Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

There are hilarious cars driving around. Not at all resembling the ones in my time… But this time is mine now, too, after all, and Geiger wants me to feel at home in it. He’s following my reaction.

‘What does it feel like,’ he asks, ‘to end up in what’s essentially another country?’

‘It feels as if there are new complications.’

I smile. Geiger smiles, too, with a dose of surprise: he had expected something else.

‘Any time has its complications. They need to be overcome.’

‘Or escaped.’

He looks at me carefully. In an undertone, he utters:

‘You didn’t manage…’

Didn’t manage. Geiger, I think, is a community-minded person. But I am not. A country is not my measure and neither, even, is a people. What I wanted to say is this: a person now, that’s a measure, but that sounds like a set phrase. Although… Can set phrases really be untrue, especially if they’re the result of life experience? Of course they can. I’ll write that down, let Geiger read it.

Incidentally, Geiger thinks I do not write as people usually do. He does not clarify very plainly what he has in mind. As if you have a light accent, one that’s not contemporary, he says, though it would seem unnoticeable to someone who did not know my history. Well, splendid. I, to the contrary, hear that he and Valentina do not speak as people spoke previously. A greater uninhibitedness has come about and also, perhaps, a halting intonation. Completely, by the way, delightful. I am attempting to imitate all that -I have a good ear.

MONDAY

Today I watched television all day. I changed the channels. They’re singing on one, dancing on another, and talking on a third. They talk animatedly, people were not able to do this before: the main thing is that they’d never developed such speed. Especially the host : he pronounces things in a singsong manner, dividing his speech into breaths rather than phrases. He can do anything… except that he cannot help but inhale, otherwise he would be speaking without pauses. A virtuoso. A person who’s a tongue.

Valentina comes in with my lunch.

‘That’s how people dance now?’ I’m pointing at the screen.

‘Well, yes,’ she smiles, ‘something like that. You don’t like it?’

‘Why not, sure. It’s energetic…’

The funniest thing is that’s how they portrayed possessed people in the amateur theater in Siverskaya. They were being healed but they danced. Rather, their dancing pointed to their need for treatment. I was acquainted with one of the actors; he sometimes came over to drink coffee. He was imposing and even frightening in the crimson accent-lighting on the stage, but he seemed frail at the table on our veranda. He dabbed his napkin at perspiration that broke out on his forehead. From time to time, he would kill a mosquito on himself and neatly place it on that same napkin. When he left, he would present the trophies to my mother. In his non-theater life, he served as a bookkeeper and his surname was Pechenkin.

‘You probably won’t like contemporary songs, either,’ says Valentina, pouring tea for me.

I already don’t like them. I keep quiet; I don’t want to be an enemy of everything new.

‘Previous songs were melodic,’ she continues, ‘but rhythm’s the main thing in them now. But there’s something to that, too, right?’

In recent days, I have noticed that she no longer looks like a medical nurse. She’s wearing her hair down now, which becomes her very much. Then again, Valentina’s initial appearance became her, too. When I stated that to her, she answered that it was Geiger who had asked her to act like a medical nurse. In the first days, they were very afraid the new reality would break me. It turns out that Geiger sought out the pince-nez, old thermometer, and all that. And then they eased up: I, according to Valentina, was hanging in there well and didn’t need any kind of operetta. In actuality, Valentina is a graduate student in psychology, writing her dissertation.

I can guess her material.

TUESDAY

On one Saturday celebrating the memory of departed parents, I happened upon Anastasia at Smolensky Cemetery. I was calling on my grandmother and father, and she was calling on her mother. She was leaving and I had just arrived. How had it worked out that we ended up there without loved ones (families usually visit the cemetery together on those days, after all)? I don’t remember. I remember only how glad I was when I saw Anastasia. At first we stood for a bit, then we began walking down a tree-lined alley.

‘How did your mother die?’ I asked.

‘From consumption. She had a drawn-out death. And Papa and I kept hoping she would live.’

I took her hand and firmly squeezed it – her fingers were cold. I felt a squeeze in response. We walked together to my father and grandmother’s grave. We cleared away dry fallen twigs and wiped the cast-iron fencing with a rag. They died back when it was still possible to order fencing. I could not even buy seedlings now, though: they had always been sold by the cemetery entrance. At first I decided not to weed out the grass (at least let something grow) but Anastasia insisted on it. She said grass means the memory of the person is overgrown and that the person is still present on earth in some way as long as there is someone to cope with that grass. I don’t know. I didn’t think so. Of course we weeded out the grass.

Then we strolled around the cemetery. Fallen leaves had not yet been cleared from the distant walkways and we inhaled their fusty smell. If your foot scooped up something bright yellow, it would be brown on the other side. The air was bitingly fresh in the nose. And, yes, I had a small drop hanging on my nose then – and so Anastasia brushed it off! She pulled a hand out of her muff and unceremoniously brushed it off. She began laughing. It was horribly awkward but at the same time… nice. It was almost… Anyway.

Yes, I almost forgot: we ran into Zaretsky then, too. When he saw us, he said:

And I’m here to commemorate my mother.’

He was holding a pink paper flower in his hand. The neck of a bottle was sticking out of the pocket of his threadbare coat. The entire bottle fit there, but the pocket bulged and the bottle was visible. I’m sure there was sausage in the other. I remember that it genuinely surprised me that Zaretsky had a mother at one time. She must have led him by the hand when he was small. And even earlier, carried him in her womb. How about that! It was easier for me to imagine that he had come about through budding.

And so I’m thinking: if it truly was autumn, then why did I want to buy seedlings? When are Saturdays in memory of departed parents? Three times during Great Lent, at Day of Rejoicing, and at Trinity Sunday. There’s Demetrius Saturday in November. Does this mean we were there on the November Saturday? Or did this all take place in the spring- now I had begun to doubt. There was sharp air, there was the muff, but why does it seem to me that it was autumn?

I am no longer certain we were stepping on leaves; it was more likely snow. Brown spring snow, mangy and shaggy. That lets out a wet squishing sound. We heard burbling as we walked past the Smolensky church: water was flowing from the roof into barrels. And steam came from our mouths with our words.

‘Imagine, our children and grandchildren will call on us here, too,’ said Anastasia. ‘They’ll walk around on the surface and talk. About, by the way, all sorts of nonsense. And we’ll be lying there, below. Silent.’

It sounded as if that would be our children and grandchildren, hers and mine. And that we would lie there together, silent. I walked along, thinking about her words, and imagined myself lying under the earth. And then someone who has already begun missing me and yearning is calling on me. That person will dream of returning to the city of the living from the city of the dead and anticipate living joys for the evening. I was imagining that then, too: how Anastasia and I would leave for home (on foot, along the Smolenka River) and drink hot tea in the kitchen, and I was seized by happiness. And the silence of my grandmother and father, lying here, did not stop me – they were always glad about my gladness. Though it was true, too, that for them – lovers of tea – there was no place at our table.