The guard’s eyes are in the door window. They watch for your hands to tense, for your bent-at-the-knee legs to raise slightly higher than your comrades’ feet. The guard enters; he has a stick. He beats you – on the head, on the shoulders. You slip from the shelf and hit your head on the floor, shrieking wildly. And you seem detached from your tormented body. From your own beastly shriek. Is that you shrieking? Are the guards who ran in kicking you? Tying you up? He twists your arms and ties them behind your back, to your feet. You are no longer a person, you are a wheel, why do they not roll you?
They drag you up steps and haul you into the ‘lantern.’ The ‘lantern’ is the upper part of the church, which formerly served as a lighthouse. There is neither light nor glass now. Only wind, the strongest wind on the top of a hill. You resist it for a time but then your resistance vanishes. And time – that continuousness that is impossible to describe – vanishes. You give yourself over to the will of that wind: it will heal your wounds, it will carry you off in the right direction. And you fly.
THURSDAY
Today when we were at the hospital, Anastasia uttered, ‘Innokenty.’ Without regaining consciousness, just like when she mentioned Nastya’s name before. And so her consciousness is glimmering, some sort of events are taking place there, someone is present in it. Nastya and I, for example.
FRIDAY
Anastasia called me by name again.
I bent over her and said:
‘I’m here, Anastasia.’
I repeated that several times, slowly and distinctly.
I asked:
‘What did you want to tell me?
She was lying with her eyes closed. Breathing heavily.
Did she hear me?
SATURDAY
He resembles Karl Marx, but wearing glasses. His right hand rests on a cane, the left draws on a board with a long metal pointer that has chalk at the tip. How the eye is constructed. The eyeball, covered by eyelids from above and below. All the invisible lines are being drawn as if they were visible; the form is depicted as transparent.
It suddenly occurred to me that it probably would have been better if Marx and his numerous followers had drawn. They could have copied Michelangelo’s David, rubbed away the extra pencil lead with stale bread, and gone to Plyos to make sketches. I think there would have been less grief in the world. A drawing person is somehow loftier, gentler than a non-drawing person. Values the world in all its manifestations. Takes care of it.
I shared these notions with Geiger. He pursed his lips and went silent. He answered my direct question about my theory by saying he could not corroborate it. He does know one universal villain who was an artist in his youth. What can you say about that? The influence of art has its own limitations.
MONDAY
Today I went alone to see Anastasia: Nastya was studying for her last exam of the term. I telephoned for a taxi and went. It has become impossible to ride the metro: the glasses don’t rescue me because people recognize me perfectly well in glasses, too. The taxi driver also recognized me. He looked at me for a long time in the rear-view mirror and then asked:
‘Forgive me, but did you feel anything there, in the ice? Were there any, you know, desires?’
‘There was the desire to be thawed.’
A pause.
‘That’s very understandable.’
Anastasia greeted me with silence and said nothing that day. Her arm (yellow spots on skin) hung off the bed. I sat on a chair by the bed and took her hand in mine. It seemed that her hand responded, squeezing slightly. Maybe this is how any hand responds when you take it. A simple contraction of muscles.
I bent toward Anastasia’s ear and asked if she remembered our hands touching? In that previous life – did she remember? Her eyelids quivered but did not open. I began telling her about how we decorated a Christmas tree. How I took the ornaments from the box and unwrapped them, the paper they were wrapped in rustling. After finding and straightening each thread, I gave the ornaments to Anastasia. I touched her fingers with my fingers, in everyone’s sight, by the way. Anastasia’s and my work offered that opportunity.
That was in the evening. But the tree turned out to be completely different when I went into the Voronins’ room in the morning. The tree (tinsel, ornaments) sparkled in the dim December sun. The vent window was open and the garlands were clinking, barely audibly. There do exist, I whispered as I held Anastasia’s hand, sounds that are rare and resemble nothing else. The sound of garlands in a draft, for example: it is all so glassy, so inexpressibly fragile, does Anastasia remember it? I love that sound very much and recall it often.
I reminded Anastasia in a whisper about other dear things, too. About how, for example, she once took my hand, saying she wanted to see my fate. She drew her fingertip along the tangle of lines and said something; it gave me chills. I did not hear her words because my ears were not working. Of all my body parts, there existed only the palm along which Anastasia’s finger was gliding. It investigated every mount, every line. The longest turned out to be the life line. I wonder if it took the frozen time into account in my case?
THURSDAY
I came to at the infirmary. Not in the same rotten barrack where I had ended up before but in a clean, lighted room. Everything – floor, ceiling, table, chairs, bed – was white and so somehow I calmly thought I had gone straight to Paradise after being beaten on Sekirka.
This was not Paradise, though: there were not things like these there. There was a bentwood chair painted with generous white strokes and the paint had frozen in rivulets on the iron bed knobs; they would not have painted like that in Paradise. The room was white but earthly. Leaning out of bed, I finally spotted non-white objects, too: a light-blue pail with a reddish rag. On the pail, dripping red letters read ‘LAZARUS.’
All the rest was essentially non-white, too. The floor, for example. Indeed, it turned out to be light brown. I lay there and was surprised that the floor could have seemed different to me a minute ago. Not only colors were returning but smells, too. The room smelled pronouncedly of medicines, and bleach wafted from the pail with the mysterious inscription. I do not think there’s any need for either of those things in Paradise.
A medical nurse entered the room and I squeezed my eyes shut. This is a camp habit: pretending you are not there. Go still if you hear someone moving. Merge with the darkness. See nothing and be unseen.
After wiping the floor, the nurse took the pail with the rag and left. Male footsteps sounded. Through my eyelashes, I saw shoes crossing a floor that was still wet. I could not remember when I had last seen shoes at the camp. Folds of trouser legs rested on the shoes. The whiteness of a lab coat replaced the trousers’ stern blackness. The man who had entered leaned over the bed and called my name.
His arrival reminded me of Geiger’s first appearance, though it could be that everything was reversed and it was Geiger who later reminded me of the man who had entered. As is known, one can pass through time in both directions. What is important: I opened my eyes. The stranger looked at me, silent. A professorial little beard, glasses. I was silent, too, because it was he who should speak. And he began speaking:
‘Your first task, Innokenty Petrovich, is to recover.’
That seemingly assumed a question about a second task, but I did not ask it. Remembering the pail, I asked:
‘Is LAZARUS a nickname for the infirmary?’
‘It’s a special nickname, shortened.’ He smiled. ‘Laboratory for Absolute Zero and Regeneration in the USSR, only it’s doubtful you have heard of it.’