‘What was that?’ I scream at Nurse Valentina, tears flowing hard. ‘Why is the happiness of my life not being recalled in full?’
Valentina presses her cool lips to my forehead.
‘Perhaps it would stop being happiness then.’
Perhaps. But I must recall everything in order to understand that.
WEDNESDAY
I am recalling. Tram rails on a frozen river. A small electric tram forcing its way from one shore to another; benches along its windows. The tram driver’s gaze bores through the snowstorm and dusk, but the other shore is still not visible. Streetlights barely illuminate the way and in their gleaming light, any unevenness in the ice looks to the riders like a crack and a chasm. The tram driver is focused; he will be the last to lose hope. The conductor is also strong of spirit but he does not forget to encourage himself with swallows from a flask – the cold and this lunar landscape could dishearten anyone, and a conductor must remain cheerful. He sells tickets for five kopecks and tears them with icy fingers. There are ten sazhens of water below him and a snowstorm at his sides, but his fragile ark, a yellow light on the ice, is striving for its goaclass="underline" a huge spire lost in the gloom. I recognize that spire and that river. Now I know what city I lived in.
THURSDAY
I loved Petersburg infinitely, you see. I felt acute happiness upon returning from other places. In my eyes, the city’s harmony countered a chaos that has frightened and upset me since childhood. I cannot reestablish the events of my life properly now and remember only that when the waves of that chaos overwhelmed me, what saved me was the thought of Petersburg, of the island the waves would smash upon…
Valentina just now gave me an injection in my bottom. Some sort of vitamin. Vitamins are painful; for some reason those syringes are much more unpleasant than syringes with medicine. I lost my train of thought…
Ah, yes, harmony. Austerity. So I am with my mother and father: I in the center, they on the sides, holding me by the hands, and we’re walking along Teatralnaya Street from the Fontanka River toward the Alexandrinsky Theater, right along the middle of the street. We ourselves are the embodiment of symmetry, of harmony, if you will. And so we are walking and my father tells me that the distance between buildings is equal to the height of the buildings and that the length of the streets is ten times greater than the height of the buildings. The theater is growing, nearing, terrifying. Clouds are speeding up in the sky. And this, too: the street was renamed later, somehow wretchedly labeled. Why?
I recalled a fire, too. Not the fire itself but people riding along Nevsky Prospect in early autumn, toward evening, to extinguish it. Ahead, on a black horse, is a bugler. With a horn to his mouth, like an angel of the Apocalypse. The bugler is trumpeting, preparing the way for a column of firefighting vehicles, and everybody is rushing in all directions. Coachmen are whipping horses, pressing them to the side of the road and waiting, standing, half-facing the firemen. And then a carriage carrying firefighters tears along in the emptiness that has come about on roiling Nevsky. They’re sitting back to back on a long bench, wearing brass helmets, with the fire brigade’s banner fluttering over them. The fire captain is by the banner, ringing the bell. The firemen are tragic in their impassivity; playing on their faces are reflections of the flame that awaits them, which has already flared up somewhere, as yet unseen.
Flame-yellow leaves from Yekaterinsky Garden, which has its own fire, fall upon the riders. My mother and I are standing, pressed against a cast-iron fence and observing as the weightlessness of the leaves is conveyed to the column of vehicles: the column of leaves slowly lifts away from the paving stones and flies over Nevsky at low altitude. Behind the line of firemen there drifts a two-horse cart carrying crowbars, spools for the hoses, and hook ladders; behind that is another cart with a steam pump (steam from a boiler, smoke from a pipe); behind that is a medical van to save the burned. I cry and my mother tells me not to be afraid, but I am not crying from fear, it is from an abundance of feelings. From admiration for the bravery and great glory of these people, from how majestically they drift past the stilled crowd to the ringing of bells.
I wanted very much to become a fire chief and each time I saw firemen I would direct a soundless request to them to take me into their ranks. Riding along Nevsky on the upper deck of an omnibus, I invariably imagined I was heading to a fire. I comported myself solemnly and a bit sadly, not knowing how everything would turn out amid the raging flame; I caught elated gazes and tilted my head slightly to the side at the crowd’s greetings, answering with only my eyes. By all appearances, I did not become a fireman after all, though now, some time later, I do not regret that.
SATURDAY
I underwent tests all day yesterday. That somehow left a rather odd impression… No, it wasn’t painful or even unpleasant for me. The devices surprised me: I had never seen such things. I, of course, am no specialist in devices and what I can say about them is nothing more than my sense of things, but that sense was unusual.
‘Was I unconscious for a long time?’ I asked Nurse Valentina later. ‘So long that new devices had time to come into being?’
Valentina lay down next to me instead of answering. She stroked my hair.
Anastasia had stroked me like that at some time. Fancy that, a name suddenly surfaced. I don’t remember who she is or why she stroked me, but I remember she’s Anastasia. Her fingers travelled through my hair, sometimes going still in reverie. They would slide along my cheek toward an ear, softly groping at the contour of the outer ear, and I would hear their improbably loud rustling. Sometimes Anastasia would press her forehead to my forehead and twist locks of her hair and mine into one curl. Light with dark. That wound us up terribly, we were so different.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Valentina asked me.
‘Will you speak to me using the informal “you,” please?’
She asked again.
Not about anything, I said. I simply have nothing to think about: I don’t remember anything. And all that is left of Anastasia is a name. Her name and the scent of her wheaten hair; I have not forgotten that, either. Though maybe I am perceiving the scent of Valentina’s hair as an impression that remains intact in my memory. Or this: the scent of Valentina’s hair (also wheaten) reminds me of something that once made me happy.
SUNDAY
Geiger brought me Robinson Crusoe. Not the new edition with the simplified orthography but an edition from 1906, before the revolution. It is the same book I read as a child – did he know that or something? I would have recognized it with my eyes closed, by touch, by weight. By scent, like Anastasia’s hair. The aroma of printer’s ink, emanating from that book’s glossy leaves, has remained in my nostrils forever. It was the aroma of wandering. The rustle of those leaves was the rustle of island leaves that protected Robinson from the sun: they were huge, bright green, and they barely fluttered. They had crystalline drops in the mornings. I leafed through the book and recognized page after page. With each line, everything that accompanied the book in my time gone by was resurrected: my grandmother’s cough, the clank of a knife that fell in the kitchen and (from the same place) the scent of something fried, and the smoke of my father’s cigarette. Judging from information about the book’s printing, all the events I have noted occurred no earlier than 1906.