I was led to the upper chapel and ordered to take off my shoes and strip to my underwear. Seeing that the floor was cement, I asked permission not to remove my socks. They struck me in the face. I entered my new cell barefoot, in my drawers, and my face bloodied. It was actually good that they struck me. It was easier for me that way.
SATURDAY
Today I came to the metro a half-hour early to meet Nastya. That did not happen by chance, however: as I was leaving the house, I realized it was still early. I sat on the parapet near our meeting place and thought: What, I cannot wait to see her? I even shrugged my shoulders. No, I decided, I simply do not feel like sitting at home. It’s dreary at my place, there are only ghosts there.
I watched workers lay asphalt on the roadway. Unwashed, unsober workers wearing dirty (once orange) vests tossed hot asphalt by the shovelful and a roller flattened it. Their faces were awful, too. There were not even faces like this when they laid the wood-block paving. It began raining, first finely, then harder. The water collected in bulging puddles on the oily, smoking asphalt. Smoke mixed with steam: hellish work. Does asphalt last long when it is laid in the rain? And by faces like those, too.
I saw Nastya from afar: fragile, with an umbrella. Resembling a statuette, something I (as an artist) value very much in women. When she noticed me, she picked up her pace and almost began running. Because I’m getting wet. I froze for so many years and now I’m getting wet. She ran up and sheltered me from the bad weather. She took a tissue from her pocket and wiped off my face – very nice! The rain stopped right then. Nastya clicked her umbrella and it collapsed. After grasping it as if it were a wet bird, she neatly folded its winged pleats.
We descended into the Metro. Thanks to Nastya, I already knew how to stand on the escalator during the descent: one step lower than a female companion, face turned toward her. Drops glistened on my female companion’s hair. A damp imprint from the umbrella smudged on her bag.
‘You know, Nastya, I remembered who I was.’ I paused a bit. ‘An artist. A beginning artist.’
She looked at me with mild curiosity. She doesn’t know how long it took to recall that.
‘Were they able to find your work from back then?’
I shook my head in the negative. Nastya turned me in the direction we were moving and we disembarked from the escalator.
‘That’s fine, you’ll draw new ones. You will draw?’ She smiled.
‘I don’t remember how it’s done. Nastya, can you imagine, I don’t remember…’
SUNDAY
All day yesterday I compiled, in my head, a plan for the article. It came easily, with no effort at all. I am an artist, after all, an artist, not a historian. A sequence of events is not important to me: all that concerns me is the fact of their existence. I wrote down the points of my plan as I recalled them, without any logic at all.
There were no new things: everyone wore old clothes. There was even a sort of chic to that: a difficult time, a beloved phrase then. Know how to survive a difficult time: wear out existing items and do not don the new ones, even if you have them. We wore out items with enthusiasm.
Newspapers were not sold but pasted to the corners of buildings. Groups of laborers read them. It brought people together.
Secret trade of provisions. Open trading was forbidden.
Water did not go all the way to upper stories. Water was stored there in bathtubs. People filled bathtubs to the brim with water but washed themselves in basins.
Also about clothes: everyone went around wrinkled because when it was cold we slept without undressing.
More often than not, lamps did not burn; the electricity operated for a couple of hours each day. People made kerosene lamps.
Waste pipes froze in the winter. We did not use the toilet but went to privies in the courtyards, more often than not with chamber pots, to empty them. But there were not privies in every courtyard.
Trams were a rarity; one had to walk. And if trams did show up, they were crammed full.
An unusual sight: no smoke from chimneys in the winter. There was nothing to heat with. People took apart wooden structures for firewood. Doors between rooms were sawed up. One time Anastasia was sick and I borrowed fifty logs from the yardman, then racked my brains for a month about how to repay it. In compensation for the firewood, I had to give him a silver saltcellar that had belonged to my grandmother. It was a pity.
Ration cards. For sugar, bread. I acquired galoshes for myself with my labor card.
Long hours waiting in line for kerosene at Petrocommune.
Flatbreads made of potato peelings. Carrot or birch tea. Also about food: a fallen horse lay for a long time at the corner of Bolshaya Morskaya Street and Nevsky Prospect; a piece of meat had been cut from its croup.
The most popular gifts in 1919: sealing wax, paper, nibs, and pencils. I gave Anastasia a jar of molasses.
I am attempting to reconstruct that world, which is gone forever, but I end up with only meager shards. And also a feeling – I don’t know how to express it correctly – that we differed from one another in the world back then, were alien to one another and often enemies; but when you look now, in some sense it works out that we belonged to one another. We had our time in common and that turns out to be quite a lot. It connected us to one another. I’m frightened that now everyone is alien to me. Everybody except Anastasia and Geiger. I have only two people who belong to me, but back then it was the whole world.
MONDAY
Today I asked Geiger why it took me so long to recall that I had been an artist. And to explain (my voice suddenly gave me away here) how it is that I cannot manage to draw anything now.
‘It’s something to do with the brain cells that are responsible for that realm,’ said Geiger. ‘By all appearances, they weren’t restored after thawing.’
‘But that was my primary activity…’
‘Maybe that’s exactly why those cells didn’t restore themselves.’ After a silence, he added: ‘On the other hand, you write very well. Your creativity, as they say now, lost one channel but gained another. Are your literary descriptions really not a form of drawing?’
A graceful answer.
TUESDAY
I was thinking about Sekirnaya Mountain again today. Painting and literary descriptions are all powerless here. Well, what kind of description can convey round-the-clock coldness? Or hunger? Any story implies a completed event but there is a dreadful eternity here. You cannot warm up for an hour, or two or three or ten. And it is impossible, after all, to accustom oneself to either hunger or cold. The residents of the second floor of the isolation cell are barefoot, wearing only their drawers, and sitting on beams. The room is unheated. It is forbidden to speak, forbidden to move. The beams are high and feet do not reach the floor. After several hours the feet swell so much that it is impossible to stand on them. The torture lasts and lasts, and that lasting kills. How can you describe that torture? You would need to write for as long as it drags on. Hours, days, months.
It is rare for someone to endure for months – people lose their minds but more often die. You sit from early morning, you feel your dangling soles and a draft wafting along the cement floor. The boards dig into your thighs. Then, when your feet already seem to feel nothing, there comes a full-body agony and the impossibility of sitting. You imperceptibly place your hands under your legs and attempt to push back from the beam the slightest little bit so there will at least be some sort of motion.