Geiger looks at me sympathetically and even somehow warily:
‘You.’
THURSDAY
I’ve been thinking all these days about what I heard. At first I seemed to take it all calmly but then a second wave somehow caught me. They’d managed to thaw me: from there, it logically follows that I had been frozen. What can I say…
That thought veered off, meandering. It strove not to return to its initial point. I recalled logs that froze into the Neva. Bottles, washtubs, dead dogs, and pigeons: everything that agonizingly melted from the ice in spring. How did I look in icy captivity – like a pigeon? Perhaps like a sleeping princess? Did my bloodless face show through the ice? Were my eyes closed? Or was there no ice at all? Most likely there was not: I read that they use nitrogen for freezing.
Some days on the island, I myself wanted to freeze. To sit under a tree and drift off. I recalled Lermontov then – I’d like to forget and fall asleep – and I imagined very well just how that happens. When it is no longer cold, when one wants to do nothing, not even to live. It’s not frightening when you aren’t thinking about life and aren’t thinking about death. You hope: maybe it will all work out somehow, so something will happen that won’t allow you to definitively perish. But that didn’t happen. In the spring, under the pine trees, they found people you simply did not even want to describe. Though I remember I did already describe that; they did not withstand overwintering well. So did I freeze there or something? It doesn’t seem that way: it is known that good freezing requires glycerin. I look at myself in the mirror without false modesty and think that, in essence, I am pretty well preserved.
Geiger stopped by a few times and slapped me on the shoulder. He would slap and leave without saying a word. What, really, could someone say here?
‘And so,’ I ask, ‘how did you manage to thaw me? And the big thing: how did you remove the glycerin from my body?’
‘A specialist…’ There is respect in Geiger’s gaze. ‘And there was no glycerin.’
‘What do you mean?’ I’m surprised.
‘There just wasn’t any, that’s all. And therein lies the mystery.’
FRIDAY
The end of March. Zaretsky died at the end of March. He was found on the bank of the Zhdanovka River with a fractured skull, not far from the sausage factory where he worked. Detective Treshnikov from criminal investigations – a sturdily built forty-year-old with a walrus mustache – came to see us. Treshnikov was ascertaining who had a stake in Zaretsky’s death. He inquired as to whether Zaretsky had any enemies or any relatives that might inherit his room. Enemies or relatives (they do know how to formulate things in investigations)… we didn’t know about either. He asked where we had all been the night before, but we were all at home.
Treshnikov told us that Zaretsky’s trousers had been unfastened and that there was a string around his waist. The end descended into his drawers.
‘Do you know what the string was for?’ he asked.
We knew very well that it was for sausage but for some reason we said:
‘We don’t know.’
Treshnikov suspected that Zaretsky was a maniacal criminal and had attempted to rape someone. And gotten it for that. We objected, saying we had not observed women coming to see him at all. The latter seemed suspicious to Treshnikov.
‘That,’ he sighed, ‘is a bad sign, when women don’t come to see them.’
Later, as a representative of our apartment, I went to the morgue to identify him. I did this without difficulty. It truly was Zaretsky lying on the marble table: small, completely naked, lividity on his face. What he had termed his peepee turned out to be surprisingly small. Looking at it was enough to throw off any thoughts of rape.
I noticed no visible injuries to Zaretsky’s head: his skull had been struck from behind. Since the murder weapon had not been found, Treshnikov surmised that Zaretsky had been pushed and hit his head on a rock: there were many sharp rocks on the shore. Treshnikov also allowed that it could have been a strike from behind. In that case, it was unlikely that Zaretsky had attacked someone; in fact, the opposite was likely. If not for the deceased’s unfastened trousers, Treshnikov would possibly have leaned toward that scenario.
Of course I could have told the investigator that the deceased brought sausage out of the factory in his drawers. After exiting the guardhouse – he himself described this when he was drunk – he would walk down to the steep riverbank, which was deserted. He would unfasten his trousers, untie his sausage, and carry it the rest of the way in his hands. This is all very understandable: it is uncomfortable to walk around with a sausage in your trousers. If I had told him that, Treshnikov would have come to the simple conclusion that Zaretsky had ended up not being the only sausage lover in that deserted place. That a sausage-factory worker had fallen prey to someone’s love for that product in our hungry time. After all, the fact that the sausage was not found on the waist string spoke to it having been taken away.
However, I did not even consider telling Treshnikov that, deciding: let him think of Zaretsky as he wishes. Was that my revenge on the deceased? I don’t know. I cannot say I especially pitied him. In parting, for some reason Treshnikov asked if Zaretsky had snitched to the GPU. My sixth sense determined that it was better not to lie, so I said he snitched. What did that question mean? Was it a hint that we, too, had motives for murder and that he knew that? The criminal case was closed soon after.
They buried Zaretsky next to his mother, at Smolensky Cemetery, where we ran into him once with the bottle of vodka in his pocket. The sausage factory arranged a funeral at its own expense: it was without particular luxury but, more important, it was said to lack people. It’s possible the factory’s chiefs decided not to interrupt the sausage-making process and didn’t excuse anyone from work. Or maybe there was not a single person among the factory employees who was at all close to Zaretsky. Of course the latter is likeliest. Anastasia and I did not go to the funeral, either. That is obvious.
SATURDAY
Here is something that surfaced from the depths of my consciousness: academic drawing presumes a foundation based on a knowledge and understanding of form, and so drawing based on an impression are alien to academic drawing. Also: form must be introduced into the dimensions so that form does not float and so that drab places do not arise on the periphery of the drawing.
Here is what’s interesting: do things like this only turn up in artists’ heads? Or everybody’s? Geiger’s, for example?
MONDAY
Today Geiger showed up accompanied by a boy who was around seven years old. Rather, Geiger stopped by for some of Valentina’s papers (they were lying on the windowsill) and the boy looked through the crack in the door: I saw him. When I asked Geiger what happened to Valentina, the door opened all the way.
‘She has morning sickness,’ said the boy. ‘Papa and I came for her things.’
A dark-skinned character with short hair and a bag in his hands came into sight behind him – Valentina’s husband, one might presume. Shorter than her. He moved the boy away from the door and slammed it shut. Geiger tossed up his hands.
‘Valentina’s pregnant again and I – can you believe – am not involved.’
Judging by the slamming door, Valentina’s husband was not so sure about that.
‘And I’m not involved, either,’ I joked.
‘Does that upset you?’ Geiger asked this seriously.
I went quiet. Geiger’s lack of involvement gladdened me.
As a chronicler of lives, I am inclined to believe him.
TUESDAY
Geiger told me it will not be long until I go out into society. I asked what that means, though I understand everything perfectly well. After all, I do watch television and read newspapers. Once Geiger had sat down in his preferred position – backwards on the chair -he explained that I will enter the public eye in the near future. In the capacity of, if I may be so bold, a newsmaker (this word exists in the world, too). This was bound to happen sooner or later.