Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

So Nastya said all our troubles began with Zaretsky. Unlike with Voronin, though, I feel no hatred toward Zaretsky. I feel pity – mixed, perhaps, with disdain – but it is pity. How he choked down his sausage after locking himself in: you could only pity him, after all. I don’t even know what short-circuited in his weak brain and why he informed on the professor… In the end, something else is important: he was not a cannibal by vocation. Like, for example, Voronin. It is terrible that he was killed.

Since the film, people have been calling with interview requests; I refuse. I agreed for the first weeks after I was ‘discovered’ (as they say), but quickly realized I was repeating myself. I began attempting to say the same thing differently, but it came out worse and worse each time. I shared that with Geiger. He answered that there is no disgrace in repetition; he said all famous people do it, so I can boldly continue. According to him, the present-day press is constructed on an advertising principle: the more repetition, the better. He elaborated on an entire theory according to which a person’s striving for something new yields to an attachment to the old. This is especially vividly pronounced in children, who always reread more willingly than they read. Maybe that’s how things are: I always preferred Robinson Crusoe to all the new books… But I began refusing interviews.

Of all the callers, I only decided to help out one young miss: her voice was trembling. That is what trembling voices do to men. True, I agreed to answer only by telephone and just one question. She asked it for a torturously long time.

‘What’s the main discovery you made in the camp?’

That’s essentially a banal question, like everything that contains the words ‘main,’ ‘most,’ etc. It’s strange that she had to bleat on so long to ask that. The more banal the question, though, the more complicated it is to answer.

‘I discovered that a person transforms into swine unbelievably fast.’

THURSDAY

Today they called me from the ‘Frozen Foods’ company. They offered me an advertising contract. I hung up.

I typed on the computer yet again today: I typed up several pages from Robinson Crusoe. I write by hand much faster, though.

FRIDAY

As of today, I have been ill for a week. It seems, though, that I’m on the mend. My temperature is not high – around 37 – but I am mighty weak. Geiger stopped by early in the morning; he insists on bed rest. I am lying here even without his insistence, however: I have no strength. He laughed when I told him about the frozen food. He said this current era is a pragmatic one, that I should have thought hard before declining. As he left, he advised regarding advertising proposals more attentively, but I could not understand from his face if he was joking or not.

Nastya called, which made me feel even more lonely. She spoke sympathetically with me but I think she called out of politeness. That can be sensed from someone’s tone, after all. And what else could I count on? No, I have no pretentions regarding special relations with her; that is not what I have in mind. I simply feel that I am a stranger to everyone here. They have their life, their ways of speaking, moving, and thinking. They value other things. And it is not that their things are better or worse than mine: they are simply different. To those alive now, I came here like a person from another continent, perhaps even from another planet. They are interested in me and scrutinize me like a museum exhibit but they do not consider me one of their own.

Solitude is not always bad, though. When I was on the island, I dreamt only of solitude. I went to sleep very quickly after lights out – simply fell on the bunk – but several minutes would pass on the borderline before I collapsed into sleep for good, and that was a time for my reveries.

I imagined Robinson Crusoe trudging along the surf at the water’s edge: I was transferred to his island from mine and even if I had not changed places with him (why would he need my island?), for several instants I took his place in that blessed, uninhabited land. My bare feet sensed a carpet of leaves in a tropical forest where it was fresh even in the heat and green in winter because there was no winter there. The carpet crunched lushly underfoot. I turned huge leaves that resembled ladles toward myself and from them drank with delight the liquid that had collected after a night rain. It spilled unevenly, falling into my nose and eyes, twisting in the air into a tight, glimmering braid.

I never conversed with anyone other than parrots and they told me only what I wanted to hear from them. There was no compulsory work here, no escort guard, not even my prisoner comrades, humiliated and enraged: there was no longer anything that did not correspond to a human way of life or that I did not want to see. Those who created the Solovetsky hell had deprived people of what was human, but Robinson, after all, did the opposite: he humanized all the nature surrounding him, making it a continuation of himself. They destroyed every memory of civilization but he created civilization from nothing. From memory.

MONDAY

I read somewhere that Themis was depicted by Greeks without a blindfold over her eyes. Without scales, without a sword. The figure we know now is the Roman Justitia, who succeeded Themis. Well. The Romans, fine; Justitia, fine. I liked her that way. The raised hand with the scales (without scales at my house, of course), a sword in the other hand and even the blindfold over the eyes. A long dress dropping into folds, the left breast uncovered. That excited me as an adolescent.

Sometimes I would take the statuette from the shelf and place it on my desk. My finger would slide along her smooth polished surface. I would take her in my hand, surprised at how precisely she settled there: my fingers easily went into the folds of the dress and her raised arm became a rest for my hand. I admired the tactile perfection of the form. This is most likely what made me an artist…

An artist! I had been coming to this for a long time: simultaneously recalling and not recalling. Sometimes you recall something in a dream and do not believe it is the truth. But now I suddenly believed: I was an artist… Fine, I was not, I just wanted to become one, but: an artist. The answer to the question of who I was, after all, has come now, when I was thinking about Themis. It manifested itself in my consciousness in all its preciseness. Themis. Form. Perfection. And I: an artist, a student of the Academy of Arts. Sphinxes on the embankment. Vase, horse, Apollo. Pencils scratching on paper. Why had I not remembered that?

Just now I found a pencil and decided to draw something. Vase, horse… But it didn’t come out. Apparently I’m too excited. Despite the late hour, I called Geiger and asked him about my discovery.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you studied at the Academy of Arts, and very successfully, too. In light of certain circumstances, you didn’t graduate.’

As I listened to his weakening voice, I realized I had woken him and that realization was not without malicious pleasure. In recalling who I had been, I experienced not only joy but annoyance, too. It seemed to me that Geiger should have hinted to me about this long ago. I even told him as much. He (pause) answered that he himself had doubts on this score but in the end chose to stick to his decision. The fact that I had now filled that hole in my memory confirmed the correctness of that course: he said I should recall the most important things in my life on my own.

Well. And what if I had not recalled?

TUESDAY

Geiger came over this morning with a set of watercolor paints, paper, and sable paint brushes. My call seemingly made an impression on him. He examined me carefully and gave me permission to leave the house. I called Nastya right away. We met at Sportivnaya and rode to the hospital. Anastasia’s condition remained almost unchanged. I say ‘almost’ because just before we left, she raised herself on her elbow and called Nastya by name. Her eyes were looking at the ceiling as she did. It is unclear if they saw Nastya.