Carefully moving aside the gifts from the sea, I took the professor’s books from the shelf. These were volumes by Mayne Reid and Jules Verne, stories of sea voyages and descriptions of exotic countries: things infinitely distant from jurisprudence. Professor Giatsintov collected at his Crimean dacha what children dreamt about but did not come true, that which his way of life did not encompass and which was not housed within the Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire. I suspect there were no laws at all in the countries dear to his heart.
I sat cross-legged in a boxwood chair (the aroma of boxwood added to the house’s smells!) and read Giatsintov’s books. I leafed through the pages with my right hand while my left clenched a piece of bread with butter and sugar. I bit off a piece and read. And the sugar crunched on my teeth. From time to time, I would raise my eyes from the book and think about how people become attorneys. Do they dream about that when they are children? Doubtful. I dreamt about being a fire captain and a conductor, but never an attorney.
I also imagined staying in that cool room forever: that I live in it as if in a capsule, that there are coups and earthquakes outside, that there is no more sugar or butter or even the Russian Empire outside, but I keep sitting and reading, reading… Subsequent years showed that I guessed right about the sugar and butter but, unfortunately, sitting and reading did not work out. The new life did not lend itself to reading.
Yes, this is important: on one of the cabinets there stood Themis, exactly the same as ours, except for the scales, because apparently nobody in the Giatsintov household had dared break them off. It seems to me now that it was Giatsintov who gave the statuette to my father. It is obviously an item to his taste.
SATURDAY
Today I asked Geiger:
‘Did my mother die?’
‘She died,’ he responded. ‘In 1940.’
SUNDAY
Today Geiger and I went to Smolensky Cemetery. We began the morning with a service in the Church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God (I began that way and Geiger sat outside), then we went to the chapel of Blessed Xenia. It turns out Xenia was recently canonized. I remember that my mother and I stopped in at the chapel at one time and people were already revering Xenia then: those who came left little notes. My mother said: ‘You write, too.’ And I wrote. What did I ask for then?
I can still see my mother on that spring day, in a headscarf tied so tightly it seemed to be squeezing her facial features, lending her a severe and somewhat distressed appearance. At first it was overcast and the wind was blowing, but then blueness took shape on the very edge of the sky. We were sitting by my father’s grave and the blueness broadened until it came to our sorrowful place, where it stopped. And so my mother and I sat on the border of blue and gray, and nothing more changed in the sky. I poured vodka into shot glasses; she cut thin slices of bread. Threads of veins ran through the back of her hand; it seemed as if I had not seen the veins before. It’s possible they popped up from the cold. Or perhaps it was the beginning of her old age.
‘What did she die of?’
I purposely asked this along the way so as not to have to clarify anything at my mother’s grave. At one time, my mother had forbidden me to speak of those present in the third person; and she was, despite everything, present here. There would have been a sort of awkwardness to my questions.
‘Of pneumonia.’ Geiger blew his nose into a paper handkerchief. ‘They said she caught cold here.’
We had no trouble finding the grave; it was not far from the walkway. Nothing had changed on the surface since my mother entered. She had entered in the literal sense: the fence was designed for two plots and, as Geiger told me, my mother was buried over my grandmother. The same granite cross was there, the one my father installed back in his day, after my grandmother’s death. His name had been carved on the cross after his death, too. When my mother was buried here, nobody carved anything, simply because there was nobody to do so. Despite the absence of a name and a mound, of course my mother was present here. That was perceptible.
Geiger took a flask and a set of silver shot glasses in a leather case out of his side pocket. There was cognac in the flask.
‘In 1940, they sent her a notification of your death,’ said Geiger, filling the shot glasses. ‘What’s interesting is that pneumonia was given as the cause of death. After freezing you, the Chekists displayed a sense of humor – even the secret police have one. Pneumonia. Caught a cold in liquid nitrogen.’
We drank without clinking our glasses.
My mother had no remaining loved ones after this notification, and she had nowhere to go but the cemetery. She would sit there for hours at a time, conversing with the departed. She died of the same illness they attributed to me in the notification. Was that by chance? I will not find out until I see her. When thinking about my mother, I had supposed that she might have died during the blockade – perhaps this was because I had been reading about the blockade in recent few days.
‘There are graves of other people I know at this cemetery,’ I told Geiger.
He nodded but did not answer, likely expecting further questions from me. But I didn’t ask. About anything. As we walked out the cemetery gates, I thought: It is good that my mother did not live to see the blockade.
Did Anastasia live to see it?
TUESDAY
My father, who has a cold, is gargling in the bathroom and I am getting on a stool next to him. I want to observe with my own eyes the mysteriousness that gives birth to guttural gurgling sounds, those strange modulations – from rumbling to groans – that you do not hear from your father at any other time. This is how a naturalist climbs to the edge of a crater, striving to reach boiling lava before eruption. At my request, my mother gives me a candle. The flame only slightly illuminates the roiling in my father’s throat and the main attraction lies in that concealment. Later, after I had grown a bit and was already gargling masterfully myself, I discovered that it works even without a voice. It works, though poorly, for the voice prolongs the exhale and makes it more powerful. Voiceless murmuring is powerless and pitiful.
WEDNESDAY
Logs. Large logs were called balany on the island. At the end of a shift, each of us had to turn in thirteen of these logs per assignment to the Chekist. We worked in pairs, meaning twenty-six in all. The assignment was unachievable, at least for those who had never done this type of work before.
The tree had to be felled and stripped of branches and sticks, but first you had to get to the base of the trunk, which got lost in the deep snow. We dug it out with our bare hands: there were no shovels; they did not even issue mittens. We let our hands warm up by raking snow away with our feet, which might as well have been bare because our footwear was bast shoes worn over footwraps of burlap. After stripping the base of the trunk, we took a two-handled saw to it and began sawing. Initially the teeth would slip from the frozen trunk but the work became easier when the saw’s blade entered the pine’s flesh. Time seemed to disappear with the identical rhythmic motions; you yourself would fall into another reality. Crouched or kneeling, we would saw until our hands froze on the saw handles. Then we would stand and switch places, while switching hands. We needed to stand in order to warm our frozen feet at least a little bit, too.