Eugene Vodolazkin - The Aviator

The screen fogs and another photograph surfaces. A yardman (1908). Wearing a sheepskin coat and felt boots… It’s probably a junior yardman: they scraped ice and brought firewood to apartments, but there was also a senior yardman that the junior ones were subordinate to. The senior workers practically wore dress suits.

And there’s Siverskaya, the road from the flour mill, beginning of the century. Good Lord, we climbed up along this very road each time! Someone is discernible in the photograph: might that be us? On Friday evening we would go to the station to greet my father after the workweek and on Sunday evening we would see him off.

The heads of Petersburg families leaving for the dacha were generally of two types: dacha husbands and champagnolics. Dacha husbands stopped renting city apartments from May through September (renting was fairly expensive) and went outside the city to their families each evening. Which took loads of time and energy. Champagnolics, on the other hand, permitted themselves to remain in their city apartments, visiting their families on weekends. For some reason it was thought that champagnolics met among themselves during the week, played cards, and drank – naturally – champagne. Based on his prosperity, my father was probably a dacha husband but he behaved as if he were a notorious champagnolic. The whole thing was that he didn’t like moving the furniture into storage in May and looking for an apartment in September, then moving the furniture out of storage yet again. Some might object to this and say everyone disliked those things. Probably nobody liked them. But he, in particular, did not.

My mother and I would stand in the station during the evening and wait for my father. Of course we were not alone. Many Siverskaya dacha people waited for their fathers from the city and came to the railroad in the evening. Some would ride there, leaving their carriages on the station square. There weren’t many trains, so everyone gathered at the same time, at half past seven, if I’m not confusing things. People would talk with one another on the platform, slapping mosquitoes for one another. Click heels on the wooden planking. Laugh as they anticipated a meeting. My mother would say an evening chill was setting in and take a heavy jacket from her bag and (despite my attempt to evade) put it on me. She would say I simply was not noticing the coolness. I truly was not noticing it.

The train was visible from afar and approached slowly. The greet-ers would turn to face it as soon as it appeared over the point where the rails met. Once they had noticed it, they didn’t let it out of their sight. They were still talking with one another and still enquiring about Siverskaya news, but what genuinely riveted their attention was the larva crawling along the rails and its inexplicable metamorphosis into a steam engine.

I did not know yet which train-car my father was riding in: he would sit in various cars and catching sight of him instantly among the arrivals was a point of honor for me. My father would step on to the platform and kiss us – first me (picking me up), then my mother – and his emergence was indescribable happiness for me. Happiness, happiness, I would say to myself when I caught sight of my father. We would cross the river, climbing that very same road by the mill, our shadows stretching improbably under the endless summer sun. Happiness. We would go inside, have supper, examine gifts (my father always arrived with gifts), read something out loud before bed, fall asleep, and dream.

As an adult, I often dreamt of my father, particularly of my summer father. Aquiline nose, pince-nez, a receding hairline taking shape over his forehead. Wearing a white shirt and light-colored trousers with a wide belt. A watch pocket and silver chain. Maybe intensely waiting for my father on the platform made this guise of his the most distinct portrait in my memory.

I remember his mannerisms. The exaggerated, even somewhat jaunty, pulling at the chain of his pocket watch. A click of the cover, a slight grimace – as if from dissatisfaction with the time, as if it were flying by too quickly. He would look at his watch when he was bored or doubting. He looked when he felt bashful, too. It was a rescuing sort of gesture. Or maybe it wasn’t a gesture, maybe it was something greater, connected with the length of time issued to him: a premonition or something? One July evening in 1917 (our last dacha year) we waited at the station for him but he did not come. Drunken sailors killed him that day at Varshavsky Station.

Later, I agonized over the mental picture of my beloved, snow-white father lying on a dirty pavement as gawkers gathered around him and he, who felt bashful, disdained and hated the attention of the street, could not even get away from them. Mama asked at the police station if he had lain there a long time (it turns out it was a long time), asked what he had been killed for (for nothing), as if it would make it easier had it been for something, then she screamed that she’d shoot all those damned servicemen with her own hands; the policemen watched her silently. Because of her grief, she did not understand what catastrophe was occurring and that shooting at sailors is about the same as shooting at waves in the sea or, let’s say, lightning. And it turned out what we had experienced was not lightning but heat lightning: the lightning was ahead. We just did not yet know that.

SATURDAY

Because of my father, I thought about the nature of historical calamities – revolutions, wars, and the like. Their primary horror is not in the shooting. And not even in famine. It is that the basest of human fervors are liberated. What is in a person that was previously suppressed by laws comes into the open. Because for many people only external laws exist. And they have no internal laws.

SUNDAY

Robinson Crusoe installed a post at the place of his salvation, marking Sundays on it. Robinson was afraid he would confuse Sundays with weekdays and not celebrate the Resurrection of Christ on the proper day. He made every seventh notch longer, making the notches indicating the first day of each month even longer still. Using a knife, he carved this large inscription into a post: I come on shore here on the 30th of September, 1659.’ I wonder what year it is now, anyway.

A computer is a hilarious item. It turns out one can type on it as if it were a typewriter. And correct. Correcting is the important thing: it’s as if there had not been a mistake, all without nerve-wracking bother, without tedious erasures on five copies. Typists would die of envy. Texts can be saved in the computer and read from the computer. I’m going to learn to type.

At Geiger’s suggestion, I read an article entitled ‘Cloning,’ something in the spirit of Herbert Wells. I did not quite grasp what the article said about ‘nuclei’ and ‘ovule’ or what was transplanted where. I liked the part about the sheep supposedly bred from a sheep udder: she was named in honor of the singer Dolly Parton, who loved emphasizing the merits of her bust. Geiger thinks what was described in the article (I have the sheep breeding in mind here) is true. He says he’s introducing me to changes that took place in the world while I was unconscious. In order, as it were, to prepare my consciousness.

He also gave me something to read about cryogenics – this article is no less exotic. About how bodies are frozen for subsequent resurrection. There is something rather ghastly about the idea itself, independent of the fact of whether or not that sort of freezing exists in reality. If the article is to be believed, there are quite a few frozen people, although there is not yet anyone alive who has been thawed. At the same time, certain experiments can be acknowledged as successful. A chicken embryo was in liquid nitrogen for several months, then thawed, and the embryo’s heart began to beat. A rat’s heart was frozen to -196 °C and it began beating after thawing, too. A rabbit’s brain had been frozen. After thawing, the rabbit’s brain (does a rabbit have a brain?) maintained its biological activity. Finally, an African baboon was cooled to -2 °C. The baboon spent fifty-five minutes in a frozen state and was successfully revived afterward.