After Geiger left, he admitted to me that he had a headache. So of course he’s not up for thinking about justice.
SATURDAY [NASTYA]
Platosha truly didn’t feel very good yesterday. I put him to bed and he went right to sleep. I called Geiger a while later to report to him about Platosha’s overall state. I also told him that his favorite childhood toy no longer makes him happy.
‘He wrote,’ Geiger reminded me, ‘that the statuette was somehow linked to his first steps in art. Practically even inspired him to take it up. And now he’s in a sort of stupor with that. His difficulties with Themis are apparently on those grounds.’
‘So what should I do with her?’
‘Nothing, let her stay there. Maybe she’ll help him with a breakthrough.’
There you go. Well, she’ll stay.
MONDAY [INNOKENTY]
I keep thinking: why, after all, did I decide to finish off Panov back then? Impulses like that vanish quickly in the camp. It’s not so much that you lack strength (of course there isn’t any), it’s just that you see no point in a vendetta. The feelings evaporate. Next to nothing remains of them and they are directed at self-preservation. Later, when I was waiting on Anzer to be frozen, I no longer had any sufferings and hurts. They were gone after all the beatings, abuses, and tortures. There was exhaustion.
But I sighed with relief on that quiet evening after hiding the shiv in the grating by the front steps to the bathhouse. Carrying something like that on me wasn’t safe. It was unnecessary, too. I needed it to be in this exact place; now all that was left was to wait for a convenient moment.
That moment came but I never did kill Panov.
On another evening that was just about as quiet, I realized he was in the bathhouse alone. Yes, everything connected with Panov happened on quiet evenings. I slipped out of the workshop and approached the bathhouse. I saw the electric light in the dressing room from a distance and recalled the night the limping young woman was raped. I attempted to enter that state when the hand delivers a blow on its own. Not even a blow but a jab, a cut. Some sort of subtle and elegant motion leading the narrow hacksaw between Panov’s ribs. I did not want him to suffer, I wanted that he not live, that his stinking existence simply cease.
I soundlessly raised the grate and pulled out my shiv. In the last rays of sun, I admired the sharpened part and the shine: how many times had I run files of various sizes along it, applying the last touches with the finest file? I hid it all, hid it from those who were in the workshop. Platonov, they say… I draw them away, take them under my elbow, and lead them toward the wall. Platonov, who are you crafting that shiv for? Nobody asked, nobody caught on. And on that very same evening, I admired the shiv, not very worried that, say, Panov would notice me. I was so on edge that he would not have escaped me anyway.
I walked up to the changing-room window before opening the door. A motionless Panov was lying on a wooden bench. He was lying on his back, arms stretched along his body, which itself was corpse-white and displayed no signs of life. I began watching his stomach, striving to detect even the slightest breathing motion, but there was no movement.
I realized what this picture in the window reminded me of: it repeated the sight of Zaretsky’s body, which I saw at the morgue and identified. I looked at what Zaretsky had been and thought that justice had triumphed. And realized I was not glad about that triumph. And wanted very much for Zaretsky to be alive.
Panov’s hand twitched and scratched his chest. I inhaled deeply. I did not know myself what I experienced at that moment – gladness or disappointment. I knew one thing: I would not kill Panov.
TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]
This afternoon, we flew to Moscow by airplane. Geiger is teaching me: the words ‘by airplane’ can be skipped; he says it’s obvious how you’re flying. Just as certainly, he says, as you no longer need to say ‘call on the telephone’: it’s enough simply to ‘call’… We had supper just now in the hotel restaurant and are sitting in our own rooms.
Unlike Dr Geiger, Aviator Platonov rose into the sky for the first time today: that is the peculiar sort of aviator he is. Not one to indulge in superfluous flights. And this lone flight of mine today did not work out well. As the airplane gathered speed on the runway, I began to feel rather unwell, stifled, and nauseous. Geiger (he said I went very pale) switched on the ventilation over my seat and I felt a bit better. It finally eased for good after the plane gained altitude.
A picture of my last visit to the Commandant’s Aerodrome with my father surfaced in my head. The end of August. An air demonstration, rain, umbrellas over the crowd. Aviator Frolov’s aeroplane was closest to us in the line of aeroplanes. People awaited his flight with particular excitement: it had been announced that today he would demonstrate aerobatic maneuvers never seen before.
Frolov is standing under the wing of his aeroplane, an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. He slaps himself on the many pockets of his overalls in search of matches. He finds them. Strikes one. The matches are damp in the rain. And here I am, thinking the following: if Aviator Frolov suddenly crashes today (this is aerobatics, after all), it will turn out that his wish – which was, in essence, simple – was not fulfilled before death itself.
I feel sorry for the aviator. I ask my father for matches and run across the field to Frolov. That isn’t allowed and the master of ceremonies whistles at me, but I’m running to deliver the matches to the aviator. He somehow understood everything so is already walking to meet me. Smiling. I keep running, holding the matchbox in my extended hand. We meet. The aviator takes the matches and lights his cigarette. He takes the first drag; his face is surrounded by puffs of smoke. He shakes my hand firmly when we part. I nearly cry out from the strength of his grip but manage to hold back. So that’s an aviator’s handshake. As I return to the crowd of spectators, I again cross part of the airfield, but the master of ceremonies isn’t whistling this time. He’s standing, turned away.
And there I am alongside my father, looking at the airfield. Aviator Frolov’s turn comes. He finished smoking his cigarette long ago and is sitting in the seat of the aeroplane. The propeller is working. The aeroplane jerks and shudders, held back by eight aerodrome workers. At the aviator’s signal, the workers let the wings go and fall down. Finally. The machine frees itself from the last thing that held it down. Jumping with one wheel then the other, it runs along for a brief distance and soars into the air. It gains altitude abruptly, somehow almost too abruptly.
Flight. The aeroplane floats in the air like a large bird. It is not entirely clear what holds it there. It might be clear when people explain about the laws of physics and the construction of an aeroplane. But it is not clear when you look at its solitary soaring in the sky. And it is astonishing. And very frightening to think of the person sitting in it.
There is a reason I had been afraid… A reason. It all happened after the complex maneuvers had already been demonstrated. Frolov’s aeroplane was flying in for a landing from the distant heavens. His circular and smooth descent was interrupted all at once. Even now it seems to me that the only possible comparison (which later made it into all the newspapers) is to a bird that was shot. Despite its explicit romanticism, that corresponded to what I saw: the right wing broke like a bird’s and the machine lunged downward, turning on its own axis.
They later wrote that a cable connecting the biplane’s wings snapped and the construction lost its rigidity, but the only thing clear in those moments was: trouble is nearing. Of course it might still have been possible to hope the aviator was executing an aerobatic maneuver and would now come out of his nosedive – but there was the broken wing, which had almost separated from the machine and was shuddering in the wind, leaving no hope.