Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

‘It’s known that in the first weeks after thawing you experienced certain complications with your health. Do you feel better now?’

‘Better,’ I attempt to loosen up. ‘At least better than in liquid nitrogen.’

Applause: what a fellow, he’s warmed up and he’s joking. I sense that I’m blushing.

‘And you spoke with Blok?’ shouts someone from the back rows.

Geiger stands and shakes his head reproachfully.

‘I did ask-’

‘I saw him at a poetry soirée,’ I answer, ‘but did not speak with him. I did speak with Remizov, in a queue. He lived on 14th Line…’

‘What did you speak about?’

Geiger knocks threateningly on the microphone with a pencil.

‘I don’t remember.’ Laughter smothers me but I try to restrain myself. ‘ I went to 8th Line for provisions and he went there, too. And I did not know he was Remizov; only later did I realize that, from a photograph.’

My lips stretch into a smile and everyone in the hall begins smiling. I roar with laughter and everyone roars with laughter. I begin sobbing and there is silence in the hall. Geiger rushes to me (his chair overturns with a crash), takes me by the shoulders, and leads me out to the courtyard through the back door. A car is waiting for us there. A fevered chill hits me: this is how I was frozen through for all those years. And now I will never warm up again.

WEDNESDAY

And I did very much want to speak with Blok. I, someone who knows so little by heart, had memorized his poem ‘The Aviator.’ Here is its beginning:

Someone even found Blok’s telephone number for me, but I never did call. I repeated that number to myself day and night. I can say it even now: 6-12-00.

THURSDAY

They brought us from Kem on a barge, the Clara Zetkin. In a hold that was tightly battened down, devoid of light and air. I was one of the last in our batch of prisoners to board the barge and so ended up on the stairway right beside the exit. There were fewer people there, and sea air seeped in through crevices in the deck hatch. That saved my life. Many of those who were pushed into the hold first were crushed or suffocated.

A storm came up about an hour after we set sail from Kem. The waves in the White Sea are smaller than in the ocean but harder to bear: perhaps this is precisely because of their low height. The very weakest began vomiting as the rocking began. People were packed into the hold like sardines, and they puked on themselves and those around them. Because of this, even those who did not usually fear the pitching began feeling ill, too.

But the worst was ahead. Heart-rending screams rang out when the ship began rolling from side to side. This was people dying; they were standing at the sides. A thousand-pood human mass was pressing them against the rusty iron side of the barge, flattening them into pancakes. When their mutilated bodies were dragged along the dock later, a trail of bloody diarrhea stretched after them.

I vomited, too: I was simply turned inside out. The fear of drowning that had seized me in the initial minutes of the rocking passed quickly. The indifference that arose painted me a picture of cold, transparent depths where I no longer vomited or heard the screams of the dying. Where there were no escort guards. In those frightening hours, for some reason I did not think about how – even on the seabed – none of us would break out of this darkness and stench, and that even at that final depth, the rusty hatch of the Clara Zetkin would remain battened down and that what lay ahead for us was eternal swimming in our own feces and puke.

They kicked us, driving us out on the dock in the Bay of Prosperity. They ordered those who were in no condition to move to be dragged by other prisoners. Those who were walking and those who could not walk all felt roughly the same. We were happy to remain alive because none of us had seen anything in our life scarier than the belly of the Clara Zetkin. At the time, we thought we would not see anything worse.

On shore, they formed us into columns and began teaching us how to answer the authorities’ greetings. We shouted ‘Good aftern—’ to the division commander, the commander of the brigade, and the camp’s chief, Nogtev, who swayed drunkenly in front of the columns and expressed his dissatisfaction with the greeting because our shouting was disunified. After everything we had lived through at sea, we had no strength left. We wanted so much to sleep. So as not to fall asleep, I deeply inhaled the sea air, which was part of the previous free world. This means, I thought, that a part of that world will still remain in our life.

We repeated our greeting countless times but the wind carried it over the entire island; that made it no better. Nogtev considered our good aftern —insufficiently cheerful, and one has to think that was the case. We simply lacked the strength for a cheerful good aftern —. Career criminals and academicians, bishops and the tsar’s generals all shouted, but their voices did not merge into one. I was standing in the first row, next to General Miller. This was a military general who had gone through the Great War and was still fairly young. Seagulls flew around us and I listened: they, too, shouted good aftern — and, apparently, better than we because Nogtev had no grievances with them. I probably fell asleep for an instant after all…

When I opened my eyes, Nogtev was already headed toward us. I was certain it was because of me. That my unmilitary appearance had provoked the rage of the head of the camp and now he was walking over to do me in. But no: he was not walking toward me but to Miller, a model of order and bearing. Nogtev’s trained eye immediately noticed the person he himself could never become. He was approaching, in his leather jacket, his gait springy, clearly a ruffian. He reached for his Nagan along the way.

‘How do you stand before the chief?’ Nogtev began yelling. ‘You have to keep your eyes peeled, son of a bitch!’

Miller looked calmly at Nogtev. He straightened the rucksack on his shoulder and there was neither fuss nor fear in that motion. His leather jacket crackling, Nogtev placed the Nagan to the general’s forehead and lingered for several instants. In those seconds I decided that now he wouldn’t shoot. Eyes set narrowly. An overlooked hair on shaved Mongol cheekbones. Lingering in these situations amounts to cancellation.

Nogtev shot.

Two guards dragged the killed man to the guard booth by his feet. They grabbed the rucksack as they went. The body remained, lying in a strange pose: on its side, an arm uncomfortably twisted underneath. Eyes open. With his previous calm, the general continued observing what happened on the shore.

Later they trained us how to turn. We turned to the right, to the left, and around, and a warm summer wind fanned us because it can be warm in the summer even on the Solovetsky Islands. The smell of pine sap and taiga berries blended with the sea’s freshness in that wind. The White Sea did not smell like southern seas but its freshness penetrated every cell in the body. A northern sun that did not set glimmered on the crests of the waves. We stood with our backs to the bay, but that glimmering was visible when we turned around, and it genuinely cheered me. It reminded me of the sea in the areas near Alushta, where I vacationed with my parents in 1911.

FRIDAY

Yes, Alushta. We stayed in Professor’s Corner at Attorney Giatsintov’s dacha; he was my father’s master’s-degree advisor at one time. When it turned out the Giatsintov family would be spending the summer of 1911 (?) in Nice, the old man offered his Crimean dacha to a former student as a place to stay. That’s how we ended up in Alushta, yes, exactly, it was 1911.