I don’t know what the current president drinks (I’m afraid it’s something else) but he hasn’t worked out to be one or the other… Innokenty, however, astounds me. A person who lived through the harshest of tyranny and utters the word ‘ruler’ so lightly! Unglaublich…[9]
There’s a reason the glass fell from his hand.
SUNDAY [INNOKENTY]
There’s a word-processing program on the computer that automatically corrects mistakes. I have the strange impression that sometimes the editor in there gets too involved and corrects a great deal more than necessary: adds something or, vice versa, erases something. It is my profound belief that the editor is too intrusive. Thanks to that program, I have the constant feeling of an outside presence… I reported this to Geiger: he laughed and said he hasn’t paid attention to these things for a long time. The usual computer insolence, he says.
MONDAY [NASTYA]
Just the other day, Geiger brought me a packet of papers. Platosha’s journal from the first half-year of his new life: the notes from the notebooks have been entered on the computer and printed out. According to Geiger, he brought them so I can understand my husband better. I do, by the way, understand him pretty well already. But what genuinely struck me in those notes is how minutely he describes all kinds of details, the older they are, the more lovingly! I told him about that and he answered that he’s writing a blueprint for the impending universal restoration of the world. My sweetie is joking.
I wonder if in a blueprint like that Platosha’s recollections would be of equal value to the recollections of other people’s – for example, mine? Although who needs my ancient history? By historical standards, ugh, it’s not even the past, it’s still the present. What could I describe that’s so special?
For example, lining up in the morning at kindergarten, like in prison or the army. Breakfast filled with sorrow. The urge to vomit from lumps in the semolina porridge; a bleach smell from the washroom blowing in when a draft gusts. Sitting over the porridge, I carefully pick out the lumps with a spoon, but sometimes they get missed and I’m forced to push them away with my tongue. And that’s when I vomit.
I have no love for those details and who would? But someone must come to love and describe them, too, otherwise the world will remain incomplete. Maybe I should be frozen, too, so I can appreciate them in a hundred years and present them to my descendants?
MONDAY [GEIGER]
The document regarding Innokenty’s rehabilitation arrived.
It is stated that rehabilitation is ‘due to the absence of elements of crime.’ Meaning that he wasn’t part of a counterrevolutionary plot and didn’t kill Zaretsky. Nobody had any doubts about that as it was.
It’s important to have the paper anyway. In a bureaucratic country like Russia, you always have to be ready to prove you’re not a camel. In our case, it’s all crystal clear: the government is guilty, meaning it should acknowledge that.
Innokenty wasn’t even moved by the paper. I even thought I saw displeasure flash in his gaze. Does he really disdain the government so much that he doesn’t need rehabilitation? No, I haven’t noticed anything like that in him.
Maybe it seems to him that a paper like that is too cheap for all his sufferings?
I asked him:
‘Do you recognize the government’s right to declare you guiltless? If you don’t recognize it, that’s understandable, too.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Only the Lord God can declare me guiltless. What the government does isn’t as important.’
Well, that’s one way to look at it.
TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]
There came a moment in the life of each Lazarus when he was injected with a sedative and sent off for freezing. The injection was a final and secret kindness toward the person being experimented on and it was shown by Academician Muromtsev. The high-level authorities believed that people should be frozen not only while they were living but while they were awake. The academician, though – justifiably considering sleep a form of life – deviated from that instruction, and the Lazaruses were grateful to him for it. Without doubt, it is easier to plunge into the kingdom of absolute zero while sleeping. In the time before their injections, the Lazaruses frequently recalled the Russian saying that sleep does not hinder death. These words sounded cynical if applied to Muromtsev’s goals, but in a strange way they must have strengthened the academician in his decision to inject the sedative.
I thought about Lazarus as I drifted off. His fate was my only hope. If it was possible to resurrect a man dead for four days who was already giving off a stench, then what could be impossible about resurrecting a person frozen according to all the rules? I understood that finding me alive upon defrosting was out of the question but I did not want to depart with a feeling of desperation. The Lord had resurrected Lazarus four days later. When would they resurrect me? And would they? I wanted to believe that they would.
Thinking now about my thawing, I – in light of the number of years that passed – ask myself: did my thawing become the resurrection of an entire generation? After all, any detail that I can now recall automatically becomes a detail of the time. And perhaps this is not a matter of detail but the whole? Maybe I really was resurrected in order that all of us grasp once again what happened to us in those terrifying years when I lived. I am sharing this with Nastya. And what if, I tell her, everything truly was schemed up for me to attest to? I did, after all, see everything and remember everything. And now I am describing it.
THURSDAY [NASTYA]
My overall state hasn’t exactly been luxurious in recent days. I’m nauseous, don’t feel like doing anything, and could just lie around without getting up. But no, there’s tons of various things to do, the main one being that I have to cook so Platosha can eat. He’s not fussy at all, he’d get by with a heel of bread, but this does mobilize me. He tells me:
‘I’m already having dreams about frozen vegetables from the ads. Can we really not use that money to hire a housekeeper?’
We can. It’s just that I, for example, don’t want there to be someone other than us two hanging around the apartment. It’s easier for me to make lunch myself. It’s more than ‘easier,’ it’s very enjoyable for me to cook for him. And he needs that so much: Platosha isn’t just some husband off the street: he’s special, the same age as the century. He requires care.
I’m laughing here, but there’s some kind of frailty in him. Yesterday he slipped and fell in the bathroom. It’s good the bathtub is plastic not iron; he didn’t hurt himself badly, just scared me. I flew in, with one leap, and saw him lying in the bathtub. Smiling.
‘I lifted one foot,’ he said, ‘over the side of the bathtub but the other one came out from under me.’
Mamma mia! ‘I lifted one foot over the side’ really is something an old man might say, not a man in the prime of life! Who is, yes, a full ninety-nine, though that doesn’t hinder him, hmm, as a husband, not the teensiest bit. I told Geiger about that fall and he scowled. He asked me to keep a more careful watch on Platosha. How much more careful could I be…?
Oh, and Geiger went through the hassle of getting official rehabilitation for award-winner Platonov; he says that could be important. He’s surprised the document arrived so quickly and thinks that is because of Platosha’s fame. The hero himself is maintaining his indifference, which is a bit strange. I understand that for the most part he doesn’t need anybody’s rehabilitation and this scrawling isn’t worth a thousandth of his sufferings, but there’s nothing offensive about it. He looks at Geiger almost angrily.