[GEIGER]
Our computer guy informed me that word processing program doesn’t always insert the day of the week in the notes.
I asked if it’s possible to restore the lost days. He answered that it’s possible: everything’s possible, he said, in a virtual world. Everything’s a question of time and effort.
I suddenly wondered: but is it necessary?
TUESDAY [INNOKENTY]
I again spent time at Nikolsky Cemetery after Nastya left for classes. It was painful for me to see it: I do remember it unpillaged. There are no longer beautiful marble gravestones here, the ones that stood in my childhood. I asked myself why those gravestones could have been needed: for reuse? For paving the streets? What happens to a people that ravages its own cemeteries? The same thing that happened to us.
On days for prayers in remembrance of the departed, my parents and I would visit some of our relatives here. I loved those outings because they were like trips outside the city, with greenery and a pond: it was like a park, not a cemetery. And just a few steps from Nevsky Prospect. No sorrow could be sensed there at all. Even death was not sensed. Perhaps I did not fear death, either, thanks to that cemetery. I feared it, of course, but somehow without panic.
There was another place I did not fear death: on the island. Unlike Nikolsky Cemetery, it could be felt everywhere there. One cannot say that death arrived for its victims at our barracks: death lived in them. Death’s presence became so everyday that we no longer paid attention to it. People died without fear.
They buried the dead simply, without coffins. They carried the corpses out of the infirmary and tossed them into crates on a cart. Four corpses fit in a crate; they were covered with a plank lid. If the corpses didn’t fit, an orderly would crawl on the lid then stamp on it. They brought the crates to a pit and tossed them below. The pit was filled in when there was no more room. There were many pits of that sort and I had occasion to be near them from time to time. They did not evoke horror in me.
I was horrified only once: when one of the corpses began moving. That’s what it was: one of the naked, decomposing corpses. Looking at its slow shambling, I did not even allow the thought that it was alive. Nothing in that person reminded me of the living. Then he suddenly extended a hand in my direction and introduced himself:
‘Safyanovsky.’
And his left eye could not open because of his swollen eyelid.
I was now standing over the grave of Terenty Osipovich and remembering how lovely his help was for me that time. What a precise word he had found after all. He was lying two meters from me, essentially a trifling distance. His grave was squeezed between two manmade hills and was reminiscent of a boat between waves.
I suspect that Nastya thought last time that I was planning to dig him out. Am I? Most likely no. Though digging up his grave would not be so terrifying. No more terrifying than seeing slow shambling in the Solovetsky grave. The dead Terenty Osipovich probably differed little from the live: his head looked like a skull even during his life. Yes, I wanted very much to see him. If I could have lowered myself those two meters to him, I would have. If he had said ‘Go intrepidly!’ to me from there, I would have gone.
[GEIGER]
Innokenty needs to have magnetic resonance imaging of his brain immediately. The machine broke down at our clinic; I had to arrange for it to be done at another.
You can count the machines in the city on one hand. There’s a huge wait for each one.
I attempted to explain who exactly requires testing. They nodded sympathetically. Explained that there was a six-month waiting list for appointments. Offered a quicker version: four months. And that’s for a person who had been frozen. O, mein Gott…[10]
I gave them three hundred dollars. They set his appointment for the day after tomorrow.
[INNOKENTY]
Some strange things with my memory. Short-term lapses.
At morning prayers, people ask the Virgin: ‘Deliver me of many and anguishing remembrances,’ and I ask that, too. My lapses are of a different nature, though: at times I forget what I had been planning to do a minute before.
But the cruel memories remain.
THURSDAY [NASTYA]
Platosha signed up for a reader’s card at the Historical Archive.
‘What,’ I ask, ‘are you going to search for there?’
‘My contemporaries.’
‘I’m your contemporary, too,’ I laugh. ‘Who else do you need?’
He didn’t laugh, though.
‘Well, various people,’ he says, ‘who aren’t very important compared to you. Minor witnesses to my life.’
I snuggled up against him and he kissed my forehead. I love his kisses on the forehead. I love his other kisses, too, but the ones on the forehead are something special, even friendly, fraternal. That’s what’s lacking, more often than not, even in the very best lover. I understand now why my grandmother prized him so much. And, when it comes right down to it, she remained faithful to him her whole life. And I love him no less. I didn’t used to say things like that, either to myself or to him. Today I said it before going to bed. Standing half-turned toward him. He placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him. We stood like that for a long time. Silent.
They’re doing tomography tests tomorrow. This worries me.
FRIDAY [INNOKENTY]
Today was the scan Geiger arranged. What’s happening with me does not gladden him (or me, either, to tell the truth) and so there we were at the consultation center. Geiger was somehow unusually solemn. He said we need to clarify my fortune. I noted that I squandered my fortune long ago. The joking looked like pathetic cheering-up. Geiger was not laughing. And nobody assigned to the scanning machine was laughing.
Before getting down to work, they asked me if I suffer from claustrophobia. What can someone who lay so many years in an icy, insulated container say? It’s interesting that I began doubting if I did not as soon as they asked me about it. I doubted as I took off my shoes. I had no answer as I lay down on the scan table, either. This was the first time that question had come up for me. And I answered ‘no.’
When the cover closed over me, and the table and I began slowly riding into some sort of tube, I thought that I probably should have said ‘yes.’ This reminded me too much of coffins traveling into a crematorium: they had shown that on a TV show. And the apparatus’s cover reminded me very much of a coffin cover. No wonder the doctor asked me to close my eyes. Why did I not close them?
The last thing I saw as I rode into the tube was the doctor hiding behind a metal door. Metal! And I was not to budge in that tube. I imagined what Gogol must have sensed, if it’s true what they say about him… A quiet panic seized me. I closed my eyes right away. Imagined the starry vault of heaven over my head. It eased. Something began buzzing and mechanically creaking, then went quiet. And began buzzing again. That smart machine was imaging my brain. I am certain that the dearheart will see why my legs are buckling and why I have become forgetful. It will report everything, calmly and impartially.
I rode out of the tube. As I laced my shoes, I saw Geiger taking the image from the doctor’s hands and looking at it against the light. Based on Geiger’s face, it wasn’t clear if he was satisfied or not. He said goodbye and left for his clinic. With the image under his arm.
[GEIGER]
A catastrophe.
I don’t know how I held myself together in Innokenty’s presence. It’s a genuine catastrophe – that became clear even from a cursory glance at the image.