Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

Seva said that in essence not very much was needed, though we wouldn’t collect a sum like that in pocket money very quickly. According to his calculations, it also worked out that getting one prostitute for the two of us was far cheaper than getting two; we simply needed to arrange things properly. Based on our young age (Seva laughed a little), the girl would think we weren’t worth much in terms of bed matters, although we would (Seva made an indecent motion with his hips) simply tire her out.

The occasion presented itself at the end of yet another school year. We were celebrating at our place on Bolshoy Prospect and each of us had received money from our parents as a reward.

‘We’ll go to the prostitutes today,’ Seva whispered in my ear. ‘Be ready.’

I didn’t answer. I did not even clarify what he had in mind about readiness.

‘They get picked up nearby, on Bolshaya Pushkarskaya Street.’

I wavered, then nodded. In the end, there had been so many conversations about this that leaving Seva on his own now would have been a betrayal. And, to be perfectly honest, I, too, was experiencing, well, a certain curiosity, let us say.

And so we went. Along the way, Seva told me what exactly to do with a lady and how.

‘It might not work out today for one of us,’ Seva said, as if by the by. ‘That happens when you’re nervous.’

His critical gaze at me made it clear whom this might not work out for. He did not permit himself to gaze at me like that very often at all.

The girls were standing in the place Seva had predicted, and that raised my degree of trust in him. When Seva headed toward one of them (the largest of them, it seemed to me), I preferred keeping a distance. He tossed me an absent-minded glance but did not change his direction. After approaching the one he chose, Seva struck up an extensive conversation with her. He pointed at me from time to time and the girl shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t even glance at me in earnest because by all appearances the question hinged not on me but on money. In the end, Seva managed to come to an agreement with her and she invited us both to follow her.

‘We have two hours with her,’ Seva whispered to me along the way. ‘Meaning an hour each.’

The girl Seva intended to tire out was named Katya. Of course she was not a girl, either by age or line of work. I scrutinized Katya furtively as I walked to one side of her: she was at least thirty years old. We did not walk long at all. Katya turned into the courtyard of a wooden house and went up to the second floor.

There was nothing in Katya’s lodging that I had imagined, neither scarlet drapes nor a huge canopy bed. It was a poor lodging, somewhere Katya simply lived after she was free of clients. And Katya herself resembled a priestess of love least of all. Leaning her elbows on the kitchen table, there stood before us a tired woman not in the prime of youth.

It goes without saying that Seva was the first to enter the room with her. I stayed in the kitchen, prepared to plug my ears at the first moans. But no moans followed. Seva came out of the room a half-hour later, hands in his trouser pockets. As red as a crayfish (had he been steamed?) and already dressed. Katya came into sight in the doorway behind him, also without any particular disorder to her clothing. Her tiredness (he’d worn her out after all, the heel!) had obviously increased. She gestured, inviting me into the room. She smoothed her light-brown and, I think, not very clean hair.

‘And so. I said it might not work out for one of us today…’ Seva blurted out.

The cheerfulness of his tone left no doubt that this was a reference to me.

‘For whom, I wonder?’ I asked him, not without a challenge.

‘For me…’

A forced smile appeared on Seva’s face. That smile – along with his inexpressibly sad eyes! – made hearty laughter begin to rise from deep inside me. It came out convulsively when it reached its upper limit, and then I could not stop. I was surprised when Katya burst out laughing, too. She laughed coarsely and meanly, her entire large body shaking, and there was no longer a speck of tiredness in her. Even Seva laughed, squealing a little – there was nothing else left for him to do.

It stands to reason that I did not go with Katya. We paid her for one person. She continued laughing as she received the money. When we went outside, we looked at her windows for a long time. It was a sunny June day. A light breeze carried the smells of warmed wood and of the horse manure that lay here and there on the cobblestone roadway. It stirred the curtains in Katya’s window, behind which (I saw) Katya was standing and watching us. I did not retain her face in my memory but the smells and the swaying of the curtains in the window stayed with me. And the dull glistening of the cobblestones in the sun and the wooden houses. Later I learned that women similar to Katya resided in those houses. Geiger and I recently strolled along Pushkarskaya Street – those houses are no longer there, and neither are the women. Their bodies decayed long ago, after absorbing so much sweat and sperm.

THURSDAY

Geiger said that my biological age is around thirty. I barely aged in the liquid nitrogen.

SATURDAY

They came to search our apartment a week after closing the criminal case regarding Zaretsky. Now, though, it was the GPU, not the criminal investigators. By this time, I’d seen both types and could compare. For the most part, criminal detectives were recruited back before the revolution. They were comprehensible people for me, even likeable in a way, with a distinctive sense of humor. Those who worked for the GPU seemed their exact opposite: their gloomy focus did not dispose them to joking. I shared this observation with Detective Treshnikov when they summoned me to identify Zaretsky. He laughed and said the main difference between criminal and political investigation consisted of criminal investigators seeking out a person because of a case and political investigators seeking out a case for a person. Treshnikov showed little respect when speaking about the professional qualities of GPU employees.

They were the ones searching my room, though. I had already seen a search in the Voronins’ room and the one taking place now was much the same. The only difference was that many of the objects that the GPU searchers touched had their own histories and my mother and father’s contact had lent them a special spirit, my father’s in particular since he was no longer with us. It was difficult to see one of the visitors weigh my father’s silver watch in his hand and hold it to his ear. He opened it – though not with the touching jaunty gesture my father made – somehow clumsily, like a monkey, as if he were revealing a nut he had found.

It was distressing to observe them rummaging in the linens. I knew my mother’s squeamishness and well imagined her feelings when someone else’s hands were groping at sheets and nightgowns. I’ll launder everything, she was thinking, I’ll launder everything thoroughly so not even a trace of those hands remains. Or maybe she wasn’t thinking that. She sat in a stupor, afraid to move at all. She was imagining that my fate now lay on frightening fluctuating scales and she was afraid of tipping the pan toward my destruction.

Of course I’m confusing things: the scales are what occupied my thoughts. And my mother was not sitting: Anastasia was the one sitting and I was afraid she would lose consciousness. But my mother was grasping the visitors by the hand and saying I was not guilty of anything. They responded that revolutionary justice would sort things out and she continued speaking, quickly and incoherently, as if she wanted to say an incantation over my unfortunate fate…