Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

‘You know, none of it stayed with me. It was only later, when I realized what that day was, that I brought back the memory. There was, if I’m not confusing things, sleet falling. More precisely, first there was rain and it changed to wet snow. I went out somewhere, forgot my scarf at home, and the snowflakes were melting on my neck; I felt their melting on my hot skin. There was wind, early darkness, you know that’s the nastiest time for Petersburg…’

I said something else, too, but at some point a slight motion began to my left: Geiger was signaling to the host to end. She asked one more question to finish up and stopped the recording, not without disappointment I thought, perhaps because Geiger had cut her off early, perhaps because of my answers. Most likely because of my answers: I don’t think she heard what she wanted.

After filming, they asked me if I could find the apartment I had gone to. I thought that I could: if I recognized the building, then why not… Geiger asked what they needed that for. They answered that they would like to film the moment of my encounter with the past. That’s what they wanted to call this show: An Encounter with the Past. Geiger said he could not let me be on a show with such a trite title. They offered to give it any other title but Geiger continued to waver. He was not sure a meeting like that would be to my benefit. He thought it should be prepared in advance instead. But the people from the television station persuaded him.

I did not recognize the front entrance when we approached. Instead of the carved oak door there hung something covered with wooden strips. It was swinging in the breeze, creaking. One of the two cameramen flicked at the strips with his fingers. ‘Veneer,’ he said. He disappeared into the darkness inside. The second cameraman proposed filming as I approached the door. They led me to the corner of the building and asked me to walk over again and go inside. I walked over and began opening the door but suddenly noticed there was a long screw sticking out of it instead of a handle. I hesitated: the encounter with the past had lost its refinement from the very start. I pulled at the screw with my thumb and index finger but the door did not open on the first try. I looked at my fingers: marks from the screw’s threads were distinctly imprinted on them. I took hold of the screw again and applied force. The door opened.

The first thing that greeted me inside was the acrid smell of urine. There was no light other than the beam coming from the television camera. It beat right in my eyes so I couldn’t see anything. I guessed as I placed my feet on the stairs. I walked up and the beam walked up, too, to my side. I stumbled and the beam stumbled: we had stepped on the same worn stair. I took hold of the railing to be on the safe side. This was an effective gesture in and of itself, completely in correspondence with an encounter with the past, but my hand didn’t slide up nicely: instead of carved smoothness -I repeat that my hand remembered that – I sensed a bare metal railing that no longer had wood on it. And though almost nothing was visible, my feet carried me on their own to the door I sought.

Geiger rang and – at first barely audibly, then louder and louder -there was a shuffling noise. The door swung open when the sound reached its upper limit (they knew how to shuffle in that apartment). A person in a holey undershirt appeared on the threshold. He was bald and seemed unsober. When the camera’s beam hit him, he squinted and asked the purpose of the filming. They explained to him that I had come to this apartment in 1923 and now wanted to go inside again. The man in the undershirt was not surprised but said he could not let me in today. He had guests today. He invited us to come back tomorrow.

What he did was right in its own way. One day holds no importance for someone who has been waiting nearly eighty years. For some reason I imagined his guests: they were most likely sitting there in undershirts, too, and had been sitting there a long time. And would sit in the future. I knew I would not come back here: otherwise they would remain with me instead of those who lived here before. They would occupy the place of those previous people in my memory, just as they had occupied their apartment. And I recalled the surname of the people who lived in the apartment before: the Meshcheryakovs.

Geiger was the first to walk out the front door of the building. He held the door by the screw, letting the rest of us out. He began telling how he’d been in various countries and how everywhere – despite wars and revolutions – old handles remained on entrance doors. Petersburg seemed to hold on for a fairly long time. Things did not come down to door handles until relatively recently, when people began unscrewing them for scrap metal. According to Geiger, the disappearance of door handles marked the conspicuous end of normal life. And the beginning of a gradual but steady decline into barbarity.

That Geiger certainly does place a lot of importance on door handles.

TUESDAY

Professor Giatsintov’s dacha. It maintained its coolness even in the Crimean heat. As I walked from the beach, I anticipated plunging into the dacha’s half-darkness – it would chill my overheated body. The coolness in this house was not linked to freshness. It was most likely linked to an intoxicating mustiness that blended the aroma of old books with numerous ocean trophies that had come (who knew how?) to this attorney and professor. Lying on shelves and dispersing a salty smell were dried starfish, pearlescent shells, a giant turtle shell (it was fastened to a sideways stand), a swordfish’s sword, a needlefish’s needle, a colonial cork helmet, and carved native masks. Speaking of natives, I hadn’t even the slightest notion of these items’ homelands. It is possible they were somehow linked to Robinson: I counted on that very much at the time.

Carefully moving aside the gifts from the sea, I took the professor’s books from the shelf. These were volumes by Mayne Reid and Jules Verne, stories of sea voyages and descriptions of exotic countries: things infinitely distant from jurisprudence. Professor Giatsintov collected at his Crimean dacha what children dreamt about but did not come true, that which his way of life did not encompass and which was not housed within the Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire. I suspect there were no laws at all in the countries dear to his heart.

I sat cross-legged in a boxwood chair (the aroma of boxwood added to the house’s smells!) and read Giatsintov’s books. I leafed through the pages with my right hand while my left clenched a piece of bread with butter and sugar. I bit off a piece and read. And the sugar crunched on my teeth. From time to time, I would raise my eyes from the book and think about how people become attorneys. Do they dream about that when they are children? Doubtful. I dreamt about being a fire captain and a conductor, but never an attorney.

I also imagined staying in that cool room forever: that I live in it as if in a capsule, that there are coups and earthquakes outside, that there is no more sugar or butter or even the Russian Empire outside, but I keep sitting and reading, reading… Subsequent years showed that I guessed right about the sugar and butter but, unfortunately, sitting and reading did not work out. The new life did not lend itself to reading.

Yes, this is important: on one of the cabinets there stood Themis, exactly the same as ours, except for the scales, because apparently nobody in the Giatsintov household had dared break them off. It seems to me now that it was Giatsintov who gave the statuette to my father. It is obviously an item to his taste.

SATURDAY

Today I asked Geiger:

‘Did my mother die?’

‘She died,’ he responded. ‘In 1940.’