Feet quite often became frostbitten and had to be amputated. This did not mean the number of one-footed people on Solovki increased dramatically: those people did not usually survive. They died in the infirmary from general exhaustion or from a stump being wrapped in poorly laundered rags following amputation.
That’s how Vasya Korobkov, my work partner, died. He had been saying since noon that he did not feel his feet, but none of the Chekists listened to him. I knew that Vasya could no longer saw: he could not even stand and was sitting in the snow by a tree trunk. I attempted to saw by myself and he just hung on his end of the saw, not moving his arm. Toward the end of the shift, we produced only ten logs, less than half the quota. They left us in the woods until morning to complete the assignment, the usual penalty. Vasya cried, beseeching the Chekists to allow us to return to the barracks. They didn’t allow it and began beating him with the butts of their rifles; I was on the receiving end, too. Their cursing drowned in the snowstorm and even their blows could barely be felt in all those white particles.
We spent the entire night in the woods but did not make one more log. At first Vasya lay on the snow, then I laid him on a log, took off his bast shoes and rubbed his feet with snow: they were like ice, cold and hard. Half the night was dark and then the snowstorm suddenly stopped and I saw Vasya’s face in the moonlight. Tears were running down it but there was no longer anything pitiful or whiny in that: Vasya’s features had become motionless from the cold. His face had lost its ability to cry or laugh, and a significance – even a solemnity or something – had appeared on it.
From time to time, I would run back and forth to warm up, but you cannot run particularly fast when you have no strength. Everything began again in the morning for me, with no sleep or food. They gave me a new partner and forced me to work. Two prisoners dragged Vasya to the infirmary, where both his feet were amputated. He died a day later from blood poisoning.
When I told Geiger one time that we worked in temperatures of forty below, without warm clothes, without footwear, and without food, he told me he did not understand how anyone could remain alive under those conditions.
Well, they didn’t.
THURSDAY
I left the hospital. That had to happen sooner or later: Geiger thought further life in the hospital’s hothouse conditions would not be helpful. We worked on my move all this week so there was no opportunity at all to write. Speaking of opportunity, it isn’t so much the spare time I have in mind as something else.
What this all means is that the actual place I moved into is my old apartment! I am now living there again, on the corner of Bolshoy and Zverinskaya. It turns out that – at the doctors’ insistence (read: Geiger’s) – the city’s powers-that-be bought up my former communal apartment, renovated it, and lodged me there. They allotted the room where my mother and I lived at one time to the medical staff attending to me (Angela, for the most part), settled me in the parlor, and left Zaretsky’s room for Geiger, in case he visits. All this was done so that I could accustom myself to my new environment as quickly as possible.
I spent my first day in the new apartment alone. As I understand it, this was how they showed tact regarding my recollections, and I was grateful for that. I walked from room to room. Everything was completely different: floors, doors, and windows. Even the old furniture was different, specially purchased prior to my move. I opened the kitchen tap and the water sounded completely different. In the 1920s it drummed sonorously on the tin sink but now it no longer drummed. And the sink was not tin. Only the size of the rooms remained the same, though I’m not even sure about that. As they told me, neighboring apartments changed their living space so many times during the years gone by and were subjected to so many new floor plans that it was simply pointless to seek out a resemblance with the past.
But it was there anyway. That resemblance manifested itself in its own way in the freshly renovated apartment with new old furniture. In how, for example, I knew for certain the number of paces from the window to the door. In how I could imagine, eyes closed, what was visible from each window. But here is the main thing: each time I closed my eyes, I seemed to hear the voices of those who had lived here at some point. For the first time, I grasped in all clarity that I had lost them – the living – forever.
I lay on the bed and closed my eyes. I felt like disappearing, not being, and freezing again without ever thawing. I fell into a dream that was murky and swampy. The dream pulled me ever deeper and more hopelessly, and I no longer understood if I was dreaming of shadows in the apartment or if they were wandering all around while I was awake. I knew that in cases like this one needs the will to awaken, the effort, but it was exactly this that I could not resolve to accomplish because I no longer knew which was scarier: dreaming or being awake. I experienced this feeling at one time on the island.
The doorbell woke me up. It was Geiger: how glad I was to see him! If not for him, I would never have woken up. He came to check in on me and brought a bottle of cognac. The cognac and Geiger’s quiet voice calmed me. I no longer felt like sleeping: I felt like sitting and talking.
Among other things, I asked Geiger if I could go out to walk around on my own. He responded that indeed this was necessary. He took a wallet from his pocket and gave it to me. He explained for a long time about the value of the banknotes, how to pay for what, and so on. I retained very little. We talked until about two in the morning and then Geiger called home and said he was spending the night at my place. I thought about how I know nothing about him, either his family or what he does outside work. What was this sitting here with me today? Part of his work or outside it?
Geiger has gone to bed in Zaretsky’s room, which was prepared for him, but I still don’t want to sleep: I slept plenty in the afternoon. I’m sitting and writing. From time to time I hear bedsprings squeaking on the other side of the wall. It’s good it’s Geiger, not Zaretsky.
FRIDAY
Whence shall I begin to weep over the deeds of my cursed life?
SATURDAY
I was standing by the window this evening. I noticed the cognac that Geiger left (open, by the way) on the windowsill. At first I looked down at the moving cars, then at the sky. In the sky were flying machines that looked very little like aeroplanes. I, Aviator Platonov, was drinking Geiger’s cognac and recalling Commandant’s Aerodrome, which, as it turns out, is now gone. But how can it be gone? How can an entire world – an entire life with its joys, tragedies, discoveries, waiting at some times, tedium at some times, the pounding of rain on empty benches, or swirls of dust on an abandoned airfield – leave the face of the earth?
Where, one might ask, is that world? Where are the women in the smart dresses who give bouquets to aviators? Where are the men in service caps that slide down to their noses? With canes and with cigarettes in their teeth – where are those men? Where are all of us who’d been standing at the edge of the field? And what sort of Atlantis were we taking to the ocean floor? Where, finally, is the giant inscription, ‘Russian Society of Aeronautics,’ that decorated the hangar from which the aeroplanes rolled?
I knew all those machines like my own five fingers. I could distinguish them with my eyes closed from the sound of the motors. A Bleriot monoplane from, say, a Voisin or Farman biplane. I knew the aviators’ faces: Pégoud, Poiré, Garros, Nesterov, and Matseevich. It’s not that I had seen them all personally, it’s just that their portraits hung at home. Where are those portraits?