Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

In an interview for one of the women’s magazines, they asked me (in an interview! with me!) if I give Innokenty Petrovich high ratings as a man. An obnoxious question, of course. And I answered that the question is obnoxious but couldn’t help myself and said that as a man Innokenty Petrovich is, well, whoa!

I sat and sat and then crawled under the covers again. I started thinking about all kinds of stuff. Yesterday, for example, yet another advertising agent – representing some kind of furniture company – contacted me. He asked Platosha to bring it to the attention of the public that furniture prices are rising rapidly everywhere but at their company, he says, where they’ve been frozen for three years now. The client’s thought is that TV viewers will perk right up and start buying their furniture. For this low-key statement, they’re offering Platosha a figure fifty per cent higher than what he gets for the vegetables… so that’s something to think about. And furniture, yes, would be a little more respectable than vegetables.

SATURDAY [INNOKENTY]

Marx says to me, tapping with his cane:

‘Construction lines are the foundation of the work. You haven’t perfected construction of form, it’s too early to move on to the light-and-shadow model.’

But I apparently moved on. Why, one might ask?

SATURDAY [GEIGER]

A proposal came to Nastya: they invited Innokenty to host a corporate event. At a cooling-unit factory, by the way. It was Nastya herself who told me. She was asking for advice.

I took her by the shoulders and advised her to slow down.

Nastya wasn’t against that. According to her, the reason she’d approached me was that the proposal seemed questionable to her.

Well, wonderful that it seemed that way. Because I’m already feeling alarmed about Nastya’s proactiveness. Innokenty senses that.

‘You probably see Nastya as very pragmatic,’ he said to me the other day. ‘In Russian terms, self-interested.’

‘No, I don’t see her that way. I think it’s still childishness speaking in her. It’s simply speaking in a contemporary way.’

Innokenty looked at me with a lingering gaze.

‘You know, I think the same thing.’

We both started laughing.

I can tell you when I didn’t feel like laughing. When I saw the television advertisement with Innokenty. I don’t watch television, I just turn it on for a short while during supper. For the evening news. And then right after the news, there’s Innokenty in a barrel. And liquid nitrogen and vegetables. And that strange text…

At first I wanted to have a serious talk with Nastya. Then I thought, well, maybe she’s right in a way. Money’s definitely necessary. Money. Geld. [6] Money (Germ.).

MONDAY [INNOKENTY]

I see that all Nastya’s activeness irritates Geiger. In a conversation with me, though, he himself defined it as childishness. That’s very correct: it truly is childishness. That sort of perception of the matter helps me, too, reconciling me with what it is about Nastya’s behavior that’s disagreeable to me. No matter how it manifests itself, though, Nastya’s childishness moves me, sometimes almost to tears. At times it scares me because it belongs to another world and it’s so incongruous with me and my experience.

I fear that we will never completely bond because my experience – I have already spoken of this – did not form me. It killed me. I’m reading a lot now about the Soviet time and, well, it seems I stumbled on the thought in Shalamov’s writings that one should not tell of the horrendous events in the camp after living through them: they are beyond the bounds of human experience and it may be better not to live at all after them.

I have seen things that burned me up from within: they do not fit into words. Shipments of female prisoners were delivered to the concentration camp and raped by guards immediately. When signs of pregnancy appeared for the unfortunate women, they were sent to Zayatsky Island – the island for Juliets. This was the place they punished sexual debauchery, which is severely penalized in the camp. The conditions were terrible on this absolutely bare island, where the wind blew eternally, and many did not survive. I write that and now shadows that were once people wander along what I wrote. The words crumble to dust: they do not come together into people at all.

If power is to return to words, the indescribable must be described. Thin faces of women from the Smolny Institute under the slobbering lips of GPU men. Under their unwashed hands. These bastards reeked of sweat and stale alcohol, and when they called for the most beautiful women to ‘wash the floor,’ the women could not disobey.

The wail of a woman whose husband was shot, five children were taken away, and who was, herself, sent to Solovki. There they raped her and infected her with a social disease. A doctor informed her about the disease. She rolled along the frozen ground by the front steps of the infirmary. At first they did not beat her, ordering her to stand. Then they began kicking her with their boots, ever harder and more frequently, beginning to enjoy themselves, becoming animals. She shouted loudly, her voice high, briefly going quiet after blows to the gut. The most terrifying thing about her wail was not its strength but the unfeminine bass note that concluded each of her high-pitched screams.

I saw that. And I have been unsuccessfully driving it from my memory ever since. That’s what I live with, what so separates me from Nastya and makes us people from different planets. How can we live together if we are so endlessly different? She has a spring garden and I have that abyss. I know how terrifying life is. But she does not know.

TUESDAY [NASTYA]

Today was Platosha’s press conference. My husband looked far more confident at this one than the previous one. That occurred to me during the press conference and was confirmed for me after watching it in the evening rerun. There’s no point in describing it: it’s all published in The Evening Paper.

TUESDAY [GEIGER]

I watched Innokenty’s big press conference this evening.

He was sitting in front of an advertising display screen. That lent the proceedings an extraordinarily commercial look.

Innokenty has become more self-confident. He answered calmly.

He twirled a pencil in his fingers. Nastya told me later that the vegetable PR agency brought the pencil (it’s a good thing it wasn’t a frozen carrot). To create an image of confidence. I don’t think Nastya needs that sort of thing.

There was no getting around some of the lovable ad-libbing that life abounds with. When Innokenty was answering a question about the level of government support (a disappointed hum in the hall), the TV camera cut to Motherland LLC on the advertising screen.

It wasn’t just the cameraman who noticed the patriotic firm. A reporter from one of the newspapers pointed at the advertising screen and asked Innokenty if it didn’t seem to him that the Motherland truly was an LLC with regard to him. The joke went flat, though. Innokenty didn’t know what the abbreviation meant.

He still didn’t laugh when they explained all that to him. He began discussing, in all seriousness, how there’s nothing bad in the Motherland having limited liability. Everyone, he said, should be liable for his actions. Only personal liability can be unlimited.

And then he said it’s pointless to blame the government for one’s troubles. And it’s pointless to blame history, too. One can only blame oneself.

The correspondents then grew gloomy. One asked:

‘And you really don’t blame the government for the fact that you landed in a camp? That they turned you into a block of ice? That your life became utter punishment, for unknown reasons?’