Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

The house is over the Oredezh. The river winds below and we are above. We swing in a hammock tied to two pine trees. More precisely, the little neighbor girl is swinging the hammock; she’s sitting on the very edge of the netting and I’m lying next to her, looking at her. I’m now seven, I think, no more than seven, but those rhythmic motions already alarm me. We’re a boat on the waves and the river below us now soars up, now disappears, turning into the tops of pine trees. Her loose hair touches me at each rise, gliding along my eyes, cheeks, and lips, but I don’t turn, I watch as a damp spot on her dress widens between her shoulder blades. I place my hand on the spot and she doesn’t shake it away because she enjoys it, as I do, and when my hand drifts to the left, I sense the beating of her heart. Fast and strong. This is our small damp secret, and my very first love.

SATURDAY

Today they gave me a new liquid medicine that’s horribly bitter. I drank it and recalled the first time in my life that I drank vodka. It was on the name day for Yelizaveta, which was being celebrated in a huge apartment on Mokhovaya Street. I remember a parlor flooded with electric light and exotic plants in wooden tubs. I don’t remember who Yelizaveta was.

Skvortsov walks over to me. His eyes are sparkling.

‘I’m running off to the German front tonight. I propose we guzzle one down.’ He lifts the hem of his frock coat and shows the neck of a bottle sticking out of his trouser pocket. ‘I have an evil little vial.’

I’d met Skvortsov for the first time right here, at Yelizaveta’s, a half-hour before. It’s difficult to refuse Skvortsov because if a person is running off to the front, this might be his final request. I agree. At the same time, I waver: I am ashamed to admit I have never yet drunk vodka. Skvortsov leads me to the stairwell and takes out his bottle. He cautiously closes the door. Leaning his back against it, he presses his lips to the bottle for a long time. I don’t know exactly how vodka is drunk. I see only that the amount of liquid in the bottle is not diminishing; there are not even little bubbles going in. Instead, I distinctly discern sediment floating in the bottle and it is beginning to seem to me that the drinker’s mouth is its source. With a groan of the world-wise, Skvortsov detaches himself from the bottle, which looks suspiciously full to me.

‘We are the same age as the century, Innokenty, hence we answer for it.’ Skvortsov is standing as if he is already swaying. ‘That’s why I’m running off to war, understand? Drink, it’s your turn.’

‘The same age as the century,’ that’s a set phrase, too. One of those repeated many times in a life. Listening to Skvortsov is funny and a little repulsive for me. And drinking after his lips is repulsive but I cannot refuse: he will think I’m afraid to drink vodka. I take the bottle indecisively.

‘It’s not for nothing they say “it’s as easy as drinking vodka,”’ says Skvortsov, encouraging me. ‘Bam, half the bottle in one gulp!’

I take one gulp (much less than the recommended) and it burns my throat. I move the bottle aside to catch my breath.

‘Don’t inhale, drink more!’ Skvortsov shouts hysterically.

I take one more gulp and the thought of Skvortsov’s spittle rushes through my head. Of the spittle he might have let into the bottle. I feel sick to my stomach.

‘Your mistake was that you inhaled,’ Skvortsov tells me. ‘You shouldn’t have inhaled.’

There’s a feeling of satisfaction in his voice. He extends his handkerchief to me so I can wipe my mouth but I deflect his hand. I’m again afraid that I’ll vomit at the sight of his handkerchief.

I saw Skvortsov a few days later on Nevsky. He waved to me from afar. He hadn’t gone anywhere then.

It dawns on me now: if we’re the same age as the century, then I was born in 1900. An obvious deduction, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me immediately.

‘Doctor, was I born in 1900?’ I ask Geiger.

‘Yes,’ he answers. ‘You’re the same age as the century.’

Hm.

MONDAY

Kuokkala. Every day after breakfast, Seva and I tear around the beach. Morning flights have become commonplace for us. I hold the string and steer an airplane kite. Seva holds the string, too, but lower: he’s no longer steering anything at all, so it is most correct to say, simply, ‘he’s holding the string.’ That’s because each time Seva begins steering the machine, it starts nose-diving right away, and falls feebly to the water’s smooth surface. Incidents like this are basically part of the game: catastrophes were a common occurrence at the dawn of aeronautics, too. All that’s surprising is that, in our case, they are all firmly linked to my cousin.

Seva is the same age as I am but for some reason he’s considered the younger one in our relationship. Of course there are people who aren’t offended by a subordinate position: they strive for that and accept it as their natural place in life. Seva isn’t like that: he suffers from his subordination but cannot take the other role.

Seva, for example, is cowardly. Well, not cowardly – that isn’t nice to say – but timid. He’s afraid of strangers, silhouettes in the window, bees, frogs, and grass snakes. I tell him grass snakes aren’t poisonous, take a grass snake with my fingers a little below its head and go to hand it to Seva, but my cousin pales immediately, his lips quivering. I begin to feel sorry for Seva. I release the grass snake and it slithers off along the path.

This evening, Geiger sat in my room with me. He has read my conjectures regarding him and Valentina. He assured me that this entry is wonderful in its candor. He, Geiger, is aiming for full openness of my subconscious in every way possible and requests that I not feel shy about expressing my thoughts and feelings. So. As he was leaving, he said:

‘My relations with Valentina cannot hinder your relations with her.’

His relations…

THURSDAY

I have spent several days lying in bed, without getting up. The weakness was unbelievable. I had no strength to write. A set phrase surfaced in my poor brain today, though: ‘You have not perfected construction of form, it is not yet time to move on to light and shadow.’

Does that mean I was an artist after all? But if so, is it not only my head that should remember (it obviously does not) but also my hand? And my hand does not remember, either. I attempted to draw something but could not make it work.

The phrase caught on some sort of hook in my consciousness and swung there all day. You have not perfected construction of form… Apparently I did not perfect it. Meaning I’m not an artist; at best, I’m a chronicler of lives. What did Geiger have in mind by calling me that?

And what did he have in mind by speaking about his relations with Valentina?

FRIDAY

Geiger informed me that the river name ‘Oredezh’ is now grammatically masculine. And written without a soft sign at the end.

‘What happened?’ I asked, ‘Did the river change its gender?’

‘It’s not only rivers now: people change their gender, too. But you go ahead and write it as before. I think it’s prettier that way.’

Today he showed me a computer. Apparently this is an expensive toy. You press one button and a small screen lights up. Press another and photographs are displayed. As if in a ‘magic lantern.’

Kamennoostrovsky Prospect by Troitsky Bridge, the 1900s. A tram is running. The colors are indiscernible on the photograph but I see those trams as if they were here now: red and yellow. The horse-drawn streetcar was painted in brownish colors and trams in bright ones. I remember their ring. The conductor on the back platform would ring to the tram driver and that meant they could start. The tram driver had his own bell, too, for carriages and pedestrians. A pedal. He would depress the pedal in order to ring it. How I dreamt of pushing it when I was a child! I would watch the tram driver’s stern face and his foot, as if it were separate, someone else’s, as if it were temporarily screwed to his motionless body, tirelessly stretching toward the pedal. The foot was shod in ordinary shoes with galoshes that were sometimes holey. It surprised me that this did not impede the interaction of the foot with such a refined object as an electric bell.