to Zhloba. The sailors took sunflower seeds from their pockets and tossed them to the gulls. They liked observing the gulls beating each other with their wings in their struggle for the seeds. Zhloba’s conversation with his comrades-in-arms turned out to be anything but simple. Isolated exclamations that the wind carried, and their gestures, spoke to that. Zhloba took a paper folded into quarters from his map case. He unfolded it, showed it to both his conversation partners in turn, and placed it back in the case. The sailors laughed about the birds’ basic instincts. This spectacle ennobled them in some way. Zhloba was, perceptibly, beginning to lose patience. He took out the paper once again, pressed it up against Bela Kun’s face and held it like that for several seconds. Bela Kun did not resist. Zemlyachka turned around abruptly and left the jetty. The men went after her. The general’s gaze followed them but not one of them turned around. The sailors understood nothing. After tossing the rest of the seeds to the seagulls, they began trudging uncertainly after their commanders. One of them returned, untied the general’s feet, and bolted off to catch up to the others. The general took several steps away from the edge. The wind was intensifying. The general flung open his overcoat to greet the wind, just as people greet someone they already said goodbye to for the last time, someone who brings joy by simply existing. The general looked at the sun without squinting. Tears welled up from rays that were still bright but already orange. The sun was hanging over the other side of the embankment, illuminating masses of ice that had frozen on the streetlamps after the night’s storm. They glistened like a dazzling Christmas garland. The size of the sun exceeded the boundaries of what is reasonable. Jolting as it moved, the sun disappeared behind the mountain at unexpected speed. The sun was setting in his presence.