WEDNESDAY
They took my temperature today: it was 36.6. For the first time during the entire measurement period. Geiger said a positive dynamic was in evidence. True, this was the morning temperature and things worsened a little toward evening, to 37.1. The mercury did creep over the red line, only by one mark, but it crept over. I often had a fever on the island, especially at the infirmary.
The infirmary is on a mountain. We lie on wooden bunks pushed close together. There are no bed linens; the planks are bare. And we’re bare: nobody has body linens, either. It’s useless anyway: many have typhus diarrhea, all the bunks are soiled with it. If you want to turn, you’ll certainly get your hand in shit, dried or fresh. Your own or someone else’s. The hand will slip along the board. Not everybody has the strength to get up to do their business, so they do it under themselves. And what can you say? There’s not even strength to curse.
The whole island is visible if you look down from the mountain; the sea is further out, as far as the eye can see, frozen because it’s the month of February. They herd us naked, to go down from the mountain to the bathhouse; it is about two versts. And then back, after the bath, after steaming. With freezing temperatures, twenty below, a snowstorm. True, we walk in the forest so there’s no wind. Bare feet slipping on packed snow so someone or other would fall, not so much from the slippery snow as from loss of strength. With a high temperature or a fever, those first seconds are nice but then you freeze immediately, enough that you can’t move. Some wouldn’t get up again after falling so they were dragged by an arm or a leg. And they would shout. That was the only way to understand they were alive. When they went silent, the snow crunched audibly under our feet.
Of course many of us died after that: a person has his limits. The fact that nobody was clinging to life any longer played a role, too: survival is difficult because once a person is seized by indifference, it is as if he is dying. He’d be lying alongside you, raving or saying something rational, and then he’d suddenly go silent. You’d turn, see his fallen jaw, and understand he died. And he could lie like that for a long time because nobody comes in here and if someone does, they won’t rush to drag him out. He lay there and you’d even calm: he wasn’t crying out or flailing his arms.
I called for Nurse Valentina in a seemingly calm voice and gestured for her to sit by my bed, asking how things were. But then I couldn’t hold back and burst into tears. I’m turning into a run-of-the-mill hysteric.
THURSDAY
There was a place in Siverskaya called the ‘Sweltering Countries’. A beach on the Oredezh under a steep, red clay riverbank. Everything was red in those places and the red horse in Petrov-Vodkin’s painting, by the way, is from this very place. Any other horse would have been simply impossible here. This was the color of sweltering countries: I think everything was like that for Robinson. Well, maybe there was also green and light blue, but those colors were in Siverskaya, too, when you really think about it. I thought about the uninhabited island while I sunned in the ‘Sweltering Countries’. I sensed the hot sand with my cheek. Robinson wore clothing made of goat skin to protect himself from the sun’s rays. Nobody would have been surprised if he had worn that clothing around Siverskaya: the dacha folk there dressed even stranger.
One time when I was lying in the ‘Sweltering Countries’, I raised my head and did not see anyone. Nobody at all, either on the banks of the Oredezh or in the river itself. Someone else had always been around when I was there. I stood, took my bag, and started out along the shore. I crossed a small bridge over the river – it was empty there, too. At first I imagined that people were simply hiding or had temporarily gone about their business, but there truly was nobody. I walked and was more convinced with each passing minute that something had happened to liberate the earth of people. At least the Siverskaya earth.
This was not simply a sense: it was a certainty. Too much pointed at complete unpeopledness. The wind in the pines rustled in a way that it had never allowed itself to rustle before. The Oredezh glimmered with an unprecedented sparkle. In all of that, one could feel a liberation completely impossible in the presence of people. Everything that had previously been suppressed by human existence now aspired toward the confines of its possibilities: trees in their greenness, sky in its blueness. In how the river meandered, its primordialness showing through; even the very name Oredezh was primordial. Names like that are not given by people, they are created by nature itself, like bent dead branches near the water, like crags worn away by wind. The Oredezh flowed here before there were people, and now it was flowing after them.
The river tossed out bend after bend to meet me and just would not end, the red cliffs rising above it, ever higher. I walked, over whelmed by the feeling of possessing that splendid earth. The Oredezh’s unpredictability, the freshness of its breeze, the swaying of the grasses by the water: all this belonged to me alone. I made the rounds of my holdings, which (a woodpecker drums on a pine) knew splendidly that nobody possessed them any longer, that my power was highly conditional. I was the only one on the entire river and in the entire wood, and nothing from me could threaten them. I was making an inspection of them and passing by them as a commander passes by a parade, head unnaturally twisted, stopping at times and saluting. Something responded to me, waving branches, whistling, and cawing, but there was something that also did not respond, even remaining unnoticed by me. Each of my observations, though, had a paramount meaning because I was now the only one who possessed the fullness of that knowledge.
The road rose along with the shore. Somehow, without my having noticed, the river was running along the bottom of a ravine, outside the confines of visibility. Treetops that barely rose above the precipice spoke of how there was not only water but also earth below. I could have touched those treetops if I had approached the edge of the precipice. But I did not approach.
Houses still stood over the river, only now they were hopelessly empty. These houses were already wound in vines, sprouting with grasses and trees, becoming part of nature. Their roofs were weakening right before the eyes, sagging and ready to collapse at any moment. Their unclosed doors kept squeaking in the wind. Drafts rustled half-rotted curtains in the windows.
I felt horror beginning to grow within me: this was the horror of solitude. The shore began descending again. I noticed a small bridge below, across the river, and dashed toward it. Boards began knocking resonantly under my feet. They swayed and hit against one another, reverberating in an echo. Their noise continued even when I was already on the shore, as if nature’s unseen army was pursuing me as the last creature that did not belong to it. I began running (not from fear but from moroseness) and rushed through the woods toward home. It was unbearable to imagine that nobody was expecting me at home, either. The great world could come to an end but this would not yet be a full ending. Even so, I had not lost hope that my little family world was holding out. I ran and cried, feeling tears roll down my cheeks and how the crying impeded my breathing.
It was beginning to darken when I neared the house. I saw my father in a window that shone with electric light. He was sitting in his favorite pose, legs crossed, hands clasped at the back of his head. He was massaging his neck with his thumbs. My mother was pouring hot water from the samovar. All this seemed unreal under a huge yellow lampshade. It seemed like an old photograph, perhaps because it was happening soundlessly. But my father’s fingers were moving, completely unmistakably, along his neck, and hot water was flowing from the samovar, steam rising from it. Only the spoken word was missing.