‘Do deign to say a parting word,’ Kutepov appealed to the general.
The general watched as the bishop’s gray hair whipped in the wind. His hair lashed at his eyes and got into lips opened from shortness of breath, but he made no attempt to remove it. This had happened in the general’s life, too. The same elderly bishop and the same gray hair whipping. But he could not remember where. Life had begun repeating itself. The bishop did not look at anyone individually and the pause did not weigh upon him. His face expressed no impatience. The general remembered: it was the violinist from his childhood. He had played right here, by the fence at the Tsar’s Garden.
‘I have nothing to say.’
Admiral Kutepov smoothed his hair and took several steps toward the crowd. He cleared his throat. A horse began neighing behind those standing.
‘We did all that we could…’
Kutepov glanced at the general, as if searching for new words. But the general was silent. Kutepov thought a bit, then asked everyone’s forgiveness. The general nodded; he found that appropriate. Kutepov cast a look around the crowd, breathed some air into his lungs, and shouted, ‘Farewell!’
‘Farewell,’ the general said to Kutepov. ‘My mission has ended.’
‘The launch is waiting for us,’ said Kutepov, nodding in the direction of the sea.
‘I commanded ground operations and now the naval operation is beginning. You’re the admiral, not I.’
The admiral looked at his watch.
‘We can’t linger any longer.’ Still acting as if he did not understand, Kutepov took a folder with a two-headed eagle from the general’s hands.
‘You’ll need that in Constantinople,’ said the general.
‘There’s no sense in waiting for them.’
‘Including a final statement of the treasury and correspondence about providing asylum.’
‘They perished on Perekop and you know it.’
‘This is not, really, about them.’
‘General, the Reds will not simply kill you, they’ll slice you to pieces.’
‘It’s not worth spending time bickering. There are 145,000 people waiting for you. And that’s just according to the lists. I think there are many more of them in reality.’
Admiral Kutepov shifted the folder from his right hand to his left, then put his hand to his peaked cap. He did that so slowly that he had time to inadvertently twist his finger at his temple. Or perhaps it only seemed that way to the general.
The embankment emptied out fairly quickly. There were only horses that had been abandoned during evacuation. Not all their saddles had even been removed. Horses nobody needed dispersed along the neighboring streets. They neighed from hunger. They were returning to the embankment again in expectation of their masters; they rubbed against icy streetlamps. The horses interpreted their abandonment as a misunderstanding.
The wind was flattening flyers against the fence at the Tsar’s Garden; they had been scattered around several days ago. The general picked one up. In the flyer, comrade Frunze called upon Yaltans not to put up resistance. He guaranteed universal amnesty for the city’s residents. The general unclenched his fingers and the scrap of paper flew off into the empty expanse of the embankment. The city’s residents had no intention of putting up resistance.
Yalta was preparing for the Reds’ entry in a different way, though. Shop windows were being boarded up. Provisions and table silver were being hidden in houses. The measures were warranted but, as it later turned out, insufficient. When the city froze from horror a day later, both the stores and the table silver seemed like mere details. Yaltans did not even remember those amidst the terror that broke out, just as nobody among the Reds remembered comrade Frunze’s flyers.
Captain Kologrivov’s detachment entered the city after the smoke of the last steamship had disappeared beyond the horizon. Retreating under the Reds’ fire, Kologrivov had managed to save most of his detachment. They were saved that day at dawn by a very strong snowstorm that suddenly came down over Perekop. The blizzard allowed the detachment to leave and disoriented their pursuers. It accompanied the detachment for half the day, hiding it in a solid snowy shroud. Kologrivov’s detachment had not perished. They had lost their way.
In the thick snow, the detachment took a mistaken course from the start—to the peninsula’s eastern extremity—rather than the Yalta direction that General Larionov had instructed. They did not figure out their mistake until the dead of night, at the Vladislavovka junction railway station. Instead of moving toward the nearest port, Feodosia, and getting on a ship there, the detachment stayed true to the order and turned back, to the west. In order to get to Yalta, they headed along the road they had already traveled, toward the center of the peninsula, not turning south until then. Only toward the evening of the next day did Captain Kologrivov’s detachment turn up in Yalta.
When he welcomed the detachment, the general did not consider accommodating them in barracks. He housed them in homes that (according to his information) had been vacated during the evacuation. Rest was a vital necessity for the soldiers after their grueling passage. Burning their military uniforms was just as necessary for them. The general ordered that they begin with that.
He himself went to the city theater. After a brief meeting in the wardrobe room, they brought him all their Tatar costumes (around two dozen) and craftsman costumes (eight). Everything was fine with the Tatar clothing but the craftsman costumes had an ineradicably foreign air to them (they had been sewn in Italy). Furthermore, they were tidy in a nonlocal way. After some thought, the general refused them, instead requesting tuxedoes with top hats; the props for The Merry Widow were checked, as well, while searching for those. Several chimneysweeper costumes were found, too, along with ethereal prop-room ladders that the general preferred to refuse: he said he was not encouraging superfluous theatricality. He also asked if the theater had any costumes for paupers but all they found were tatters for a holy fool (Boris Godunov); this was unacceptably light-weight for the month of November. The general took individual pieces from the theater’s wardrobe—including a dozen sashes and hats—to have in reserve. He ordered that everything he set aside be loaded on a cart and brought to the Oreanda Hotel. Written in the notebook’s margin in the general’s hand, opposite the story of visiting the theater, was ‘a good idea.’
Not everyone, however, thought it was a good idea. That became obvious when the tardy detachment formed up by the Oreanda Hotel at dawn. The soldiers heard out the general’s explanations and glumly confirmed their readiness to submit to his orders. These were essentially neither explanations nor orders. The general did not explain anything and, even more so, did not order anything. He simply spoke about what, in his opinion, would be best to do at the given moment. The soldiers understood little of what was happening and one can only guess exactly what thoughts were slinking around in their heads regarding their military commander’s condition. Their sullenness was, as the saying goes, written all over their faces, but the inertia of their esteem for the general kept them from insubordination. In the end, they, too, lacked plans for how to save themselves.
The general headed toward the Yalta city limits with a group of horsemen dressed in Tatar costumes. The horsemen swayed beautifully in their saddles, as befits those who grew accustomed to horses in childhood. The general reminisced about how, many years ago, a horse had pawed at the ground, bringing down a rain of pebbles in a gorge. He then noticed one of his cavalrymen making his horse paw at the ground and he nodded approvingly. He recognized the Petersburg dressage school. Pebbles bounced off ledges in the gorge and flew even better than in the general’s childhood. The other horsemen kept to a steady trot and the general listened carefully to their hoofbeats. Resonant clopping on the stony road blended with dull thudding on ivy growing over the road. The rhythm should not betray any anxiety. It was the rhythm of people far from war. Someone needed to fetch kumys from the nearest Tatar village. The general said he wanted them to ride with kumys. He thought he had made provisions for everything, down to the smallest details. They looked at him with undisguised surprise. After the general had ridden off, Captain Kologrivov explained to the soldiers: ‘What has occurred once before carries a seal of approval. Do as he orders.’