Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

Anastasia’s gaze greeted me. I took small steps toward it, as if to a streetlight in the dark. I felt Nastya’s hand on my shoulder, but that didn’t help me. I would even say it hindered me. I probably should have gone in to her alone. My voice froze in my throat and I did not utter a word as I approached the bed. I sank to my knees and pressed my forehead to Anastasia’s hand. I sensed her other hand – almost weightless – on the back of my head. The hand moved. It was stroking my hair, as it had stroked it in another time. There we were in our apartment on Bolshoy Prospect and everyone was still alive: my mother, Professor Voronin, and even Zaretsky. He was alive, too. They had all gone out about their business, and Anastasia and I remained. She was ailing and so I went in to see her. And I placed my forehead on her hand and she stroked the back of my head. I had been seeing all this, awake, and it turned out I was speaking, speaking out loud. They were silently listening to me: Anastasia, Nastya, and the nurse. Suddenly Anastasia broke the silence. She said:

‘Zaretsky.’

It sounded like a gate squeaking. Or a nail on glass. It was not her appearance that was furthest from how she was then, it was her voice. I raised my head. Anastasia was looking at the nurse.

‘Zaretsky, after all, is my sin.’

The nurse nodded, obviously out of politeness. It’s doubtful she knew anything about Zaretsky.

‘What do you mean, Granny?’ asked Nastya, her tone assuming no answer.

‘I… What do they call it now? Put out a contract on him… Exactly that, a contract! And that’s it, the trouble.’

‘Granny!’

‘That’s your grandmother for you. Trouble…’

Anastasia inhaled sharply and had an uncontrollable coughing fit. The nurse pounded on her back and raised her on the pillows. Without showing Anastasia, she signaled to us to leave. Her precautions were unnecessary: Anastasia could not see anything anyway. She was half-lying, breathing heavily, and her eyes were closed. We went out.

Several minutes later, they wheeled Anastasia out of the room on a stretcher. The stretcher was racing at a speed unusual for a hospital but we didn’t lag. Those coming in the other direction jumped toward the walls of the corridor. The stretcher flew off into the wide-open doors of intensive care at full speed. Those doors closed in front of us.

An hour later, an intensive-care doctor came out and told us Anastasia was in a coma. We stayed, to stand by the intensive-care doors. They brought us chairs a while later and we sat on them until evening. At around ten, they requested that we go home, citing hospital regulations. I did not even know it was already ten: after all, it’s light outside. Nastya and I understood this wasn’t about the regulations: they felt sorry for us. We left.

SUNDAY

We went to the hospital in the morning. No change.

Geiger called in the evening. It turns out that yesterday marked a half-year since the day my consciousness returned.

Will Anastasia’s consciousness return?

MONDAY

Everything is as before. Under these circumstances, that can be considered a piece of good news.

WEDNESDAY

We were at the hospital today and yesterday. We sat on chairs in the corridor. They asked us what the point was in our sitting if we would not be let into the intensive-care unit anyway. The point, we say, is that we are nearby.

The chief physician invited us to his office yesterday and announced that his staff were doing everything possible. He served us cognac. His face was rosy after the cognac and he grew rather uninhibited. He said there was basically no hope whatsoever. He gave Nastya and me business cards, for the second time, I think. As he saw us out, he straightened the lab coat tossed on his shoulders. According to Nastya, the suit under his lab coat was expensive. And would have completely lost its effect if the lab coat were all buttoned up. The suit under the lab coat reminded me of Academician Muromtsev. There was nothing else of the academician whatsoever in the chief physician.

Muromtsev. His suit, shoes, and, most important, his manner of speaking, were all very atypical of Solovki. He examined me once a day, sometimes with the attending physician, sometimes separately. Little by little, I began to understand that his interest was separate, too, and only partially coincided with the doctor’s interest. I did not, however, need very long to surmise about that interest. One time, Muromtsev asked the nurse to leave us by ourselves and then, as they say, he filled me in.

After the academician’s refusal to freeze Felix Dzerzhinsky’s corpse (1926), the Laboratory for Absolute Zero and Regeneration in the USSR was arrested en masse and sent from Leningrad to Solovki. Attempts to justify themselves through the absence of experience in freezing people were unsuccessful. Muromtsev’s letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party – in which he stated in detail the results of freezing rats and explained his refusal to freeze Dzerzhinsky – did not help, either. According to the investigator who interrogated Muromtsev, a resolution written in Joseph Stalin’s own hand was on the letter and it deemed the academician’s decision a mistake. It was indicated in the resolution that when working with Dzerzhinsky’s body, it was necessary to employ the very same scientific methods as before, regarding the deceased as a large rat.

At the same time, the letter about freezing obviously made an impression on Stalin. From Muromtsev’s point of view, that explains the happy fate of the LAZARUS employees. They not only avoided the firing squad, they were also accommodated in humane, by camp standards, conditions. After ending up on Solovki, the laboratory workers found out the author of the resolution was feeling a personal interest in the experiments they had conducted. He had not yet crushed all his enemies but he knew he would certainly deal with them and then the time would come to think about immortality.

That interest manifested itself to its full extent when Stalin telephoned Academician Muromtsev one day. He asked if the rats used in the experiment remained alive. After receiving an affirmative answer, Stalin proposed continuing the experiment on live people. The academician had not expected scientific guidance from the political leader but nonetheless ventured to object along the lines that upon filling blood vessels with a solution, it is not so particularly important whether the organism is dead or alive, that it might as well be dead upon freezing in any case, and, finally, where would he find live people for goals like those, anyway?

Stalin went silent. He sincerely did not understand the problem since there were still so many live people at the camp. The political leader asked the academician to pass the phone to the camp chief and ordered him to find live people. Assuming he was being blamed for the conditions in which he held prisoners, the chief promised, in a weak voice, to find live people. He was, of course, not being blamed for anything, though.

Live people were found in the isolation cell at Sekirka. From the camp chief’s perspective, these were people ready to do anything. They had no exaggerated expectations about how long they would remain alive. Their advantage over other live people lay in the fact that they would choose freezing voluntarily. These people did not need to be subjected to beating that would ruin human material and, thus, the experiment’s purity. People from Sekirka were delivered to Anzer, fed well for several months, and then used for the experiment.

Muromtsev told me about much more (he later invited me for walks more than once) but each day I listened to him less attentively. I walked along the shore with him, nodded to him when his speech broke off, and laughed when he laughed, though I was thinking about my own matters. Sometimes I was not even thinking, I was simply watching as muddy shreds of foam floated along the shore. As sharp Anzer rocks tore open an ebbing wave. Muromtsev and I had a warm relationship: in some sense we had a common cause. But one circumstance existed that gradually distanced me from him: Muromtsev remained alive. And I was preparing to die.