‘Do you love her like before?’ she asked.
Yes, a nice face. Only someone with a face like that can ask questions of that sort. Those who had been standing on the street came into the admissions area, too, and surrounded us.
‘I love her.’
Like before?
FRIDAY
Even as I was waking up, I realized I was taking ill. Nagging pain in my joints, aching cheekbones. Watery eyes. I called Geiger and said I seemed to have influenza. The flu, agreed Geiger. He ordered me not to leave the house. He came over about forty minutes later, bringing medicines.
‘It was obvious,’ he said, ‘that riding the metro would end up this way because you don’t have immunity to today’s infections. But this is something you have to go through, too. It’s just important not to go to the hospital for now: it’s dangerous for both you and Anastasia. It’s probably even more dangerous for her.’
I don’t have immunity yet; however, she apparently does. After Geiger left, I attempted to call Nastya but didn’t catch her at home. At the appointed time, I went out to the chapel by the metro. Nastya was standing there and I approached her uncertainly, even somehow sideways, covering my mouth with my hand. She noticed me walking from afar and followed my approach with slight surprise. She moved a lock of hair behind her ear with her thumb (a gesture of uncertainty). Remaining two or three steps away, I explained to her what happened. She understood everything and we agreed to call each other.
Solitariness awaited me at home. Geiger’s morning visit didn’t count: it is his doctorly duty to care for me. Yes, he fulfills his duty responsibly to the highest degree, even in a friendly manner, but that just doesn’t compare with how I once sat by Anastasia’s bed when she was ill. Even lay there. Read Robinson Crusoe to her while she held my hand. And now, after meeting an eternity later, our hands had touched again. As then, Anastasia was lying in bed and was again sick. It is true the illness (illness?) is different now, but Anastasia is different, too. She has changed a lot.
Nevertheless, the fact that she is here makes everything easier. Her existence on earth is evidence that my previous life was not just a dream. After lying down in bed, I can close my eyes and think that Anastasia will walk over to me now, take me by the hand, and share her coolness. This can still be imagined, too: she will rise from her hospital bed, come here, and take me by the hand. Nothing is impossible during a person’s life: impossibility sets in only with death. And even that is not necessarily the case.
SUNDAY
I spent all day yesterday in a drowse. Geiger is uneasy: he had not expected that the flu would be so severe.
‘You’re paying for not being sick all those decades,’ he told me. ‘It’s an adaptation process.’
Nicely stated…
A nurse comes to see me three times a day. Not Angela but a dull middle-aged woman, a sick man’s dream. Takes my temperature, gives me pills. Sometimes gives injections. She calls Geiger each time (I hear his distressed, mosquito-like voice on the other end of the line). He comes to visit every evening now.
The last time I took ill was on the island: of course, care was different there. Different. In the evening the medical attendant took my temperature: it was 39.5.
‘Excuse me from work tomorrow,’ I requested.
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘The quota for being excused has already been used up. Just go for light work. It’s 39.5, so I’ll intercede.’
I barely rose in the morning. The weak barracks light bulb blurring in my eyes. Darkness, November, five hours left until sunrise – and what was the sun there? Worse than the light bulb. I could not believe my ears at the job assignment: ditch-digging. And I had no strength to walk. Not even strength to object. It was very bad, though perhaps a little easier than typhus.
I was standing in water up to my knees. I had bast shoes for footwear but it was even more difficult in bast shoes so people took them off before working in a ditch. I felt an icy cold with my feet; the rest of my body felt fever. Such a fever that the water would start boiling near my feet any minute now. The soles of my feet slipped along the swampy, peaty earth. I pulled earth out of the water, shovel after shovel. It came up to the surface with a squishing sound. As if it is parting from its environment. Bleeding black ooze, shovel after shovel. I could not go on. I lay on the edge of the ditch.
Voronin. I saw Voronin walking with his revolver, but I had no strength to even stir. Yes, it appeared he’d shoot me now, too. And everything would end for me: ditch, wake-up, thin gruel. Zaretsky did welclass="underline" he had none of this. They whacked him with a heavy object; he didn’t even suffer. But I was beaten at interrogations and smothered in the hold of the Clara Zetkin so they could finish me off, weakened, on the edge of a ditch. One shot and I’d be gone. No more being read to by my grandmother when I was ill, no dacha in Siverskaya, no Anastasia. That was how much I, alone, would drag off behind me. Or maybe that would all remain somewhere, in some part of the universe, not necessarily in my head after alclass="underline" it would find itself a tranquil harbor and exist there.
Voronin kicked me and, to my surprise, it didn’t hurt. Maybe because I no longer correlated myself with my body. Well, he kicked… Someone told Voronin I was ill and he kicked me again. I should have shut my eyes, as if I had lost consciousness – why did I not close them? Or lose consciousness for real because assimilating what happens is so difficult when fully conscious.
Voronin acted as he always acted. After beating one of us zeks, he forced him to urinate in a mug. He brought the mug to my face and ordered me to either drink it or go to work. He cocked the gun and counted to three…
They say that what was done in concentration camps has no statute of limitations. I will send that description to the office of the public prosecutor, police – or what is it – the supreme court: let them hear about Voronin. I feel my temperature rising as I write. There is noise in my head. I will make it to the Day of Judgment, charging Voronin not so much with torment and murder as appropriating the surname dearest to me. Do they attach significance to surnames there?
Then I truly lost consciousness. That saved me from being shot and I ended up in the infirmary. Upon recovery, I was sent to an isolation cell on Sekirnaya Mountain, for refusing to work.
MONDAY
Today Geiger announced that nurse Angela will no longer be coming to see me. Well, that’s reasonable. I understand why they sent her to me but I don’t consider it correct. I don’t need such a vulgar nurse.
TUESDAY
One of the television channels showed a film about me today. It was compiled from extracts of interviews that I gave recently. The extracts are interspersed with Solovetsky newsreels, set to sad music. The music takes the place of all the sounds and words from that time, which were, of course, not musical. Especially the words.
They say that a half-truth is a lie. The falsity of that newsreel is not even that it’s straightforward flimflam filmed at the order of the GPU. I never saw anyone in the infirmary in clean linens, nobody read the newspaper or played chess in the common room, etc. I repeat: that is not what’s at issue. It’s simply that, in some strange way, the black-and-white figures darting around the screen stopped corresponding to reality: they are only its faded signs. Just as petroglyphic drawings in caves – animals and little figures of people – are hilarious and remind one of real people and animals but say nothing about life back then. You look at them but the only thing that is clear is that bison were four-legged and people two-legged, essentially the same as now.