Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

A bottle of wine turned up in the bag, too, along with the news-sheets. Seva placed it on the table with a confident thud.

‘Did he give you the bottle, too?’

‘No, I filched the bottle at home. To mark the beginning of the revolutionary struggle. Bring some glasses.’

He had not commanded like that in a long time. I brought glasses. Seva was simply glowing from the realization of his involvement in a mystery. After we drank down one glass each, I asked him if he had read the novel The Possessed. For some reason Seva began to speak to me condescendingly and nasally:

‘You know, there’s no need to bring novels into it, all right? That’s all in the past, a hundred years ago. There’s an objective necessity now for taking power into one’s…’

‘Fine, no novels. Coup d’état attempt. Five years of hard labor, if not ten. Farewell, grammar school; farewell, Petersburg. Are you prepared for that?’

It became clear right then that my cousin was not prepared for that. It was only because I had begun to pity him that I did not laugh out loud. Seva was rosy-cheeked after the wine but paled noticeably and his lips, as it happens, began quivering:

‘It just seemed to me…’

I could say that the hair on Seva’s head stood on end because of a breeze from the window. Perhaps I will say that: what that expression covers does correspond to his condition. Seva was still speaking muddled-headedly and I was looking at him without listening. Why, I thought to myself, had I scared him so much? Why did I interrupt his flight – when, in all seriousness, who would touch him, a grammar-school student? Well, in the worst case, they’d flog him, but even that was unlikely.

Seva was so upset that he did not even drink all the wine. He left the news-sheets and the bottle with me and requested that I destroy them. Of course I destroyed them because neither alcohol nor coups attracted me. I took the bottle with the unfinished wine out to the rubbish bin – it turned out Seva had filched it for naught. I threw the news-sheets in the stove and those nuggets of revolutionary thought burned without a trace. Their contents completely escaped my memory.

What remained was a warm September day that strode into my room through an open window. An open window in autumn is such a rarity. The quivering of a palm on a carved (roses and lilies) stand.

A slanted ray of sun that alit on the desk. In focus: a stack of books. A light, thin coating of dust unnoticeable without the sun. A ladybug on a history book.

SATURDAY

Lera Amfiteatrova asked:

‘So do you want me?’

I was seeing Lera for the first time but answered in the affirmative, for how else could I answer at the age of fifteen? It was the so that struck me more than anything: it aspired to be the result of some sort of communication but, as it happened, there had been no such communication. There had been several glances – mine – at a young woman standing at the other end of a parlor. She caught them. There was more provocation in how she did that than in the glances themselves. Did I want her? I don’t know. Maybe I did want her. But I looked at her because she was unusual. I knew from the courageous cut of her dress that she was an emancipated woman.

In our class, people didn’t hold back when talking about emancipated women, describing, in detail, their outward appearance and moral laxity (Lera presented all that immediately), so I identified her without difficulty. She behaved in full accordance with the commonplace description, with the exception, perhaps, of not having short hair; she fulfilled her part, as they say, ‘to a T.’ What was surprising was that I, someone not at all remarkable, became the object of her attention. Or maybe that’s not surprising. Why display your progressiveness to someone who is already fairly progressive?

She took me decisively by the hand and led me toward the exit as music played in the parlor. It seemed that we were moving in time with that music and that our rhythmic movement was paralyzing what remained of my will. I am now attempting, unsuccessfully, to recall what parlor this was, what music it was. That doesn’t matter anyway; it all disappeared immediately. I remember Lera’s sweaty palm, despite the fresh breeze outside. Wandering through dark, walled-in courtyards in search of the apartment her girlfriend had lent to her (she said us). Lera held the apartment key at the ready in her free hand, and that hand reached in the direction we were moving. Both the key, taken out in advance, and the reaching hand gave our motion a striving as well as an even greater degree of theatricality.

We soared to the top floor on pocked steps. Here, Lera finally used her key and we entered a small room. The only furniture was a bed, table, and chair. Behind the chair was the white flash of a small door that apparently led to a kitchen. Lera walked right up to me. She was slightly taller than I and my nose drew in her moist breath. She tilted her head. Touched her lips to mine. Ran her tongue along my lips. Slowly turned her back to me.

‘Now unlace my dress…’

Ash-brown ringlets quivered on her neck. I began unlacing.

‘Are you unlacing a dress for the first time or what? And is all this also for the first time?’

‘All this for the first time…’

Lera sighed deeply. The dress was unlaced and removed. After the dress there followed a light blouse and a petticoat with flounces. Pantaloons and a chemise. A corset that I also needed to unlace (once again to Lera’s sighs). I fiddled for a long time with garter fasteners: in the end, Lera undid them when she took off the corset. She sat on the chair. I crouched and removed the stockings from her legs. My hands with the black stockings descended along Lera’s white skin. Surprisingly white. Women did not sun themselves then.

Needless to say, the number of Lera’s complaints and sighs increased when we lay down in bed. Lera was not shy in directing my motions and she promised someone unknown that she was teaching a boy for the last time. After a while, it seemed that Lera’s sighs lost a shade of indignation, but I am not fully certain of that. How old was she? I think she was eighteen, no more. She seemed utterly adult to me then.

Then she smoked, sitting on the chair. Legs crossed, still undressed. Her thumb and index finger held a silver holder with a cigarette and she carefully released smoke from her mouth. I silently watched her after settling myself on the bed, cross-legged. I was seeing a naked woman’s body for the first time. After pointing at my cross, Lera asked:

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s shameful to be a religious believer in an epoch of aeroplanes. I’m a priest’s daughter and I don’t believe.’ She inhaled smoke. ‘Why do you keep silent?’

‘Did aeroplanes really abolish death?’

Lera began laughing:

‘Of course!’

MONDAY

I recalled. I recalled everything about the aviator. I was about ten or twelve years old when my father took me to the Commandant’s Aerodrome to watch aeroplane flights. No Commandant’s Aerodrome had existed even a couple of years before: there was only the Commandant’s Hippodrome where air demonstrations took place. Once they built the aerodrome next door, the demonstrations have been taking place there… I know from Geiger that in today’s life this is called an air show but I like demonstrations much better. I think there are too many shows in life these days. I’m speaking as a person who has watched TV all week.

July, sun. A warm wind blowing at the lace on parasols. Many people wearing straw hats; a few wearing triangular hats made of newspaper. We’d arrived first thing in the morning, so were standing in the front spectator row. We could examine not only the aeroplanes but also the aviators. I firmly resolved to become an aviator the very first instant I glimpsed those people. Not a fire captain and not a conductor, but an aviator.