Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

He smiled.

‘Well, let that person work on something while waiting.’

So much time apart. It’s scary.

It required a lot of effort to successfully contact Zheltkov. I described Innokenty’s condition and asked him for help.

Zheltkov started mumbling something incomprehensible. Obviously bored. You see, I, uh, uh, uh, I’m not in charge of medicine…

Taken aback, I repeated that consultations abroad and expensive tests are required. In other words, bills will need to be paid. A lot of bills.

But our Zheltkov was in complete, purposeful denial. Unexpectedly so, I noted to myself.

Is this really because Innokenty wasn’t even considering Zheltkov’s political project?

I told one person in the know about that and he wasn’t surprised. He said that if Innokenty had become uninteresting for Zheltkov, then Zheltkov had already genuinely forgotten about my patient. He figured it won’t even be possible to get calls through to Zheltkov now.

I expressed cautious doubt:

‘Well, a person can’t be that shitty!’

‘What are you talking about!’ he laughed. ‘It’s easy to be.’

Scheisse… [15] Shit. (Germ.)

I told Nastya that separation because of death is temporary. I believe in that: anyway, it seems to me that everything is granted according to faith. If you want to encounter someone, you will definitely encounter them. True, I am afraid that’s feeble consolation for her now.

I wonder if there will be something to encounter there , other than people. Something that does not apparently constitute life’s fundamentals but something I feel would be difficult to part with. For example, the crackling of candles on a Christmas tree. How you pinch needles off the tree and carefully draw them to the flame. They give off a coniferous aroma when they burn: it’s vivid, like everything with farewells. There is the sparkling of flames in the evening and the extinguished dark, dark mass at night. When you wake up by chance after midnight, your first thought is of the tree. You make your way to it in a nightshirt. You walk almost by feel, most likely by the sound of the barely audible glassy ringing of garlands in a draft. Bare feet freeze on the parquet. You begin warming them once you reach the tree. Alternating your feet as you press their soles to your warm calves. Confetti that had stuck to them drops off. You hear someone has risen to go to the toilet. You press into the tree’s broad boughs and dissolve in them. As you wait out the sounds in the kitchen, you slip into cottony drifts at the bottom of the tree and truly do disappear there. Until morning… It seems that I would even get up posthumously to look at a tree with just one eye. If, of course, the eye is intact.

Well, what else? Let’s say: a dish of raspberries on the veranda at the dacha. It swells with light in a diffused ray of sun. An insect with its wings carelessly folded crawls along the edge of the dish. Not a beetle, not a midge, not an ant. You have difficulty naming it, though it’s not as if you have never seen it. That happens: you’ve been running into a person for half your life in the very same place, perhaps in the entryway or at the bookstore, and his face is familiar right down to the finest wrinkle, but his name is unknown. There are constant companions like that in life. When you part with them, you miss them for their low-key, timid appearance, for their folded wings and manner of moving around.

Or, let’s say, a fire at dusk. Its reflection has spread along the Oredezh and is no fainter than a moonlit path. The conversation isn’t a conversation, only individual words, simple ones, soothing ones. For example: I’ll fetch more firewood. Or: the water’s boiled. The crunch of a half-decayed branch underfoot. Gurgling water in a pot, sometimes feeble hissing of a log. You want time to freeze like the river by the dam. For it not to grow brighter but not to darken, either. For the red cliffs to remain visible… it seems I have already written about those, have I not? Devonian clay. Will that be there ?

Sometimes I wonder: which of us is the patient, Innokenty or I?

I’m fulfilling his instructions: I’m writing, don’t you know, pictures from life… I’ve never done this, and I don’t feel I have it in me. I’m used to speaking in terms of diagnoses and prescriptions.

But.

To be honest, I’m liking the writing more and more.

Our cooperative writing is, if you will, an attempt to convey experience to descendants. The same thing mankind has been working on throughout history. It’s just that our experience is, let’s put it, unusual. That irritated me in the beginning, but I’m okay with it now.

Innokenty, however, conveys more than experience.

Nastya told me he contacted an advertising company on his own and offered his services. She found out about that by chance: they ran across her when they arrived with the contract to sign. She kicked them out on the landing and demanded an explanation from her husband.

And he was sitting in an armchair, listless and quiet. What, he asked, are you planning to live on when I’m not here?

She was silent, tears flowing.

Innokenty himself felt he shouldn’t speak to her like that. I think he simply didn’t have the strength to choose his words carefully. He spoke directly about what he was thinking.

He doesn’t believe in his own recovery. There’s no need to say what that means for a patient.

The most horrible thing is that even I can’t reassure him.

Pieces of information about Platosha’s health have seeped into the press. Personally, I couldn’t care less, but he does go outside. He sees the tabloids in the kiosk windows: pictures and headlines, headlines like ‘The Experiment Failed,’ ‘Platonov Is Deathly Ill.’ One of the papers bought his MRI scan and published it on the front page. ‘Innokenty Platonov’s Brain Is Deteriorating.’ Nobody even needs to buy any of that, anyway: they see how he walks. How his feet go out from under him, how he holds on to my arm. He doesn’t want a cane: he says that would be too much somehow, admitting the very worst. Admitting (I didn’t say) the obvious. On the other hand, maybe he’s right, though: as long as the obvious hasn’t been admitted, it’s not obvious.

I showed Geiger the publication with the MRI. He turned as red as a fire engine and rushed off to call someone. Three minutes of choice curses. It all ended with him telling the other party to choke on his own balls. Difficult to accomplish, of course, and I don’t know how they responded on the other end of the line. I hadn’t expected that from Geiger, but I won’t lie: I liked it. Maybe I hadn’t seen enough of that in the German guy before.

It’s just that, ugh, none of this helps Platosha at all. He has this idée fixe now, to earn as much as possible for me and our daughter. He said that since he himself has no future, he wants to provide for the future of those near and dear to him. He said that calmly, as if it goes without saying. The other day he contacted an advertising company, the same thing I, the fool, used to do for him before. I stopped that process right away.

I sense an intense yearning for my unlived years. A sort of phantom pain. I might have been frozen then but I did exist! Which means that’s my time, too, and I bear responsibility for it, too. I feel the twentieth century, all of it, is mine, no exceptions. When I watch Soviet newsreels, at times I see myself in the background. Could that really be accidental? No. It is my absence there and noninvolvement in the events reflected there that could be considered accidental.

‘Do I understand correctly,’ Geiger asked me, ‘that it’s also permissible to describe those events of your life that didn’t happen?’