Oblivion

PART 3

My craving to escape my parents’ home as a young man was multiplied by the desire to be where nothing reminded me of Grandfather II; I could never be myself on the streets of our hometown—I was always a little bit him, as well: here I had taken Grandfather II to the shoemaker, here we’d walked from the train station, here we’d bought him a suit.

In this city I had lost the ability to be anonymous; for true anonymity is not in being unrecognized but in the fact that the environment does not mirror, does not return you to yourself with the help of memories.

There are places that become obsolete: many things are tied to them, but they are tied to a former you; there you are mostly a person from days past rather than now. The whole city and all its streets had become like that for me; when I was in the last grades of high school, I even tried to find new ways of getting there, instead of the usual routes, overlaying a new map on the old one; but decades of life without moving made that maneuver impossible: every road had been traveled, every sight seen. So I chose geology as a profession; I needed to get as far away as possible, to be in new areas, freed of a binding legacy.

I saw the world; but the important thing is that I traveled the country from edge to edge. It turned out that there is the gravity of destiny; there is a field that is always wider than how we see it; my departure, my work in distant places was just a path for returning to what I had hoped to escape. But I returned a different man, ready to accept and assume my inheritance, even though I did not know about this readiness until life summoned me.

In an old city, and especially in a capital, passing eras leave behind the significance and passion of architecture; the legacy of various years creates a contradictory urban ensemble, splendid and magniloquent; the buildings emit a glow, and it illuminates them. Therefore the past is not visible there; only magnificent façades remain. What lies behind the façade cannot be understood without archives and witnesses.

But in nature, everything a man does remains exposed; you cannot hide anything behind architecture, behind high-rises, bridges, or monuments; there is also little that can be hidden in a city whose cultural patrimony comprises only one era and which emanates the general aesthetic of that era.

Therefore, the first time I flew in a helicopter over the taiga, approaching a northern town, and I saw the star-like pattern of logging radiating through the heavy forests, dozens of kilometers of logged forests and the low camp barracks, some still active, some abandoned, I learned more from my impression than I could have read in books; I saw the effect created by the camps, the catastrophic vision of an environment organized in such a way that you could not recognize the evil of it.

Many people were deprived of life, of fate, of freedom; in the context of that enormous, all-encompassing evil any lesser evil became invisible; it became possible to live where everything—from the look of the housing to speech—dehumanized instead of humanized; the camp and the housing for former inmates expanded, settled in, and began reproducing itself without the state’s involvement. My passage through these parts, changed by the camps, became my path of return: to Grandfather II and his life and works.

I can’t set down everything I encountered and saw in my wanderings, to bring it all together in a text; so now I am holding the 25 rubles from the mine where they buried money; I feel there are passages through time that can briefly connect what should have been learned and understood; for me such a passage, a keyhole, is Lenin’s profile—if you don’t look at it but through it.

The first look—through the portrait—is into the time before my travels, in my last year of school.

Behind our school stood the burned-out remains of a two-story house: the broken walls guarded piles of charred beams and crumpled iron sheets; the house gave off the sense of a dead catastrophe, and it summoned you inside, to study its core, see the ugly frozen agony of things—to come close without risk to the hardened face of death which could no longer look back.

I climbed into the house; the destruction inside was not as bad as it looked from outside. But as I opened a door in the hallway I almost stepped into a void: the door opened right below the ceiling of a large space, a former sculptor’s studio. The stairs leading down had collapsed; the studio was filled with rubbish that fell when the house was burning, and you couldn’t tell it was there from the façade; a hidden room, the secret of the burned building.

Dozens of Lenins stood on the floor: just busts. Plaster, granite, metal, plasticine, the size of a child’s head and waist-high on an adult. The Lenins looked at one another, the beam of my flashlight was weak, and in the far corners the sculptures easily blended with the dark, like ghosts incarnate of former times, the shadows of monuments.

The air smelled of ash, stone, dust; dust covered their heads, the floor, the scattered sculptor’s tools; this was not wispy household dust, practically weightless—this was solid dust that could have been the remains of a plaster sculpture; too heavy to be moved by a powerful draft.

If one of the busts had been unfinished or, say, marred by an obvious flaw, the moment would have had a different feeling. But all the Lenins repeated one another without variation, they weren’t even copies, but copies of copies; they had reproduced here, in the cell of oblivion, six steps from the Garden Ring Road, splitting off like amoebas; they had no relation to the real Lenin, each was but a monument of a monument, a bust of a bust.

I realized that the dust everywhere was the dry residue of time; it withered and fell here, fruitless, unable to overcome itself. It seemed that the big Lenins had come first, before the smaller ones: a chain reaction of degeneration was taking place in a hidden crevice, dying time tried to reproduce itself, save itself—and it could not create anything new, not even anything equal to the past.

The real mausoleum was here and not in Red Square; here I understood what the death agony really is—a person doesn’t die right away, but through the extended death of all his “I”s.

The monuments also tried to die, but nonexistence would not accept the multiplied sculptural image which had never been alive as an image, which had appeared stillborn, and it simply grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Probably if one were to go down and look, somewhere under the table, under the workbench, under the pile of newspapers, under the rags there would be a rat-sized Lenin, a mouse-sized Lenin, and so on down to the dust particles, which must consist, like chalk, of calcified algae, of micro-Lenins, limestone sculptures visible only under a microscope.

Death-within-death; a dead time—for me that was the multitude of busts on a dusty floor in an abandoned studio; the house was torn down, but the decay was infinite and still continues somewhere.

The second look—through the portrait of Lenin—came in the years when I worked in the North, in the mountains where our expedition was studying old deposits started by the work of prisoners and then abandoned.

The mountains were foggy then; objects lose their material component in the fog and become more image than thing; fog transforms the external world into something similar to the inner world, inhabited by ethereal substances in a spectral environment; whatever you see—a hut, a tripod for land surveying—everything first appears as a symbol floating out of the swirls of foggy murk; the fog seems to present that which is usually hidden—the substantially defined form, the soul of a thing as if it manifested consciousness. And the mind then perceives the object differently: not literally, scanning all its potential imagery and meanings.

It was through a break in the fog that I saw the barracks in a mountain pass. Barely visible through the white mist, they somehow did not seem to belong to a concrete place. Cut out of the landscape, blurred, vanishing at the edge of vision, the barracks came closer without becoming clearer; but the details were not important. From the fog came contours and outlines unburdened by volume—the important part was in the lines.

You can draw a house in which you would not want to live; and you can slightly break the lines of the drawing so that even though it will still be a drawing of a house, there will be something in the lines that Filonov or Kandinsky could understand: the lines will be grief, misfortune, death; it is not the composition that will mean something in total, but each line will express what seems inexpressible in the graphic arts with such clarity it could be a visible sound instead of a line. This will be Munch’s The Scream, but presented not through subject and color, but the agonized scream of geometric figures before their death, hacked apart, squashed in torture vices, stretched on the rack.

The outlines of the barracks appeared to push the barracks themselves into the background; you couldn’t say you were seeing buildings, human dwellings. The barracks stood like plywood cargo crates in which people were stacked, unnaturally long—this correlation of length and width appears only in coffins.

These outlines felt like a long scream, the scream of a form that was suddenly horrified by itself.

In that camp I learned the features of many other places that were present and unrevealed but here displayed themselves with the explicitness of the absolute. They were not literal, physical features, rather they were the features of the emotional sensation that a place makes on us; the features of its sensual and mental portrait.

In the barns of kolkhoz farms, in the Khrushchev-era slums on the outskirts of cities, in railroad station warehouses, in the one-story village houses and the houses of worker settlements, in sheds, in provincial hotels, in timber offices, in army dormitories, in district hospitals, and in many other buildings scattered across the country, I intuitively recognized those camp barracks. They were hidden inside the buildings, clad in pathetic architectural dress—and yet they were revealed in general outlines, corners, and most important in the sense of deadly (and I don’t mean that figuratively) dreariness.

Once I visited a miner’s home; the apartment windows had a view of the refuse heaps of the coal mines—huge cones of tailings, the waste that remained after the minerals are removed. The heaps gave off dust and smoke, and froze: the man lived with a view of the futility of his labor—here is the residue, the wind carries it far, even the monument of a miner in the middle of town had a black dusting on its face; he lived here but this view ate at him, like acid, even if he didn’t think about it. Hence the dreariness, the deadly dreariness—the angst of a man who was only the material or tool of a great construction project.

I experienced the same feeling—multiplied many times—in the mountains; not only multiplied but on a qualitatively different level; the camp barracks, the heaps from adits, the horizontal tunnels on the mountain slopes—it expressed a great concept, it was part of a gigantic plan, but when applied to an individual fate it served as a way of making it meaningless.

Slave labor, the lifeblood of the place, was anachronistic in the twentieth century; an anachronism only perpetuates itself, it always falls out of its time and does not participate in it, no matter how active the imitation of participation may be.

But besides the time gap there was also a spatial gap. I understood why they exiled people to the taiga, the tundra: they were crossed out of the general existence of humans, exiled from history, and their death took place in geography, not in history.

Everything there was made so that the place where people lived and died would not absorb anything from their lives, so that the place would have no attraction, not even a weak one. There was nothing there to elicit compassion, nothing for feeling to cling to—and that was the irreparable harm.

Just wood and stone all around; gray slate, lichen-covered and soggy in the rain, and gray planks and logs. The gray color of the wood, with the shimmer of the nap on an expensive coat, was a sign for me; the wood was drying out, like an old man’s muscles, its fibers were beginning to show, and that patina of gray covered it: the muted shine of death. I had seen planks like that in abandoned villages and now here, in the mountains of the North. They resembled—there is no sacrilege here—wooden relics: even if it turned freezing, I would not use them for a fire.

I walked from barrack to barrack: they were built hastily and cheaply, using wooden wedges instead of nails; wood and stone, no iron, no ocher shades of rust. The place was dying with unnatural thoroughness, trying to vanish into nature. I found only one nail, forged and four-sided, its head deformed by many blows. The nail gave me hope that the place would not vanish completely, a trace, a memory would remain; the nail showed that these barracks were not a mirage, a spectral settlement of wind and fog, that there had been people here.

I recalled all the nails I had ever hammered: how you put the sharp tip to the board, strike with a fifth of your strength so that it bites into the wood, and then when the nail is going in precisely, you hammer, enjoying the precision—and with the last blow you drive the head even with the board, like making a period, connecting what should be held together, should be connected.

The nail; it came out easily from the rotting wood and lay in my hand. Its form—the form of a period with a deep root that cannot be pulled out of where it is placed by the meaning of what was said—was asking something of me. Looking at the nail, the logs, the boards, I suddenly understood what I had not understood before: how there can be a connection between true faith and a form of superstition which demanded material proof: the devout preservation of a nail from the Cross of the Savior, or a sliver of its wood. I saw that it was not about proof or a literal, museum preservation of the object—the objects we consider inanimate that were the weapon or merely witnesses of suffering take on a threatening cast; they receive a second existence, a resemblance to a voice breaking through its own stammer—the soul of the event, the quintessence of its providential meaning settle into objects and speaks to us.

Standing with the nail in my hand, I felt that the place was weakly affecting me. Small islands of soil appeared amid the rock, so thin that even moss could not take root in it. And then it was as if I had taken a step away from myself and saw the place with different eyes—I saw that these handfuls of soil that plants avoided were human remains; or, what the remains had turned into; once they were remains and now had become soil.

I saw that what had happened here had happened conclusively; death is not instantaneous, it lives on after itself: a person dies; then those in whose memory he had lived on also die; the traces of his existence are washed away, like particles of ore in stone. This waiting work of death, which knows more about the time allotted to men and things, rarely finishes in visible time: people may not remember anything, but death is more demanding of the purity and completeness of oblivion.

In this place it had completed its work and had been aired out.

Speaking mentally or emotionally to the dead is only possible when there could be an echo from something in response; when there is a mold of presence, symbolically depicted in a death mask. But if death has shattered the death mask as well, then no one and nothing will respond.

That was the feeling I had there among the rocks; the sense of loss that cannot be overcome by feeling or thought. The earth was too clean and in the thinness of its layer too open to being seen, making it impossible to draw a connection between it and the people who had died here. Just the nail, as if it were the only thing left of an entire house, the nail was in my hand; retaining the meaning of its form, but representing the singularity of an object, and therefore it was simultaneously meaningful and useless.

The fog was lifting; the wind was chasing it away. I went up to the adits along the path among the rocks, following the way the prisoners took to the top. This was not an attempt to put myself in their shoes; but it was important to repeat someone’s path, to follow step by step; here, on the narrow path on a steep climb to where the ends of rusty rails hung over the emptiness, rails from which rocks were thrown, rails that called you to jump down, here something happened through me, the way I had been, something that was supposed to happen in this place.

The sun suddenly shone on the slag heaps of the adits; the shards of mountain crystal that filled the heaps sparkled in response with icy glitter that falsely refreshed the eye. The mountain looked so strange, the pure glow without any color admixture was so beautiful, that I stopped: that ideal clear light embodied the inanimate life of nature, the action of its laws, which in their tested majesty rejected all that was human. The slag heap had rock that had absorbed the mortal efforts of men, the blows of picks, blood and warmth of hands wounded by the rock, and now that rock was coolly sparkling in the sun; its beauty did not weaken or dim and therefore seemed dangerous, freezing, like the glow of thin spring ice beneath which is the dead, airless winter water, filled with the decay of fish.

To break away from this impression, I turned. The sun had filled the lake at the foot of the mountains with light; convex, like a drop on glass, its contour struck me in the eye. A mean trick of nature, a joke that had waited several million years: the lake looked like Lenin’s profile, which was imprinted on us by medals, badges, stamps, statues, paintings, and drawings in books.

The lake with its thick, almost pastry-like icing of sunny light seemed like a monstrous monument, monstrous because the natural forms easily and willingly took on the features of something man-made, and this acceptance, without coercion, clearly evinced the meaningless, memory-less existence of nature, which we had anthropomorphized much too frequently.

Seeing this betrayal of matter—betrayal of the men who climbed up to the heaps every day from the barracks, looking at the profile of the dead leader in whose name they were forced to labor—I rejected the feeling of closeness with these mountains, from the line of imagination that had anthropomorphized them. A different, older feeling arose: the possible humanity of nature was just a mockery, a devilish joke; man can count on no one in nature except himself.

Soon after—the expedition was continuing work in the area of the abandoned camp—I went out on a solitary hike. Two days into the trip rain clouds settled over the mountains and it rained, the wind blowing the drops horizontally, parallel to the ground; I was wearing good weatherproof gear but still I felt chilled. The bad weather was here to stay, the mountain tundra was soaked, and everything that was good for the campfire—old logs, reindeer moss, and switches of polar birch—was damp; a heavy front was coming from the west, and it was clear that by nightfall the rain would change over to snow, a northern summer blizzard, and the rocks in the mountain passes would be icy.

I was about to turn back when I noticed an awning of boards and tar paper over an old test tunnel, one of many such holes made all over the slopes for several kilometers around the camp; the prisoners opened up the ground and rubble to reach the indigenous rock for testing. The canopy had been made recently, otherwise the wind and snow would have destroyed it; someone without a tent was sheltering from the weather.

A fugitive prisoner, a zek, lay beneath the awning; the pea jacket, tattoos, everything gave him away; the soles had come off his tarpaulin boots, tied with a cord, and his feet were bleeding; he couldn’t go on without shoes, he had torn pieces from his jacket and wrapped them around his feet, but the fabric with cotton batting fell apart in the rain; he saw the snow clouds over the top of his tunnel and he probably knew he would die that night.

I knew what he would have done to me if he had found me asleep in my tent; the fugitive was very skinny, his face was overgrown with hair with bits of moss, leaves, wood chips, and dirt in it: he had been wandering in the taiga for a month or more, having decided to run not toward the railroad but over the mountains to a different region where they would not be looking for him. He huddled in the hole, bent over, holding a three-sided shiv made from a file, no longer human or even humanoid; he was a wood spirit crawled up from underground. If I had had a rifle, I would have shot him and covered him with stones—out of fear, out of the sensation that this really was an underground creature that had killed an escaped prisoner.

But I didn’t have a rifle; I went down into the hole. The fugitive pushed the shiv aside; he was too weak to kill me with any benefit to him. I could simply go away, as if I hadn’t seen the canopy, and the fugitive would freeze to death; who knew why he was in prison, how he had escaped, if he had comrades and where they were; what he ate, mushrooms or human flesh; I went down, turned on my gas stove and started some bouillon cube broth. I realized that I was probably saving a murderer, maybe a rapist, robber, cannibal; he had been in the taiga too long to have had enough food in his pockets for that period, he was giving me too wild a look—as if he saw me gutted, freshly butchered. I should have left, gone back to our camp, radioed for a police helicopter, but I couldn’t do it; I tried to imagine his victims, whether they would have been prepared to kill him in revenge—but that had no direct bearing on the hole, the icy rain, the approaching snow front. It could be that the death awaiting the fugitive was just retribution, and that most likely he deserved it; but the idea of retribution was coming from my mind, wondering how to get out of this hole clean, without getting involved or taking anything on. “This is retribution, it is just, go away, and let it happen,” I told myself but kept cooking the broth. It turned out that there are situations from which you cannot make an exit without soiling your morality and the point was not in a choice of a number of evils but in the fact that once you’ve gone down into the hole, you can’t pretend you’re still standing atop it.

The fugitive drank the bouillon from the edge of the pot; the tin should have burned his fingers, but it didn’t: they had toughened, covered with layers of horny skin. We had nothing to say; he knew what I would ask, I knew how he would lie.

I left the fugitive my climbing boots, the pot, food, matches, two packs of cigarettes, my change of clothes, and my medicine chest. I knew that if he survived he would laugh over the idiot he had met and regret that he had not met me sooner when he was strong enough to rob and kill me, so that I would not turn him in. Calling for a police helicopter was my most frequent thought, and I sometimes imagined hearing the propeller blades through the rain, that it was passing by and would land, and that others would make the decision for me and drag him onboard. But for me to go through the pass and tell our radioman to call for a copter—here, near the former camp—it all took on another meaning; here the echo would have responded too readily to the barking of guard dogs and shots, if the fugitive tried to hide; here it was fundamentally wrong to appeal to the authorities, to the state, its court and justice; this place had its history, and it very strongly defined what was allowable here and what was not.

I climbed out of the hole to see how far the clouds were; behind me I heard metal—the fugitive was opening cans. I turned; the broth had given him a little strength, enough to use the shiv; I couldn’t jump into the hole, he would kill me, he thought I wanted to take away the food; all the same, I jumped in to get my backpack, and he threw a rock at me; I tried to pull him away from the cans, but he poked at me with the shiv, growled, kicked, grabbed me with his free hand and held me down with his knee; I hit him, I was stronger, but strength meant nothing here—he was frenzied, he was guarding the hole, guarding the food; I knocked him down, but he rose and threw himself at my feet, biting down on my trousers, and tore deep into my calf with the shiv; I got out of the hole, and he began tossing out the pot, clothing, shoes, bandages—everything but the food; he no longer knew what things meant, and his mind still only recognized food as food. I bandaged my leg while he growled and choked down tinned meat, drank evaporated milk from a perforated can, and gulped down crackers with the wrapping paper; he was killing himself, after a long fast he would get twisted bowels, but he couldn’t stop.

He died in an hour; even in convulsions he wouldn’t let me approach; even dying, when I tried to press down on his belly, stick my fingers in his mouth to make him vomit, he hit and bit me; in his jacket pocket I later found an empty matchbox and three fingers smoked over a campfire; the meat was preserved and did not rot.

My mind was so debilitated and my emotions so drained that I actually wondered whether the fingers should be buried separately or with him in one grave; then I realized that the second, eaten fugitive was already inseparable from the first; I piled stones over the dead man and added some soil with my sapper’s shovel; I did not try to remove the empty cans and wrappers—I couldn’t go down there again.

It was snowing; the low front had scattered the small foggy clouds and behind the blizzard, still quiet, transparent, I could see the ruins of the camp; a sunbeam broke through the clouds, illuminating the ruins, and it seemed that they were swallowing the cold glow of the snowy sun, the way light falls inside the rear of a sandstorm; in that space of distortion and loss, the human does not function, there can be no care, or gift, or compassion—the distortions pull them into their orbits and swirl them into unwilling collaboration with evil.

That is how I see that camp and lake in the valley; there I understood everything that subsequently served as a guiding light.

Back from the expedition, I learned that the housekeeper had died; the apartment passed to me by Grandfather II’s will. I delayed a long time before going there; I knew it wasn’t a question of the apartment itself; I could not accept those square meters, they did not belong to me, nor could they—life was returning me to what I had left: the personality of Grandfather II. I sensed that nothing good would come of it; the camp barracks, the fugitive who had lost all human semblance—sometimes you look back and see how life is bringing you toward understanding, how nothing is random but is interconnected, and if you live with an ear for that causality—not to mystical perceptions that are an imitation of direct conversation with life, but for perceiving what is given to you and how—you cannot select a path, a path and time select you; there is nothing messianic, or being chosen, or fatalistic about this; it is a very hidden, profoundly private sensation: your turn, your time, your deed.

I eventually did go to the old address; on one hand, I felt uncomfortable entering the empty apartment; there was a sense that it was a bit too easy, as if the apartment would have gotten used to the housekeeper’s departure, gotten over her death—and only then, carefully, without touching anything, could one go inside. But on the other hand, I was prompted by the feeling that at a moment when death is still nearby, when all the objects are exposed by the departure, you may be able to see and sense things that evaporate and settle down later; the objects will be objects once again, they will shut down, and you won’t hear anything, only the given state of mute objects.

As a child, I liked to eavesdrop on objects; I pretended to be leaving the house, fussing over my shoelaces in the entry, opening and shutting the door, so that the objects would think I had left—and then I would hide among the clothes and shoes. Never quite separate from the people who wore them, by virtue of their predestination they were forced to be double agents, my secret helpers; cut to fit the human body, they made me invisible to the vague vision of the object world, for which the main thing, I thought, was the silhouette, the contour.

I often imagined what went on in the apartment when no one was there, and I thought that after a certain time—in case one of the people returned for something—the objects, like crabs on the seafloor exposed by low tide, scurried from place to place, peeking up from below, planning, conspiring, hiding something under the shell of their usual ordinary appearance, and always ready to pretend to be the obedient, weak-willed things that my parents knew.

Upon entering Grandfather II’s apartment, I remembered my childhood game, which was no game; I crossed the threshold of his possessions as heir, belated, awkward, having lived a different, nomadic, life, feeling burdened by property and not knowing why I needed a one-bedroom apartment in a luxurious Stalinist building, where the telephone was a relic, heavy black plastic hanging on the wall, as if the words that might come through the receiver should be heard standing at attention; I picked up the receiver like a shell on the beach—to listen to the hoarse breathing of a time past.

In the rooms where Grandfather II’s housekeeper—she lived the way petitioners sit, on the edge of the chair, as something second-rate compared to the objects—lived after his death, Grandfather II’s life manifested itself in the placement of the furniture seen anew with a fresh view, his habits, his domestic routes, his imperious character: the furniture was sturdy and heavy, on the shelves thick shot glasses on skinny stems shone dully, and I didn’t want to touch them with my fingers or lips—what had people toasted to with these, with what thoughts, with what in their hearts had they drunk from them? I found a vodka bottle, closed with a twist of paper, in the sideboard, but the paper crumbled into the lightest brown flakes and the vodka must have evaporated, leaving tasteless water.

Things looked at me—there was only one piece of furniture from the last half of the century, a nightstand made of particleboard; I pulled it away from the wall and on the back plywood panel there was a yellow label: “article, nightstand, 24 rubles,” and I sensed that this was my only ally here, and if not an ally, then at least not an enemy; “article, nightstand” was a word combination that had something familiar from the time in which I was born, a time of plywood and particleboard, particularly pathetic materials without pedigree, as if all the more solid and significant things had been used up mindlessly, leaving only sawdust and splinters from which people had learned to make furniture and partitions in their houses. But the cupboard and sideboard, the couches and shelves came from the 1930s; generously lacquered, they were more solid than me, they got you with their weight and bulk, their glass dimmed by innumerable reflections that left particles on the glass, while I was a balloon, something weightless and insignificant in this preserve of other times.

There wasn’t a single book in the house and there wasn’t any place to put one, not a shelf or a nook, just depositories for clothing and dishes, and beds wide and high—such beds are good for loving a woman, joining blood with blood, crumpling and bunching up the hot sweaty sheets, and for dying unfettered on those same sheets, hot and damp from fever. There were mounds of bed linens in the closets, enough for a large family, and this warehouse of sheets, blanket covers, and pillowcases revealed a time when clean linen meant more than just clean linen; there was the smell that a hot iron gives off when it’s filled with coal, the smell of plain soap, the ribbed washboard, running water and wooden mangle. A clean white tablecloth, one without a spot or pulled thread, starched, made a color pair for the main state color of the times—red. White was the mainstay of home; for some because they had come from dirt and remembered it all too well; for others because they sensed the impurity of the times and not seeing a way of staying clean themselves, sought external cleanliness. This drive for cleanliness remained throughout life: the closet had mops, buckets, rags, brooms—the housekeeper had scoured the house until her final hour.

Besides the blatant hostility of the furniture, I felt something else; it was like a message, a letter that lay in the “For Pickup” nook at the post office for ten years. In leaving me his house, Grandfather II considered it a message that only I would understand. Somewhere in here, either in plain sight or under the wallpaper, in the seams of his clothes, in the design of the parquet floor, there was a sign, a sign in invisible ink that had to be heated or wetted or held up to the light at a certain angle; the apartment was not empty, the message awaited its hour—a sleeping seed, a grain of an instant in which fate slept.

I started going through things in the sideboard and cupboards, random things tossed ashore by the tide of life; keys to unknown locks, no longer existing doors, forks and spoons, survivors of sets bought two-thirds of a century ago, lost in moves to various towns; I found the handle from a broken cup—that cup was valuable, memorable somehow; I found bent or broken frames for eyeglasses and pince-nez; coins, kopecks from forgotten years that were somehow selected from the rest and settled in the sideboard; buttons, rusted hooks, single cuff links—one with mother-of-pearl blackened like a damaged fingernail, the other homemade, carved ivory with Grandfather II’s initials; it was like the rubbish in a magpie’s nest, or the stuff that scatters on the asphalt after a crash, unremarkable, usually found in pockets and the bottom of bags and briefcases, but here taking on the significance of unused punctuation marks: everything is said, the sentence is complete, and the excess commas are strewn on the ground.

What is left when nothing is left is this clean nonrubbishy rubbish, arrayed like evidence on a policeman’s desk; what’s left despite our vain hopes is evidence of minor mishaps—broke my glasses, cracked the cup, lost my cuff link—as if life was intentionally collecting them, giving us back our unworthy agitation in the face of trivial difficulties; what is left is the biography of objects, which shows that essentially nothing happens to us, nothing really happens; the dry residue that remains are these mementoes, penknife notches on a school desk.

There could be no special testimony, no secret message among these scattered things on their own, away from the hierarchy of objects, the order of things, where there are pairs, dozens, settings, and sets. Sometimes such trifles can form a rebus, but here there was only one uniting trait: all these things were cracked, broken, bent, or spoiled—the sideboard drawer held three watches that had stopped in different decades—and whatever evidence they bore spoke of only one thing: no one slips out of life unbroken, and its effect is mechanical and automatic but inevitable and irreparable. Broken connections, disrupted unity, lost community; interrupted events, vague, having lost their own name; a hole in the pocket, a rent in a raincoat, and everything falls out, and you can catch only a few things in your fingers. It is not a mystery but the negation of a mystery; the apotheosis of ordinariness, the manifestation of mass consumption.

Well, this merely proved (things are the most impartial biographers) that Grandfather II, whatever his past, whatever he had hidden behind his blindness, had in many ways lived the most ordinary life; his things were as harmless as rattles, teething rings, and baby bottles, while I had expected in accordance with my childhood memories for them to at least partially take on his scale. But there was no real scale either—he was not great, but small, a blind old man who knew how to do only one thing—elicit fear, not fright which we often confuse with fear, especially as children, but fear—the oppressive living essence that forces the psyche into an unnatural state and forces a person to stifle himself; fear, the optical lenses of fear increased Grandfather II’s figure, gave it a demonic, creepy glow. The real horror was in the useless keys, the saucers from beat-up tea sets, in worn coins—in the anonymity of existence, in the impossibility of learning anything morally from these remains, which could have been caught in an archaeologist’s sieve, about a person who seemed to blend into the general background of an era, lost amid the trifles, who had taken on the quotidian as a scheme, or even more accurately, had always lived by it; a person about whom you sensed great evil but whom you could never call great or even having scale in that evil. Not minor, not great—average; his personality had lost the element that gives the potential for the grotesque, for playing with scale, for the chance to turn into a dwarf or a giant. He was like the monuments that filled the country, not big, not small, but which won by repetition, the power of the commonplace.

Time passed, and I understood that as an adult I would not find anything in the apartment; everything that was visible I had examined, and not a single object replied to my silent question. Going through the closets, methodically opening drawers and boxes, searching—the very thought made me want to wash my hands, scald them with hot water until they turned red, until they burned. I had to return my childhood perception—I had spent a lot of time in Grandfather II’s rooms—go through the paths of that perception, which drew its own map of the apartment in sensual relief, to notice which objects remained themselves and which ones were slightly blurry, shimmering iridescently, showing that something was hidden inside; remember which corners, dark spaces behind furniture, and secret places behind the drapes called to me; the answer was there somewhere, in the past, in the view I once had from my height as a child.

I lay down on the couch, this position equalizes adult and child; a spring poked my side through the cushion; I lay there a long time, twilight came, the velvet curtains softening the light, and soon the room was dusky, so dark that I could not tell the color of the dark blue vase; the color was gone as if the vase was the usual glass dipped in water. I was getting sleepy but the couch spring, no matter how I turned, bothered me, poking my body, not letting me relax, not letting me sleep. I felt that something was missing and I wound the clock—an old alarm clock with an arc between two nickel-plated bells, resembling a snail that had a clock face instead of a shell. The clock started up, it had a special sound, a tinny dry click, which made me think as a child that it was counting its own separate time, the time of coming events that no one except Grandfather II was supposed to know about. Now it all came together, the clock, the blue twilight, the spring in my side, and I remembered how once I caught a cold visiting my parents, and they left me to spend the night at Grandfather II’s; I lay on this very couch, covered with two blankets, and I couldn’t fall asleep, the clock and spring kept me in the brittle space of half-awake and half-asleep, the room had already undergone the nighttime transformation, it was inhabited with shadows swaying like underwater grasses, and the objects had huddled in the corners, vaguely rising from the darkness; shadows and corners—the room turned into the combination of dozens of blurred templates, alternating stripes of curved and straight lines; its volume decreased, it contracted from a cube into a sphere, movable, breathing, like the lungs seen from inside.

I recalled how Grandfather II walked through the room that night; he suffered from insomnia—it was only in his dreams that he could see things that went beyond the framework of memory, but he slept badly, went to the kitchen for a glass of water, then a second and third, trying to fill some hole in himself, and only then slept, full of water, bloated like a bedbug; blind, he moved like a sleepwalker, reading the apartment by touch, and I thought that he might forget himself during these nocturnal walks, remembering that he was not always alone when he was awake, and do something that he would not do in the daytime; open a door, get something he did not want seen. And this time I was right: on the way back—the faucet was still dripping in the kitchen—Grandfather II came over, tucked in my blanket, and checked with his hand whether I was asleep; the corners of the eyes are relaxed when a person is sleeping, while they are tense in an awake person who shuts his eyes, and he knew the places to touch lightly to see if someone was asleep; I truly was dozing, I was almost asleep, almost no longer felt my body which had grown alien and heavy, like winter clothing. Having ascertained that I was asleep, Grandfather II went to his room.

He started bustling in there; if I had risked getting up and stepping on the floor, Grandfather II would have heard me immediately; but he had not shut the door and I could see what was going on in the big mirror of the chiffonier opposite the door; Grandfather II opened the top drawer of his desk and rummaged in it.

I knew that drawer; a child remembers every area where he is not allowed and tries to figure out ways of getting in; that drawer was always locked, it had a special lock, unlike the others in the desk, and I never saw a key on Grandfather II’s key chain that might fit it. I had tried pushing in a heavy fishing line to move the things inside and guess what was there from the sound; I shined my flashlight through the keyhole, I studied whether I could remove the screws and take out a side of the drawer; all in vain.

Grandfather II closed the drawer; the key was in his hand but he made a fist and I didn’t get a look at it; Grandfather II got in bed—where had he put the key!—and that was the end of the incident in the night; in the morning I found a moment to look around his room, but I couldn’t see where he could hide the key.

Now two decades later, my old interest in the drawer was the hottest clue I had recalled; I went to the desk and tugged lightly at the drawer. I expected it to be locked, but it submitted to the tug with a creak; the apartment must have been examined for valuables more than once over twenty years.

In the drawer was a bundle of well-worn letters tied with a colorful ribbon, probably tied by a woman, a box of pen nibs, and a few razor blades for removing ink splotches and errors; a calendar with an announcement of elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and a round candy tin filled with paper fasteners; there was a smaller tin, for caviar, which held teeth, with crowns and without, canines, incisors, wisdom teeth—the dental history of Grandfather II’s life; he must have collected them out of some strange whim, a madman’s eccentricity—something like a belief that you have to show up at the Final Judgment with all your bones, turn yourself in with all thirty-two teeth accounted for; but even the gold and steel of the crowns could not connect these teeth in the box with a human image—they seemed to belong to some animal like a wolf or dog; strong-boned, powerful, big, that had passed many other animals, fat and skinny, it didn’t matter, through its jaws; a magnitude—a mathematical magnitude—of the consumed flickered before me when I looked at those teeth; a long line of living creatures eaten so that the jaws could swallow another one.

Grandfather II had saved his canines and incisors as if preparing for a new life where they would come in handy. In the same box, wrapped in wax paper, were my milk teeth, tiny, pathetic, like those of a puppy or fox kit; I wanted to throw them away instantly, there was something nasty in the existence of a part of myself that was separate from me; I was engulfed by the old, forgotten sensation that he was following an instinct and collecting everything that could bring me closer to him, everything through which he could own me, literally and figuratively; the answer to why, or rather the start of the path to the answer, was somewhere here in this drawer; I sensed it as I went through Grandfather II’s pagan amulets.

His dental bridges were there, too—pink plastic with smooth ceramic teeth and a special powder to clean them. There were four pieces—Grandfather II started losing his teeth early, either because of some long-ago starvation and his exhausted organism, or because his body was matching his desire to appear to be a little old man, a lisping, gray granddad with teeth-in-a-glass. Grandfather II, he was a grandfather, a mighty word charged with a radical power, traded his body for the signs of aging, even though he was in good health, and it helped him, let him hide behind age, although not completely.

The false teeth, the elderly lifestyle, the insistent use of baby words—puddy cat, yumyum porridge, jammies; walking stick, medication schedule, milk toast instead of soup—all a mask to fool people and cunning to fool death, self-deprecation, marked impotence; here I am, I’m blind, harmless, and weak, I am like a bug in Your hand, do not squash me, Lord. But he wasn’t a bug, he was a scorpion sleeping under a cold damp rock on a hot day; the drawer, which gave off a sharp smell of turpentine and furniture shellac as chilling as the touch of a centipede’s legs, seemed to be a den of toxic creatures, they had hidden and run off, but the sense that they had been there remained; I knew that feeling from Central Asia, where the deceptively pleasant air always carried the presence of the sun’s stinger, the cheery crippling poison dissolved in it, the bite always near.

There was yet another box in the drawer, creamy yellow, for vanilla fudge. This fudge had been my favorite sweet. Grandfather II knew it and whenever I visited he treated me; I even thought that if I opened the box I would find hardened honeyed grains of the candied fruits that now contained only the memory of their taste. Grandfather II would give me one, sometimes two, but never more, not out of stinginess but as if he knew the final number of candies not given to someone else, and he was in no hurry to hand them all to me at once, so they would last longer; I would not have accepted the candies, even though I liked sweets, for the candies from his fingers seemed oversweet, but I was afraid; I had the feeling that if I refused he would force it on me, shove it in my mouth.

The fudge box was a signal, a sign; only Grandfather II and I knew about the custom of treats; inside the box were strange handmade toys: a rifle two matchsticks long, with a sharp bayonet made from an awl; a horse covered in real horsehide I think—the hide was moth-eaten and straw stuffing fell out of the belly; a German shepherd made of glove leather, with sharp claws glued on; several human figures, as anonymous as tailor’s dummies—wood, screws, smooth rounded heads; their arms and legs moved, and there were clever notches in their hands, where the rifle fit perfectly. The toys were very old and too real for toys; it was clear that they were just a small part of some set and I could feel that you didn’t play with them the way you do with plastic soldiers—wood, iron, leather were not of a toy nature; the objects in the box were too heavy, too carefully detailed—they lacked the abstraction of toys that left room for the imagination; on the contrary, they seemed as if someone had the idea to depict a specific horse, dog, and people in this crazy way—except the people had no clothes and only one of them had Lilliputian leather boots the size of thimbles.

I had never encountered anything like this; I did remember that Grandfather II had said several times—in a roundabout way, vaguely, and perhaps even making it up—that when I grew up he would give me some very special—and he didn’t say toys, he said playthings, games. There they were—rifle, horse, dog, and then people; they could not belong to a child, they were handmade souvenirs for an adult—and at the same time they gave off the aura of madness, a neurosis, a wild concentration on details that came from the inability to capture the whole, the morbid detail of a mad concept, the same kind of paganism as in keeping the teeth. The little figures could have belonged to an aged military officer replaying old battles, but ones in which the wooden soldiers led by the will of the blood-maddened marshal die for real, die the death of things—which is why they had to be made of simple, elementary materials, wood, iron, leather.

I was stunned; the sun’s sting, the poison, it was like a blow, a snakebite; I wanted to find a document, evidence, and instead I found Pandora’s box.

If he had been alive, Grandfather II would have given me the figures and explained something, told me their provenance; a story or a fairy tale, an anecdote—and they would have been turned into amusing marionettes or cute things from the past: here’s what little ones had before there was the Detsky Mir children’s store in Moscow. I would have taken them, depending on my age, as toys or as souvenirs; I would have kept them without feeling everything I was feeling now that I was alone with them.

The figures were scary—I didn’t want to hold them. It seemed that touching them had its dangers; that they were a connection with the dead people they depicted; yes, the figures were anonymous, devoid of concrete features—but in each of them I sensed a person, just as devoid of traits, ruthlessly dehumanized, rolled smooth by time.

The spirit of the times was fully realized in them: not the general and superficial one that is in the air and forms an era’s ambience—fashion, slogans, speeches, technological innovations—but what is deeper and closer to the heart: the concepts of good and evil, the concepts of human and inhuman, the dominant note of relations, what one man can do to another—and the times will accept those deeds as a matter of course.

The spirit of the times—what is a person in those times, how free, or unfree, is the human in people; the figures belonged to a time when a person wasn’t even a toy, for that image allows for fate, which is varied and enjoys fickle games, but a unit deprived of fate.

The figures in the box—horse, dog, and three featureless “people”; they had that clumsy solidity that distinguishes a peasant harness or homemade scythes, pitchforks, and shovels; they were obviously not made by Grandfather II, he wouldn’t know how, his fingers did not have such tactile precision; some parts showed that the maker lacked needle files and chisels, everything was done with just two or three tools: knife, hone, and boot needle; old leather, old copper wire, waxed thread—the figures were meant to last a long time, or perhaps, the maker didn’t know how to work any differently.

There was nothing more in the box; I untied the pack of letters. I didn’t remember Grandfather II writing letters often or receiving many; not New Year’s or Soviet Army Day cards or telegrams or parcels—Grandfather II lived almost without any connections, friendships, family; his telephone rang only once when I was there, and he spoke shutting the door to his room, and I listened to him apologize and ask the caller to call back tomorrow—I’m not feeling well—as if he didn’t want to reveal the real reason, that a boy was visiting him. The letters must have survived because the housekeeper didn’t find the key to this drawer when she was burning his papers; the drawer had remained locked for years, and then, when the key was found, it seemed silly to burn a few remaining documents.

The letters, which the sender must have assumed would be read aloud to Grandfather II by the housekeeper, had wishes for good health; every letter mentioned seal blubber and bear fat sent to Grandfather II; asked if it had helped; seal blubber and bear fat—it was all about the fat, the writer explained how they caught the seal, how they shot the bear; the correspondent was a clumsy writer, words did not obey him, and he piled them on, one holding up the next so the sentence did not fall apart. But as soon as it came to hunting, the cold will of the shooter organized the rhythm of halting style. Seals and bears, bears and seals, the resident of a northern town exterminated them, made the long trek to the sea, went out hunting in the winter, and I don’t think it had to do with Grandfather II’s needs; the writer did not hunt in order to send parcels to the capital. He talked about hunting as if he did not do the shooting but simply observed the carbine fire the bullets; this removal of the weapon from a subordinate role and ascribing its own significance to it showed a certain restrained reverence. The man had found a support, had found an object that was different from other objects, that had power over life, which other objects lack, and he’d clung fast to it ever since.

He leaned on the rifle, carbine, gun, the way people of superficial faith lean, figuratively, on the church; the weapon became his religion but without all the emotion that usually surrounds it; the smell of the oil, the smoke, the machismo of a man with a double-barreled shotgun, ammunition belts, gunfire, hunting stories—none of this seemed to matter to the writer. He believed strictly and almost chastely, believed in the higher wisdom of the mechanism, in the trigger, firing pin, percussion cap, shell, and barrel; he believed in the laws of physics that made the shot possible. The seals and bears he killed died because the shotgun has to shoot; because the sight seeks a target; because the bullet wants to fly; he was a barely literate arbitrary poet of shooting who saw the world as being flat—a target does not have a third dimension—and that made reading his letters even more frightening; any murderer fixated on destruction was more human than this connoisseur of bluing gun barrels, direct and reverse threading, different gunpowders and types of sights, in love with his gun because it was soulless, which made it seem lofty, impartial, and just.

You could say that the letter writer had discovered a new unity beyond nationality and beyond culture—the unity of people with guns, the unity of pure force, and he enjoyed embodying pure force with no ideological coloration. He must have been pleased imagining arsenals growing and weapons rooms filling up; pleased reading about a new missile or new cannon in the newspaper—they were all merely forms of force, a force without content, force per se, and he had decided as a youth to be part of force—the most imperceptible part, the most impersonal part, without ambition and in that sense safe for the integrity of the force.

Obliquely it was clear that the writer was once very close to Grandfather II; this was obvious from the missing details and information that sometimes made the letters unclear and which Grandfather II apparently knew. Judging by the postmarks, the letters were around thirty to forty years old; the penultimate one came a few months before his death and the last one after Grandfather II had died; that one mentioned a meeting with Grandfather II and it mentioned me, too, as if the writer had seen me. Try as I could, I couldn’t remember anything; all I had was the return address—a street in a small northern city that had a huge mining complex, which I had heard about when I worked as a geologist.

I reread the letters in case I had missed something; seal blubber, bear fat—I imagined Grandfather II taking spoonsful of smelly jellied fat, too natural, untamed by cooking; the fat smelled of musk, subcutaneous glands, meat, blood, fur, smelled of animal, and in order to eat it you would have to overcome disgust, one which was greater than ordinary disgust: it expressed human prohibitions and crossing them brought you closer to being a wild beast.

I remember the time on an expedition after a long period of hunger we shot a deer and started eating the fresh liver; after a week of bad weather the sun was flickering in the leaves, and I felt the same warm flicker inside me of the life force, how the fading life of the deer was directly passing into my muscles, and the muscles were responding with readiness to race, grab, tear apart. The sun illuminated the river bottom, and the smooth deep water gave off the power of the current, the wind bent the birches, and I felt the current of natural forces passing through me, I was one with the water, the wind, I was a cluster of desires, translucent and thick, like the sunlight of August in the taiga. I was running and grabbing—and a minute later, I got a cramp, not from the raw liver, my stomach had accepted that, but because I had fallen into an animal state and now my humanity was being painfully restored.

Seal blubber, bear fat, the secret of Grandfather II’s longevity smelled of ancient blood, the letters smelled of blood, and I no longer wanted to know what was in his past; just to leave the apartment, throw away the keys, let it stay there like a forgotten mousetrap, locked and sealed; if it had been a house instead of an apartment, I would have burned it down, like a plague house. Once again I sensed Grandfather II’s blood circulating in me, I could feel the short animal hairs growing, the too-hard nails growing; I wanted to gnaw meat from bones, ooze blood, suck out the marrow.

I recalled how once at the dacha an old woman from the village, who did not like the dacha owners for parceling out their garden allotments on the best berry and mushroom spot on the edge of the woods, in the most damp spot where she gathered St. John’s wort, chamomile, coltsfoot, melilot, bur-marigold, clover, raspberry leaf, and linden flowers, the old woman once met Grandfather II on the forest path. I was creeping after him and saw the look she gave him, with his folding chair, jug, and fishing reels, neat, with a handkerchief in his pocket, she looked at him and said loudly, “Werewolf!” Grandfather II unexpectedly replied loudly, “You’re demented, old woman,” and went on; he replied rather aloofly and rather disdainfully, the way a cranky old man might have responded to a nasty old woman he knew—she’ll wear you out with her nagging—but the old woman was neither nasty nor a nag, she was known for her silence, and she and Grandfather II had never exchanged a word before; I sat in the bushes, so the herb woman would not see me, Grandfather II walked on, and she watched him go, whispering something to herself.

Later I tried to get into her house; someone was sick and I offered to go get some herbs for a cold. The old woman let me into the house, too spacious for her alone; the timbered izba dwelling was big, made of logs you could barely embrace, and you could see that it had been built by a big family. In the middle stood an enormous whitewashed stove, which had spread like a woman of a certain age, cosmic in sensibility—everything rotated around it, it was the axis and the support, inside its womb buckwheat porridge stewed, soups cooked, and bread was born—karavai, a loaf as round as the fruitful sun, peasant bread; but the stove just made the emptiness of the rooms more pronounced and bitter. Through a hanging I saw a wall of photographs in one of the rooms—dozens of male and female faces, with the peasant gaze, concentrated and severe, as if having your photograph taken was hard work to be approached with full cognizance; for an instant the photographs made the izba full of people, talking, eating, coming in from the gardens, the fields, it filled up and emptied. While the woman went through her herbs, I searched for my knowledge of the force that swept all those people away, leaving the old woman to maintain the house as a memory of the departed; she gave me the herbs, dried, prickly, and explained how to pour boiling water over them; I wanted to say something consoling but realized that there is a deadline for sympathy and condolences, there is a deadline for commiseration and compassion, and it had long passed; my words would have no effect, because nothing had been said earlier, and not by me.

The old house was hopeless, the stove was hopeless, it took so many logs, the crooked fence where the bottles dried, and the lame cat that warmed itself behind the stove; I left thanking her and promising myself to visit the old woman again, but I did not keep my promise—everything I could have felt fit into that single impression, and it could not expand or even repeat itself; there was a precision in the singularity of the meeting, in the fact that it did not turn into a kindhearted caretaking; the old woman did not need it the way a praying person does not need encouragement, and after a few years I forgot her, immersed as I was in the well-being of childhood which avoids problems of the old.

And now years later—life sometimes anticipates our questions by decades—I remembered her, remembered her cry of “Werewolf!”; it coincided with my insight, my sensation of the thick impure blood; I fled the apartment, I locked the door and threw the key in the river, choosing that route intentionally; I went to my parents’ house with the firm determination not to accept my inheritance, to have nothing to do with that apartment, to sell or exchange it—let it be, shut, empty, lost among the other apartments, buildings, and streets, let it recede to a dot; I had understood something, and my history was over.

I was alone then in my parents’ house; when I came in I started seeking support in books, as usual—you pick up a book, open it at random, and get into the plot to break up the whirlwind of your thoughts; but this time I intentionally selected a book to be as far away as possible from the present and not get the least echo or coincidence from the text; I chose The Epic of Gilgamesh, He Who Saw the Unknown, a dark-green, swampy colored volume; I took it remembering the description of Uruk, the humanization of Enkidu, the expedition against Humbaba; but the book did not open there at all. I read:

“Let the gate of the mountain now be opened!” I repeated; I thought about the Yakut tales of mammoths living underground, and if the tundra buckled from the ice freezing in the soil, the Yakuts believed that mammoths had walked deep underground; if they found a mammoth carcass in a precipice, they thought it had died by accidentally stepping out into the sunlight. I sensed that this imagery was right—going through land, through mountain, through accumulated ossified time; but I did not yet know what I would have to do, how to act.

Nights were dreamless, but close to dawn dreams came, three dreams; they repeated in the same order. Sometimes a dream extends into the deepest layers of consciousness that lie beside the main well through which we dive into ourselves; it is they, and not the popular ideas of the moment, that in many ways determine our belonging to a certain historical time.

Military brass bands have different sounds in different years, and depend not only on the hearer; there is a silence on the eve of war that can be torn by the sound of a single bugle, and there is a silence after a defeat in which the sound of an entire band will be muted and lost.

There are times of light and times of darkness; the general tone changes, the illumination changes, and the same color looks different as if in different optical media: the red banners of the Civil War, which had more scarlet, and the red banners of the thirties, which had more crimson, look the same in black-and-white newsreels.

It turned out that the portion of the past that is extant and unnoticed in the present, diffused in it, is very great; it was the voice of grains, the argument under the bench, the voice of random people, chords of random melodies through the rasp of the loudspeaker, the voice of boarded-up windows. Sand, dust, ashes, remains, bone meal, salt, sugar, kerosene, soap, matches spoke; old houses, river bends, rotting sunken ships, coal burned in furnaces, gunpowder pushing bullets out of barrels, and the greenish metal of casings all spoke; everything that vanished, disintegrated, was drunk, eaten, lost, and used up also spoke, and it was lost, it echoed in the dream gathering strength; it would not yield to daytime consciousness, only to sleep.

The first dream started: I saw the springtime river ice, mushy from the weakened inner tension, and still solid only in one place, a strip across the river.

There was a ford there in winter, the trampled snow hardly melted, and the ruts made by wheels, runners, horseshoes, boots, and children’s shoes stood out more. They took on additional meaning: the people were dead—that was the knowledge of the dream—but their footprints accidentally survived.

An archaeologist finds a declivity in hardened sand, a footprint, and in the unimaginably distant past, where you can’t even imagine human existence, a notch appears for counting to begin, a sign of affirmation: I was. This phenomenon, which has a dual nature of fact and symbol—one reinforcing the other—graphically approaches the pulsating point in the middle of the page, without any neighboring points; the starting point.

The footprints on the ice also pulsated, but they were not just points: voluminous letters of set type, forming words, lines, text. It seemed that each had been left deliberately: people could have walked without a trace and in general life is such that no traces are left if you don’t make an effort—but the ones who had walked on the ice had stepped intentionally so that the wet snow of the thaw would accept the body’s weight and take a cast of their soles.

The words frozen in the ice were bitter; every print meant a step, and the step brought them closer to vanishing, which the print resisted. They were repeated—thus a desperate person keeps repeating the same thing, and a recitative appeared composed of many repetitions.

Hasty, overlapping, overflowing, like a lament, the prints joined up a multitude of fates and the single path. It seemed that an unremitting threat had accompanied the travelers, pushing them from behind, keeping them from turning off.

Later—the guess arose one night and then kept appearing every time—I realized that somewhere in the snowy mush were prints of the guards’ boots, who were unlikely to have walked on the untouched snow, but they were no longer recognizable: they were lost, blended into the whole. This indistinguishability of prisoners and guards—when you can’t tell which was which—elicited horror, even though there was a hint in it: it was not the convoy of guards that pointed out the direction, for the threat that forced people to walk on the ice hovered over them as well.

Here the dream changed; somewhere so far away that its small universe barely accommodated such a distance, something collapsed, the concussion accelerated time that had been imperceptible until then, an icy crashing roar grew—and a crack zigzagging along the line of the river channel broke the ice of the ford in two.

The crack expanded rapidly, turning into an ice hole, foaming water bursting from it; the ice fragmented, chewed up by the ice holes, tearing the solid picture of the ford into shreds; floes tumbled and the water pushed with greater strength, inundating all the traces, all the prints. This was water of the bottom currents that avoided the ice holes, that had settled in the deep holes beneath the steep banks, oily and stale, as if the drowned had decomposed in it slowly—because of the cold—it was like the emptiness of an undiscerning gaze in which things, phenomena, and events are lost and cease to exist.

Suddenly in a single movement, the weight of the ice as yet untouched by cracks in the channel moved forward, which revealed how wide the channel was. What had seemed to be a sloping bank turned out to be ice hummocks, while the banks were so far away that they could not be seen by the eye or captured by the mind. The movement of the ice knocked me off my feet and then the ice holes moved out beneath me.

This is where I woke up, but I woke from one dream into the next. Both—and there is still the third—were related to each other like several spheres with a single center. Moving from dream to dream you were always in the heart, in the epicenter of events expressed differently in each of the spheres of the joint three-part dream.

I was on a train platform, seeing it not with the vision of an eyewitness, but somehow from inside the event. And so the dream began: a train approached the platform; two dozen cars seemed insignificant compared to the steam engine. The smoke, imbued with soot, was stifling; the dull cutting edge of the wheels, their red spokes, the grease like a bodily discharge oozing from the pistons; the ruby star at the end of the headless torso was like a brand on a powerful animal that consisted only of muscles, branded by a five-pointed cut, and the power of the muscles pushed red meat through the wound, creating a mark that was a convex star—this all overwhelmed me and deprived me of will.

I—the me who existed outside the dream—naturally knew how the old steam engines looked: I’d had a childhood full of technology, of enormous machines made to scale as toys. But in my time steam engines were different. The imperfection of construction—the way dinosaurs are imperfect from the point of view of evolution—made that mass of metal seem alive somehow; technology and primal force.

The steam engine gave rise to a time whose aesthetics looked to industrial labor for inspiration, a time of the triumph of mechanics; mechanics gave poets metaphors, it was entrusted with the setup of human life, and they tried to take humans apart and put them back together in a new way, to create a homunculus of steel and aluminum with a motor for a heart. The steam engine became a marvelous symbol, the triumph of creative power—but now, as I sensed in my dream, time itself feared it, the way the ancient gods feared the hundred-armed giants they created.

In its furnace, the unbelieving martyrs of the revolution burned as if in a fiery oven, the steam engine brought the body of the leader assigned to be immortal to the capital, and the steam engine itself became one of the minor gods of the new pantheistic religion. Now at the station the arrival of the train spread a sense of dread: the steam engine seemed to have its own understanding of where to go and whom to take, and the trip turned into anxious anticipation—you can never tell at what moment you are traveling at the will of another, elevated above everything else.

The train stopped at the platform and people came out of the cars. The glass dome of the station, the iron beams, all the rivets were covered in the cold sweat of hoar frost on the foggy morning that settled on the smoke particles. Something stuck in the works of the station clock; the minute hand froze, trembling, and the face resembled the round window of baggage scales.

At the very end of the platform, near the steam engine, a few men in uniform appeared; the color and style were not important: amid the overcoats, sheepskin jackets, raincoats, and quilted jackets the essential detail was the uniform itself, identical, anonymous, and severe. It was an image—the image of power, universal, like the law of gravity, so all-encompassing that it has no recognizable features.

The proximity of the steam engine and uniformed soldiers was not accidental: its red star made the stars on the cockades of their caps all the more visible. When they appeared, blocking the exit from the platform, the people who came off the train already belonged to the kind of crowd that appears briefly when a large number of people forced to spend a long time together start to move. This vaguely friendly crowd where the weak attraction of accidental acquaintance was still maintained, moved in a businesslike and almost joyous fashion—the long anticipation was over—and simultaneously each person was separate from his fellow travelers, walking in his own rhythm, and the farther from the wagon, the less this community of people could be called a crowd, for each person was individualized, walking his own road for which the train station was only the starting point, and the law determining the behavior of a crowd did not govern him.

But as soon as the soldiers appeared, the people coming out of the train first slowed down imperceptibly, then each person turned, stumbled, lost his rhythm in order to hide from the soldiers behind the person walking in front. It looked as if a number of targets set at various distances had sidled along in order to hide behind one another. A person walked, hidden behind another’s back, and did not see that behind him someone was walking in his footsteps, and behind him, another, and behind him, yet another … The raucous, cheerful crowd that had filled the platform suddenly squeezed itself into many uneven chains, as if after a chemical reaction that made human atoms combine into extended weaving molecules.

I waited to sense the fear of all those people—it should have erupted, transforming the station air, which had been turned into a trap. However, instead of a sharp eruption I sensed a sedative; there was fear, but it was usual, ordinary, only slightly elevated; there was no tension, it was as if people were rejecting themselves, bidding themselves farewell—and carried themselves to the exit like a pile of folded clothing in an army steam bath, or a prison.

Even though people hid, there was no more intelligence behind it than in the movements of a worm chopped in half by a shovel. Real fear comes in expectation of direct loss of life—here the separation seemed to have taken place much earlier than when the people came out on the platform or even got into the train; it happened almost at birth. Their lives had been taken away from them and returned in the form of a peacoat from naval supply, for temporary use; now, on the platform, their lives were being demanded back—perhaps unexpectedly but with every right to do so.

A separate corner was created next to the soldiers: huddled together were the ones pulled out of the crowd; by its density, the group made an island in the relatively uncongested human sea, but there was no impression of an island at all; you immediately registered one peculiarity—it was as if these people were not there, and only later did you understand why.

Everyone else—many hundreds of people—avoided looking at the prisoners; the prisoners did not look out beyond the limits of their circle, and so the group completely fell out of the entire field of vision.

I tried to hold my gaze and keep it from veering off—but like a compass needle following a magnet, it chased the directing vectors. To break out of the current of gazes that carried me to the exit, past the prisoners, I gazed through the station windows at the freight lines, and there I saw a steam engine that was the twin of the first engine, to which heated freight cars with barred windows were being coupled. At that moment I remembered—remembered in the local “induced” memory of the dream—that I had lived through this already the last time I had this dream, and I swore to watch the freight tracks, the areas of the dream that remained outside my view—swore because this second steam engine, this second train, was intended for the prisoners on the platform.

They began bringing people into the freight cars and I realized that the ones who’d been arrested at the station were taken in order to fill the spots of people who hadn’t been arrested in the city. With the view beyond the borders of the station dome I saw the reason for this anxiety which had seized me when I first spotted the steam engine. The prison train was already in place when the train approached the station, the track curved, and for a period the passengers could see the freight cars from the windows; two different times, present and future, passed very close, like oncoming ships, but the present did not, could not, recognize the future, and the future seemed indifferent to the present. For the passengers, the freight cars were the last meaningless shots in a film of their journey, and if you were to ask any of them a few days later what they had seen when the train was pulling into the station, at best they would recall that there was another train nearby, but nothing more definite than that.

But this particular, this meaningless detail—a prison train on the side tracks, a row of gray-green freight cars—became like cancer cells for those who were arrested, multiplying, devouring the healthy flesh of the universe, growing, blocking out the narrowing horizon, and turning into a single rusted jaw of the freight car.

Along the same tracks that had brought them there, the prisoners would be taken back in the direction from which they had come. But although each of them had arrived as someone with a name, who could say I am so-and-so traveling from here-to-there, now they would become no one, they would not even know where they were being taken.

I saw people moving from the clear bright station, whose dome of glass cells formed a network of coordinates on the platform, drawn with precision, as if in a math workbook, by the sun that had suddenly started to shine above the city’s morning fog, moving into the shadow of other buildings on the freight tracks, for the shadow of the twilight of the night still held sway, detained by the light frost.

I saw the station, I saw the clock still resisting moving the minute hand to the next division, the enormous mosaic panel on the far inner wall of the station which was not yet completed and which made it look as if the headless red gigantic soldiers it depicted were building themselves, and that the construction scaffolding helped them stand up straight—I saw it all as one frozen instant.

The border between light and shadow clarified the meaning of what was happening: people were being led out from the present tense; its territory ended where the encirclement began, gray soldiers stood with rifles and bayonets over their shoulders, and two convoy soldiers with a canvas bag took away the prisoners’ watches. The bag looked as if it would start wriggling, filled with puppies to be drowned, but no, it was just getting heavier and the soldier could no longer hold it with one hand.

The watches fell into the bag and the days of life they measured vanished down its dark gullet. Next to them, soldiers removed wedding rings, breaking marriages; if the ring had grown tight, they called the field doctor; he had smelling salts in case someone passed out, but his bag also held oil and soap. The doctor greased the finger and twisted and turned the ring, which he gave to a special guard. He had a small plywood box with a slot hanging around his neck, and if the ring did not fit through the slot, the guard left it on the lid of the box, so as not to keep unlocking it, and the precious stones set in gold or silver, two or three diamonds, a ruby, a sapphire, looked like colored glass: their value meant nothing now.

But this merely prepared the prisoners; the main thing occurred on the border of light and dark. The watches and rings were taken away in the daylight, and after that the person had to step into the semidarkness, knowing he would vanish in it the way the ones who entered before him had vanished.

This was the most tormenting part of the dream: people did not die but they ceased existing in the present. The present went on quite well without them, every new moment pushed back the previous ones, in which those people still were.

I sensed that oblivion does not come in gradualness, extension, or postponement, but that it is an integral part of time itself, whose unreasoning force makes it happen here and now; blind Cronus is continually devouring his children, and every new moment does not try to add to the last one but to destroy it. Only memory can resist forgetting; of course, not always.

Deprived of names, deprived of liberty, torn from their families forever, people do not stop being people. But they vanish, the way a crashed plane vanishes from the radar, both for their families and for the generation of yet unborn descendants.

The prisoners would be remembered the way the dead or those who moved to another continent are remembered: the memories are not added to, and consequently this break in memory is unlikely to be filled.

As for us—we can judge the past only by the evidence that it preserved about itself.

I had time only to see the faces, the most ordinary faces without beauty, or significance, or sharp features of breeding. In essence, the faces, despite the varying ages, were like the ones in their distant or not so distant youth: time had transformed them, compressed, stretched, wrinkled them, and the changes that were too easily noticeable made it difficult to see that if you were to remove all the wrinkles and signs of age in reverse order, like stage makeup, the faces would return precisely to their youthful images.

Time had fallen into their facial features, but mechanically, like erosion that changes the shape of mountain chains; the events of inner life, which irreversibly change and mold the face and keep it from going into reverse aging, were not manifested here.

And now when disaster came, people helplessly sought support within themselves—and could not find it. Past years came off, unpeeled like sunburned skin, to an age in which everything that happens is still perceived with an eye to the immeasurable duration of the future and when it seems that there will be enough time for a whole new different life, and more than one; an age which has no experience of finished and irredeemable events.

People were lost—as if a person had been asked to show his papers and he reached into his pocket only to find that there were no pockets, no coat, no memory of where it all had gone. They did not dare seek sympathy from one another, as if suspecting the same loss of self in others.

Perhaps if they had known of the arrest beforehand, some of them might have found the courage and will to resist, but this—coming off a train and seeing a soldier’s finger pointed at you—this was greater than just being caught unawares: it was an evil mockery of fate in general and of each individual fate in particular.

The prisoners’ lives were smashed at such a quotidian, unremarkable moment that the very contrast between the event of the arrest, which sucks up the person whole, and the fact that it was not a link in any chain of events, was not preordained or predicted but happened out of nothing without reason or cause—this contrast did away with individual fate per se.

The point was not the fatal injustice of the arrest; that was only one of the consequences of its gratuitousness. The soldier’s finger, randomly pointing at people walking past, became its presentation, embodiment, and symbol; this was not that seeming gratuitousness when you wonder why it happened this way and not otherwise; the absolute absence of explanation elevated gratuitousness to the status of the sole reason for everything in the world; from now on any event in this upside down world occurred not by force of causation but by force of arbitrariness, and thus arbitrariness and violence became universal law.

The red gigantic soldiers on the mosaic panel, their red bayonets scraping the station’s dome, headless guards, were an expression of that law; the fragmentation of the mosaic made it seem that they lacked human anatomy and consisted of cells of well-fed flesh; the panel was so huge that the red soldiers barely fit under the vaulted station roof, and the enormous building, full of air and light, was suddenly turned by association into a decrepit and vile cannibal’s cave.

The last arrested man stood where they were confiscating watches. The train engineer and his assistant and stoker were walking that way to the train, accompanied by soldiers. And I knew—this knowledge had been incorporated into the dream but it did not appear right away—that the prisoner was the engineer’s younger brother and that they had not seen each other in a long time. The guards had turned the younger brother to face the wall, going through his pockets, while the steam engine whistled and began backing up, distracting the engineer’s attention, and the two brothers did not see each other. The engineer climbed into the cab, threw off his jacket, and while he was pulling a sweater over his head, his brother was led past the steam engine to the freight cars.

Even in my sleep I was stunned by the ordinariness and ease with which this non-meeting transpired; events avoided joining up, they existed separately, unconnected, and what could have been a tragedy—brother recognizing brother at the fateful moment—did not become one.

At that moment, a band set up on a far platform; they were rehearsing a welcome for some delegation. The music wasn’t coming together, it wasn’t that they were playing false notes, they just couldn’t elicit the melody. Then a boy came out, who was supposed to read a greeting from the Pioneers; but the rhymed speech staggered, too, it was as if he had swallowed half the text.

No music, no poetry; for some reason, the poem caught my attention. I understood that the words were supposed to echo each other like watchmen through the rhymes, to see one another, and that it was the total vigilance of words, their mutual vision, that created the special cognitive optics of the text, the poetic insight.

I knew that the engineer would never learn whom he hauled in the prison car, and his brother, exiled to live in a place where the transcripts of meetings of the regional party committee were recorded on birch bark and where paper was more valuable than nails, would never send a line about himself.

The train started on the siding. As a child, when you went out to the railroad tracks to count railway cars and guess what was in them, you sometimes encountered a train so long it seemed never-ending, the only one in the world. The train extended and extended beyond the turn, steam puffed, semaphores glimmered; eventually the cars ended, and your eye was caught by the locked door of the last car; it seemed that it was slightly ajar, and that opening was the last chance to do something, to force the dream to change its course; but the train was leaving, and the door remained before your eyes: this was the beginning of the third dream.

The door at first retained its look, then it became just a door, then it changed—it was different every time I had the dream; the door to a bedroom, living room, office; wood, metal, knob, lock—everything changed. Only one thing remained—it was ajar, as if the instant when the door was almost shut was plunged into subjective time that did not have the duration of a dream for the sleeper, and it lasted endlessly. The door was no longer open but not yet shut; and I knew that if it did close it would never open again, it would vanish leaving an impenetrable wall.

I reached toward it, looking for a wedge to hammer between the door and the jamb—and I almost managed, but I didn’t; if only to save what was beyond the door with my gaze, I looked through the keyhole—and fell into it, flew through space with a multitude of other doors, shutters, gates, hatches, and well covers. Everything that could be closed was shut—desks, coffers with letters, mailboxes, safes, oven doors, notebooks, textbooks, stamp albums; the whole world was folding up like a big book that would be wrapped in iron strips, padlocked, and placed under a bushel.

There, behind every door, things left behind by the people taken away in the train were dying; lenses in eyeglasses cracked, the thin wire frames of pince-nez bent out of shape, the amalgam came off mirrors in black cancerous spots, the images of faces once reflected in the mirrors faded and dissolved, wallpaper peeled from walls, twisting like ribbons of paper streamers; corroding the corks, iodine evaporated from dark yellow bottles, the belts in sewing machines fell apart, pencil lead crumbled, records shed black powder; wood and cement expelled nails and bolts, glue holding pages of photo albums dried out, elastic failed in underwear, buttons fell off clothing, and fur collars shed; the letters wore out on typewriters, piano strings burst, keys and pedals stuck, and pages eaten with the rust, like blood, of paper clips, released the faint aroma of handwritten letters as the ink faded.

Not a single room in my dream had people; rooms, corridors, stairwells, attics, cellars, entryways, and cupboards alternately formed into a dizzying sequence and fell apart like shards, then joined up again, threaded onto the trajectory of my movement; but I did not encounter a single person. Their absence was the kind that happens only in dreams or in recollections of early childhood: it seems that people had just been here, had just left, hiding from you, and the more clearly the air holds the residual warmth of life and the echo of voices, and the floorboards remember recent steps, the more tormenting is the inability to understand where they went and where to look for them. In childhood this inability makes you bawl, for it is perhaps the first experience of despair: your mother and father are so obviously, so definitely not there, their absence is commensurate with the collapse of the universe; without finding them you cannot believe again in the world, you cannot acquire the strength to live, because not means that there is a hole in the world where people vanish—and you could vanish, too.

Things did not die silently; almost every sound a thing makes comes because something is being done to it, but here things had their own voices; their speech is a thousand times slower and more protracted, and usually we do not hear the faint rustle of newspapers wrinkling, the quiet cracking of aging porcelain or glass, the mosquito whine of the filaments in lightbulbs. But in the empty rooms where time was rapidly running out, all these creaks, cracks, and rustles combined into a primal sound.

Sometimes a dying person’s death rattle sounds as if the human and animal no longer live in him and only the third component of his being, unknown to him, is left, related to inanimate nature: this is the way clay in mud volcanoes pulsates and bubbles up in bursting blisters. And then, just before the end, speech returns to him.

The objects also screamed at first, as if they had become feral, and then, on the contrary, acquired something human in the unity of their sounds; they had absorbed the voices of their owners, their intonations, and now, dying, they tried to speak in the rhythm of those intonations. A strange speech ensued: to the human ear it sounded like interjections of a pre-language that directly expressed emotion in sounds—be it a moan of pain or an exclamation of joy—without mediating it in words. The fourth string on a violin is closest to the human voice, and every object seemed to have discovered the gift of the fourth string; it seemed that silent tension had lived in them and it could become sound only through dying.

Now it seemed that the things were falling into an abyss, bumping into one another, spinning, and screaming in horror almost like humans; the rooms and other spaces replaced one another infinitely, this sequence had no exit and no end.

Suddenly, I recognized the cacophony, and at the point of recognition the movement through rooms slowed and soon stopped. From my childhood memory, from the recollections of the same age as that of the apparent loss of my mother and father, came an image: a suspension bridge across the river, stretched on thick ropes, and the sinews of those ropes are severed by a saw with tiny, angry teeth like those of a mouse, the ropes break, but the bridge remains suspended in air as if by the power of habit of those who walked on it, and falls into the water only after a few seconds.

Creaks and squeaks, a crackle and the long, feminine tender singing of the burst ropes extending in an arc over the river water as if in an attempt to recreate the bridge in sound, in the singing arc. And my internal cry, because I could not understand why they needed to destroy the old bridge in order to build a new one, and the firm conviction that the new one would not be better, even though there was no scarier trial than stepping onto the rotten boards and swaying over the rocks below the crossing in rhythm to someone’s heavy steps—would not be better because the ability to be better was taken away, just like that, in one instant, with a knacker’s ardor, with the desire for definitive change, by dumping the old bridge into the water, when they could have taken it apart, found a use for the wood and metal.

My memory of the demolished bridge extricated from memories of long ago resembled a bush torn out of the ground with a ball of soil hiding the roots: the demolition of the bridge was the epicenter of the memory, and everything else moved into the shadow: the village houses on the riverbank vanished, the church vanished, and even the banks lost the contours of a strictly defined place, turning into an image of riverbanks in general.

The river had risen, as if there was flooding; it was no longer water flowing in the river channel, but the entire world palpable in memory became the channel and the overflowing banks and the sky all became a single current in the midst of which the river was a chute, rapids that gather before a waterfall.

The movement halted by the memory of the bridge began again, but in a different iteration; the river, which was part of the dream, suddenly became bigger than it, as if the place where dreams are unfolded has images that cannot be seen awake, that exist only as abstract concepts; images all the more reliable and expressive because familiar real objects serve as their base but which in dreams are perceived not visually but sensually, not as symbols but as forces to which you and the world of the dream are subject.

My consciousness—the consciousness of the sleeper, sensed as light that makes the dream’s reality visible—contracted to a nutshell; the current seized me; it was a strange current, a current in place, as if the source and mouth were both here; the current carried me not away but deeper, a current without distance. However, the current did not only disembody. There was a hint in it, as in rain or wind, of another presence; there was a vague yet clear sense that “someone is there.”

Someone fought the current wordlessly, did not want to yield to it; someone’s exploit was taking place—long ago, forgotten, but still continuing. I understood that there were people there; the ones who left the emptied rooms, to whom the dying things addressed their scream; the bridge—a road to them—had collapsed, but I had managed to cross it.

Thus, through dreams, a person gets the insight of memory: he senses the ominous presence of shaded areas of the past untouched by the light of consciousness; there, in the prison of time, are people, events, and knowledge of oneself that is excluded from the sphere of inner life.

The clairvoyant of memory—that’s who I became in my sleep. The flow of the river into which my dream had turned divided me from myself, tore all the threads that connected consciousness and memory, which allow you to know who you are at any moment in the details of the past; having become no one, devoid of the selectivity in memory predetermined by a personality, I acquired my memory whole all at once.

The power of the water receded; and I learned that the memory of a single man is not a fragile boat. Memory—the way it was revealed to me—was an ark.

In the current, in the movement of water that had seemed empty, islands appeared, banks arose in the distance, and the river became a river again; I had reached the very bottom of the dream where images had no concrete features and now I was returning, moving closer to being awake.

The islands, flat and sad, resemble the islands of northern rivers; consisting of gravel, sand, and soil, they are washed away by every flood, and they wander along the riverbed, cursed by pilots and buoy keepers. These islands are big sometimes, but people don’t even put fishing huts on them; sometimes, if the island has been around a long time, held by river rot, grass runs riot greedily, and tempted by the thick grass, people carry haystacks on wide boats, like wagons, down the river. But cattle eat this grass reluctantly, as if sensing that the stalks and leaves came from empty water, that the grass is extremely hungry and will take away strength without giving a drop, it will not sate them; it will dilute the blood and make watery milk. The next year you won’t be able to find the grass meadow, only shoals instead of an island; islands like this are not mapped and only the villagers near the banks remember where they were.

I noticed that the water was carrying some islands—huge peat floats; somewhere upriver the water was washing away peat deposits; old, darkened wooden crosses stood on one of the peat islands—the river had torn off a piece of a cemetery.

The other islands did not move; their banks seemed to be held down by boulders, fortified. When I got close to one of them, I saw that it was a shore of human faces; people were close together, the first row in water up to their throats, the next stood higher on the sloping bottom, the next even higher, and many rows were only faces for someone looking from the river.

The water did not reflect these faces: the power of regeneration seemed to have been exhausted by the river, and it carried old reflections, blurry and unclear, in which you just make out a cloud, or the blue and white side of a ship, or the rain-gray pine forest on a cliff.

The river water flowed without urgency or pressure, like blood in the veins of a sleeping person; if it were possible to transfer this river from dream to reality, to separate it from the vague banks of dreams and insert it, as into a frame, into the hills and cliffs of any known valley, from a distance it would look like an ordinary river. But on its bank, a person would suddenly sense that it was yesterday’s river; it merely flowed in these parts but no tributary would feed into it, no spring would break through its bottom sands.

The faces of the people in the water and near the water were dark; the current suddenly picked up one or another of them, and his place was taken by the one who had been a step behind him; this is how the river washes away the shore, quietly undercutting the ground beneath the stones. The faces were so dark that it seemed the people had walked underground, not in a tunnel, but through the ground, and particles of dirt had eaten into the skin; there was dirt in their mouths, in their stomachs and lungs, all the body’s spaces were filled by it.

The people were buried alive but did not die in their graves, wandering underground until they reached the riverbank and opened the ground like a door. They came out into a world where a note next to their names on long-ago faded lists asserted their nonexistence, and now death was completing the postponed work in just a few seconds. They saw me, they were all looking at me, and the combined force of their gaze created a vision inside the dream: sandy shoals, fog and smoke, a tall iron boat, the splash of water, huge iron gates open on the hold of the barge, a gangplank with ropes above the water. Up the gangplank in a single file came prisoners, guards, officers, sailors, and engineers—they walked without turning and vanished in the hold, where only the bent metallic ribs were visible. Then the metal doors began to close—on their own, no one set them in motion, neither people nor mechanisms—and they looked back, prisoners and guards together, but there were fewer of them—the others were blocked from my view by the meeting gates. Once again I wanted to stop the gates, insert a wedge, reach out—and woke up, my gaze not recognizing the house because my gaze—like an ark—was full of faces seeking salvation in it.

The dreams came for three days; on the fourth, I realized I had to go to the city where the letters found in Grandfather II’s desk were written, I had to find the one who sent them. That this was the only way to find out something from the past was already clear, but now I sensed that this path had opened; we were mutually ready, I to set out and the path to let me pass.