Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

SUNDAY

Today Geiger and I went to Smolensky Cemetery. We began the morning with a service in the Church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God (I began that way and Geiger sat outside), then we went to the chapel of Blessed Xenia. It turns out Xenia was recently canonized. I remember that my mother and I stopped in at the chapel at one time and people were already revering Xenia then: those who came left little notes. My mother said: ‘You write, too.’ And I wrote. What did I ask for then?

I can still see my mother on that spring day, in a headscarf tied so tightly it seemed to be squeezing her facial features, lending her a severe and somewhat distressed appearance. At first it was overcast and the wind was blowing, but then blueness took shape on the very edge of the sky. We were sitting by my father’s grave and the blueness broadened until it came to our sorrowful place, where it stopped. And so my mother and I sat on the border of blue and gray, and nothing more changed in the sky. I poured vodka into shot glasses; she cut thin slices of bread. Threads of veins ran through the back of her hand; it seemed as if I had not seen the veins before. It’s possible they popped up from the cold. Or perhaps it was the beginning of her old age.

‘What did she die of?’

I purposely asked this along the way so as not to have to clarify anything at my mother’s grave. At one time, my mother had forbidden me to speak of those present in the third person; and she was, despite everything, present here. There would have been a sort of awkwardness to my questions.

‘Of pneumonia.’ Geiger blew his nose into a paper handkerchief. ‘They said she caught cold here.’

We had no trouble finding the grave; it was not far from the walkway. Nothing had changed on the surface since my mother entered. She had entered in the literal sense: the fence was designed for two plots and, as Geiger told me, my mother was buried over my grandmother. The same granite cross was there, the one my father installed back in his day, after my grandmother’s death. His name had been carved on the cross after his death, too. When my mother was buried here, nobody carved anything, simply because there was nobody to do so. Despite the absence of a name and a mound, of course my mother was present here. That was perceptible.

Geiger took a flask and a set of silver shot glasses in a leather case out of his side pocket. There was cognac in the flask.

‘In 1940, they sent her a notification of your death,’ said Geiger, filling the shot glasses. ‘What’s interesting is that pneumonia was given as the cause of death. After freezing you, the Chekists displayed a sense of humor – even the secret police have one. Pneumonia. Caught a cold in liquid nitrogen.’

We drank without clinking our glasses.

My mother had no remaining loved ones after this notification, and she had nowhere to go but the cemetery. She would sit there for hours at a time, conversing with the departed. She died of the same illness they attributed to me in the notification. Was that by chance? I will not find out until I see her. When thinking about my mother, I had supposed that she might have died during the blockade – perhaps this was because I had been reading about the blockade in recent few days.

‘There are graves of other people I know at this cemetery,’ I told Geiger.

He nodded but did not answer, likely expecting further questions from me. But I didn’t ask. About anything. As we walked out the cemetery gates, I thought: It is good that my mother did not live to see the blockade.

Did Anastasia live to see it?

TUESDAY

My father, who has a cold, is gargling in the bathroom and I am getting on a stool next to him. I want to observe with my own eyes the mysteriousness that gives birth to guttural gurgling sounds, those strange modulations – from rumbling to groans – that you do not hear from your father at any other time. This is how a naturalist climbs to the edge of a crater, striving to reach boiling lava before eruption. At my request, my mother gives me a candle. The flame only slightly illuminates the roiling in my father’s throat and the main attraction lies in that concealment. Later, after I had grown a bit and was already gargling masterfully myself, I discovered that it works even without a voice. It works, though poorly, for the voice prolongs the exhale and makes it more powerful. Voiceless murmuring is powerless and pitiful.

WEDNESDAY

Logs. Large logs were called balany on the island. At the end of a shift, each of us had to turn in thirteen of these logs per assignment to the Chekist. We worked in pairs, meaning twenty-six in all. The assignment was unachievable, at least for those who had never done this type of work before.

The tree had to be felled and stripped of branches and sticks, but first you had to get to the base of the trunk, which got lost in the deep snow. We dug it out with our bare hands: there were no shovels; they did not even issue mittens. We let our hands warm up by raking snow away with our feet, which might as well have been bare because our footwear was bast shoes worn over footwraps of burlap. After stripping the base of the trunk, we took a two-handled saw to it and began sawing. Initially the teeth would slip from the frozen trunk but the work became easier when the saw’s blade entered the pine’s flesh. Time seemed to disappear with the identical rhythmic motions; you yourself would fall into another reality. Crouched or kneeling, we would saw until our hands froze on the saw handles. Then we would stand and switch places, while switching hands. We needed to stand in order to warm our frozen feet at least a little bit, too.

Feet quite often became frostbitten and had to be amputated. This did not mean the number of one-footed people on Solovki increased dramatically: those people did not usually survive. They died in the infirmary from general exhaustion or from a stump being wrapped in poorly laundered rags following amputation.

That’s how Vasya Korobkov, my work partner, died. He had been saying since noon that he did not feel his feet, but none of the Chekists listened to him. I knew that Vasya could no longer saw: he could not even stand and was sitting in the snow by a tree trunk. I attempted to saw by myself and he just hung on his end of the saw, not moving his arm. Toward the end of the shift, we produced only ten logs, less than half the quota. They left us in the woods until morning to complete the assignment, the usual penalty. Vasya cried, beseeching the Chekists to allow us to return to the barracks. They didn’t allow it and began beating him with the butts of their rifles; I was on the receiving end, too. Their cursing drowned in the snowstorm and even their blows could barely be felt in all those white particles.

We spent the entire night in the woods but did not make one more log. At first Vasya lay on the snow, then I laid him on a log, took off his bast shoes and rubbed his feet with snow: they were like ice, cold and hard. Half the night was dark and then the snowstorm suddenly stopped and I saw Vasya’s face in the moonlight. Tears were running down it but there was no longer anything pitiful or whiny in that: Vasya’s features had become motionless from the cold. His face had lost its ability to cry or laugh, and a significance – even a solemnity or something – had appeared on it.

From time to time, I would run back and forth to warm up, but you cannot run particularly fast when you have no strength. Everything began again in the morning for me, with no sleep or food. They gave me a new partner and forced me to work. Two prisoners dragged Vasya to the infirmary, where both his feet were amputated. He died a day later from blood poisoning.

When I told Geiger one time that we worked in temperatures of forty below, without warm clothes, without footwear, and without food, he told me he did not understand how anyone could remain alive under those conditions.