Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

Babushkin beat me at my second interrogation. In reality, he probably had not been in the best condition the night before and had decided not to begin the case half-heartedly. It could also be that he had some sort of errands after work that evening. This time, Babushkin was fresh and in no hurry. He sat me on a chair, tied my hands and feet, and then, after rolling up his shirtsleeves, hit me in the face with a swinging blow. I felt blood flow from my nose along my lips and chin. When I fell along with the chair, Babushkin tore off my shoes and used a wooden truncheon to beat my heels with all his might. It was unbearably painful but did not lead to serious injury. Serious injury was probably not encouraged, even in his department.

I was not afraid when Babushkin was tying me or when he was rolling up his sleeves. He thought he was scaring me that way. But he did not scare me: he beat me, even taking a certain pleasure in it. Silently. I was silent, too. I saw many beatings later in my life that were accompanied by shouting and cursing, but this was the most unusual because of its wordlessness. After asking a question once, Babushkin decided to beat me until I answered. I did not remain silent out of heroism. It was as if I had fallen into unconsciousness and only feebly understood what was happening.

After not receiving an answer to his question, he asked me another anyway.

‘How did you,’ he said as he was beating me, and, oddly enough, Babushkin continued using the formal ‘you’ with me, ‘how did you kill your neighbor Zaretsky? Zaretsky wrote to us that you threatened to kill him, but we ascribed no significance to that.’ He waved Zaretsky’s letter in front of me. ‘But we should have.’

Two guards dragged me by the arms to my third interrogation. My feet had swollen so much after the beatings that I could not walk on my own. My shoes would not go on and my bare feet trailed along the corridor’s stone floor. At that interrogation, Babushkin read me Averyanov’s testimony, which described, in detail, my role in Voronin’s counterrevolutionary plot. At that interrogation, I admitted my participation in the plot and confessed to killing Zaretsky.

FRIDAY

Geiger brought me the ‘Canon of Repentance’ and I read it all day. Slowly, stopping.

Whence shall I begin to weep over the deeds of my cursed life?

What beginning shall I make, O Christ, to my present grieving?

SUNDAY

Today is Easter. During the night, Geiger and I went to St Prince Vladimir Cathedral, where I used to go in years past. Geiger initially did not want to bring me there, fearing I would catch some sort of virus in such a crowd, but I insisted. The whole street was packed with cars and we left ours a block from the church. There truly were many people.

Outside, the police were attempting to handle the crush; we could barely enter. Inside was crowded, too. Stifling. Nothing had changed there, though the icons had completely darkened. Geiger bought two candles and we began making our way forward. This turned out not to be so simple. We joined a narrow flow that was moving in fits and starts. Only after standing for a few minutes did we realize that this was a trickle, that’s how slowly it was moving. Wax from my candle dripped on my fingers without burning. I sniffed: it was paraffin, not wax.

Another Easter came back to me, too: without candles and not even in a church, but under an open sky. It was not simply open, it was cloudless and bottomless, with flashes of northern lights playing on it. It was the only occasion in my memory when we, the prisoners, were let out of our barracks at night and we gathered by the cemetery church. I had never seen an Easter like that before and probably never will again. Primarily bishops filled the church, so almost no space was left for priests and laymen.

We stood among the graves in melting snow drifts, catching words from the service, which carried out the open doors. It already smelled of spring, too: the breeze was warm, and under our feet there lay those in the tombs. For the first time in many months of life on the island, I felt a sense of relief. We knew that a day of excruciating labor awaited us after the sleepless night but nobody returned to the barracks because the feeling of happiness that enveloped us was dearer. Even those who were at the beginning of a long sentence at the camp believed in their impending release. They saw it clearly in the sky’s night radiance.

TUESDAY

The long-awaited press conference took place yesterday. True, I was not the one who had been waiting for it and was not hastening it. I was just worried; how would I be received? I didn’t sleep the night before or the night after. I was only able to fall asleep this afternoon. I woke up just now, and it’s evening, dark outside, and uninviting. I feel the previous worry approaching and will not sleep again tonight: how will I live now? My own obscurity had screened me, as if it were snow, but what now? Now everyone knows my face, I’m a celebrity, but I did not need that at all. If I were a contemporary of modern-day people, my celebrity would gladden me: I think I would bask in it. Only I am not one of them so why should I establish myself among them? They looked at me as if I was a fish in an aquarium, and curiosity was the only thing in their eyes. I felt as if I didn’t know who I was. Exactly as in childhood, when they pushed me to the middle of the parlor and said: ‘Go intrepidly.’

But I felt trepidation. I peer through a crack in the door before entering the conference room: oceans of people, television cameras. They tell me that many others could not make their way in here. And I suddenly recognize this room. I was in it when I studied at the university. Maybe this is the university? Does remembering the room mean I studied here? A good student question. I have enough sense not to ask anyone… It turns out not to be the university. Without my asking, they inform me we are in a building of the Academy of Sciences. There’s a mosaic by Lomonosov – ‘Poltava’ – over the grand staircase (they show it). Was I an academician in my past life?

Everyone applauds when I enter the room with Geiger, and a vice president of the Academy of Sciences. The vice president says that, to his mind, the applause is for the Russian Academy’s scientific might and for my human courage. I lower my eyes at his words about courage since all my memories of the freezing are hazy. It is the same with courage.

Some of those circumstances become clear when Geiger takes the floor. He announces to attendees that the freezing was conducted at the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp by Academician Muromtsev’s group, all of whose members ended up there. I shift my gaze to Geiger and he nods to me in the affirmative without interrupting his speech. He had not alluded to the Solovetsky Islands in our conversation about Muromtsev. In essence, I could have guessed about the islands.

Geiger speaks for a long time yet, lingering on the specifics of preserving my body and the medical details of thawing, but I am no longer listening. A lot begins to fall into place in my memory: island, torture, cold. Especially the cold, which was cosmic and insurmountable, and which kept deepening and ended, it turns out, with this.

Afraid of damaging my recovery, Geiger forbids journalists from asking me questions about the past. They ask about the present. I answer the first questions in a somewhat cold-ridden voice, clearing my throat from time to time. My temperature, I say, is normal. My blood pressure is within the norm. I keep sensing the rough surface of the microphone with my lips and hear myself as if from a distance. The pauses in my speech are filled by the clicking of cameras. I utter brief sentences and am ashamed of myself: this is how a thawed baboon might answer, not a person of the Silver Age.