Platosha and I bought some pies and various kinds of Middle Eastern sweets at the bakery. The doorbell rang at six that evening. We opened the door. Two guards (with wires in their ears) came in first, followed by uniformed people from the ‘Nord’ bakery, and only then Mister Zheltkov. About a dozen photographers and TV correspondents were behind Zheltkov. Two more guards completed the delegation. Feeling lost, we backed into the large room and the guests (this was reminiscent of a military offensive) advanced toward us.
We drank tea for about ten minutes, just long enough to fulfill the requirement of setting up the shot and carrying out the filming. Put bluntly, I wouldn’t say any soul-searching conversation came out of it. And how could it have been soul-searching when only Platonov, Zheltkov, and I were sitting at the table, despite inviting everybody to sit with us? The rest of the delegation stood by the wall, clicking camera shutters and chatting on their walkie-talkies. We took a sip each and the whole group of them departed, noisy and stamping. We were left with a large teapot inscribed ‘From the Government of the Russian Federation’ plus three cakes from Nord, and we’ve only managed to open one of them.
I wonder if that’s how he always drinks tea?
TUESDAY [GEIGER]
Nastya called. She told me how Zheltkov came by unexpectedly this evening.
I already knew. I saw it on TV: they showed everything. Innokenty Platonov and Zheltkov, patron of the thawed.
The issue wasn’t really about Zheltkov. Nastya called because of the pies and cakes: they’re delicious but there’s nobody to eat them. She invited me to stop by tomorrow for tea.
Of course I’ll stop by.
WEDNESDAY [GEIGER]
We drank tea. I’m not Zheltkov, I can’t be so quick. I stayed very late, until 1.30, and took a taxi home.
I wasn’t expecting Innokenty to start discussing dictatorship and the Terror. About what a misfortune it was for the people. (Nastya silently drew my attention to the pies.)
And then he spoke his mind, saying dictatorship is, in the final reckoning, society’s decision, that Stalin was expressing a societal will.
‘There’s no societal will to die,’ I objected.
‘There is. It’s called collective suicide. Why do pods of whales beach themselves, have you thought about that?’
I had not thought about that.
‘Are you saying,’ I said, ‘that Stalin was only an instrument of that suicide?’
‘Well, yes. Like rope or a razor.’
‘A view like that frees the villain from responsibility: you can’t hold the rope accountable.’
Innokenty shook his head.
‘No, the responsibility remains with the villain. You simply need to understand that the villainy could not help but be accomplished. People were waiting for it.’
Waiting for it?
FRIDAY [NASTYA]
This morning I woke up before Mister Platonov. I sat cross-legged on the bed, examining my sleeping husband. There was no serenity on his face – there was suffering. His lips trembled sometimes, his eyelids, too. From what, one might ask? After all the blows of fate and losses, there’s such a happy ending. He found it alclass="underline" widespread attention (come on, this is even full-fledged fame!) and money; he even found his lost Anastasia in my person.
I really wanted to wake him up but didn’t dare. I would have had to explain that, well, when he was sleeping… An explanation like that might traumatize him. Geiger’s already warning me all the time that I need to be careful with him. And so I didn’t wake him up, I just kept watching him. Hand on the blanket, threads of veins running just under the skin: there’s something childlike in how they show through. Just think: the hand of a hundred-year-old person! The hand that touches me.
In an interview for one of the women’s magazines, they asked me (in an interview! with me!) if I give Innokenty Petrovich high ratings as a man. An obnoxious question, of course. And I answered that the question is obnoxious but couldn’t help myself and said that as a man Innokenty Petrovich is, well, whoa!
I sat and sat and then crawled under the covers again. I started thinking about all kinds of stuff. Yesterday, for example, yet another advertising agent – representing some kind of furniture company – contacted me. He asked Platosha to bring it to the attention of the public that furniture prices are rising rapidly everywhere but at their company, he says, where they’ve been frozen for three years now. The client’s thought is that TV viewers will perk right up and start buying their furniture. For this low-key statement, they’re offering Platosha a figure fifty per cent higher than what he gets for the vegetables… so that’s something to think about. And furniture, yes, would be a little more respectable than vegetables.
SATURDAY [INNOKENTY]
Marx says to me, tapping with his cane:
‘Construction lines are the foundation of the work. You haven’t perfected construction of form, it’s too early to move on to the light-and-shadow model.’
But I apparently moved on. Why, one might ask?
SATURDAY [GEIGER]
A proposal came to Nastya: they invited Innokenty to host a corporate event. At a cooling-unit factory, by the way. It was Nastya herself who told me. She was asking for advice.
I took her by the shoulders and advised her to slow down.
Nastya wasn’t against that. According to her, the reason she’d approached me was that the proposal seemed questionable to her.
Well, wonderful that it seemed that way. Because I’m already feeling alarmed about Nastya’s proactiveness. Innokenty senses that.
‘You probably see Nastya as very pragmatic,’ he said to me the other day. ‘In Russian terms, self-interested.’
‘No, I don’t see her that way. I think it’s still childishness speaking in her. It’s simply speaking in a contemporary way.’
Innokenty looked at me with a lingering gaze.
‘You know, I think the same thing.’
We both started laughing.
I can tell you when I didn’t feel like laughing. When I saw the television advertisement with Innokenty. I don’t watch television, I just turn it on for a short while during supper. For the evening news. And then right after the news, there’s Innokenty in a barrel. And liquid nitrogen and vegetables. And that strange text…
At first I wanted to have a serious talk with Nastya. Then I thought, well, maybe she’s right in a way. Money’s definitely necessary. Money. Geld.[6]
MONDAY [INNOKENTY]
I see that all Nastya’s activeness irritates Geiger. In a conversation with me, though, he himself defined it as childishness. That’s very correct: it truly is childishness. That sort of perception of the matter helps me, too, reconciling me with what it is about Nastya’s behavior that’s disagreeable to me. No matter how it manifests itself, though, Nastya’s childishness moves me, sometimes almost to tears. At times it scares me because it belongs to another world and it’s so incongruous with me and my experience.
I fear that we will never completely bond because my experience – I have already spoken of this – did not form me. It killed me. I’m reading a lot now about the Soviet time and, well, it seems I stumbled on the thought in Shalamov’s writings that one should not tell of the horrendous events in the camp after living through them: they are beyond the bounds of human experience and it may be better not to live at all after them.
I have seen things that burned me up from within: they do not fit into words. Shipments of female prisoners were delivered to the concentration camp and raped by guards immediately. When signs of pregnancy appeared for the unfortunate women, they were sent to Zayatsky Island – the island for Juliets. This was the place they punished sexual debauchery, which is severely penalized in the camp. The conditions were terrible on this absolutely bare island, where the wind blew eternally, and many did not survive. I write that and now shadows that were once people wander along what I wrote. The words crumble to dust: they do not come together into people at all.