Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

FRIDAY [GEIGER]

They called me from the presidential executive office. They announced, in ceremonial terms, that Innokenty and I are invited to Moscow to receive state awards.

I remembered right away: they’d called me a couple months ago. They’d asked who, besides me, was worthy of an award for a brave scientific experiment. I answered that, to begin with, I don’t know if I’m worthy of that. They politely interrupted and proposed that I think about it anyway. Wahnsinn… [8] Insanity (Germ.).

If taking part in the experiment was brave for anyone, it was Innokenty. I named him.

This time, it was my interlocutors who expressed doubt. They were concerned that Innokenty Petrovich was, in some measure… the object of the experiment.

‘No,’ I retorted, unexpectedly fervently. ‘No, no, and no.’

He was the most genuine subject, if they could appreciate what those words meant. He entered the experiment consciously and was its subject.

And so it turns out that people in the president’s executive office are capable of listening. They gave awards to both me and Innokenty. Though I’ll receive the Order of Honor and he’ll receive the Order of Courage. On his side, they valued courage over all else. Which, as I told him when I informed him about the award over the phone, certainly begets honor.

Innokenty regarded that news impassively. He asked only if Nastya was invited to the ceremony. No, she wasn’t. And it’s doubtful I could change anything here.

FRIDAY [INNOKENTY]

Geiger just telephoned me and told me something strange about awards. It’s not so much that I don’t believe it (oh, the things I’ve had to believe after being thawed!) but that it’s a poor fit. What is more, Geiger found out that invitations to the Kremlin don’t include relatives. Nastya will be offended again. Or maybe it was just a prank, I mean about the awards? I have read about cases like this.

FRIDAY [NASTYA]

The tenants are moving into my apartment tomorrow. Today I went there to sort out a few final things and took the honorable award-winners with me. Thus, we went by taxi: Honor to the right on the back seat, Courage to the left, and I in the middle, as who knows who. Well, let’s suppose Motherhood: could I become a Mother Heroine? Yes, no problem.

They’re bashful because I wasn’t invited to the ceremony but I console them as much as I can. With all my heart, I do not want to go to Moscville. It’s one thing to go for a ride to the Smolny with a baby in your belly but another to be caught in traffic in a foreign land. It’s gratifying, though, that they both remembered me this time. I do love them both, even that dorky Geiger!

We put the apartment in relative order, gathered up four bags of things that I’m hesitant to leave among people I don’t know, and brought them to Bolshoy Prospect. The statuette of Themis seemed like a particularly valuable object to me, left to my grandmother by Platosha’s mother. Themis’s scales were broken off: at my husband’s hand, according to lore. I purposely took Themis down in his presence – ceremonially and unhurriedly – but he didn’t react. He nodded listlessly when I placed her on the cabinet in the dining room.

‘What can be higher than justice!’ I shouted, to wake this person up.

He thought for a minute and said:

‘Probably only charity.’

After Geiger left, he admitted to me that he had a headache. So of course he’s not up for thinking about justice.

SATURDAY [NASTYA]

Platosha truly didn’t feel very good yesterday. I put him to bed and he went right to sleep. I called Geiger a while later to report to him about Platosha’s overall state. I also told him that his favorite childhood toy no longer makes him happy.

‘He wrote,’ Geiger reminded me, ‘that the statuette was somehow linked to his first steps in art. Practically even inspired him to take it up. And now he’s in a sort of stupor with that. His difficulties with Themis are apparently on those grounds.’

‘So what should I do with her?’

‘Nothing, let her stay there. Maybe she’ll help him with a breakthrough.’

There you go. Well, she’ll stay.

MONDAY [INNOKENTY]

I keep thinking: why, after all, did I decide to finish off Panov back then? Impulses like that vanish quickly in the camp. It’s not so much that you lack strength (of course there isn’t any), it’s just that you see no point in a vendetta. The feelings evaporate. Next to nothing remains of them and they are directed at self-preservation. Later, when I was waiting on Anzer to be frozen, I no longer had any sufferings and hurts. They were gone after all the beatings, abuses, and tortures. There was exhaustion.

But I sighed with relief on that quiet evening after hiding the shiv in the grating by the front steps to the bathhouse. Carrying something like that on me wasn’t safe. It was unnecessary, too. I needed it to be in this exact place; now all that was left was to wait for a convenient moment.

That moment came but I never did kill Panov.

On another evening that was just about as quiet, I realized he was in the bathhouse alone. Yes, everything connected with Panov happened on quiet evenings. I slipped out of the workshop and approached the bathhouse. I saw the electric light in the dressing room from a distance and recalled the night the limping young woman was raped. I attempted to enter that state when the hand delivers a blow on its own. Not even a blow but a jab, a cut. Some sort of subtle and elegant motion leading the narrow hacksaw between Panov’s ribs. I did not want him to suffer, I wanted that he not live, that his stinking existence simply cease.

I soundlessly raised the grate and pulled out my shiv. In the last rays of sun, I admired the sharpened part and the shine: how many times had I run files of various sizes along it, applying the last touches with the finest file? I hid it all, hid it from those who were in the workshop. Platonov, they say… I draw them away, take them under my elbow, and lead them toward the wall. Platonov, who are you crafting that shiv for? Nobody asked, nobody caught on. And on that very same evening, I admired the shiv, not very worried that, say, Panov would notice me. I was so on edge that he would not have escaped me anyway.

I walked up to the changing-room window before opening the door. A motionless Panov was lying on a wooden bench. He was lying on his back, arms stretched along his body, which itself was corpse-white and displayed no signs of life. I began watching his stomach, striving to detect even the slightest breathing motion, but there was no movement.

I realized what this picture in the window reminded me of: it repeated the sight of Zaretsky’s body, which I saw at the morgue and identified. I looked at what Zaretsky had been and thought that justice had triumphed. And realized I was not glad about that triumph. And wanted very much for Zaretsky to be alive.

Panov’s hand twitched and scratched his chest. I inhaled deeply. I did not know myself what I experienced at that moment – gladness or disappointment. I knew one thing: I would not kill Panov.

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

This afternoon, we flew to Moscow by airplane. Geiger is teaching me: the words ‘by airplane’ can be skipped; he says it’s obvious how you’re flying. Just as certainly, he says, as you no longer need to say ‘call on the telephone’: it’s enough simply to ‘call’… We had supper just now in the hotel restaurant and are sitting in our own rooms.

Unlike Dr Geiger, Aviator Platonov rose into the sky for the first time today: that is the peculiar sort of aviator he is. Not one to indulge in superfluous flights. And this lone flight of mine today did not work out well. As the airplane gathered speed on the runway, I began to feel rather unwell, stifled, and nauseous. Geiger (he said I went very pale) switched on the ventilation over my seat and I felt a bit better. It finally eased for good after the plane gained altitude.