Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

‘Punishment for unknown reasons does not exist,’ answered Innokenty. ‘One need only think about it and an answer will certainly be found.’

Interesting logic. In a strange way, it coincides with the GPU’s logic. They always helped find answers at the GPU.

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

I keep asking myself if Nastya resembles Anastasia. Just after we met, it seemed to me that she resembles her. But now, apparently, no. I cannot identify the changes that have taken place in Nastya. Has she become more uninhibited? More self-confident? They say you can only get to know a woman through marriage. Perhaps that is yet another phrase, a cliché, but does that mean it’s incorrect?

Yes, Nastya was a little different during the time we were not living together. But it would be strange to maintain the style of our previous relationship when the circumstances of our interaction have changed. For example, we now see each other naked – does that mean we should use words from another time? It’s simply that Anastasia and I did not have this phase of life together, otherwise I think she, too, would have changed. And it’s already high time I stopped comparing Nastya with Anastasia. Nastya is her own person, she is not that sheep Dolly and not a copy of her grandmother. She’s a completely separate person. Why am I measuring her using someone else’s scale?

WEDNESDAY [NASTYA]

I was awoken during the night by something like quiet whimpering. When I turned on the nightlight, I saw it was Platosha. He was crying in his sleep and his face was wet from tears. He was trying to say something but wasn’t opening his mouth, and his voice was thin, somehow almost like a child’s. That’s why it seemed like he was whimpering. A face with closed eyes isn’t usually expressive but there was so much grief on his… Not a face but a tragic mask, reflecting what he’d suffered there, in his previous life. Wake him up? Or don’t wake him up? I wanted to cut that troubling dream short right away but was afraid that would only be worse. I touched my lips to Platosha’s eyes and sensed the salt. He opened his eyes but didn’t wake up. He closed them again and went on sleeping, without groaning.

Then I couldn’t go back to sleep. All kinds of daytime stuff started getting in my head. I remembered that today I’d made a final agreement about renting out my apartment and even accepted a deposit. I started deciding what to leave in the apartment: the furniture, of course, dishes, and some other stuff. Take: favorite books, all sorts of intimate little things, my grandmother’s things. In these cases, you usually put together a list but I didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to wake up Platosha.

THURSDAY [INNOKENTY]

Several GPU men raped a young woman in the medical department. I was lying on the other side of a wooden wall and heard everything. I couldn’t stand. I shouted to the doctor but there was no doctor. I began pounding on the wall but nobody paid me any attention. I continued pounding. One of the rapists came in, dragged me to the floor, and kicked me several times with his boot. I lost consciousness.

When I came to, I heard crying on the other side of the wall. The doctor’s voice was audible, too, and the jingling of medical instruments. Then the doctor came to see me.

‘I can point out one of the employees who was there,’ I said. ‘He came in to beat me and I remember him.’

The doctor carefully helped me lie on the bed.

‘Do you really remember?’ He turned at the threshold. ‘If I were you, I’d forget as soon as possible.’

It’s surprising, but I knew who was lying on the other side of the wall. This was the same unearthly creature I had seen once in an apartment on the Petrograd Side. A railing with wrought-iron lilies on the stairway, the smell of books in the apartment. She walked ahead of me. Limping. I moved slowly behind her along bookshelves. She limped, yes. Hair gathered at the back, shawl on her shoulders, and if you looked, she was exactly like a librarian, especially with all those books around. I had brought her several more books: some of the ones Professor Voronin borrowed from this family. The Meshcheryakovs: the surname blended with the address and was thus preserved. The Meshcheryakov family. What kind of family was it? I never did find out.

I never even learned her name. Did I not want to? Did I think a mystery could not have a name?

We went to their library (really, all the rooms there were a library). Two armchairs on opposite sides of a round table. She turned around, stood behind the chair further away, and placed her hands on its back. I was regarding her for the first time: no, she was not a librarian. Not at all.

‘Here.’ I held the books out to her. ‘They asked me to give these back to you.’

She remained silent so I said:

‘Thank you.’

She smiled. Her face was astonishing: gothic with sunken eyes. And a vein twisting around her thin neck. And that limp… She answered:

‘You’re welcome.’

She did not offer me tea because tea was simply not compatible with her – what, would she boil water on a kerosene stove? But she did not even offer me a seat. A queen. I stood and looked at her. I imagined the happiness of pairing with her. Not happiness: it was something else. There cannot be happiness with a woman like this, there could only really be the sweetness of pain. She was particular and that particularity attracted. Everyone. There is a reason that even the animal-like GPU men hunted for her in the medical department. The soloist women from folk-dance ensembles no longer got them worked up. They, the bastards, wanted the ethereal.

She came to me that night at the camp after everyone left. She hobbled in. Crawled in. She remembered me from Petersburg back then, too, and had recognized me here. She sat on my bed and then lay down, because she could not sit. I caressed her hands. I caressed her hair: it was wiry, stiff with clotted blood. Silently. I already knew that I needed to be silent with her. But our touches were deeper than words. Toward morning, she pressed her lips to my ear:

‘Thank you.’

I wanted to answer her but she covered my mouth with her hand.

‘I would no longer exist otherwise.’

Her hand smelled of medicines.

Lying alongside me, she was Anastasia. When she left, I knew I would kill the GPU man. I felt at ease and fell asleep.

FRIDAY [GEIGER]

Yesterday they contacted me from the Smolny building. They said the governor is inviting me and Innokenty to meet with him. Since the question of Innokenty’s apartment had been decided at the gubernatorial level, I replied that I would ask Innokenty to come.

I called him. He had nothing against it. Basically, he regarded it very calmly.

We arrived there just before twelve today. We had to wait a little; the governor was meeting with someone. There were already journalists in the meeting room when they invited us in. They sat the conversation’s participants in armchairs by a round table.

The governor read a few phrases from a piece of paper. I can’t remember a single one of them now other than the final phrase. It said that Innokenty, like no one else, should understand the difference between democracy and dictatorship.

Innokenty thanked him. As I understand things, nothing more was required, but Innokenty decided to respond. Essentially, why not?

Innokenty said that the proportional level of evil is approximately identical in all epochs. Evil simply takes on various forms. Sometimes it presents itself through anarchy and crime, sometimes through the authorities. He, someone who has lived so long, has seen both.

The governor thought for a moment and asked how Innokenty feels.

The answer wasn’t formal here, either. The guest told the governor about changes in temperature and blood pressure. Of course that was unexpected. Aber schön. [7] But lovely (Germ.).