Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

I looked at the cabinet where Themis stood, understanding that now nobody would sort anything out, that any outcome to the matter was unjust because there was no longer an instrument for weighing. The most frightening thing for me that evening was the sight of the bronze statuette with the broken-off pans: it was even more frightening than those creatures digging in my linens, perhaps more frightening than what threatened me later. The sight of that statuette left not the slightest hope. I suddenly realized in all clarity that the conception of right and not right had disappeared over several years or so. And of up and down, light and dark, human and beastly. Who would do the weighing, what would they weigh, and who needed that now, anyway? Only a sword remained with my Themis.

As they were leading me out, my mother stopped one of the GPU men and whispered a few words to him. This was the one who had been interested in my father’s watch. She took his hand and placed something in it. The watch – what else could she have placed there? The watch-lover smirked and did not answer. The hand with the watch slid into the pocket of his breeches. My mother pressed herself against his shoulder, still not understanding that was useless. She spent her final embrace not on me but on him, hoping to at least buy me some lenience. Anastasia was next to me and I did manage to press my cheek to her but when my mother rushed to me, the escort guards were already standing between us.

I turned on the landing and cast a glance at the lighted rectangle of the door. Behind the escort guards’ backs I saw my loved ones for what turned out to be the last time. Even now I see them with photographic precision. I know they saw me the same way when I turned. They photographed me for a lifetime: the flash of their grief illuminated me. The two photographs will merge into one after my death.

Outside, I was shoved into a closed van. When the GPU men climbed in after me, the door clanked as it slammed; I had never heard a more hopeless sound. Just under the ceiling was a window covered by a grate: thanks to that, I could differentiate my traveling companions’ somber faces. I saw the roofs and upper floors of buildings, too. I recognized several of them and from that understood where we were. I remember that it was not yet dark. Despite the evening hour, the sky was spilled with light: the white nights were approaching. I was parting with the city and felt I would never return to it. That is how things worked out. I have returned now to a completely different city. That one no longer exists.

MONDAY

As a child, I loved monitoring the work of pavers. How they laid wooden hexagons in wood-block paving. How they poured tar on the cracks and spread sand. Wheels rode softly and noiselessly along pavement like this – softness is characteristic of wood; it is alive. Sometimes in the mornings, before leaving for school, I would hear them repairing the pavement, changing blocks that had come out of place. They brought hexagonal pieces on a cart or chopped them there, from stockpiles, so they were the size of the pothole, then drove them in with massive tampers that produced muffled wooden sounds. I heard those sounds in my sleep and they didn’t bother me: to the contrary, they made the minutes before getting up even sweeter because the people working had risen long ago. They were suffering from the cold, bent in the damp wind, but I was lying in my warm bed, still lying there, my minutes seeming like an eternity to me. I felt the same thing when yardmen began clearing snow with shovels while it was still dark. They scraped it. Chipped ice. Had quiet quarrels. Unlike me, they were not glad for the snow. They were not waiting for it by mid autumn as I was when, each morning, I opened my eyes, raised them, and went still, looking to see if the ceiling was lit by the reflection of a street that had whitened during the night.

I do not like snow now, either.

Andrew of Crete’s ‘Canon of Repentance’ was being read last week and Passion Week began today. I would ask Geiger to bring me the ‘Canon of Repentance’ but it is very doubtful he has it.

I miss Valentina. Will she be back?

WEDNESDAY

Geiger told me the idea of freezing people came into the authorities’ heads after Lenin’s death. The authorities were uneasy, convinced by the Lenin example that a head of state undergoes the same changes after death as a rank-and-file citizen. Preserving bodies in a frozen condition until such time as science would be capable of prolonging biological life seemed to them like a way out. Their natural concern about posthumous existence served, according to Geiger, as a stimulus for research in the field of freezing. They did not even attempt to freeze the leader of the world proletariat himself: in fact they only began embalming him after decomposition was already well underway.

Geiger mentioned Academician Muromtsev’s working group, which was instructed to study issues related to freezing after Lenin’s death.

‘Is that name familiar to you?’

‘It is familiar,’ I answered uncertainly. ‘Yes, it seems familiar…’

It turns out that a lot of what I had read about in the American’s book was done back in the 1920s by Muromtsev. Rats and rabbits, they all froze and thawed beautifully in his laboratories: everything except monkeys, which were simply impossible to obtain in Leningrad at the time. The laboratory worked very successfully from 1924 to 1926, when Muromtsev was arrested.

As Geiger explained to me, in 1926 the academician flatly refused to freeze Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had a stroke after speaking for two hours during a Central Committee plenary session. The scholar explained his unwillingness to freeze Dzerzhinsky by saying that science was not yet ready for such complex experiments. He attempted in all sorts of ways to prove that the transition from rats to Dzerzhinsky was impossible without experimenting on intermediary forms. But they didn’t listen to him.

Muromtsev was accused of sabotage. According to his accusers’ account, he had not frozen Dzerzhinsky because he did not wish for Iron Felix to be defrosted at some future time. After several weeks of interrogations, the accused agreed with that account. He admitted that he felt sorry for those people who would live later and need to be involved with Dzerzhinsky, and said he had, well, on the whole, sabotaged the entrance of the Land of the Soviets’ leadership into immortality.

THURSDAY

I was not beaten at my first interrogation. Babushkin, who conducted the interrogation, only noted down data for the record. He also asked if I admitted my participation in the plot Voronin organized. He said an honest confession would safeguard me from many woes. I denied all the accusations and Babushkin heard me out pensively. He had a tired appearance that day. It even occurred to me then that he somehow looked grandmotherly, befitting his surname.

After the interrogation, they led me to a dark, vile-smelling cell. I lingered slightly in front of the open door (the sight was awful) and they pushed me, forcibly, over the threshold. I stumbled on something and fell to the floor. I lay, face down, for some time. My eyes were closed but my nose inhaled the stench of the place and my hands groped at a soft, almost rotten, wooden floor. It had been wooden at some time but dampness and sewage had changed its nature. I lay, not stirring, as if I still hoped what was happening was a dream, that I needed to not exhale, not move, and (the main thing) not wake up at this point in the dream, in order that it not become reality.

My hopes were not justified. In the end, I somehow stood. First on all fours, then at full height. I glimpsed the silhouettes of my cellmates – I could not discern more. One of them indifferently showed me my place on the bunks. Nobody asked me about anything and I said nothing. I lay down and truly did fall asleep that time, sleeping soundly, not dreaming. I awoke in the middle of the night from someone’s moan, then fell back to sleep. At morning wake-up, I could not understand where I was.