Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

‘I don’t remember how it’s done. Nastya, can you imagine, I don’t remember…’

SUNDAY

All day yesterday I compiled, in my head, a plan for the article. It came easily, with no effort at all. I am an artist, after all, an artist, not a historian. A sequence of events is not important to me: all that concerns me is the fact of their existence. I wrote down the points of my plan as I recalled them, without any logic at all.

There were no new things: everyone wore old clothes. There was even a sort of chic to that: a difficult time, a beloved phrase then. Know how to survive a difficult time: wear out existing items and do not don the new ones, even if you have them. We wore out items with enthusiasm.

Newspapers were not sold but pasted to the corners of buildings. Groups of laborers read them. It brought people together.

Secret trade of provisions. Open trading was forbidden.

Water did not go all the way to upper stories. Water was stored there in bathtubs. People filled bathtubs to the brim with water but washed themselves in basins.

Also about clothes: everyone went around wrinkled because when it was cold we slept without undressing.

More often than not, lamps did not burn; the electricity operated for a couple of hours each day. People made kerosene lamps.

Waste pipes froze in the winter. We did not use the toilet but went to privies in the courtyards, more often than not with chamber pots, to empty them. But there were not privies in every courtyard.

Trams were a rarity; one had to walk. And if trams did show up, they were crammed full.

An unusual sight: no smoke from chimneys in the winter. There was nothing to heat with. People took apart wooden structures for firewood. Doors between rooms were sawed up. One time Anastasia was sick and I borrowed fifty logs from the yardman, then racked my brains for a month about how to repay it. In compensation for the firewood, I had to give him a silver saltcellar that had belonged to my grandmother. It was a pity.

Ration cards. For sugar, bread. I acquired galoshes for myself with my labor card.

Long hours waiting in line for kerosene at Petrocommune.

Flatbreads made of potato peelings. Carrot or birch tea. Also about food: a fallen horse lay for a long time at the corner of Bolshaya Morskaya Street and Nevsky Prospect; a piece of meat had been cut from its croup.

The most popular gifts in 1919: sealing wax, paper, nibs, and pencils. I gave Anastasia a jar of molasses.

I am attempting to reconstruct that world, which is gone forever, but I end up with only meager shards. And also a feeling – I don’t know how to express it correctly – that we differed from one another in the world back then, were alien to one another and often enemies; but when you look now, in some sense it works out that we belonged to one another. We had our time in common and that turns out to be quite a lot. It connected us to one another. I’m frightened that now everyone is alien to me. Everybody except Anastasia and Geiger. I have only two people who belong to me, but back then it was the whole world.

MONDAY

Today I asked Geiger why it took me so long to recall that I had been an artist. And to explain (my voice suddenly gave me away here) how it is that I cannot manage to draw anything now.

‘It’s something to do with the brain cells that are responsible for that realm,’ said Geiger. ‘By all appearances, they weren’t restored after thawing.’

‘But that was my primary activity…’

‘Maybe that’s exactly why those cells didn’t restore themselves.’ After a silence, he added: ‘On the other hand, you write very well. Your creativity, as they say now, lost one channel but gained another. Are your literary descriptions really not a form of drawing?’

A graceful answer.

TUESDAY

I was thinking about Sekirnaya Mountain again today. Painting and literary descriptions are all powerless here. Well, what kind of description can convey round-the-clock coldness? Or hunger? Any story implies a completed event but there is a dreadful eternity here. You cannot warm up for an hour, or two or three or ten. And it is impossible, after all, to accustom oneself to either hunger or cold. The residents of the second floor of the isolation cell are barefoot, wearing only their drawers, and sitting on beams. The room is unheated. It is forbidden to speak, forbidden to move. The beams are high and feet do not reach the floor. After several hours the feet swell so much that it is impossible to stand on them. The torture lasts and lasts, and that lasting kills. How can you describe that torture? You would need to write for as long as it drags on. Hours, days, months.

It is rare for someone to endure for months – people lose their minds but more often die. You sit from early morning, you feel your dangling soles and a draft wafting along the cement floor. The boards dig into your thighs. Then, when your feet already seem to feel nothing, there comes a full-body agony and the impossibility of sitting. You imperceptibly place your hands under your legs and attempt to push back from the beam the slightest little bit so there will at least be some sort of motion.

The guard’s eyes are in the door window. They watch for your hands to tense, for your bent-at-the-knee legs to raise slightly higher than your comrades’ feet. The guard enters; he has a stick. He beats you – on the head, on the shoulders. You slip from the shelf and hit your head on the floor, shrieking wildly. And you seem detached from your tormented body. From your own beastly shriek. Is that you shrieking? Are the guards who ran in kicking you? Tying you up? He twists your arms and ties them behind your back, to your feet. You are no longer a person, you are a wheel, why do they not roll you?

They drag you up steps and haul you into the ‘lantern.’ The ‘lantern’ is the upper part of the church, which formerly served as a lighthouse. There is neither light nor glass now. Only wind, the strongest wind on the top of a hill. You resist it for a time but then your resistance vanishes. And time – that continuousness that is impossible to describe – vanishes. You give yourself over to the will of that wind: it will heal your wounds, it will carry you off in the right direction. And you fly.

THURSDAY

Today when we were at the hospital, Anastasia uttered, ‘Innokenty.’ Without regaining consciousness, just like when she mentioned Nastya’s name before. And so her consciousness is glimmering, some sort of events are taking place there, someone is present in it. Nastya and I, for example.

FRIDAY

Anastasia called me by name again.

I bent over her and said:

‘I’m here, Anastasia.’

I repeated that several times, slowly and distinctly.

I asked:

‘What did you want to tell me?

She was lying with her eyes closed. Breathing heavily.

Did she hear me?

SATURDAY

He resembles Karl Marx, but wearing glasses. His right hand rests on a cane, the left draws on a board with a long metal pointer that has chalk at the tip. How the eye is constructed. The eyeball, covered by eyelids from above and below. All the invisible lines are being drawn as if they were visible; the form is depicted as transparent.

It suddenly occurred to me that it probably would have been better if Marx and his numerous followers had drawn. They could have copied Michelangelo’s David, rubbed away the extra pencil lead with stale bread, and gone to Plyos to make sketches. I think there would have been less grief in the world. A drawing person is somehow loftier, gentler than a non-drawing person. Values the world in all its manifestations. Takes care of it.

I shared these notions with Geiger. He pursed his lips and went silent. He answered my direct question about my theory by saying he could not corroborate it. He does know one universal villain who was an artist in his youth. What can you say about that? The influence of art has its own limitations.