Barber number one – a bald, middle-aged man – is preparing to cut the hair of someone middle-aged but not bald. Empty snipping of scissors in the air. He shifts into work mode: the full-fledged sound of hair being trimmed.
Barber number two is also aging and bald. He lights the spirit lamp and passes a straight razor over it. He goes over the client’s cheeks with a shaving brush.
Keeping in mind possible complexes and envy, can one entrust one’s hair to a bald barber? It’s a question…
Both clients answer in the affirmative. The second client risks less because he is only being shaved. In this case, it’s impossible to inflict much damage to the appearance. Only to cut the cheeks.
The barbers converse with one another.
They’re having a long discussion – maybe over an entire day – about the prices of provisions. They can’t bring clients into the conversation, other than with regard to opinions about individual products. But the clients can’t be brought into the fullness of the conversation.
They repeat individual words and even phrases one after the other. Pensively, several times.
The clients can’t repeat like that. To do that, they would need to acquire the special rhythm of cutting hair. Its special tranquility. And that is only accessible to professionals.
Yashin from the archive called as I was writing that. He said Voronin turns out to be alive.
I didn’t even understand immediately who he was talking about. When I realized, I didn’t believe it. That camp scum Voronin is alive! That uncommon swine is alive!
This was the first time Yashin called me instead of Innokenty. This is a special case, he said, the doctor should decide.
Yes, it’s special. And it’s not very clear what to decide here.
Geiger examined me yet again. He requested that I close my eyes, extend my arms, and touch the tip of my nose with each hand. I couldn’t. Meaning I could but not on the first try; as I understand things, that doesn’t count.
‘That doesn’t count, does it?’ I ask.
He smiles listlessly. Put another way, he appreciates that I’m such a cheerful guy. True, he suspects that this cheeriness is from hysteria and he is not so far off the mark.
Whence shall I begin to weep over the deeds of my cursed life? I was reading the ‘Great Canon of Repentance’ aloud to Nastya. There is an astonishing phrase there: When God wishes, nature’s order is overcome. We repeated that many times.
Innokenty and I were talking about higher justice. He loves that expression.
So take the way they pinned Zaretsky’s murder on him and dragged him off to Solovki. Where, I ask, is the higher justice in that undeserved punishment? And he answers that – from the perspective of higher justice – there’s no such thing as undeserved punishment.
That sounds lovely, though not especially convincing. What’s called then punish them both…
And then there’s that other matter: that the GPU man Voronin, scum to end all scum, surfaced the other day. There are no evil deeds he hasn’t committed.
It’s becoming clear he safely reached the age of one hundred. That he retired with the rank of general back in his day and is receiving a special personalized pension. He’s living in the Kirov building on Kamennoostrovsky Prospect.
I wonder what Innokenty will say about that when he finds out. What will he say about higher justice? Innokenty who, to the contrary, is catastrophically losing his health.
All that I’m doing now is stating the changes in his body. And unfortunately there are many. Too many.
If everything continues developing at this speed…
Yes, I’m giving Innokenty certain medications. Yes, they ease the course of the illness. But they don’t affect its causes. As before, those causes remain hidden.
Why are the cells dying? Why is that only happening now? Why is it only certain groups of them? Nobody knows the answers.
Only God, as Innokenty formulates it. And since my relations with the heavenly sphere are pretty troubled, no information is passed on to me.
When God wishes, nature’s order is overcome. Platosha read to me out loud from the ‘Great Canon of Repentance’ and we discovered those amazing words for ourselves. No, not ‘amazing,’ that’s somehow too cheap for them. Words filled with joy and hope. Their meaning has long been obvious to me, but I couldn’t express it that well. Of course I’m relying on Geiger, too – he’s not exactly the lowliest person in medicine – but I rely far more on Him, in Whose hands there is medicine, and Geiger and Platosha and I.
We can only receive His help through the power of faith in Him, meaning through the power of our plea. Two things have to come together here: faith and the desire to recover. Not only the ill person but also his loved ones should display them both. The loved ones, I think, to an even greater degree because they have more strength (they’re the healthy ones) and the ill person is prone to depression.
On another topic. The sudden resurfacing of Voronin, whom Geiger has already contacted. First off, this person I share a surname with is, contrary to expectations, in his right mind. Also contrary to expectations, Voronin isn’t against meeting with a former zek: I was sure he wouldn’t agree. According to Geiger, he reacted without particular sentimentality, just saying, ‘Let him come.’ Now Geiger wants to prepare Platosha. To lead up to it cautiously: what if, say, Voronin happens to be alive…
I don’t know what sort of feelings the news about Voronin will provoke in Platosha. There are lots of scenarios, right up to the desire to kill him. It’s frightening to utter ‘the natural desire.’
For now, I decided not to show my drawing to anyone after all. I’ll practice more and draw something truly worthy of Nastya and Geiger’s appreciation. If my skill were to return to its full degree, I would draw Zaretsky. Portrait of a person mournfully bent over saus-age. I would draw him compassionately rather than mockingly. If not with love then at least with pity. After all, he had nobody to pity him and not one tear was spilled at his funeral. Not one.
In general, I think that when you describe a person in a genuine way, you cannot help but love him. Even the very worst person becomes your composition: you accept him into yourself and begin feeling responsibility for him and his sins – yes, for his sins in some sense, too. You attempt to understand and justify all of that, so far as it is possible to do so. On the other hand: how can one understand Zaretsky’s action if he himself does not?
‘Are you an atheist?’ Innokenty asked me.
‘No, I don’t define myself that way. I’m most likely a person who trusts scientific knowledge. If science proves to me that God exists, well then…’
‘Don’t delude yourself. Science hasn’t been able to answer the most important questions. And it cannot, not one of them.’
‘For example?’
‘How did everything arise from nothing? How does a soul come about and where does it go? There’s oceans of questions and they all lie beyond the boundaries of science.’
‘Possibly. Even so, it’s difficult for me to step across those boundaries.’
Although I sometimes step across them.
I’m stepping across them now, where things relate to Innokenty.
He read me a phrase from a church canticle. Its point is that if God desires it, the natural order of things is overcome.
In Innokenty’s and my case, the framework of science is tighter-fitting than ever: it’s just poking into my ribs. Squeezing religious thought into me: that only He can help here.
Geiger and I talked about God. He does not deny the possibility of God but first and foremost he believes in facts presented by science. Though there is no need to believe in facts, it’s enough to know them. There are many of those facts – hordes and hordes of them – it’s just that they all relate only to what is not fundamental. It even sometimes seems to me that those facts distract from what is fundamental. Of all the millions of small explanations, it is the one that is all-embracing that doesn’t come together. And won’t come together because those things are located in different dimensions. So Geiger is waiting in vain here for a transition from quantity to quality. A explains B, B explains C, and so on until infinity, but where is whatever explains all that infinity in its entirety?