THURSDAY
Geiger said that my biological age is around thirty. I barely aged in the liquid nitrogen.
SATURDAY
They came to search our apartment a week after closing the criminal case regarding Zaretsky. Now, though, it was the GPU, not the criminal investigators. By this time, I’d seen both types and could compare. For the most part, criminal detectives were recruited back before the revolution. They were comprehensible people for me, even likeable in a way, with a distinctive sense of humor. Those who worked for the GPU seemed their exact opposite: their gloomy focus did not dispose them to joking. I shared this observation with Detective Treshnikov when they summoned me to identify Zaretsky. He laughed and said the main difference between criminal and political investigation consisted of criminal investigators seeking out a person because of a case and political investigators seeking out a case for a person. Treshnikov showed little respect when speaking about the professional qualities of GPU employees.
They were the ones searching my room, though. I had already seen a search in the Voronins’ room and the one taking place now was much the same. The only difference was that many of the objects that the GPU searchers touched had their own histories and my mother and father’s contact had lent them a special spirit, my father’s in particular since he was no longer with us. It was difficult to see one of the visitors weigh my father’s silver watch in his hand and hold it to his ear. He opened it – though not with the touching jaunty gesture my father made – somehow clumsily, like a monkey, as if he were revealing a nut he had found.
It was distressing to observe them rummaging in the linens. I knew my mother’s squeamishness and well imagined her feelings when someone else’s hands were groping at sheets and nightgowns. I’ll launder everything, she was thinking, I’ll launder everything thoroughly so not even a trace of those hands remains. Or maybe she wasn’t thinking that. She sat in a stupor, afraid to move at all. She was imagining that my fate now lay on frightening fluctuating scales and she was afraid of tipping the pan toward my destruction.
Of course I’m confusing things: the scales are what occupied my thoughts. And my mother was not sitting: Anastasia was the one sitting and I was afraid she would lose consciousness. But my mother was grasping the visitors by the hand and saying I was not guilty of anything. They responded that revolutionary justice would sort things out and she continued speaking, quickly and incoherently, as if she wanted to say an incantation over my unfortunate fate…
I looked at the cabinet where Themis stood, understanding that now nobody would sort anything out, that any outcome to the matter was unjust because there was no longer an instrument for weighing. The most frightening thing for me that evening was the sight of the bronze statuette with the broken-off pans: it was even more frightening than those creatures digging in my linens, perhaps more frightening than what threatened me later. The sight of that statuette left not the slightest hope. I suddenly realized in all clarity that the conception of right and not right had disappeared over several years or so. And of up and down, light and dark, human and beastly. Who would do the weighing, what would they weigh, and who needed that now, anyway? Only a sword remained with my Themis.
As they were leading me out, my mother stopped one of the GPU men and whispered a few words to him. This was the one who had been interested in my father’s watch. She took his hand and placed something in it. The watch – what else could she have placed there? The watch-lover smirked and did not answer. The hand with the watch slid into the pocket of his breeches. My mother pressed herself against his shoulder, still not understanding that was useless. She spent her final embrace not on me but on him, hoping to at least buy me some lenience. Anastasia was next to me and I did manage to press my cheek to her but when my mother rushed to me, the escort guards were already standing between us.
I turned on the landing and cast a glance at the lighted rectangle of the door. Behind the escort guards’ backs I saw my loved ones for what turned out to be the last time. Even now I see them with photographic precision. I know they saw me the same way when I turned. They photographed me for a lifetime: the flash of their grief illuminated me. The two photographs will merge into one after my death.
Outside, I was shoved into a closed van. When the GPU men climbed in after me, the door clanked as it slammed; I had never heard a more hopeless sound. Just under the ceiling was a window covered by a grate: thanks to that, I could differentiate my traveling companions’ somber faces. I saw the roofs and upper floors of buildings, too. I recognized several of them and from that understood where we were. I remember that it was not yet dark. Despite the evening hour, the sky was spilled with light: the white nights were approaching. I was parting with the city and felt I would never return to it. That is how things worked out. I have returned now to a completely different city. That one no longer exists.
MONDAY
As a child, I loved monitoring the work of pavers. How they laid wooden hexagons in wood-block paving. How they poured tar on the cracks and spread sand. Wheels rode softly and noiselessly along pavement like this – softness is characteristic of wood; it is alive. Sometimes in the mornings, before leaving for school, I would hear them repairing the pavement, changing blocks that had come out of place. They brought hexagonal pieces on a cart or chopped them there, from stockpiles, so they were the size of the pothole, then drove them in with massive tampers that produced muffled wooden sounds. I heard those sounds in my sleep and they didn’t bother me: to the contrary, they made the minutes before getting up even sweeter because the people working had risen long ago. They were suffering from the cold, bent in the damp wind, but I was lying in my warm bed, still lying there, my minutes seeming like an eternity to me. I felt the same thing when yardmen began clearing snow with shovels while it was still dark. They scraped it. Chipped ice. Had quiet quarrels. Unlike me, they were not glad for the snow. They were not waiting for it by mid autumn as I was when, each morning, I opened my eyes, raised them, and went still, looking to see if the ceiling was lit by the reflection of a street that had whitened during the night.
I do not like snow now, either.
Andrew of Crete’s ‘Canon of Repentance’ was being read last week and Passion Week began today. I would ask Geiger to bring me the ‘Canon of Repentance’ but it is very doubtful he has it.
I miss Valentina. Will she be back?
WEDNESDAY
Geiger told me the idea of freezing people came into the authorities’ heads after Lenin’s death. The authorities were uneasy, convinced by the Lenin example that a head of state undergoes the same changes after death as a rank-and-file citizen. Preserving bodies in a frozen condition until such time as science would be capable of prolonging biological life seemed to them like a way out. Their natural concern about posthumous existence served, according to Geiger, as a stimulus for research in the field of freezing. They did not even attempt to freeze the leader of the world proletariat himself: in fact they only began embalming him after decomposition was already well underway.
Geiger mentioned Academician Muromtsev’s working group, which was instructed to study issues related to freezing after Lenin’s death.
‘Is that name familiar to you?’
‘It is familiar,’ I answered uncertainly. ‘Yes, it seems familiar…’
It turns out that a lot of what I had read about in the American’s book was done back in the 1920s by Muromtsev. Rats and rabbits, they all froze and thawed beautifully in his laboratories: everything except monkeys, which were simply impossible to obtain in Leningrad at the time. The laboratory worked very successfully from 1924 to 1926, when Muromtsev was arrested.