Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

‘If they feel it,’ Zaretsky giggled, ‘I’ll tell them it’s my peepee.

After all, I only take out a little at a time, just to eat in the evening.’

That’s exactly what he said, peepee… Did Zaretsky himself have one? There are people that details like that just do not square with.

After learning his method for carrying out sausage, I was afraid he would invite me to dinner. Pour some vodka and offer sausage to chase it with, and I’d vomit right there… There was no reason to fear: these Belshazzarian feasts were solitary. Zaretsky never ever invited anyone. And though his voice invariably warmed in conversations with women (I heard this more than once), he never even invited them into his room. For the most part, Zaretsky had no need for the organ he successfully imitated at the guardhouse.

I remember Zaretsky’s sorrowful figure in the kitchen, at the primus stove, with a smell characteristic only of him: a blend of vodka, kerosene, sausage, and an unbathed body. In the barely glimmering light of an electric bulb. I thought the bulb was simply incapable of shining any brighter in Zaretsky’s presence but it shone the same way even without him. Sometimes it died out completely after blinking many times, leaving only the flame of the burner in the kitchen, which illuminated nothing. When the bulb would begin shining again a while later, Zaretsky turned up by the primus once more. His hand on the valve.

He would open the valve a tiny bit, meaning that everything over the flame came to a boil very slowly. He attempted to economize on kerosene that way. Or maybe he simply sought reasons to linger a bit more in the kitchen. No, he didn’t become friends with anyone, but even he apparently required some sort of interaction. One might have said Zaretsky was lonely if that word conveyed what went on with our neighbor. Is a worm lonely in a tree trunk? There was, after all, something of a worm about him. Flexibility. Softness. The ability to take on the temperature of his surroundings.

MONDAY

Today Geiger told me:

‘The Great Patriotic War, which is also known as World War Two, took place from 1941 to 1945.’

‘In my day,’ I answered, ‘the war called Great began in 1914.’ ‘There you go,’ nodded Geiger. ‘It’s now called World War One.’

He talked to me for a long time about the Great Patriotic War. I can’t believe it… I can’t believe it. Although, really, why not?

TUESDAY

The scent of flowers in Siverskaya. People grew them at many dachas. When renting a dacha, city people would specially stipulate the presence of flowerbeds, and the flowers were delightfully fragrant. When the slightest wafting of the wind subsided in the evenings, the air turned to nectar. One could drink it in, something we did sitting on the open veranda, admiring a striking sunset (with a candle toward the end of summer, in half-darkness).

Dacha folk loved chrysanthemums, especially after Anastasia Vyaltseva sang her sentimental song about them. She sang it right here, in Siverskaya, at Baron Frederiks’s country estate, and I stood on the other bank of the Oredezh, listening to her voice. That voice floated freely along the water, accompanied by lights from the estate, and I caught each note on my bank of the river. I fell into despair when a swooping breeze rustled with the sound of foliage, and I trembled from the cold of the night and new feelings that filled me to overflowing.

We bought a gramophone that year and listened to Vyaltseva from morning until night; almost all the dacha folk listened. And Vyaltseva, a Siverskaya dacha woman, would stroll past other people’s dachas, listening to herself. Sometimes singing along. The chrysanthemums truly had faded and fading could be heard in the singer’s surname, too: somehow everything came together in her singing, so it was rare that someone didn’t cry. Her singing was striking.

About fading. Papa brought an Astrakhan watermelon from the city. We washed it; it was striped and gleaming, with a little tail. We flicked our fingers along the surface – dong! dong!- and there was a rich sound, resilient. Genuine. There were no watermelon specialists among us but it was obvious that a bad watermelon could not sound like this. Papa cut it into two parts and yes, indeed: red, flowing with juice, and smelling of summer’s end. From each half he then cut off semicircles that sparkled in the sun.

After we had eaten up the watermelon, there remained even, green rinds that were very pretty. I would not allow them to be thrown away and placed them under the front steps so they could be admired afterward. They lost their sheen the next day and shriveled a couple of days later. Even so, I remembered their beauty and would not allow them to be tossed in the bucket; they lay under the front steps some time longer. Flies clinging to them. I realized then that beauty fades very quickly.

I remember how I ate watermelon on Bolshoy Prospect with Anastasia, her father, and my mother. This was in the strange oval room that remained with the Voronins after the ‘densification’ of their apartment. That watermelon, from the city, remained a puzzle: there was no bread in Petrograd at the time, but here, suddenly, was a watermelon… Some person in a uniform overcoat (a lot of people wore overcoats like that at the time) stuck it in Voronin’s hands right on the street. He winked, as if to say eat up, and then blended in with the crowd. Voronin smiled bashfully but couldn’t explain anything to us.

That watermelon didn’t gleam like the one in Siverskaya but that was a different time for us, too. Mama watched as Voronin cut the watermelon. He didn’t do it as deftly as our father: the knife kept cutting unevenly. I was watching Mama and she knew I was because we were remembering the exact same thing. I was also watching Anastasia, thinking that she, too, would fade some day, that her fresh, shining face would shrivel like a watermelon rind. Could something like that happen? And I answered: it cannot.

WEDNESDAY

They took my temperature today: it was 36.6. For the first time during the entire measurement period. Geiger said a positive dynamic was in evidence. True, this was the morning temperature and things worsened a little toward evening, to 37.1. The mercury did creep over the red line, only by one mark, but it crept over. I often had a fever on the island, especially at the infirmary.

The infirmary is on a mountain. We lie on wooden bunks pushed close together. There are no bed linens; the planks are bare. And we’re bare: nobody has body linens, either. It’s useless anyway: many have typhus diarrhea, all the bunks are soiled with it. If you want to turn, you’ll certainly get your hand in shit, dried or fresh. Your own or someone else’s. The hand will slip along the board. Not everybody has the strength to get up to do their business, so they do it under themselves. And what can you say? There’s not even strength to curse.

The whole island is visible if you look down from the mountain; the sea is further out, as far as the eye can see, frozen because it’s the month of February. They herd us naked, to go down from the mountain to the bathhouse; it is about two versts. And then back, after the bath, after steaming. With freezing temperatures, twenty below, a snowstorm. True, we walk in the forest so there’s no wind. Bare feet slipping on packed snow so someone or other would fall, not so much from the slippery snow as from loss of strength. With a high temperature or a fever, those first seconds are nice but then you freeze immediately, enough that you can’t move. Some wouldn’t get up again after falling so they were dragged by an arm or a leg. And they would shout. That was the only way to understand they were alive. When they went silent, the snow crunched audibly under our feet.