Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

[ ]

Nastya was discharged today. It turns out they did an ultrasound during the course of her treatment. And they reported the most important news, too, when they discharged her: it’s a girl. A daughter. I have been thinking about that all day today. For some reason, I had imagined it would be a boy. That doesn’t mean that a girl is worse, there are simply things that seem to go without saying.

On the one hand, I could offer more advice to a boy because I have gone through that rather complex journey. On the other hand, my journey began almost a century ago. It’s a big question as to whether that experience has any value now. So then, in terms of experience, it makes little difference if I have a daughter or a son. As a man, it’s probably nicer for me to have a daughter. And, when it comes down to it, all the best things in my life are connected with women.

I just reread this: what silliness! It’s obvious, after all, that the abstract points here don’t apply. People love a specific person, not a boy or a girl. After being born, a person ceases to be an abstraction and then… But will I have a then ?

[ ]

I’m at home again. We’re at home again! Us and our daughter: I just found out we’re having a girl. Why didn’t they say right away that I’m having a girl – were they afraid to jinx it? They didn’t believe in a happy outcome? Or is it ineradicable Soviet-era spitefulness, plain and simple? It’s pointless to guess and, really, not very interesting.

I think our daughter will pull us both – him and me – out of this pit. When we were riding home from the hospital in the taxi, I said:

‘Platosha, sweetie, two ladies are totally depending on you. You just can’t pack it in now.’

And he even smiled in response, but so very haggardly that I almost burst into tears. I swear, it would’ve been better if he hadn’t smiled. I nestled up to him, put my head on his shoulder and then wrapped him in my arms. The driver looked at us in the mirror and that’s how we rode the whole way: hugging.

[INNOKENTY]

Yashin telephoned and said he had something interesting for me. When I arrived, he brought me a file with materials about my cousin Seva. It came after the archive sent an inquiry to the public prosecutor’s office: Yashin dug deep… He’s a professional, I had to admire him. Even the way he pulled out the papers sheet by sheet seemed somehow very adroit. In white gloves; he’s a red-head himself. I found myself on the first sheet, in the list of those who had been assigned to the 13th Brigade. With Seva’s signature. Opposite two surnames was a notation instructing particular strictness of incarceration. One of those surnames was mine. Did Seva really want so badly to get rid of me?

He and I had flown so much on the aeroplane kite, I in the front seat, he in the back! Seva had not moved into the front seat, not even at the transit point: he did not shoot me, did not deprive me of my life using his own will. He granted that I die my own death – if, of course, death from exhaustion can be considered one’s own. We ran and I slowed down because I saw Seva gasping for breath. We slapped our feet along the damp sand, slipping and raising a spray, and the kite flew majestically over the sea – where we could not run to follow it – and it seemed that he and I were flying with it. Our aeroplane dove when we stumbled, but that was almost unnoticeable: it looked as if it had caught another airstream.

How is it that Seva faltered so his aeroplane corkscrewed down? I discovered – from all the documents that Yashin brought – that my cousin was shot in 1937. The documents did not refer directly to torture during the course of the investigation but, based on isolated cries that found their way into the records, one can gather that there was torture. Based on cries and, most important, the particularities of the information that lurched from Seva like uneven waves. Only at the first interrogation was there a conversation that was more or less substantive. The rest – since there was nothing for Seva to tell – read like unsuccessful attempts at guessing the investigators’ wishes.

The protocols, which are usually short on words, did not economize on detail this time. They told, at length, what Seva said as he begged for his life, how he sobbed loudly like a woman and fell to kiss the interrogators’ feet. In the final interrogations, after obviously losing his mind, he proposed they release him to go conquer desert regions of Uzbekistan. He demanded they come to him ten years hence and eat fruit in the garden he would plant. Seva described to the interrogators all of them drinking tea at an evening hour when there is no longer intense heat and it is easy to breathe. Judging from the detail of the notes, Seva’s speeches made a big impression on his listeners. One must suppose that the investigators tired of the interrogations and themselves dreamt of a quiet garden life. In some strange way, I, too, felt a sense of peace after reading this.

[ ]

Today Innokenty and I spoke seriously about his health for the first time. ‘More precisely, my ill health,’ he corrected. It’s good he’s joking…

I recalled the joke about how a man is brought to the hospital with a knife between his ribs. ‘So is it very painful?’ the doctor asks him. ‘Oh, no,’ answers the man, ‘only when I laugh.’

I told that joke to Innokenty. He nodded. Muttered something like how that’s about him. Then he lifted his face and there were tears in his eyes.

I didn’t bring up the topic, Innokenty did. He started talking about the changes he’s noticed in himself. If I didn’t know for certain that Innokenty doesn’t read medical books, otherwise I would have thought he was quoting a description of the symptoms of a brain disorder.

Judging from all that, his working memory has suffered most tangibly. He forgets things that just occurred. Fortunately, not all of them.

Even so, he recalls events from the beginning of the century without particular difficulty.

Hysteria has manifested itself: it was noticeable even today. In the middle of our conversation, Innokenty suddenly announced that he no longer sees any point in keeping his notes.

‘What does “no longer” mean?’ I asked. ‘What’s changed in comparison with the previous months?’

‘Well, you yourself understand perfectly well where my road now leads.’

‘No, I don’t understand. Unfortunately, nobody understands that yet.’

He looked right at me. His look was mean.

‘I should write, just so you can defend yet another dissertation?

Innokenty had never talked like that with me. I kept silent because I didn’t know what to say. He abruptly walked up to me and embraced me:

‘Forgive me, Geiger. I’m monstrously unfair.’

And I’ve already defended all possible dissertations, by the way.

[ ]

I went to the archive again, to continue familiarizing myself with Seva’s dossier. From time to time – when Seva was definitively worn out – idyllic pictures of the garden in the desert yielded to curses aimed at the interrogators as well as Soviet power in its entirety. It is interesting that at one of those moments Seva recalled our conversation about the locomotives of history. He cited those words to his torturers and said:

‘I didn’t think that locomotive would carry me here. Innokenty did, after all, warn me: go on foot.’

New interrogations involved clarifying Innokenty’s fate. The fact that Seva had personally sent me, his own cousin, to a hopeless place was deemed as especially sophisticated craftiness and part of a criminal plot. When they pressured Seva yet again, he produced not one plan but an impressive three, though not one of them corresponded to my situation at the time, something Seva did not know.