Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

‘You’re paying for not being sick all those decades,’ he told me. ‘It’s an adaptation process.’

Nicely stated…

A nurse comes to see me three times a day. Not Angela but a dull middle-aged woman, a sick man’s dream. Takes my temperature, gives me pills. Sometimes gives injections. She calls Geiger each time (I hear his distressed, mosquito-like voice on the other end of the line). He comes to visit every evening now.

The last time I took ill was on the island: of course, care was different there. Different. In the evening the medical attendant took my temperature: it was 39.5.

‘Excuse me from work tomorrow,’ I requested.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘The quota for being excused has already been used up. Just go for light work. It’s 39.5, so I’ll intercede.’

I barely rose in the morning. The weak barracks light bulb blurring in my eyes. Darkness, November, five hours left until sunrise – and what was the sun there? Worse than the light bulb. I could not believe my ears at the job assignment: ditch-digging. And I had no strength to walk. Not even strength to object. It was very bad, though perhaps a little easier than typhus.

I was standing in water up to my knees. I had bast shoes for footwear but it was even more difficult in bast shoes so people took them off before working in a ditch. I felt an icy cold with my feet; the rest of my body felt fever. Such a fever that the water would start boiling near my feet any minute now. The soles of my feet slipped along the swampy, peaty earth. I pulled earth out of the water, shovel after shovel. It came up to the surface with a squishing sound. As if it is parting from its environment. Bleeding black ooze, shovel after shovel. I could not go on. I lay on the edge of the ditch.

Voronin. I saw Voronin walking with his revolver, but I had no strength to even stir. Yes, it appeared he’d shoot me now, too. And everything would end for me: ditch, wake-up, thin gruel. Zaretsky did well: he had none of this. They whacked him with a heavy object; he didn’t even suffer. But I was beaten at interrogations and smothered in the hold of the Clara Zetkin so they could finish me off, weakened, on the edge of a ditch. One shot and I’d be gone. No more being read to by my grandmother when I was ill, no dacha in Siverskaya, no Anastasia. That was how much I, alone, would drag off behind me. Or maybe that would all remain somewhere, in some part of the universe, not necessarily in my head after all: it would find itself a tranquil harbor and exist there.

Voronin kicked me and, to my surprise, it didn’t hurt. Maybe because I no longer correlated myself with my body. Well, he kicked… Someone told Voronin I was ill and he kicked me again. I should have shut my eyes, as if I had lost consciousness – why did I not close them? Or lose consciousness for real because assimilating what happens is so difficult when fully conscious.

Voronin acted as he always acted. After beating one of us zeks, he forced him to urinate in a mug. He brought the mug to my face and ordered me to either drink it or go to work. He cocked the gun and counted to three…

They say that what was done in concentration camps has no statute of limitations. I will send that description to the office of the public prosecutor, police – or what is it – the supreme court: let them hear about Voronin. I feel my temperature rising as I write. There is noise in my head. I will make it to the Day of Judgment, charging Voronin not so much with torment and murder as appropriating the surname dearest to me. Do they attach significance to surnames there?

Then I truly lost consciousness. That saved me from being shot and I ended up in the infirmary. Upon recovery, I was sent to an isolation cell on Sekirnaya Mountain, for refusing to work.

MONDAY

Today Geiger announced that nurse Angela will no longer be coming to see me. Well, that’s reasonable. I understand why they sent her to me but I don’t consider it correct. I don’t need such a vulgar nurse.

TUESDAY

One of the television channels showed a film about me today. It was compiled from extracts of interviews that I gave recently. The extracts are interspersed with Solovetsky newsreels, set to sad music. The music takes the place of all the sounds and words from that time, which were, of course, not musical. Especially the words.

They say that a half-truth is a lie. The falsity of that newsreel is not even that it’s straightforward flimflam filmed at the order of the GPU. I never saw anyone in the infirmary in clean linens, nobody read the newspaper or played chess in the common room, etc. I repeat: that is not what’s at issue. It’s simply that, in some strange way, the black-and-white figures darting around the screen stopped corresponding to reality: they are only its faded signs. Just as petroglyphic drawings in caves – animals and little figures of people – are hilarious and remind one of real people and animals but say nothing about life back then. You look at them but the only thing that is clear is that bison were four-legged and people two-legged, essentially the same as now.

There were Solovetsky sounds, though: a head striking the bunks when a guard came in, took a zek by the hair, and beat, beat him against the bunk’s support post until he was tired; or the snap of nits pressed by a fingernail. There were smells, too. Of squashed bedbugs. Of unwashed bodies: after all, we worked every day until we were worn out but we hardly washed. And that all wove together into the overall smell of despair, the color and sound of despair, because it only seems that they are concealed within the soul and out of reach for the sensory organs.

Of course the sound of the forest and the swaying of ferns and the smell of pine cones and the sky also existed on the island. If you placed your hands to your eyes in the fashion of binoculars, closing out the surroundings, then you could imagine that this was not the sky over Solovki but somewhere over Paris or, at the very least, over Petersburg. Things of this sort gave birth not so much to hope as to a change of fate (it was not foreseen), and they seemed to attest that elements of the rational still exist on earth, in nature if not in people. Here there is also the creak of a door in the wind (a listless sort of creak but then a sudden energetic slamming) and the smell of the fire at the logging site. You look at the fire for a minute, toss in a piece of kindling or two, and that seems to ease things. It burns as it should. Human laws can be revoked but it turns out the physical ones cannot.

I took in the newsreel footage (they showed it with stylized crackling) and recognized a lot. I recognized the Holy Gate: oh, how my heart missed a beat when I entered it for the first time. After all, by stepping from the boat to the dock, I was already in the camp, but I only acknowledged my imprisonment after entering the gate. By mistake I wrote impoverishment, which is not so bad, either. I recognized the chief, that scoundrel Nogtev. Regarding scoundrels, by the way: it seemed to me that Voronin flashed somewhere there, too. Was it him or not?

Take Voronin: who is he now? A heap of bones if, of course, he was not cremated. He instilled such fear in all of us at the time, but now he is dust, a small gray figure in the footage. And I called him a scoundrel; I continue to hate him. It’s just that if this is happening now, it works out that I hate the present-day him and it’s already obvious who that is. Who, then, do I hate? If I feel all that for the him that was then, does that mean he is not dust? Perhaps Voronin became a part of me by remaining in my memory and I hate him within myself?

WEDNESDAY

Nastya called and asked after my health. It’s nice that she’s concerned. I catch myself thinking I miss her. I asked after Anastasia’s health. I cannot bring myself to say ‘your grandmother’s,’ though that is what Nastya always calls her. Everything is fine, she said, meaning, as usual.