Well, what else? Let’s say: a dish of raspberries on the veranda at the dacha. It swells with light in a diffused ray of sun. An insect with its wings carelessly folded crawls along the edge of the dish. Not a beetle, not a midge, not an ant. You have difficulty naming it, though it’s not as if you have never seen it. That happens: you’ve been running into a person for half your life in the very same place, perhaps in the entryway or at the bookstore, and his face is familiar right down to the finest wrinkle, but his name is unknown. There are constant companions like that in life. When you part with them, you miss them for their low-key, timid appearance, for their folded wings and manner of moving around.
Or, let’s say, a fire at dusk. Its reflection has spread along the Oredezh and is no fainter than a moonlit path. The conversation isn’t a conversation, only individual words, simple ones, soothing ones. For example: I’ll fetch more firewood. Or: the water’s boiled. The crunch of a half-decayed branch underfoot. Gurgling water in a pot, sometimes feeble hissing of a log. You want time to freeze like the river by the dam. For it not to grow brighter but not to darken, either. For the red cliffs to remain visible… it seems I have already written about those, have I not? Devonian clay. Will that be there?
Sometimes I wonder: which of us is the patient, Innokenty or I?
I’m fulfilling his instructions: I’m writing, don’t you know, pictures from life… I’ve never done this, and I don’t feel I have it in me. I’m used to speaking in terms of diagnoses and prescriptions.
But.
To be honest, I’m liking the writing more and more.
Our cooperative writing is, if you will, an attempt to convey experience to descendants. The same thing mankind has been working on throughout history. It’s just that our experience is, let’s put it, unusual. That irritated me in the beginning, but I’m okay with it now.
Innokenty, however, conveys more than experience.
Nastya told me he contacted an advertising company on his own and offered his services. She found out about that by chance: they ran across her when they arrived with the contract to sign. She kicked them out on the landing and demanded an explanation from her husband.
And he was sitting in an armchair, listless and quiet. What, he asked, are you planning to live on when I’m not here?
She was silent, tears flowing.
Innokenty himself felt he shouldn’t speak to her like that. I think he simply didn’t have the strength to choose his words carefully. He spoke directly about what he was thinking.
He doesn’t believe in his own recovery. There’s no need to say what that means for a patient.
The most horrible thing is that even I can’t reassure him.
Pieces of information about Platosha’s health have seeped into the press. Personally, I couldn’t care less, but he does go outside. He sees the tabloids in the kiosk windows: pictures and headlines, headlines like ‘The Experiment Failed,’ ‘Platonov Is Deathly Ill.’ One of the papers bought his MRI scan and published it on the front page. ‘Innokenty Platonov’s Brain Is Deteriorating.’ Nobody even needs to buy any of that, anyway: they see how he walks. How his feet go out from under him, how he holds on to my arm. He doesn’t want a cane: he says that would be too much somehow, admitting the very worst. Admitting (I didn’t say) the obvious. On the other hand, maybe he’s right, though: as long as the obvious hasn’t been admitted, it’s not obvious.
I showed Geiger the publication with the MRI. He turned as red as a fire engine and rushed off to call someone. Three minutes of choice curses. It all ended with him telling the other party to choke on his own balls. Difficult to accomplish, of course, and I don’t know how they responded on the other end of the line. I hadn’t expected that from Geiger, but I won’t lie: I liked it. Maybe I hadn’t seen enough of that in the German guy before.
It’s just that, ugh, none of this helps Platosha at all. He has this idée fixe now, to earn as much as possible for me and our daughter. He said that since he himself has no future, he wants to provide for the future of those near and dear to him. He said that calmly, as if it goes without saying. The other day he contacted an advertising company, the same thing I, the fool, used to do for him before. I stopped that process right away.
I sense an intense yearning for my unlived years. A sort of phantom pain. I might have been frozen then but I did exist! Which means that’s my time, too, and I bear responsibility for it, too. I feel the twentieth century, all of it, is mine, no exceptions. When I watch Soviet newsreels, at times I see myself in the background. Could that really be accidental? No. It is my absence there and noninvolvement in the events reflected there that could be considered accidental.
‘Do I understand correctly,’ Geiger asked me, ‘that it’s also permissible to describe those events of your life that didn’t happen?’
‘Absolutely right. Maybe it only seems they didn’t happen. Just like when it seems something didn’t exist but it did.’
The main thing is not to overvalue events as such. I do not think they come into being as something internally particular to a person. After all, they are not a soul that determines personality and is inseparable from the body during life. There is no inseparability in events. They do not compose a part of a person: to the contrary, a person becomes part of them. A person falls into them as people fall under a train – and just have a look at what’s left of you after that.
I ask myself yet again: what should be considered an event, anyway? Waterloo is an event for some people, but for others an event is an evening discussion in the kitchen. Let us suppose there is a quiet discussion in late April, under a lampshade with a dim, blinking light bulb. The sound of automobile engines outside. The discussion itself – with the exception of individual words – might not remain in the memory. But the intonations remain: they are tranquil, as if all the world’s serenity entered into them that evening. When I felt like having serenity, I recalled those exact intonations and that exact April discussion.
No, no, I was recalling a discussion at a railway station in the winter, too, but the question is, what year? I suppose it was 1918 or, for example, 1922: I could still have witnessed it in those years. In essence, nothing prevents that discussion from occurring in my absence in, say, 1939. Even so, I did not take part in it, I only listened. But its fundamental quality would not change even if I had not listened: in terms of its degree of tranquility, that discussion is not inferior to what is described above. And in the metaphysical dimension of the phenomenon, the discussion meant only one thing: striving for serenity.
Now, regarding the main thing. Waterloo and a tranquil discussion only seem incomparable at first glance because Waterloo is world history but the discussion apparently is not. That discussion, though, is an event of personal history, and world history is but a small part – a prelude or something – of that. It is clear that under circumstances like that Waterloo will be forgotten, even though a good discussion never will.