Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

Of course many of us died after that: a person has his limits. The fact that nobody was clinging to life any longer played a role, too: survival is difficult because once a person is seized by indifference, it is as if he is dying. He’d be lying alongside you, raving or saying something rational, and then he’d suddenly go silent. You’d turn, see his fallen jaw, and understand he died. And he could lie like that for a long time because nobody comes in here and if someone does, they won’t rush to drag him out. He lay there and you’d even calm: he wasn’t crying out or flailing his arms.

I called for Nurse Valentina in a seemingly calm voice and gestured for her to sit by my bed, asking how things were. But then I couldn’t hold back and burst into tears. I’m turning into a run-of-the-mill hysteric.

THURSDAY

There was a place in Siverskaya called the ‘Sweltering Countries’. A beach on the Oredezh under a steep, red clay riverbank. Everything was red in those places and the red horse in Petrov-Vodkin’s painting, by the way, is from this very place. Any other horse would have been simply impossible here. This was the color of sweltering countries: I think everything was like that for Robinson. Well, maybe there was also green and light blue, but those colors were in Siverskaya, too, when you really think about it. I thought about the uninhabited island while I sunned in the ‘Sweltering Countries’. I sensed the hot sand with my cheek. Robinson wore clothing made of goat skin to protect himself from the sun’s rays. Nobody would have been surprised if he had worn that clothing around Siverskaya: the dacha folk there dressed even stranger.

One time when I was lying in the ‘Sweltering Countries’, I raised my head and did not see anyone. Nobody at all, either on the banks of the Oredezh or in the river itself. Someone else had always been around when I was there. I stood, took my bag, and started out along the shore. I crossed a small bridge over the river – it was empty there, too. At first I imagined that people were simply hiding or had temporarily gone about their business, but there truly was nobody. I walked and was more convinced with each passing minute that something had happened to liberate the earth of people. At least the Siverskaya earth.

This was not simply a sense: it was a certainty. Too much pointed at complete unpeopledness. The wind in the pines rustled in a way that it had never allowed itself to rustle before. The Oredezh glimmered with an unprecedented sparkle. In all of that, one could feel a liberation completely impossible in the presence of people. Everything that had previously been suppressed by human existence now aspired toward the confines of its possibilities: trees in their greenness, sky in its blueness. In how the river meandered, its primordialness showing through; even the very name Oredezh was primordial. Names like that are not given by people, they are created by nature itself, like bent dead branches near the water, like crags worn away by wind. The Oredezh flowed here before there were people, and now it was flowing after them.

The river tossed out bend after bend to meet me and just would not end, the red cliffs rising above it, ever higher. I walked, over whelmed by the feeling of possessing that splendid earth. The Oredezh’s unpredictability, the freshness of its breeze, the swaying of the grasses by the water: all this belonged to me alone. I made the rounds of my holdings, which (a woodpecker drums on a pine) knew splendidly that nobody possessed them any longer, that my power was highly conditional. I was the only one on the entire river and in the entire wood, and nothing from me could threaten them. I was making an inspection of them and passing by them as a commander passes by a parade, head unnaturally twisted, stopping at times and saluting. Something responded to me, waving branches, whistling, and cawing, but there was something that also did not respond, even remaining unnoticed by me. Each of my observations, though, had a paramount meaning because I was now the only one who possessed the fullness of that knowledge.

The road rose along with the shore. Somehow, without my having noticed, the river was running along the bottom of a ravine, outside the confines of visibility. Treetops that barely rose above the precipice spoke of how there was not only water but also earth below. I could have touched those treetops if I had approached the edge of the precipice. But I did not approach.

Houses still stood over the river, only now they were hopelessly empty. These houses were already wound in vines, sprouting with grasses and trees, becoming part of nature. Their roofs were weakening right before the eyes, sagging and ready to collapse at any moment. Their unclosed doors kept squeaking in the wind. Drafts rustled half-rotted curtains in the windows.

I felt horror beginning to grow within me: this was the horror of solitude. The shore began descending again. I noticed a small bridge below, across the river, and dashed toward it. Boards began knocking resonantly under my feet. They swayed and hit against one another, reverberating in an echo. Their noise continued even when I was already on the shore, as if nature’s unseen army was pursuing me as the last creature that did not belong to it. I began running (not from fear but from moroseness) and rushed through the woods toward home. It was unbearable to imagine that nobody was expecting me at home, either. The great world could come to an end but this would not yet be a full ending. Even so, I had not lost hope that my little family world was holding out. I ran and cried, feeling tears roll down my cheeks and how the crying impeded my breathing.

It was beginning to darken when I neared the house. I saw my father in a window that shone with electric light. He was sitting in his favorite pose, legs crossed, hands clasped at the back of his head. He was massaging his neck with his thumbs. My mother was pouring hot water from the samovar. All this seemed unreal under a huge yellow lampshade. It seemed like an old photograph, perhaps because it was happening soundlessly. But my father’s fingers were moving, completely unmistakably, along his neck, and hot water was flowing from the samovar, steam rising from it. Only the spoken word was missing.

My mother lifted her head. She uttered:

‘So you’ve come back, my chum.’

My father caught my hand and shook it lightly.

What happiness that was. I don’t remember any further happiness like that.

FRIDAY

Anastasia was fifteen when we moved to the Voronins’ apartment. We handed in information about everyone in the apartment, for ration cards, so I learned her age. On nearly the first day we moved in. A six-year difference, I thought, surprising myself at my own thinking. That thinking compared me with Anastasia, meaning it connected us. Was it by chance that I thought of her in this particular way? I did not compare my age with Zaretsky’s.

Almost immediately, I began recognizing Anastasia by her steps. She walked softly, treading from heel to toe. Voronin walked with a shuffle. Zaretsky as if he were on stilts. From my room, I learned about Anastasia’s motion based on the barely audible creak of the floorboards. Based on the length of her journey and the clicking of the electric light switch, I guessed where she was going: to the bathroom, the toilet, or the kitchen. The bathroom and the toilet were closer and the light switches there turned with an easy click. The journey to the kitchen was the longest but the kitchen light switch was louder than the others. When someone began turning it on, it rang out with the plaintive sound of a spring; at the end, there was a muffled shot. I felt like going out to the kitchen each time I heard the sound of that shot.

Sometimes I did go out there. Most often at night, when the entire apartment was already sleeping. I would find Anastasia, who had risen for a drink of water, in her nightshirt. In communal apartments, everybody eats and drinks in their own rooms, but the Voronins continued, by force of habit, to do so in the kitchen. The nightshirt was an old habit, too: in communal life, people usually toss a robe over it.