[GEIGER]
Nastya is in the hospital.
They didn’t let Innokenty in to see her today; they ordered him to come tomorrow. He called and told me about it. He also asked me to find a description of the aeroplane ‘Farman-4.’
I asked:
‘Why?’
He said:
‘Since we’re restoring a general picture of life as it once was, let’s have it. Add it to our other texts.’
I’ll add it, that’s not complicated. Just open the encyclopedia and write.
But. I feel uncomfortable. I don’t know if it’s worth supporting endeavors like these.
And so, ‘Farman-4’ is a biplane, with two pairs of wings. Two-seater. Manufactured during 1910–1916. Engine: sixty-five horsepower, propeller diameter 2.5 meters. Weighed 440 kilos, capable of lifting 180 kilos. Fuselage made of pine, wings and wheel covered with creamy-yellow canvas. Sehr raffiniert.[13] Frolov flew in a Farman (that sounds like a little verse). Unfortunately, he also crashed in one.
I don’t know why I’m writing all this. It’s not easy to do. Even so, it’s easier than writing about the results of Innokenty’s tests.
[INNOKENTY]
Last night I wrote until I fell asleep right at the table. I dreamt of Frolov’s aeroplane. In my dream, I even remembered what it was called: ‘Farman-4.’ Now that is memory: it even preserved the ‘4’ – who would have thought? I dreamt that his plane was running along the airfield but just could not take off. The aviator sees that there are all kinds of leaves, grass, and flowers under his shoes, and it all blends into a dark-green mass. Maybe it would be better not to take off… He could just keep riding and riding – what’s wrong with that? He could just bounce on the hummocks, the wings trembling occasionally.
But that’s not what we loved him for.
[ ]
I stayed the night at Innokenty’s. We talked until around three.
He took out the vodka, first one bottle, then another. I didn’t think of objecting: what kind of objections could there be here? We did drink both bottles.
I was basically afraid he would start asking me about his health. He didn’t.
Nastya’s health worries him far more now. He’s very afraid the baby will die.
The conversation somehow slid on to how life is structured these days. Innokenty called it anarchy. I noted that authoritarian rule usually comes after anarchy. Which is essentially very sad.
But Innokenty – Innokenty who did time! – said authoritarianism may be a lesser evil than anarchy.
He compared the populace of a country to deep-sea fishes. They can only live under pressure, he said.
I attribute that statement to the quantity of vodka consumed.
An unpleasant discovery: during the time we sat around, Innokenty choked several times. Some sort of swallowing disorder, and this is not a matter of the throat. It’s a problem with the brain.
[INNOKENTY]
I went to see Nastya today. She is ill and looks it: she’s pale, even green. I have never seen her like this. I sat with her until late in the evening, until they showed me out. During lunch, I ate nearly her entire portion because she couldn’t eat. Her attending physician is of the opinion that this is due to toxicity in her body.
Put bluntly, the food is not from the Metropol. This is what I think: the cooks here aren’t especially trying to make lunch not taste good, right? They just don’t put in everything that’s called for: stated simply, they steal. They’re our people. They just cannot help themselves.
But Geiger says you cannot control these people, or anyone else, by coercion. He and I argued half of last night about the advantages of democracy. I see those advantages even without his comments. They might be natural and appropriate in some places, but they just cannot seem to develop in our country. In Geiger’s ancestral motherland, for example, they can, but not here.
I think the whole issue is personal responsibility. Per-so-nal. Individual. When that’s missing, there needs to be some external corrective action. If, for example, a person has problems with his spine, they put a brace, a fairly severe thing, on him. But it holds up the body when the spine cannot. That is exactly what I’m going to tell Geiger. I cited a marine example but now I’ll cite a medical one.
[GEIGER]
I examined Innokenty the other day and noticed that his arms and legs have become slightly thinner. The reason: decrease in muscle mass. This testifies to problems with the spinal cord.
Innokenty had a positron-emission tomography scan today. There is little joy. Why did I regard this as limited to the brain, anyway? It was to be expected that the cooling would affect the entire body. Including the spinal cord. But what, what, exactly, was the effect? If only I could understand that…
[ ]
Nastya was discharged today. It turns out they did an ultrasound during the course of her treatment. And they reported the most important news, too, when they discharged her: it’s a girl. A daughter. I have been thinking about that all day today. For some reason, I had imagined it would be a boy. That doesn’t mean that a girl is worse, there are simply things that seem to go without saying.
On the one hand, I could offer more advice to a boy because I have gone through that rather complex journey. On the other hand, my journey began almost a century ago. It’s a big question as to whether that experience has any value now. So then, in terms of experience, it makes little difference if I have a daughter or a son. As a man, it’s probably nicer for me to have a daughter. And, when it comes down to it, all the best things in my life are connected with women.
I just reread this: what silliness! It’s obvious, after all, that the abstract points here don’t apply. People love a specific person, not a boy or a girl. After being born, a person ceases to be an abstraction and then… But will I have a then?
[ ]
I’m at home again. We’re at home again! Us and our daughter: I just found out we’re having a girl. Why didn’t they say right away that I’m having a girl – were they afraid to jinx it? They didn’t believe in a happy outcome? Or is it ineradicable Soviet-era spitefulness, plain and simple? It’s pointless to guess and, really, not very interesting.
I think our daughter will pull us both – him and me – out of this pit. When we were riding home from the hospital in the taxi, I said:
‘Platosha, sweetie, two ladies are totally depending on you. You just can’t pack it in now.’
And he even smiled in response, but so very haggardly that I almost burst into tears. I swear, it would’ve been better if he hadn’t smiled. I nestled up to him, put my head on his shoulder and then wrapped him in my arms. The driver looked at us in the mirror and that’s how we rode the whole way: hugging.
[INNOKENTY]
Yashin telephoned and said he had something interesting for me. When I arrived, he brought me a file with materials about my cousin Seva. It came after the archive sent an inquiry to the public prosecutor’s office: Yashin dug deep… He’s a professional, I had to admire him. Even the way he pulled out the papers sheet by sheet seemed somehow very adroit. In white gloves; he’s a red-head himself. I found myself on the first sheet, in the list of those who had been assigned to the 13th Brigade. With Seva’s signature. Opposite two surnames was a notation instructing particular strictness of incarceration. One of those surnames was mine. Did Seva really want so badly to get rid of me?
He and I had flown so much on the aeroplane kite, I in the front seat, he in the back! Seva had not moved into the front seat, not even at the transit point: he did not shoot me, did not deprive me of my life using his own will. He granted that I die my own death – if, of course, death from exhaustion can be considered one’s own. We ran and I slowed down because I saw Seva gasping for breath. We slapped our feet along the damp sand, slipping and raising a spray, and the kite flew majestically over the sea – where we could not run to follow it – and it seemed that he and I were flying with it. Our aeroplane dove when we stumbled, but that was almost unnoticeable: it looked as if it had caught another airstream.