MONDAY
I read somewhere that Themis was depicted by Greeks without a blindfold over her eyes. Without scales, without a sword. The figure we know now is the Roman Justitia, who succeeded Themis. Well. The Romans, fine; Justitia, fine. I liked her that way. The raised hand with the scales (without scales at my house, of course), a sword in the other hand and even the blindfold over the eyes. A long dress dropping into folds, the left breast uncovered. That excited me as an adolescent.
Sometimes I would take the statuette from the shelf and place it on my desk. My finger would slide along her smooth polished surface. I would take her in my hand, surprised at how precisely she settled there: my fingers easily went into the folds of the dress and her raised arm became a rest for my hand. I admired the tactile perfection of the form. This is most likely what made me an artist…
An artist! I had been coming to this for a long time: simultaneously recalling and not recalling. Sometimes you recall something in a dream and do not believe it is the truth. But now I suddenly believed: I was an artist… Fine, I was not, I just wanted to become one, but: an artist. The answer to the question of who I was, after all, has come now, when I was thinking about Themis. It manifested itself in my consciousness in all its preciseness. Themis. Form. Perfection. And I: an artist, a student of the Academy of Arts. Sphinxes on the embankment. Vase, horse, Apollo. Pencils scratching on paper. Why had I not remembered that?
Just now I found a pencil and decided to draw something. Vase, horse… But it didn’t come out. Apparently I’m too excited. Despite the late hour, I called Geiger and asked him about my discovery.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you studied at the Academy of Arts, and very successfully, too. In light of certain circumstances, you didn’t graduate.’
As I listened to his weakening voice, I realized I had woken him and that realization was not without malicious pleasure. In recalling who I had been, I experienced not only joy but annoyance, too. It seemed to me that Geiger should have hinted to me about this long ago. I even told him as much. He (pause) answered that he himself had doubts on this score but in the end chose to stick to his decision. The fact that I had now filled that hole in my memory confirmed the correctness of that course: he said I should recall the most important things in my life on my own.
Well. And what if I had not recalled?
TUESDAY
Geiger came over this morning with a set of watercolor paints, paper, and sable paint brushes. My call seemingly made an impression on him. He examined me carefully and gave me permission to leave the house. I called Nastya right away. We met at Sportivnaya and rode to the hospital. Anastasia’s condition remained almost unchanged. I say ‘almost’ because just before we left, she raised herself on her elbow and called Nastya by name. Her eyes were looking at the ceiling as she did. It is unclear if they saw Nastya.
On the way back, I proposed going somewhere for lunch. We came out of the metro at Ekaterininsky Canal, which has now been renamed. The little restaurant that Nastya brought me to looked out on Kazan Cathedral. The canal’s granite separated us from the cathedral and its unseen waters flowed somewhere below.
‘Order for both of us,’ I requested. ‘It’s been about a hundred years since I was last in a restaurant.’
‘Eighty-something,’ Nastya corrected me.
‘I was being coy.’
We were sitting opposite one another by a window and the huge cathedral took up the entire window. It looked at us with obvious reproach because it had seen me out for walks so many times with Anastasia. Sitting with her on granite steps that were cold even on summer evenings. The final picture that remains in my mind is from autumn: a newspaper tossing about hysterically between the columns. In the dusk, it resembles a medium-sized ghost and Anastasia and I look at it silently. Both we and the cathedral were eighty years younger then.
Now it has seen me with Nastya. This is not what you think, I could have told it. But I did not. My mouth was busy with the beefsteak Nastya ordered but this was not even about the beefsteak: I myself did not understand what was happening to me. Do I like Nastya? Of course I like her. Being with her is easy and nice. I had not experienced those two feelings in either my camp years or (even more so) in the decades that followed. Do I consider that I am somehow being unfaithful to Anastasia like this? No, I do not. When that question came into my head there, by the window, I got worked up, but I’ve calmed down now at home. I’ve realized how absurd the question is. My gaze fell on Geiger’s paints: when had he managed to buy all that today? Or maybe he didn’t buy them today? Maybe everything was purchased for the future and had been awaiting its time?
WEDNESDAY
Picture windows curtained in canvas. Plaster copies of ancient statues. Michelangelo’s slave, the Discobolus. Apoxyomenos, head doubly tilted – forward and to the side, a difficult perspective. Proto-forms: sphere, cube, cylinder, pyramid, cone, six-sided prism, triangular prism. Parts of David’s face: nose, eyes, lips.
For half of last night I attempted to draw with paints. Nothing came out.
THURSDAY
Some popular magazine or other has commissioned me to write an article about 1919 in Petersburg. This is very opportune for me right now. For whatever reason, the drawing just is not coming along but maybe writing will work out? The pay isn’t bad, either; I had not expected it would be so much. I warned the editors right away that I will not be writing about events or even people: they knew all that without my telling them. What interests me is the most minor of everydayness, things that seem unworthy of attention and are taken for granted by one’s contemporaries. This everydayness goes along with all events and then disappears, undescribed by anyone, as if it had taken place in a vacuum.
They nod to me: write, they say, no need to ask, but then I can’t stop. So, I say, shells remain within layers of rock: billions of shells that lived on the ocean’s floor. We understand what they looked like but we do not understand their natural life outside the layers of rock: life in the water, among rippling seaweed, illuminated by a prehistoric sun. That water is not in historical compositions. You, they laugh in the editorial office, are a poet. No, I object, summoning the spirit of Geiger: I am a chronicler of lives.
FRIDAY
I climbed Sekirnaya Mountain with two escort guards and felt my stomach cramping from fear. I was ashamed of my fear because I had never before been so afraid, even when I was on the way to Solovki. The escort guards were calm or – more likely – indifferent people, which in camp terms is the best thing possible. They did not urge me on and they barely cursed, but they also displayed no particular interest in my fate. They did not even speak about anything amongst themselves. It was obvious they had tired of camp life and were now simply conserving their strength. It was not just prisoners that the camp wore out.
As we were climbing the mountain, an inconceivably beautiful expanse opened up before us. Yellow forests. Dark blue lakes. A leaden sea somewhere at the very horizon. I recalclass="underline" the forests were not completely yellow. Green spots of spruces were visible, as if someone had poured one paint into another but had not stirred. I began feeling uneasy. I took that beauty as a sign of my rapid demise. I thought that something like this could only manifest itself before death, as the best thing that one is granted to see during life. The escort guards could have seen it, too, but they were looking in the wrong direction.
They led me to an isolation cell located in the church and knocked with their rifle butts. A lock clanged on the other side of the door, like a wolf’s teeth in a fairy tale. As if it were swallowing me. I was ordered to enter; the escort guards remained outside. I cast a parting glance at them after stepping over the threshold. It was rough for me, very lonely, that they were leaving. As if a child had been surrendered to a shelter by his relatives. Even those people seemed like relatives to me before the face of the death awaiting me.