If power is to return to words, the indescribable must be described. Thin faces of women from the Smolny Institute under the slobbering lips of GPU men. Under their unwashed hands. These bastards reeked of sweat and stale alcohol, and when they called for the most beautiful women to ‘wash the floor,’ the women could not disobey.
The wail of a woman whose husband was shot, five children were taken away, and who was, herself, sent to Solovki. There they raped her and infected her with a social disease. A doctor informed her about the disease. She rolled along the frozen ground by the front steps of the infirmary. At first they did not beat her, ordering her to stand. Then they began kicking her with their boots, ever harder and more frequently, beginning to enjoy themselves, becoming animals. She shouted loudly, her voice high, briefly going quiet after blows to the gut. The most terrifying thing about her wail was not its strength but the unfeminine bass note that concluded each of her high-pitched screams.
I saw that. And I have been unsuccessfully driving it from my memory ever since. That’s what I live with, what so separates me from Nastya and makes us people from different planets. How can we live together if we are so endlessly different? She has a spring garden and I have that abyss. I know how terrifying life is. But she does not know.
TUESDAY [NASTYA]
Today was Platosha’s press conference. My husband looked far more confident at this one than the previous one. That occurred to me during the press conference and was confirmed for me after watching it in the evening rerun. There’s no point in describing it: it’s all published in The Evening Paper.
TUESDAY [GEIGER]
I watched Innokenty’s big press conference this evening.
He was sitting in front of an advertising display screen. That lent the proceedings an extraordinarily commercial look.
Innokenty has become more self-confident. He answered calmly.
He twirled a pencil in his fingers. Nastya told me later that the vegetable PR agency brought the pencil (it’s a good thing it wasn’t a frozen carrot). To create an image of confidence. I don’t think Nastya needs that sort of thing.
There was no getting around some of the lovable ad-libbing that life abounds with. When Innokenty was answering a question about the level of government support (a disappointed hum in the hall), the TV camera cut to Motherland LLC on the advertising screen.
It wasn’t just the cameraman who noticed the patriotic firm. A reporter from one of the newspapers pointed at the advertising screen and asked Innokenty if it didn’t seem to him that the Motherland truly was an LLC with regard to him. The joke went flat, though. Innokenty didn’t know what the abbreviation meant.
He still didn’t laugh when they explained all that to him. He began discussing, in all seriousness, how there’s nothing bad in the Motherland having limited liability. Everyone, he said, should be liable for his actions. Only personal liability can be unlimited.
And then he said it’s pointless to blame the government for one’s troubles. And it’s pointless to blame history, too. One can only blame oneself.
The correspondents then grew gloomy. One asked:
‘And you really don’t blame the government for the fact that you landed in a camp? That they turned you into a block of ice? That your life became utter punishment, for unknown reasons?’
‘Punishment for unknown reasons does not exist,’ answered Innokenty. ‘One need only think about it and an answer will certainly be found.’
Interesting logic. In a strange way, it coincides with the GPU’s logic. They always helped find answers at the GPU.
TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]
I keep asking myself if Nastya resembles Anastasia. Just after we met, it seemed to me that she resembles her. But now, apparently, no. I cannot identify the changes that have taken place in Nastya. Has she become more uninhibited? More self-confident? They say you can only get to know a woman through marriage. Perhaps that is yet another phrase, a cliché, but does that mean it’s incorrect?
Yes, Nastya was a little different during the time we were not living together. But it would be strange to maintain the style of our previous relationship when the circumstances of our interaction have changed. For example, we now see each other naked – does that mean we should use words from another time? It’s simply that Anastasia and I did not have this phase of life together, otherwise I think she, too, would have changed. And it’s already high time I stopped comparing Nastya with Anastasia. Nastya is her own person, she is not that sheep Dolly and not a copy of her grandmother. She’s a completely separate person. Why am I measuring her using someone else’s scale?
WEDNESDAY [NASTYA]
I was awoken during the night by something like quiet whimpering. When I turned on the nightlight, I saw it was Platosha. He was crying in his sleep and his face was wet from tears. He was trying to say something but wasn’t opening his mouth, and his voice was thin, somehow almost like a child’s. That’s why it seemed like he was whimpering. A face with closed eyes isn’t usually expressive but there was so much grief on his… Not a face but a tragic mask, reflecting what he’d suffered there, in his previous life. Wake him up? Or don’t wake him up? I wanted to cut that troubling dream short right away but was afraid that would only be worse. I touched my lips to Platosha’s eyes and sensed the salt. He opened his eyes but didn’t wake up. He closed them again and went on sleeping, without groaning.
Then I couldn’t go back to sleep. All kinds of daytime stuff started getting in my head. I remembered that today I’d made a final agreement about renting out my apartment and even accepted a deposit. I started deciding what to leave in the apartment: the furniture, of course, dishes, and some other stuff. Take: favorite books, all sorts of intimate little things, my grandmother’s things. In these cases, you usually put together a list but I didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to wake up Platosha.
THURSDAY [INNOKENTY]
Several GPU men raped a young woman in the medical department. I was lying on the other side of a wooden wall and heard everything. I couldn’t stand. I shouted to the doctor but there was no doctor. I began pounding on the wall but nobody paid me any attention. I continued pounding. One of the rapists came in, dragged me to the floor, and kicked me several times with his boot. I lost consciousness.
When I came to, I heard crying on the other side of the wall. The doctor’s voice was audible, too, and the jingling of medical instruments. Then the doctor came to see me.
‘I can point out one of the employees who was there,’ I said. ‘He came in to beat me and I remember him.’
The doctor carefully helped me lie on the bed.
‘Do you really remember?’ He turned at the threshold. ‘If I were you, I’d forget as soon as possible.’
It’s surprising, but I knew who was lying on the other side of the wall. This was the same unearthly creature I had seen once in an apartment on the Petrograd Side. A railing with wrought-iron lilies on the stairway, the smell of books in the apartment. She walked ahead of me. Limping. I moved slowly behind her along bookshelves. She limped, yes. Hair gathered at the back, shawl on her shoulders, and if you looked, she was exactly like a librarian, especially with all those books around. I had brought her several more books: some of the ones Professor Voronin borrowed from this family. The Meshcheryakovs: the surname blended with the address and was thus preserved. The Meshcheryakov family. What kind of family was it? I never did find out.