Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

SUNDAY [GEIGER]

So, let’s say there’s a choir at a morning concert.

We had a choir like that at school. It goes without saying that I didn’t sing in it – with my ear! But I listened and was thoroughly absorbed during morning concerts celebrating various holidays.

The happiest morning concert was for the New Year.

The choristers assembled in rows on a wooden structure (light clattering) that I don’t know what to call even now. Benches installed in three tiers on a stage.

According to the choir master, this design revealed the singers’ vocal possibilities most fully. They were somehow arranged there so the sound floated in a special way: right to the soul. At least to mine.

The girls’ voices were wonderful – like sterling silver – and it was they who defined the beauty of the morning concerts. I called their voices ‘morning voices’ to myself.

I listen to music in the car every day, some of it choral.

How rarely morning voices now sing. One might say they do not sing.

There’s competent and professional articulation, but there’s no magic. There’s no morning.

[NASTYA]

It’s 1993; my mother and I are in Tunisia. We’re abroad on holiday for the first time (and some of the first to go!). And without my father for the first time. Although it’s at his expense: he sends us money from America. Officially, it’s like he hasn’t left us yet, like he’s still there to earn money, but, it’s obvious what’s going on with him. During one of his visits, I was watching him out the window and saw a young woman waiting for him in our courtyard. It’s not that he didn’t think he had to hide: he simply hadn’t thought about it. It never occurred to him that he might be noticed. They kissed and set off, hooking their pinkie fingers – a variation from abroad that people here weren’t using yet. I ran into this little twosome later in the city; my father was embarrassed. She was American; she had come with him and was staying at a hotel. As I understand it, he spent the greater part of the day in her hotel room.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Yes, Tunis. I wanted to describe Tunis, one of my most vivid impressions. Carthage, which should have been destroyed, and that senator (what’s his name?), I forget… The beach. Heat that gives way to coolness in the hotel lobby. African fruit and vegetables as part of an ‘all-inclusive’ package. On the very first evening, I had the runs, of a very high quality; this also turned out to be included.

Evenings were something special. Surprisingly fresh and pleasant. Not what I expected from Africa at all, who would have thought… Maybe it was the evenings that made this land so attractive. Accordingly, they attracted aggressors from various tribes, including my very own mother. I got tired returning her abuse and counted the days until leaving because it was impossible to switch my plane ticket. This isn’t about my mother so why am I writing all this?

This is about Platosha. I sense there’s something happening that’s not good, and I’m feeling uneasy. I already spoke with Geiger: he’s worried. Very. The conversation with him basically left me reeling. I didn’t even understand half of what he told me but what I did understand was enough to put me in a daze.

[GEIGER]

Our computer guy informed me that word processing program doesn’t always insert the day of the week in the notes.

I asked if it’s possible to restore the lost days. He answered that it’s possible: everything’s possible, he said, in a virtual world. Everything’s a question of time and effort.

I suddenly wondered: but is it necessary?

TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]

I again spent time at Nikolsky Cemetery after Nastya left for classes. It was painful for me to see it: I do remember it unpillaged. There are no longer beautiful marble gravestones here, the ones that stood in my childhood. I asked myself why those gravestones could have been needed: for reuse? For paving the streets? What happens to a people that ravages its own cemeteries? The same thing that happened to us.

On days for prayers in remembrance of the departed, my parents and I would visit some of our relatives here. I loved those outings because they were like trips outside the city, with greenery and a pond: it was like a park, not a cemetery. And just a few steps from Nevsky Prospect. No sorrow could be sensed there at all. Even death was not sensed. Perhaps I did not fear death, either, thanks to that cemetery. I feared it, of course, but somehow without panic.

There was another place I did not fear death: on the island. Unlike Nikolsky Cemetery, it could be felt everywhere there. One cannot say that death arrived for its victims at our barracks: death lived in them. Death’s presence became so everyday that we no longer paid attention to it. People died without fear.

They buried the dead simply, without coffins. They carried the corpses out of the infirmary and tossed them into crates on a cart. Four corpses fit in a crate; they were covered with a plank lid. If the corpses didn’t fit, an orderly would crawl on the lid then stamp on it. They brought the crates to a pit and tossed them below. The pit was filled in when there was no more room. There were many pits of that sort and I had occasion to be near them from time to time. They did not evoke horror in me.

I was horrified only once: when one of the corpses began moving. That’s what it was: one of the naked, decomposing corpses. Looking at its slow shambling, I did not even allow the thought that it was alive. Nothing in that person reminded me of the living. Then he suddenly extended a hand in my direction and introduced himself:

‘Safyanovsky.’

And his left eye could not open because of his swollen eyelid.

I was now standing over the grave of Terenty Osipovich and remembering how lovely his help was for me that time. What a precise word he had found after all. He was lying two meters from me, essentially a trifling distance. His grave was squeezed between two manmade hills and was reminiscent of a boat between waves.

I suspect that Nastya thought last time that I was planning to dig him out. Am I? Most likely no. Though digging up his grave would not be so terrifying. No more terrifying than seeing slow shambling in the Solovetsky grave. The dead Terenty Osipovich probably differed little from the live: his head looked like a skull even during his life. Yes, I wanted very much to see him. If I could have lowered myself those two meters to him, I would have. If he had said ‘Go intrepidly!’ to me from there, I would have gone.

[GEIGER]

Innokenty needs to have magnetic resonance imaging of his brain immediately. The machine broke down at our clinic; I had to arrange for it to be done at another.

You can count the machines in the city on one hand. There’s a huge wait for each one.

I attempted to explain who exactly requires testing. They nodded sympathetically. Explained that there was a six-month waiting list for appointments. Offered a quicker version: four months. And that’s for a person who had been frozen. O, mein Gott… [10] Oh, my God (Germ.).

I gave them three hundred dollars. They set his appointment for the day after tomorrow.

[INNOKENTY]

Some strange things with my memory. Short-term lapses.

At morning prayers, people ask the Virgin: ‘Deliver me of many and anguishing remembrances,’ and I ask that, too. My lapses are of a different nature, though: at times I forget what I had been planning to do a minute before.

But the cruel memories remain.

THURSDAY [NASTYA]

Platosha signed up for a reader’s card at the Historical Archive.

‘What,’ I ask, ‘are you going to search for there?’

‘My contemporaries.’