SATURDAY
I keep thinking about the nature of recollections. Can it really be that what my memory stores is only a combination of neurons in my head? The smell of a Christmas tree, the glassy ringing of garlands in a draft of air, is that neurons? Paper strips crackling on a window frame when it is opened in April and the apartment fills with spring air. Fills with subdued conversation from the street. The evening clicking of heels along the sidewalk, the drone of nocturnal insects in the dome of a lamp. And Anastasia’s and my timid feelings, which I remember gratefully and will remember until the end of my life – are those neurons, too? Her whisper, which slips into speaking out loud thanks to her laughter; the aroma of her hair when she’s lying alongside me.
After those days of illness, we would often lie alongside one another. Usually during the afternoon, when nobody was in the apartment. We would lie there, embracing. Sometimes not touching one another. Talking. Silent. In one of those minutes, I whispered right into her ear:
‘I want you to become my wife.’
Anastasia always laughed easily and I was afraid she would burst out laughing. But she did not. She answered briefly:
‘I want that, too.’
Also in my ear. I felt her warm lips.
She and I had not begun speaking with the informal ‘you.’ It seemed to me that the chastity of our relations should not be subject to any ordeals, even such trifles as the familiar form of ‘you.’ There was less than a year before Anastasia would come of age, and I had vowed to myself to wait for her coming of age.
‘It must be difficult for you…’ Anastasia once said. ‘Without a woman.’
‘I have a woman. You.’
She blushed.
‘Then I shall be a woman… in all ways.’
I kissed her on the forehead.
‘I don’t want to do that before we are wed.’
The most acute feeling is one left unfulfilled and I experienced that completely. Never before had my formal ‘you’ been so sensual. I still sense its heat on my lips. A most genuine heat. It is difficult to believe that this is achieved through a combination of neurons.
MONDAY
A person is not a cat and cannot land on four paws wherever thrown. A person is placed in a certain historical time for some reason. What happens when someone loses that?
TUESDAY
Today was an unusual day: I found myself in the city for the first time. After my morning procedures, Geiger asked:
‘Do you want to go for a car ride?’
Did I want to? After sitting in my room for so many weeks? I broke into a foolish smile. The last time I had smiled at a proposal like that was as a child, when every trip seemed like a holiday. Even now, though, a trip was no common matter. What lay ahead for me was not a ride in an automobile familiar from my youth but in one of the streamlined apparatuses I had thus far seen only on television. The important thing was that my forced seclusion was ending and I was dipping into a new life.
Dipping is the exact word here. Just take a dip, my parents would tell me at the beach, fearing a cold. But don’t swim. I won’t, fine, I won’t, taking a dip is something fun, too. Fearful that my weakened body would yield to its very first infection, Geiger did not let me out of the automobile. He stopped from time to time and allowed me to lower the window. I would press the button on the door, the window would slide down with a barely audible drone. You can get lost in that…
And so we sat for a while in front of the Hermitage, the Bronze Horseman, and St Isaac’s Cathedral. I detected no substantial changes in comparison with my time. Well, perhaps asphalt instead of paving stones. Electric poles were made of something different, not wood. We went to Vasilevsky Island; things were generally in order there, too. We set off for the Petrograd Side.
We stopped at the corner of Bolshoy Prospect and Zverinskaya Street (we parked, barked Geiger). We got out of the automobile. There is now something unbookish in what was formerly the ‘Life’ bookstore. Something more likely gastronomical. And the building on the opposite side of Bolshoy Prospect had been two stories smaller. I remember this well because I often looked out the window at it: that building’s entire life had seemed to be in plain sight. And they had built it higher.
We headed toward that building. Geiger pressed three fingers on the buttons by the handle and the door opened. We began walking upstairs, not hurrying. The staircase was covered in gobs of spit and cigarette ends: the gobs were the usual but I had never seen cigarette ends like this. They had a very unusual look. Geiger jingled keys by one of the doors.
‘This is my friends’ apartment,’ he said, whispering for some reason. ‘There’s an excellent view of your house from here.’
We entered. Everything was unusuaclass="underline" floors, furniture, and lamps. That is to say everything was recognizable and it was clear what each item was intended for, but it was surprising at the same time.
The windows faced in two directions: Bolshoy Prospect and the courtyard. Geiger led me to the window that looked out on Bolshoy Prospect. I kept my surprise to myself: it was winter in the city but there were no double windows, these were a special kind, thin. And it was warm in the apartment.
Looking at the windows of my former building, I remembered how Anastasia and I had winterized them. Using a knife edge, we pushed cotton wool into the crevices in the frames and glued strips of paper over it. We boiled paste. Later, my mood always improved at the smell of paste. I recalled the feeling of autumn coziness. It was windy and cold outside but it would be warm at our house. When I took a smeared strip from Anastasia, I felt a curl of her hair on my cheek. I kissed her fingers – she pulled back her hand. You’re crazy, they’re covered in paste. She licked the paste from my lips.
Geiger pulled binoculars from his briefcase and gave them to me. Aha, exactly, there I am standing with her, it is all visible now. She smears and hands the strips to me, I glue them on. I carefully smooth each strip along the frame. The paper is wet and slippery, and there are lumps under it. Sometimes the paper tears noiselessly and I neatly connect the torn ends. I press them, not smoothing. It is intricate work. This is what should have saved us in the winter but did not save us. The warmth left the apartment anyway.
THURSDAY
My formal you and Anastasia now seem somehow excessive, comical even, to me. At the time, though, they were nearly a pledge of her – Anastasia’s – inviolability. They were to some degree a symbol of my askesis, something akin to a cassock in which a monk would probably find it easier to resist temptations. Or, to the contrary, more complex.
The sensual basis of our relations was certainly present but this was a particular kind of sensuality. It went no further than a glance, an intonation, or a chance touch, and that lent it an incredible acuteness. Lying in bed at night, I would recall our afternoon discussions. Her words and mine. Gestures. I interpreted and reinterpreted them.
Even in the dark, the bent nails gleamed on the boarded-up door by which my bed stood. I would run a finger along them. I thought about how her bed was on the other side of the door. Sometimes I heard a muffled squeak. It was as if we were sleeping in the same bed, divided by a partition. Divided for now, it seemed.
What we were hiding so painstakingly from everybody was, of course, no secret to anyone in the apartment. There are things that are impossible to hide when living under the same roof. Even the professorially absent-minded Voronin doubtless had a hunch about something. He had begun looking at me, one might say, with new attention, and that attention was benevolent. The professor would either slap me on the back encouragingly or smile for no reason. One time he came up to Anastasia and me and embraced us. That embrace was equivalent to a blessing.