Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

The event is dated 1914. Or 1911, for example. Platosha insistently asks that all descriptions be dated. Why? I ask. That way, he says, it shows that fundamental events (like the tea-drinking on the veranda) are capable of defining completely different times, meaning they’re universal. According to him, that line of reasoning in favor of precise dating is equally applicable against precise dating, too. It works out, I realized, that the line of reasoning is universal, too.

Let’s say it’s 1907.

A child has a cold and a severe cough.

They read Robinson Crusoe to him.

The cough is so deep that the reading alone isn’t enough for recovery. The doctor recommended cupping.

They do this as a family. His grandmother reads, his mother and father set out the jars on the nightstand and prepare the wick.

They grease the child’s back with petroleum jelly, using light round motions.

His father will place the jars. He takes the most crucial tasks upon himself.

The patient is seven and he is afraid. This is the first time they have cupped him.

It becomes genuinely scary when they light the wick, wetted with alcohol. That might have suggested thoughts of the inquisition, if the patient had known about that.

An open flame is always scary.

The boy is lying on his stomach and grasping a pillow with his arms. He’s burying his face in it. A moment later, he senses the first jar on his back.

It’s not as painful as he had imagined. Maybe it’s not at all painful.

Carefully, he lifts his head. Watches his father’s hands.

His father moves the wick inside the jar a bit, removes it, and lowers the jar on the boy’s back. Of course it’s a little hot.

He can feel the jars pulling his skin into them. His father winks at him. His mother uses a blanket to cover his back, with the jars on it.

His grandmother continues reading Robinson Crusoe . The book is curative in combination with the jars.

A new rush of fear before the jars are removed. The boy seems to think they sank themselves into his back for good. They remind him of mean little fishes. Maybe piranhas.

His father carefully runs his right index finger along the lip of a jar and it comes unstuck with a loud smacking sound. Fifteen first-class smacking sounds.

My walking has worsened. I have the sensation of walking on moss. I carefully place my foot, as if I’m afraid it will collapse. Exactly where I’m headed no longer presents a mystery for me: losing thousands of cells a day, it’s impossible not to guess how this journey will end. These losses cannot go on forever.

I have made it a rule not to complain, even to Geiger, not to mention Nastya. Since the reasons for what is happening are unclear, complaining brings nothing but distress to anyone. Especially since, hm, this is not my first departure from life. But. Death in the camp seemed like a way out and now it seems like a departure. A departure from those I love. From what I love. From my recollections, which I have already been writing down for so many months.

Today I woke up early in the morning; it was still dark. I lay motionless, so as not to awaken Nastya. I observed, as I am wont to do, wandering automobile headlights on the ceiling. Trolleys, which replaced horse trams, used to run along Bolshoy Prospect. I would watch them for hours, attempting to understand the secret of the trolley’s self-propelled movement. For some reason, it excited me more than the movement of automobiles. Maybe that’s because of the magnitude, unwieldiness, and loudness of the trolley, something that, at first glance, was not created for moving around within an expanse, let alone transporting city people. But if – it occurred to me – a construction of that sort were enabled to leave its location, it could be destined for defensive and (even better) offensive purposes. I imagined the motion of hundreds of trolleys on the field of battle and it was a majestic spectacle.

From time to time, in testing the soundness of the trolley, I would place a five-kopeck coin on the rails. The experiment seemed so important to me that, in my childish lightheartedness, I reconciled myself in advance to possible losses: rather, I simply did not think about them. My father cautioned against those losses in order to wean me off this dubious amusement. He supposed the trolley could go off the rails and mildly noted to me that I should weigh the possible damages before deciding on this risky experiment.

What could I say here? By that time, I already knew five-kopeck coins were no impediment for the trolley: it simply did not notice them. I watched each time to see if the giant would shake when riding over them: it never once shook. What my father was correct about is that readiness for losses is indeed characteristic of experimenters, even adults. I come to the conclusion that they are large children and that for them the torn-off head of a doll – as the history of our unfortunate Motherland has confirmed – does not differ from a human head.

Returning to those same blessed years, I will say that I accumulated a collection of shiny, flattened little pieces of metal. Touching them with the tip of my index finger, I still sensed the remnants of the embossed image, but that didn’t ruin the pleasant impression of smoothness. Yes, smoothness – even the polishedness of those former coins – is a recollection specially preserved for me. In the land of my childhood, where nothing ever went amiss, they became a worthy currency. Their astonishing surface and my index finger were made for one another. In the more than hundred-year history of placing five-kopeck coins under the trolley, my experiment was one of the first. I will note as well that my actions were not the result of blind imitation: I thought this up myself.

I fear all that will sink into oblivion if it is not written down. It would be a noticeable gap in the history of mankind, but the largest loss would be for Anna, whom I think about all the time. Quite a lot of things have already been described for her, but I simply cannot cover everything. Luckily, I am receiving help now and this has begun to go faster.

1910. Early March. A two-story wooden building not far from the railroad. On sunny days, the spring melt begins and is heard by all the building’s residents. The drops open a path for themselves in the iced-up snow and all sound different, depending on the size of the hole in the ice. Everything closes up at night and freezes over so the drops nearly have to do their work all over again in the morning. From nearly a clean slate, though of course the snow is no longer very fresh in March. Like a pockmarked face, it is uneven and pitted with tracks from dogs, cats, and crows – everyone who walks near the two-story buildings. That snow is covered with a thin layer of stove soot that invariably shows through even fresh snow. Or maybe it is fresh soot. It deliberately flies in each time there is freshly fallen snow, covering it out of a pure aversion to whiteness.

There are huge puddles – entire ponds – along the railroad embankment. These puddles freeze over at night, too, but they are so deep they do not have time to freeze through to the bottom, and do they even have a bottom? In childhood, you fear they do not. The trees stand in icy bark until midday, but it melts after that. The water in those puddles is cold and black. There is no reason even to think about entering one of them.

Keep thy mind in hell and despair not . I was paging through a book about Mount Athos and my eye fell on those words. I set the book aside and began doing something else but the words surfaced and stung. After all, they are about me. Keep thy mind in hell – that is the condition I had already plunged into several weeks ago. And despair not , that is what comes to me with greater difficulty. I rushed for the book and could not find that spot immediately but eventually did. It has been said of those words that they are a revelation attributed to Silouan the Athonite. I do not know who Silouan the Athonite is and I am not even sure if I understand those words properly, but they boosted me a little.