Oblivion

PART 4

When you wake up in a train that left a big city in the night, you are surrounded by only vast, expansive things: power lines, rivers, roads, fields. The country comes to the embankment to watch the railcars with the kindly mockery of the permanent toward the transient, and hills and forest edges learn how to be the view from the window; the triangulation towers on local heights—points for attaching geographical coordinates—look like Martian tripods after a failed invasion, but the crosses on churches give optical axes and space is formulated from these buildings; a cross here is not only a symbol of faith but a land surveying tool.

When I opened my eyes we had already passed the central zone and reached the taiga; the train was climbing up the globe, north, along the great canal; somewhere there, beyond the pine forest, waters borrowed from lakes flowed in wooden sluices, the water traveled across granite watersheds; the ships in the narrow canal seemed to be traveling on dry land, the masts high above the trees, and the ship horn chased a long echo; the towns and cities near the railroad stood on the edges of lakes, threaded on the line of the canal, and crane booms and tall trees loomed above the low houses, and it all seemed too big for village life; but the lakes saved everything—spread out with hilly shores.

The canal led to the northern sea; its predecessors were ancient portage routes, the old river paths that were perhaps walked much more than dry land. Probably there was more unconscious symbolism in the creation of the canal—let the water through, let it flow rather than stand—than actual necessity; the locks with their added columns and arches, the temples of cargo delivery, the tabernacles of river ships—the life of the big country was supposed to flow into these parts through the canal, as if through a catheter; a cellulose paper plant was built on the shore of one of the lakes: the trees were cut down for the sake of the word, and power over these regions shifted from timber to paper.

Now the villages and towns were situated on two sides of the road—of the tracks and the canal; ships went past, trains went past—two flows, two directions, two currents bearing away; life gradually took on the features of platform and wharf, wharf and platform, depending on which way you turned; the residents were not fed by the land on which their houses stood but by the water and land roads; sometimes loaded, sometimes empty; the canal and railroad tracks were surrounded by zones of alienation, and the residents were icebound between the two zones.

The train reached a big station; twenty minutes’ wait and a locomotive change. On the low platform, shin-high, sellers bustled, knowing where the car doors would be; most were female, old women and kids; paastrees, paastrees, cowoldbeer, cowoldbeer, fish, fish, fish, kefir whowantskefir, berries, berries, hotpotates, hotpotates, getcher chips, chips, chips, mineral water—dozens of selling patters, pattering sellers, hurry-hurry, hurryitup, mister, wheresyourbag, costsmore withthejar, swallowing letters hungrily. But each face, every figure that had acquired the platform whirl and bustle suggested another face and figure—the real ones they would be back home; God knows what awaited them there—an old woman’s corner with a view of the empty vegetable plot, an apartment in a boarded-up two-story barracks, where everything is in everyone’s face, and the yellowed sheets of a bedridden man hang on the same wash line as the yellow diapers of an infant.

The locomotive was coupled, the conductors were hurrying people to get in, the sellers were rushing to the next track, the express was approaching from the north, its high beam and red double whiskers appeared around the turn, while I stood, finishing my cigarette; for some reason I always need to use up all the time allotted for a stop.

An old woman walked along the next platform; she carried a bouquet of peonies, the stems already fading and losing their firmness, but the flowers were still living, deep claret and fully opened. I knew those flowers—I had dug them out and rinsed the tangled roots in a pinkish manganese solution, the tubers like knotted flesh—and by early July the tight glossy buds exploded in a single day into large purple petals, tenfold folded, crumpled, and now falling apart like a pomegranate shattered by its overripeness, almost vulgar in its lack of restraint in proportion, but gorgeous because of that lack of strictness, lushness, loss of form, reduced by the glowing darkness of the depth of its color.

Peonies like that—I knew this—brought from the dacha were now flowering on Grandfather II’s grave, their sensitive leathery roots going deep; they are death flowers, which are not only appropriate in the face of a death, but somehow crown and attenuate it; the ones whose vegetative flesh is closest to human flesh and can therefore stand in for it in the funeral ritual, grow in the soil of the cemetery, which does not tolerate random plantings; claret peonies—tiny black ants often crawled into their buds; a dark spot on the green, a herald of future decay.

The old woman’s fingers clumsily held the flowers bound by a scrap of ribbon; the peonies were falling apart, bending in various directions, and it seemed that the same thing was happening inside the old woman: her life was about to fall apart, and the old woman was just trying to get into the cover of her house and be alone with the hardship of dying. The unsold flowers were in the way, her hands could not contain them, the hands were almost dead, life had gathered closer to the heart, to the belly.

I realized that I could not get into the train leaving her on the platform; I recognized her the way you recognize people who appear to us only a few times, and they are different, but in relation to use they are the same person—confidante, wordless advisor and comforter.

I had seen her only two times before—in the underground passage of the metro near my house. She healed me from the self-love of grief and self-reliance of insulted injury; they were late evenings of a hot and dusty summer and something was fermenting in people, flaring up in meaningless fights, or cursing, or broken glass; the air was stifling, flowers faded quickly, leaves drooped; I was coming home, wrapped up in my grief and injury, so furious that I was stumbling—everything was in the way, not handy, rubbing me the wrong way—and both times late in the metro passage the old woman was there dressed in a child’s knit cap and a very old dress, in the fashion of her youth, threadbare from washing. There was something of a fastidious mouse used to living with people about her; the gray hairs on her lip, the worn fabric where threads held other threads at a third of their power, her poor vision, her weakness, her clarity of mind in the tiny area, about the size of eyeglasses, of her daily cares. She stood there neither meekly nor pleadingly, but without catching anyone’s attention; before her on a cardboard box were seedlings of houseplants in plastic cups and separately in a jar the claw-like feather of a century plant.

She had meekness before God; we think that meekness means being ready to bear everything, but that is our pride speaking, our accountant’s concept of justice and revenge; true meekness is where the contradiction is gone—bear it or not, put up with it or not, where there is an equal possibility of one or the other—but you do not raise your voice against God. And meeting that old woman you knew that nothing would befall her in the nasty nighttime metro; all your injuries, anxieties, and sorrow were shamefully tiny in her presence—they became insignificant and nonexistent; just before you had been suffering, a cold, slippery, poisonous lump had filled your solar plexus, and now it was all gone.

“I’ll get there myself,” the old woman said on the platform, guessing my intention. I bought the peonies; the southbound express hid her from me, the step of my train car began to move.

It happens that an accidental meeting, for a short second, creates a nearness that does not occur in ordinary life; you suddenly learn that there are no distances, no defenses—they are illusory—there is only the most profound kinship; no risk is needed, no overcoming obstacles or going beyond your boundaries to meet another—the meeting has taken place; it is greater than any of us, we live inside it, we have already met; meeting is not an accident, it is a law, a means and an environment for existence: it is not between us, we are in it.

The train had left the station; the flowers were on the table in my compartment as a greeting and sign of farewell simultaneously in saturated colors of purplish claret.

The flowers breathed; their excessive sweetness reminded me of the cemetery, Grandfather II’s grave; evening was descending and the train flew out onto a bridge, and the bolted steel girders stood along the sides of the tracks like enormous letters. Below was the broad river, and the river was still, the current could be felt only near the bottom, under the tense smoothness of the water; the train moved for several minutes in emptiness, the bridge itself was not visible, only the supports and the river, and my heart beat harder, feeling this interruption. The river was turned to glass by the sunset and a long fishing boat powered by a single rower moved across the current, slowly, heavily, as if the oars were scooping mercury.

I recognized the boat from the mosaics on the vault near Grandfather II’s grave, the long shadows of poplars that seemed to have fallen once and for all and could not get any longer; but there Charon transported a shade wrapped in a long shroud, while here the ferryman or fisherman was alone.

The near bank was still illuminated, molten in the sunset, while the far bank was hidden by the dark, and it was where the rower was headed; a deep ravine bisected the darkened bank, and a tongue of blackness fell from it into the river.

The train rushed ahead and its speed made everything outside seem slow; the rower could not turn, the wind could not ruffle the water, the ray of light could not chase away the dark, and we moved to the dark bank, and we moved through the foggy water meadows, where everything was as velvety as a bat’s wing, silent and immobile; people in the last cars could still see the river, the rowboat, the light, but the head of the train had plunged into twilight, into the winged silence of birds circling above the meadows; a few oxbows shimmered, giving off the heat of the day, and it was only these rising mists that showed that this light was still here, that the cold of night was not eternal here.

Sensing night, the flowers by the window began folding up their petals; the scent also fell asleep, its discharge ended; the glow of the river, the dark spot of the boat and rower, and the long shadows of the trees remained only in my eyes until I fell asleep. Wherever I looked, everything was blocked by the golden river and the movement of the oars, the world moved into the background, something you remember only through another memory and which moves away like the shore for someone on a boat; and through the water’s glow I could see my former life, suddenly very distant and less palpable than the funnels left by the oars on the smoky volcanic glass of the water.

I got off the train early in the morning, dark with rain; the passengers—and there were quite a few—vanished with amazing deftness. They were just there, coughing, grunting, swearing, with clumsy travel gear, boxes, backpacks, bags, carts, always more than there was room for, traveling hard, in stress, spitting every minute, working their muscles and elbows; they were just getting red in the face, bending over, carrying, dragging, pushing things somewhere, and suddenly there was no one, just a few taxi drivers without passengers smoking by their cars and watching dogs snarl in the empty lot near the station.

I went into the station. Sitting at a table in the café were two policemen and two guys in leather jackets; all four were the same. People who start growing quickly at the age of thirteen or fourteen have faces like that: physical grace cannot keep up with growing muscles and for a year or two the teenager turns into a lout. Their faces still had that expression of adolescent dullness—as if each of them, because of an excess of flesh, felt only with his stomach and penis; the table was covered with plates of shashlik and fried potatoes and a bottle of vodka, the waitress watched from the doorway.

The four sat like gatekeepers of the world I was entering; the waiting room stank of belching, of sour saliva dripping from a snoozing drunk, and then of smoke; people accustomed to sleeping rough—on the floor, on trunks, on the luggage rack of a train car, on dormitory cots, on plank beds in holding cells—lay on the benches, heads covered; everyone was bent over and rolled up for warmth, but it seemed they wanted to look as if they had already been hit, no need to hit them anymore. I knew how to sleep like that—sensing not my heart but my wallet in my sleep; I had slept in worse places, but here, walking through the station, I was still off the train, where you’re a passenger and think you have some rights—and for the four men at the table I was also a passenger: criminal slang is precise in its aphoristic scorn for those who think they are going somewhere and not being taken there.

The bus to town had already left or had not yet come. By the bus stop, painted tires were used for flower beds; I had laid out similar ones on “volunteer Saturdays” in school. I recognized the familiar poverty, the second life of things that substitute for needed objects; flowerbeds made out of tires or upside-down bottles dug into the ground, a feeding bowl out of a cardboard milk packet, ashtrays out of food tins. Born and bred among them, I now wondered: Does that happen only with things? What if my feelings and thoughts are also a forced substitution for something real? What if my love isn’t love at all, but another flower bed of tires with spittle-covered marigolds?

A car pulled up to the bus stop; a black Volga with an antenna—someone’s driver was making money in the morning. The door opened; the inside of the Volga was like a den: slipcovers of dark, fuzzy, fake fur, tinted windows, everything slightly worn, slightly unclean, smelling stale from the heater; the driver was like that, too—in a wooly vest that left his elbows bare, corduroy trousers, fat, with gold teeth, unshaven, with squinty eyes in the rearview mirror, clearly just barely awake but quick, the kind of guy who likes juggling—flicking a cigarette out of a pack and catching it in his mouth—thinking that was cool; these kind usually become taxi drivers rather than personal chauffeurs, they huddle together meeting trains in small towns, but you think twice before getting into the car. A taxi like that doesn’t drive you, it takes you away, and even a familiar road seems slightly unfamiliar; the driver gives off a sense not of danger but of unease—maybe he ran down someone on a rainy night and drove away, maybe he robbed a drunk passenger, maybe he’s selling something—and the money he gives you in change will always be ancient, greasy, wrinkled as if it never had a chance to lie in a wallet but kept making the rounds, over and over, folded, crumpled and greedily stuffed into a pocket. The bills—one torn, the second with a drop of blood, the third with some numbers written on it—will also smell of something pathetically forbidden, drunken conspiracies, hangover disputes, called-in debts, the worn oilcloth on a store counter spotted with herring brine; and you will imagine that for half the trip the driver kept deciding whether to drive you where you needed to go or to turn off into an alley or lonely spot you don’t know, tell you he has a flat, and see what you do …

The Volga flew up onto the railroad bridge—rail cars, cisterns, floodlights, squat cargo cranes flashed by—and raced down the potholed streets of the city. We had to press ahead, go some thirty kilometers, and arrive in another city, the one in the letter to Grandfather II; this town was low, the farther one arose in the distance with the smokestacks of a mining plant and beyond them gray sloping mounds enveloped in smoke and cumulus clouds.

The forest tundra began outside the city, but there wasn’t a single green tree there, only cliffs, stone rubble, and dead tree trunks; the prevailing wind was from the direction of the mining plant, and the smoke from the stacks precipitating with fog and rain had burned and killed every living thing over the decades. There should be no life in these places and they should not be seen—their picture has nothing to do even with the sight of natural catastrophes: just as a criminologist can tell murder from suicide, you can see murder, whether direct or indirect, in landscapes mutilated by humans, you can tell because in nature death is swift and not ugly, while murder done by people is marked by protracted deformity.

Then came warehouses, fences, fences, fences; in the distance there were mountains, night sky, and unfettered expanses, while here everything was fenced, separated by walls; barbed wire covered everything. There were barriers everywhere, warning signs, “no entry” symbols, guard booths and outside them, strays who rushed to bark at the car. Then suddenly, like an abyss, came an empty lot retaining only the start of work—here they excavated a hole, there they abandoned a pipe, there they set up strips of wood to mark out something or other; the lot was as dark as the dirt and you could dig into the darkness with a shovel. The car flew on, and once again there were fences, floodlights, workshops, pipes, smoke, steam, and light—and then another plunge into emptiness. Man defended himself, barricaded himself, he was not master of these lands, and the guard booths were the architectural descendants of prison camp guardhouses; this land was infected with a fungus, the fungus of the watchman, and all of this, the fences, wire, barricades, was like a single never-ending shout: “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

The car flew and it seemed that we lived on our land like occupiers; that we looked at one another through a prison door peephole; there was music, the singer rasped that all his friends were bulls, fists ready to fight, gun ready to blaze, there was no salvation from the bulls; when the driver switched stations I could see that he had tattoos on his fingers—amateur, pale, perhaps somebody had tried to remove them—and the music, jerky and undisciplined, and the words were strangely suited to the locale. We were racing through a prison camp zone, even though these were not prison factories; the zone was everywhere, its mark was on everything—three rows of barbed wire. It seemed that every object here had to be locked away from thieves, and the locks multiplied, locks, bolts, hasps, the next set of locks, in case the first ones are defeated, and so on; oncoming cars did not turn off their high beams, blinding me, but the driver did not turn away, he was used to it; the gun ready to blaze, no salvation from the bulls, the speakers roared, and we flew, senselessly fast, as if in a hurry to fight with someone, break bones, knock out teeth; the dark, the fences, the empty lots—everything chased after us, everything showed that you could not stop here, in a plague-ridden place, and that gave a sense of daring, a ruthless readiness to live at odds with everything, to chomp onto life like it was a tough piece of meat, with sinews and fur; I had frequently been in such places, but this was the first time I realized that the criminals had won, the camp had beaten the not-camp; the camp was not gone, it had smeared itself into the landscape, cut itself into parts, and each part settled in, changing everything around it, in the milieu of human habitation.

The toys I found in Grandfather II’s apartment suited this area very well—faceless figures, rifle, German shepherd, horse; they came from here. A bridge flashed by, the fences were left behind, and the town’s narrow streets wound around hills, signs, store windows, kiosks, bus stops, railroad tracks crossed the road several times, beyond the hills factories appeared then disappeared, and the mountains came closer, squashing the town into a hollow, with only one exit, across the bridge we had taken.

To the right appeared another abyss of darkness; but I could make out a big building. The driver explained that this was a train station, that previously commuter trains used to run here, but the branch was abandoned during perestroika and only freight lines were left; the station was unsupervised and there had been a fire. The road twisted up a slope, and the car flew right up to the station; the building was typical, with arches, columns, and very wide windows—a railroad temple from the forties or fifties, an altar of schedules. The fire had merely blackened the walls, and the station had the desecrated majesty of an abandoned church, as if the locals rejected a religion; I could not tell from his tone whether the driver was sorry or on the contrary was proud of the arson, his speech betrayed both.

I came back to the station in the daytime; I had a similar experience only once, in Istanbul by the Golden Gate; I saw what happened to a former crossroads of history, saw how the once-ruined is ruined a second time; at the fortress walls of the former Constantinople, vendors sold cell phone covers, broken kettles, bolts, nuts; here’s a defroster (the plastic yellowed by time or smoke), here’s a bent microscope, here’s a package of syringes. The users of the syringes had moved inside the walls, campfires sent up smoke, ragged bums, who gave off a vibe of cowardice and violence, wandered amid the collapsed battlements.

Depression hits you by the Golden Gate; a new horde, the nomads of the new world, traders in fake leather jackets huddle in the ruins, unable to take them apart completely and build something different; they have grown accustomed to disarray, to accepting crevices in the old walls as living space; to the fact that you can live without looking back at the past and assuming that the shade of ancient walls is convenient shade on a hot day and nothing more.

At the station I saw the same kind of abandoned crossroads, a silt-filled mouth of fate; the city cut off its own path to the outside, destroyed the window to the big world, and now lived like a blinded Cyclops deprived of its train headlight eye. But the station was burned, and the city was forced by the landscape, by the hollow in which it was situated, to shut down on itself; the place exerted a kind of terror against its populace, and people responded in kind: the walls of houses and garages were thickly covered in graffiti, curses addressed to no one in particular but directly at the environment; the scrawls were written over rectangles of fresh paint—the swear words were painted over—abundantly, fluently, and monotonously; evidence of petty revenge—knocked over garbage cans, broken streetlamps and windows, rubbish tossed on the side of the roads—showed that the residents were fighting a partisan war with the town.

Dropping me at the hotel, the driver left, and I started looking at the ads on the lamppost covered in white drips of glue; most were about apartment sales and exchanges, there were many, and they were glued on in layers, the lamppost was covered with a clustered fringe, and it seemed as if no one was comfortable living here, everyone wanted to change something, move, find a new view from the window even if it’s still within the same city limits.

In towns like this above the polar circle, the hotel is called either “North” or “Arktika”—this one was Arktika. These hotels have a special kind of discomfort; most guests are there on business, there are no insouciant vacationers.

Here dreams are laconic, like a still life of a pitcher and two glasses, but you still have to bring dreams, like food for the train, from home. In your room, you find yourself on the unfurnished margin of life. There are too few objects—tray, electric kettle, ashtray—the distance is too great between them, like in the desert, it takes a half day to get from one to the other, and they are all not quite real. In a room like that you can lay out your things, toss a book on the nightstand and cigarettes on the table, but it still feels as if you’ve stopped in some uninhabited area. All around, as in nature, only monotonous surfaces; out there—hills and valleys, here—horizontals and right angles; it’s a kind of new wilderness, a new wildness; the best reading here is a geometry textbook.

The hotel windows opened on a blank wall of the building next door; it was about ten meters to the wall, and there were no curtains—why bother, when the brickwork was so close?

Forced to live with a view of the wall, I read it like a book, the book of the wall. It’s good to look at a town from the point of view of buildings; from the point of view of bricks; then you are not an observer, you are one with the spirits of the place. But this wall did not allow me to mentally move into it, it repelled my gaze; the brick was not laid evenly, the lines were crooked, and the wall wavered; all you could learn was how gradually it was laid and how the people worked on the construction.

It seemed to me that the intention to build was missing from their actions; each brick was laid not even automatically but with a thought that was as far from construction as possible—a thought about home or about the evening’s pay packet. As a result, you could not say about the wall or the whole house that they were actually built; you could not say that the house was solid on the ground. The wall before me blocked my view but at the same time was not convincing; it seemed that it could collapse at any moment because they had not put in that something that holds a house together along with brick and mortar.

I saw that a great force of compulsion had erected the town, cleared the forest, laid the roads, dug the canals, and built the factories; but it turned out that compulsion is incapable of one thing: the effort a person brings to work freely chosen. Without that effort, without that bit of spiritual labor that merges with physical labor, all the roads, bridges, cities, and factories were held up only by the will of the state that had them built. When that will vanished, when its time has passed, people were left with a legacy of great construction in which spiritually they were not involved; they were left among houses, stations, and streets built under duress.

Sleeping in a room with a view of the wall was good; dreaming was a way of leaving the building. The dreams—the three dreams I had at home—did not come anymore; they could not exist in this hotel room, they were too personal for this commonplace setting; the dreams I had after the train were not even dreams but just preparation, clean sheets of paper for dreaming on which light, unrecognizable shadows flitted; I could not expect more than that for now.

I had decided ahead of time that I would not go looking for the man who wrote to Grandfather II right away; I wanted to see the town first, see its present—and only then disturb its past.

The town was named for a Bolshevik killed in the mid-1930s; the name of the town communicated nothing to the place, or the place to its name. They spoke different languages and avoided each other.

The area’s mountains bore names given to them by local ethnic groups; these names left the sensation of raw meat and gnawed bones in your throat; reading a dozen names in a row from the map was like drinking thick blood that was steaming in the cold; the names were redolent of campfire smoke, fish scales, rawhide, canine and human sweat, they were long and the syllables joined up like reindeer or dogs in harness.

The town name—two syllables, with an sk ending—gave away its alienness, the Bolshevik’s name looked good on a big map of the country where the names of his comrades formed a toponymic constellation, a lifetime and posthumous pantheon, but up close the name seemed ridiculous, a random collection of letters which the residents got used to and considered themselves dwellers of Abracadabra-sk.

All the original foundations of the town lay outside it, first it appeared in a plan, on a map, and only then in the area. No matter how it grew, how it developed, it remained a papier-mâché town. There were houses, stores, streets, trees, intersections, and streetlights—but it was inherently ephemeral; the town existed as long as the ore lasted next to it; of itself, without the ore, it meant nothing. It did not arise at a focus point of historical fates, or at the crossroads of trade and military interests, but near a giant pocket of land from which riches could be mined; it was created according to the will of the regime that moved thousands of workers to the north, it grew out of barracks, temporary huts, and that spirit had not dissipated; stale, uninhabited, the spirit of a new construction, of a workshop, oiled rags, and rotting pipes.

I left the hotel in search of the library; I hoped to read something written by regional historians and then to go find the city museum, if there was one.

It was too dark to read in the library, damp and green; there were flowers everywhere in pots, vines, sharp-leaved plants, and the books seemed to get lost in the jungle; the librarian, who did not see me, walked past with her watering can, and the pots stood as if she was watering books instead of flowers, adding the water of words to old, dried out volumes. The wall calendar was from two years ago; charts with letters—А, Б, В—stuck out from the shelves into the aisles, rabbit ears of the alphabet; it was classroom-like, pathetic.

There were no works on the town history in the library; instead, the librarian showed me old editions, prerevolutionary and from the 1920s, with half-erased ex libris inscriptions; books were taken away from those sent here, and that created the first collection for the library.

Local history could be learned only from the newspaper archives. The pages, as fragile as dried seaweed, kept the hieroglyphs of the past’s daily news; photographs turned into black-and white underwater photography; you could barely make out a few details—the corner of a house, a man’s silhouette, but that was all—through a murky substance, like water at a silty river bottom; the view into the photograph was the view through the glass of a diving suit—you expected a deep-water fish to swim by, a bottom angler with glassy beads on its whiskers. I realized the substance was time, and I was a diver who could speak only to himself—the deep diving suit does not let sound escape.

The newspapers lay before me, but they did not let me inside; they joined up in columns of letters, bristled with names, details, dates, decrees, announcements, and holiday editorials; Dumin’s brigade overfulfilled the plan for skidding logs, excavator Rutin got a state award, the separation line was started up in Mine 3a—the newspaper pages reported only ancient news, news, news; news items crowded, chatted, hustled one another, there were so many, as if everything done was done for the sake of creating news, and even better, for creating two or three stories, news that the previous story, just a day later, was obsolete and here is something even newer; the newspaper pages flashed by like an express train you couldn’t jump on to from the platform. The surnames and names also flashed by, unless it was an article about some production worker; the thin sheet of paper—a vertical slice of time a micron thick—was stacked with others just like it, the newspaper lay in thick piles, but there was no temporal volume; I needed a book in three dimensions, a book as a collected, repackaged rethinking of time, but no one ever wrote a book about the town. “There isn’t enough of us for a book,” said the librarian. “We haven’t accumulated enough, we’re too thin on the ground, too thin.”

The library as entrée to the past did not work. The museum was even more hopeless; it was too new, that museum, and its creators were too concerned with having a good, trustworthy past; so the whole thing was a stage set, newly minted: the way restaurants are decorated in “olde time” fashion. In the middle there was a reconstruction of an earthen house in which the first settlers allegedly lived—they called the prisoners “settlers”; the house was made of first-class logs, with glass in the low windows, the roof covered with even sod; this was a historical attraction, an attempt to amend one’s genealogy.

A glass case displayed a kettle made out of a can, an explorer’s rubber boots chewed up by rats, a rusty lantern, and some other objects, real ones, not fakes, but placed under glass and brightly illuminated, they appeared to be frozen lumps of mud from a tractor rut exhibited in a museum for some reason. The past did not come closer, on the contrary, it was moving away, and the exhibits were presented as evidence of a civilization—earthly or not—to which we now living had no relation; “Look, they also had a life” said the glass cases, and the respectable present, ashamed of the rough past (which is why the earth house was made of the highest-quality wood) showed them in their best light and rushed to announce that the past was in the past and shoved it deeper away, into the stifling sack, the sleeve, the cellar.

Next to the cases representing the history of the town were cases with archeological exhibits; a spoon hand-carved out of wood, a lighter made out of a shell case—and nearby bone arrow and spearheads, sharpened cutting stones, fish bone needles, clay beads; it was strange to see that, despite the difference in intention and materials, both types of objects lagged behind us by an immeasurable period of time and were closer to each other than to us.

The prisoners of the 1930s and 1940s lived in foxholes before they built barracks; the fishermen and hunters of the Neolithic period who left drawings and petroglyphs in the nearby mountains, hunters of the sun and pilots of the moon—they were related by the dark of the cave, where the first rational feeling was pain; and I thought of an old acquaintance, a professor of archaeology who studied Neanderthal culture and was then arrested and sent to the camps.

We met in the region where he had been exiled and later remained; there he studied the history of local tribes inhabiting the long and narrow sandbars in the thousands of kilometers of swamps. In times closer to our own, an epic was being created by people’s lives, and big events, wars and revolutions were woven into its pattern and reinterpreted as a mythological scene; Nicholas II, Lenin, and Stalin were turned into heroes of the middle world, Bolsheviks were born out of the ground; battles and clashes reached them like a wave striking a distant shore, the receptive myth reworked them without destroying its own wholeness; the GOERLO plan for national electrification was turned into combat over the sun, collectivization into a clash between the spirits of the land and the spirits of war who destroyed all the fruits of the earth for the work of death.

The professor studied these tribes without scientific detachment, rather, he did not separate his perceptions from those of the people whose minds created the myths; the professor said that he tested the effectiveness and saving power of a mythical perception of reality, turning it into a battle of the ancient polymorphic forces of good and evil, a struggle without distinction of warring sides. In this consciousness, good is not yet separated from evil, they grow out of the same life root and easily flow into each other, they are close and fraternal; for instance, what is really evil is presented as good and what is seen as a victory of good is actually the triumph of evil. This is how the mind protects itself, the professor thought, extending the spectral presence of good through mythology, when facing the totality of evil without the distorting lens of myth would destroy you.

Yet the professor did not forget his prior scientific interests and liked to tell me that since he had been in the few caves with Neanderthal remains and had studied their skeletons in order to establish what the creatures looked like, in the camps he had the feeling he was surrounded by those he thought had become extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

The discovery, in the final years of the professor’s life, that Neanderthals were not ancestors of man, but were an independent subspecies and warred with humans, confirmed his unscientific hypothesis, which was nevertheless exact in a different way: the ancient anthropoid races did not vanish, they learned to coexist with humans, grew to look like them, but their cannibalistic nature remained the same; when the human qualities in humans are abused, that nature is revealed and manifests itself: the cannibals openly practice their cannibalism. However, the professor used this hypothesis metaphorically as well: “It’s easier this way than accepting that everything I have seen belongs to human nature.”

The town also had a geological museum; the main exhibits were the local ores used to make fertilizer and the minerals with rare earth metals.

All were ugly, here was one homely stone and oddly, a whole city, tens of thousands of people, arose just to mine that stone, so ordinary looking; when you look at the minerals cerium or scandium, you understand that they have an admixture of metals that are extremely expensive, but their value is profoundly conceptual.

Of course, you are judging like an ordinary person expecting an obvious depiction of value that would justify the massive expenditures—processing plants, quarries, mines—but at the same time there is something very true in the ordinary view; it was telling you that labor here has a specific meaning and there is no point in judging it by its fruits.

Even coal extracted from a mine is a compressed form of the fierce sun of the Jurassic period, the sun of gigantic creatures and vegetation, it remembers the shimmer of scaly skin, the heat of the sun that was younger by hundreds of millions of years, coal—and there is a reason why heat and food is calculated in calories—seems to be the food of fire, and the ancient respect for fire makes coal the bread of flames, a significant presence in the business of life. The rocks and minerals in the museum did not speak to the heart, they could become valuable only in a chain of chemical transformations, traveling along several conveyor belts, and it seemed that a miner who cut out a rock like that with his jackhammer should ask himself why he’s done so and should have to persuade himself that his work has meaning and is useful—for the distance is too great between a piece of gray dull rock and the extraction of a useful substance.

After the library and museums I decided after all to visit the street where the man who wrote to Grandfather II lived; not drop in on him, not ask about him, just walk down the street, as if by chance; bring the future a little closer, but not enter it; see what that man sees—or saw—every day, his store, his tobacco kiosk, his bus stop, his front door; take a good look—for now as a casual stroller—at the street that would irreversibly become that street, look at it freely as one of many streets, and maybe it would tell me something, warn me.

I wanted to ask for a map at the newspaper counter, but realized that the town did not need to see itself from the outside; they would hardly publish a map here, it was all known, all the corners, intersections, alleys, and courtyards; people don’t look at maps here, they ask the way; and so did I.

No one knew the street indicated in the letter; people tried to remember, stopped others, one even called home—there was no such street; of course, it wasn’t hard to get mixed up: it was called Red Kolkhoz Street, and the town had many other streets with red in the name: Red Army, Red Partisans, Red Lighthouse, Red Dawn; none of them had anything to do—by name—with the locale, creating a parallel system of ideological cosmogony in which Red Dawns rose above the country and the Red Lighthouse lit the way for the Red Partisans for some reason; people were trapped in this net of non-reality, and they lived in it, pronouncing the names and extending the existence of this hassle. I remembered a village outside Moscow where I was visiting friends in their dacha and I awoke in the morning with the horrible realization that I was in a place called Lenin’s Precepts, and the very possibility of living there, of saying “We live in the Precepts” or “The population of the Precepts,”—it was detrimental to sanity to live in something that was doubly fictitious because Lenin never left any precepts. Now I was dealing with the topography of an entire town that was deprived of its own voice, drawn on a grid, and the streets intersected like footnotes in articles of the latest mythological dictionary.

At last someone recalled that Red Kolkhoz Street had existed but then the old buildings were razed, they were some of the first built in the town, and the Rainbow neighborhood was created, and the street was now called First Rainbow.

Hoping that maybe Grandfather II’s correspondent had been given an apartment in one of the new buildings, I went to First Rainbow. They were multistoried houses painted in bright colors copying one of the big northern cities; orange, pink, and violet nine-story buildings. They were no longer new—it was fifteen or twenty years later, but the cheerful colors denied the possibility of a man from the past choosing to live here; there were no old people in the courtyards, they apparently did not manage to live here among walls the color of fruit-flavored gum.

For this place, the local past did not exist; the residents were not miners but factory managers, they had forced out the former owners on Red Kolkhoz Street and planned their own, separate neighborhood free of mine dust, and the times were such that you could change the name from the straw and manure Red Kolkhoz to Rainbow. Actually, you could gauge the attitude toward the past by the name change: moving into new apartments—this was during perestroika—people were moving into the future, they called it Rainbow, and even though they couldn’t get paint in the entire rainbow spectrum, they could set themselves apart, legalize their caste, and probably no one saw that the neighborhood looked like a dollhouse in a filthy wasteland.

Beyond the last buildings there was one more, a village house, low, its shingles blue-gray with lichen; it had not been torn down for some reason. I went there—the house was from former times, it was the same age as the letters that were dropped into a mailbox around here by the man who wrote to Grandfather II.

An old woman was hilling potatoes in the garden; there are old woman like that—eighty, ninety years old, who lost their husbands a long time ago at war or in the mines, so long ago that others manage to live an entire life, from birth to death, in that period of time. The past—marriage, motherhood—is so distant that either the person or the past has to die, and if the person lives, the past dies. These old women are a special breed—they don’t get tired, life to them is a daily chore—dig, water, hill, weed; they harness themselves habitually and probably only for themselves, without hope, without expectation, without haste. After all, you get tired when the work is hard and rest is far away, but they truly do not understand the meaning of rest, and no work is hard for them because in order to sense its difficulty you have to know the meaning of idleness, which they have never experienced. They are not inspired to work—people like that eventually tire; they work like abstract forces in textbooks—they press, haul, accelerate, move; there is horsepower and there is human power—and that power alone is what keeps them alive.

I said hello; the old woman yelled at me to go away—she wasn’t going to sell the house. I replied that I didn’t need the house, I was looking for the people who lived here twenty years ago, before the new neighborhood. She unlatched the gate and led me into the house; she didn’t quite believe me and kept expecting me to start talking about buying, to name a sum, but there was something else as well that made her mood change so readily.

The house was a kingdom of hand-knit rugs, coverlets, and curtains: a sewing machine, an old Singer, stood in a prominent place and it seemed that the old woman had gotten a magical spool with never-ending thread; she sewed, spun, knitted, and never ran out of thread, and she did not know what to do with it, but she was afraid to turn off the machine and spindle or put down her knitting needles: What if the thread was her life?

A framed newspaper clipping hung on the wall, wreathed in paper flowers, an atheist shrine; that clipping—the woman started telling me about it—determined her fate. There she was in the photo, a young weaver, the only one in the entire town to have ever personally seen the Bolshevik in whose honor the town was named, and she was even photographed with him; he received a delegation of shock worker weavers and they brought her, a girl, as an example of youth labor; then the Bolshevik was killed, and she moved to the place bearing his name—and in this town the newspaper clipping served to ensure her well-being. While the town bore that name, the authorities—both Soviet and the ones who came after—took good care of her; the old woman—I was told this later—gave talks about the Bolshevik in schools and kindergartens, at municipal meetings and anniversaries; her own life was insignificant, she had become something like a film strip or a gramophone recording that captured the image and voice of the deceased; she did not embroider or invent things; she toiled as an eyewitness.

Yet no one thought to find out how she felt about the man for whose posthumous existence she had stifled her own life; it was only much later, in the new times, that they learned he had sent her parents to the camps; but she had continued talking about him, witnessing those eight minutes she had been next to him; first the newspaper clipping saved her from being sent away and turned her into a visual aid for schoolchildren; then she became an eight-minute segment of newsreel, and then she no longer could change.

Telling me about her past life, she spoke as if she sensed the time was coming when her newspaper clipping would mean nothing, no matter what the town used to be called; her house was standing thanks to that clipping, she was the only one who hadn’t been moved out of Red Kolkhoz Street, and now the framed newspaper wreathed in flowers looked more like an idol of a forgotten deity; the face, the font—they were all too long ago and it kept moving away, not forgotten but losing its meaning, turning into a curiosity, and if people learned that she had seen the man for whom the town was named, they were only surprised that she was still alive.

When she heard I was looking for someone, the old woman hoped I would bring changes, that an old relationship would be rekindled, time would turn back; but seeing that my interest was not in that, she seemed to regret letting me in; she said only that people from Red Kolkhoz Street were resettled in various places, these had been the oldest buildings in the town, and some had gotten good apartments in the center, in the Stalinist houses; apparently the managers of the factory had enough power to move out the former owners but had to humor the former higher officers of the camp guards; basically, that was the plan—to divide the town’s past from the town’s present, to separate so that it would be easier for some to forget the others.

I asked her some more about the town, where I could look for the people who moved, what they lived on now; the old woman told me to go the quarry—I would understand everything there, about the people who moved and the ones who didn’t; the quarry for her was an answer that obviated the very possibility of a question.

She, a former weaver, the guardian of someone else’s memory, who had lived a life different from the rest, protected by the newspaper clipping on the wall, replied as if I had asked her where her peers where, where her husband and children were and whether she had had any; where was her generation, what had it left behind, where were the survivors, the last ones, what could they tell me; “Go to the quarry,” she said and closed the door, then bolted it.

I walked through town again; I was just strolling, keeping the general direction in mind, and realized something I had noted but had no words to describe: the town was planned for people walking in columns and turning at right angles; a single person, a single dweller with irregular routes was apparently too minor for the planners’ focus, they lacked the vision to see the human figure through the plan; as a result, the city was divided up by plants and factories and the person—an ordinary person—seemed to be there illegally.

I saw how “zones,” walled off by fences and barbed wire, whether a prison camp or a closed, restricted enterprise, entered the public and private space and distorted it. In essence, the town as town did not exist—there was a territory on which private interests were permitted selectively, stores, schools, nurseries, but this was a necessary concession; things were not intended for humans here, and thus the locale resembled a beam chewed up by a wood borer; everything was illegal, crooked, roundabout, and under the table; cut this corner, move this board, go through the dump; across the lot, in the hole in the fence, and back alleys, alleys, alleys.

You couldn’t get to the quarry just like that, it was guarded—including against people like me, simple gawkers, who could be hurt in a blast; but the higher the fences and the more guards, the more varied the loopholes; I didn’t even have to search—any spot used frequently gives itself away, by a path leading to it, or clothing wrapped around bars that are just a little wider apart so that a person can squeeze through; or by signs of useless fortification, soldered strips of metal, piles of concrete beams, “no entry” signs; but there was a path that disappeared inside the labyrinth of beams; these people who erected these barriers also lacked vision with the correct resolving power, so there was always a crack—sidle in, losing buttons, pull yourself up, and get through somehow.

I met tramps collecting metal; old men going into the tundra for mushrooms—the road to the best mushroom places crossed the quarry; workers who had hidden something on their shift and now were back to retrieve it; kids—they were on their way to play at war; a couple looking for a trysting spot; they all squeezed in habitually, clambered, pushed, dragging in a basket or some bottles; the tramps were hauling a spool of wire; I used their path into the quarry.

I had seen quarries like this in Kazakhstan; but there it was hot, the air over the enormous pit boiled, turned white and opaque, and even the sound of the blasts were drowned, muffled by it. Here in the North, the pit opened all of itself at once, pulling you inside, into the five hundred-meter depth; the quarry was a mirror reflection—in terms of the earth’s surface—of the Tower of Babel, molded out of emptiness; the spirals of the quarry road, circling down from level to level, went to the bottom, so deep and narrow compared to the top of the quarry cut that there were only a few hours of sunlight a day down there.

The gray quarry cliffs were covered by a coat of very fine stone dust that had been wetted and then dried; this coating, with pulverized minerals weakly reflecting the sun, gave the quarry this color; dust covered the dump trucks, huge Belazes, excavators with toothed jaws; here, where there was no soil but only solid rock, the sophisticated human mind discovered its predatory nature; the technology was ready to bite, chew, dig in, crumple, blow up; this mind—I thought of the museum—was close to the mind of the Neanderthal but on a new spiral of development; a mind that combined the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger, neck of a giraffe, and body of a woolly mammoth to create a hybrid, the excavator with gaping jaw; a mind motivated by an insatiable, hopeless desire to devour.

My brain refused to recognize this five hundred-meter hole in the ground, these stalking excavators that embodied the stupid assiduousness of metal, as the work of humans. They must have been created by semirational animals or insects who preferred scale to accuracy or grace; creatures that did not know individuality and functioned only in quantity. The gigantic hole and the enormous trucks had a challenging but unarticulated manifesto, a heavy symbol; the practical meaning—extracting ore—took a backseat in this picture: human effort multiplied by mechanical power created inhuman effort and the quarry showed the volume and measure of that effort.

There must be proportions that keep things made by human hands commensurate with man and when violated turn those things against him. It was not that you feel like a grain of sand or a dust mote at the quarry. The violation of the principle of proportionality separates people from what they are doing; it deprives them of significance in terms of labor. In fact, labor as such vanishes, if we understand it as a living connection between the worker and the result of his work, a connection that is mutually enriching and ennobling.

The quarry boomed, thundered, and clanged metallically; the dump trucks and bulldozers bellowed, diesel exhaust floated in the air, water pumps rumbled; but the result was ephemeral: tons and percentages, units of measure.

The whole city—streets, windows, bread and vegetables on a counter—was covered with a coating of gray quarry dust, giving it an aspect of death, like the cheap powder at the morgue, for the excessive scale of labor here left its trace on the residents.

This was particularly noticeable in late August, on Miners Day. The whole city drank; they drank without abandon, ardor, zeal or the ordinary pleasure of drunkards. Time, as colorless as vodka, twisted like a filament in a bottle; the colorless day hung horribly, unnaturally long. Colorless people lay in the streets and others walked past; the connection of words fell apart, the alphabet fell apart, and people shouted and muttered vowels, clumps of words; the collapse of reason manifested in those sounds reached a peak. Then the final last silence settled over the town.

On the day meant to celebrate their work, their labor, people vented on themselves what they couldn’t vent at the quarry, workshops, and pipes; on the day of legal and even approved drunkenness people felt an outburst of definite, collected, and predetermined self-destruction; this kind of suicide is not tried by healthy people but by legless cripples already a third dead—they only need to kill two-thirds of themselves, death had done part of its work, and they set to it with determination and facility, knowing that the mortal path is a third shorter.

This was the ultimate rebellion, stifled almost in embryo; dozens of kilometers of tracks, hangars, pipe, factories, precipitation lakes, the quarry, the transporters of enrichment plants—it surrounded and divided up the city, it looked like a car after an accident in which living flesh is squashed and mutilated by metal. Only the quarry kept increasing, growing in width and depth, and all their labor went to using their own lives, the effort of the muscles, and the wear on their hearts to magnify the gaping hole in the ground. This was the most monstrous part––the extracted ore was broken up, turned into fertilizer, freight trains took it south—because what they saw, continually, daily, was the growing hole sucking up their work.

The slopes of the mountains around the quarry had been blown up and it was called the “avalanche zone.” You could see the thrusting chunks of cliff flesh from every point in the town, the twisted, unnaturally smashed rock, moved by the centrifugal energy of the blasts; the avalanche zone took up three sides of the city horizon, the blown-up cliffs huddled on the slopes as if beyond the point of equilibrium, frozen in midfall.

There are pictures, a combination of lines and angles, that humans should not see: looking at them is like chewing ground glass to see what flavor it is; they painfully damage the sensory foci of perception; the view of the avalanche zone was one such picture. The world after a catastrophe; the world cracked open, disjointed, with no possibility of bringing it together again; I was amazed to understand that the raw material extracted from the quarry is for fertilizer which is then sprinkled on fields; I saw the joyless cereals growing on those fields—as if sprinkled with ash from a crematorium.

The gray bread of my childhood, the loaves of bread on the bakery counters, people lining up an hour before opening, the line darker than twilight; women in gray scarves, men in gray coats, faces gray with lack of sleep, and the gray salted urban snow; I understood now where that bread had come from, delivered in vans that looked like Black Marias; where that ubiquitous gray came from—not in a belittling sense but grayness as the absence of color or as the color of dust.

You stood at the quarry edge and told yourself this is how hell looks; but the image of hell, the circles of hell marked by the spirals of the quarry road, came from culture; you were using it to save yourself from what could barely be described in artistic language, because the quarry was an anti-image, the negation of imagery as such.

It was gaping; they say a gaping wound, and if you can move away from the details of the flesh you can see in a wound not the outline, not the shape, but the incursion of destructive shapelessness.

The quarry sucked up your gaze, where it was lost; it encountered nothing but emptiness, traces of the work of emptying; it was impossible to deal with the absurd, to let your mind think about the volume of absence.

Something was done in this place that should not be done; some line was crossed that should not be crossed in human nature—the hole of the quarry gathered the city around itself, pulled in the region.

The view of the quarry materialized the hopelessness of life, verging on despair, translated this sensation into a visual one, existing in the world as a thing; the quarry did not threaten to swallow up anything, did not beckon with fatality, it simply was—in the dull steadiness of a hole, the most immutable thing, and that man is transient compared to its immutability was almost unbearable.

I left the quarry, but I could have stayed; distances meant nothing here. The quarry was carved into my consciousness; before I did not know how the human world looked without humans; now I knew.

At the bus stop—a shift had just ended—I heard that the rock in the quarry was deteriorating with every year; they were working with an ore content per ton that would have been considered without prospect in the past.

This was another point of view—the impoverishment of the rock, the impoverishment of the urban environment, as if the two processes were connected, not directly, but connected. Old theater posters hung at the bus stop, two months old, and no one was putting up new ones; the city was as washed out as these posters and had nothing fresh on offer; its fate was covertly intertwined with the basic activity of the residents—extracting ore in the quarry in the mine that opened veins leading away from the main mass of ore. The rock was being depleted, and the city was being depleted, for it functioned as a factory, unable to create an urban environment on its own, and people were lost within it.

It was evening; I walked along the outskirts of the town, past warehouses and garages, built close together, clinging to the neighboring wall, as if the building would fall down without it. There were rubbish heaps and packs of stray dogs, shaggy, with dried mud and burdock in their fur; each garage and each shed was built differently, but they had one thing in common: the garage and the shed were built while looking over the shoulder, with an uncertainty, with a sense that the construction was not quite legal—did you have to get permission or could you get away with it; and the sensation that the building did not quite trust the ground on which it stood combined with another sensation: that all the construction materials had been either blatantly stolen or picked up along the way. The combination of the two sensations created a third—the sensation of a life that did not look at itself, that had shrugged itself off.

The garages and sheds had been built thirty or forty years ago; the five-story buildings of the town had moved right up close to them, and the balconies on their facades—as if by an airborne architectural virus—had turned into the same dilapidated sheds, slapped together and glassed in sloppily; the houses had looked at the sheds for so long they took on their features; people lived in the concrete boxes as best they could and they increased their living space by an extra forty-three square meters, and those balconies poking out of the building facade presented a pathetic, almost illegal private life, ubiquitous and unseen, like mold; life resembling something base, self-sowing, all-penetrating.

People here bought cars to have a garage; in a city that did not know about beaches, in a city you could cross on foot in an hour, a car was just a form of winter clothing, fur-on-wheels. The crowded apartments, where men’s clothes and women’s clothes had to squeeze into a single closet, where everything was dual purpose, served two functions, like a double bed, and every spot always had more than one person—the crowded apartments got additional space with the garage, something that in the general asexuality of life, with the exception of the kitchen, had a gender specificity. Men visited one another in the garage; the garage was storage for everything that would not fit in the apartment, it was storeroom and cellar, for potatoes and pickling; a creature of the housing deficit, an appendix of lifestyle—a garage, a shed.

The town’s five-story apartment houses were ugly in their anonymous similarity, while the garages stunned you with a different ugliness; monotonous and extremely functional—walls, roof, door, that is, simply useful cubic meters—they still differed a bit; every builder tried to create a distinguishing detail: make it stand out, different from the others, add a stovepipe, bending it a special way, attach a small overhang above the door, weld an iron corner over the lock so the lugs couldn’t be broken—and these small changes became unbearably noticeable. Accumulating in your view, they repeated as attempts to be different somehow, with no possibility of doing so. I sensed that boredom was more usual here than yearning, because yearning refers to something that does not exist in a given life, while boredom asserts that there is nothing to yearn for: there is nothing anywhere, every place is the same as here.

I grew up in place just like this; it had a glue factory, and trucks from the slaughterhouse, carrying bones covered with a red-stained tarp, drove there along a pot-holed road. The trucks bounced, bones fell out, and all along the road dogs lay in the bushes waiting for a windfall; sometimes a clumsy old dog, perhaps wounded in the melee, slipped and fell under the wheels; dark wet tracks remained on the asphalt.

In the winter, the trucks going to the factory were joined by others, carrying snow to the melting station, which was under our windows; snow fell, now was beautiful—but there, behind the fence of the snow-melting station, it lay dirty and splotchy, piled up like defective hides at a slaughterhouse, and all winter I watched the absurd transport of snow to be melted, another sign of quiet, habitual madness.

Trucks carried snow, trucks carried bones, dogs, which lived in the winter by the snow-melting boilers, watched for the trucks, and everything around was waiting for something.

This anticipation, like a secret ballot, selected two genii loci, two of its permanent residents.

The old woman who came to the store with her old cat in a purse and showed him—as people came out of the store with their purchases—what she could have fed him if they increased her pension; and the old man who collected bottles in the morning and then used the kopecks he got for the movies, watching the same film a dozen times; everyone waited, everyone hoped silently; having read a lot of spy novels I hoped that a plane would accidentally drop a bundle with clothing, money, gun, and documents, a package with a different fate.

There were a lot of poplars in the area, and in the summer the wind chased balls of dusty gray fluff along the sidewalks; later, in the Kazakhstan desert, I saw balls of tumbleweed and I learned that the infinity of boredom was the indifferent repetition of life. I understood that I had experienced that sensation before—it was the background of my childhood: trucks with bones, trucks with snow, stray dogs by the road, clumps of fluff in the gutter, carried by the wind.

It wasn’t that nothing new ever happened in the neighborhood of my childhood; worse was that there was nothing old in it: its houses, built to depopulate the dormitories, communal flats, and rooms with eight people in eight square meters, started falling apart the moment they were built; they lacked the dignity of age. Life did not expand, it limped along, going nowhere.

Now in this northern town, it was like returning to my childhood; I recognized the twisted backyards, delineated by laundry, the roofs over domino tables, the sandboxes—and right there, the garages and sheds; everything was so mixed up and stuck together, growing into one another, that I thought: it’s no wonder that the most attractive place of my childhood was the shooting gallery—a blue trailer behind the movie theater. There was always a long line, and from the number of people waiting—five kopecks a shot, moving targets attached to the ceiling, rabbits, boars, and wolves—you could guess that the shooting gallery served a special need; people lived among fences, alleys, dead ends, and went to the gallery for a gulp of straight shooting, to see the clarity of the goal.

I went back once to my old place, where I had not been for over twenty years. Streets, houses, yards—everything seemed extremely small and miserable; you could imagine that I had grown up and what had seemed enormous to me was now in its normal size. But that explanation left something out, it was based on dry mathematical calculation; I thought that sometimes a child is forced to see not the geometry of space that exists but the one he creates in his gaze, increasing perspective, adding volume where it does not exist in reality.

I realized that I simply could not have lived as a child in that courtyard, among those houses—they were too spiritually and visually insignificant even for a nine-year-old, and the exaggerated metamorphosis that I imposed on them was a question of salvation and self-preservation.

I walked past sheds and garages; I needed to find out, to see the town from the inside out, walk the paths and tracks that its residents used, to re-create the drawing of their movements—that is how a place becomes familiar; on Friday nights they drank at the garages, spreading a newspaper on the hood of a car or on a crate; there was music—persistent music that I had already heard in the taxi; its essence wasn’t in the melody but in the cheap voices, male and female.

Cheap voices—men and women sang about love, separation, meetings, long sentences, prison, they sang as if the night before moving they’d heaped everything into a single pile without separating the rubbish from the essential. People drank and ate to those voices, cooking shashlik somewhere; the garages and sheds came to an end, the trampled thin woodland began, and on every meadow a bonfire burned.

And suddenly, in the woods, I heard different voices—people conversing, how much to pour into whose glass, who wants the hotdog, give me a light, and this simple conversation was without the empty intonations that pretend to add some meaning.

I turned from the road and saw five men sitting on logs. One, quite old, sliced up a sausage and then stuck the knife in his leg—no one winced, they all knew it was wooden; another, also an old man, sat aloofly, leaning on a stick made out of a bus handrail, bicycle reflectors sewn onto his faded overalls; the third, with a scar across his whole face covered with rough stubble, was pouring vodka into the glasses, the fourth I saw only from the back and he sat too still, as if paralyzed, and the fifth, on the contrary, was shaking, a subcutaneous tic ran all over his body, and his features winked at one another, made faces, and his left eyebrow teased the right.

You could see their miners’ past in them; the horizon, or plane, is a work term for a miner; in order to reach the horizon—one of many—you have to go down into the mine, and often miners work on a single horizon for decades, limited for them by the end of the pit face; their horizon is a dead end, and people fight the rock in that dead end, but it merely retreats without ceasing to be a dead end, and labor in the pit face—even if the ore is hauled up to the surface—is labor that has no exit in itself.

The horizon of life, underground, dark, the daily descent into the mountain strata, where it is already warm from the heat of the depths, a descent along a long vertical; the people working in mines seem to hold the sky on their shoulders; the body remembers the pressure of the stone strata sensed by the spinal cord. Heavy muscles, heavy tread—they are like lead and platinum in the table of elements, they are compressed by pressure, they are nurtured by darkness. Underground walkers, receiving a miner’s headlight sturdier than a human body every twenty-four hours from the lamp room—they were people who live in two worlds, this one and that one, people whose daily path on the ground is shorter than their path under the ground—the side drifts are often several kilometers long, and the miners walk beneath their houses, the city, the suburbs, walk though stone, where there are only the mole tunnels of the drifts and the vertical conduit of the mine shaft—its throat, the only way up.

All five had been miners, laborers of the underground; all five had been in accidents at different times. Now they stuck together—half-crippled, too strong to die; the mine tossed them out like slag, but there was enough power in their bodies for a long life—life after the collapse—and they gathered here in the woods, where they could see the quarry, the mine yard, the building of the shaft, the waste banks and refuse heaps; it seemed that the mine attracted them, lured them to this place.

They noticed me and asked for cigarettes; I gave them mine and they offered me a drink. The vodka slid down to my stomach like a warm slug; they asked me who I was and where from—without curiosity, I had two legs and not one; I told them I was searching for at least a trace of a man who was long gone—and named Grandfather II.

They were silent, the combination of letters did not move or upset them. Of course, I did not expect random people in the woods near the city limits to know Grandfather II’s biography, that the mystery of his life would be solved so easily; however, I kept still: for the first time it occurred to me that perhaps it was no longer possible to learn something about Grandfather II, that I was the only person who had part of the information about him and the rest was lost for good, dissolved, or else existed without any connection to him, for example, just as objects who knows from where, things among things; a photograph in somebody’s dresser drawer, a book on a shelf, a cup in the cupboard and no force of will, no insight could combine them, make them recognize one another and give evidence.

I said nothing; they asked me what I wanted with this man who had died so reliably and so long ago, who was I?—grandson, great-grandson, distant relative, journalist, just curious? I replied that I hoped to understand what I wanted with him when I learned something about him; I repeated Grandfather II’s full name—out of hopelessness, because I saw myself then: behind the garages, among the thin birches, with a view of the mine, in a random place with chance acquaintances, at the end of a cul-de-sac; the man with the scar called to the legless one—try to remember, you know everything; try!

The legless man seemed to wake up and gave him a sly look: first you tell me to forget everything and now I have to remember; the others began persuading him—it looked as if this was a favorite pastime, like spinning a top on a map to see where it lands, asking him to recall something, feeding their general interest which found no nourishment in their quotidian lives.

As I later learned, the old man with the wooden leg was in charge of the mining office archives. “The archive is like the pit,” he told me, “except there’s paper instead of rock.” Every ton of ore extracted from the quarry and mine gave birth to numbers, ore demanded ink for the typewriters—and paper; pages of maps, work plans, reports, transcripts of thousands of meetings and thousands of committees settled in the archive, thickening, baking over the decades into boulders of paper; people rarely looked into the pages, but regulations required they be kept, and paper took up most of the room in the archive basement, the paths among cupboards and shelves narrowed, the light from the ceiling lamps could no longer reach the lower shelves or distant corners; the archive really did resemble a mine.

The head of the archive received new documents once a quarter and the rest of the time he waged war against rats; the rats, apparently attracted by the smell of decomposing paper, crawled into the basement through pipes, chewed through wooden covers and doors, tried to jump into the pocket of his overalls when he went down from the common space to his work corner; the rats must have been lured by the warmth of the basement, the warmth of paper scraps, so good for creating a nest and bringing up baby rats, but they seemed to hate paper. Creatures of disasters and sorrows, wars and revolutions, creatures of the timeless times, they sensed that the archive was a warehouse of the past, even if the past was only data on ore excavation, and they tried to destroy, befoul, and shred the paper and bring up equally gluttonous progeny.

The old man blocked entries with concrete, sprinkled poison in corners, set up homemade traps; he was afraid—said the miner with the scar, laughing—that the rats would chew his wooden leg if he fell asleep in the basement and would never be able to get back upstairs. But that was a funny fear, and the old man laughed, too—the battle with rats gave meaning to his life and maybe the other envied him. Upstairs, in the mining offices, there were engineers, geologists, surveyors, management; they passed around test ore, argued about spare parts for the Belazes, ordered carloads of explosives, made plans, and drew schemata—while below in the basement a mining engineer with a wooden leg, caught once in a mine collapse, was fighting off rat attacks, and he believed that the upper floors stood only thanks to his struggles. The administration building was set on a foundation of paper, and the old man who retained the reverence for paper that came from the olden days when it was a rarity, no matter what was written on it, and its appearance in some village almost meant a change in destiny—the old man, who knew the value of income and expenditure, selflessly protected the archive; the stamps, signatures, the lines of extractions let you re-create the architectonics of fates and the march of time.

I told the old man Grandfather II’s surname again; he pondered, as if trying to remember on which shelf the documents could be.

“He was the warden of the camp,” the old man said after a pause. “There was no town here yet, just the camp, the quarry, and the mine. He was in charge of it all. Fifteen thousand people. Two thousand guards and employees, the rest were prisoners. He was in charge for a long time, around ten years, from the first barracks to the first houses. Then something happened to him, I don’t remember what. I wasn’t there, I know this from documents and stories. I have very few papers from that time, they are all kept by the ministries.”

“They called me in there once,” he added with a snigger. “They needed some reference about the factory. You know what’s there? The same kind of archive as mine, just bigger. Massive deposits of paper. It lives a long time, paper. And they sit there, pulling their dirty tricks, not human beings, just identification badges, but there they sit on that paper, on old files.”

I remembered that building; the town had secret manufacturing plants, and that’s why there was a branch of that organization; I hadn’t gone there to ask about Grandfather II. The building was in the Constructivist style—a gray cube with an inner courtyard and a rectangular hanging arch; the cube seemed to be endowed with a special unloving life, and if it were fed, the building would grow, expanding to the size of the House on the Embankment, the warehouse of fates in Moscow, and then it would give birth to smaller cubes. There was something about that house, with its small inner courtyard shut by cast iron barred gates—something that exuded both prison and crematorium at the same time, two places where a person no longer belonged to himself; but that was the architecture speaking, the intention of previous times, but now—the old man was right—the building’s strength was only in the paper stored inside it.

Of course, now, two decades since the former regime had ended, there was nothing shockingly new among the files in the cardboard folders; but the point was that none of the cases had seen the light of a uniquely precise moment of history, at the only time when they could have changed anything; not necessarily, in fact probably not, but still it was possible. But now it was only dead paper; no demonic spirit, no aura of horror surrounded the office—just dead paper; the archives held what was left of people, there were pages with sentences, and the office even let you look at them, let you make photocopies, but kept the actual papers as collateral; even in death the office controlled those people, otherworldly serfs; the office turned out to be—without irony—the only owner of the assembly of souls.

All five former miners looked at me; now I couldn’t just up and leave, even if I had wanted to. What had happened to them—accidents, wounds, the life of a cripple—had happened to me; it was no longer the fact that the blood of Grandfather II who had started this place was in my blood; I had come here to rid myself of the shadow of Grandfather II, had come with an approximate idea of what I would learn, even though I had not imagined that Grandfather II was warden of a prison camp; I had come with an inner isolation from the place and its people and I had regarded the residents here only from one angle: what they could tell me. But here was the hellish hole in the ground and cripples damaged by a mine collapse, and I couldn’t learn anything dispassionately, first I had to reply to the question of who I was, before asking about Grandfather II; I had to stand beneath a mine collapse, call it down on myself, stay here—and only then something would be revealed to me, because I would become part of what was revealed.

In the morning—for I spent the evening there in the woods, going out for a bottle a few times as the youngest one, drank, and listened to stories of how the mine grew and the quarry expanded—I went to look for the new address of the man who had written to Grandfather II. On the street someone told me that the city had a lost and found office, which included an address bureau.

It was located in an old pump house; red brick with a pointy tin roof painted dark green, the pump house had been built by the steam engine depot, where there were garages now, and the water tower was given to the police for some reason. With narrow windows and brick crenellations, it looked like a fortress tower lost in geography. Inside it was cold—the cold water from the deep well had seeped into the bricks.

The lost and found office and the address bureau were run by one man—a police captain with the manner of a pickpocket, skinny, tall, all cartilage and fluidity, unable to sit still, able to be in two or three places at once; he did well among the lost wallets and long narrow drawers with address cards: the town lost things, people got lost in the town, and they came to him with every loss, and he sat there looking as if he had stolen the items, had lured away a person, and then, befitting his job, was also involved in the search.

The captain led me down a spiral staircase to the former pump room; now it was a storeroom for items and address files. Along the way he managed to complain that the lost and found wasn’t what it used to be—pronouncing “lost and found” with a special intonation; before, the captain said, people turned in more, whatever they found in the street, but now they would turn in a purse only if they’d found it on a bus and had called in the police to check whether it was a bomb; otherwise, nobody turned anything in.

Of course, the captain was exaggerating: we walked past piles of unclaimed items, dusty bundles, gutted wallets, attaché cases, ladies’ bags; I saw cosmetic bags, a roll of roofing felt, a picnic cooler, drafting tools, baby carriages, downhill skis and even ice skates; a plastic horse on wheels, milk cans, pails, carts, a bag of cement. It looked like the antechamber of the world to come, which people reached after a long journey, accumulating stuff as they went, and then had to leave it all here. The objects stood there, huddled in bunches like sheep without a shepherd, and it seemed that if anyone whistled to them, the carriages and carts would roll on their own and the rest of the stuff would climb in, and the canes and crutches would hobble and the skis would slide. The things were afraid: they were abandoned and now, aged and old-fashioned, they didn’t know what would happen to them; I saw the captain with fresh eyes: Did he understand what service he was doing? The losses of the entire city were gathered here and there was something bitter in the fact that they were unnoticed; it was easier to accept, to just pay no mind to the loss, even though the lost items could be found and returned.

While the captain rummaged in the drawers for the address of Grandfather II’s correspondent—if still alive—I thought about those things; once, when I was with a woman, I realized that we were both tired people who looked with pity upon our own bodies, and our embrace had a taste of that pity; we had lived so long that the only object from the past we had was the body: another city, another apartment—the body lives longer than contemporary objects made to be replaced. I wanted so much to tell it: here we are all alone, pal; here we are alone … I thought about things and the loneliness of man among them; of the fact that a person can be described as a selection of his important objects—but when someone else comes to this selection, what is he going to do? Create a puzzle out of a wristwatch, a cigarette case engraved From your coworkers, a wedding ring, and a validated ticket? And here I stand among lost objects when all I need is a person—one who might know and remember; I do not trust objects.

The captain told me the address; the person I sought had moved from Red Kolkhoz Street. Then he suggested I take a look at the finds—if I liked something, I could buy it; sort of like a pawnshop, said the captain. I said no; he kept trying to interest me in a fishing rod left on a bus; he spun the gilt-edged lure and triple hook, showing me how the fish would swallow it; the pole was pathetic, homemade, but the captain took that into account, making up a story about how tackle that doesn’t look like much is really the best; the captain was a bullshitter, he spent the day among rubbish, trying to sell it and waiting for success—what if some fool brings him something truly valuable; at the door we ran into the next visitor with something under his arm; the captain bustled and rushed me out the door, these were probably stolen goods for sale. I gave the captain some money, he perked up and stopped rushing me, the money received as a bribe equalized me with the rest of his visitors and created a relationship—I gave, he took—and he probably wanted to introduce me to the petty thief, out of boredom, to see what would happen.

It was sunny. The city authorities had started the fountains six weeks late and the pipes were not yet cleared; rusty, murky water rose to the sky; I bought an ice cream and then the captain caught up with me. “Lunch,” he said. “Shall we have lunch?”

We went to a café; over lunch the captain asked me in a seemingly confused way but actually quite cautiously why I was looking for that person; seeing that I did not understand where he was going, the captain spoke more clearly: in this town many old men have a lot of money; if someone, for example, had a good job in the business sector, he retired a millionaire; kickbacks, accounts, faked documents, construction materials sold on the side—there were plenty of ways of getting rich, the mining plant was too big, too dark and convoluted even for the people managing it, and “many, many”—as the captain repeated—managed to use their jobs to their advantage. And if I, say, were looking for that kind of man, being related to him in some way, and having expectations of money, then I should get myself some friends first.

The captain told me as an aside the story of a young city slicker who asked him for an address, he had come for his inheritance, but, alas, he never got it—something happened to him. “I gave him the address all right,” the captain said, “but he refused to have lunch with me.”

The captain was probably lying; he lied the way he ate—not concerned with the taste, hurrying to get it into his gullet and take another bite; in essence, he was chewing price lists, swallowing rubles, he wanted to have an expensive lunch at my expense; he was cowardly, the captain, used to looking over his shoulder and making do with small change; I noticed that the suitcases and bags at the lost and found had their side seams undone—the captain had sliced the stitching with a razor in case something was sewn into the lining. He was giving me a similar once-over; but it was clear that the captain was not alone, he could get in touch with others and make it seem that I really was a future heir.

It was too late to tell the captain I was only looking for someone who could tell me about the former camp warden; too late to pretend to be a historian or a journalist. The captain believed what he had made up about me, his guesses and fantasies were reinforced, and any attempt to be anyone but a seeker of inheritance would only make him suspect that I was trying to get him off track. The captain had waited so long among the old bags, among the card files, alone in his robber’s tower, had spent so much time buying up rags and stolen electronics, all small-time, all secretly, that now he saw me as his one and only sparkly, shiny, precious opportunity. I realized that believing his own fantasy, he would tell his fellow crooks I was a rich heir, not even realizing that he was lying; the captain ate olives, sucking the pits and neatly placing them on the edge of his plate; he was eating me, he was a local and I was a stranger, and he knew that very well.

I could only pretend to accept his offer; I was counting on his greed—he would pretend to have told the gang when in fact he would not because he knew that he would get nothing, being an idle blabbermouth; the captain replied that he would find out where I was staying and come visit me that evening. I got up, put money for both of us under the ashtray, into which the captain, smiling, dropped an olive pit.

I went to the address the captain had given me. In the nominal center of town there was a block of Stalinist houses; in Moscow they’re just a fragment of architectural history, one style among others, but here the Stalinist buildings comprised the only architecture there was. Wind, snow, and rain did not spare their excesses: the stucco moldings and decorative balconies were flaking, the white trim of the windows had vanished, and the wall paint had peeled; damp drafts filled the broad and high-ceiling lobbies, wind moved through vaulted arches, the concrete, lime, and brick crumbled, mold the color of pond scum covered the bottom of the walls, and moss spread in the cracks; rust dripped everywhere, and where the stone was broken the reinforcement rods stuck out, and in places you could see that the concrete was reinforced with tightly wrapped barbed wire instead of rods—they must have run out of metal.

That sight—a house built on barbed wire—gave me the feeling that the building was about to shudder, all poked through, riddled, and no surface would hold, no matter the brand of cement. The wire seemed to be breaking the house apart from inside, the way tree roots break through asphalt, and all the molding, the bas reliefs, the vases in niches were not enough to make me believe that this building was meant for living, for people. Animals have a good sense about this, and it was the case here: there wasn’t a cat or dog to be seen, a bird feeder dangled empty in the wind, and only rats rustled in the garbage cans.

There was something strange in this neighborhood, one detail—I couldn’t figure out exactly what—was disturbing me; something was missing from the sounds of the city, a note in the background noise was gone. I stopped, but the more closely I listened, the more I realized that hearing would not help; the answer was literally before my eyes. Here—the only place in town—the windows were not covered by light cotton curtains but thick, heavy brown or straw-colored drapes, probably weighted by dust, full of heavy folds like the skin beneath an old man’s eyes; the drapes covered the closed windows; no sound reached the street from the apartments.

The residents had shut themselves off from the air of the street, locked the wide entry doors; in their apartments, where the sunlight rarely fell, they tried to preserve the air of their dwindling days; in the diffused honey light at sunset, perhaps they dusted the lacquered furniture, enjoying the cognac-colored lacquer, the cut-glass crystal glasses in the sideboard, and the existence of well-crafted things took away the fear of their own impotence.

I remembered the other time I had heard this silence, only once, but I remembered it for its singularity; as a child, one morning in the paleontological museum in the dinosaur skeleton hall.

The museum was empty that morning; I beat my parents to the biggest hall with the tyrannosaurus and other carnivorous monsters, and I was amazed: usually I was afraid of this room, afraid of the fangs and claws the size of my head, afraid of the skeletons that looked like enlarged drawings—they revealed the natural-rational meaning of creation, and I did not know what to think of life, of nature, which creates with equal thoroughness both the tender jay and the predatory pterodactyl.

It was quiet, completely quiet; and what I saw in the gaping monstrous jaws was not the anger and wrath that had frightened me before but instead the distortion from suffering and death; I saw that the room with the skeletons, the entire museum, the entire sunny autumn day—everything, we were all inside invisible jaws that had not yet closed, but in some final sense it had already happened.

And here on the street of the northern town I recognized that silence—the silence of a museum where the vanished creatures of a different era, fierce and horrible, were diminished by the fleshless face of death and became just as harmless as a squashed frog drying in the heat.

In the lobby I was met by the same ocher, rhomboid tile as in the Moscow building where Grandfather II lived; tile, walls, railing, elevator—it was all the same. I was amazed: how many other cities were there where I could walk into a building whose interior would inevitably elicit memories that I considered profoundly personal; even the wires leading to the doorbell bent the same way as in the former building, and I thought that there was really only one building, like the statue of Lenin, and that the differences in the biographies of its residents in various cities was averaged out by this uniformity; that the memorial plaques you sometimes see on its walls are just a mockery because for each apartment many more were led out of it than those who live there now. I imagined what would happen if all those decomposed residents were to return—the house could not fit them all, they would stand on the staircases, in the courtyard, strangers to one another, but each would recognize the sand-colored rhomboid tiles, the doorbells, the little plaques with the apartment numbers … The ones who survived would stay inside their rooms, afraid to come out, afraid to open the door a crack, because through that crack would squeeze flimsy shadows with black spots, ink splotches for faces, blotted out by the censors’ ink.

I started up the stairs; for a second I thought there was no one left in the building, that stale funereal air came through the keyholes, that behind the doors all the mirrors were covered. I recognized the beginning of my third dream that started me on this path; not that it had taken place here, though it could have.

The air on the landings still held—as it holds the smells from your neighbors’ kitchens—the febrile, sweat-soaked, throat-rattling dreams of old men; they slept, turning under their eiderdowns, gritting their teeth so as not to speak in their sleep, not choke, like a drunk on vomit, on the unexpected words of a sleepwalker, and their bodies trembled and sweated, and the sweat reeked of death.

Fourth floor, apartment sixteen; the bell jangled, it seemed, behind every door at once, the sound flew down long corridors, striking the glass panes of wardrobes and scattering as bouncing beads on the parquet. There was quiet behind the door; I rang again and waited a few minutes. The lock clicked inside the apartment.

In the dark of the chain-length crack, I saw a face. A woman stood behind the door, a meter and half from me, but I could not say whether it was a person or an image; then I realized that her face was partially paralyzed, only the eyebrows moved, expressing surprise; I couldn’t see her features, it turns out a face lives in motion, in the barely perceptible movements of the facial muscles, and when it is motionless, there is nothing to be said about it; my gaze was attracted by the nostrils—two black dots, two entrances into the inner darkness of the body.

I imagined that a lizard or snake could crawl out of those black apertures, like holes in a stone wall or a cliff; that they did not belong to the face, they were openings, dangerous, evil; if I could, I would have shut the old woman’s nostrils, filled them with flesh.

To get out of that darkened moment, half inhaled into those nostrils, I spoke; I greeted her and asked for Semyon Vikentyevich. The old woman went back down the corridor, she left so noiselessly, as if she spent a lifetime trying not disturb someone’s sleep, sensitive, troubled, imbued with neuralgic pains; she returned just as noiselessly and unlocked the door. She had three dozen keys—probably to all the rooms, cupboards, closets, desk—and they did not make a sound, as if each key had been wrapped in cloth. There was something bizarre in that key ring, in that passion for keys, for their grooves and teeth, in the desire to keep all the keys together; there was a hint here, a key to the woman herself; she made an inviting gesture—come in—and immediately shut the door behind me. I had not noticed but I immediately felt it: the door was locked.

Keys and doors, doors and keys; I understood who she was: a former warder, the wife of some big shot who got her a job in his department; now an aide for the man I was visiting.

The old woman gave me a gentle shove: go. I went down the dark long corridor; two skinny cats were cleaning themselves near their bowls, the walls were bare, the side doors were shut, and only at the end of the corridor weak daylight from the room illuminated moth-eaten bear and deer heads, cotton stuffing poking out, and moths twirled in the sunbeams like animated dust; I remembered the letters—bear fat, seal blubber—the head belonged to one of the bears whose flesh supported life in the body of Grandfather II.

The first thing I saw in the room was a stick, just like the one with which Grandfather II killed the black dog in my childhood, made of polar larch, honey-rose from the resin, twisted like sinews, lacquered, and caught in shiny brass bands; the stick leaned against an armchair, and the vertical line of bright light through a crack in the drapes gave it a long shadow, like a sundial.

“An eternal stick,” said the man sitting in shadow. “A larch like this grows two hundred years, you can’t chop it down with an ax. A good thing. We’ll rot but it won’t.”

I was looking at the stick; now I saw that it was not just similar to, it was the one, the stick that had broken the black dog’s back. The stick was repeated, the way, when you go down winding tower stairs, the view is repeated through the windows set one above the other; it was repeated, fixing a spiral of time.

But there was something else besides the larch stick that sent me back to the past. From the almost pre-memory state of memory, from the first five or six years of my life, from the regions which show you to what degree a person consists of blanks and gaps—from there, as if through gauze, something was beating, as if memories could have a heart.

The voice—I knew that voice—but I had never heard it before.

The old man started to speak again; I barely heard what he said because this time his words resembled the sounds vibrating in my memory; I thought I was losing consciousness, falling forward, but in fact it was the liberated memory laying its hand on my forehead.

That’s what had happened—a heavy hand on my forehead, hard, bony fingers, a half-awake state, and two people by my bed: Grandfather II and this old man seated in the armchair. They were speaking in a half whisper thinking I was asleep; two aging men by a five-year-old’s bed. I didn’t know whose hand was on my forehead, whose fingers were so cold—their hearts could barely pump blood to them; their figures rose above me, blurred by twilight, and my body under the blanket got goose bumps: an alarm clock always ticked in my dacha room, but it was silent then—probably it had run down and no one rewound it—and those lost seconds came out as goose bumps.

I had a clear sense of my young age, the childhood of my body—not consciousness, my body—how weak and pitiful it was; the old men stood above me like priests above a prepared sacrifice, and I felt threatened just by our relative positions, increased by the rough hand that caressed me, practically scratching me.

I recalled a taut apple, unripe, that I had cracked open that day, and I saw myself as a soft seed, not yet turning brown; the old men stood over an open bed, showing white in the dark, and the moment was broken like the apple, to its very core.

I recalled Grandfather II grafting apple trees, we had many of them in the garden with knobby grafting scars ringing the bottoms of their trunks; of all the knives of my childhood there was only one I didn’t dream of owning—Grandfather II’s crooked garden knife, hooked, scary, scarier than a scalpel, ugly, like the beak of a bird of prey. You couldn’t peel with it, or cut up a potato, or play knives—you could only slice layers, cut apart tree fibers, leaving a shiny smooth cut. All those things—the white apple, the grafts cut at an angle, the apple trees with twisted trunks if the graft grew together badly, Grandfather II’s knife—they combined into a panicked sensation that the two old men were there to do something to me.

That they were just standing and talking was even more eerie, their speech sounded like a spell spoken over a sleeper whose mind was softened and defenseless; the hand kept stroking my forehead, and I felt an invisible mark, a seal, being left by that touch; the old men spoke of their childlessness, Grandfather II said two names and I understood that he had had a wife and a son who died in early childhood; I also understood that now, blind, he was imagining that he was at the bedside of his child and showing him to the other old man.

In that replacement, that substitution, the sign his hand was putting on my forehead was created; it is wrong to put a living person in place of a dead one, even in thought—it puts in place unnatural ties and casts a shadow into the future of the imagined predestination, which will never come to pass, but will tie knots the person will have to untie with his own life.

I must have blocked this memory; I honestly did not remember the second old man; he must have been passing through Moscow and come to visit Grandfather II at the dacha. In the morning when I got up, he was gone, the night was gone, Grandfather II’s words about his dead son—the event moved into the distance, as if it had occurred years ago, and soon after vanished completely; dream or reality, the vision was too much for me to handle then, which is why it was hidden by my consciousness and returned in childhood as a vague, tormenting echo in my dreams, where I sensed that my place in life was taken by someone else, a cuckoo in the nest, a monstrous infant who grew along with me but remained an infant. I shuddered when I heard “Who’s been eating my porridge? Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” I knew who; a blurred white face, as if in a beaker with formaldehyde, looked at me from my dreams, the key to which I had lost, and no one else in our family had ever heard of Grandfather II’s wife and son.

And now standing in the room to which I was led by postcards in Grandfather II’s papers, I sensed that one of the most significant events of my life had taken place: that which tells us about ourselves exists in fragments, scattered in time and space, and most often we do not know the most important thing about ourselves, though it already exists; I remembered the second guiding dream with the train engineer and his arrested brother, missing each other forever by the prison train, brought together so as not to meet; I sensed that my life was being refracted in the present moment like a beam in a magnifying glass, refracted and reset by this lens of understanding; I learned what I had come for, and that knowledge, it turns out, had always been with me, in my memory.

Essentially, it was the end of the journey, I could leave the room and go home; but I remembered that the door was locked, too firmly locked. Naturally, I could have asked to open it, moreover, that’s what I wanted to do; I was eager to get out, eager to think about what had happened; but the door wasn’t being opened yet. Gradually I realized there was something else I was to learn and understand, and my being resisted this imminent discovery. But leaving meant leaving, acting arbitrarily.

The right thing was not to leave before the hosts opened the door for me; the right thing was to take from this meeting not only what I wanted to learn but what my mind rejected in foreboding, which promised not a return home but another, new journey.

The old man rose from the armchair toward me; I jumped back. Before me stood an aged child, physically; the concept of thinness no longer applied—he was not just thin, he was desiccated, as if he had been drained and pinned like an insect and kept for years under glass on a velvet cloth. His muscles had melted leaving only sinew, the skin was as transparent as fine parchment, and the inner life of the body was revealed; blue blood vessels, with a pigeon-wing iridescence, were woven into a map of the blood flow and here and there dark areas like squashed blueberries showed subcutaneous bruising. The old man was half dressed, his body no longer could sweat and exude the death that was crawling beneath his skin; he no longer had a face in the human sense, the flesh had melted like butter from a growing fever, and the twitching pupils looked out straight from the skull. The cartilage on his ears had wilted like smoked mollusks, his eyelashes and eyebrows had fallen out, and only a weak childlike fluff, as if it had been scorched, covered his brows; the swollen capillaries on his cheeks had blended together into fine hieroglyphics written in crimson ink; the old man was dying of radiation disease, he had been exposed to a low level dose which was acting on his body only now; the body was no longer capable of hematosis, the blood in his veins was not renewed, and he was slowly being poisoned by the life he was living—and had lived—poisoned by the past, its slag and toxins accumulating in tissue. He was being killed by time; standing before him, I was the embodiment of that new time; he hated me, that was clear from his clenched teeth, he had forgotten that his withered lips did not cover them anymore; his dentures were smooth and white, and I remembered Grandfather II’s false teeth.

I handed him his own letter; he read it, nodded to show he understood who I was, and began to speak. He said he knew how Grandfather II had died, he knew that I had received a blood transfusion from him—Grandfather II had told his housekeeper whom to inform if something happened to him and ordered her not to tell my family about it.

The old man waited to find out why I was there, and I asked if he had any papers, maybe photographs; I didn’t want to ask him about Grandfather II, the head of the prison camp, didn’t want to ask about their relationship, it was all clear anyway.

The old man told me to take the album from the closet and remove the greeting card from the first page; there was a photograph behind it.

Age had removed most of the black and white from the photo, it was faded; it felt as if the photographer had been taking a picture of a memory.

There were people in the photo, they were gathered for an opening ceremony for something, among them I recognized Grandfather II; there was only one spot that stood out—a spot of blackness in the place where the shovel in Grandfather II’s hands had dug out a clump of dirt. The hole was dark, it attracted the eye like a beauty mark on a cheek. I understood that the quarry I had seen the day before had come out of that hole.

The photograph tried to convey the joy of the actions, spectral banners blended with the clouds, officers of the camp guards and engineers squeezed together to get into the shot; a poorly dressed band played horns and there was a sense that not the clothes but the musicians were made out of quilted cotton fabric charred by bonfires in winter, and then patched up, not people but puppets; the band played, the flags fluttered, but it was all done—the quarry was begun and the future was predestined; the future of the town, of all these people, and my future.

I stood there, knowing there was nothing more to ask, it was all there in the photo. Get out, get out as fast as I could; I just wanted to find out where the wife and son were buried so I could visit their graves and thereby complete my descent into the past. The old man told me where to look in the local cemetery; but when I started making my hasty farewells, he stopped me.

The old man talked; he knew that the end was near and that he could “confess,” and whatever he said, whatever he admitted, I would not even dare to berate him, so fragile was his health; perhaps this was the first time he could talk freely and he used that freedom to deal with me. “You want to stay clean,” he said. “It won’t work, I’ll dirty you up!”

No, he didn’t see me as a pure boy whose naiveté was irritating; he didn’t want to prove that everyone is more likely to do evil rather than good, he didn’t want to make generalizations; nor did he try to justify himself through a person’s total dependence on circumstances. He hated me because I came from a world with mobile phones, foreign cars, Internet, Wi-Fi, trips abroad, bowling; the world had changed, people chose not to remember anything rather than remember with fear or remember with sorrow, and the old man whispered—thinking he was shouting—that he had been head of the execution squad, he had seen a bullet fly through the body of a goner and the goner did not die because while wounds endanger a healthy body, a person in extreme emaciation no longer senses a wound as a wound, he has great endurance in the face of death. The old man whispered, thinking he was shouting, that the abandoned slag heaps of the mine where they tossed the bodies attracted bears for many years; he whispered that he had shot people himself, with a Nagant rifle, he whispered that there are still undiscovered graves near the town, he knew where, he could show me if I didn’t believe him; the old man was scared.

He wasn’t afraid of what he had done; he became frightened when he realized that he, head of the execution squad, was nothing in today’s world; they did not spit in his face but nor were they afraid of him. He, who had outlived not only his victims but those who could have served as witnesses about and for them, was alone; all the executions, all the murders were forgotten, an entire era had settled to the bottom of memory, and he, locked inside it, was trying to prove that he had existed; the old man could not tolerate the fact that the evil he had wrought no longer existed as evil; he had killed, and the world had finally shut its eyes and when it opened them again it was as if nothing had ever happened. The world did not notice, and the old man was deprived of the only, almost otherworldly, perverted spiritual support in a criminal’s self-perception: knowing that you have done something irreversible, irreparable, once and forever, that you took the place of God; that your act would not be smoothed over or forgotten.

I managed to escape; the old woman unlocked the door and I ran down the stairs carrying the photograph, which I had forgotten to return. I planned to go back to the hotel and lock myself in—everything around me, everything I had seen and felt came back in one sensation, that this world was born of Grandfather II, that he had touched the ground with a shovel blade and the ground responded, opened up, and now it could not be closed, it could not be reversed; the town stood on a fault, and the past had more power over it than the present.

I didn’t reach the hotel; the Volga I had taken from the station came out around a corner and blocked my way; if I hadn’t recognized the car I might have gotten away, instead for a few seconds I thought that the driver had also recognized me and wanted something; then three men jumped out of the car, and in the backseat I saw the captain from the address office; I ran, they caught me, hit me in the back, and bent back my arms.

They opened the trunk about a half hour later; it was getting dark, the car was parked at an enormous man-made lake—one of the settling pools of the mining works, filled with greenish acidic mass; nearby a bird struggled in the chemical mixture—they said birds were poisoned by the pool’s evaporation and fell into it; the lump of dirt fluttered, gurgled, and only its beak—the sludge of the pool did not stick to it—opened and shut, a tiny bellows filling the lungs.

They made me kneel at the edge of the pool; dried vomit and blood stained the concrete; apparently, this place had been used before.

The captain and the driver stayed in the car; they smoked, the dashboard glowed green, the city lights flickered in the distance, a train carrying ore moved along the tracks, the diesel locomotive had long disappeared around the curve but the train kept going, and I suddenly realized that I was afraid I wouldn’t see the final train car; that fear hid the greater fear, that they would beat me, drop me over the edge and dip my face into the settling tank. I looked over my shoulder: three men behind me, I couldn’t tell which one was in charge; the tattoos on their hands were like stamps on the damp linens of platzkart railway bunk beds, the hands twitched and danced as if they’d undergone an electrical shock; the three were talking about what to do with me and the one missing the right ring finger was the most adamant.

They had kept an eye out for me, the captain had mentioned something to somebody about the foolish heir, and they were going to torture me about nonexistent money, jewels, and safe deposit boxes; my entire inheritance was the photograph in my jacket pocket. And then I looked closer at the one missing a finger and I recognized the features of the fugitive I tried to feed in the distant mountains by the abandoned prison camp; this was his younger brother or twin, unless I was hallucinating.

I started to talk; I told him that I knew how his brother died, knew the place where he was buried; I saw the stump of the ring finger and I thought that the one who had died nameless had left that notched ring behind.

I was right: his brother really had escaped—that was the last they had heard of him—and vanished; they let me up and asked questions, I told them how I had found him and tried to save him and then buried him. My captors discussed whether or not I had turned him in to the cops and decided they would have heard that he was returned to the prison colony and given an extra term. Had I killed him? I told them to look at me: Did I look like a killer? They laughed.

Things were turned around; the captors weren’t all that sure I was a rich heir, they were checking the captain’s tip; they drove me to a cheap eatery for me to draw a map of the fugitive’s grave; the captain sat next to me on the backseat and regarded me respectfully: he was certain that I had fooled the three men and was probably almost in awe of my cunning.

They asked me what I was doing in the town; and contrary to reason, I gave them a quick version of the story. The adopted grandson of the camp warden—I told the bandits about Grandfather II and they listened with respect; I was one of them, I was related to the camp world and it turned out that barbed wire not only separates, it unites: they even apologized for twisting my arms. There was no distinction between prisoners and guards, thieves and turnkeys—in any case, in the past; there was only a man who had founded their town, a man in whom they sensed a greater, senior power—and they thought they could have found a common language with him. Grandfather II, like them, bent and broke people, and now that the old feuds were becoming insignificant, they missed the arbitrariness elevated into law—they thought they would have found a place for themselves in those days, a place on the side of force, and the reflection of the force would have lent legality and justification to their base passion for torture. “I would have worn a uniform in those days,” said one; and I saw that all three would have worked as guards—freedom did not interest them, power did; the fugitive, the big brother, would have killed anyone suggesting it, but these men, younger, would have accepted it as their due; they did serve, in fact, as private security at the plant.

The dead man, almost against his will, protected me; that attempt at humanity had worked. If I had abandoned him, I would not have had the right—for myself—to refer to that incident; but I didn’t abandon him and I didn’t turn him in—and now I avoided the sludge of the settling tank where the deceived bird was dying in sticky bubbles.

Their mood had changed sharply; I described the way to the abandoned camp as best I could, but I knew that the younger brother would not travel to rebury his big brother—he would only tell stories about how he grabbed an outside mark, and the mark turned out to be a guy who had seen his brother’s body; gradually the story would mutate to the point of unrecognizability—either I would become a traitor punished by the younger brother, or, on the contrary, I would have carried the fugitive on my back; but all that would be later and for now we drank at the eatery—to friends, to the failure of enemies—and the captain drank with everyone, as if he had never ratted on me.

I planned to go to the cemetery in the morning, to the graves of Grandfather II’s wife and son, but I changed my mind; I sensed that the trip would be the end, that I would have to return after I did it—and I tried to postpone the end.

I wanted to see the place where the old man who was chief of the execution squad got the dose of radiation. The town had its own radiation—the radioactivity of dysfunction, of strain and fracture; I wanted to compare the sensation of the two places to see if they were similar in any way.

Not far out of town, in the mountains, was the ravine where the prisoners dug radioactive ore.

When they were creating the nuclear bomb, every geological expedition looked for that ore whatever else they were doing. Here in the North, they found it. I imagined tens of thousands of people all over the country, in the steppes, the deserts, taiga, and tundra looking for the decaying substance that was fraught with chain reaction, searching for the yellow uranium tars the color of the spots on the skin of poisonous snakes; I pictured Geiger counter needles reacting when they found grains of minerals surrounded by the brown aureole of radioactivity and the sharpened tips of pencils marked the contours of future sites on faded pages of field diaries in graphite.

Searching for substances whose life span is equivalent in duration with human life, searching for short-lived mineral compounds, betrayers of rock that has it own, long life of millions of years; searching for the key to the forces of nature; searching for the accelerator of decay, in a sense the philosopher’s stone commensurate with the philosophy of the new age that seeks means of destruction rather than construction; methods of stopping history, ending time.

Uranium, an element named for the castrated god, the god of time who gave up his place to Cronus and by disappearing made possible the change of generations of the gods—uranium is a sterile creature that cannot give a start to a thing and cannot be smelted into a permanent form like copper or iron; uranium, discovered by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in the year of the start of the French Revolution, the year the Bastille was stormed and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was passed—did the German natural philosopher think that the black substance in his test tube would weigh more on the scales of history than all the gold ever extracted by humanity? That for the sake of this substance roads would be built and mines created? Did he hear in the sounds of that year the underground jolts that were predictions of future revolutions—and the revolution that would take up the French revolution’s red flag?

To get to the ravine, you had to go past abandoned plants and an unfinished enrichment factory. It was the place where the outskirts of the city joined the mining plant’s territory, creating a no-man’s land where no one lived, not even tramps and feral dogs; while the ruins of factories and houses along the edge of town smelled of neglect, here it seemed that the space itself was decaying and filling up with caverns.

There were fireplaces and rusted snarls of cord—the metal guts of tires—everywhere; splashes of rust, cisterns knocked on their sides, smashed power line towers, hunks of metal, twisted, bent, hacked by giant scissors; truck tire tracks that looked as if someone had intentionally tortured the earth. Among the skeletons of barracks, like trees chopped by mortars in a military dream, stood wastewater risers; huge fountains of water gushed pointlessly from forgotten wells. None of the usual litter there—cans, papers, wrappers, scraps of food—only the remains of former habitation, warped metal and murdered wood.

I couldn’t walk through that space; here at the juncture of the town and the industrial zone, everything that in other places nearby was practically hidden, masked by architecture and landscape, was laid bare; the mutilated space itself did not elicit fear but the reality of the inner lives of the people whose effort and determination, or rather, lack of effort and absence of determination gave rise to it.

Once, several geological institutes had their laboratories here; the barracks frames were all that was left, everything else was looted when the labs were closed. Among the chopped and charred slate were pieces of core samples—long cylinders of rock raised from the depths of holes. Usually they were laid out in special boxes meter by meter, and the meter columns of samples gave a reading of the entire vertical of the hole. Those abandoned core samples, overgrown with weeds, pointlessly removed from the ground, from great depths, showed that people left here as if rejecting their work, tossing it aside casually and hastily, and in the vacuum created by their departure, a different life began: the way bindweed takes over old ruins.

Looking at the core samples, I remembered a story that used to be told as a joke; back in the 1980s, a retired driller applied to the Ministry of Geology. He had a project to make use of some of the old holes, which were usually filled with cement to keep the underground water strata from mixing. He proposed turning the holes into cemeteries: burying people vertically, lowering one on top of the other; there were thousands of such holes drilled all over the country, and his explanatory note stated that their total capacity would enable decades of burials, freeing up, he explained scrupulously, the workforce, the cemetery diggers and coffin makers, for other state needs, the word “state” underlined.

The ministry had seen all kinds of proposals: the era had given rise to wild thoughts, the suppressed energy of restructuring and transformations found a way into apolitical and, in that sense, safe technological inventions. The more slowly time flowed, the more alleged inventions appeared that rejected the laws of science, overriding them out of the inventor’s desire, a desire so clearly inept and passionate that it was beyond science; people wanted to change something, and the laws of the natural sciences seemed more malleable than the laws of the social order. But the scientist who proposed vertical cemeteries amazed everyone; and now, standing before the abandoned core boxes, I sensed where that man had come from and what environment had addled his brain.

To get around the ruined land that belonged to no one, I decided to follow the railroad track leading to the mine; women’s voices could be heard above the embankment; I couldn’t make out the words yet, but I could pick up the intonations. The voices did not come from any particular place—the air resonated with them, as if it contained them like a chemical cloud or steam.

Two women were wearily discussing something. From the interjections that arise when vowels are pronounced, lighting a word from within with different emotional tones—a-a, u-u, o-o—you could tell what they were talking about. I got closer and the phrases were clearer. Yesterday Valera said … ate some hot dogs … I have to sleep with him when he’s drunk …. the kids are in the next room … he burned a hole in the pillowcase with his cigarette … started drinking first thing in the morning … he’s trying to get in my daughter’s room …

The words were about human life, but they seemed to be spoken by the area; two women dispatchers sat in their respective booths, kilometers apart from each other, at two sets of crossroads, and now, as there was a break, there were no trains running carrying ore, they were having a conversation over the loudspeakers. No one could eavesdrop because there was no one around; day after day they chatted and it seemed there was nobody closer—among friends and neighbors—than each other.

Maybe these conversations had been conducted for years, and had not changed; in rain and blizzard, in summer and winter, one woman said “he burned a hole in the pillowcase,” and it was always the same pillowcase and the same cigarette; and her friend said nothing in response, just listened.

The same ruins, the same gouged earth, lay around the embankment, and the women’s conversation did not clash with it, the way a conversation about domestic things would, referring to home—in the sense of walls, roof, hearth—amid the abandoned buildings. On the contrary, this was the only conversation possible here.

The voices carried from the loudspeakers up on posts, and it seemed that the words spoke themselves and there were no people at all, just a recording set on repeat in an empty dispatcher office.

It was muggy in the ravine, low clouds were caught on the mountain peaks; it was raining but it felt as if the drops were already flying and had not yet reached the ground. The ruts of the old road were overgrown, and the bridges across the river had been washed away; a narrow path trampled in the rut showed that people came here for mushrooms or berries. The river water was mountain water, too transparent, too clear—it will never slake your thirst, you have to add salt or acid; bilberries ripened in the thickets; the ulcers of the industrial zone were just a half kilometer away, but nature here was untouched, in another decade the old road would disappear under new birches.

The camp appeared after a turn; some of the houses were built out of river boulders, and now they looked like a parody of medieval architecture: two stories, hunkered down, without roofs, with narrow windows to keep in the heat. The wooden buildings had rotted or been burned down long ago, only the electric poles with crooked crossbeams remained, but the eye refused to see them as crosses, to take in the symbolism—they were just poles; it was the same with these buildings—I realized that someone seeing this without knowing it used to be a prison camp would never guess.

Neither the masonry, not the black spots where they used to dump coal, nor the abandoned carts on the slope, nor the adits, nothing in and of itself was evidence. Even the roll of barbed wire, in which a hare had once gotten caught—rodents gradually carried out the tiny bleached bones, as if they had been dumped from a plate—was just a roll of barbed wire. In order to unwind it, like you unwind a thread from a ball of wool, pulling out the entire past, the entire image of this place six decades ago, and not only the image but the essence of what had gone on here—you needed to know something about it, you needed some sort of guidance.

I went through the camp workshops, the trestle beds were still there, to the compressor room where rusty pipes stretched up to the adits leading into the mine; the only thing I found was a button, a homemade button carved out of a piece of tin can; a comprehensible and simultaneously useless object without clothes. The impression of the place was the same; it was a button: real, indubitable, yet torn from something more important, too small, hopelessly lost.

But the button in my hand reminded me of something; I remembered that I had stood in the mountains on this latitude but a thousand kilometers to the east, and I had seen the remains of this camp in the broad saddle of the pass, and the rusted pipes from the compressor room had stretched along the slopes.

The button had two holes made with an awl or nail; I remember the nail I had held in my hand then as evidence that a trace is always left, what remains is what held together the building of the past, and these things, as a special material, always live longer than the building itself. But now I held not a nail but a hole made by a nail; the situation had reversed itself. I began looking through the button, like miniature binoculars, and its two openings suddenly joined up with two spots, the openings of adits on the ravine slope.

I did not want to go up there; but every dark hole in the ground attracts you, as if it were the opening into the underside of the world, an addition to three-dimensionality. I also remembered the goal of this walk into the mountains: the adits were tunnels to the places they excavated the mineral that then yielded uranium.

The disfigured no man’s land, the disintegrating speech of two women on the railroad had not yet become even a recent memory, they were still part of the present moment, and the source of all this impoverishment, destitution, and privation beckoned the way a struck dog on the side of the road, flies in its exposed guts, catches your eye; it attracted your imagination by the honest openness of ugliness. To see not the consequences but the original cause; to see the belly of the collapse—to enter it!

I climbed up to the adits; once, they had been blocked by stones and crossed by welded rails; but the water dripping from them dug out a road, created collapses, and you could gain entry. I expected to find the center of danger, the source of the murk that filled the region; nothing of the kind. At first, being underground made no impression at all; then I realized that I was wrong to look for something noticeable; something else was more important, but what?

In abandoned adits where there are no currents, no drafts, the immobilized air gradually loses its flow and begins to resemble frozen colorless fog: each breath you take creates an emptiness, a hole, and in order to breathe a second time, you have to take a step.

Disintegrated air, decomposed: your voice sticks in it, light diffuses, and the watery dust from drops falling from the ceiling creates rainbows in the flashlight beam, as joyless as the wing of a dead butterfly.

The blackness had penetrated its very being, corroding it from within, the way rust corrodes iron: it falls apart at your touch. It seemed that every molecule, every atom was enveloped in black, could not see one another; you suddenly feel that the air is blind, the way a person can be blind from internal disarray: the coherence of the world is beyond his ability to see.

What I sought was what I was breathing in: I should have brought a respirator. No one had breathed this air for decades and it preserved everything, like virus strains in a test tube; not thoughts and voices, but the toxin of the era, the exhalation of destruction and decay. I was filling my lungs with something that should not be touched by man; my breath caught, as if I had seen that the meat I was eating was rotten and filled with maggots, even more repulsive than worms: the maggot turns into a worm inside your flesh.

I lit a cigarette, letting the strong tobacco disperse the miasma; no strange whispers, no sense of someone’s presence, only the air, empty, preserving nothing but decay, and time, for I realized that this tunnel was a cellar where the air remained from specific years gone by, numbered just like a prisoner.

Time did not stop here—the word stop implies a fixed moment when movement ends; it had never moved here at all, it stood like water in black caves where the movement is from striped fish. I thought that if this adit could be tipped like a bottle, the air and the time would flow out; they would mix with today’s time and recognize each other as past and present.

Coming back out into the light, I heard a helicopter. An Mi-8 from the local airport landed not far from the ruins of the stone barracks; people came out—not people, just splotches of color so bright and radiating that it hid the outline of their figures; yellow, red, violet, light blue, emerald, navy blue, and orange jackets, trousers, backpacks, and hats; they moved the way people do with cameras and video cameras, looking for the best angle for a shot and where to best pose for a photograph; they separated, mentally dividing up the valley with their angles, and no one looked at the ground. The wind carried English words; in the city I would have perceived it as foreign, but here in the ravine, it seemed even more alien, doubly strange, as if people who spoke a foreign language decided to imitate tropical birds.

Streams of hot air came from the helicopter’s exhaust vents; the foreigners, who had been brought here for an excursion—I’d seen the sign in town for “camp tours”—wore protective footgear and tried not to touch the soil or the buildings, they must have been warned about radiation. I stood on the mountain slope, by the adits, like a savage witnessing the landing of a spaceship; their clothing came from a different, full-color world, and I wanted to shout that you can’t come here in a helicopter, you can’t land for an hour to take pictures and pick up a souvenir that the tour organizers left for you to find. If I’d had a gun, I would have chased them away with a shot; instead all I could do was watch and understand that despite the spirit of the our times which insisted not just on the equality but on the total conformity of people, there were insuperable barriers, indelible differences deeper than religion, culture, or prosperity; the colored jackets negated the area, protected against its colorlessness, and I saw—through color—that we were born in different times, even though they coincided chronologically. This difference—between those born in the same years but in different times—was so powerful that it elicited denial. The two women at the railroad and the three bandits from the night before were closer to me—it was not that we were surrounded by the same realities of life, but that we were born of those realities, we carried their deficiencies and could speak in the language of deficiencies; but the people in the colored jackets with cameras were whole and in that sense, estranged.

The helicopter flew away; I went down, down, down the stones, the river channels, and it seemed that now there was only descent for me, down the dried channels, the crunchy moss, down, down, down.