The Aviator

Part Two

FRIDAY [GEIGER]

Innokenty announced to me the other day that he hasn’t been keeping his journal for a couple weeks now. He just kind of announced that, by the by.

I did already know he’s not keeping it. Only it hasn’t been a couple of weeks, but almost a month, although (as the saying goes) who’s counting?

I didn’t hold back and clarified anyway about it being a month. He responded by calling me a German, ha. Then he smiled and said that, for him, that’s praise. And I smiled, as if, abgemacht.[2] I responded that it’s praise for me, too.

And the important thing: I took advantage of that conversation and convinced him to continue the journal. True, to do that I had to promise Nastya would do the same. And even I. Otherwise, according to Innokenty, he’ll feel like a lab rat. So there you go…

So we’ll all write, each at our own computers. Then we’ll merge everything.

I have observed that, for some reason, writing is pleasurable for Innokenty. A sort of replacement for drawing, which somehow went wrong for him. He’s not writing these days because life is now more important to him than creating something.

I’m a different case. I speak poorly. I write poorly. There’s neither life nor creating, just science. Everything that I need to write about Innokenty would basically fit in a logbook.

Or maybe not everything?

FRIDAY [NASTYA]

Everybody has to write! That idea seemed a little weird to me at first but then I thought, well, why not? Some kind of three-way journal’s pretty interesting.

The first thing, which I have to start with – because no other news is more important – is that I’m pregnant! I think it happened on my first night with Platonov. His behavior then kind of scared me. It seemed like he lost consciousness once or twice, for a second. That’s understandable: he loves me double, for my grandmother and for me. That doesn’t bother me, though. I actually like it.

What bothered and worried me is the thought that I’m not a virgin. That’s just a detail for a contemporary person but my beloved is unusual. He only started using the informal ‘you’ with me on our first night, something he never did with my grandmother. Geiger quoted Bunin with regard to Platonov: ‘A person of a bygone age.’ They regarded virginity very strictly in that bygone age: do not dare lose it! But my kind friend did not so much as ask a question on that score. Although I think he noticed everything. Felt it keenly, you might say.

We moved to his place on Bolshoy and I’ve heard nothing from him but words of love ever since. Of course I’d guessed before about how he regarded me but, after all, he couldn’t say anything to me then. Meaning he’s talking now. And I’m talking because I really love him. Platosha’s smart and affectionate. He’s also, by the way, very good in bed: you wouldn’t say this is a guy who’s just been thawed out. He’s good and I tell him that all the time. He smiles back. Now that’s somebody with a nice smile.

Smile, sweetie!

SATURDAY [INNOKENTY]

And so, a continuation of the notes. If I am to be exact, these are no longer notes. Based on the fact that it has now been suggested that I use a computer, I thought up the word printings. I informed Geiger and Nastya about that and they nodded listlessly. They do not like it, oh, they do not like it. And it’s not pretty enough for them. Truth be told, it’s not for me, either, but I don’t let on. I am testing how far my friends’ tolerance will go.

So far, they are tolerating. Geiger is basically happy that – to express it in a preindustrial way – I’m again putting pen to paper, since it turns out I wrote nothing for about a month. I somehow wearied of my previous scribblings and thought I had stopped, but here I am starting again, induced by Geiger. I’ll put it bluntly: not without hesitation.

Geiger put pressure on me in the sense that the journal is an ancient genre and is thus natural for me. I, after all, stated in Bunin’s way, am ‘a person of a bygone age.’ And I kept a journal wonderfully for half a year so why not keep it further? He already spoke to me about the ‘not-bygone age’ at some point. It is a vivid phrase, I remembered it. True, I have only read early Bunin and don’t remember reading that there, but I understand Geiger’s motivation. It is important for him to document what happens in my brain. But why do I need that? As Geiger himself said, I wrote for an entire half-year; is that really not enough?

I told him that these notes make me into someone unusual, the subject of an experiment. Rather like some sort of rat, at a time I should be blending in with this new way of life and, well, basically (I giggle, forcedly), I have a young wife and I am not in the mood for notes in the evenings. Geiger objected: rats don’t keep journals and nobody is impeding me (a glance at Nastya) from blending in with a new way of life. He was, put bluntly, insistent.

Geiger convinced me that the course of my rehabilitation should remain for science. Reacting to the rat, he suggested putting everyone in equal positions: me, Nastya, and him. In his opinion, events will be presented from three angles so there will be multiple dimensions of views about what happens. It’s supposed to comfort me that everyone in our troika will write, since I will no longer be in a special position. Anyway, Geiger convinced me.

The most important thing is last: Nastya is pregnant.

MONDAY [GEIGER]

I wonder: how does Innokenty perceive Nastya? She came into his life without my involvement. Very felicitously, in my view. Something that’s genuinely good can’t be arranged. It happens on its own.

Take Nastya. More than anything, she loves him. Beyond that, she loves him and all the fullness of his life. With his feelings for Anastasia, with his camp experience, with his current fame.

His fame, it seems to me, is an object of particular attention for Nastya. She simply basks in it. That’s excusable: Nastya is essentially still very young.

She’s pretty smart. That’s important for a person like Innokenty. She’s emotional. Maybe overly emotional, which can be annoying sometimes. In our case, however, that quality of Nastya’s is most likely a plus. Innokenty is growing accustomed to his new time thanks to her active help.

Basically, Russian women are surprisingly lively. I, a German, like that about them.

Nastya’s also practical. Not tight-fisted, not sparsam,[3] but practical. Since Germans have already come up, that quality is, of course, German. It manifests itself in her with certain details and phrases.

For example, we run across a watermelon stand on the street. Sure enough, Innokenty wants to buy a watermelon right then and there. Nastya announces that the watermelons are better in the nearby supermarket. And cheaper. But the thing is that he wants to buy the watermelon here and now. He likes that life itself is revealing its riches to him. And a supermarket is, well, excuse me, another matter. Here it’s a find, there it’s procurement.

There’s nothing bad in her practicality. It’s simply a little unexpected for her age and mentality. How does that go along with her emotionality?

Or maybe that’s the style of this era? A generation of lawyers and economists.

Only where, one might ask, is the dream?

Where is the flight?

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

After Anastasia died, I asked myself if my relationship with Nastya is not infidelity. Not in the sense of man/woman but in the most absolutely human dimension possible. If I am to be entirely frank, that question came about even before Anastasia’s death and before my relationship with Nastya, but I was afraid to ask it. Even of myself. Because I could guess where this course was heading. Then, after asking that question, I was afraid of answering it in the first weeks after Anastasia’s death, though it was already impossible to set aside.

What is difficult to do under ordinary conditions sometimes works out easier on paper. Or on the computer, in my case. I answer the question about whether my life with Nastya amounts to being unfaithful to Anastasia with a firm ‘No.’

The main proof is Nastya’s pregnancy. Anastasia and I should have had a child but we no longer could have a child. Nastya is carrying Anastasia’s flesh within herself, which means that the child she and I will have is partially Anastasia’s child. If Russian history were not so pitch black, then Nastya would have been Anastasia’s and my granddaughter. Is this just a matter of history, though? And is it worth piling all the blame on history?

Just recently, I have noticed that in Russia people have come to like a phrase about how history has no subjunctive mood. Phrases come up now, too, as in my time, and people repeat them whether or not they have relevance. History, you see, does not have… Maybe it does not, it’s just that there are cases when it grants something like a second attempt. This is repetition and simultaneously non-repetition of what already was.

Otherwise, how can you explain that I was granted one more chance for life? That I – if we are to call things by their real names – have risen? That Anastasia lived long enough to see me in that late meeting? That I met Nastya, whom I love and who loves me? Could all that simply be separate cases or, even, chance? Of course not. Nastya and I (and Anastasia!) are dealing with pieces of the same mosaic because when many chance things come together in one common picture, that amounts to a consistent pattern.

I cannot force myself to go to Anastasia’s grave. I am afraid of believing she has died.

WEDNESDAY [INNOKENTY]

Now, as life is settling into a routine little by little, happiness shows through everything, through the most common everydayness, no matter what I do. Everydayness is essentially happiness: to go where you want, read what you want… And, finally, to simply live. But my main happiness is in Nastya and in expecting the child. In the evenings, when I sit with Nastya on the sofa, I caress her belly. Where the changes are still almost unnoticeable. But what is supposedly noticeable – or so Nastya says – is only the fruit of my imagination. Well, fine, she knows better: no matter how you look at it, she knows her belly better.

I think about the little one constantly. I wrote ‘the little one’ just now and it almost seemed as if I was identifying the baby with the male gender. That is not actually how I see things. It even seems that I might want a girl more. She would continue that series: Anastasia, Nastya… It is unclear, however, how she should be named. It’s inconvenient when an entire family carries the same given name.

WEDNESDAY [NASTYA]

Platosha’s favorite topic is the child. That’s a bit unexpected… Where did a man get so much motherliness? It would be more correct to say fatherliness but somehow that doesn’t sound as good. He started caressing my belly in the evenings and it’s ticklish. He asks why I tense up when he touches me. I shrug but I do know why: so I don’t laugh from the ticklishness; the laughter would probably offend him. I’m also afraid of farting. Gas has been bugging me during my pregnancy, especially after supper. I think the gas makes my belly larger and my Platonov takes that as the baby’s growth.

We kept thinking about which apartment it would be better for us to live in now, mine or Platonov’s. We decided on Platonov’s. We – that’s Geiger and I – decided and Platonov didn’t interfere, the sweetheart. Geiger said it’s best for a thawed person to live in familiar surroundings. He’s a real pro so it’s best not to argue with him about the life of the thawed. There’s no need to argue anyway: the apartment on Bolshoy Prospect is better and more comfortable. We can rent out my apartment; why let it sit empty? Although Geiger did wheedle support for Platosha out of the government, it’s already clear now that we can’t get by on that alone. Because our government’s support is pretty listless.

Platonov will have lots of new expenses now he’s a celebrity here. He’ll be quite the awesome partier: just about everybody wants to meet him now. I want for him to be the best. A real social lion, not a Kunstkamera exhibit. The baby and I will just be here for him; we don’t need more than that.

THURSDAY [GEIGER]

I just read that calendar dates reside in linear time but the days of the week are in cyclical time.

Linear time is historical but cyclical time is a closed system. Not even time at all.

Eternity, one might say.

It works out that the history set forth by the three of us isn’t aspiring to go anywhere. It’s the most reliable history.

Maybe it’s not even history.

FRIDAY [INNOKENTY]

Marx. He taught drawing. He was imposing and, yes, there was a striking resemblance to the author of Capital. As a professor of art, he could not help but understand that. Did he hope that the new authorities would not touch a person with an appearance like that or something? Did he joke? Protest? I cannot recall his first name so why not simply call him Marx?

He walks past the easels, swaying. Squeaking the parquet floor. His fat finger scratches a little at his beard. He says:

‘Form floats on the sheet. It is essential to take charge of that format in its entirety and construct a world in it.’

Construct a world. A voice that is muffled, from deep within. As if there is someone else there inside that person, sitting and giving orders.

SATURDAY [GEIGER]

I was at the Platonovs’ today. I’m going to call them both that, even though their marriage is unofficial for now. It’s a good name. Everything that the name Plato comprises carries within itself a shading of wisdom.

Does this couple carry that shading within, too? To some degree, yes. Innokenty by virtue of the circumstances of his life. By the number of things he’s lived through. Nastya by virtue of innate qualities.

I don’t mean to say that Nastya’s wise: it would be silly to say that about a girl. What I have in mind is that she’s arranging their life together rationally. A feminine wisdom or something.

Basically, wisdom is experience more than anything. Experience that’s processed, of course. If there’s no processing, then all the bruises you get are useless.

When I spoke about that out loud, Innokenty objected, saying that processing can happen without bruises, too. That sounds authoritative from the mouth of a person with such baggage in his life. If there aren’t any bruises, though, it’s unclear what to process. Innokenty didn’t really clarify this, and I didn’t even begin to ask.

Then there was a wonderfully tasty supper. Candlelit, by the way. Nastya secured the candles in two holders she’d brought from home. She explained that they were her grandmother’s and asked if Innokenty recognized them. He made an indefinite gesture. Nastya, I think, wanted very much for him to recognize the candleholders.

Of course, he could have recognized them. At least as gratitude for the supper.

After supper they sat on the sofa. I was in a chair. Innokenty didn’t take his hand off Nastya’s belly. I inferred from that that Nastya’s pregnant. I asked about it, as if I were joking. They answered completely seriously: yes, she’s pregnant.

That makes me happy. Very happy. I congratulated them.

At Innokenty’s suggestion, we played lotto. People played that in his day. People don’t play it now but does that really matter? Particularly since it’s so nice to play. So cozy.

As I played, I thought about how Innokenty had earned this coziness like nobody else.

I was also thinking that if I were president, I would make the population of the Russian Federation play lotto in the evenings. Of everything that the authorities could undertake right now, that seems like the best thing.

SUNDAY [INNOKENTY]

We had a nice evening with Geiger yesterday. He became very animated when he learned of Nastya’s pregnancy. Well, yes, it is always pleasant for a natural scientist when someone in his care reproduces: that speaks to good vitality. I am joking. Our relationship with Geiger is human first, then doctorly and all the rest. That has become even more obvious since I left the hospital. He might look a bit aloof but I do know him. He’s a very heartfelt person in his own way.

Geiger’s characteristic love for truisms is another matter. This is, rather, his love for a formula, perhaps even for a phrase. Well, things such as the blood pressure increasing after coffee or, let’s say, punishment following crime. And I read the other day that it turns out that coffee does not always raise blood pressure, far from it. I won’t even speak of crime and punishment.

Geiger recently said of Nastya that she is surprisingly pragmatic for her age, that young people grow up fast. Someone on the outside might think that’s praise but I have already studied Geiger pretty well. He regards this quality of Nastya’s as paradoxical and he does not like paradoxes. He is no friend of paradoxes. I even imagine, roughly, what kind of phrase phrase he’s using as a starting point here: romance is characteristic of youth or something of that sort. The thought that romance can combine with a businesslike attitude irritates him to the depths of his soul.

Geiger is a person of rules. He likes a phrase because it formulates a rule. His strength (he is absolutely reliable) is in rules, but there is a weakness there, too: he fears exceptions. I am sure that Geiger understands that life is more complicated than any diagrams, but at the same time, he values them. For him, this is a question of the world’s orderliness. In Russian life, though, the exception is the rule, it’s just that Geiger doesn’t understand that. Or rather he does not accept it.

One topic yesterday was bumps and bruises that allegedly automatically engender experience. Bruises subjected to processing are what experience is: that is exactly what was said. But that isn’t how it seems to me. Meaning it’s possible that bruises can engender experience. But they might not. My main impressions, for example, are not connected with bruises, though I had oh so many bruises. In the literal sense, at that.

MONDAY [NASTYA]

Today I managed to reach an agreement for renting out my grandmother’s apartment. It all came together quickly, what can I say. I told Platosha that I hadn’t run up the price and was rewarded for moderation. He kissed me on the nose. His gaze was absent; details like that don’t interest him. I rubbed my nose on his chin.

‘Do you understand, you bonehead, that it’ll be easier for us to live now?

‘The main thing,’ he answered, ‘is to live, the rest will somehow follow.’

‘Effort, by the way, is needed for it to follow.’

It works out that I’m earning the riches for the two of us. Does that make me bitter? Not at all. It would be a catastrophe if Platosha began earning the riches, too. He and I are both strong in that we’re different and complement one another. That’s called an ideal marriage. I envelop his life in comfort and he makes up for everything he missed out on when he was frozen.

He reads a lot. There are two stacks of books by our bed: the one on his side is large and, well, mine is small. I flipped through Platonov’s collection yesterday: history, philosophy, literature. Nothing to sneeze at. And what’s in my pile… it’s mortifying to even talk about that. Detective and romance novels. Items predominantly for us ladies. Written in Russia.

My books can always be set aside, even thrown away, but Platosha’s, well, no can do. Ugh… This is something that makes me jealous. I crawl under his hand and whisper:

‘Are you very busy, Innokenty Petrovich?’

He laughs. Asks forgiveness. He asks this very zealously and I resist feebly. It turns out that I’m more interesting than the book that’s flying to the floor. It lies there, flattened, its cover facing up, observing our finale and apotheosis. I look at it from time to time. And so, on a nice high note, my eyes meet with Arnold Toynbee, for example. This disheartens me a little. The most touching thing is that a minute later my Platonov reaches over me for the book and gets down to reading again. Right now, as I write, he’s reading a book about how the USSR conquered the cosmos. Somehow unexpected.

Is it very awful that I, a pregnant woman, am doing gymnastics like this? I’ll need to ask the doctor.

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

Today I read a book about Solovki: it describes the Kem transit camp. That, as it happens, is the place I last saw my cousin Seva. Somehow, I do not want to write about that.

WEDNESDAY [GEIGER]

Innokenty told me that ‘a certain Belkov’ from the government called him. He spoke with him for a fairly long time.

Of course he meant Zheltkov. A person who’s well known to everyone but Innokenty. Zheltkov offered all kinds of support. He left his phone number so Innokenty can call him if need be. He promised to ‘stop by for tea’ if he’s in Petersburg.

Sehr demokratisch.[4]

WEDNESDAY [NASTYA]

Zheltkov from the government called Platosha. Zheltkov himself. He offered ‘all kinds of support.’ True, as someone noted, it’s worth doubting when they offer all kinds of support: a proposal like that carries no obligation. But I think Zheltkov’s beside the point here: what can he offer if Platosha doesn’t need anything?

And Platonov’s quite something himself: he talked without any particular emotion, quite impassively, one might say. Without exaggerated (ah!) joy, even without any agitation that’s difficult to suppress, meaning v. calmly. I waved a hand in front of him, to say: Come back to life a little. Inside, I was proud of my Platonov: the country’s leadership is calling him and he’s talking like that, no fuss. Like a man.

THURSDAY [INNOKENTY]

Of course Geiger isn’t as straightforward as I described him in recent days. I’m striking back at him about Nastya’s pragmatism. He already understands that words like that wound me and now he’s keeping quiet. It is best to be quiet, Geiger… And so: though I exaggerated something in my notes, in the main, I do not think I was mistaken. Geiger is a smart and shrewd person who believes in social ideals that are reflected in his various types of statements, not infrequently in fairly pompous pronouncements. As I have noted, Geiger knows a lot of them. Outwardly, he utters them offhandedly, but in his soul he values them very highly.

What he seems not to understand is that reality tires of pronouncements and then tends to evaporate from them. Only phrases remain and they are not used at all as one might expect. Let us suppose that in my time we liked the phrase about peace to the people and land to the peasants. And what happened? Instead of peace, they received civil war and instead of land, there was requisitioning of farm produce followed by collective farming. Nobody could have even contemplated that, even Geiger if he had lived then. How would he have adapted his slogans to reality?

Or those discussions of his about experience: I keep thinking about those. Maybe bruises do engender some sort of experience but I continue to think that kind of experience is not the most important thing. Let’s say that in childhood I often saw the deceased in church: that’s a bruise, too, if you will. But as I remember now, those deceased did not engender a fear of death in me. I examined them carefully and was not even afraid of stretching to touch them. One time I stroked an old man on the forehead: his forehead was cold and rough. My mother was scared and dashed over to pull me away, but I didn’t really understand why.

Only years later, when I was maturing, did I discover death and feel horrified about it, but that was not a result of my meetings with the deceased. The discovery was predicated on the logic of my inner development.

SATURDAY [GEIGER]

The topic of experience touched our Innokenty very seriously. We had yet another conversation on that score. Innokenty said it wasn’t the beatings in the camp that formed him. It was other things entirely. A grasshopper’s chirping in Siverskaya, for example. The smell of a samovar that’s boiled.

I attempted to explain to him that this is taken into consideration, too. In the end, any action takes place set against some sort of backdrop. He just waved me off, though. The grasshopper, he says, is the main action. And the samovar, too.

‘Good.’ I asked, ‘Do you acknowledge history as a chain of events?’

‘I acknowledge that,’ answered Innokenty. ‘There’s just the question of what to consider an event.’

For Innokenty, history is not just outside time. Its particularity also lies in that it consists not of events but of phenomena.

Or there’s this: a historical event is anything that can exist in the whole wide world. Including, it stands to reason, a grasshopper and a samovar. Why? Well, because, as it turns out, both those things disseminate calmness and peace. And in that, he said, lies their historical role.

MONDAY [NASTYA]

The day started with disappointment. Our intended tenants called to turn down the apartment. When I asked why, they answered that it was something personal. I informed Platonov of what happened and he took it calmly. I’m sorry, though. I spent a lot of time and energy on the search, found a married couple without children, and now this. I’ll have to start all over again. There’s no such thing as luck, it occurred to me. And then I recalled a little story from Platosha’s youth, about an Australian resident who goes to the bottom of the sea in search of human happiness. That’s who we need.

Interestingly, this evening we were at a reception at the Australian consulate. This was basically the first time I’d been to a foreign reception; it was hilarious. The consul appeared in the beginning and welcomed everybody on behalf of the citizens of Australia. Among other things, a non-Australian spoke: he started explaining why Serbia needed to be bombed; nobody was expecting to hear about that. The funniest thing is that he was bug-eyed, like the ‘Australian Resident’ toy, and his speech turned out to be a retelling of Platonov’s story.

There was a buffet after that. People kept coming up to my Platonov and expressing gratitude for his courage. He would set aside yet another tartlet and politely thank them. He said he’d simply had no choice. I admired my gallant companion. We never did figure out why they’d invited him to the consulate. Maybe they were gathering courageous people there that day.

TUESDAY [GEIGER]

Innokenty has changed. The fear of what didn’t exist in his time is no longer conspicuous. The current time really is his now, too. He’s settled in pretty well.

He’s hanging in there calmly, if not exactly confidently. And it seems like he’s growing accustomed to his role as a celebrity.

People invite him everywhere, they’re glad to see him everywhere. I heard him on the telephone answering, ‘Thank you…’ and ‘I’ll have to take a peek at my calendar…’

Innokenty truly does already have a calendar. It’s Nastya.

Of course she likes this life more than anyone. Nastya’s in seventh heaven and doesn’t hide her feelings. It’s rather amusing. At times she takes on a weary look when recollecting her pregnancy. Even then, though, she sparkles with happiness.

And I’m glad of it. You’d have to look really hard for a source of positivity like that. It’s very important for my patient.

THURSDAY [INNOKENTY]

Of all my Solovetsky years, Anzer was probably the only human time. I cannot call that time ‘happy,’ only because each day of my physical recovery drew me closer to the day of my departure. To the day, I whispered to myself, of my death, because neither I nor the other Lazaruses nurtured any sorts of illusions about the results of the freezing. Muromtsev did everything to extend the time we spent at Anzer but what did the gift of a few weeks mean by comparison with a life taken away?

We felt like animals being fed for slaughter who – unlike ordinary animals – know that. In fact there was something animal-like in our life: there was some sort of stupefaction that did not allow one to fall into despair. It was as if they were holding your head under water and then suddenly let go, allowing you to inhale, so you gasp for air with your mouth, not thinking much about what awaits you afterwards. You are simply glad that you can breathe.

Muromtsev petitioned for the Lazaruses to have complete freedom of movement. They were granted passes allowing unlimited movement around the island. After breakfast (which was, by the way, very filling), I would head out for a walk. I wore a short sheepskin coat and a hat of wolf’s fur with soft officer boots on my feet. Along the way I would run into half-undressed prisoners with wheelbarrows: they were exactly the same as I had been, not long ago at all. Their eyes silently followed me: it was strictly forbidden to talk with Lazaruses. I would go down to the water and stroll along the shore.

Although snow had already accumulated in the middle of the island, especially in the wooded parts, it barely lingered on the open shore. Only in certain places, catching on the bushes, did it unobtrusively make its presence known and even in those spots it blended with the sand, becoming unnoticeable. There were astonishing sandy beaches on Anzer. Stepping along the sand, I felt its softness even through the boots and imagined I was in the south: summer, the damp brim of a bucket hat, and grains of sand between sweaty toes.

The water was not summery, so I tried not to look at it. The sea had no azure skies above, so there was nowhere for it to take on the corresponding color. But the sand had a completely summery look. True, it was cold, but, well, I wasn’t touching it anyway.

I am now reading about outer space. It’s interesting that the first to make it there were dogs.

FRIDAY [GEIGER]

Today Innokenty signed a contract to advertise frozen foods. That resulted from the callers reaching Nastya.

Innokenty told me at one point that they’d called him. He hung up. I probably would have hung up, too.

But Nastya didn’t hang up. She spoke with them in a businesslike way, learned the size of the fee, and was impressed.

She’s right about something. The money that the authorities allocated to support Innokenty comes up categorically short. And it doesn’t arrive regularly, either. I’ve had to hold paid consultations at the clinic and that’s not fully legal. But the proceeds went toward our patient.

It’s interesting that it was Nastya who told me about the signed contract. With a certain pride. Innokenty hasn’t commented on it at all. Is he feeling awkward about it?

If the connections with frozen foods continue, I’ll be able to turn down the consultations.

FRIDAY [INNOKENTY]

Nastya has changed somehow. If compared with who she was before Anastasia’s death, she’s slightly different. I discover a new Nastya each day, and that’s a great pleasure.

To what degree does she resemble Anastasia?

SATURDAY [NASTYA]

There’s a big press conference planned for next week at a news agency. At first I thought it was the agency’s initiative, but they let slip that the event is paid for by a vegetable company. By an improbable (oy!) coincidence, it’s the company Platosha advertises. How curious: the vegetable merchants don’t just advertise their own cabbage but also the person who advertises the cabbage. They’ve thought everything through.

Incidentally, my Platonov signed a contract for a series of advertising spots. Right after signing, they brought him to a studio to film the first spot. He refused weakly, said he wasn’t dressed for filming and all that, but they said the opposite was the case: he’d need to undress. I whispered to him that there was no reason to be especially nervous: he had clean underwear. That was no reassurance, though.

We came to the studio. There’s a container made of some sort of special material standing there: it’s silvery with a hundred polished rivets. There’s cotton wool soaked with glue along the edges of the container, as if it’s icy, and there’s gas coming out of it, imitating liquid nitrogen’s coldness. The gas spreads along the floor around the container in fluffy layers. They undress Platosha to his underwear and plant him in the barrel. Actually, he’s barely visible in that container – just his head and shoulders. Off-camera, they ask Platosha:

‘What helped you endure here for so many decades?’

He takes a package of frozen vegetables and raises it over his head:

‘This did!’

The whole studio rolls with laughter.

And I suddenly feel sorry for him.

SUNDAY [GEIGER]

Innokenty and Nastya described filming the advertising spot.

On the one hand, it’s comical. On the other, though, it degrades the tragic element of Innokenty’s life. In his own eyes, first and foremost.

It imagines that he spent all those decades lying in a barrel. He didn’t give a damn, just sustained himself on frozen vegetables.[5]

What tackiness that is, anyway. Schrecklich.

MONDAY [INNOKENTY]

A couple of days ago, I was filmed for an advertising spot: Nastya made an agreement with an agency for a whole series of them. It’s unbelievable stupidity and it’s embarrassing to even talk about, but they pay an insane fee. I never would have thought it would bring in so much money.

I’m reading now about what happened in the country after my arrest. The authors keep expressing the thought that the entire country became a prison camp. Of course, even back then I heard bits of news from the newly arrested and knew some things thanks to Muromtsev, whose connections to the country’s capitals had not been cut off. But still, I had not imagined the true scope of the Terror.

Muromtsev. He was a sincere person, carefree, too, in a way. I think the fact that he was already residing on Solovki is what saved him from worse troubles. He was located in the center of the vortex, where, as we know, it is calmest of all. If he had not already been imprisoned, Muromtsev would have been shot thirty times for what he told me during our walks. As for me, I no longer hid my judgments from anyone – not just Muromtsev – when I was preparing to be immersed into liquid nitrogen. My words most likely made it to the camp’s authorities, but were regarded with total calm. Knowing that all my judgments would be frozen along with me. And would never thaw.

It surprised me greatly that other Lazaruses were cautious, as was the way at the camp. Maybe they truly believed that they would be thawed someday and were afraid of possible accusations in the future? Their fear acted upon me, oppressively. Could it really be, I wondered, that even the distant future would not lead us out of this Bolshevik hell?

Muromtsev sometimes invited me to his apartment (he had a separate apartment!) and treated me to coffee with cognac. When his lips touched the coffee cup, his mustache sank unexpectedly low, its spiky ends sticking out. It was obvious that the academician’s mustache was treated to special care. A small beard embellished his face, too, and his delicate round glasses shone splendidly, but the very finest thing about Muromtsev was his mustache. That mustache, along with the coffee and cognac, instilled hope. So long as people who looked like that existed, normal life did not seem irretrievable.

During one of our conversations, Muromtsev said to me:

‘The real terror will begin soon.’

‘What?’ I inquired. ‘So this is unreal?’

‘There’s no reason to be ironic. Two things are needed for real terror: society’s readiness and someone who will take charge. Society’s readiness is already there. There’s just one small thing missing.’

‘And so who will take charge?’

Muromtsev was silent.

‘The strongest one. He once telephoned me, as you know. Well, then: his strength can be felt even over the telephone. It’s animal-like somehow, not human.’

I believed Muromtsev: he worked with rats.

TUESDAY [NASTYA]

Zheltkov called this morning – I answered. Rather, his aide called and when I responded that Platonov wasn’t at home, Zheltkov himself intervened in the conversation, and said that’s even better.

‘You and I are going to hatch a little plot: we’re plotting a tea party so your husband doesn’t know. We’ll invite him when it’s a done deal, so to speak.’

‘Are you in Petersburg?’ I asked.

‘What about you?’

Loud laughter in the phone. I laughed, too, but mostly to be polite. We said goodbye until evening. Zheltkov’s a great guy. Humorous, easy to talk with. True, according to Zheltkov, Innokenty Petrovich had apparently been dreaming about a tea party like this for ages, practically requested it, and now it is finally happening. But that’s just how he is: it doesn’t ruin anything, it even enhances Zheltkov in some sense, as if, you know, we’re all human beings here, we can make something up if need be. When somebody’s totally lacking weaknesses, somehow that’s not human…

Platosha and I bought some pies and various kinds of Middle Eastern sweets at the bakery. The doorbell rang at six that evening. We opened the door. Two guards (with wires in their ears) came in first, followed by uniformed people from the ‘Nord’ bakery, and only then Mister Zheltkov. About a dozen photographers and TV correspondents were behind Zheltkov. Two more guards completed the delegation. Feeling lost, we backed into the large room and the guests (this was reminiscent of a military offensive) advanced toward us.

We drank tea for about ten minutes, just long enough to fulfill the requirement of setting up the shot and carrying out the filming. Put bluntly, I wouldn’t say any soul-searching conversation came out of it. And how could it have been soul-searching when only Platonov, Zheltkov, and I were sitting at the table, despite inviting everybody to sit with us? The rest of the delegation stood by the wall, clicking camera shutters and chatting on their walkie-talkies. We took a sip each and the whole group of them departed, noisy and stamping. We were left with a large teapot inscribed ‘From the Government of the Russian Federation’ plus three cakes from Nord, and we’ve only managed to open one of them.

I wonder if that’s how he always drinks tea?

TUESDAY [GEIGER]

Nastya called. She told me how Zheltkov came by unexpectedly this evening.

I already knew. I saw it on TV: they showed everything. Innokenty Platonov and Zheltkov, patron of the thawed.

The issue wasn’t really about Zheltkov. Nastya called because of the pies and cakes: they’re delicious but there’s nobody to eat them. She invited me to stop by tomorrow for tea.

Of course I’ll stop by.

WEDNESDAY [GEIGER]

We drank tea. I’m not Zheltkov, I can’t be so quick. I stayed very late, until 1.30, and took a taxi home.

I wasn’t expecting Innokenty to start discussing dictatorship and the Terror. About what a misfortune it was for the people. (Nastya silently drew my attention to the pies.)

And then he spoke his mind, saying dictatorship is, in the final reckoning, society’s decision, that Stalin was expressing a societal will.

‘There’s no societal will to die,’ I objected.

‘There is. It’s called collective suicide. Why do pods of whales beach themselves, have you thought about that?’

I had not thought about that.

‘Are you saying,’ I said, ‘that Stalin was only an instrument of that suicide?’

‘Well, yes. Like rope or a razor.’

‘A view like that frees the villain from responsibility: you can’t hold the rope accountable.’

Innokenty shook his head.

‘No, the responsibility remains with the villain. You simply need to understand that the villainy could not help but be accomplished. People were waiting for it.’

Waiting for it?

FRIDAY [NASTYA]

This morning I woke up before Mister Platonov. I sat cross-legged on the bed, examining my sleeping husband. There was no serenity on his face – there was suffering. His lips trembled sometimes, his eyelids, too. From what, one might ask? After all the blows of fate and losses, there’s such a happy ending. He found it all: widespread attention (come on, this is even full-fledged fame!) and money; he even found his lost Anastasia in my person.

I really wanted to wake him up but didn’t dare. I would have had to explain that, well, when he was sleeping… An explanation like that might traumatize him. Geiger’s already warning me all the time that I need to be careful with him. And so I didn’t wake him up, I just kept watching him. Hand on the blanket, threads of veins running just under the skin: there’s something childlike in how they show through. Just think: the hand of a hundred-year-old person! The hand that touches me.

In an interview for one of the women’s magazines, they asked me (in an interview! with me!) if I give Innokenty Petrovich high ratings as a man. An obnoxious question, of course. And I answered that the question is obnoxious but couldn’t help myself and said that as a man Innokenty Petrovich is, well, whoa!

I sat and sat and then crawled under the covers again. I started thinking about all kinds of stuff. Yesterday, for example, yet another advertising agent – representing some kind of furniture company – contacted me. He asked Platosha to bring it to the attention of the public that furniture prices are rising rapidly everywhere but at their company, he says, where they’ve been frozen for three years now. The client’s thought is that TV viewers will perk right up and start buying their furniture. For this low-key statement, they’re offering Platosha a figure fifty per cent higher than what he gets for the vegetables… so that’s something to think about. And furniture, yes, would be a little more respectable than vegetables.

SATURDAY [INNOKENTY]

Marx says to me, tapping with his cane:

‘Construction lines are the foundation of the work. You haven’t perfected construction of form, it’s too early to move on to the light-and-shadow model.’

But I apparently moved on. Why, one might ask?

SATURDAY [GEIGER]

A proposal came to Nastya: they invited Innokenty to host a corporate event. At a cooling-unit factory, by the way. It was Nastya herself who told me. She was asking for advice.

I took her by the shoulders and advised her to slow down.

Nastya wasn’t against that. According to her, the reason she’d approached me was that the proposal seemed questionable to her.

Well, wonderful that it seemed that way. Because I’m already feeling alarmed about Nastya’s proactiveness. Innokenty senses that.

‘You probably see Nastya as very pragmatic,’ he said to me the other day. ‘In Russian terms, self-interested.’

‘No, I don’t see her that way. I think it’s still childishness speaking in her. It’s simply speaking in a contemporary way.’

Innokenty looked at me with a lingering gaze.

‘You know, I think the same thing.’

We both started laughing.

I can tell you when I didn’t feel like laughing. When I saw the television advertisement with Innokenty. I don’t watch television, I just turn it on for a short while during supper. For the evening news. And then right after the news, there’s Innokenty in a barrel. And liquid nitrogen and vegetables. And that strange text…

At first I wanted to have a serious talk with Nastya. Then I thought, well, maybe she’s right in a way. Money’s definitely necessary. Money. Geld.[6]

MONDAY [INNOKENTY]

I see that all Nastya’s activeness irritates Geiger. In a conversation with me, though, he himself defined it as childishness. That’s very correct: it truly is childishness. That sort of perception of the matter helps me, too, reconciling me with what it is about Nastya’s behavior that’s disagreeable to me. No matter how it manifests itself, though, Nastya’s childishness moves me, sometimes almost to tears. At times it scares me because it belongs to another world and it’s so incongruous with me and my experience.

I fear that we will never completely bond because my experience – I have already spoken of this – did not form me. It killed me. I’m reading a lot now about the Soviet time and, well, it seems I stumbled on the thought in Shalamov’s writings that one should not tell of the horrendous events in the camp after living through them: they are beyond the bounds of human experience and it may be better not to live at all after them.

I have seen things that burned me up from within: they do not fit into words. Shipments of female prisoners were delivered to the concentration camp and raped by guards immediately. When signs of pregnancy appeared for the unfortunate women, they were sent to Zayatsky Island – the island for Juliets. This was the place they punished sexual debauchery, which is severely penalized in the camp. The conditions were terrible on this absolutely bare island, where the wind blew eternally, and many did not survive. I write that and now shadows that were once people wander along what I wrote. The words crumble to dust: they do not come together into people at all.

If power is to return to words, the indescribable must be described. Thin faces of women from the Smolny Institute under the slobbering lips of GPU men. Under their unwashed hands. These bastards reeked of sweat and stale alcohol, and when they called for the most beautiful women to ‘wash the floor,’ the women could not disobey.

The wail of a woman whose husband was shot, five children were taken away, and who was, herself, sent to Solovki. There they raped her and infected her with a social disease. A doctor informed her about the disease. She rolled along the frozen ground by the front steps of the infirmary. At first they did not beat her, ordering her to stand. Then they began kicking her with their boots, ever harder and more frequently, beginning to enjoy themselves, becoming animals. She shouted loudly, her voice high, briefly going quiet after blows to the gut. The most terrifying thing about her wail was not its strength but the unfeminine bass note that concluded each of her high-pitched screams.

I saw that. And I have been unsuccessfully driving it from my memory ever since. That’s what I live with, what so separates me from Nastya and makes us people from different planets. How can we live together if we are so endlessly different? She has a spring garden and I have that abyss. I know how terrifying life is. But she does not know.

TUESDAY [NASTYA]

Today was Platosha’s press conference. My husband looked far more confident at this one than the previous one. That occurred to me during the press conference and was confirmed for me after watching it in the evening rerun. There’s no point in describing it: it’s all published in The Evening Paper.

TUESDAY [GEIGER]

I watched Innokenty’s big press conference this evening.

He was sitting in front of an advertising display screen. That lent the proceedings an extraordinarily commercial look.

Innokenty has become more self-confident. He answered calmly.

He twirled a pencil in his fingers. Nastya told me later that the vegetable PR agency brought the pencil (it’s a good thing it wasn’t a frozen carrot). To create an image of confidence. I don’t think Nastya needs that sort of thing.

There was no getting around some of the lovable ad-libbing that life abounds with. When Innokenty was answering a question about the level of government support (a disappointed hum in the hall), the TV camera cut to Motherland LLC on the advertising screen.

It wasn’t just the cameraman who noticed the patriotic firm. A reporter from one of the newspapers pointed at the advertising screen and asked Innokenty if it didn’t seem to him that the Motherland truly was an LLC with regard to him. The joke went flat, though. Innokenty didn’t know what the abbreviation meant.

He still didn’t laugh when they explained all that to him. He began discussing, in all seriousness, how there’s nothing bad in the Motherland having limited liability. Everyone, he said, should be liable for his actions. Only personal liability can be unlimited.

And then he said it’s pointless to blame the government for one’s troubles. And it’s pointless to blame history, too. One can only blame oneself.

The correspondents then grew gloomy. One asked:

‘And you really don’t blame the government for the fact that you landed in a camp? That they turned you into a block of ice? That your life became utter punishment, for unknown reasons?’

‘Punishment for unknown reasons does not exist,’ answered Innokenty. ‘One need only think about it and an answer will certainly be found.’

Interesting logic. In a strange way, it coincides with the GPU’s logic. They always helped find answers at the GPU.

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

I keep asking myself if Nastya resembles Anastasia. Just after we met, it seemed to me that she resembles her. But now, apparently, no. I cannot identify the changes that have taken place in Nastya. Has she become more uninhibited? More self-confident? They say you can only get to know a woman through marriage. Perhaps that is yet another phrase, a cliché, but does that mean it’s incorrect?

Yes, Nastya was a little different during the time we were not living together. But it would be strange to maintain the style of our previous relationship when the circumstances of our interaction have changed. For example, we now see each other naked – does that mean we should use words from another time? It’s simply that Anastasia and I did not have this phase of life together, otherwise I think she, too, would have changed. And it’s already high time I stopped comparing Nastya with Anastasia. Nastya is her own person, she is not that sheep Dolly and not a copy of her grandmother. She’s a completely separate person. Why am I measuring her using someone else’s scale?

WEDNESDAY [NASTYA]

I was awoken during the night by something like quiet whimpering. When I turned on the nightlight, I saw it was Platosha. He was crying in his sleep and his face was wet from tears. He was trying to say something but wasn’t opening his mouth, and his voice was thin, somehow almost like a child’s. That’s why it seemed like he was whimpering. A face with closed eyes isn’t usually expressive but there was so much grief on his… Not a face but a tragic mask, reflecting what he’d suffered there, in his previous life. Wake him up? Or don’t wake him up? I wanted to cut that troubling dream short right away but was afraid that would only be worse. I touched my lips to Platosha’s eyes and sensed the salt. He opened his eyes but didn’t wake up. He closed them again and went on sleeping, without groaning.

Then I couldn’t go back to sleep. All kinds of daytime stuff started getting in my head. I remembered that today I’d made a final agreement about renting out my apartment and even accepted a deposit. I started deciding what to leave in the apartment: the furniture, of course, dishes, and some other stuff. Take: favorite books, all sorts of intimate little things, my grandmother’s things. In these cases, you usually put together a list but I didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to wake up Platosha.

THURSDAY [INNOKENTY]

Several GPU men raped a young woman in the medical department. I was lying on the other side of a wooden wall and heard everything. I couldn’t stand. I shouted to the doctor but there was no doctor. I began pounding on the wall but nobody paid me any attention. I continued pounding. One of the rapists came in, dragged me to the floor, and kicked me several times with his boot. I lost consciousness.

When I came to, I heard crying on the other side of the wall. The doctor’s voice was audible, too, and the jingling of medical instruments. Then the doctor came to see me.

‘I can point out one of the employees who was there,’ I said. ‘He came in to beat me and I remember him.’

The doctor carefully helped me lie on the bed.

‘Do you really remember?’ He turned at the threshold. ‘If I were you, I’d forget as soon as possible.’

It’s surprising, but I knew who was lying on the other side of the wall. This was the same unearthly creature I had seen once in an apartment on the Petrograd Side. A railing with wrought-iron lilies on the stairway, the smell of books in the apartment. She walked ahead of me. Limping. I moved slowly behind her along bookshelves. She limped, yes. Hair gathered at the back, shawl on her shoulders, and if you looked, she was exactly like a librarian, especially with all those books around. I had brought her several more books: some of the ones Professor Voronin borrowed from this family. The Meshcheryakovs: the surname blended with the address and was thus preserved. The Meshcheryakov family. What kind of family was it? I never did find out.

I never even learned her name. Did I not want to? Did I think a mystery could not have a name?

We went to their library (really, all the rooms there were a library). Two armchairs on opposite sides of a round table. She turned around, stood behind the chair further away, and placed her hands on its back. I was regarding her for the first time: no, she was not a librarian. Not at all.

‘Here.’ I held the books out to her. ‘They asked me to give these back to you.’

She remained silent so I said:

‘Thank you.’

She smiled. Her face was astonishing: gothic with sunken eyes. And a vein twisting around her thin neck. And that limp… She answered:

‘You’re welcome.’

She did not offer me tea because tea was simply not compatible with her – what, would she boil water on a kerosene stove? But she did not even offer me a seat. A queen. I stood and looked at her. I imagined the happiness of pairing with her. Not happiness: it was something else. There cannot be happiness with a woman like this, there could only really be the sweetness of pain. She was particular and that particularity attracted. Everyone. There is a reason that even the animal-like GPU men hunted for her in the medical department. The soloist women from folk-dance ensembles no longer got them worked up. They, the bastards, wanted the ethereal.

She came to me that night at the camp after everyone left. She hobbled in. Crawled in. She remembered me from Petersburg back then, too, and had recognized me here. She sat on my bed and then lay down, because she could not sit. I caressed her hands. I caressed her hair: it was wiry, stiff with clotted blood. Silently. I already knew that I needed to be silent with her. But our touches were deeper than words. Toward morning, she pressed her lips to my ear:

‘Thank you.’

I wanted to answer her but she covered my mouth with her hand.

‘I would no longer exist otherwise.’

Her hand smelled of medicines.

Lying alongside me, she was Anastasia. When she left, I knew I would kill the GPU man. I felt at ease and fell asleep.

FRIDAY [GEIGER]

Yesterday they contacted me from the Smolny building. They said the governor is inviting me and Innokenty to meet with him. Since the question of Innokenty’s apartment had been decided at the gubernatorial level, I replied that I would ask Innokenty to come.

I called him. He had nothing against it. Basically, he regarded it very calmly.

We arrived there just before twelve today. We had to wait a little; the governor was meeting with someone. There were already journalists in the meeting room when they invited us in. They sat the conversation’s participants in armchairs by a round table.

The governor read a few phrases from a piece of paper. I can’t remember a single one of them now other than the final phrase. It said that Innokenty, like no one else, should understand the difference between democracy and dictatorship.

Innokenty thanked him. As I understand things, nothing more was required, but Innokenty decided to respond. Essentially, why not?

Innokenty said that the proportional level of evil is approximately identical in all epochs. Evil simply takes on various forms. Sometimes it presents itself through anarchy and crime, sometimes through the authorities. He, someone who has lived so long, has seen both.

The governor thought for a moment and asked how Innokenty feels.

The answer wasn’t formal here, either. The guest told the governor about changes in temperature and blood pressure. Of course that was unexpected. Aber schön.[7]

SATURDAY [INNOKENTY]

Yesterday they telephoned me from some political party and proposed that I join. I played at wavering. They explained to me that this was the governing party and that if I wanted to achieve anything… But I have Nastya, what else can I achieve? I thanked them and hung up. Then Geiger called with an invitation from the governor. And I agreed right away to go with him and for some reason didn’t even think about mentioning the party’s call. Because maybe it coincided with the invitation? What do they want from me? Advertising? Did they like my ads with the vegetables?

When the governor hosted us today, I had the opportunity to scrutinize him up close, imagine to myself what political authority looks like. And it looks, put bluntly, ordinary, nothing outrageous: large bald spots, a groomed and somehow simultaneously wrinkled face, spots on the skin. I looked at the governor and thought about how being near him caused me no agitation, the same as if his presence were televised. Yes, that’s the exact comparison: the object of observation is nearby and fully visible but there’s no contact with him: he’s on the other side of a screen.

And my life is on this side.

SUNDAY [INNOKENTY]

No, I will write about my cousin Seva after all. About Seva at the Kem transit point. About Seva in a leather jacket, wearing a service cap with a red star.

We zeks had already been standing in formation for more than two hours, waiting for the chief who would decide our fate. Rather, our fates, because even here, each person had his own. The chief appeared and he was Seva. He walked in the company of several Chekists. I cannot say I was very surprised when I saw him, at least after the first second. In essence, one might have expected something of the sort from him. He had found that big strength he was seeking and was now acting in its name.

He did not notice me right away. First he sat down at a table and poured himself some water from a pitcher. Drank it. And then raised his eyes and noticed. He appeared to be smiling but it only appeared that way. It was a spasm, not a smile. He immediately lowered his eyes to the paper on the table. After scratching his nose, he began reading it: surname and place for assignment. His voice shook, despite the forced severity. It began breaking as the letter ‘P’ approached.

‘Platonov!’

There was fear and entreaty in Seva’s gaze. He was undoubtedly thinking that his kinship to me would compromise him. That the Chekists would inform on him to the proper place right away.

‘Here!’ I answered.

Seva and I, two aviators. At the sea, an even more northern one now than before. Only this time he was the leader, all the strings were in his hands. Where were we flying?

‘Remain on Popovsky Island until my special instruction.’ His voice has become a wheeze.

‘Yes, sir, remain!’

I looked at the floor. The paint on the boards was peeling. A camel had formed there; it was just lying there on the floor. They do well, those camels, in warm regions. They can spit on everything. I sensed Seva’s relief even without seeing him: I did not let on that I knew him. I had enough sense to understand that a transit point was not the best place to recognize someone.

From that moment on, the hope arose in me that he would pull me out of the camp. Or, say, leave me here with light work. I expected that today or tomorrow he would somehow find me or simply summon me. To cheer me, for starters, and then – who knows? – to ease my lot.

None of that happened. Seva was not interested in either meeting with me or – even less so – in my staying constantly alongside him. With his mistrustfulness, I think he considered that too dangerous for himself.

Seva’s special instruction appeared twelve hours later. They sent me to the 13th Brigade of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp. That was one of the harshest places on Solovki. Had Seva set my destruction as his goal? I don’t know. I am certain only that he suffered in signing his instruction. Maybe he was remembering our argument over the locomotives of history.

TUESDAY [GEIGER]

They didn’t invite Nastya to see the governor. Innokenty stated this complaint to me after the fact.

Originally, he said nothing of the sort. From this it follows that the complaint originated with the uninvited herself. Innokenty requested that in cases like this I mention Nastya separately.

She’s been walking around looking pale. It’s obvious that the pregnancy is not progressing very easily. The nerves are from that.

About the outing to the governor, by the way. While we were waiting, Innokenty told me that the other day he finished reading a book about heroes of outer space. Oddly enough, of the multitude of heroes, it was the dogs, Belka and Strelka, that made the greatest impression on him. He spoke anxiously about them.

TUESDAY [NASTYA]

Platosha and Geiger went to see the governor but nobody invited me. It’s not that I especially wanted to see that governor guy – in theory I couldn’t care less about him – it’s just that, according to etiquette, the invited’s wife should be with him. The thought likely didn’t occur to Geiger but Innokenty Petrovich could have considered it. At first, I didn’t tell him what I thought on that score but then I said it when we were making love. He: oh, that is pretty embarrassing, I didn’t figure things out right away, it didn’t even cross my mind.

It’s too bad it didn’t. That’s all, I don’t feel like writing more today.

THURSDAY [INNOKENTY]

I studied the GPU rapist’s routes. I didn’t so much study them – because how could I follow someone who moved about the camp freely? – I simply worked at the repair workshop, not far from where those routes ran. The GPU man’s surname (I found this out fairly quickly) was uncomplicated: Panov. As for his routes, they weren’t elaborate, either: they led to the command-staff bathhouse that stood behind the workshop.

Panov usually appeared on Saturdays with his entire GPU shift; sometimes he came in the middle of the week. At first I thought this character was meeting with ladies there, but it became clear that he preferred arranging those meetings for home. Panov went to the bathhouse so often solely because he loved steaming a while. He valued bodily enjoyment in the broader sense, but steaming was the most important thing to him. It seemed to me that the way our paths crossed in that huge place (it happened on its own!) was not accidental. It definitely convinced me that I would finish off Panov after all, as I had schemed.

There wasn’t even any need for me to run after him: he himself walked past me and I saw him through the workshop’s dulled window. One time I took a bucket with a rag and washed the window. They all laughed, wondering why. I cannot (I said) stand dirt on window glass. This is still a habit of mine from home. Well, if it’s from home (they were laughing anyway) that’s another matter. For all that, I could now see Panov well: walking back and forth. He sometimes went back alone, from which I could conclude that on those occasions he was the last one in the steam room.

One time, he moved wearily (head lowered, finger in his nose) past the window, and I slipped out of the workshop through the back door and made my way to the bathhouse without going out to the road. There was no light in the changing-room window. The door to the bathhouse was locked. I soon discovered the key under a wooden grate by the door but left it in place. I had found out the most important thing: Panov stayed in the bathhouse after it was supposed to be closed and staff were to leave, under camp regulations. They left him the key and he closed the bathhouse on his own.

I could have already left but I lifted the wooden grating again. It was knocked together roughly, with large gaps between the slats. I pulled a hacksaw blade out of my trouser leg. One end was sharpened and the other was wrapped in coarse fabric. I placed the blade in the gap between the boards and it settled well. I pressed two fingers on its edge. It sank all the way between the gaps, not counting the small end it could be pulled out with. But it was impossible to notice if you didn’t know about it. Only I knew about it. And that secret made my life easier.

FRIDAY [GEIGER]

They called me from the presidential executive office. They announced, in ceremonial terms, that Innokenty and I are invited to Moscow to receive state awards.

I remembered right away: they’d called me a couple months ago. They’d asked who, besides me, was worthy of an award for a brave scientific experiment. I answered that, to begin with, I don’t know if I’m worthy of that. They politely interrupted and proposed that I think about it anyway. Wahnsinn…[8]

If taking part in the experiment was brave for anyone, it was Innokenty. I named him.

This time, it was my interlocutors who expressed doubt. They were concerned that Innokenty Petrovich was, in some measure… the object of the experiment.

‘No,’ I retorted, unexpectedly fervently. ‘No, no, and no.’

He was the most genuine subject, if they could appreciate what those words meant. He entered the experiment consciously and was its subject.

And so it turns out that people in the president’s executive office are capable of listening. They gave awards to both me and Innokenty. Though I’ll receive the Order of Honor and he’ll receive the Order of Courage. On his side, they valued courage over all else. Which, as I told him when I informed him about the award over the phone, certainly begets honor.

Innokenty regarded that news impassively. He asked only if Nastya was invited to the ceremony. No, she wasn’t. And it’s doubtful I could change anything here.

FRIDAY [INNOKENTY]

Geiger just telephoned me and told me something strange about awards. It’s not so much that I don’t believe it (oh, the things I’ve had to believe after being thawed!) but that it’s a poor fit. What is more, Geiger found out that invitations to the Kremlin don’t include relatives. Nastya will be offended again. Or maybe it was just a prank, I mean about the awards? I have read about cases like this.

FRIDAY [NASTYA]

The tenants are moving into my apartment tomorrow. Today I went there to sort out a few final things and took the honorable award-winners with me. Thus, we went by taxi: Honor to the right on the back seat, Courage to the left, and I in the middle, as who knows who. Well, let’s suppose Motherhood: could I become a Mother Heroine? Yes, no problem.

They’re bashful because I wasn’t invited to the ceremony but I console them as much as I can. With all my heart, I do not want to go to Moscville. It’s one thing to go for a ride to the Smolny with a baby in your belly but another to be caught in traffic in a foreign land. It’s gratifying, though, that they both remembered me this time. I do love them both, even that dorky Geiger!

We put the apartment in relative order, gathered up four bags of things that I’m hesitant to leave among people I don’t know, and brought them to Bolshoy Prospect. The statuette of Themis seemed like a particularly valuable object to me, left to my grandmother by Platosha’s mother. Themis’s scales were broken off: at my husband’s hand, according to lore. I purposely took Themis down in his presence – ceremonially and unhurriedly – but he didn’t react. He nodded listlessly when I placed her on the cabinet in the dining room.

‘What can be higher than justice!’ I shouted, to wake this person up.

He thought for a minute and said:

‘Probably only charity.’

After Geiger left, he admitted to me that he had a headache. So of course he’s not up for thinking about justice.

SATURDAY [NASTYA]

Platosha truly didn’t feel very good yesterday. I put him to bed and he went right to sleep. I called Geiger a while later to report to him about Platosha’s overall state. I also told him that his favorite childhood toy no longer makes him happy.

‘He wrote,’ Geiger reminded me, ‘that the statuette was somehow linked to his first steps in art. Practically even inspired him to take it up. And now he’s in a sort of stupor with that. His difficulties with Themis are apparently on those grounds.’

‘So what should I do with her?’

‘Nothing, let her stay there. Maybe she’ll help him with a breakthrough.’

There you go. Well, she’ll stay.

MONDAY [INNOKENTY]

I keep thinking: why, after all, did I decide to finish off Panov back then? Impulses like that vanish quickly in the camp. It’s not so much that you lack strength (of course there isn’t any), it’s just that you see no point in a vendetta. The feelings evaporate. Next to nothing remains of them and they are directed at self-preservation. Later, when I was waiting on Anzer to be frozen, I no longer had any sufferings and hurts. They were gone after all the beatings, abuses, and tortures. There was exhaustion.

But I sighed with relief on that quiet evening after hiding the shiv in the grating by the front steps to the bathhouse. Carrying something like that on me wasn’t safe. It was unnecessary, too. I needed it to be in this exact place; now all that was left was to wait for a convenient moment.

That moment came but I never did kill Panov.

On another evening that was just about as quiet, I realized he was in the bathhouse alone. Yes, everything connected with Panov happened on quiet evenings. I slipped out of the workshop and approached the bathhouse. I saw the electric light in the dressing room from a distance and recalled the night the limping young woman was raped. I attempted to enter that state when the hand delivers a blow on its own. Not even a blow but a jab, a cut. Some sort of subtle and elegant motion leading the narrow hacksaw between Panov’s ribs. I did not want him to suffer, I wanted that he not live, that his stinking existence simply cease.

I soundlessly raised the grate and pulled out my shiv. In the last rays of sun, I admired the sharpened part and the shine: how many times had I run files of various sizes along it, applying the last touches with the finest file? I hid it all, hid it from those who were in the workshop. Platonov, they say… I draw them away, take them under my elbow, and lead them toward the wall. Platonov, who are you crafting that shiv for? Nobody asked, nobody caught on. And on that very same evening, I admired the shiv, not very worried that, say, Panov would notice me. I was so on edge that he would not have escaped me anyway.

I walked up to the changing-room window before opening the door. A motionless Panov was lying on a wooden bench. He was lying on his back, arms stretched along his body, which itself was corpse-white and displayed no signs of life. I began watching his stomach, striving to detect even the slightest breathing motion, but there was no movement.

I realized what this picture in the window reminded me of: it repeated the sight of Zaretsky’s body, which I saw at the morgue and identified. I looked at what Zaretsky had been and thought that justice had triumphed. And realized I was not glad about that triumph. And wanted very much for Zaretsky to be alive.

Panov’s hand twitched and scratched his chest. I inhaled deeply. I did not know myself what I experienced at that moment – gladness or disappointment. I knew one thing: I would not kill Panov.

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

This afternoon, we flew to Moscow by airplane. Geiger is teaching me: the words ‘by airplane’ can be skipped; he says it’s obvious how you’re flying. Just as certainly, he says, as you no longer need to say ‘call on the telephone’: it’s enough simply to ‘call’… We had supper just now in the hotel restaurant and are sitting in our own rooms.

Unlike Dr Geiger, Aviator Platonov rose into the sky for the first time today: that is the peculiar sort of aviator he is. Not one to indulge in superfluous flights. And this lone flight of mine today did not work out well. As the airplane gathered speed on the runway, I began to feel rather unwell, stifled, and nauseous. Geiger (he said I went very pale) switched on the ventilation over my seat and I felt a bit better. It finally eased for good after the plane gained altitude.

A picture of my last visit to the Commandant’s Aerodrome with my father surfaced in my head. The end of August. An air demonstration, rain, umbrellas over the crowd. Aviator Frolov’s aeroplane was closest to us in the line of aeroplanes. People awaited his flight with particular excitement: it had been announced that today he would demonstrate aerobatic maneuvers never seen before.

Frolov is standing under the wing of his aeroplane, an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. He slaps himself on the many pockets of his overalls in search of matches. He finds them. Strikes one. The matches are damp in the rain. And here I am, thinking the following: if Aviator Frolov suddenly crashes today (this is aerobatics, after all), it will turn out that his wish – which was, in essence, simple – was not fulfilled before death itself.

I feel sorry for the aviator. I ask my father for matches and run across the field to Frolov. That isn’t allowed and the master of ceremonies whistles at me, but I’m running to deliver the matches to the aviator. He somehow understood everything so is already walking to meet me. Smiling. I keep running, holding the matchbox in my extended hand. We meet. The aviator takes the matches and lights his cigarette. He takes the first drag; his face is surrounded by puffs of smoke. He shakes my hand firmly when we part. I nearly cry out from the strength of his grip but manage to hold back. So that’s an aviator’s handshake. As I return to the crowd of spectators, I again cross part of the airfield, but the master of ceremonies isn’t whistling this time. He’s standing, turned away.

And there I am alongside my father, looking at the airfield. Aviator Frolov’s turn comes. He finished smoking his cigarette long ago and is sitting in the seat of the aeroplane. The propeller is working. The aeroplane jerks and shudders, held back by eight aerodrome workers. At the aviator’s signal, the workers let the wings go and fall down. Finally. The machine frees itself from the last thing that held it down. Jumping with one wheel then the other, it runs along for a brief distance and soars into the air. It gains altitude abruptly, somehow almost too abruptly.

Flight. The aeroplane floats in the air like a large bird. It is not entirely clear what holds it there. It might be clear when people explain about the laws of physics and the construction of an aeroplane. But it is not clear when you look at its solitary soaring in the sky. And it is astonishing. And very frightening to think of the person sitting in it.

There is a reason I had been afraid… A reason. It all happened after the complex maneuvers had already been demonstrated. Frolov’s aeroplane was flying in for a landing from the distant heavens. His circular and smooth descent was interrupted all at once. Even now it seems to me that the only possible comparison (which later made it into all the newspapers) is to a bird that was shot. Despite its explicit romanticism, that corresponded to what I saw: the right wing broke like a bird’s and the machine lunged downward, turning on its own axis.

They later wrote that a cable connecting the biplane’s wings snapped and the construction lost its rigidity, but the only thing clear in those moments was: trouble is nearing. Of course it might still have been possible to hope the aviator was executing an aerobatic maneuver and would now come out of his nosedive – but there was the broken wing, which had almost separated from the machine and was shuddering in the wind, leaving no hope.

The crowd at the aerodrome went silent all at once. Everyone already knew the aviator was flying to his own death. He was somehow flying for an unbelievably long time and the aeroplane’s spinning looked comical, thus especially frightening. Each time the machine turned its upper part toward us, Frolov was visible, sitting in his pilot’s seat, and his hands were arranged differently each time: he was likely pulling desperately at various levers, attempting to draw the machine out of its tailspin. The moments of his flight kept lasting and lasting, and I had time to think that this was extending his life and that I was seeing him alive now and an instant later he would be dead and everybody knew it: both he, tearing at the machine’s levers, and we, frozen in speechlessness… I prepared to catch that dreadful moment of the transition from life to death but, of course, caught nothing.

When the aeroplane’s nose plunged into the ground (the wooden crack of its structure), the silence exploded into the crowd’s thousand-voiced scream. The human mass rushed toward the aeroplane from all sides, instantaneously flooding the airfield with itself – just as spilt coffee spreads over a tablecloth. People were already prepared to run, too, and the aeroplane’s strike into the earth served as their starter. I rushed along with them, foretelling the aviator’s condition based on the machine’s broken wings. I ran and shouted but slowed my run without realizing it myself, falling further back from the first row, and deserting those who needed to be the first to approach the person who had been smashed. And the slower I ran, the louder my scream became, as if I was attempting, with that desperate scream, to make up for my absence in the forward line.

When I finally did see Frolov, his appearance turned out to be less frightening than I had feared. Cleaved forehead, stream of blood from the mouth, hand unnaturally turned. That hand had taken the matches from me. It had shaken my hand, firmly, until it hurt. Now it was not fit for any handshakes, even the weakest. I recalled that hand later, when I read this well-known verse by Blok:

More dead than a lever: I knew the cost of that detail.

WEDNESDAY [NASTYA]

I watched the report from the Kremlin on TV. My guys were on fire today. Award-winner Platonov found the opportunity to speak about Belka and Strelka during the ceremony – I think it was very appropriate and showed a love for nature. Geiger was pretty good, too: he tossed out a quick ‘thank you’ and returned to his place. Without glancing at the supreme commander-in-chief. He doesn’t like him very much; well, what’s to love about him if you come right down to it? Long story short, I was proud of both award-winners.

WEDNESDAY [GEIGER]

Innokenty and I are on the way back from Moscow. We’re in a train compartment: we decided to take the train after all.

He doesn’t handle flying well. He has memories of some aviator who perished. Perished before his eyes.

I’m writing.

Innokenty is examining our medals. He put the two little cases in front of himself: Honor in one, Courage in the other. Pensively chews at his lips. He has the look of a person stricken by bewilderment. It’s amusing to watch him.

This morning they gathered us at the presidential executive offices on Staraya Square. I knew all the future award-winners, or almost all.

Shortly thereafter, they loaded us on a bus and brought us to the Kremlin. We waited for the ceremony in a hall with a low ceiling. We ate pastries and drank juice.

A manager from the protocol service was going around the hall. He offered to take gifts for the president. One is not to present anything to the president oneself.

He approached us, too, but Innokenty and I just threw up our hands. We weren’t planning to present anything to anyone. Disappointment flashed over the manager’s face.

Innokenty was in the lavatory when the manager invited everyone to go ahead to the ceremony. His disappointment deepened.

Innokenty was called first from our pair. After glancing at a paper, the president praised his courage and compared him with Gagarin.

‘I’m afraid I do not deserve the comparison with Gagarin,’ Innokenty said dolefully, ‘because my courage was forced. It is probably more akin to the courage of Belka and Strelka, who also had no other choice. So it would be better to compare me with them.’

There was applause in the hall and the president smiled uncertainly. He joined the general applause. He obviously had not expected anything about Belka and Strelka.

Innokenty just put on both medals. I see them on his chest through bottles of mineral water. They suit him.

FRIDAY [INNOKENTY]

Geiger and I returned from Moscow yesterday. An unusual trip. As I walked through the Kremlin, I thought: if I had found myself here in the twenties or thirties, I could have met one of those who…

All our hopes and all our hatred rose like steam, to the top of the world, right here. They warmed themselves in that here, inhaled it. And if one truly could have ended up at the Kremlin during those years, then told them to their face about all the thoughts we had about our life… Of course it’s funny: you can’t even manage to open your mouth, nothing, not one word; you do well if you simply manage to cast a glance. Just to catch a passing glimpse of them: that’s something in itself already. To die from heartbreak but catch a glimpse.

But I looked at the current one: my heart did not break. It did not even beat faster. And not because he’s this way or that way but simply because this is not my time, it isn’t native to me: I sense that, so cannot become close to this time. I experience nothing but an abstract interest in what’s happening. It’s just the same as if I had been presented to the president of, let’s say, Zimbabwe: yes, it’s the president, yes, it’s captivating, but nothing responds inside. And you can tell him everything you want, but… that doesn’t tempt you. It isn’t interesting.

After the ceremony, they invited us for a glass of champagne. I drank the Kremlin champagne and suddenly thought to myself that this is the drink of power. I am always having ideas like that. I imagined power and the ability to conquer being poured down my throat along with the champagne, and, most importantly, with these attributes, a certain special responsibility for the country that transforms a bureaucrat into a ruler so that the country’s business becomes his personal business and the country itself becomes a part of his own ‘I.’

I shared my reflections about the beverage with Geiger but he didn’t approve of my line of thinking:

‘Where there’s a good bureaucrat, there’s no need for a ruler.’ Wonderful. A European view. I lifted my glass to Geiger’s glass. ‘And where have you seen a good bureaucrat in Russia?’ We clinked and the glass slipped from my hand. I watched as it flew, as if in slow motion, and knew that in an instant it would spray champagne and shards in all directions, and it kept flying and, there, it finally fell and the spray flew all over, just exactly as I imagined it. I had become a witness to some sort of strange time phenomenon: not real time and even more so not the past – maybe the future? After all, I saw that picture for an entire eternity before the glass smashed. Several staff members ran over, suggesting I not worry. Essentially, I wasn’t worrying anyway.

SATURDAY [GEIGER]

I keep recalling my trip with Innokenty.

Especially the conversation over champagne, which he likened to a beverage of power. What a strange fantasy! That drink, he says, transforms a bureaucrat into a ruler.

I don’t know what the current president drinks (I’m afraid it’s something else) but he hasn’t worked out to be one or the other… Innokenty, however, astounds me. A person who lived through the harshest of tyranny and utters the word ‘ruler’ so lightly! Unglaublich…[9]

There’s a reason the glass fell from his hand.

SUNDAY [INNOKENTY]

There’s a word-processing program on the computer that automatically corrects mistakes. I have the strange impression that sometimes the editor in there gets too involved and corrects a great deal more than necessary: adds something or, vice versa, erases something. It is my profound belief that the editor is too intrusive. Thanks to that program, I have the constant feeling of an outside presence… I reported this to Geiger: he laughed and said he hasn’t paid attention to these things for a long time. The usual computer insolence, he says.

MONDAY [NASTYA]

Just the other day, Geiger brought me a packet of papers. Platosha’s journal from the first half-year of his new life: the notes from the notebooks have been entered on the computer and printed out. According to Geiger, he brought them so I can understand my husband better. I do, by the way, understand him pretty well already. But what genuinely struck me in those notes is how minutely he describes all kinds of details, the older they are, the more lovingly! I told him about that and he answered that he’s writing a blueprint for the impending universal restoration of the world. My sweetie is joking.

I wonder if in a blueprint like that Platosha’s recollections would be of equal value to the recollections of other people’s – for example, mine? Although who needs my ancient history? By historical standards, ugh, it’s not even the past, it’s still the present. What could I describe that’s so special?

For example, lining up in the morning at kindergarten, like in prison or the army. Breakfast filled with sorrow. The urge to vomit from lumps in the semolina porridge; a bleach smell from the washroom blowing in when a draft gusts. Sitting over the porridge, I carefully pick out the lumps with a spoon, but sometimes they get missed and I’m forced to push them away with my tongue. And that’s when I vomit.

I have no love for those details and who would? But someone must come to love and describe them, too, otherwise the world will remain incomplete. Maybe I should be frozen, too, so I can appreciate them in a hundred years and present them to my descendants?

MONDAY [GEIGER]

The document regarding Innokenty’s rehabilitation arrived.

It is stated that rehabilitation is ‘due to the absence of elements of crime.’ Meaning that he wasn’t part of a counterrevolutionary plot and didn’t kill Zaretsky. Nobody had any doubts about that as it was.

It’s important to have the paper anyway. In a bureaucratic country like Russia, you always have to be ready to prove you’re not a camel. In our case, it’s all crystal clear: the government is guilty, meaning it should acknowledge that.

Innokenty wasn’t even moved by the paper. I even thought I saw displeasure flash in his gaze. Does he really disdain the government so much that he doesn’t need rehabilitation? No, I haven’t noticed anything like that in him.

Maybe it seems to him that a paper like that is too cheap for all his sufferings?

I asked him:

‘Do you recognize the government’s right to declare you guiltless? If you don’t recognize it, that’s understandable, too.’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Only the Lord God can declare me guiltless. What the government does isn’t as important.’

Well, that’s one way to look at it.

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

There came a moment in the life of each Lazarus when he was injected with a sedative and sent off for freezing. The injection was a final and secret kindness toward the person being experimented on and it was shown by Academician Muromtsev. The high-level authorities believed that people should be frozen not only while they were living but while they were awake. The academician, though – justifiably considering sleep a form of life – deviated from that instruction, and the Lazaruses were grateful to him for it. Without doubt, it is easier to plunge into the kingdom of absolute zero while sleeping. In the time before their injections, the Lazaruses frequently recalled the Russian saying that sleep does not hinder death. These words sounded cynical if applied to Muromtsev’s goals, but in a strange way they must have strengthened the academician in his decision to inject the sedative.

I thought about Lazarus as I drifted off. His fate was my only hope. If it was possible to resurrect a man dead for four days who was already giving off a stench, then what could be impossible about resurrecting a person frozen according to all the rules? I understood that finding me alive upon defrosting was out of the question but I did not want to depart with a feeling of desperation. The Lord had resurrected Lazarus four days later. When would they resurrect me? And would they? I wanted to believe that they would.

Thinking now about my thawing, I – in light of the number of years that passed – ask myself: did my thawing become the resurrection of an entire generation? After all, any detail that I can now recall automatically becomes a detail of the time. And perhaps this is not a matter of detail but the whole? Maybe I really was resurrected in order that all of us grasp once again what happened to us in those terrifying years when I lived. I am sharing this with Nastya. And what if, I tell her, everything truly was schemed up for me to attest to? I did, after all, see everything and remember everything. And now I am describing it.

THURSDAY [NASTYA]

My overall state hasn’t exactly been luxurious in recent days. I’m nauseous, don’t feel like doing anything, and could just lie around without getting up. But no, there’s tons of various things to do, the main one being that I have to cook so Platosha can eat. He’s not fussy at all, he’d get by with a heel of bread, but this does mobilize me. He tells me:

‘I’m already having dreams about frozen vegetables from the ads. Can we really not use that money to hire a housekeeper?’

We can. It’s just that I, for example, don’t want there to be someone other than us two hanging around the apartment. It’s easier for me to make lunch myself. It’s more than ‘easier,’ it’s very enjoyable for me to cook for him. And he needs that so much: Platosha isn’t just some husband off the street: he’s special, the same age as the century. He requires care.

I’m laughing here, but there’s some kind of frailty in him. Yesterday he slipped and fell in the bathroom. It’s good the bathtub is plastic not iron; he didn’t hurt himself badly, just scared me. I flew in, with one leap, and saw him lying in the bathtub. Smiling.

‘I lifted one foot,’ he said, ‘over the side of the bathtub but the other one came out from under me.’

Mamma mia! ‘I lifted one foot over the side’ really is something an old man might say, not a man in the prime of life! Who is, yes, a full ninety-nine, though that doesn’t hinder him, hmm, as a husband, not the teensiest bit. I told Geiger about that fall and he scowled. He asked me to keep a more careful watch on Platosha. How much more careful could I be…?

Oh, and Geiger went through the hassle of getting official rehabilitation for award-winner Platonov; he says that could be important. He’s surprised the document arrived so quickly and thinks that is because of Platosha’s fame. The hero himself is maintaining his indifference, which is a bit strange. I understand that for the most part he doesn’t need anybody’s rehabilitation and this scrawling isn’t worth a thousandth of his sufferings, but there’s nothing offensive about it. He looks at Geiger almost angrily.

FRIDAY [INNOKENTY]

It seems stupid somehow, but I collapsed in the bathroom the other day. With a crash. Nastya came running in, anxious, and I pretended everything was fine, though I actually did hurt myself. I told her my foot went out from under me on a slippery spot, but slippery had nothing to do with it. My leg simply buckled and I fell. The most unpleasant thing is that this was not even the first time. Last week I caught my foot on a curb when I was running across the road and nearly fell. A day later, I went out for milk and did fall then, on the steps to the store.

It’s somehow especially shameful when a young person falls, arms flapping, with instant fear in the eyes. That’s not such a big thing for an old man, but for someone young – ugh! – despite the fact that I’m already a hundred. And everybody helps you get up, everybody sympathizes: how very revolting to be the center of attention! This aversion of mine apparently comes from my father. And it’s very strange: for some reason, I thought of him when I was lying on the steps at the store, thought about him lying silently outside Varshavsky Station.

My falls are beginning to worry me, and there was that glass at the Kremlin, too. I don’t know if it’s worth speaking to Geiger about this; he fusses over me as it is and if I tell him, it’s farewell, quiet life, and hello to tests, and things being banned.

Maybe it just seems this way to me, but everything began after the statuette of Themis returned to our apartment. She reminds me about my fiasco with art and the sorrowful events that took place before my arrest. I am not ruling out that this is all a matter of the psyche. As it happens, Geiger did tell me that half of all illnesses originate in the psyche. Just as, by the way, recoveries do. It’s important to find the right mindset. I will try to handle that myself.

[NASTYA]

The award-winner has a new fantasy. He wants to fill in the gap in time that came about after he was frozen. He and I are now gathering books and films from the 1930s through to the 1980s. It’s really mostly movies: despite the Soviet drivel in them, they show the way of life very precisely. And the fashion: wide trousers and rolled-up shirt sleeves in the 1950s. Cigarette trousers and pointy-toed shoes in the 1960s. Platosha pokes me in the side:

‘Just look at their faces: the faces are completely different and half a century hasn’t even gone by.’

‘Well, yes, well, a little different but not that much… So what are faces like now?’ I ask him.

‘Do you really not see? Nervous in some way, mean, a “Don’t touch me!” expression. Not everybody’s, of course, but a lot.’

‘So you like Soviet good looks more?’ I nip cautiously at his ear.

He shrugs his shoulders. It appears he doesn’t like it.

MONDAY [GEIGER]

Innokenty’s watching old films and newsreels now. He says there’s a hole in time for him so he’s filling it in.

I watched a fifties newsreel with them yesterday. It’s remarkable. Like being on another planet.

He stopped the video player when they were showing a Komsomol woman close up. Yes, the face was expressive. I noticed, by the way, that the epoch is reflected more vividly on female faces than male. Maybe because female faces are more animated.

‘There were still millions in the camps but there’s unfeigned happiness on her face. Unfeigned!’ Innokenty walked right up to the screen. ‘Why is she so happy, huh? Despite everything.’

Nastya grimaced. Yes, female faces are phenomenally animated.

‘And why doesn’t a drug addict sense the reek in a drug den?’ I said. ‘Why do people prefer utopia to reality?’

‘I, by the way, did not prefer it.’ Innokenty took the remote and switched from the video player to the television. Channels flashed by. ‘So now everybody’s supposedly free, but what a sour look they have! I was sure joy would come with freedom.’

‘It turns out,’ Nastya said, ‘that it’s better to be in utopia and be happy than to be free but sorrowful.’

Innokenty threw up his hands. The remote fell with a crash.

I didn’t initially want to write this: Innokenty worries me. Some sort of trouble with his health. Problems with his motor functions. And I can’t yet understand what the exact issue is.

Nastya told me about Platosha’s fall in the bathroom. I myself saw the smashed glass in the Kremlin. Of course it could be accidental to fall and to drop the glass and the remote, but something in all this puts me on my guard.

I’ve begun keeping a more watchful eye on Innokenty. An uncertainty has appeared in his gait. It’s unnoticeable if you don’t look closely, but it wasn’t there before.

TUESDAY [NASTYA]

Entrepreneur Tyurin called us yesterday. That’s how he introduced himself: Tyurin, entrepreneur. Evidently an oilman. Platosha spoke with him, putting on the speaker phone so I could hear (our Platonov is adapting by the hour, not the day). Tyurin said he’s arranging fireworks in the evening on Yelagin Island and wanted very much for us to come. I suddenly remembered: mamma mia, he’s in the top ten on the Forbes list! A Moscow person – there aren’t any like him in Petersburg. Or Siberia, either, where he pumps his oil. If you toss aside local patriotism, then all the money, careers, and everything else, too, it’s all in Moscow. That should be recognized as an indisputable fact; it’s not even an issue to get distracted by, like I am now.

Anyway, according to Tyurin, entrepreneur, he stopped by Petersburg today and felt like arranging fireworks in the evening, at the last minute, no advance preparations. He asked if we were offended that this essentially unknown person popped up out of nowhere. Unknown, Platosha agreed, but we’re not offended. Life, said Tyurin, should be casual: if you feel like fireworks today – and on Yelagin Island in particular – then there will be fireworks. Those words would be music to the ears of the homeless man who rummages around in our bin: he simply doesn’t know what life should be, otherwise he’d have arranged for fireworks on Yelagin.

Platosha conversed unenthusiastically with Tyurin but I made an energetic sign to him, to pull himself together. I understand that all that shooting things off on Yelagin is horrifically money-oriented and ostentatious, but even so… I really wanted to go. ‘I really want to go,’ I wrote on a slip of paper and put it in front of Platosha’s eyes.

‘Fine,’ Platosha told him, ‘we’ll come.’

We didn’t have to come: they sent a limousine for us… Just now, he, my sovereign master, came up behind me. He read the word ‘limousine’ and started laughing.

‘Stop,’ he said, ‘stop writing about limousines.’

You’re right, sweetie, you’re right… No, I’ll say two other things anyway. After the main fireworks there was a salute, and the volleys were named. The first volley, of course, was dedicated to Tyurin, and the second one was for Platosha. And also – maybe the most surprising thing – I noticed a fantastically beautiful diamond ring on Tyurin’s finger. I told him that, in front of everybody, so it would be nice for him. And he took off the ring and held it out to Platosha, as if it would suit him better. And he winked at me. Platosha refused but Tyurin placed the ring in his palm and closed his fingers over it. A very showy gesture, regal, as one of the journalists said (I already saw that shot in several newspapers today). Though Tyurin, I repeat, is probably money-oriented, and not a king. The ring, however, truly is amazing – I examined it all morning. Platosha, the silly man, doesn’t want to put it on.

[INNOKENTY]

What an appropriate abbreviation that is anyway, LAZARUS, even if you consider that I didn’t lie there for four days. I have seen icons depicting Lazarus’s resurrection: he’s walking out of a crypt and the people standing nearby are covering their noses. Fine… According to Geiger’s description, I didn’t look so good when they took me out of the nitrogen. I did not, however, smell.

Lazarus’s first death was not sudden: he was sick, very sick. My departure for freezing was not unexpected, either. It works out that we both had time to prepare ourselves. And his and my thoughts before departing were possibly the same, too. And then the Lord resurrected him: so how did he live with that? Even I, after all, who was returned to life by the mere mortal Geiger, cannot fully realize the extent of what happened. I arrived at the only thought possible: that the Lord thawed me, employing Geiger’s hands.

How did Lazarus’s life turn out after his resurrection? Yes, it is allegedly known that he lived another three decades and was a bishop in a Cypriot city, but I don’t mean the details that are called biography. What concerns me is what he felt after having already once departed the world of the living.

After all, it is not accidental when a person returns from wherever he was. It is a change to the natural course of events or to a decision that has been made. There should be weighty reasons for any return. A person has special tasks when the return is from the great beyond and not just anywhere. Lazarus of the Four Days attests to the Lord’s omnipotence.

What do I attest to? In the final analysis, to the same thing. Beyond that, though, probably also to the time I was initially placed in. Those living in that time of mine did not yet know what to attest to for their descendants, did not know exactly what would prove useful decades later. But I know. This helps me to some degree, though of course it is only to some degree because my attestations are futile anyway. For all that, it’s good if they serve the resurrection of my previous time, even if a resurrection like that is incomplete.

I think ever more often about resurrection. Nastya’s name speaks to that, too. Sometimes it seems to me that Nastya has resurrected Anastasia, that they are seamless and compose a common life, purposely created for me from two different lives. At times, that thought seems like insanity to me because it denies the uniqueness of any separate life. I can speak with certainty about only one thing, that I love them both.

THURSDAY [NASTYA]

Platosha received a proposal to host a corporate event for a gas company. He turned it down. Put bluntly, I was a little blown away when I heard the amount of the fee. I didn’t reproach Platosha, not one word: he’s a man, it’s his decision. The gasmen, however, didn’t back off. They contacted me and explained that they’re drilling test holes in the Arctic, meaning that, under the circumstances, they needed Innokenty Petrovich – even if they had to sweat blood. If not in the capacity of leading the corporate event, then at least in the capacity of a guest. And the fee would not even be reduced. All that was required of Innokenty Petrovich would be to show up with the Order of Courage, propose a toast to the company’s general director (and his wife), and wish everyone success in extracting gas. That was already a different matter. It’s funny, of course, about the toast and the director, but not burdensome or shameful. Platosha agreed. I asked him to tell Geiger that this decision was made without my knowledge, otherwise our mutual friend would simply devour me. It’s interesting that Geiger understands the meaning of banknotes but when talk turns to methods for earning them, that’s when the grimaces and all that ‘You see, Nastya,’ and the like start. I don’t want to look more mercantile than everybody else – maybe I dream about being Lady Hamilton, too – but someone has to arrange the means for existence. Really, it’s strange the German’s not the one doing that.

Be that as it may, we went, the sun scorching us, to that corporate event. The scene for the action was the Yusupov Palace, where – at the entrance and on the staircase (wow!) – there were black servants in livery and cut flowers everywhere. In the foyer were members of the board of directors, Duma deputies, movie actresses, bandits, zombies with a Soviet look, fashion models, correspondents, and professional schmoozers. In short: everybody that loves gas.

Vadim, head of the company’s PR department, greeted us. He embraced us both around the shoulders and reported to us in a loud whisper with no introductions whatsoever:

‘I’m liking that journalist woman Zhabchenko more than anybody. Her invitation was specifically for one person: her. And you know what she did? Do you know?’

‘No, we don’t,’ we answered in chorus.

‘She gave the invitation to her husband and showed up herself a half-hour later and said she was on the list. Showed her passport, too. The guards checked her and the lists, and, naturally, let her in.’

‘And is her husband Zhabchenko, too?’ asked Platosha.

‘Well, there’s the whole trick. Who would look at the initials with a surname like that? The little bitch! Forgive me…’

Vadim smiled charmingly. A minute later he was already talking with somebody else. They brought us champagne. I jokingly asked Platosha if the champagne would impede his performance. He smiled and slapped himself on his jacket pocket. That’s where he had the printout of his toast, provided to us by the very same Vadim. In that toast, the person who had been freed from icy captivity was to raise his glass to the health of the Savchenko couple – Vitaly and Lyudmila – who wage war with ice near the North Pole itself. Everybody knew that the couple waged war with ice without leaving Nevsky Prospect, but a statement of that sort was considered admissible as poetic license.

Platosha looked rather tired at the palace. Yes, he was smiling – that smile does look good on him! – but it came out kind of forced. Of course he drank quite a bit, too much, I’d say, but his tiredness wasn’t because of that. It had engulfed him in the first minutes after we arrived at the banquet.

The serving of the dishes, for example, displeased him: about two dozen waiters carried roast piglet around the hall on a platter and, behind it, also on a platter, sturgeon and lots of things I didn’t even know the names of. I asked Platosha if he was sick but he said he was only feeling a light indisposition.

A retired admiral was sitting at the table with us, a kindly fellow who was making sure not one toast went by without drinking a shot. A half-hour later Platosha asked our neighbor if it was true that he had as much free time as a retired admiral. The admiral answered that it was the absolute truth. He smiled, displaying the whiteness of his false teeth. Platosha soon repeated that question again and then again, but the admiral answered just as kindly as the first time.

It’s too bad the promised toast wasn’t at the beginning of the evening: then the effect would have corresponded better to what the gasmen had planned. But since the toast was conceived as a culmination, it came closer to the end. It didn’t evoke much protest from the hall when Platosha proposed drinking to the Zhabchenko couple who wage war with the ice. I’m not even sure everybody heard his toast. It’s interesting that the Zhabchenko couple, who were sitting in the far end of the hall and yelling louder than everybody, heard it. After the scene to get into the banquet, it didn’t surprise them that a toast was being proposed in their honor. Even their declared war with the ice didn’t surprise them. They stood and bowed.

And we received the fee anyway.

[INNOKENTY]

Here in my old apartment, I sometimes feel as if I’m on an island, in the middle of the sea of someone else’s life. Poor Robinson Crusoe.

[GEIGER]

Innokenty worries me more now.

His movement is increasingly less confident. Sometimes I see him veering slightly when he walks.

If you don’t look closely, you won’t notice. But I look closely. I want to figure out the course of this thing, to grasp how it will develop further.

The problems aren’t only with motor functions, though. It seems like his working memory is starting to break down. He frequently loses his train of thought if he’s suddenly distracted while he’s speaking.

I don’t want to talk about this yet with either him or Nastya. I don’t want to scare them. I keep hoping it’s temporary.

And that corporate event with the gasmen. I understand that alcohol was the reason for the mix-up. Even so, I don’t like this incident. How can you forget what you studied all evening the night before?

And the corporate event itself, that was Nastya’s escapade. No matter how much they both convince me she had nothing to do with it, I can smell it: Nastya came up with it.

I want to let her have it in the head but am refraining. She’s amusing.

SUNDAY [INNOKENTY]

Today we went for a walk around the cemetery at Alexander Nevsky Monastery. I really love walking around cemeteries. Nastya does not, though. One time during a walk, she said she’s tormented by the thought that our happiness will end someday. I answered that it will indeed end someday, perhaps even soon: after all, anything under the sun can happen. I said that and regretted it: Nastya began crying. Somehow, that was not really like her.

It was very nice, though: diffused September sun, leaves on the ground in individual yellow spots, not yet a complete cover. Nastya walked, holding me by the arm, pressing her cheek to my shoulder, which slowed our motion. We examined inscriptions on gravestones. Old gravestones are very beautiful, more beautiful than even today’s expensive ones. And the inscriptions were simply wonderful because their old orthography cannot compare with the new: it has a soul. Our literature’s Golden Age is tied to that orthography as well.

Even my childhood and youth are tied to the orthography, too, though I am not part of the Golden Age. Platonov (a gaze over a pince-nez), when is the letter yat written in the roots of words? My memory has lost her face, figure, and voice, but that gaze over the pince-nez has remained. Although why, in fact, ‘she,’ when it could be a man? Yes, it was definitely a man: a ribbon from the pince-nez in the frock-coat pocket. The letter yat, I answer, is written in a series of words of age-old Russian origin…

Something familiar revealed itself on a granite gravestone that had risen up in front of us, but I still didn’t understand what. No, I understood. I understood: the name, of course. Terenty Osipovich Dobrosklonov, 1835–1916. And the phrase, ‘Go intrepidly!’ Actually, it’s not written there, but of course not everything under the sun is written.

Go intrepidly into the Kingdom of Heaven, Terenty Osipovich. The taxidermied bear by the door, my running through the enfilade of rooms, and the triumphal recitation of a verse. Theoretically, this could be another Terenty Osipovich, but I feel in my heart that it’s the same one. As it happens, he died a year before everything began. A year before, meaning Terenty Osipovich was lucky. He died peacefully, in full ignorance regarding the imminent changes, and was among – one would like to believe – a circle of people close to him, hoping for their carefree lives.

Eighty-three years have passed since 1916 and one must suppose that little is left of Terenty Osipovich: skeleton, wedding ring, the buttons of his luxurious full dress uniform (and maybe the uniform itself!) and, of course, the two tails of his beard. Yes, a small part of him, next to nothing, but it is part of him, the very same Terenty Osipovich who cheered me at a difficult moment during the sixth year of my life. And there he was, lying under the ground, two meters from me…

‘If this grave were dug up,’ I said to Nastya, ‘we could see a person I met for the last time in 1905.’

Nastya’s long drawn-out gaze at me. Expressively keeping silent. It seemed she did not want to dig up Terenty Osipovich.

‘Simply put, he is one of the witnesses of my childhood,’ I explained. ‘My father called him by his full name to me and I remembered it. That happens. It was one of the first names that lodged in my memory. And I suddenly stumble on him here, can you imagine?’

‘No meeting is more surprising.’

Nastya pressed even harder against my shoulder. She saw that nobody was planning to dig up Terenty Osipovich.

[NASTYA]

A strange stroll: that’s what I’d call a story about today. We walked around the Nikolsky Cemetery at Alexander Nevsky Monastery. This was not, by the way, the first time we were taking a stroll at a cemetery: Platonov has – how to put this? – a certain weakness for these strolls. They don’t exactly weigh on me but on the other hand, I can’t say they improve my mood much; they’re not exactly Disneyland. Though I do need to walk, because of the baby.

And so we’re strolling and strolling, when suddenly Platosha is standing still by one grave. Terenty Osipovich Dobrosklonov is lying there: it would be a sin not to remember a name like that. Terenty Osipovich coined the phrase ‘Go intrepidly,’ allegedly uttered to my future husband during his childhood. I can’t argue: the phrase is a good one – no worse than Terenty Osipovich’s name – but the impression this grave made on Platosha is beyond description.

He told me, in detail, everything connected with that phrase and then even said that if Terenty Osipovich were dug up, there’d be nothing to reveal but a skeleton and a full dress uniform. Well, yes, I agreed, there’s no reason to labor under delusions here. And he thought a bit and then said the beard, too, would probably be revealed. Metal items of some sort, as well. And I was suddenly feeling like he was somehow saying that for real, all businesslike. That a little more and he’d dig up that grave and reveal all. We stood by the grave for almost an hour.

The saddest part of our stroll is that Platosha’s leg twisted again when we entered the monastery grounds. He said it was because the road by the gate is paved with cobblestones and he’s already become used to asphalt. I nodded but – under the pretext of surging emotions – I grasped him firmly by the arm. And I laid my head on his shoulder to totally reduce the distance between us. He wasn’t walking very confidently at all. I don’t know, should I tell Geiger about that? He’s over-cautious and will start dragging his patient in for testing, and hospital things are already getting under Platosha’s skin. I’ll wait for now.

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

Much depended on what seat you took in the lecture hall. It was most interesting to sit at a point with a well-defined line of sight. For example, steeply below and with a three-quarters rotation, which is the most interesting view on Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. His head is thrown back a lot already and if you take a seat in the first three rows, the lower part of the chin – which is always unseen – is revealed, along with the nostrils. The eye slips below the nose and the forehead isn’t visible at all. Those who had the power to build a complex form according to the laws of perspective, as well as to see and maintain proportions, aspired to sit in those spots.

And, by the way, Marx is Alexander Vasilyevich Pospolitaki. I figured that out through a book about the Academy of Arts. I recognized the professors in a group photograph and found his surname in the caption. He died at the White Sea–Baltic Canal. I think his appearance was too colorful. What fit with the 1910s fell into complete disuse in the 1930s. Alexander Vasilyevich turned out not to be sensitive to the change of styles.

[GEIGER]

I’ve been reading everything Innokenty wrote all these months, so it’s as if I’ve come to appreciate his view.

Sometimes I see things exactly as he does. As if I’m listening with his ears.

The clanking of instruments tossed on a tray.

The crackle of a bandage torn off.

The smell after washing floors: lemon, sometimes strawberry. It lifts the mood if it’s not cloying.

This is the smell of changes. Only sensing that did I grasp how radically life has changed. It used to smell of bleach: I did catch that time.

During my internship, I earned extra money as an orderly and washed the floors with bleachy water. It’s supposedly a disgusting smell but it does connect me with my youth. My heart beats faster when I sense it.

It turns out that you can even warm to something disgusting and then sigh about it some time later. And then there is the beautiful.

My time hasn’t been interrupted, but here I am, capable of grieving for the past.

And then there’s Innokenty: he has two lives that are like two shores of a large river. He’s looking from the present shore to the past shore.

He didn’t swim across that river: there wasn’t even a river. He simply regained consciousness and the water was behind him. What had been his road became the riverbed. And he didn’t walk that road.

He once told me he yearns for the years unlived.

THURSDAY [INNOKENTY]

I have been reading Bakhtin. From time to time Geiger brings me books that, according to him, an educated person should know, at least through an initial reading. He brings the best that appeared in various fields during my icy slumber. As I was reading, I thought: Robinson was tossed on an island for his sins and deprived of his native realm. And I was deprived of my native time, and that was for my sins, too. If not for Nastya…

By the way, it turns out she’s read Bakhtin. She called those deprived of a time and space the chronotopless. Geiger laughed hard; he appreciates Nastya despite his difficulty relating to her. But I didn’t laugh. I suddenly thought about those deprived both of their time and the space they inhabited: they are, after all, the dead. It works out that Robinson and I are half-dead. And perhaps even dead, at least for those who knew us in a previous time and previously inhabited space.

SATURDAY [GEIGER]

I called Innokenty and Nastya came to the phone. She said Platosha had headed for Smolensky Cemetery. That she’d gone with him several times but frequent strolls around cemeteries (breathing loudly in the phone) had become rough for her.

‘Strolls around cemeteries?’

‘Yes, around cemeteries. It’s his new hobby.’ Nastya went silent. ‘He’s searching for previous acquaintances.’

I went to Smolensky Cemetery. I remembered where his mother’s grave was and went in that direction. I saw Innokenty a couple of minutes later at the end of a tree-lined walkway. Wearing, at my suggestion, dark glasses so he wouldn’t be recognized. People recognize him anyway.

He walked, limping from time to time. He had a newspaper-wrapped bundle in his hands. The Evening Paper. The bundle was strange and initially distracted me from the limping.

After greeting him, I asked Innokenty what might be carried to the cemetery in a bundle. Innokenty blushed. He muttered something unintelligible. I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known my question would agitate him so much.

‘You don’t have to tell me…’ I smiled.

‘I have nothing to hide.’

Innokenty unfolded the newspaper. In it lay the statue of Themis. Well, how about that. Why, one might ask, does he need that at the cemetery? What kind of justice was he restoring here?

This began to seem funny but I held back. Why, why… He was carrying it, supposedly, to his mother; he didn’t go to see Anastasia. There was apparently some story connected with Themis. But there really was nothing to blush about…

We slowly moved toward the exit along the tree-lined alley. I walked with my head down. As if I was contemplating something. I was watching his feet.

He truly was limping.

We’ll get down to serious testing in the coming days. I didn’t say anything to him about that.

[NASTYA]

Plastosha has infected us with plain old bare description. He keeps repeating: describe more! I catch myself thinking over how best to describe this or that. Even Geiger, I heard, is attempting to express something. And really, why not Geiger, too? On what grounds do I deny him artistic capabilities? In German, by the way, ‘Geiger’ means ‘violinist.’

SUNDAY [GEIGER]

So, let’s say there’s a choir at a morning concert.

We had a choir like that at school. It goes without saying that I didn’t sing in it – with my ear! But I listened and was thoroughly absorbed during morning concerts celebrating various holidays.

The happiest morning concert was for the New Year.

The choristers assembled in rows on a wooden structure (light clattering) that I don’t know what to call even now. Benches installed in three tiers on a stage.

According to the choir master, this design revealed the singers’ vocal possibilities most fully. They were somehow arranged there so the sound floated in a special way: right to the soul. At least to mine.

The girls’ voices were wonderful – like sterling silver – and it was they who defined the beauty of the morning concerts. I called their voices ‘morning voices’ to myself.

I listen to music in the car every day, some of it choral.

How rarely morning voices now sing. One might say they do not sing.

There’s competent and professional articulation, but there’s no magic. There’s no morning.

[NASTYA]

It’s 1993; my mother and I are in Tunisia. We’re abroad on holiday for the first time (and some of the first to go!). And without my father for the first time. Although it’s at his expense: he sends us money from America. Officially, it’s like he hasn’t left us yet, like he’s still there to earn money, but, it’s obvious what’s going on with him. During one of his visits, I was watching him out the window and saw a young woman waiting for him in our courtyard. It’s not that he didn’t think he had to hide: he simply hadn’t thought about it. It never occurred to him that he might be noticed. They kissed and set off, hooking their pinkie fingers – a variation from abroad that people here weren’t using yet. I ran into this little twosome later in the city; my father was embarrassed. She was American; she had come with him and was staying at a hotel. As I understand it, he spent the greater part of the day in her hotel room.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Yes, Tunis. I wanted to describe Tunis, one of my most vivid impressions. Carthage, which should have been destroyed, and that senator (what’s his name?), I forget… The beach. Heat that gives way to coolness in the hotel lobby. African fruit and vegetables as part of an ‘all-inclusive’ package. On the very first evening, I had the runs, of a very high quality; this also turned out to be included.

Evenings were something special. Surprisingly fresh and pleasant. Not what I expected from Africa at all, who would have thought… Maybe it was the evenings that made this land so attractive. Accordingly, they attracted aggressors from various tribes, including my very own mother. I got tired returning her abuse and counted the days until leaving because it was impossible to switch my plane ticket. This isn’t about my mother so why am I writing all this?

This is about Platosha. I sense there’s something happening that’s not good, and I’m feeling uneasy. I already spoke with Geiger: he’s worried. Very. The conversation with him basically left me reeling. I didn’t even understand half of what he told me but what I did understand was enough to put me in a daze.

[GEIGER]

Our computer guy informed me that word processing program doesn’t always insert the day of the week in the notes.

I asked if it’s possible to restore the lost days. He answered that it’s possible: everything’s possible, he said, in a virtual world. Everything’s a question of time and effort.

I suddenly wondered: but is it necessary?

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

I again spent time at Nikolsky Cemetery after Nastya left for classes. It was painful for me to see it: I do remember it unpillaged. There are no longer beautiful marble gravestones here, the ones that stood in my childhood. I asked myself why those gravestones could have been needed: for reuse? For paving the streets? What happens to a people that ravages its own cemeteries? The same thing that happened to us.

On days for prayers in remembrance of the departed, my parents and I would visit some of our relatives here. I loved those outings because they were like trips outside the city, with greenery and a pond: it was like a park, not a cemetery. And just a few steps from Nevsky Prospect. No sorrow could be sensed there at all. Even death was not sensed. Perhaps I did not fear death, either, thanks to that cemetery. I feared it, of course, but somehow without panic.

There was another place I did not fear death: on the island. Unlike Nikolsky Cemetery, it could be felt everywhere there. One cannot say that death arrived for its victims at our barracks: death lived in them. Death’s presence became so everyday that we no longer paid attention to it. People died without fear.

They buried the dead simply, without coffins. They carried the corpses out of the infirmary and tossed them into crates on a cart. Four corpses fit in a crate; they were covered with a plank lid. If the corpses didn’t fit, an orderly would crawl on the lid then stamp on it. They brought the crates to a pit and tossed them below. The pit was filled in when there was no more room. There were many pits of that sort and I had occasion to be near them from time to time. They did not evoke horror in me.

I was horrified only once: when one of the corpses began moving. That’s what it was: one of the naked, decomposing corpses. Looking at its slow shambling, I did not even allow the thought that it was alive. Nothing in that person reminded me of the living. Then he suddenly extended a hand in my direction and introduced himself:

‘Safyanovsky.’

And his left eye could not open because of his swollen eyelid.

I was now standing over the grave of Terenty Osipovich and remembering how lovely his help was for me that time. What a precise word he had found after all. He was lying two meters from me, essentially a trifling distance. His grave was squeezed between two manmade hills and was reminiscent of a boat between waves.

I suspect that Nastya thought last time that I was planning to dig him out. Am I? Most likely no. Though digging up his grave would not be so terrifying. No more terrifying than seeing slow shambling in the Solovetsky grave. The dead Terenty Osipovich probably differed little from the live: his head looked like a skull even during his life. Yes, I wanted very much to see him. If I could have lowered myself those two meters to him, I would have. If he had said ‘Go intrepidly!’ to me from there, I would have gone.

[GEIGER]

Innokenty needs to have magnetic resonance imaging of his brain immediately. The machine broke down at our clinic; I had to arrange for it to be done at another.

You can count the machines in the city on one hand. There’s a huge wait for each one.

I attempted to explain who exactly requires testing. They nodded sympathetically. Explained that there was a six-month waiting list for appointments. Offered a quicker version: four months. And that’s for a person who had been frozen. O, mein Gott…[10]

I gave them three hundred dollars. They set his appointment for the day after tomorrow.

[INNOKENTY]

Some strange things with my memory. Short-term lapses.

At morning prayers, people ask the Virgin: ‘Deliver me of many and anguishing remembrances,’ and I ask that, too. My lapses are of a different nature, though: at times I forget what I had been planning to do a minute before.

But the cruel memories remain.

THURSDAY [NASTYA]

Platosha signed up for a reader’s card at the Historical Archive.

‘What,’ I ask, ‘are you going to search for there?’

‘My contemporaries.’

‘I’m your contemporary, too,’ I laugh. ‘Who else do you need?’

He didn’t laugh, though.

‘Well, various people,’ he says, ‘who aren’t very important compared to you. Minor witnesses to my life.’

I snuggled up against him and he kissed my forehead. I love his kisses on the forehead. I love his other kisses, too, but the ones on the forehead are something special, even friendly, fraternal. That’s what’s lacking, more often than not, even in the very best lover. I understand now why my grandmother prized him so much. And, when it comes right down to it, she remained faithful to him her whole life. And I love him no less. I didn’t used to say things like that, either to myself or to him. Today I said it before going to bed. Standing half-turned toward him. He placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him. We stood like that for a long time. Silent.

They’re doing tomography tests tomorrow. This worries me.

FRIDAY [INNOKENTY]

Today was the scan Geiger arranged. What’s happening with me does not gladden him (or me, either, to tell the truth) and so there we were at the consultation center. Geiger was somehow unusually solemn. He said we need to clarify my fortune. I noted that I squandered my fortune long ago. The joking looked like pathetic cheering-up. Geiger was not laughing. And nobody assigned to the scanning machine was laughing.

Before getting down to work, they asked me if I suffer from claustrophobia. What can someone who lay so many years in an icy, insulated container say? It’s interesting that I began doubting if I did not as soon as they asked me about it. I doubted as I took off my shoes. I had no answer as I lay down on the scan table, either. This was the first time that question had come up for me. And I answered ‘no.’

When the cover closed over me, and the table and I began slowly riding into some sort of tube, I thought that I probably should have said ‘yes.’ This reminded me too much of coffins traveling into a crematorium: they had shown that on a TV show. And the apparatus’s cover reminded me very much of a coffin cover. No wonder the doctor asked me to close my eyes. Why did I not close them?

The last thing I saw as I rode into the tube was the doctor hiding behind a metal door. Metal! And I was not to budge in that tube. I imagined what Gogol must have sensed, if it’s true what they say about him… A quiet panic seized me. I closed my eyes right away. Imagined the starry vault of heaven over my head. It eased. Something began buzzing and mechanically creaking, then went quiet. And began buzzing again. That smart machine was imaging my brain. I am certain that the dearheart will see why my legs are buckling and why I have become forgetful. It will report everything, calmly and impartially.

I rode out of the tube. As I laced my shoes, I saw Geiger taking the image from the doctor’s hands and looking at it against the light. Based on Geiger’s face, it wasn’t clear if he was satisfied or not. He said goodbye and left for his clinic. With the image under his arm.

[GEIGER]

A catastrophe.

I don’t know how I held myself together in Innokenty’s presence. It’s a genuine catastrophe – that became clear even from a cursory glance at the image.

I scrutinized everything at the clinic, clutching at my head. The amount of dead cells is beyond description.

The scariest thing is that I don’t have the slightest notion of the direct reason for cell death in Innokenty.

Of course it’s clear in general terms that it’s the freezing, but what’s the mechanism? What’s the specific mechanism for what is happening? Intervention is impossible without a distinct understanding of that.

And it all began as a ‘success story’…

Everything was in perfect order after the thawing. They did tomography on Innokenty when he was still unconscious. The tomography machine was in working condition then…

An important question: what to say to the Platonovs?

Or not say? And if I say something, should it be to both of them? One of them?

To whom?

[INNOKENTY]

I went to the archive today. They practically greeted me with ceremonial bread and salt. They apparently feel a kinship with me: I myself am nearly an archival phenomenon. They inquired as to what historical period interests me. It’s not a historical period that interests me, it’s people. Plus the sounds, smells, and manners of expression, gesticulation, and motion. I remember some of those things, but have already forgotten others. Definitely forgotten. When I said that, they coughed a bit and smiled. It’s possible they thought I had not yet fully thawed. They asked me to clarify the years. Well, I say, roughly 1905 through 1923. For Petersburg. And 1923 through 1932 on Solovki. They sent a red-headed employee with the surname Yashin into the storeroom for ‘cartons.’

A carton is a large box with archival materials. Yashin brought several of them, concerning various periods. In each carton there lay an inventory. I opened the inventory of the first carton and got lost in it. There were listings of institutions and their employees, archives of clerical offices, instructions from the powers that be, and even a selection of newspaper clippings. After delivering all that, Yashin continued to stand some distance away, and I felt his sympathetic gaze on the back of my head.

His sympathy turned out to be enterprising. In the end, Yashin approached me and offered his help. He asked what names interested me most of all.

‘For you these names won’t –’ I began but Yashin interrupted.

‘Write a list and the estimated years of activity for those people. How about a list of ten people to start?’

What were Terenty Osipovich’s active years? Everything is, however, more or less clear about Terenty Osipovich: his journey ended at the Nikolsky Cemetery. And my strange comrade Skvortsov? Skvortsov who was banished from the line in starving Petrograd. The same age as the century. And Voronin from the Cheka? I felt his activity to the fullest, with every cell in my body. Skvortsov and Voronin, two dissimilar birds who flew through my life… I wrote down ten names and gave them to Yashin.

TUESDAY [NASTYA]

I keep thinking about Platosha’s health. I’m feeling anxious. These fears seem almost funny to me during the day but at night, not so much. What actually causes them? Nothing. Nothing! Geiger has some concerns that I hope will come to nothing. But they’ve scared me.

This morning I went to ‘brush my teeth’: I shut myself in the bathroom and sobbed soundlessly. I turned on the water to be sure it couldn’t be heard. I even blew my nose without trumpeting sounds – I just quietly wiped off the snot – because people blow their noses when they cry.

Although they also blow their noses for no particular reason.

[INNOKENTY]

Yashin called and said he had found information about Ostapchuk.

‘Write this down.’

‘I’m writing.’

Ostapchuk, Ivan Mikhailovich. Born 1880. Worked as a watchman at Pulkovo Observatory from 1899 until 1927.

(In 1921,I add for my part, he and I were knocking together display boards at no. 11 Zhdanovskaya Naberezhnaya. While lying on pieces of wood, we drank murky homebrew sent to him from his wife’s relatives in the village.)

And so, in 1927, he leaves for that same village: Divenskaya, which, by the way, is located not far from Siverskaya. He is leaving, I think, from pure fear, because he has a presentiment of the Terror. It apparently seems to Ostapchuk that it is easier to survive the Terror in the village. If that is the case, then Ostapchuk was laboring under a misapprehension.

Several months later, they arrest him in the village for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. One of the pieces of evidence of that activity was the knocking together of agitational display boards on a sunny May day in 1921. It turns out that materials declared by the investigation to be anti-Soviet had been hung on those boards later. I, too, could have fallen within the investigation’s field of vision by taking part in preparing the display boards, but somehow I did not. Was it because I was incarcerated for murder by that time? Doubtful. If I were the investigator, I would have done the opposite, connecting one case with the other since a murderer is without doubt the best candidate for pursuing anti-Soviet agitation.

Now the most interesting part: anti-Soviet agitator Ostapchuk ended up on Solovki in early 1932. Might we have met? Theoretically yes, if Ostapchuk had been sent to the Laboratory for Absolute Zero and Regeneration in the USSR. But they did not send him there and our fates drifted apart again. He returned to Leningrad in 1935 and got work at his good old Pulkovo Observatory, where he worked right up until his death, which followed in 1958.

Yashin learned all that from Ostapchuk’s personal dossier, which was preserved in the materials of the Pulkovo Observatory. In those same papers, he found an indication of Ivan Mikhailovich’s cemetery plot, too: Serafimov Cemetery. Appreciating the employee’s dedication during his life, the observatory did not forsake him after his death, either. According to Yashin, the institution’s financial reports preserve not only the bill for constructing a memorial stone, but also bills for wreaths and flowers for the deceased’s grave. Receipts every five years for buying ‘silver-tone’ paint figure into things, too, evidencing regular touchups to the fencing. In the upper right-hand corner of the stone is chiseled an inscription, in Latin unknown to Ostapchuk: Per aspera ad astra.[11]

[GEIGER]

Today I spoke with Nastya. I explained everything to her. Rather, I explained everything that I could because I myself understand little.

I won’t write here about the medical side of things. I’ve been describing that in the medical records these past few days so repeating it now would be stupid somehow. Especially stupid since my description contains only questions.

Nastya sensed that and panicked. She grabbed my arm right away. She was in hysterics.

It’s good it’s that way. It would be worse if the emotions were internalized. It’s much more difficult to come out of that state.

I’m in a foul mood. A doctor shouldn’t become attached to a patient. That’s worse for both.

It’s just that Innokenty isn’t a patient to me. After I successfully pulled him alive out of the liquid nitrogen, he’s become something like a son to me. It sounds pompous but that’s how it is. Especially since I don’t have a son. Or a daughter.

I wonder if Nastya will inform Innokenty about what’s happening with his brain. I didn’t forbid her anything. Even I don’t know whether to inform him or not.

And if he asks? Well, if he asks, then… I don’t know that, either. I seem to have studied him well, but I can’t size up his reaction. If he’s to be informed, it would probably be better if Nastya did it.

I’m looking at my arm now: there’s a bruise – she grabbed me for real. And she’s for real, too. Despite all that silly giddiness in her head.

THURSDAY [NASTYA]

There was a conversation with Geiger. I’d been expecting that. I already knew not to expect good news. It’s hard for me to reproduce what Geiger said in detail but the essence of it is devastating. The cells in Platosha’s brain have begun a mass ‘die off.’ In speaking of ‘dying off,’ Geiger had in mind not their full death but a sharp weakening of function. Beyond that, a lot of cells are dying and only a very small number of them are being regenerated. In his opinion, what speaks to regeneration is the fact that Platosha has stopped limping on his right leg. At the same time, his overall condition is worsening and fairly quickly. Geiger will begin examining Platosha’s spinal cord in the coming days: he sees problems there, too.

I’m reporting everything intelligibly now, but I was like a crazy woman when I heard what Geiger had to say. Now I’m ashamed. He was already wary of me (could I really not see?) and now he’ll completely avoid me. I didn’t ask Geiger if it’s right to tell Platosha all this but now I realize it’s up to me to decide. On the one hand, it’s horrific to hang that sort of weight on someone who’s ill, but on the other, he’ll soon realize people are hiding something from him, and then his situation will be even worse. I thought and thought but didn’t come up with any-thing. Then I saw him in the evening, started bawling, and told him everything. Not everything, of course. Only as much as I’d been planning to if I decided to tell him. And it turned out I decided to.

He heard it all out calmly. He said that it could only have been expected. That the decades spent in liquid nitrogen had to manifest themselves somehow.

When we were lying in bed, I said:

‘We’ll pull through it all. We just can’t lose hope.’

He hugged me. Pressed his lips to the bridge of my nose. He whispered:

‘Of course. I’ve been working on that all my life.’

[INNOKENTY]

Nastya told me the results of the MRI. It’s better to pronounce all three of those words – magnetic resonance imaging – because the abbreviation sounds a little scary. As, by the way, do the test results.

I went to Serafimov Cemetery today. I knew from the description in the archives that Ostapchuk’s grave is right alongside the cemetery church. I found it without difficulty: the inscription Per aspera ad astra catches the eye from a distance. It was recently refreshed on the browned stone with the same paint they used on the fence. It’s interesting that – in the masses of everything Ostapchuk talked about on that notable day – the conversation, as it happens, did not turn to the stars. The day we met, which became the day we parted.

Even at this time, it did occur to me that I would never see him again. And that turned out to be enough for me to commit the meeting to memory. It’s not that my contact with Ostapchuk made a huge impression on me: the thought that we were parting forever was huge. I just could not fathom that, and it was scary because the loss of any person and any thing is a part of death. Which is the loss of everything.

Here at Serafimov Cemetery, I unexpectedly see Ostapchuk in the flesh, pouring homebrew into mugs. Woven of contradictions, his nose puckers from the impure scent, welcoming it joyfully at the same time. Ostapchuk is bare-chested: he has taken off his high-collared jacket because he’s being careful with it and doesn’t want to wear it out for no reason. He’s sitting on the curb of his grave and partakes of the drink, covering his nose with his fingers (this is a strong drink) and lifting his chin. I follow the movement of Ostapchuk’s Adam’s apple.

Now it’s my turn: I take out the vodka I brought with me and pour it into silver shot glasses brought from home – we didn’t have luxuries like this in 1921, but all the safer for both of us. We drink because it befits the place (we’re not going to knock together display boards here) and, truth be told, I have long felt like having a drink with Ostapchuk. He’s two meters away from me now – maybe not alongside me and maybe underground – but he is here. I think this time he’s wearing a high-collared jacket or even something solemn if, of course, he did not have last-minute regrets about putting it on because everything could be horribly ruined in the ground.

It isn’t so scary to be in Ostapchuk’s presence. Unlike him, after all, I – with my ghastly MRI – am alive and will possibly still live for some time. I am capable of moving around and, for example, riding a tram down Savushkin Street to the cemetery gates or buying vodka and odds and ends, but the main thing is that I can leave here, leave this cemetery alive. Unlike our Ostapchuk, who lies under that beautiful inscription day and night. At night he’s in the cold light of the stars, to which, if one believes the inscription, he so strove, due to his place of employment.

SATURDAY [NASTYA]

Platosha came home drunk yesterday. I asked:

‘Where, if you don’t mind my asking, were you drinking?’

‘I don’t mind, my dear. At Serafimov Cemetery, with Ostapchuk.’

‘So who’s this Ostapchuk?’ ‘Ostapchuk, my darling, is deceased.’

He kissed me and then sat for about another hour and a half at the computer.

[GEIGER]

I understand very little of what’s happening.

I’m not capable of affecting it.

I’m terrified.

Today I dreamt that an automobile is hurtling along at very high speed. And I’m at the wheel of the automobile. Only there’s bad luck: there’s basically no steering wheel. Or even brakes. You don’t need an interpreter to understand that dream.

Yes, I know that cell die-off is the result of the extended supercooling. Only that doesn’t give much information. I don’t have an answer to the question of exactly how it’s all happening.

Why did the cell degradation begin only a half-year later? After all, if a cell is damaged, it’s logical to suppose it won’t ‘wake up’ in the first place. But it did wake up and stayed wonderfully awake for half a year!

And what if I were to allow that the degradation began right away and acquired its avalanching character only now? But that’s not it, no: Innokenty has been under very thorough monitoring.

One might suppose that we’d changed rehabilitation methods and provoked cell death. But the methods haven’t changed. They haven’t changed!

My brain is in overdrive.

[NASTYA]

Time magazine named Platosha ‘Man of the Year.’ The name of the magazine is appropriate for him, and it’s a nice title, too, but there’s obviously little joy. Even a week ago, we would have been happy and arranged a celebration, but ugh…

Platosha looks at us from the magazine cover and from all the billboards and advertising kiosks, too: Time has great advertising. They found an excellent photo: the subject of the shot obviously doesn’t know he’s being photographed while he’s talking with someone, smiling. Of course the photo is black-and-white and the lighting’s amazing, but the nicest thing about it is the wrinkles formed by his smile. Platosha’s like a movie actor.

My pace slows involuntarily at every kiosk. Handsome. Oh-so handsome! And I think: nothing can happen to him, to someone like that. There is surely some kind of logic in events! It’s one thing for an elderly monk with a drab gaze, someone worn down by life… but here’s someone who looks like a playboy (nobody knows he’s not a playboy, after all), some kind of Brad Pitt – how, you might ask, does this picture fit together with ‘cell die-off’?

[INNOKENTY]

First I read Robinson Crusoe, then the New Testament, the parable of the prodigal son.

I once told Nastya that mercy is higher than justice. Just now I thought: not mercy but love. Love is higher than justice.

[GEIGER]

After work I stopped by to see Innokenty.

He was at home by himself. I was seeing him for the first time one-on-one since the sad news about his condition.

It was easier in Nastya’s presence. She doesn’t allow silence to hang, sprachfreudiges Mädchen.[12]

And here we were, silent half the time. Neither he nor I wanted to talk about the test results.

[INNOKENTY]

Nevsky Prospect. Aviator Frolov’s funeral. Seva and I have come to see that brave person off on his final journey. My parents are mourning the aviator, too, but at home. They didn’t come, so as not to cry in public: they knew they couldn’t contain themselves. Seva and I are crying, though, it’s fine. I, a twelve-year-old, am not ashamed to sit on his shoulders, so I can at least see something; many people are sitting like that. We agreed that he will sit on my shoulders later, but somehow it didn’t work out that way. It was forgotten. My hands are clasped under Seva’s chin and I feel Seva’s tears falling on them.

Now the funeral procession comes into view and seems to be riding past us yet again. I scrutinize that spectacle so greedily afterwards, replaying it in my memory so often that it remains iterative in my consciousness. The procession hurriedly returns to the top of Nevsky as if it were being filmed in reverse, then it again begins its majestic motion forward.

Officers with a cross, banners with Christ’s face, and wreaths come first. The cross is in the center, the banners are to the sides, and the wreaths are at the back. Behind them march two columns carrying the deceased man’s medals and honors. And there, finally, is the hearse with a high canopy rising over the procession. Under the canopy is a closed coffin. In the coffin is the departed, who is dear to all of us. Icarus, as is written on one of the wreaths.

All that drifts slowly toward us. Shouts and conversations go quiet around us. Only the clip-clop of horses harnessed to the hearse is audible. I am grasping at Seva’s hair but he doesn’t notice. I’m attempting to imagine Frolov in the coffin, his arms crossed on his chest with an icon, a paper band on his forehead. Pale. The smell of tobacco from his lips. The aroma of his final cigarette, smoked thanks to me.

We’re standing with our backs to Gostiny Dvor, and the huge crowd is flowing past us, like a sea, in the direction of Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The sea is viscous; it envelops everything that crosses its path: the cars of the horse tram, carriages, streetlights. Everything that falls into this stream is immovable to an equal degree, regardless of its own nature.

Finally, I dismount and we join that crowd because it is only possible to move in one direction: toward Nikolsky Cemetery. We walk along Nevsky, past Yekaterinsky Garden, along Anichkov Bridge, through Znamenskaya Square, and, well, consequently, we walk all the way to the monastery. I do not understand why I have yet to visit Aviator Frolov’s grave at Nikolsky Cemetery.

So that’s the picture. I do not remember the season. On Nevsky – if, of course, there is no snow – one cannot discern the season anyway. You will hardly find any trees here and people dress somehow incomprehensibly, without concern for the season. When it comes down to it, there just aren’t seasons here. There is a wintertime and a nonwintertime, and everything else is lacking in our part of the world.

[NASTYA]

The other day, Platosha said we should get married. I realized what that means. He wants to move our relationship into the realm of eternity. He believes it’s no longer possible to trust time. That his days are numbered. He doesn’t say that directly, but a sort of mosaic came together from individual phrases he’s thrown out on various occasions. I’m the only one who sees it because I interact with him constantly. Well, maybe Geiger, too. Yes, Geiger, too, of course.

Geiger doesn’t know about the proposal but he senses Platosha’s general condition well. And I sense Geiger’s. I think he’s suffering no less than us, but he doesn’t discuss the illness, either with Platosha or with me. I’d been waiting for comforting words from him but they haven’t come. At first that was very hurtful but then I realized what the deal was. Geiger’s a rational person and simultaneously honest in the German way. He doesn’t know what’s going on with Platosha, so he finds no comforting words. I think comfort that’s not based on facts would not only seem pointless to him but also immoral. He’s strongly mistaken about that, though.

Platosha, by the way, isn’t saying anything either, for different reasons. He’s a courageous person and prefers to keep everything to himself. He’s afraid of traumatizing me. He’s not afraid of traumatizing Geiger, but they’re concurring here that there’s no point in discussing the incomprehensible. So everybody stays silent. When I attempt to bring it up, neither of them keeps the conversation going.

Oh, and Zheltkov called to congratulate Platosha on ‘Man of the Year.’ I was gesturing to Platosha: invite the guy to tea, he loves it. He didn’t invite him.

[INNOKENTY]

Zheltkov called twice this week, once when Nastya was here, once when she wasn’t. I didn’t tell her anything about the time she wasn’t here. He said then that he had an interesting political project for me. That I, as a person who’s been around for ages (is he implying the liquid nitrogen means I’m from the Ice Age?) could be useful… I didn’t let him finish. Above all, I said, I am a nonpolitical person.

‘But you,’ he objected, ‘you didn’t even listen to the gist of my project!’

‘And it’s a good thing I didn’t. What if it’s a state secret and I have to live with it after turning it down?’

‘Well, not that much of a secret,’ growled Zheltkov. ‘Fine, we’ll make do without any projects. It would be better to have tea, right?’

He burst into the same laughter as during the tea party.

Why does Nastya think that laugh is sincere?

[NASTYA]

Today Platosha went to see Geiger at the clinic for yet another blood test, and I went to St Prince Vladimir’s Cathedral. I walked through the park that they say used to be the church cemetery. There were maple and poplar leaves on the paths here and there, but not yet a complete covering. I suddenly realized it’s already the beginning of autumn. Slight fading but not yet an avalanche.

We’d gone to the cathedral together before this but here I was walking by myself; something sank inside me. Will the day really arrive that I’ll come here alone? If those had been only thoughts, I could have somehow driven them away, but then it proved to be autumn, too: a sort of overall departure. As I was walking by the church gates, past the panhandlers, they didn’t even pester me, they just followed me with their eyes; that’s the sort of look I turn out to have.

The evening service was underway – I don’t know what it’s properly called. The church was in half-darkness, illuminated only by candles. After entering, I headed for the left side altar where there’s an icon of St Panteleimon, the great martyr and healer. A prayer to him hung by the icon and I read it. Then I pressed my forehead to the icon’s glass, standing there a very long time. I told Panteleimon about Platosha. About how much he suffered and agonized during his life but the most important thing is that we’re now expecting a child. Alongside me, people were kissing the icon and the glass under my forehead was no longer cool, but I kept telling and telling. Soundlessly moving my lips. The warmth of the glass I had heated transformed into Panteleimon’s warmth for me. Quiet prayers wafted to me and calmed me.

Then I stood by the Savior, by the icon ‘Joy of All Who Sorrow.’ Never before have I had a conversation like this, but now it happened. This was a genuine conversation, though only I spoke. The answer to me was hope, which came to replace despair. A special joy of the sorrowful.

I came home after Platosha. When he asked where I’d been, I told him, though I hadn’t initially planned to. I was afraid the story about the church would reveal to him how serious his condition seems to me. I was afraid that might finish him off completely. But I couldn’t have even guessed that such joy would come to me that I’d be able to share it with him.

He told me:

‘You’re glowing all over. I’m afraid your glow will turn into its opposite if things don’t go well for me.’

To be honest, I hadn’t expected that.

‘Are you proposing that I plead for you and not believe it can come true? Do you remember – it’s somewhere in Chekhov – about the priest who goes to plead for rain and brings an umbrella with him?’

‘You don’t need the umbrella. Just plead.’

He kissed me on the forehead. He’s not right. Not right!

[INNOKENTY]

An ambulance came for Nastya. She had been complaining for several days about a heaviness in her belly but had not allowed me to telephone for a doctor and today it all got worse, so we had to telephone. It’s good we begged with the doctors to take her to the Nevsky Maternity Hospital, where she has been receiving care since the beginning of her pregnancy. I don’t understand why I, a fool, had not insisted on the hospital earlier… Of course I do understand. She was scared to leave me on my own. And I am scared to be left. But what can be expected now? Just the thought of that makes me feel ill. I really should have insisted. Taken her by the hand and brought her to the hospital.

I felt absolutely nauseous when we got to the maternity hospital. I did ask to go to her room and sit alongside her, but no way! Why did you arrive so late, sweetheart, it’s almost night! As if we’d chosen when to arrive… They would not let me past the admissions area. And they took Nastya to a room on a stretcher. What a distressing spectacle when someone close to you is taken away on a stretcher. Ugh.

I sat for about another hour on a couch in the admissions area. People came to look at me: I think the entire hospital staff checked in at my couch. To look: they looked but they did nothing to unite me and Nastya. Not. A. Thing. In the end, they asked me to leave the couch, too: they said they were supposed to close the hospital for the night. I left without uttering a word. Of course I could have told them how bad I felt but I could not find the exact word.

I ended up on Nevsky Prospect a few minutes later. I started going into the metro – I even bought a token – but didn’t ride.

‘Are you going in?’ asked the attendant. ‘We’re closing, by the way.’

Then close. I changed my mind about taking the metro when I pictured being at home without Nastya. After leaving the metro, I headed toward Moscow Station; I decided to sit there a while. People, lots of people, though I had been dreaming of a bright place without people. I didn’t feel like talking with them or even just seeing them. I didn’t feel like knowing they exist. Because after parting with Nastya, it would be better on the whole if they weren’t there. My loneliness was only more pointed because of their presence. I sat in the station for about an hour and a half.

I went out to Znamenskaya Square – I remember when it was still called that, still with the church and the brilliant monument. I imagined the emperor returning to his place, with a stonelike tread. There were cars with flashing lights in front of him – they stopped traffic for his majesty, they had not been expecting him. His horse stepped slowly: the clatter of hoofs, sparks on the asphalt. I returned, so why can’t the emperor return? Both of us are history.

I plodded off toward the Nevsky Monastery. I was tired, my legs were giving way. A kitchen table someone had carried outside stood in front of one building. I sat on it. My feet drummed lightly on it, making a muffled drumming noise. I had never sat like that before on Nevsky. On a kitchen table. I rested a little and walked on.

To my surprise, the entrance to the monastery was open. People were standing by the gate, waiting for something. A minute later, a vehicle with ‘MuniWater’ written on it; showed up and drove through the gate at low speed. I walked after the car, in no hurry. Nobody stopped me; I obviously resembled a MuniWater employee in some way. Maybe with my pensiveness. People who handle water are often pensive.

I hesitated and then decided to go to Nikolsky Cemetery. It turned out the vehicle was headed there, too. It was still driving just as slowly, as if feeling its way, and its headlights grabbed trees and monuments from the darkness. They became improbably three-dimensional, moving in the electric beams, changing places, losing their own shadows and acquiring others’.

Work was in full swing at Nikolsky Cemetery. Illuminated by powerful floodlights, two roaring earthmovers had extracted soil from the graves (so it seemed to me) and piled it in areas of open ground. No, it was not from the graves. When I walked closer, it was clear the vehicles were working on the small road: they had dug a trench. I could also see that overlooking the trench were not just mounds of black earth but also several coffins that had been raised to the surface. Over the long course of their existence, the rows of graves had ceased being rows and some burial places took up nearly half the little road. Those graves had obviously needed to be dug up.

I remembered that Terenty Osipovich’s grave protruded, too, and the thought that it might have to be disturbed in order to extend the mysterious trench – well, yes, that thought flashed. After walking along the trench, which stretched past the second earthmover, I stopped (a pertinent image), as if rooted to the ground: Terenty Osipovich’s coffin was already standing on a small hill of fresh earth. Of course I could not be certain it was actually Terenty Osipovich lying in the coffin but the coffin was hanging over his grave: who would be there if not him?

I walked right up to the coffin. One of the boards on its side had fallen off but the illumination from the floodlights did not reach the gap that had been left. Nothing was visible through it. One could not be convinced that this was Terenty Osipovich without opening the lid. But how could you do that?

As I was pondering, a flexible pipe extended from the vehicle that had arrived. It slithered from a giant reel that rotated with an un-expectedly high-pitched sound. Water lines were being laid through the cemetery at night so as not to disconcert anyone. They neatly placed the pipe in the bottom of the trench. Everyone watched as if entranced while city authorities turned to the departed after having provided a water supply to the living. Without the others noticing, I stepped toward the coffin and laid a hand on the lid’s half-rotted wood. I groped around the edges. There turned out to be a small gap where the lid came together with the coffin. I dug my fingers into it and pulled the lid upward with force.

The force was unnecessary: the lid lifted easily. I again cast a glance at those around me: they were all observing the laying of the pipe, as before. In one motion, I raised the lid slightly and moved it to the edge of the coffin. A person’s remains became visible in the beam beating down from the floodlight. That person was Terenty Osipovoch. I recognized him immediately.

Gray hair was stuck to his skull. Solemn dress uniform, almost untouched by rot. He was, essentially, like this in life. True, he lacked a nose and two black holes gaped instead of eyes but other than that Terenty Osipovich resembled himself. For an instant, I waited for him to appeal to me to go intrepidly but then I noticed that he also had no mouth.

[GEIGER]

Nastya is in the hospital.

They didn’t let Innokenty in to see her today; they ordered him to come tomorrow. He called and told me about it. He also asked me to find a description of the aeroplane ‘Farman-4.’

I asked:

‘Why?’

He said:

‘Since we’re restoring a general picture of life as it once was, let’s have it. Add it to our other texts.’

I’ll add it, that’s not complicated. Just open the encyclopedia and write.

But. I feel uncomfortable. I don’t know if it’s worth supporting endeavors like these.

And so, ‘Farman-4’ is a biplane, with two pairs of wings. Two-seater. Manufactured during 1910–1916. Engine: sixty-five horsepower, propeller diameter 2.5 meters. Weighed 440 kilos, capable of lifting 180 kilos. Fuselage made of pine, wings and wheel covered with creamy-yellow canvas. Sehr raffiniert.[13] Frolov flew in a Farman (that sounds like a little verse). Unfortunately, he also crashed in one.

I don’t know why I’m writing all this. It’s not easy to do. Even so, it’s easier than writing about the results of Innokenty’s tests.

[INNOKENTY]

Last night I wrote until I fell asleep right at the table. I dreamt of Frolov’s aeroplane. In my dream, I even remembered what it was called: ‘Farman-4.’ Now that is memory: it even preserved the ‘4’ – who would have thought? I dreamt that his plane was running along the airfield but just could not take off. The aviator sees that there are all kinds of leaves, grass, and flowers under his shoes, and it all blends into a dark-green mass. Maybe it would be better not to take off… He could just keep riding and riding – what’s wrong with that? He could just bounce on the hummocks, the wings trembling occasionally.

But that’s not what we loved him for.

[ ]

I stayed the night at Innokenty’s. We talked until around three.

He took out the vodka, first one bottle, then another. I didn’t think of objecting: what kind of objections could there be here? We did drink both bottles.

I was basically afraid he would start asking me about his health. He didn’t.

Nastya’s health worries him far more now. He’s very afraid the baby will die.

The conversation somehow slid on to how life is structured these days. Innokenty called it anarchy. I noted that authoritarian rule usually comes after anarchy. Which is essentially very sad.

But Innokenty – Innokenty who did time! – said authoritarianism may be a lesser evil than anarchy.

He compared the populace of a country to deep-sea fishes. They can only live under pressure, he said.

I attribute that statement to the quantity of vodka consumed.

An unpleasant discovery: during the time we sat around, Innokenty choked several times. Some sort of swallowing disorder, and this is not a matter of the throat. It’s a problem with the brain.

[INNOKENTY]

I went to see Nastya today. She is ill and looks it: she’s pale, even green. I have never seen her like this. I sat with her until late in the evening, until they showed me out. During lunch, I ate nearly her entire portion because she couldn’t eat. Her attending physician is of the opinion that this is due to toxicity in her body.

Put bluntly, the food is not from the Metropol. This is what I think: the cooks here aren’t especially trying to make lunch not taste good, right? They just don’t put in everything that’s called for: stated simply, they steal. They’re our people. They just cannot help themselves.

But Geiger says you cannot control these people, or anyone else, by coercion. He and I argued half of last night about the advantages of democracy. I see those advantages even without his comments. They might be natural and appropriate in some places, but they just cannot seem to develop in our country. In Geiger’s ancestral motherland, for example, they can, but not here.

I think the whole issue is personal responsibility. Per-so-nal. Individual. When that’s missing, there needs to be some external corrective action. If, for example, a person has problems with his spine, they put a brace, a fairly severe thing, on him. But it holds up the body when the spine cannot. That is exactly what I’m going to tell Geiger. I cited a marine example but now I’ll cite a medical one.

[GEIGER]

I examined Innokenty the other day and noticed that his arms and legs have become slightly thinner. The reason: decrease in muscle mass. This testifies to problems with the spinal cord.

Innokenty had a positron-emission tomography scan today. There is little joy. Why did I regard this as limited to the brain, anyway? It was to be expected that the cooling would affect the entire body. Including the spinal cord. But what, what, exactly, was the effect? If only I could understand that…

[ ]

Nastya was discharged today. It turns out they did an ultrasound during the course of her treatment. And they reported the most important news, too, when they discharged her: it’s a girl. A daughter. I have been thinking about that all day today. For some reason, I had imagined it would be a boy. That doesn’t mean that a girl is worse, there are simply things that seem to go without saying.

On the one hand, I could offer more advice to a boy because I have gone through that rather complex journey. On the other hand, my journey began almost a century ago. It’s a big question as to whether that experience has any value now. So then, in terms of experience, it makes little difference if I have a daughter or a son. As a man, it’s probably nicer for me to have a daughter. And, when it comes down to it, all the best things in my life are connected with women.

I just reread this: what silliness! It’s obvious, after all, that the abstract points here don’t apply. People love a specific person, not a boy or a girl. After being born, a person ceases to be an abstraction and then… But will I have a then?

[ ]

I’m at home again. We’re at home again! Us and our daughter: I just found out we’re having a girl. Why didn’t they say right away that I’m having a girl – were they afraid to jinx it? They didn’t believe in a happy outcome? Or is it ineradicable Soviet-era spitefulness, plain and simple? It’s pointless to guess and, really, not very interesting.

I think our daughter will pull us both – him and me – out of this pit. When we were riding home from the hospital in the taxi, I said:

‘Platosha, sweetie, two ladies are totally depending on you. You just can’t pack it in now.’

And he even smiled in response, but so very haggardly that I almost burst into tears. I swear, it would’ve been better if he hadn’t smiled. I nestled up to him, put my head on his shoulder and then wrapped him in my arms. The driver looked at us in the mirror and that’s how we rode the whole way: hugging.

[INNOKENTY]

Yashin telephoned and said he had something interesting for me. When I arrived, he brought me a file with materials about my cousin Seva. It came after the archive sent an inquiry to the public prosecutor’s office: Yashin dug deep… He’s a professional, I had to admire him. Even the way he pulled out the papers sheet by sheet seemed somehow very adroit. In white gloves; he’s a red-head himself. I found myself on the first sheet, in the list of those who had been assigned to the 13th Brigade. With Seva’s signature. Opposite two surnames was a notation instructing particular strictness of incarceration. One of those surnames was mine. Did Seva really want so badly to get rid of me?

He and I had flown so much on the aeroplane kite, I in the front seat, he in the back! Seva had not moved into the front seat, not even at the transit point: he did not shoot me, did not deprive me of my life using his own will. He granted that I die my own death – if, of course, death from exhaustion can be considered one’s own. We ran and I slowed down because I saw Seva gasping for breath. We slapped our feet along the damp sand, slipping and raising a spray, and the kite flew majestically over the sea – where we could not run to follow it – and it seemed that he and I were flying with it. Our aeroplane dove when we stumbled, but that was almost unnoticeable: it looked as if it had caught another airstream.

How is it that Seva faltered so his aeroplane corkscrewed down? I discovered – from all the documents that Yashin brought – that my cousin was shot in 1937. The documents did not refer directly to torture during the course of the investigation but, based on isolated cries that found their way into the records, one can gather that there was torture. Based on cries and, most important, the particularities of the information that lurched from Seva like uneven waves. Only at the first interrogation was there a conversation that was more or less substantive. The rest – since there was nothing for Seva to tell – read like unsuccessful attempts at guessing the investigators’ wishes.

The protocols, which are usually short on words, did not economize on detail this time. They told, at length, what Seva said as he begged for his life, how he sobbed loudly like a woman and fell to kiss the interrogators’ feet. In the final interrogations, after obviously losing his mind, he proposed they release him to go conquer desert regions of Uzbekistan. He demanded they come to him ten years hence and eat fruit in the garden he would plant. Seva described to the interrogators all of them drinking tea at an evening hour when there is no longer intense heat and it is easy to breathe. Judging from the detail of the notes, Seva’s speeches made a big impression on his listeners. One must suppose that the investigators tired of the interrogations and themselves dreamt of a quiet garden life. In some strange way, I, too, felt a sense of peace after reading this.

[ ]

Today Innokenty and I spoke seriously about his health for the first time. ‘More precisely, my ill health,’ he corrected. It’s good he’s joking…

I recalled the joke about how a man is brought to the hospital with a knife between his ribs. ‘So is it very painful?’ the doctor asks him. ‘Oh, no,’ answers the man, ‘only when I laugh.’

I told that joke to Innokenty. He nodded. Muttered something like how that’s about him. Then he lifted his face and there were tears in his eyes.

I didn’t bring up the topic, Innokenty did. He started talking about the changes he’s noticed in himself. If I didn’t know for certain that Innokenty doesn’t read medical books, otherwise I would have thought he was quoting a description of the symptoms of a brain disorder.

Judging from all that, his working memory has suffered most tangibly. He forgets things that just occurred. Fortunately, not all of them.

Even so, he recalls events from the beginning of the century without particular difficulty.

Hysteria has manifested itself: it was noticeable even today. In the middle of our conversation, Innokenty suddenly announced that he no longer sees any point in keeping his notes.

‘What does “no longer” mean?’ I asked. ‘What’s changed in comparison with the previous months?’

‘Well, you yourself understand perfectly well where my road now leads.’

‘No, I don’t understand. Unfortunately, nobody understands that yet.’

He looked right at me. His look was mean.

‘I should write, just so you can defend yet another dissertation?

Innokenty had never talked like that with me. I kept silent because I didn’t know what to say. He abruptly walked up to me and embraced me:

‘Forgive me, Geiger. I’m monstrously unfair.’

And I’ve already defended all possible dissertations, by the way.

[ ]

I went to the archive again, to continue familiarizing myself with Seva’s dossier. From time to time – when Seva was definitively worn out – idyllic pictures of the garden in the desert yielded to curses aimed at the interrogators as well as Soviet power in its entirety. It is interesting that at one of those moments Seva recalled our conversation about the locomotives of history. He cited those words to his torturers and said:

‘I didn’t think that locomotive would carry me here. Innokenty did, after all, warn me: go on foot.’

New interrogations involved clarifying Innokenty’s fate. The fact that Seva had personally sent me, his own cousin, to a hopeless place was deemed as especially sophisticated craftiness and part of a criminal plot. When they pressured Seva yet again, he produced not one plan but an impressive three, though not one of them corresponded to my situation at the time, something Seva did not know.

After learning they had frozen me, he advanced a fourth version. It consisted of them intending to drag the virus of revisionism – which had eaten away at me – into the communist future by freezing me. No spirit could be sensed now in what Seva uttered: there was only a tormented body. It wanted nothing beyond the cessation of torture. It did not even want life: the self-incrimination reflected in the transcripts boded nothing but the firing squad for Seva.

In revealing ever more new details about himself and me, my unfortunate relative even demanded that I be thawed and interrogated with prejudice. Several pages pasted into the dossier recorded that an attempt of the sort was undertaken. It ended lamentably for the interrogators. After clarifying whose instruction had ordered the freezing experiments, the attempt to defrost me was deemed revisionist and I remained in place. Unlike, by the way, the interrogators, who were handed over to a court.

[ ]

Platosha and I decided to legalize our relationship before God and people. First, before people: marrying requires a stamp in the passport. There’s actually a long wait at the registry office but Geiger helped with that. One of the heads of the passport service turned out to be his former patient.

‘Was he frozen, too, before he worked at the passport service?’ I asked Geiger.

‘The opposite,’ said Geiger. ‘He froze after he got there. But sometimes he thaws out: they’ll register you without a wait.’

So even Geiger has a sense of humor. My relationship with him is better than ever.

After that I went to St Prince Vladimir Cathedral and made arrangements for our wedding. They asked: with or without a choir? With a choir, of course. How could it be without a choir? I told Platosha about all that in the evening, including Geiger’s help speeding up the process. And he said:

‘If Geiger’s in such a hurry, that means things aren’t good for me. He’s the best informed of all of us.’

I started saying Geiger’s not at all in a hurry, but then the telephone started ringing. They were asking Platosha about yet another interview. He refused and hung up. He already either couldn’t recall our previous conversation or just didn’t want to continue it. Never mind, as they say. Sometimes it’s rough being with him.

[INNOKENTY]

I am ashamed of myself. I’m feeling afraid and thus tormenting those around me and, really, there are only two of them. Why am I doing that? It doesn’t even make things any easier for me. I’m afraid that some sort of latent irritation has appeared in me because I will depart and they will remain. If that is truly how things are, then my behavior is doubly shameful. I need to watch myself carefully.

I told Geiger the other day that I don’t intend to write any longer. But now I understand: I do intend to. Because of my daughter. If she is not fated to see me alive, I will appear before her in written form, as they say, and my pages will accompany her throughout her life. There is no point in writing about the major events: she’ll find out about those anyway. The descriptions should touch on what occupies no place in history but remains in the heart forever.

An abandoned narrow-gauge railway substation, for example. Everyone forgot the substation and everyone forgot the narrow-gauge railway. I don’t remember where it was or where the railway led, if it even did. It stretched, rusty, through grasses; it was already nearly invisible. Some other children and I were playing under the platform and the sun made its way through cracks in the boards. Grasses stirred, grasshoppers chirped, there was a hot spell. And a cool breeze was blowing there, under the rough flooring. The platform was high so we were all able to stand at full height underneath. We were sitting in pairs, though, leaning against one another’s backs. Sitting was good, soft: grass grew under the platform, too, though it wasn’t thick, and some mosses were also growing. One boy had nobody to lean against. And so, he said:

‘There will be a thunderstorm. It will be the end of us.’

We could see nothing to portend a thunderstorm, but that’s only how it seemed: an absolutely leaden cloud was approaching from behind the grove we weren’t looking at. Unlike the boy who had warned us, we were self-absorbed and had not noticed anything. Later in life, I have observed that solitary people sense more subtly and notice nearing changes before others. And so that cloud rode into the sunny splendor, with a full complement of rain, lightning, thunder, and even hail. Hail the size of pigeon eggs, as is commonly said. Maybe a pigeon egg. I have never seen their eggs but the hailstones truly were large. The way they drummed on the boards made me think the boards would not hold out long.

I’ll add that lightning flashed and thunder boomed. It didn’t even boom, it cracked, infernally loudly. As if the sky were breaking into two uneven parts (the sun was still shining, far away). I, of course, had lived through thunderstorms more than once even before this, but in all those previous storms, seconds passed between lightning and a clap of thunder. My mother and I sometimes counted them. This time, though, the claps of thunder rang out together with the lightning, and that was scary. We were sitting as before, pressing our backs against one another, but now it was fear rather than a friendly feeling that bonded us. Water poured through the cracks in the boards, flowing behind our shirt collars and streaming, cold, along the body. And the boy who remained unpaired shouted in the intervals between lightning:

‘Heavenly electricity!’

I became desperately sorry for him and that sorrow overpowered fear. I moved away from the back I had managed to cling to and gave up my place to the shouter. He did not so much as stir, though. He was enjoying the horror of his solitariness. And the fullness of knowledge.

[ ]

I looked at the menologium in search of a name for our daughter. According to the doctors’ calculations, she should be born around April 13. St Anna is celebrated on that day. I told Platosha that and he was glad. He said that name reminds him of mine and my grandmother’s. I’m glad, too: Anna’s a beautiful name and not everybody can be Anastasia in any case. I decided to look to see who else is celebrated on that day. It turns out there’s Prelate Innokenty, educator of Siberia and America. Amazing.

We’re continuing to prepare for the wedding, mentally, at least, because we don’t want any celebrations at all. Geiger is our only guest. Platosha asked him to keep notes about the wedding. Geiger wavered slightly but didn’t dare refuse: Platosha did write for him for more than half a year.

Oh, this is important: we did register (what a Soviet term!). We came to the Petrograd District registry office and registered, wearing sweaters and jeans. Some old bag came out, lips pursed, to welcome us but Platosha stopped her. He calmly said that was unnecessary. She understood and wasn’t even offended. She limited her performance to ‘Sign the registry here.’ We signed.

We had a beer in the nearest pub: I had non-alcoholic, Platosha had German unfiltered. Over all, Platosha’s mood has lightened a bit in recent days. No, that’s not the word: it’s changed. He isn’t gladder now, but he’s calmer, and that’s an improvement of sorts.

[ ]

I forgot to say: the thunderstorm was short and the sun soon peeked out. The streams through the cracks became ever thinner. I glanced stealthily at the boy who had shouted about heavenly electricity. He was sitting, hands folded, with the sorrowful look of a prophet. Something in him was otherworldly. I wonder who he was and what became of him.

We watched the sparkling of the flowing water for a while longer. Now there weren’t even thin streams. Water initially covered the cracks as if it were a film but that thin film tore suddenly, turning into uniformly large drops. We went out into the open expanse and saw a rainbow. Our rusted narrow-gauge railway was departing underneath it, as if riding under a bridge.

[ ]

Innokenty and Nastya married today at St Prince Vladimir Cathedral.

Innokenty asked me the day before if I would describe the wedding. I offered to film it for them. He took me by the arm and said:

‘No, please describe it in words. In the final reckoning, only the word will remain.’

A debatable statement. I kept silent. But I’m writing: I did promise to write.

The other thing is that I’m not the best describer in this case. I’m a stranger to the Orthodox service. And the Lutheran one, too, when it comes down to it. Though I was christened as a Lutheran.

And so, the wedding. It lasted about forty minutes: that’s the only thing I can say with certainty.

The meaning of its parts is beyond me, with a few rare exceptions. For example, when the priest asks each person if they are marrying of their free will. And when they both drink from the same chalice. That goes right to your heart.

When Nastya drank, Innokenty looked at her so marvelously. I can’t think of the words. As if inspired, perhaps. Yes, inspired.

It would have made a tremendous photograph. Sharp focus on Innokenty’s eyes and Nastya’s face slightly fuzzy. And the glimmer of the bronze chalice. Maybe a photo like that will appear. Someone was taking pictures there, some journalists.

Crazy thoughts kept creeping into my head. Things like, there’s Innokenty, born in 1900, and Nastya in 1980. That’s what you’d call an age difference.

Will Innokenty like my description?

I’m writing and thinking: maybe the wedding will pull him out of his depression?

[ ]

We didn’t go to bed the night after our wedding. We sat on the bed, nestled against one another. And didn’t utter a word. Not one. We held hands and felt the same thing. We lay down toward morning. Went right to sleep.

This afternoon, Platosha was watching TV and suddenly said:

‘How can invaluable words be wasted on TV series, on these wretched shows, on advertising? Words should go toward describing life. Toward expressing what hasn’t yet been expressed, do you see?’

‘I see,’ I answered.

I truly do see.

[ ]

What happiness that I met her.

[ ]

Innokenty and I talked over tea about the role of the individual in history. We had to talk about something other than medicine.

He repeated his favorite thought about political leaders. That the people find exactly who they need at that particular moment.

I cautiously said:

‘How do you picture that: everybody in 1917 needed the exact same thing? Old, young, smart, stupid, righteous, guilty? They all needed the exact same thing?’

‘And where do you see smart there? And, most important: righteous?’

Harsh. There was a time when the notion of universal guilt irked me in Pushkin. Find out, he says, who is right, who is to blame, then punish them both.

For Innokenty, that frame of mind is connected with his overall condition. Which is worsening.

[ ]

Geiger and I debated. In my opinion, he has a strange notion that someone is tossing the noose down upon us from above again and again. That we’re not the ones who braid it. Quite the defender of the Russian people… And at one time he was telling me about his hopes: there, he thought, Soviet power will go away and we’ll start living! And… so? Have we started living now? Soviet power has been gone for how many years now: did we start living?

And its arrival was not accidental: I do remember it well. The Bolsheviks are now called ‘a handful of conspirators.’ And how was this ‘handful of conspirators’ able to topple a thousand-year empire? It means Bolshevism is not something external for us.

So Geiger does not believe in a collective impulse for perishing and does not see rational reasons for it. But reasons can be irrational, too. All, all that threatens to destroy holds for the mortal heart a joy of inexplicable delight… That, of course, is not always how it is, and it’s not for all people (here, Geiger is right), though it is for a great number of them! For enough to turn the country into hell. My cousin succumbs to the oprichniks, my neighbor goes to snitch on Professor Voronin. Voronin’s colleague Averyanov gives monstrous testimony about him. Why?!

Well, who cares about him – my cousin – he’s a weak person, he wanted to establish himself. Averyanov, let’s say, was envious: a natural feeling for a colleague. But why did Zaretsky snitch? Out of considerations based on principle? But he had no principles (or considerations, either, I suspect). Money? But nobody was giving him money. He himself told me when he was drunk that he didn’t know why he snitched. I know, though: out of an overabundance of shit in his body. It – that shit – grew in him and waited for the social conditions to spill over. And they did.

In that case, though, maybe he is not to blame for snitching on Anastasia’s father? Maybe the social conditions are to blame? I think Geiger thinks so. But then it wasn’t social conditions that snitched on the professor, it was Zaretsky. That means he committed a crime and his getting bashed on the head turned out to be his punishment. The justified, I emphasize, punishment of a villain, though few knew of that. Everything looks more complex with respect to who bashed him. Is he a villain or an instrument of justice? Or both? How can all that be explained to Anna?

Sitting at the computer, Innokenty asked me:

‘Where is the Internet’s content located?’

At first I didn’t understand the question.

‘What do you mean where? It’s in the Internet…’

‘Can you name the specific place where it’s stored? Or am I to understand that it’s evenly spread around a network?’

‘There are computers that store the information. They’re housed in data centers –’

He didn’t let me finish.

‘So there’s nothing mystical about it and there are fully dedicated machines that store that content, right?’

Right. I didn’t understand what surprised him so much.

[ ]

Geiger explained to me how the Internet functions: its content is distributed in a series of computers. If you think about it, it would be pretty much impossible otherwise, but I had almost come to believe in some kind of special system standing over computers. Almost a special reality arising from the very fact of the connection between computers.

It suddenly occurred to me that this is a sort of model for public life. Which, when it all comes down to it, is not life but a phantom. Plunging into it is not without its hazards: it can sometimes become clear that there is no water in the pool. Life and reality are on the level of the human soul – that is where the roots of everything good and bad are located. Everything is decided by touching the soul. Probably only a priest works on such things. Well, and maybe an artist, too, if they’re successful at it. I was not.

[ ]

Platosha says he thinks all the time about Anna: that’s what we already call our little girl now. I know it’s early and we shouldn’t, but what can we do if she’s come into our lives? We already sense her character, for example. When she stamps her little foot in my belly, we understand there’s a feisty young woman growing. Platosha asks me to call to him when she’s kicking like that. One time we both saw my belly swaying from Anya’s little foot!

He wants Anya to know everything about him. That’s why he’s now planning to write much more thoroughly. I said to him:

‘Don’t make things more complicated for yourself. She’ll grow up a little and you’ll tell her everything.’

‘No,’ he answers, ‘I’ll write: everything’s firmer on paper, more reliable. Oral stories, you know, blur in the memory, but what’s written doesn’t change. And what’s important is that it can be reread.’

I do know why he’s writing, though! Good Lord, there’s no secret there. He thinks he won’t live until she’s born.

One time in Siverskaya I saw an aeroplane taking off from a poorly mown field. As it sped up along the runway, the aviator drove around potholes, bounced on hillocks, and – oh, joy! – suddenly ended up in the air. Watching that machine move spasmodically around the field, frankly, nobody expected flight. But the aviator took off. There was no more hillocky field for him and no more laughing spectators underneath his wings: there appeared a sky with sprawling clouds and the colorful earth like a patchwork.

For some time, I have seen that picture as a symbol of a fitting course for life. It seems to me that accomplished people have a defining trait: they depend little on those around them. Independence, of course, is not the goal but it helps achieve the goal. There you are running through life with the weak hope of taking off and people are looking at you with pity or, at best, with incomprehension. But you take off and from up high they all seem like dots. That’s not because they have instantly diminished but because the view from above (lectures on the basics of drawing) makes them into dots, into a hundred dot-faces oriented toward you. With open mouths, it would appear. And you’re flying in the direction you chose and tracing, in the ether, figures that are dear to you. Those standing below delight in them (perhaps envying a little bit) but lack the power to change anything because everything in those spheres depends solely on the flyer’s skill. On an aviator splendid in his solitude.

[ ]

Platosha told me about some aviator’s flight in Siverskaya. Based on the tone of the story, I understood immediately this was not so much about the aviator as about Platosha: he has differing manners when talking about others and himself. He talked and talked, then suddenly pondered.

‘What are you thinking about?’ I asked.

‘What pothole did I trip in, anyway? Why didn’t I take off? What ruined my artistic abilities?’

At first I tried persuading him that his abilities couldn’t have just left him, that they’ll certainly come back. That’s not simply consolation: I myself firmly believe it. The comparison with the aviator is, of course, lovely, but it’s lame if applied to Platosha. He hugged me and said he’s already lame. Then we sat, silently, for a long time. Rocking slightly.

Innokenty decided to write for his daughter. To describe his life.

He also appealed to Nastya and me with an unusual request: help him write.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘How can someone be helped in describing his own life?’

‘Not the life itself but what’s on its fringes. I’m simply afraid I won’t have time for everything on my own.’

And so Innokenty will tell us what to describe.

This will be about specific things, not general things. About what everybody perceives identically.

Mosquitoes in Siverskaya, for example.

What else did he already allude to? Visiting the barbershop, a bicycle on a wet path…

As I understand it, he’s painting some sort of big, important canvas. At the same time, he’s recruiting helpers to sketch the background. They’ll draw the secondary figures along his contours…

‘I’m not refusing to help,’ I said, ‘but I’m a poor helper. Writing isn’t my calling.’

‘To the contrary, Geiger, I value you because you’re succinct and write simply.’

‘And me,’ Nastya said, ‘what do you value me for?’

Innokenty thought for a bit.

‘For the exact opposite qualities.’

I understand it’s impossible to refuse. But I don’t understand how to regard this endeavor. As his vital necessity? As an eccentricity? As a progressing illness?

The latter would be the easiest of all, but I’m not in any hurry to see that.

Something strange. Platosha asked Geiger and me to help him with his descriptions. Yes, yes, of course, we answered. To be honest, though, I don’t know how to go about this. If you ask, you risk offending. I couldn’t stand it and asked the next day. Platosha wasn’t the teensiest bit offended.

‘Treat it,’ he said, ‘as a life story.’

‘Yours?’

‘Mine. And a life story in general.’

The request for help with my descriptions surprised them both a lot: is that really so strange? They nodded to me about everything, but their faces, their faces… Of course the backdrop for my behavior is unfavorable: possible brain failure and so on and so forth. But is the essence of my idea truly not obvious? Yes, every person has particular recollections but there are things that are lived through and recollected the same way. Yes, politics, history, and literature are all perceived differently. But the sound of rain, the nocturnal rustling of leaves, and a million other things – all that unites us. We’re not going to argue about that until we’re hoarse or (you never know) smash each other over the head. That’s the basis for everything here. That’s what needs to be worked with, that’s what I’m requesting of the people dear to me. May their voices appear amid what I’ve described. They won’t distort my voice: to the contrary, they’ll enrich it.

After all, the only thing I’m working on is finding a road to the past, either through witnesses (there are no more after Anastasia’s death) or through recollections, or through the cemetery, where all my life companions have moved. I’m attempting to come closer to the past in various ways, in order to understand what it is. Is it separate from me or am I still living it, even now? I had a past even before my icy slumber, but it never possessed the separateness it does now. Everything that I have recalled about my past has not drawn it closer to me. I think of it as a hand that was chopped off and sewn back on. Perhaps that hand moves somehow, but it is no longer mine.

In essence, the years in liquid nitrogen changed nothing regarding the past. They intensify the problem but do not engender it: the problem existed previously, too. Its essence is that the past is cut off from the present and has no relation to reality. What happens to life when it ceases to be the present? Does it live only in my head? That same head that is now losing tens of thousands of cells a day and raising suspicions even among those close to me? Living people – with my recollections and their own – must be let into my head right away… After reviving our mutual recollections, perhaps those people will also revive what belongs only to me.

Siverskaya of the 1900s was the dacha capital of Russia. The mosquito capital. Especially in June. I think there are plenty of mosquitoes there now, too – you could even rename it Mosquitskovo in their honor – but now there’s sprays, coils, and creams. But back then? Well, maybe creams. Other than that, though, I think it was mostly fires. These were fires that burned old rags, leaves, and other little things that made a lot of smoke. Anyway, the technical side doesn’t interest Platosha.

The details are important to him, like the cautious, even somehow helicopter-like landing of an insect on the arm. A mosquito isn’t a fly, it doesn’t move around on the arm. It works where it lands. It pokes its little proboscis into unprotected skin and starts sucking blood. You swat it on your arm and the blood smears on your skin. When I was a little girl, I heard that if you swat a mosquito at the scene of the crime, the skin won’t itch. I think that’s an exaggeration, with a moral: punishment should follow crime. In the same place, at the same time. Blood atonement, as they say.

Nocturnal buzzing is the peskiest. It’s probably worse than a bite. Comparable to dental drilling: you still don’t know if it’ll be painful, but the sound of the drill already permeates you. You listlessly defend yourself through your sleep or just duck under the covers. It’s stuffy, so you duck back out a minute later. And it’s stuffy in the room, too: the windows are closed because of the mosquitoes! It’s double suffering, from the mosquitoes and the stuffiness. You finally toss off the covers and give your body over to the mosquitoes. At least it’s not hot. What’s interesting is that the mosquitoes don’t exactly rush to a naked body. Maybe they’re stunned by the grandness of the gesture. Or maybe all that nudity shocks them.

Will Platosha like what I wrote?

I felt an urge to draw – that hadn’t happened in a long while. I set Themis on the dinner table and moved a lamp from the desk to the bookshelf after removing the books. The lighting came out fairly well, with a shadow. I set up the easel, took a sheet of paper and a graphite pencil, and began drawing. Even before much had appeared on the sheet, I felt like the drawing would come out. After all my numerous attempts, today my hand suddenly recalled the motions. It found confidence with each stroke and I was no longer thinking about the rules of drawing: my hand knew everything on its own.

When it was finished, I turned on all the lights and carefully began examining the drawing. There were many shortcomings in it but that wasn’t important. I had managed to draw something sound for the first time in the months after thawing. My main complaint was probably about the shadow. I remembered that they had taught me not to blacken it, not to fill the paper’s pores with graphite. The paper should shine through slightly, even through the strokes. According to a definition from Marx, from blessed memory, it is better to ‘not quite’ than to ‘overdo.’ I could apply that definition to art in general.

I took the sheet from the easel and laid it on the table. I went to the kitchen and opened the breadbox. Next to the fresh bread there lay some stale pieces Nastya had not thrown away, saving them for the pigeons. I was lucky: among dried-out bread as black as tar there was a stale little piece of white bread. I crumbled it finely on the drawing. Using circular motions and pressing lightly, I rolled the crumbs along the surface of the drawing until they absorbed the extra graphite. I carefully brushed the blackened crumbs on the floor with a wide brush. I blew away the finest ones.

All the lines remained but they had become much paler. I took the pencil and went over the drawing again. It was slightly different now: the accents had changed positions. And I liked it better this way. I felt joy. It also occurred to me – no, it did not occur to me, it simply jabbed: despite the massive mortality of my poor cells, does this mean that some were restored?

July 1913.

Moderately warm evening rays cut through a barbershop. Dust swirls in the rays.

Barber number one – a bald, middle-aged man – is preparing to cut the hair of someone middle-aged but not bald. Empty snipping of scissors in the air. He shifts into work mode: the full-fledged sound of hair being trimmed.

Barber number two is also aging and bald. He lights the spirit lamp and passes a straight razor over it. He goes over the client’s cheeks with a shaving brush.

Keeping in mind possible complexes and envy, can one entrust one’s hair to a bald barber? It’s a question…

Both clients answer in the affirmative. The second client risks less because he is only being shaved. In this case, it’s impossible to inflict much damage to the appearance. Only to cut the cheeks.

The barbers converse with one another.

They’re having a long discussion – maybe over an entire day – about the prices of provisions. They can’t bring clients into the conversation, other than with regard to opinions about individual products. But the clients can’t be brought into the fullness of the conversation.

They repeat individual words and even phrases one after the other. Pensively, several times.

The clients can’t repeat like that. To do that, they would need to acquire the special rhythm of cutting hair. Its special tranquility. And that is only accessible to professionals.

Yashin from the archive called as I was writing that. He said Voronin turns out to be alive.

I didn’t even understand immediately who he was talking about. When I realized, I didn’t believe it. That camp scum Voronin is alive! That uncommon swine is alive!

This was the first time Yashin called me instead of Innokenty. This is a special case, he said, the doctor should decide.

Yes, it’s special. And it’s not very clear what to decide here.

Geiger examined me yet again. He requested that I close my eyes, extend my arms, and touch the tip of my nose with each hand. I couldn’t. Meaning I could but not on the first try; as I understand things, that doesn’t count.

‘That doesn’t count, does it?’ I ask.

He smiles listlessly. Put another way, he appreciates that I’m such a cheerful guy. True, he suspects that this cheeriness is from hysteria and he is not so far off the mark.

Whence shall I begin to weep over the deeds of my cursed life? I was reading the ‘Great Canon of Repentance’ aloud to Nastya. There is an astonishing phrase there: When God wishes, nature’s order is overcome. We repeated that many times.

Innokenty and I were talking about higher justice. He loves that expression.

So take the way they pinned Zaretsky’s murder on him and dragged him off to Solovki. Where, I ask, is the higher justice in that undeserved punishment? And he answers that – from the perspective of higher justice – there’s no such thing as undeserved punishment.

That sounds lovely, though not especially convincing. What’s called then punish them both…

And then there’s that other matter: that the GPU man Voronin, scum to end all scum, surfaced the other day. There are no evil deeds he hasn’t committed.

It’s becoming clear he safely reached the age of one hundred. That he retired with the rank of general back in his day and is receiving a special personalized pension. He’s living in the Kirov building on Kamennoostrovsky Prospect.

I wonder what Innokenty will say about that when he finds out. What will he say about higher justice? Innokenty who, to the contrary, is catastrophically losing his health.

All that I’m doing now is stating the changes in his body. And unfortunately there are many. Too many.

If everything continues developing at this speed…

Yes, I’m giving Innokenty certain medications. Yes, they ease the course of the illness. But they don’t affect its causes. As before, those causes remain hidden.

Why are the cells dying? Why is that only happening now? Why is it only certain groups of them? Nobody knows the answers.

Only God, as Innokenty formulates it. And since my relations with the heavenly sphere are pretty troubled, no information is passed on to me.

When God wishes, nature’s order is overcome. Platosha read to me out loud from the ‘Great Canon of Repentance’ and we discovered those amazing words for ourselves. No, not ‘amazing,’ that’s somehow too cheap for them. Words filled with joy and hope. Their meaning has long been obvious to me, but I couldn’t express it that well. Of course I’m relying on Geiger, too – he’s not exactly the lowliest person in medicine – but I rely far more on Him, in Whose hands there is medicine, and Geiger and Platosha and I.

We can only receive His help through the power of faith in Him, meaning through the power of our plea. Two things have to come together here: faith and the desire to recover. Not only the ill person but also his loved ones should display them both. The loved ones, I think, to an even greater degree because they have more strength (they’re the healthy ones) and the ill person is prone to depression.

On another topic. The sudden resurfacing of Voronin, whom Geiger has already contacted. First off, this person I share a surname with is, contrary to expectations, in his right mind. Also contrary to expectations, Voronin isn’t against meeting with a former zek: I was sure he wouldn’t agree. According to Geiger, he reacted without particular sentimentality, just saying, ‘Let him come.’ Now Geiger wants to prepare Platosha. To lead up to it cautiously: what if, say, Voronin happens to be alive…

I don’t know what sort of feelings the news about Voronin will provoke in Platosha. There are lots of scenarios, right up to the desire to kill him. It’s frightening to utter ‘the natural desire.’

For now, I decided not to show my drawing to anyone after all. I’ll practice more and draw something truly worthy of Nastya and Geiger’s appreciation. If my skill were to return to its full degree, I would draw Zaretsky. Portrait of a person mournfully bent over saus-age. I would draw him compassionately rather than mockingly. If not with love then at least with pity. After all, he had nobody to pity him and not one tear was spilled at his funeral. Not one.

In general, I think that when you describe a person in a genuine way, you cannot help but love him. Even the very worst person becomes your composition: you accept him into yourself and begin feeling responsibility for him and his sins – yes, for his sins in some sense, too. You attempt to understand and justify all of that, so far as it is possible to do so. On the other hand: how can one understand Zaretsky’s action if he himself does not?

‘Are you an atheist?’ Innokenty asked me.

‘No, I don’t define myself that way. I’m most likely a person who trusts scientific knowledge. If science proves to me that God exists, well then…’

‘Don’t delude yourself. Science hasn’t been able to answer the most important questions. And it cannot, not one of them.’

‘For example?’

‘How did everything arise from nothing? How does a soul come about and where does it go? There’s oceans of questions and they all lie beyond the boundaries of science.’

‘Possibly. Even so, it’s difficult for me to step across those boundaries.’

Although I sometimes step across them.

I’m stepping across them now, where things relate to Innokenty.

He read me a phrase from a church canticle. Its point is that if God desires it, the natural order of things is overcome.

In Innokenty’s and my case, the framework of science is tighter-fitting than ever: it’s just poking into my ribs. Squeezing religious thought into me: that only He can help here.

Geiger and I talked about God. He does not deny the possibility of God but first and foremost he believes in facts presented by science. Though there is no need to believe in facts, it’s enough to know them. There are many of those facts – hordes and hordes of them – it’s just that they all relate only to what is not fundamental. It even sometimes seems to me that those facts distract from what is fundamental. Of all the millions of small explanations, it is the one that is all-embracing that doesn’t come together. And won’t come together because those things are located in different dimensions. So Geiger is waiting in vain here for a transition from quantity to quality. A explains B, B explains C, and so on until infinity, but where is whatever explains all that infinity in its entirety?

An abundance of discoveries befogged the heads of my former contemporaries who made atheism a fashion, too. Even then, they were reminiscent of a ladybug on the highway who’s charmed by her own motion and crawls a dozen meters. The ladybug seems to think she’s learned and grasped everything. She will never find out, though, where the highway begins and where it leads. I shared this comparison with Geiger. He narrowed his eyes:

‘The ladybug is God’s creature, though, despite her arrogance. And God allows varying views.’

A cunning Teuton; you can’t get the upper hand.

‘Of course the ladybug is God’s creature, which is why she was granted wings. An insect needs only to fly up into the sky to see the entire road, don’t you see? There was a children’s song about that.’

‘Why “was”?’ he laughs. ‘There still is.’

Geiger finally reported to Platosha about Voronin. Gradually, after preparing him, but he told him. Platosha raised his eyes to Geiger and looked at him for a long time. I thought (feared) he’d rush to Voronin’s right away but he didn’t. He asked calmly when we’re going to see him.

From this, one might think at first that Platosha was somehow reacting inappropriately to the news. I think Geiger had that impression. But it seems like Platosha goes through the most significant things in silence. Although… Geiger offered him his hand as he was leaving. Maybe he expected some sort of inference or something about news that stunned us. But then Platosha suddenly said:

‘If it’s no trouble, Geiger, describe weapons stopped at the station in Siverskaya. They’re being transported on open, flat-bed cars. Autumn 1914. Fog changing to mist.’

Autumn 1914. Fog changing to mist.

The weapons’ barrels are raised upward. Dark green, gradually emerging from grayness. Pensively aiming into the sky, the splendor of their matte luster.

Drops flow down them and fall heavily below. The drops flow along the metal platforms, along wheels that shine in the places they touch the rails.

A kingdom of motionless metal; God forbid it budges. It rattles and shakes softly, answering the military trains passing through.

Sooner or later, they’ll pull the wheel wedge out from under the foremost car and bring over a steam engine. Everything will start into motion. Sorrowful motion to the west.

All that harsh metal will oppose the softness of the human body. Its – the body’s – oneness. It will scatter into small pieces.

The weapons will lose their pensiveness and perhaps even dry off. They will shoot unceasingly, both hitting their targets and missing. Actually, they can shoot when they’re wet, too.

After Nastya went to the university, I read. Later I watched the news on TV but quickly shut it off. I took the photograph of Professor Voronin off the chest of drawers and examined it. There’s the professor sitting in an armchair, legs crossed. His elbow is leaning into a small table with a pile of books. There’s a cane in his hand (he never carried a cane). His hair is combed back; there are symmetrical islands of gray on a beard that is still mostly black. A particular academic chic. I search the professor’s eyes for traces of future suffering – that happens in old photographs, it’s discovered in hindsight – but no, there seems to be none of that… Could he really not have foreseen it? Or was he conforming to the photographer’s expectations and looking at himself through the photographer’s eyes?

The wrenching motionlessness of pre-revolutionary snapshots. Nastya, it occurs to me, never saw her great-grandfather in motion. But I saw. And, incidentally, I see. I freely enter the silver frame and observe the professor setting the cane aside and rising slowly from the chair. It is possible there’s even a sigh or, let’s say, a crack of the joints, since the person has been sitting motionless in that photograph for nearly a century. His gait is slightly pigeon-toed and I could have showed that to Nastya, but that would not be the same thing. No matter who or what I might show, it would be my portrait.

I take the album about Solovki from the bookshelf. I open it to page seventy-seven (I even remember the page!) and see a photograph of a person with the exact same surname: Voronin. You cannot say his face is ferocious; Nastya confirmed this, too, when I showed him to her. I wanted him to have a sharply sloping forehead and fangs coming out of his mouth. Reflecting his inner substance. But no: he has a high forehead, well-proportioned features, neatly combed hair, and is smoothly shaven. He turned out to be tenacious, like all vampires. With his appearance, he could have worked as an assistant school principal or the director of a club and nobody would have discovered his inclination for bloodsucking. He and I will meet tomorrow. I am astounded at my calm. Perhaps that is because the news about Voronin is too unbelievable.

I have always been surprised that one name is capable of denoting such various entities. It works out that Voronin can be this way and this way. How did he become who he is, anyway? That’s a good question.

We headed to Voronin’s in the evening: Platosha, Geiger, and me. I just went to be with them since the agreement was only for Geiger and Platosha. Yes, plus some Chistov From-the-Organs. Voronin insisted on the presence of this Chistov. But, well, anybody in Voronin’s position would have proceeded that way. Only would just anybody end up in his position? So this one’s actually fearful for his worthless life now. The louse. What was it my grandmother said about Zaretsky? That she put out a contract on him? I think, in the Zaretsky case, that was my grandmother’s delirium. But on Voronin, I’d put out a contract. I know you can’t talk like that, but I’d do it if I knew where and how. All I’d have to do is imagine how he’d tormented Platosha…

And so we – meaning the three of us – went to see Voronin and I was thinking: well, how about that, Voronina going to see Voronin, though we’re not exactly birds of a feather! I’d even forgotten I’ve been Platonova for a little while. I held back a bit, watching them walk. There was wind, almost a hurricane – the right sort of weather when you’re going to meet a villain: so here I am! My companions were walking, bent forward, fighting a wind mixed with leaves and large but still sparse raindrops. The collars of their raincoats fluttered in their fingers. That, it occurred to me, is how the arrival of payback might look, although of course there was no talk of payback.

Chistov was already waiting for us by the front door. When we entered the hall, he took a paper out of a binder and asked Platosha to sign it. It was a release form saying Platosha has nothing against Voronin and isn’t planning to prosecute him. Chistov pulled an expensive pen out of his pocket, placed it and the paper on the binder, and froze, holding it all in front of Platosha. A pause hung.

‘Without this, Innokenty Petrovich,’ said Chistov, ‘you and I aren’t going to see Mr. Voronin.’

Innokenty Petrovich pensively took the pen.

‘What’s in the pen?’

‘Ink, imagine that.’

There wasn’t the slightest irritation in Chistov’s tone.

Platosha signed the paper and Chistov put it away in the binder. He stuck the pen back in his pocket.

‘You know, I understand your emotions,’ he said in just as even a tone, ‘but I want you to understand me. The law is the law. Everything must take place without any incidents. Do you promise?’

‘I promise,’ answered Platosha, somehow very seriously.

And he repeated:

‘I promise.’

The three of them went up to the apartment and I stayed downstairs, by the elevator. Maybe, it occurred to me, our SS officer will kick the bucket at the sight of Platosha? That sort of incident seemed allowable to me.

The meeting with Voronin. It was strange.

I’d foreseen various scenarios, but not this one.

I thought there would be mutual damning. Or reconciliation. But there was neither one nor the other here.

Voronin was sitting in an armchair when we entered. He was holding a cup with both hands. Warm sweater, trousers, slippers. Skull taut with skin, fluff at the sides.

I suspect he thought to have the cup so his hands would be full. In order to have the opportunity not to be the first to offer a hand – he was afraid nobody would respond. I, for example, didn’t plan to offer him a hand under any circumstances.

But maybe he wasn’t afraid. Maybe I’m attributing too much subtlety to his feelings.

There was someone else with us, wearing civilian clothes; Voronin invited him. After we entered, he half-sat on the windowsill and it was as if he was no longer there. The ideal escort. He was, thus, by the window, and Innokenty and I were at the threshold.

‘I know that you were resurrected,’ murmurs Voronin. ‘I wanted to have a look at you.’

His voice is already almost gone, but his will remains. It’s the last thing that will leave him.

He wanted to have a look at zek Platonov: there he is, delivered. Under surveillance, by the way. Delivered and remaining silent.

‘So, have I changed?’ Voronin asks Innokenty.

‘Yes.’

‘You, however, have not.’

A woman enters the room and takes the cup from Voronin’s hands. She remains, to stand, rocking from heel to toe. Squeaking the parquet.

A fly buzzes by the window pane.

‘Catch it, would you, Chistov?’ Voronin suggests in a whisper.

Chistov slowly slides his hand along the glass and catches the fly with a brief, precise motion. He explains to us:

‘The fly doesn’t see when you extend your hand behind it.’

He removes the fly from the room. The woman addresses Voronin:

‘Do you need anything else, Dmitry Valentinovich?’

Without answering her, Voronin looks at Innokenty point-blank:

‘Don’t expect repentance.’

The woman sighs and gazes into the cup.

‘Why?’ asks Innokenty.

After closing his eyes, Voronin quietly but distinctly utters:

‘I’m tired.’

He’s tired. Chistov, who returned, points to his watch.

We leave.

Life is constructed so very astonishingly. Voronin turns out to be the only person who has remained to bear witness to my time. I searched for the dead so they could bear witness, if not through words then at least through their presence, but then someone who is alive turned up. Now he is not so much a criminal as a witness. I feel that and he feels that. And there is no hatred between us. Something akin to – yes, yes – solidarity is appearing. Just as you find a common language even with a savage on an uninhabited island. In a sense, Voronin and I are now on an island, the two of us. There are just the two of us from our time. It’s another matter that his witnessing differs little from that of the dead. Voronin’s appearance is somehow posthumous, too.

He said: don’t expect repentance. I ask myself yet again: why? Why was he left alive until the age of a hundred if not for repentance? He is a great criminal and it is possible the Almighty delayed his departure, giving him an opportunity to change his mind. Voronin said he’s tired. Everybody decided that was a signal to end the meeting. I think, though, that he was speaking about his condition, when there is no longer either rage or penitence. The soul submerges into slumber.

Tea on an open veranda in autumn. Smoldering coals fanned by a boot. A boot as soft as an accordion. And clean: otherwise how would you fan coals with that at the table? Really, they could be fanned in some other place, but the people sitting at the table want to see everything from the very start. The samovar is large and the water in it is slowly coming to a boil. Everybody’s waiting for the first little wisps of steam to appear: steam is still only floating from the mouths of the people sitting there. It’s very noticeable in the rays of a weakened sun that warms no one. The air is harsh, with smells of pine and the river. A dog barks on the other side of the fence; its chain hits audibly against the doghouse. Supposedly it could relax and not bark much if chained up, but no, that’s not happening. It’s agitated. Participating in public life.

Everyone, no matter who, is dressed warmly; some are wearing scarves. Hands reach toward the samovar: it’s already capable of warming. The discussion is endless ‘Titanic’ and ‘Ferdinand’ and it moves in waves, now quieter, now louder. The conversation turns into muttering (everyone has withered a little) that prefaces the samovar’s churning. That’s it, it’s boiled. The teapot for the tea concentrate appears right away and catches the first stream from the samovar, still gurgling. A time-out for it to steep. One cup follows another. They sit and drink tea; one could say they’re reveling in it.

The event is dated 1914. Or 1911, for example. Platosha insistently asks that all descriptions be dated. Why? I ask. That way, he says, it shows that fundamental events (like the tea-drinking on the veranda) are capable of defining completely different times, meaning they’re universal. According to him, that line of reasoning in favor of precise dating is equally applicable against precise dating, too. It works out, I realized, that the line of reasoning is universal, too.

Let’s say it’s 1907.

A child has a cold and a severe cough.

They read Robinson Crusoe to him.

The cough is so deep that the reading alone isn’t enough for recovery. The doctor recommended cupping.

They do this as a family. His grandmother reads, his mother and father set out the jars on the nightstand and prepare the wick.

They grease the child’s back with petroleum jelly, using light round motions.

His father will place the jars. He takes the most crucial tasks upon himself.

The patient is seven and he is afraid. This is the first time they have cupped him.

It becomes genuinely scary when they light the wick, wetted with alcohol. That might have suggested thoughts of the inquisition, if the patient had known about that.

An open flame is always scary.

The boy is lying on his stomach and grasping a pillow with his arms. He’s burying his face in it. A moment later, he senses the first jar on his back.

It’s not as painful as he had imagined. Maybe it’s not at all painful.

Carefully, he lifts his head. Watches his father’s hands.

His father moves the wick inside the jar a bit, removes it, and lowers the jar on the boy’s back. Of course it’s a little hot.

He can feel the jars pulling his skin into them. His father winks at him. His mother uses a blanket to cover his back, with the jars on it.

His grandmother continues reading Robinson Crusoe. The book is curative in combination with the jars.

A new rush of fear before the jars are removed. The boy seems to think they sank themselves into his back for good. They remind him of mean little fishes. Maybe piranhas.

His father carefully runs his right index finger along the lip of a jar and it comes unstuck with a loud smacking sound. Fifteen first-class smacking sounds.

My walking has worsened. I have the sensation of walking on moss. I carefully place my foot, as if I’m afraid it will collapse. Exactly where I’m headed no longer presents a mystery for me: losing thousands of cells a day, it’s impossible not to guess how this journey will end. These losses cannot go on forever.

I have made it a rule not to complain, even to Geiger, not to mention Nastya. Since the reasons for what is happening are unclear, complaining brings nothing but distress to anyone. Especially since, hm, this is not my first departure from life. But. Death in the camp seemed like a way out and now it seems like a departure. A departure from those I love. From what I love. From my recollections, which I have already been writing down for so many months.

Today I woke up early in the morning; it was still dark. I lay motionless, so as not to awaken Nastya. I observed, as I am wont to do, wandering automobile headlights on the ceiling. Trolleys, which replaced horse trams, used to run along Bolshoy Prospect. I would watch them for hours, attempting to understand the secret of the trolley’s self-propelled movement. For some reason, it excited me more than the movement of automobiles. Maybe that’s because of the magnitude, unwieldiness, and loudness of the trolley, something that, at first glance, was not created for moving around within an expanse, let alone transporting city people. But if – it occurred to me – a construction of that sort were enabled to leave its location, it could be destined for defensive and (even better) offensive purposes. I imagined the motion of hundreds of trolleys on the field of battle and it was a majestic spectacle.

From time to time, in testing the soundness of the trolley, I would place a five-kopeck coin on the rails. The experiment seemed so important to me that, in my childish lightheartedness, I reconciled myself in advance to possible losses: rather, I simply did not think about them. My father cautioned against those losses in order to wean me off this dubious amusement. He supposed the trolley could go off the rails and mildly noted to me that I should weigh the possible damages before deciding on this risky experiment.

What could I say here? By that time, I already knew five-kopeck coins were no impediment for the trolley: it simply did not notice them. I watched each time to see if the giant would shake when riding over them: it never once shook. What my father was correct about is that readiness for losses is indeed characteristic of experimenters, even adults. I come to the conclusion that they are large children and that for them the torn-off head of a doll – as the history of our unfortunate Motherland has confirmed – does not differ from a human head.

Returning to those same blessed years, I will say that I accumulated a collection of shiny, flattened little pieces of metal. Touching them with the tip of my index finger, I still sensed the remnants of the embossed image, but that didn’t ruin the pleasant impression of smoothness. Yes, smoothness – even the polishedness of those former coins – is a recollection specially preserved for me. In the land of my childhood, where nothing ever went amiss, they became a worthy currency. Their astonishing surface and my index finger were made for one another. In the more than hundred-year history of placing five-kopeck coins under the trolley, my experiment was one of the first. I will note as well that my actions were not the result of blind imitation: I thought this up myself.

I fear all that will sink into oblivion if it is not written down. It would be a noticeable gap in the history of mankind, but the largest loss would be for Anna, whom I think about all the time. Quite a lot of things have already been described for her, but I simply cannot cover everything. Luckily, I am receiving help now and this has begun to go faster.

1910. Early March. A two-story wooden building not far from the railroad. On sunny days, the spring melt begins and is heard by all the building’s residents. The drops open a path for themselves in the iced-up snow and all sound different, depending on the size of the hole in the ice. Everything closes up at night and freezes over so the drops nearly have to do their work all over again in the morning. From nearly a clean slate, though of course the snow is no longer very fresh in March. Like a pockmarked face, it is uneven and pitted with tracks from dogs, cats, and crows – everyone who walks near the two-story buildings. That snow is covered with a thin layer of stove soot that invariably shows through even fresh snow. Or maybe it is fresh soot. It deliberately flies in each time there is freshly fallen snow, covering it out of a pure aversion to whiteness.

There are huge puddles – entire ponds – along the railroad embankment. These puddles freeze over at night, too, but they are so deep they do not have time to freeze through to the bottom, and do they even have a bottom? In childhood, you fear they do not. The trees stand in icy bark until midday, but it melts after that. The water in those puddles is cold and black. There is no reason even to think about entering one of them.

Keep thy mind in hell and despair not. I was paging through a book about Mount Athos and my eye fell on those words. I set the book aside and began doing something else but the words surfaced and stung. After all, they are about me. Keep thy mind in hell – that is the condition I had already plunged into several weeks ago. And despair not, that is what comes to me with greater difficulty. I rushed for the book and could not find that spot immediately but eventually did. It has been said of those words that they are a revelation attributed to Silouan the Athonite. I do not know who Silouan the Athonite is and I am not even sure if I understand those words properly, but they boosted me a little.

My present hell is that death is far scarier here than on the island. Of course I clung to life there, inasmuch as I could, but I did not fear death. When the expanse of my life began shrinking to nothing, death nearly seemed like an exit to me. I felt my worn-out body hungering for it, but my spirit fought that desire. My spirit was awake.

Now I am fearful of death like never before. I have everything: a family, money, and my strange fame, but all indications say they will not be gladdening me much longer. Money and fame mean nothing in the face of death, that is already obvious. Parting with someone close scares me – my funny Nastya, whom it now feels I have known my entire life. And with Anna, who is living in her and is my continuation. Whom I might never even see. Understanding all that keeps the mind in hell. This speaks emphatically about the mind, about understanding using the mind. And using something else, too, so as not to fall into despair.

1916. A bicycle on a dirt road after the rain. It moves along with a quiet hiss.

The wheels raise moisture from the road, throwing it on the bicycle’s fenders. The moisture flows off them, to the ground, in large muddy drops.

Sometimes the wheels drive into wide puddles. The sound of water parting. Two waves diverge from the center of the puddle, toward its edges.

The bicycle jolts on tree roots from time to time. A bag with tools jangles. It bounces the cyclist on the seat’s springs.

It’s growing dusky.

The cyclist presses the small wheel of a hub dynamo to the bicycle wheel. There is light and buzzing. The movement of a small circle of light along the road.

Did bicycle lights exist in 1916? I don’t know.

I think they existed.

It doesn’t matter.

I am remembering ever less of what happened a minute, hour, or day ago. I feel uncomfortable when Nastya sees my obvious memory lapses: they are obvious, although – luckily – they are infrequent for now. In those situations, I remove the conversation far from contemporary life, to somewhere at the beginning of the century. Just as the hard of hearing ask their own questions instead of answering. In changing the topic yesterday, I took it upon myself to tell Nastya about a grammar-school staging of The Inspector General, in which, by the way, I participated. Nastya immediately saw through that but did not let on. She said that will be the basis of one of the descriptions she has taken on at my request. Yes, of course, that’s wonderful, I responded. I asked myself, though: but can she describe my life without that basis? Using only the feelings that inspire her? If she were to learn to find and describe things that fit with me, my life could continue in my absence.

A grammar-school staging of The Inspector General. Marya Antonovna and Anna Andreevna, from the neighboring women’s school, are rustling with dresses brought from the theater. The smell of mothballs accompanies the dresses from the wardrobe room to the school: the smell doesn’t get aired out as they carry them, it seems to grow even stronger in the fresh air instead. The way a wine’s bouquet begins to blossom, become fragrant in all its nuances, and gladden after the cork is removed. One is left thinking the dresses taken from the hangers were granted a similar characteristic: to the extent, of course, that all the nuances of mothballs are capable of gladdening.

There is hardly any scenery: a small marble table from the principal’s office, a candle burning on it. A bookcase (carried in from the library) with books; moreover, books a half-century old were chosen. Khlestakov approaches Anna Andreevna. The stage’s boards creak under his feet, and that’s very audible in the front rows: there’s a good reason that art demands distance. Anna Andreevna, says Khlestakov… He touches her with his hand. His hand shakes and his voice shakes. The character, it must be understood, isn’t nervous at all, but the boy playing him is nervous, sensing the girl’s arm through the dense material of the dress. He has yet to confess his love to anyone and uses this theatrical confession or, actually, finds it in that text… What, really, does he find in it? In rehearsal he uttered the text pretty sensually. It cannot be ruled out that he’s falling in love because of what he utters.

It’s stuffy in the school auditorium despite open windows; June has turned out to be hot this year. Outside, the tops of the poplars are covered in fluff and windlessly still, as if they were sketched. Anna Andreevna has beads of sweat on her forehead, as does Khlestakov, and everybody in the auditorium understands what is happening between them and they’re elbowing each other, waiting for how this thing will end. This tenderness was not envisaged by the play, but it’s so obvious. Everything’s noticeable for the spectators, you can’t hide anything from them. They’re attentive. They clap their inky hands at the end of the scene. My Platosha shows through in Khlestakov, but the 1914 model for Anna Andreevna was, I suspect, reduced to dust long ago.

I did not sleep last night: I was recalling Pushkin’s ‘The Shot.’ Where Silvio postpones his retaliatory shot for six years. He makes his appearance when the hero has married and is happy… Death did not touch me on the island. I was almost indifferent to it then. It has returned with its shot now, when joy appeared in my life. It waited a long time. Should it be understood that death’s shot is retaliatory?

Innokenty’s working memory has worsened even more noticeably.

Nastya tells me that constantly, describing situations. And I do see it myself, too.

He loses his train of thought. Catches himself not remembering where he was headed in the apartment.

He doesn’t remember anything that’s automatic, like did he brush his teeth or take his pills.

I prescribe a heap of pills for him. True, there’s little use in them. They’re not able to stop the primary thing: the loss of cells.

I’ve rethought and rechecked everything ten times, with no results. I’ve buried my nose in publications from the last decade. Nothing.

I’ve never experienced such powerlessness. It makes me sick. Sick because Innokenty is fading.

Maybe he should be sent abroad? To Munich, for example. I don’t think they know anything there that we don’t know here, but all the same… Another perspective is important, too.

I could say there would be less responsibility on me then, but that actually doesn’t worry me. My main responsibility is to him – I’m not afraid of any other responsibility.

There’s just one trouble. I feel like we don’t have much time for all the decisions. Zeit, zeit.[14]

He asked me:

‘What’s happening to you?’

I said:

‘I’m afraid of your death.’

We hadn’t said these things out loud until then. Although they had been thought. I lost my filters for a minute. He’s the only person close to me, the only one I can complain to. And now that close person is leaving. And the only thing left is to complain to him. I acted horribly.

I started crying and nestled up to him.

‘Forgive me for talking like that about death. That fear has eaten away at me inside and now it’s coming out in the open.’

‘Well, in the first place, I haven’t died yet…’

My God, then what can possibly be in the second place?

He was sitting, pale, thin. And my voice wasn’t minding me.

He said:

‘Death should not be seen as a farewell forever. It’s a temporary parting.’ He went silent. ‘The departed is, basically, outside of time.’

The departed. It sounds like a draft in a tunnel.

‘And the one who’s staying behind? That person is within it.’

He smiled.

‘Well, let that person work on something while waiting.’

So much time apart. It’s scary.

It required a lot of effort to successfully contact Zheltkov. I described Innokenty’s condition and asked him for help.

Zheltkov started mumbling something incomprehensible. Obviously bored. You see, I, uh, uh, uh, I’m not in charge of medicine…

Taken aback, I repeated that consultations abroad and expensive tests are required. In other words, bills will need to be paid. A lot of bills.

But our Zheltkov was in complete, purposeful denial. Unexpectedly so, I noted to myself.

Is this really because Innokenty wasn’t even considering Zheltkov’s political project?

I told one person in the know about that and he wasn’t surprised. He said that if Innokenty had become uninteresting for Zheltkov, then Zheltkov had already genuinely forgotten about my patient. He figured it won’t even be possible to get calls through to Zheltkov now.

I expressed cautious doubt:

‘Well, a person can’t be that shitty!’

‘What are you talking about!’ he laughed. ‘It’s easy to be.’

Scheisse… [15]

I told Nastya that separation because of death is temporary. I believe in that: anyway, it seems to me that everything is granted according to faith. If you want to encounter someone, you will definitely encounter them. True, I am afraid that’s feeble consolation for her now.

I wonder if there will be something to encounter there, other than people. Something that does not apparently constitute life’s fundamentals but something I feel would be difficult to part with. For example, the crackling of candles on a Christmas tree. How you pinch needles off the tree and carefully draw them to the flame. They give off a coniferous aroma when they burn: it’s vivid, like everything with farewells. There is the sparkling of flames in the evening and the extinguished dark, dark mass at night. When you wake up by chance after midnight, your first thought is of the tree. You make your way to it in a nightshirt. You walk almost by feel, most likely by the sound of the barely audible glassy ringing of garlands in a draft. Bare feet freeze on the parquet. You begin warming them once you reach the tree. Alternating your feet as you press their soles to your warm calves. Confetti that had stuck to them drops off. You hear someone has risen to go to the toilet. You press into the tree’s broad boughs and dissolve in them. As you wait out the sounds in the kitchen, you slip into cottony drifts at the bottom of the tree and truly do disappear there. Until morning… It seems that I would even get up posthumously to look at a tree with just one eye. If, of course, the eye is intact.

Well, what else? Let’s say: a dish of raspberries on the veranda at the dacha. It swells with light in a diffused ray of sun. An insect with its wings carelessly folded crawls along the edge of the dish. Not a beetle, not a midge, not an ant. You have difficulty naming it, though it’s not as if you have never seen it. That happens: you’ve been running into a person for half your life in the very same place, perhaps in the entryway or at the bookstore, and his face is familiar right down to the finest wrinkle, but his name is unknown. There are constant companions like that in life. When you part with them, you miss them for their low-key, timid appearance, for their folded wings and manner of moving around.

Or, let’s say, a fire at dusk. Its reflection has spread along the Oredezh and is no fainter than a moonlit path. The conversation isn’t a conversation, only individual words, simple ones, soothing ones. For example: I’ll fetch more firewood. Or: the water’s boiled. The crunch of a half-decayed branch underfoot. Gurgling water in a pot, sometimes feeble hissing of a log. You want time to freeze like the river by the dam. For it not to grow brighter but not to darken, either. For the red cliffs to remain visible… it seems I have already written about those, have I not? Devonian clay. Will that be there?

Sometimes I wonder: which of us is the patient, Innokenty or I?

I’m fulfilling his instructions: I’m writing, don’t you know, pictures from life… I’ve never done this, and I don’t feel I have it in me. I’m used to speaking in terms of diagnoses and prescriptions.

But.

To be honest, I’m liking the writing more and more.

Our cooperative writing is, if you will, an attempt to convey experience to descendants. The same thing mankind has been working on throughout history. It’s just that our experience is, let’s put it, unusual. That irritated me in the beginning, but I’m okay with it now.

Innokenty, however, conveys more than experience.

Nastya told me he contacted an advertising company on his own and offered his services. She found out about that by chance: they ran across her when they arrived with the contract to sign. She kicked them out on the landing and demanded an explanation from her husband.

And he was sitting in an armchair, listless and quiet. What, he asked, are you planning to live on when I’m not here?

She was silent, tears flowing.

Innokenty himself felt he shouldn’t speak to her like that. I think he simply didn’t have the strength to choose his words carefully. He spoke directly about what he was thinking.

He doesn’t believe in his own recovery. There’s no need to say what that means for a patient.

The most horrible thing is that even I can’t reassure him.

Pieces of information about Platosha’s health have seeped into the press. Personally, I couldn’t care less, but he does go outside. He sees the tabloids in the kiosk windows: pictures and headlines, headlines like ‘The Experiment Failed,’ ‘Platonov Is Deathly Ill.’ One of the papers bought his MRI scan and published it on the front page. ‘Innokenty Platonov’s Brain Is Deteriorating.’ Nobody even needs to buy any of that, anyway: they see how he walks. How his feet go out from under him, how he holds on to my arm. He doesn’t want a cane: he says that would be too much somehow, admitting the very worst. Admitting (I didn’t say) the obvious. On the other hand, maybe he’s right, though: as long as the obvious hasn’t been admitted, it’s not obvious.

I showed Geiger the publication with the MRI. He turned as red as a fire engine and rushed off to call someone. Three minutes of choice curses. It all ended with him telling the other party to choke on his own balls. Difficult to accomplish, of course, and I don’t know how they responded on the other end of the line. I hadn’t expected that from Geiger, but I won’t lie: I liked it. Maybe I hadn’t seen enough of that in the German guy before.

It’s just that, ugh, none of this helps Platosha at all. He has this idée fixe now, to earn as much as possible for me and our daughter. He said that since he himself has no future, he wants to provide for the future of those near and dear to him. He said that calmly, as if it goes without saying. The other day he contacted an advertising company, the same thing I, the fool, used to do for him before. I stopped that process right away.

I sense an intense yearning for my unlived years. A sort of phantom pain. I might have been frozen then but I did exist! Which means that’s my time, too, and I bear responsibility for it, too. I feel the twentieth century, all of it, is mine, no exceptions. When I watch Soviet newsreels, at times I see myself in the background. Could that really be accidental? No. It is my absence there and noninvolvement in the events reflected there that could be considered accidental.

‘Do I understand correctly,’ Geiger asked me, ‘that it’s also permissible to describe those events of your life that didn’t happen?’

‘Absolutely right. Maybe it only seems they didn’t happen. Just like when it seems something didn’t exist but it did.’

The main thing is not to overvalue events as such. I do not think they come into being as something internally particular to a person. After all, they are not a soul that determines personality and is inseparable from the body during life. There is no inseparability in events. They do not compose a part of a person: to the contrary, a person becomes part of them. A person falls into them as people fall under a train – and just have a look at what’s left of you after that.

I ask myself yet again: what should be considered an event, anyway? Waterloo is an event for some people, but for others an event is an evening discussion in the kitchen. Let us suppose there is a quiet discussion in late April, under a lampshade with a dim, blinking light bulb. The sound of automobile engines outside. The discussion itself – with the exception of individual words – might not remain in the memory. But the intonations remain: they are tranquil, as if all the world’s serenity entered into them that evening. When I felt like having serenity, I recalled those exact intonations and that exact April discussion.

No, no, I was recalling a discussion at a railway station in the winter, too, but the question is, what year? I suppose it was 1918 or, for example, 1922: I could still have witnessed it in those years. In essence, nothing prevents that discussion from occurring in my absence in, say, 1939. Even so, I did not take part in it, I only listened. But its fundamental quality would not change even if I had not listened: in terms of its degree of tranquility, that discussion is not inferior to what is described above. And in the metaphysical dimension of the phenomenon, the discussion meant only one thing: striving for serenity.

Now, regarding the main thing. Waterloo and a tranquil discussion only seem incomparable at first glance because Waterloo is world history but the discussion apparently is not. That discussion, though, is an event of personal history, and world history is but a small part – a prelude or something – of that. It is clear that under circumstances like that Waterloo will be forgotten, even though a good discussion never will.

Platosha’s saying strange things. I’ve made it a rule to agree with him.

January 1939. A railway station.

Consider it a polar station: snowdrifts to the windows, icicles to the ground.

Four o’clock in the afternoon but it’s already twilight.

A yellow light in the window. When frozen, it seems to transform into a large lantern. A lighthouse for those walking to the railway. There aren’t many of those who walk: the trains run infrequently here.

A weak bulb burns in the waiting room (let’s be blunt: what kind of a room is this?) and that is what fills the window with its light. In the corner is a potbelly stove. Not the greatest interior here, but it’s warm. There are footprints of melted snow on the plank floor.

Two people are sitting on a bench, having an unhurried discussion.

The cashier is listening in on their conversation from her window. Occasionally she adds something.

About once an hour, freight trains or long-distance trains rush past the station. Neither type stops here. They drench the window with steam and then their cars or tanks begin clacking monotonously.

During those moments, the chair shakes underneath the cashier. The bench shakes under the two having a discussion, too. They go silent and wait for the train with an emphatically patient look.

On their knees are fur hats with earflaps; they tug at them with fingers reddened from the cold. One’s hair is tousled, the other’s is the opposite, flattened.

That’s how fur hats with earflaps affect people differently.

Why did God resurrect Lazarus? Maybe Lazarus understood something that could only be understood after dying? And that understanding summoned him back to earth. More specifically, he was granted a kindness, a return.

Or maybe there was a grievous sin on him that could only be corrected while alive and he was resurrected for that? Only it is unlikely a person like that could carry a grievous sin.

It is known that Lazarus never smiled after his resurrection. Which means earthly matters could no longer evoke emotion by comparison with what he saw there.

I saw nothing when I was removed from life. Then again, I did not die.

1958. A summer morning on the Fontanka River. The sun hits window panes and rushes to the river at a sharp angle. A yardman in a white apron is spraying the granite embankment with water from a hose. When he presses a finger to the end of the hose, he increases the water’s pressure and it polishes the grainy pink surface with a hiss. A yardman’s task is not as simple as it may seem, and it does not lack for danger. The yardman lets go of the end of the hose and looks absently at his red finger. Then he looks at the water and its weak-willed flow. He shakes his head. He presses the end of the hose again and now he’s spraying, undistracted. He shifts the stream from the sidewalk to the granite parapet and, further, to an ornamental grating. The metal transforms the stream into a million mist droplets and they turn into a rainbow in the sun.

An automobile – a Pobeda with its top down – drives along the freshly rinsed roadway. The wheels make a soft, damp sound and small watery crests form behind them. A woman with light-colored hair, wearing glasses, is behind the wheel; she’s smiling. Alongside her, on the front seat, is a folder fastened with a tie. A professor. It’s very likely the woman is a professor. She’s driving to the university or, let’s say, to the public library. The morning is greeting her with a coolness that streams, unhurried, out of dark, high-walled courtyards. It’s damp in the courtyards, summer is only at the top stories of the buildings, where flower pots are placed in open windows. Below is cold and mud. I’d have liked to add ‘and snow’ but that would not be correct. There is only cold and mud.

In thinking about how to provide for the future of my family, I catch myself realizing I will not witness what happens to them. There is already no place for me in that future. The only way out is to transfer my I into them. Or for me to enter their I. I am not ruling out that, during the course of our common motion, we will meet in the middle and our I will become common to all of us. Nastya and I need to work out some common views and assessments of situations, inasmuch as my remaining time allows that. We need to at least reach positions on the most crucial things, so the absence of one of us will not be noticeable. So the one who is absent will feel comfortable that decisions will be made in the only proper way.

I was stunned today.

When I stopped by at the Platonovs’ this evening, I saw a drawing by Innokenty. A portrait of Zaretsky.

I don’t know precisely what to call the technique, I suppose it’s a charcoal drawing. Something softer than a pencil.

The contours break off in some places; in others they dissolve, somewhere unnoticed, in the paper.

A figure bent over a table. Splayed fingers ruffling hair.

On the table are a bottle and a glass with vodka at the very bottom. A piece of sausage with the end bitten off.

There’s not even a shadow of caricature in the portrayal. Either in the face of the sitting man or in how he’s propping up his head or even in the bottle and sausage. The drawing is deeply tragic.

The sitting man is mourning something (perhaps his own life) and the vodka and sausage are his only witnesses. The facial features are refined. The shoulders are hunched.

As long as he’s silent, his appearance is elevated, perhaps as it was intended to be. Zaretsky is silent. His bleating, his ugly words, aren’t heard.

And you think: the thoughts he’s immersed in are lofty. And the sausage is just an austere necessity. A requirement for the body.

He’s not looking at it. The focus of his gaze is somewhere beyond the boundaries of that room, maybe beyond the bounds of the visible world in general.

That drawing would have stunned me even if I hadn’t known anything about Zaretsky. But I do know, so the drawing stunned me doubly. It liberates Zaretsky. It delivers him from his horrendous role as a maggot.

That drawing is a straw that Innokenty and Nastya and I can grasp at. It turns out that the mysterious blockage for Innokenty’s artistic work has lifted. He can draw again. And how he draws!

In terms most familiar to me: some group of cells has been restored in him. For now, ‘how’ and ‘why’ are questions into the void. I’m stating a fact, not attempting to explain it.

Platosha is a genius. That amazing portrait that Geiger and I saw… I wanted to say something about the portrait and then suddenly remembered and realized, just in time, that it would sound pathetic. No matter what, it’d be like retelling War and Peace or, say, humming the Fortieth Symphony. I’ll just say one thing: only yesterday I hated Zarestky because of my grandmother’s stories. But I’ve forgiven him after that portrait. Almost forgiven. As Platosha drew him. There’s one weak spot in what I’m saying: I’m his wife. What wife’s husband isn’t a genius in her eyes? I’m feeling an intense urge to not be his wife for a minute and tell the whole world that Platonov’s a genius. But it just wouldn’t work out to not be his wife. He and I are one flesh and one spirit.

Platosha has no strength. He goes out less and less, and he’s usually lying down when he’s at home. He watches television. Or writes. Sometimes he has fits of fear. He’s terrified he’ll die soon. Or terrified he’ll die in his sleep without saying goodbye to anyone. The floor lamp is lit more and more often in our room: darkness seems like a harbinger of death for him. When we go to bed, he asks me to give him my hand; he squeezes it and that’s the only way he can go to sleep. More than anything, he’s afraid Anna and I will be left without help. He already sees us as orphans. I go into the bathroom, shut myself inside, and turn on the water, both hot and cold, full blast. Our pipes wail from the heavy pressure. And I wail, too.

I am reading the Primary Chronicle. The chronicler recounts year after year. He says: In this year since the creation of the world there was this, in the next year there was this. And in this year ‘nothing happened.’ Those years are called empty. Years in which there was nothing. At first I racked my brains: why refer to these years? Then I realized: these people feared losing even a small particle of time. Those who lived for an eternity especially appreciated time. And not even time so much as its continuity, the absence of holes. Maybe they thought that genuine eternity only advances after time has been lived carefully. I have felt that, too! I knew I should not release from my life those decades when I was frozen. And I was not mistaken.

Basically, life collapses into pieces, although I am attempting to tie them together. It collapses and then ceases. Keep thy mind in hell and despair not. Everything that I think about immerses my mind in hell, which is despair itself.

I managed to arrange testing for Innokenty in Munich. Actually, I didn’t, my former patients did.

The issue isn’t so much about the necessary sum as the impetus. Only now am I really admitting to myself that the organizational problems were a pretext to some degree.

Is this sort of trip necessary? I don’t have inner certainty about that even now.

Based on the data I’ve sent, they’re not ruling out surgical intervention, though I don’t consider that useful.

I carried out Innokenty’s regeneration, step by step. Does anyone know the state of things better than I?

On the other hand, maybe that knowledge is impeding me now? Maybe a fresh view is exactly what’s needed under the circumstances?

Finally, is it possible that what’s called ‘emotional attachment to a patient’ is preventing me from making a correct decision now?

I’ll tell him about Munich just before the trip itself. There’s no need to tell him earlier. He and Nastya are already on edge.

1969. A May Day demonstration. The morning air is cool. The afternoon air is, too, however: after all, it’s not yet summer. Thoughts about temperature are brought on by a foam medical thermometer of gigantic proportions: two people are holding it. It shows 36.6, obviously not the air temperature. Whose temperature, one might ask, is it showing? An unknown giant’s? The entire demonstration’s? Judging from the inscription – ‘The Country of Soviets’ – 36.6 refers to the country. One of the demonstrators says the country is hopelessly sick and its temperature is being taken using a thermometer with the temperature drawn on. He’s speaking in an undertone, as if only to himself. No, truly only to himself.

Flags of various colors, but predominantly red, flutter in the wind. There are portraits of the leaders of the party and the government (not fluttering). Those in attendance are standing in their educational institutions’ columns, the First Medical Institute, for example. They’re awaiting a command to start moving. Someone takes a flask from a jacket pocket.

‘Cognac. Want some, Marlen Yevgenyevich?’

‘Why not?’

His lips envelop the flask and he takes several large swallows. He exhales loudly, wipes his mouth, and latches on again. The sharer saddens. He had not expected his flask would be used as a pacifier. He’s afraid the cognac will lose some of its qualities after Marlen Yevgenyevich’s lips.

‘Polina, have a drink?’

He’d probably be able to touch the flask’s opening again after Polina.

‘No, thanks,’ says Polina.

And she usually drinks. She must have also seen how unappetizingly Marlen Yevgenyevich was drinking.

The column slowly begins moving. First the thermometer, then the flags and portraits. It flows along Lev Tolstoy Street like spilled preserves. It merges with other columns on Kirovsky Prospect, entering the overall rhythm and overall joy. Essentially, the joy arises from the rhythm. From the large accumulation of people. Of course, on the whole there’s nothing to be glad about.

Nothing to be glad about.

1975. Alushta. A sand beach. The writer of these lines is contemplating a watery surface. Boats, trawlers, and some sort of huge, extended vessels; we’ll just call them tankers. They are so far away they are no longer audible, and their maneuvers are reminiscent of silent film. Or the rocking of plywood vessels along stage scenery. They travel strictly along the line of the horizon, not deviating from it, either upward or downward.

There is a mat lying between me and the sea. It’s spread half-facing the sea, taking into account the location of the sun. A girl sits on the mat as I follow the horizon. A young girl, about sixteen. She has just come out of the sea. The sea continues flowing from her hair, which is drawn into a ponytail. The moisture on her skin is like rain on freshly laid asphalt: each drop is separate. That may not be a poetic comparison but it is exactly what first comes to mind. The laying of asphalt made a big impression on me back in its day.

She removes a paper cone from her beach bag. It holds cherries. The swimmer girl settles in with her legs crossed and her back to me. The line of her spine, shoulder blades, and knees is like a grasshopper’s. When Nastya glances over my shoulder at this text, she notes that a grasshopper is an invertebrate. I tell her she is simply jealous. Nastya agrees and kisses the top of my head. I leave the part about the grasshopper in.

The spectacle arouses thirst. I take my wallet and go to the beach vending machine. Water with syrup (3 kop.) is unsuitable in this case. Only simple carbonated water (1 kop.) can be drunk in these circumstances. It slops into the cup with a snort and churns. Small bubbles rush upward and burst with microscopic sprays – transparently (an apt description) hinting that the water in the machine is cold.

The hint, however, is false: the water is not cold. But this is better than nothing, indeed in 1911, when I was here the last time, there was no vending machine at all, and it was not only vending machines that were lacking. I should say that everything has changed a lot here. What has remained is the great joy that the beach gives. You experience it with the mere thought of the beach. And you still experience that joy even when you understand distinctly that you no longer have a place on it and that far less pleasant things await you.

1981. Leningrad, Kupchino district. Heatwave.

Birthday party in a prefab apartment building.

It’s best not to enter a Petersburg prefab apartment building during a heatwave. Actually, it’s best not to live in one at all.

A Petersburg heatwave is sticky and humid. It’s a total oven in a prefab building and it’s impossible to air out. And everybody’s stuck together in a crowded space.

You don’t feel like drinking at birthday parties like this. Well, except maybe cold beer. You truly do begin with beer and end with you know what. Schrecklich.[16]

‘Have some Olivier salad. And here’s herring under a blanket of beet.’

‘Just the word coat right now…’

Laughter in the room. An Okudzhava song is playing.

‘I insist that everyone have something to eat.’

It works out that everyone just drinks.

‘Sery, I’m going to sign you up for karate. Obviously not today.’

One of the guests reaches for the vodka, to say a toast. You can see the side of his shirt is damp.

He stands so he can pour for the people sitting on the opposite side of the table. Now it’s revealed that his back is wet, too.

After he straightens up to speak, it’s clear to everyone that his belly’s damp as well. If he’d sat there without crowing, nobody would have noticed a thing.

‘Hold Sery’s head over the bathtub. Someone really should sit with him and hold his head so he doesn’t choke on his puke.’

‘It’s called aspiration of vomitus.’

‘You hold his head, then, if you’re so smart.’

‘I’m smart?’

‘No, not you. I was joking.’

A half-hearted fight starts. Everybody rushes to separate the scufflers. They don’t resist.

Platosha is getting more and more incomprehensible. He requested that Geiger and I describe – no more, no less – Zaretsky’s death. I started objecting, saying we didn’t see that death, how can we describe it. Platosha’s response: there’s a lot you didn’t see but somehow you’re describing it all. He waved it off: fine, no need, I was just proposing it. Geiger signaled to me, unnoticed, and I bit my tongue. Zaretsky’s a significant person for Platosha: everything started with him. There’s a reason he drew him.

I wasn’t thinking when I objected to Platosha. To be honest, no, I don’t understand exactly what our descriptions are needed for anyway but since it seems important to Platosha, the question is retracted. I’d describe something for him every day – demonstrations, parks, weddings, murders – if only he could recover.

Today I found out that I need to fly to Munich in a few days. I found out by chance, after receiving an express-delivery package from a Munich hospital. I immediately telephoned Geiger, who had arranged the matter. He explained that he kept quiet about my trip because he didn’t want to worry either me or Nastya prematurely.

I’m agitated. It works out that I will be flying alone. Geiger is fighting with the Ministry of Health over his clinic now and needs to be there every day. He’ll fly to Munich, but only for one day, for the concluding consultation. As far as Nastya goes, the doctors insist she not travel anywhere. They say it could end badly. Despite the recommendation, she has resolutely made up her mind, but I won’t allow it.

It’s terrifying for me to go alone. I’m not letting on, but it truly is terrifying for me. One time when I was a child they brought me to the hospital with an appendicitis attack. The white corridors scared me and the smell of medicine scared me, but what drove me to genuine despair was that my parents were not allowed in the operating room with me. I was wheeled away on a stretcher and I twisted around and looked back at them, a doleful pair waving to me from somewhere in the depths of the corridor. I melted into tears, both from my sudden solitude and from endless pity for them, too, because I knew their orphanhood was more acute than mine. So as not to aggravate their suffering, I did not allow myself to howl out loud but my tears flowed so abundantly that they perplexed even the nurses, who had seen everything.

That picture flashed in my memory like a blurry dot, like some light in the fog, and then suddenly appeared in all its harshness. Back then, in childhood, my departure was not yet a departure and I again met with those dear to me. Only God knows where my movement through a corridor will carry me this time. When Geiger came to see us in the evening, he mentioned, speaking quickly, that they might ‘open up that little skull of yours.’ ‘Little skull of yours’ and his careless tone speak to his having rehearsed that phrase.

1923. March.

Zaretsky, a person who has finished working his shift at a sausage factory, is getting ready to go home.

He safely makes it through the guardhouse with a sausage in his trousers. The sausage is hanging on a string right next to his genitalia and is not visible to the guards.

Zaretsky’s genitalia (this is discovered at the morgue) are small, thus the sausage has ample space.

Zaretsky’s elder contemporary, Freud, would have considered this incident of theft to be unconnected with the stomach. Who knows, maybe the victim truly did feel more confident with sausage in his trousers. Maybe his self-esteem improved.

At any rate, it’s uncomfortable to walk around with sausage in your trousers. The sausage constrains movement. It could, in the end, simply tear off the string. Come out of his trousers in front of everyone.

Someone carrying sausage in that manner is taking a risk and Zaretsky understood that.

After walking a fair distance from the factory, he usually went down to the Zhdanovka River. Unfastened his trousers and untied the sausage. Went up to the embankment again, sausage in hand.

A person with sausage always attracts attention in Russia, but especially in 1923.

From here on, there are various possible scenarios.

Someone had begun keeping an eye on this sausage-factory employee. They could have already been waiting for him by the river on that fateful day. Standing behind a tree, say, a weeping willow. They quickly grabbed Zaretsky’s sausage when he took it out.

What happened from there? Chance asserts itself here.

They might have pushed Zaretsky so he hit the top of his head on a sharp rock. That’s what investigator Treshnikov, who didn’t know about the sausage, surmised. Of course those same characters might have hit Zaretsky with that rock – I don’t think they were great philanthropists.

The question arises, however: why did they want to kill him? After all, the victim couldn’t have even complained about the loss since the item was stolen in the first place.

The second scenario.

Rivers draw social dropouts. Lots of various riffraff hang around on the riverbanks.

Someone among the Zhdanovka dropouts notices Zaretsky. The sausage maker’s galoshes slosh in the wet snow, which attracts attention. The bank of the Zhdanovka in March is not the sort of place to take a stroll. It’s clear to an attentive person that the man sloshing in the snow has not come down here at random.

Prepared for any development of events, the observer noiselessly follows Zaretsky. He follows him out from behind the suppositional weeping willow. He still doesn’t know what exactly Zaretsky has schemed up, but sees a victim in him.

He has a knack, the instinct of a hunter. Speaking in contemporary terms, he’s a scumbag. He’ll kill without thinking about practicability. He’ll kill because it’s possible to kill. He’ll look at the manipulations with the sausage (he’s accustomed to not being surprised), raise the rock, and lower it on the back of his client’s head.

He eats the sausage as he watches the death throes. He melts into the dusk.

Geiger wrote about Zaretsky’s murder and Platosha asked him to read it aloud. Geiger, who has banned the word ‘no’ with regard to my husband, began reading. I was watching only Platosha. He listened calmly to the strange description he’d ordered and though I thought it had sufficed for him, it turned out that, no, it had not. And that’s what he said: it did not suffice. He didn’t explain why. It seemed to me that Geiger was a little annoyed and that his annoyance regarding Platosha’s strange request somehow even appeared to be unexpected. Maybe Geiger was annoyed that it was a strange request and he had fulfilled it. And then, there you go: it didn’t fit.

Geiger said to me:

‘Well, then you write about that death.’ He turned to Platosha. ‘Or you?’

Platosha answered:

‘Good, I’ll try.’

I nodded.

I think we’re all truly close to lunacy.

And also: Platosha’s flying off to Munich tomorrow. And he’s not taking me with him.

Geiger could not manage the seemingly simple matter of writing a description of Zaretsky’s murder. It works out that’s not such a simple matter. We’ll see what Nastya writes. She told me yesterday that I’m not fighting for my recovery. Maybe tiredness is the reason here, I don’t know. It is hard to sense the acuteness of a feeling – any – for long. It seems to me that one tires from even fearing death. In the end, something sets in, taking the form of indifference for some and tranquility for others.

I am losing my strength and memory but not experiencing pain and in that I see that mercy has been presented to me. I do know what suffering is. It is terrible, not because it torments the body but because you no longer dream of ridding yourself of pain: you are prepared to rid yourself of your body. To die. You simply are not in a condition to think about matters such as the meaning of life and you see ridding yourself of suffering as the only meaning of death. When an illness’s symptoms are mild, that gives an opportunity to think everything over and prepare yourself for anything. And then those months or even weeks issued to you become a small eternity and you stop considering them a short period. You cease comparing them with the average life expectancy and other silliness. You begin understanding that there is an individual plan for each person. What does average life expectancy have to do with anything…?

Tomorrow I go to Munich. I place no big hopes on this trip but I am glad for it in some sense. We’re all truly tired and we need to get some rest from one another.

Today we saw Innokenty off at the airport. I’ll fly to Munich in a week.

Second day without Platosha. It feels empty. Now I can cry as much as I want – nobody sees – but there are no tears. It turns out you need someone’s presence for tears, even if you think the person doesn’t notice anything. I went to an evening service and I did have a cry there. It’s good it was so dark; nobody could see anything.

Platosha sent me an email this morning. He writes that they welcomed him well and showed him the city. They went for a walk in the English Garden during the second half of the day. He liked the garden best of all because – even with the fallen leaves – it reminded him of places in Siverskaya. After that, Platosha described the Siverskaya forest in late autumn, in detail. Sharp air smelling of mold, a brook between the trees, crows on branches. Those birds, he wrote, love thin branches, so they can sway. I hadn’t noticed that but it’s true, that’s exactly what they do: come to think of it, do crows have many pleasures? It’s both hilarious and touching: Munich fits into five lines and the rest is Siverskaya. There’s a question at the end: did I describe Zaretsky’s murder? I thought he’d forget with everything going on now, but he didn’t. I’ll have to get going on it, I promised after all. I don’t feel like it.

They showed me Munich. A beautiful city but its heart beats indifferently. I had never been to Munich and nothing resonates for me here, neither the aromas of its shops or the greenery or the beautiful cars. All of that came about and developed without my participation, with the exception, perhaps, of the English Garden, which reminds me of childhood. Even on the day I arrived, it occurred to me that this visit is seemingly in vain. It’s difficult to explain, but that’s the exact impression that has formed.

Later I had my first meeting with the doctor, Professor Meier. My initial thought: my German doctor is better. To the question ‘Wie geht es Ihnen?’[17] I answered ‘Ich sterbe.’[18] My answer reflected the notes Geiger had sent, my overall general state, and, of course, Chekhov; Dr Meier had but the vaguest notion of all that. He muttered ‘Noch nicht,’[19] and we communicated further with the help of an interpreter: my grammar-school German ran out there.

While conducting my initial examination, Professor Meier became absorbed in papers for a long time. A half-hour, perhaps longer, passed. Paging through my medical history (which Geiger heroically translated into German!), the doctor kept wetting his index finger with saliva and chewing at his lips. Sometimes he scratched his nose. Then he raised his head and said:

‘Expect no miracles from our clinic. That’s so there are no misapprehensions. We will do all we can.’

I felt that I was smiling broadly, showing all my teeth:

‘But it’s miracles I came for…’

‘Miracles, that’s in Russia,’ said Meier, his gaze growing sad. ‘There you live by the laws of the miracle, but we attempt to live in conformity with reality. It’s unclear, however, which is better.’

‘When God wishes, nature’s order is overcome,’ I said, expressing my main hope, but the interpreter could not translate that.

She asked me to clarify what I had in mind.

‘Tell the professor that he’s completely right. There is something to think about here.’

I walked along the clinic corridor and pondered how – when things are located within the bounds of medicine – it is better, of course, to trust Germans. But my case went outside those bounds long ago. So why am I here?

Innokenty just told me he’s returning to Petersburg.

He was calling from the hotel, where he’d stopped for his things. He’ll head to the airport from there.

He requested that I not tell Nastya about his return. He doesn’t yet know if he’ll succeed in buying a ticket for the soonest flight and he doesn’t want to worry her. The main thing is he doesn’t want her to talk him out of it. And I have to take that as automatically applying to me, too.

I didn’t talk him out of it. I just said I’d meet him at the airport.

He didn’t explain his action at all, but what kind of explanations could there be, anyway? He said only that an understanding of the matter only came to him in Munich.

Well then, it’s good that an understanding came to somebody. Me, I don’t understand anything. I don’t even know if intervention from the Munich doctors would have been useful.

I know one thing: I offered him that opportunity. And he made his choice.

I’m writing by hand for the first time in several months. That isn’t at all simple: my hand doesn’t move well. Geiger calls this ‘problems with fine motor skills.’ I’m writing and not typing because it turns out it’s forbidden to use a computer when a plane is landing. The word landing contains its own overstatement. A half-hour ago, they announced that the plane’s landing gear won’t extend. We cannot land.

I’m writing because I need something to do. Some people are looking out the windows. They might not have looked, but they were ordered to open the shades. In the event of an emergency landing, the eyes would not need to waste time acclimatizing themselves to natural light. Some people are crying, but it’s better to write. I think paper is more reliable than a computer. Unlike a computer, paper would not be destroyed when hitting the ground. True, it can burn.

The airplane is using up fuel so that doesn’t happen. There have already twice been commands to press your head against the seatback in front of you, then twice the plane made a landing approach. After flying over the runway, it smoothly rose into the sky: yet again, the landing gear had not extended.

I am in a window seat in one of the airliner’s last rows. To my right is an elderly German with a white band above his collar. I know it denotes his belonging to the clergy. He asks with a mild German accent:

‘How many of us are flying here, about three hundred people?’

‘At least,’ I answer.

His line of thinking is comprehensible but I don’t want to follow it. I turn away, toward the window. Petersburg is under the wing, but not the slightest sign of landing gear. From time to time, a crew member approaches a window but sees the same things I do: the lines of Vasilyevsky Island, the cupola of St Isaac’s Cathedral, and the spire of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral. It is a rare city that can present such beauty for a last moment.

The airplane’s captain comes out of the cockpit and addresses the passengers using a microphone. He says that landing-gear failure is a common occurrence in aviation and nobody has died from that yet. His appearance radiates calm. The first bars of The Seasons sound in the speakers. The stewardesses appear in the parallel aisles at the same time. They are no longer smiling like at the beginning of the flight but panic is not noticeable on their faces, either. The captain (his uniform brand-new) walks through the cabin, unhurried, and disappears behind the curtain in the tail of the plane. My neighbor looks at the stately Russian beauties with fascination as they pour mineral water to the music of Tchaikovsky. Danger intensifies the perception of beauty.

Behind me are the sounds of stifled sobs and brief slaps. I turn around. Through a gap in the curtain, I can see one of the stewardesses sitting on a fold-down chair and sobbing; the captain is smacking her cheeks with his hands. His unhurried movement into the rear compartment had a very concrete mission.

In a parallel row, someone is throwing up.

My hand can already barely trace out letters, they’re becoming ever smaller and more crooked, I need a brief rest. And yes, this is important, I promised to describe Zaretsky’s murder. There doesn’t seem to be much time before landing.

The landing gear on the Munich plane is jammed. They just announced that at the airport.

I’m terrified.

I’m trying not to think about anything.

I have my journal with me and will simply describe what I see. I think Innokenty would act exactly the same way.

One thing is good: Nastya doesn’t know what’s happening. She doesn’t even know Innokenty left Munich.

People who are here to greet passengers are standing around in tears. The peculiar stillness of those preparing themselves for tragedy. A draft rustles the cellophane on bouquets: little by little, the flowers are acquiring an ominous meaning.

They’re setting up the first TV cameras in the concourse and outside.

The horrible thought flashes that in some sense a catastrophe for a sick person is… The thought is horrible in its wrongness.

Psychologists are showing up in the concourse. They immediately determine who needs help: really, you don’t need to be a psychologist for that.

They don’t approach me. I’m writing and they know that those who write are fully within psychological norms.

A TV broadcast from the airport pops up on a huge screen. Television is harsh. It’s supposedly impassive in recording what happens, but the harshness is in that impassivity.

Existence is bifurcated. There are people with bouquets here and the exact same ones are on the screen. I see myself. There’s a psychologist next to me hugging a client on the screen, stroking her spine every so often. Strange, I hadn’t seen them.

I turn around: yes, they’re standing here. The client is absentmindedly crying on the psychologist’s shoulder. It’s not yet clear if she needs to cry: this might yet all work out.

The airplane: a camera zooms in on it. A huge structure, taking up the entire screen. An opera house, ice palace, or water park, not just an aircraft. The embodiment of the idea of what is grandiose.

It’s not flying but hanging. Posing for the camera on the border of the landing field, in ripples of molten air.

It approaches for a landing. Descends.

Rushes over the landing strip.

We see the landing gear hasn’t extended again – don’t land! Don’t land…

A mutual scream.

The airplane gains altitude and departs for its next lap.

I figured out a long time ago that Platosha killed Zaretsky. With him so far away now, it’s easier for me to write about that. Of course my grandmother threw me off track with her I put out a contract, but not for long. For some reason, I simply hadn’t considered whom she had the contract with. Meaning: whom she told. When they arrested her father – my great-grandfather – she told Platosha that under no circumstances should he kill Zaretsky. It was difficult not to understand that request. I think the idea had crossed his mind anyway, but what was left for him after what she said?

I don’t picture the murder itself very well. I won’t fantasize: it’s all too serious. I’ve wanted many times to talk with Platosha about Zaretsky but just haven’t dared. Since he doesn’t speak about it, I thought I shouldn’t, either. Now, though, maybe I will. After all, it’s for good reason that he approached Geiger and me about Zaretsky: it was a request about something bigger.

And Geiger, by the way… For some reason, it seems to me that he had a hunch about it all, too. Maybe even before I did. But he’s keeping quiet, keeping quiet.

Lord have mercy. I told the priest: so I repented in confession that I once killed a man but I feel no relief. The priest responded: you asked forgiveness from God, Whom you did not kill, but perhaps you should ask forgiveness of the one you killed? My God, what can I say to the one I killed? And will he hear me from there? So I came home, took the murder weapon, and went to the scene of the crime. When I arrived there, I said: forgive me, servant of God, Nikolai, that I killed you with a statuette of Themis on a March evening in 1923. Maybe you have been waiting for those words since that same year and I just have not uttered them – I simply did not think that was possible.

Then I went to the cemetery. I took Themis with me and spoke again with Nikolai, servant of God. I asked separate forgiveness for Themis: it seemed to me when I was killing that I was restoring justice, though what kind of justice could we be talking about here? It’s sheer injustice. And I even thought that up about justice later: I initially made my choice of Themis for a completely different reason.

My fingers were an ideal fit for the statuette. It seemed as if the figure had been sculpted in an odd way, for a hand to grasp: only the scales were a hindrance. After they had broken off, though, Themis’s raised arm became a natural support for the hand. And so the bronze goddess of justice became a handle and her marble base a hammer. The statuette, which had previously been used for exclusively peaceful purposes (primarily nuts) was suddenly transformed into an instrument of retribution. As I walked along the Zhdanovka River, I felt at the statuette inside my jacket and it was as cold as an axe.

I waited for Zaretsky behind a bush. Not behind a weeping willow as Geiger fancied it, but behind a spreading bush that I don’t know what to call. I had to wait longer than I had presumed after my study of Zaretsky’s movements: something had likely delayed him. That only played into my hands: it was growing ever duskier. And what if he had not come then: that thought had ripped at my consciousness so many times! If the matter had been postponed, it might not have taken place: it’s possible to gather your strength the first time, but it is already difficult the second.

The matter was not postponed, though. Zaretsky appeared so unexpectedly that I barely managed to duck down behind my bush. I don’t know what, exactly, delayed Zaretsky but his face was sad. Just as sad as how I recently depicted him in my drawing. It was the face of a human, not a reptile. If his face had remained like that, maybe everything would have taken a different turn on that March evening. But his human face gradually crumpled and slipped like an old mask, through which its previous features showed. He began unfastening his trousers. I looked around; there was nobody in the area.

As I came out of my hiding place, I thought that he had informed on Anastasia’s father with this face. That imparted strength in me. Coming here, I had feared that I would not be able to strike at the critical moment. That – in the literal sense – I could not raise my hand against him. Nothing of the sort. I took several steps in Zaretsky’s direction, sensed how nicely the statuette lay in my hand, and struck almost without swinging my arm. A dry, almost wooden, crack sounded. Zaretsky fell without turning. Without seeing me.

I leaned over him. He was lying on his back. His legs were bent at the knees and shaking very slightly. The sausage was sticking out of his unfastened trousers. Overcoming my disgust, I tore it off and tossed it into the Zhdanovka. Two ducks swam over to the splash. They watched the rippling circles with regret. And I seemed to switch off. Unhurried, I made my way up from the river and plodded off along the embankment, leaving Zaretsky amid the dirty snow and rocks.

I returned home. Anastasia and I drank tea and sat in armchairs in her room. The clock ticked; we stayed silent. It is good to stay silent to ticking. I began thinking everything that happened on the Zhdanovka was a dream. But time went on and Zaretsky was still not there. And then I realized it was not a dream. That it was the most genuine reality. Life. Or rather, death.

‘I wonder why Zaretsky’s not here,’ said Anastasia.

‘He’ll show up!’ I said, my voice cheery.

‘And what if he doesn’t?’

Anastasia smiled, barely noticeably.

If only she had known how much I hoped he would show up. Horrifying and bloodied, just so long as he came.

But he did not come.

Fire trucks started driving out on the field.

They’re lining up along one of the landing strips. Meaning that’s where they’ll land the unfortunate airplane.

A shot taken from a helicopter: a column of ambulances moving along the highway toward the airport. A half-kilometer behind is another column.

I suddenly thought: what an ancient name, ambulance. It was preserved among all the losses.

I decided to work on descriptions but turned on the TV for some reason. There’s live coverage about a plane from Munich. Now I feel on edge: Platosha could have easily ended up on it. Firemen are unwinding hoses on both sides of the landing strip. I think: those people sure do take risks! They might have to douse a burning plane.

I recall how little Platosha wanted to be a fireman, too. Danger had already captivated him back then and he was already crying then, thinking about these people’s tragicness and grandeur. About the struggle between life and death, where death takes on the contours of a blazing beam or a gunpowder magazine. Or an airplane coming in without its landing gear.

Ambulances are driving out on the landing field. Doctors get out of them; there are white stripes of lab coats under jackets they’ve thrown on. Just the sight of those stripes makes you feel faint because they remind you of the body’s suffering.

Some aviation expert is speaking on TV. He says they made a decision for a ‘belly landing’ so they’re preparing the strip now. The idle chatter of someone off-camera is irritating. If you’re so smart, then explain why the landing gear didn’t extend or – even better – make it so it does. If you can’t, then be quiet.

He’s quiet.

They show the plane. It’s already set a course for descent.

A close-up of the firemen. They’re watching where the plane should appear from, unable to look away. There are gleams on their faces, from the blinking lights. They raise the muzzles of their fire hoses on command. Foam begins spurting out of them.

Why are they showing all this?

I live with this recollection and it will remain with me until the end of my life. Inasmuch as the end might come soon, I suppose it will apparently remain after my death, too. All the events and all our recollections about them will meet there. If the soul is eternal, then I think everything connected with it will also be preserved: actions, events, and sensations. Perhaps in some other, withdrawn, form or maybe in a different sequence, but it will be preserved because I remember the inscription on the famous gate: God preserves all.

I touch my neighbor’s shoulder:

‘What do you suppose? The blow that I inflict on someone close to me – should it come before I ask forgiveness for it? Is that the sequence for these events?’

Faint surprise appears in his eyes.

‘How can they exist otherwise?’

‘Just now I thought that they can. Genuine repentance, after all, is a return to the condition before the sin, a sort of way to overcome time. The sin does not disappear, though, and it remains as a former sin and – you won’t believe this – as a relief because it was repented. It exists and is destroyed, simultaneously.’

My conversation partner places his hand over mine, which is lying on the armrest, and squeezes it firmly. There are tears in his eyes.

‘I didn’t understand a single word of what you said. But for some reason, it seems you are correct.’

The airplane has set a course to land. Innokenty, my friend, hold on.

‘Why is it you keep writing?’

‘I’m describing things, sensations. People. I write every day now, hoping to save them from oblivion.’

‘God’s world is too great to count on success with that.’

‘You know, if each person were to describe his own sliver of that world, even if it’s small… Although why, really, is it small? You can always find someone whose field of view is broad enough.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as an aviator’

What luck that Platosha’s not on that plane.

Take the statuette of Themis. It’s hard to imagine my childhood without her, she accompanied the most vivid moments. I didn’t yet know what sort of instrument I was preparing when I broke off her scales. But it turned out my childhood prank was part of a drama that unfolded years later on the bank of the Zhdanovka River. I want to say that there are no fundamental or nonfundamental events and everything is important and everything is put to use, whether for good or bad.

An artist drawing life in the minutest details understands that. No, he is not in a position to reflect certain things. When drawing a flowerbed in a southern city, he supposedly cannot convey the aroma of flowers on a July evening. And he cannot convey damp stuffiness after a rain, into which that aroma dissolves so you could drink it. But there is an amazing moment when a picture begins to smell fragrant. Because genuine art is an expression of the inexpressible, without which life is not complete. Striving for fullness of expression is striving for fullness of truth.

There is something that remains outside the bounds of words and paints. You know that it is there but you just cannot approach it: there is a depth there. You stand at the surf and realize you will need to walk differently in order to go further: you cannot rule out walking atop the water. Because, for example, when saying ‘my childhood,’ I am not explaining anything at all to my future daughter. In order to give her any notion of that at all, I will need to describe a thousand various details, otherwise she won’t understand what composed my happiness.

In that case, what awaits description? Well, of course there’s the wallpaper over the bed – I still remember its flowery pattern. My finger slides over it in the evening, in the minute before slumber. The clang of the chamber pot lid is as piercing as that of orchestral cymbals. Among sounds, a bed squeaking – at every move I make – is also memorable. A hand caresses its shiny cold railing, entwines with them, bestowing its warmth upon them. It slips down, groping at the folds of the linens and resting against the knee of my grandmother, who sits by the bed. I examine the chandelier and its spidery shadows. It is bright in the center of the ceiling but there is darkness in the corners. On the cabinet, Themis holds her scales, radiating justice. My grandmother is reading Robinson Crusoe.