There were Solovetsky sounds, though: a head striking the bunks when a guard came in, took a zek by the hair, and beat, beat him against the bunk’s support post until he was tired; or the snap of nits pressed by a fingernail. There were smells, too. Of squashed bedbugs. Of unwashed bodies: after all, we worked every day until we were worn out but we hardly washed. And that all wove together into the overall smell of despair, the color and sound of despair, because it only seems that they are concealed within the soul and out of reach for the sensory organs.
Of course the sound of the forest and the swaying of ferns and the smell of pine cones and the sky also existed on the island. If you placed your hands to your eyes in the fashion of binoculars, closing out the surroundings, then you could imagine that this was not the sky over Solovki but somewhere over Paris or, at the very least, over Petersburg. Things of this sort gave birth not so much to hope as to a change of fate (it was not foreseen), and they seemed to attest that elements of the rational still exist on earth, in nature if not in people. Here there is also the creak of a door in the wind (a listless sort of creak but then a sudden energetic slamming) and the smell of the fire at the logging site. You look at the fire for a minute, toss in a piece of kindling or two, and that seems to ease things. It burns as it should. Human laws can be revoked but it turns out the physical ones cannot.
I took in the newsreel footage (they showed it with stylized crackling) and recognized a lot. I recognized the Holy Gate: oh, how my heart missed a beat when I entered it for the first time. After all, by stepping from the boat to the dock, I was already in the camp, but I only acknowledged my imprisonment after entering the gate. By mistake I wrote impoverishment, which is not so bad, either. I recognized the chief, that scoundrel Nogtev. Regarding scoundrels, by the way: it seemed to me that Voronin flashed somewhere there, too. Was it him or not?
Take Voronin: who is he now? A heap of bones if, of course, he was not cremated. He instilled such fear in all of us at the time, but now he is dust, a small gray figure in the footage. And I called him a scoundrel; I continue to hate him. It’s just that if this is happening now, it works out that I hate the present-day him and it’s already obvious who that is. Who, then, do I hate? If I feel all that for the him that was then, does that mean he is not dust? Perhaps Voronin became a part of me by remaining in my memory and I hate him within myself?
WEDNESDAY
Nastya called and asked after my health. It’s nice that she’s concerned. I catch myself thinking I miss her. I asked after Anastasia’s health. I cannot bring myself to say ‘your grandmother’s,’ though that is what Nastya always calls her. Everything is fine, she said, meaning, as usual.
So Nastya said all our troubles began with Zaretsky. Unlike with Voronin, though, I feel no hatred toward Zaretsky. I feel pity – mixed, perhaps, with disdain – but it is pity. How he choked down his sausage after locking himself in: you could only pity him, after all. I don’t even know what short-circuited in his weak brain and why he informed on the professor… In the end, something else is important: he was not a cannibal by vocation. Like, for example, Voronin. It is terrible that he was killed.
Since the film, people have been calling with interview requests; I refuse. I agreed for the first weeks after I was ‘discovered’ (as they say), but quickly realized I was repeating myself. I began attempting to say the same thing differently, but it came out worse and worse each time. I shared that with Geiger. He answered that there is no disgrace in repetition; he said all famous people do it, so I can boldly continue. According to him, the present-day press is constructed on an advertising principle: the more repetition, the better. He elaborated on an entire theory according to which a person’s striving for something new yields to an attachment to the old. This is especially vividly pronounced in children, who always reread more willingly than they read. Maybe that’s how things are: I always preferred Robinson Crusoe to all the new books… But I began refusing interviews.
Of all the callers, I only decided to help out one young miss: her voice was trembling. That is what trembling voices do to men. True, I agreed to answer only by telephone and just one question. She asked it for a torturously long time.
‘What’s the main discovery you made in the camp?’
That’s essentially a banal question, like everything that contains the words ‘main,’ ‘most,’ etc. It’s strange that she had to bleat on so long to ask that. The more banal the question, though, the more complicated it is to answer.
‘I discovered that a person transforms into swine unbelievably fast.’
THURSDAY
Today they called me from the ‘Frozen Foods’ company. They offered me an advertising contract. I hung up.
I typed on the computer yet again today: I typed up several pages from Robinson Crusoe. I write by hand much faster, though.
FRIDAY
As of today, I have been ill for a week. It seems, though, that I’m on the mend. My temperature is not high – around 37 – but I am mighty weak. Geiger stopped by early in the morning; he insists on bed rest. I am lying here even without his insistence, however: I have no strength. He laughed when I told him about the frozen food. He said this current era is a pragmatic one, that I should have thought hard before declining. As he left, he advised regarding advertising proposals more attentively, but I could not understand from his face if he was joking or not.
Nastya called, which made me feel even more lonely. She spoke sympathetically with me but I think she called out of politeness. That can be sensed from someone’s tone, after all. And what else could I count on? No, I have no pretentions regarding special relations with her; that is not what I have in mind. I simply feel that I am a stranger to everyone here. They have their life, their ways of speaking, moving, and thinking. They value other things. And it is not that their things are better or worse than mine: they are simply different. To those alive now, I came here like a person from another continent, perhaps even from another planet. They are interested in me and scrutinize me like a museum exhibit but they do not consider me one of their own.
Solitude is not always bad, though. When I was on the island, I dreamt only of solitude. I went to sleep very quickly after lights out – simply fell on the bunk – but several minutes would pass on the borderline before I collapsed into sleep for good, and that was a time for my reveries.
I imagined Robinson Crusoe trudging along the surf at the water’s edge: I was transferred to his island from mine and even if I had not changed places with him (why would he need my island?), for several instants I took his place in that blessed, uninhabited land. My bare feet sensed a carpet of leaves in a tropical forest where it was fresh even in the heat and green in winter because there was no winter there. The carpet crunched lushly underfoot. I turned huge leaves that resembled ladles toward myself and from them drank with delight the liquid that had collected after a night rain. It spilled unevenly, falling into my nose and eyes, twisting in the air into a tight, glimmering braid.
I never conversed with anyone other than parrots and they told me only what I wanted to hear from them. There was no compulsory work here, no escort guard, not even my prisoner comrades, humiliated and enraged: there was no longer anything that did not correspond to a human way of life or that I did not want to see. Those who created the Solovetsky hell had deprived people of what was human, but Robinson, after all, did the opposite: he humanized all the nature surrounding him, making it a continuation of himself. They destroyed every memory of civilization but he created civilization from nothing. From memory.