Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

On the way back, I proposed going somewhere for lunch. We came out of the metro at Ekaterininsky Canal, which has now been renamed. The little restaurant that Nastya brought me to looked out on Kazan Cathedral. The canal’s granite separated us from the cathedral and its unseen waters flowed somewhere below.

‘Order for both of us,’ I requested. ‘It’s been about a hundred years since I was last in a restaurant.’

‘Eighty-something,’ Nastya corrected me.

‘I was being coy.’

We were sitting opposite one another by a window and the huge cathedral took up the entire window. It looked at us with obvious reproach because it had seen me out for walks so many times with Anastasia. Sitting with her on granite steps that were cold even on summer evenings. The final picture that remains in my mind is from autumn: a newspaper tossing about hysterically between the columns. In the dusk, it resembles a medium-sized ghost and Anastasia and I look at it silently. Both we and the cathedral were eighty years younger then.

Now it has seen me with Nastya. This is not what you think, I could have told it. But I did not. My mouth was busy with the beefsteak Nastya ordered but this was not even about the beefsteak: I myself did not understand what was happening to me. Do I like Nastya? Of course I like her. Being with her is easy and nice. I had not experienced those two feelings in either my camp years or (even more so) in the decades that followed. Do I consider that I am somehow being unfaithful to Anastasia like this? No, I do not. When that question came into my head there, by the window, I got worked up, but I’ve calmed down now at home. I’ve realized how absurd the question is. My gaze fell on Geiger’s paints: when had he managed to buy all that today? Or maybe he didn’t buy them today? Maybe everything was purchased for the future and had been awaiting its time?

WEDNESDAY

Picture windows curtained in canvas. Plaster copies of ancient statues. Michelangelo’s slave, the Discobolus. Apoxyomenos, head doubly tilted – forward and to the side, a difficult perspective. Proto-forms: sphere, cube, cylinder, pyramid, cone, six-sided prism, triangular prism. Parts of David’s face: nose, eyes, lips.

For half of last night I attempted to draw with paints. Nothing came out.

THURSDAY

Some popular magazine or other has commissioned me to write an article about 1919 in Petersburg. This is very opportune for me right now. For whatever reason, the drawing just is not coming along but maybe writing will work out? The pay isn’t bad, either; I had not expected it would be so much. I warned the editors right away that I will not be writing about events or even people: they knew all that without my telling them. What interests me is the most minor of everydayness, things that seem unworthy of attention and are taken for granted by one’s contemporaries. This everydayness goes along with all events and then disappears, undescribed by anyone, as if it had taken place in a vacuum.

They nod to me: write, they say, no need to ask, but then I can’t stop. So, I say, shells remain within layers of rock: billions of shells that lived on the ocean’s floor. We understand what they looked like but we do not understand their natural life outside the layers of rock: life in the water, among rippling seaweed, illuminated by a prehistoric sun. That water is not in historical compositions. You, they laugh in the editorial office, are a poet. No, I object, summoning the spirit of Geiger: I am a chronicler of lives.

FRIDAY

I climbed Sekirnaya Mountain with two escort guards and felt my stomach cramping from fear. I was ashamed of my fear because I had never before been so afraid, even when I was on the way to Solovki. The escort guards were calm or – more likely – indifferent people, which in camp terms is the best thing possible. They did not urge me on and they barely cursed, but they also displayed no particular interest in my fate. They did not even speak about anything amongst themselves. It was obvious they had tired of camp life and were now simply conserving their strength. It was not just prisoners that the camp wore out.

As we were climbing the mountain, an inconceivably beautiful expanse opened up before us. Yellow forests. Dark blue lakes. A leaden sea somewhere at the very horizon. I recall: the forests were not completely yellow. Green spots of spruces were visible, as if someone had poured one paint into another but had not stirred. I began feeling uneasy. I took that beauty as a sign of my rapid demise. I thought that something like this could only manifest itself before death, as the best thing that one is granted to see during life. The escort guards could have seen it, too, but they were looking in the wrong direction.

They led me to an isolation cell located in the church and knocked with their rifle butts. A lock clanged on the other side of the door, like a wolf’s teeth in a fairy tale. As if it were swallowing me. I was ordered to enter; the escort guards remained outside. I cast a parting glance at them after stepping over the threshold. It was rough for me, very lonely, that they were leaving. As if a child had been surrendered to a shelter by his relatives. Even those people seemed like relatives to me before the face of the death awaiting me.

I was led to the upper chapel and ordered to take off my shoes and strip to my underwear. Seeing that the floor was cement, I asked permission not to remove my socks. They struck me in the face. I entered my new cell barefoot, in my drawers, and my face bloodied. It was actually good that they struck me. It was easier for me that way.

SATURDAY

Today I came to the metro a half-hour early to meet Nastya. That did not happen by chance, however: as I was leaving the house, I realized it was still early. I sat on the parapet near our meeting place and thought: What, I cannot wait to see her? I even shrugged my shoulders. No, I decided, I simply do not feel like sitting at home. It’s dreary at my place, there are only ghosts there.

I watched workers lay asphalt on the roadway. Unwashed, unsober workers wearing dirty (once orange) vests tossed hot asphalt by the shovelful and a roller flattened it. Their faces were awful, too. There were not even faces like this when they laid the wood-block paving. It began raining, first finely, then harder. The water collected in bulging puddles on the oily, smoking asphalt. Smoke mixed with steam: hellish work. Does asphalt last long when it is laid in the rain? And by faces like those, too.

I saw Nastya from afar: fragile, with an umbrella. Resembling a statuette, something I (as an artist) value very much in women. When she noticed me, she picked up her pace and almost began running. Because I’m getting wet. I froze for so many years and now I’m getting wet. She ran up and sheltered me from the bad weather. She took a tissue from her pocket and wiped off my face – very nice! The rain stopped right then. Nastya clicked her umbrella and it collapsed. After grasping it as if it were a wet bird, she neatly folded its winged pleats.

We descended into the Metro. Thanks to Nastya, I already knew how to stand on the escalator during the descent: one step lower than a female companion, face turned toward her. Drops glistened on my female companion’s hair. A damp imprint from the umbrella smudged on her bag.

‘You know, Nastya, I remembered who I was.’ I paused a bit. ‘An artist. A beginning artist.’

She looked at me with mild curiosity. She doesn’t know how long it took to recall that.

‘Were they able to find your work from back then?’

I shook my head in the negative. Nastya turned me in the direction we were moving and we disembarked from the escalator.

‘That’s fine, you’ll draw new ones. You will draw?’ She smiled.