Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

As long as he’s silent, his appearance is elevated, perhaps as it was intended to be. Zaretsky is silent. His bleating, his ugly words, aren’t heard.

And you think: the thoughts he’s immersed in are lofty. And the sausage is just an austere necessity. A requirement for the body.

He’s not looking at it. The focus of his gaze is somewhere beyond the boundaries of that room, maybe beyond the bounds of the visible world in general.

That drawing would have stunned me even if I hadn’t known anything about Zaretsky. But I do know, so the drawing stunned me doubly. It liberates Zaretsky. It delivers him from his horrendous role as a maggot.

That drawing is a straw that Innokenty and Nastya and I can grasp at. It turns out that the mysterious blockage for Innokenty’s artistic work has lifted. He can draw again. And how he draws!

In terms most familiar to me: some group of cells has been restored in him. For now, ‘how’ and ‘why’ are questions into the void. I’m stating a fact, not attempting to explain it.

Platosha is a genius. That amazing portrait that Geiger and I saw… I wanted to say something about the portrait and then suddenly remembered and realized, just in time, that it would sound pathetic. No matter what, it’d be like retelling War and Peace or, say, humming the Fortieth Symphony. I’ll just say one thing: only yesterday I hated Zarestky because of my grandmother’s stories. But I’ve forgiven him after that portrait. Almost forgiven. As Platosha drew him. There’s one weak spot in what I’m saying: I’m his wife. What wife’s husband isn’t a genius in her eyes? I’m feeling an intense urge to not be his wife for a minute and tell the whole world that Platonov’s a genius. But it just wouldn’t work out to not be his wife. He and I are one flesh and one spirit.

Platosha has no strength. He goes out less and less, and he’s usually lying down when he’s at home. He watches television. Or writes. Sometimes he has fits of fear. He’s terrified he’ll die soon. Or terrified he’ll die in his sleep without saying goodbye to anyone. The floor lamp is lit more and more often in our room: darkness seems like a harbinger of death for him. When we go to bed, he asks me to give him my hand; he squeezes it and that’s the only way he can go to sleep. More than anything, he’s afraid Anna and I will be left without help. He already sees us as orphans. I go into the bathroom, shut myself inside, and turn on the water, both hot and cold, full blast. Our pipes wail from the heavy pressure. And I wail, too.

I am reading the Primary Chronicle . The chronicler recounts year after year. He says: In this year since the creation of the world there was this, in the next year there was this. And in this year ‘nothing happened.’ Those years are called empty . Years in which there was nothing. At first I racked my brains: why refer to these years? Then I realized: these people feared losing even a small particle of time. Those who lived for an eternity especially appreciated time. And not even time so much as its continuity, the absence of holes. Maybe they thought that genuine eternity only advances after time has been lived carefully. I have felt that, too! I knew I should not release from my life those decades when I was frozen. And I was not mistaken.

Basically, life collapses into pieces, although I am attempting to tie them together. It collapses and then ceases. Keep thy mind in hell and despair not . Everything that I think about immerses my mind in hell, which is despair itself.

I managed to arrange testing for Innokenty in Munich. Actually, I didn’t, my former patients did.

The issue isn’t so much about the necessary sum as the impetus. Only now am I really admitting to myself that the organizational problems were a pretext to some degree.

Is this sort of trip necessary? I don’t have inner certainty about that even now.

Based on the data I’ve sent, they’re not ruling out surgical intervention, though I don’t consider that useful.

I carried out Innokenty’s regeneration, step by step. Does anyone know the state of things better than I?

On the other hand, maybe that knowledge is impeding me now? Maybe a fresh view is exactly what’s needed under the circumstances?

Finally, is it possible that what’s called ‘emotional attachment to a patient’ is preventing me from making a correct decision now?

I’ll tell him about Munich just before the trip itself. There’s no need to tell him earlier. He and Nastya are already on edge.

1969. A May Day demonstration. The morning air is cool. The afternoon air is, too, however: after all, it’s not yet summer. Thoughts about temperature are brought on by a foam medical thermometer of gigantic proportions: two people are holding it. It shows 36.6, obviously not the air temperature. Whose temperature, one might ask, is it showing? An unknown giant’s? The entire demonstration’s? Judging from the inscription – ‘The Country of Soviets’ – 36.6 refers to the country. One of the demonstrators says the country is hopelessly sick and its temperature is being taken using a thermometer with the temperature drawn on. He’s speaking in an undertone, as if only to himself. No, truly only to himself.

Flags of various colors, but predominantly red, flutter in the wind. There are portraits of the leaders of the party and the government (not fluttering). Those in attendance are standing in their educational institutions’ columns, the First Medical Institute, for example. They’re awaiting a command to start moving. Someone takes a flask from a jacket pocket.

‘Cognac. Want some, Marlen Yevgenyevich?’

‘Why not?’

His lips envelop the flask and he takes several large swallows. He exhales loudly, wipes his mouth, and latches on again. The sharer saddens. He had not expected his flask would be used as a pacifier. He’s afraid the cognac will lose some of its qualities after Marlen Yevgenyevich’s lips.

‘Polina, have a drink?’

He’d probably be able to touch the flask’s opening again after Polina.

‘No, thanks,’ says Polina.

And she usually drinks. She must have also seen how unappetizingly Marlen Yevgenyevich was drinking.

The column slowly begins moving. First the thermometer, then the flags and portraits. It flows along Lev Tolstoy Street like spilled preserves. It merges with other columns on Kirovsky Prospect, entering the overall rhythm and overall joy. Essentially, the joy arises from the rhythm. From the large accumulation of people. Of course, on the whole there’s nothing to be glad about.

Nothing to be glad about.

1975. Alushta. A sand beach. The writer of these lines is contemplating a watery surface. Boats, trawlers, and some sort of huge, extended vessels; we’ll just call them tankers. They are so far away they are no longer audible, and their maneuvers are reminiscent of silent film. Or the rocking of plywood vessels along stage scenery. They travel strictly along the line of the horizon, not deviating from it, either upward or downward.

There is a mat lying between me and the sea. It’s spread half-facing the sea, taking into account the location of the sun. A girl sits on the mat as I follow the horizon. A young girl, about sixteen. She has just come out of the sea. The sea continues flowing from her hair, which is drawn into a ponytail. The moisture on her skin is like rain on freshly laid asphalt: each drop is separate. That may not be a poetic comparison but it is exactly what first comes to mind. The laying of asphalt made a big impression on me back in its day.

She removes a paper cone from her beach bag. It holds cherries. The swimmer girl settles in with her legs crossed and her back to me. The line of her spine, shoulder blades, and knees is like a grasshopper’s. When Nastya glances over my shoulder at this text, she notes that a grasshopper is an invertebrate. I tell her she is simply jealous. Nastya agrees and kisses the top of my head. I leave the part about the grasshopper in.