Platosha’s saying strange things. I’ve made it a rule to agree with him.
January 1939. A railway station.
Consider it a polar station: snowdrifts to the windows, icicles to the ground.
Four o’clock in the afternoon but it’s already twilight.
A yellow light in the window. When frozen, it seems to transform into a large lantern. A lighthouse for those walking to the railway. There aren’t many of those who walk: the trains run infrequently here.
A weak bulb burns in the waiting room (let’s be blunt: what kind of a room is this?) and that is what fills the window with its light. In the corner is a potbelly stove. Not the greatest interior here, but it’s warm. There are footprints of melted snow on the plank floor.
Two people are sitting on a bench, having an unhurried discussion.
The cashier is listening in on their conversation from her window. Occasionally she adds something.
About once an hour, freight trains or long-distance trains rush past the station. Neither type stops here. They drench the window with steam and then their cars or tanks begin clacking monotonously.
During those moments, the chair shakes underneath the cashier. The bench shakes under the two having a discussion, too. They go silent and wait for the train with an emphatically patient look.
On their knees are fur hats with earflaps; they tug at them with fingers reddened from the cold. One’s hair is tousled, the other’s is the opposite, flattened.
That’s how fur hats with earflaps affect people differently.
Why did God resurrect Lazarus? Maybe Lazarus understood something that could only be understood after dying? And that understanding summoned him back to earth. More specifically, he was granted a kindness, a return.
Or maybe there was a grievous sin on him that could only be corrected while alive and he was resurrected for that? Only it is unlikely a person like that could carry a grievous sin.
It is known that Lazarus never smiled after his resurrection. Which means earthly matters could no longer evoke emotion by comparison with what he saw there.
I saw nothing when I was removed from life. Then again, I did not die.
1958. A summer morning on the Fontanka River. The sun hits window panes and rushes to the river at a sharp angle. A yardman in a white apron is spraying the granite embankment with water from a hose. When he presses a finger to the end of the hose, he increases the water’s pressure and it polishes the grainy pink surface with a hiss. A yardman’s task is not as simple as it may seem, and it does not lack for danger. The yardman lets go of the end of the hose and looks absently at his red finger. Then he looks at the water and its weak-willed flow. He shakes his head. He presses the end of the hose again and now he’s spraying, undistracted. He shifts the stream from the sidewalk to the granite parapet and, further, to an ornamental grating. The metal transforms the stream into a million mist droplets and they turn into a rainbow in the sun.
An automobile – a Pobeda with its top down – drives along the freshly rinsed roadway. The wheels make a soft, damp sound and small watery crests form behind them. A woman with light-colored hair, wearing glasses, is behind the wheel; she’s smiling. Alongside her, on the front seat, is a folder fastened with a tie. A professor. It’s very likely the woman is a professor. She’s driving to the university or, let’s say, to the public library. The morning is greeting her with a coolness that streams, unhurried, out of dark, high-walled courtyards. It’s damp in the courtyards, summer is only at the top stories of the buildings, where flower pots are placed in open windows. Below is cold and mud. I’d have liked to add ‘and snow’ but that would not be correct. There is only cold and mud.
In thinking about how to provide for the future of my family, I catch myself realizing I will not witness what happens to them. There is already no place for me in that future. The only way out is to transfer my I into them. Or for me to enter their I. I am not ruling out that, during the course of our common motion, we will meet in the middle and our I will become common to all of us. Nastya and I need to work out some common views and assessments of situations, inasmuch as my remaining time allows that. We need to at least reach positions on the most crucial things, so the absence of one of us will not be noticeable. So the one who is absent will feel comfortable that decisions will be made in the only proper way.
I was stunned today.
When I stopped by at the Platonovs’ this evening, I saw a drawing by Innokenty. A portrait of Zaretsky.
I don’t know precisely what to call the technique, I suppose it’s a charcoal drawing. Something softer than a pencil.
The contours break off in some places; in others they dissolve, somewhere unnoticed, in the paper.
A figure bent over a table. Splayed fingers ruffling hair.
On the table are a bottle and a glass with vodka at the very bottom. A piece of sausage with the end bitten off.
There’s not even a shadow of caricature in the portrayal. Either in the face of the sitting man or in how he’s propping up his head or even in the bottle and sausage. The drawing is deeply tragic.
The sitting man is mourning something (perhaps his own life) and the vodka and sausage are his only witnesses. The facial features are refined. The shoulders are hunched.
As long as he’s silent, his appearance is elevated, perhaps as it was intended to be. Zaretsky is silent. His bleating, his ugly words, aren’t heard.
And you think: the thoughts he’s immersed in are lofty. And the sausage is just an austere necessity. A requirement for the body.
He’s not looking at it. The focus of his gaze is somewhere beyond the boundaries of that room, maybe beyond the bounds of the visible world in general.
That drawing would have stunned me even if I hadn’t known anything about Zaretsky. But I do know, so the drawing stunned me doubly. It liberates Zaretsky. It delivers him from his horrendous role as a maggot.
That drawing is a straw that Innokenty and Nastya and I can grasp at. It turns out that the mysterious blockage for Innokenty’s artistic work has lifted. He can draw again. And how he draws!
In terms most familiar to me: some group of cells has been restored in him. For now, ‘how’ and ‘why’ are questions into the void. I’m stating a fact, not attempting to explain it.
Platosha is a genius. That amazing portrait that Geiger and I saw… I wanted to say something about the portrait and then suddenly remembered and realized, just in time, that it would sound pathetic. No matter what, it’d be like retelling War and Peace or, say, humming the Fortieth Symphony. I’ll just say one thing: only yesterday I hated Zarestky because of my grandmother’s stories. But I’ve forgiven him after that portrait. Almost forgiven. As Platosha drew him. There’s one weak spot in what I’m saying: I’m his wife. What wife’s husband isn’t a genius in her eyes? I’m feeling an intense urge to not be his wife for a minute and tell the whole world that Platonov’s a genius. But it just wouldn’t work out to not be his wife. He and I are one flesh and one spirit.
Platosha has no strength. He goes out less and less, and he’s usually lying down when he’s at home. He watches television. Or writes. Sometimes he has fits of fear. He’s terrified he’ll die soon. Or terrified he’ll die in his sleep without saying goodbye to anyone. The floor lamp is lit more and more often in our room: darkness seems like a harbinger of death for him. When we go to bed, he asks me to give him my hand; he squeezes it and that’s the only way he can go to sleep. More than anything, he’s afraid Anna and I will be left without help. He already sees us as orphans. I go into the bathroom, shut myself inside, and turn on the water, both hot and cold, full blast. Our pipes wail from the heavy pressure. And I wail, too.