WEDNESDAY
There is a statuette of Themis on a cabinet: it was given to my father the day he graduated from law school. They would point it out to me when I was still an infant, saying: Themis. Later – particularly in the presence of guests – they would ask: where is Themis? I would show them. I did not yet know who Themis was, I thought she was just some nonsense standing on a cabinet. I liked everything about Themis except the scales: they didn’t swing. I tolerated that until I was about seven and then attempted to make the scales move: I bent them, knocking them with a hammer. I was sure they had to swing; I thought something had jammed them. Of course the scales broke off.
THURSDAY
Geiger stayed in the room today after my morning exam. He slid a hand along the back of a bentwood chair.
‘You once asked Valentina if you were unconscious for a long time…’
He pressed both hands on the back of the chair and looked at me. I pulled the blanket up to my chin.
‘Is that a secret, too?’
‘No, why would it be? Your rehabilitation is moving along successfully and I think certain things can already be explained to you. But only certain things, so it’s not everything at once.’
As if she had been awaiting that phrase, Valentina entered the room carrying a tray with three cups. I realized it was coffee even as she was barely stepping foot over the threshold. It was fragrant. When was the last time I drank well-brewed coffee? They helped me get up and a minute later we were all sitting: I on my bed, and Geiger and Valentina on chairs.
‘The thing is,’ said Geiger, ‘that you truly were unconscious for a very long time and there have been changes in the world. I’m going to tell you a little at a time and you’ll continue recalling everything that happened to you. Our task – together – is for those two streams to merge painlessly.’
The coffee turned out to be just like its smell, maybe even a tiny bit better. Geiger began talking about conquering outer space. It turns out that we and the Americans have already been flying to outer space for a long time. Well, bearing Tsiolkovsky’s ideas in mind, that was to be expected. (What’s lacking in my coffee is sugar. I ask if I may have some sugar. Geiger wavers; he says he doesn’t know how glucose will behave in my body.) The first in outer space was a Russian, but Americans have been on the moon. I don’t know much about outer space or the moon but, to my mind, there’s nothing much to do there. ‘People have been to the depths of the deepest seas,’ Geiger went on.
I nodded.
‘Could you have thought about something like this in your time?’ Valentina asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘There were already some thoughts on that score even back then.’
I told about how at fairs there was this toy called the ‘Australian Resident’. A small (glass) man with bugged eyes floated in a little glass cylinder of water. A rubber membrane was fastened to the top of the cylinder. If you pressed the membrane, the Australian Resident went to the bottom, spinning on his axis. ‘The Australian Resident descends to the ocean’s depths, seeking human happiness!’ shouted the salesman. Limping slightly on one side and shuffling along, the salesman moved around the fair surprisingly quickly, his voice alternately subsiding and then suddenly somehow appearing alongside you. ‘The Australian Resident descends…’ It amused everyone that these fighters for human happiness looked so unusual. That they were so mobile. It goes without saying that Russian residents, unlike the Australian, were unable to spin with such speed.
Geiger’s hand was on Valentina’s shoulder. His fingers seemed to be mechanically tugging at a lock of her hair. They were pointing at me. Geiger uttered right into her ear, in a stage whisper:
‘This isn’t just about conquering the elements, after alclass="underline" think bigger, it’s the problem of happiness…’
‘It seems the struggle for happiness doesn’t inspire you much, does it?’ Valentina asked me.
‘Basically, only tragedy comes from that,’ I said.
Valentina made no attempt to move away from Geiger’s hand. She laughed. Was there some kind of relationship between them? I wondered. He treated her in a very proprietary manner.
Geiger also told me something about the technology field but
I didn’t retain it all. Yes, people now write with a ‘ballpoint pen’ (there’s a ball in the nib), so anyway, that’s what Valentina hid from me a few days ago. She wanted to guard me from the jolt. I will tell you honestly: this did not jolt me.
My temperature went up in the evening and Valentina read to me from Robinson Crusoe. She asked what, exactly, to read and I asked her to read wherever the book fell open. It makes no difference to me where to begin: it is very likely that I remember that book by heart. It opened at the story about how Robinson transfers his things from his former ship. He knocks together a raft from spare masts and makes trip after trip, bringing ashore his supply of provisions, carpenter’s tools, sails, rope, rifles, gunpowder, and many other things. The raft rocks from the weight of the trunks lowered on it and the reader’s heart beats faster because everything Robinson has is his last: there’s no replacement for anything. The time that had given birth to him remained somewhere far away; maybe it was even gone forever. He is in a different time now, with his previous experience and previous habits, and he needs either to forget them or recreate an entire lost world, something that’s not simple at all.
I don’t think there is anything between Geiger and Valentina. They communicate between themselves nonchalantly but that proves nothing. It is a sort of doctor’s manner.
FRIDAY
We rented a dacha in Siverskaya. We would arrive on the Warsaw railroad line, second class, in puffs of smoke and steam. The train trip took about two hours, stopping four times: in Alexandrovskaya, Gatchina, Suida, and, of course, in our own Siverskaya. These are my first place names on earth, the first signs of the inhabited world outside Petersburg. I still had no inkling of the existence of Moscow and knew nothing of Paris, but I knew of Siverskaya. I announced the stations along the Warsaw line from the age of two, that’s what my parents told me.
After stopping in Siverskaya, the locomotive would exhale heavily and that was its final exhalation. Something inside it still gurgled and something hissed, but there was no longer any preparedness to carry on further: all that those noises indicated was the inability to go quiet instantly. A racehorse snorts like that after a race when restoring its breathing.
Our many belongings – feather beds, hammocks, dishes, balls, and fishing gear – were unloaded from the baggage car to a cart. We rode in a light coach and the cart trailed slowly behind us. We would stop after crossing the Oredezh River along a mill dam. We observed as the coachman assembled local peasant men to push the cart along the rise, up to the steep riverbank. In actuality he didn’t assemble them, he chose them: a whole crowd of them stood there on the dam, waiting, knowing that carts would come from the train and need to be pushed. Each asked for twenty kopecks and wouldn’t agree to less: that was enough for two bottles of beer and they drank no less.
After finding myself on the platform, I would inhale the incomparable Siverskaya air. I, a little boy, was not yet able to express what that specialness consisted of (I probably cannot do that now, either) but even then I understood clearly that it had nothing in common with Petersburg air. That perhaps this was not even air but something of an oddity: dense, aromatic, and not so much to be inhaled as to be drunk.
The views were different, too, as were the colors and the sounds. Green and rustling. Brown, bottomless, and splashing. Shifting to light blue on a sunny day. There was the roar of a waterfall on a dam and the tremors of metallic railings from the falling of water, and a rainbow in the mist. Along one side of the dam were fullness and reverie; on the other were churning and strain. And above all that was the fiery ochre of steepness: it was Devonian, if put scientifically, the clay on which bricks were laid for the local stoves.