Oblivion

PART 5

The city cemetery where Grandfather II’s wife and son were buried was just a piece of land in the middle of the tundra. The graves, fences, and crosses unframed by trees looked as if patients in hospital beds had been brought outside; a cemetery without trees, without a brick wall around it, it seemed like a slum repeating the boredom of the garages and sheds. There was also the feeling that the deceased had settled themselves in a new place, and the result was a disorderly conglomeration of graves instead of a regular order; they huddled together like prisoners on bunk beds to keep warm, like people with bundles pushing into a train car until their ribs cracked, they buried others and then climbed into the ground themselves.

A little church was stuck on the edge of the cemetery; its red brick, which hadn’t yet turned dark, reminded me of the few big houses where the mine bosses lived, as you come into town; if not for the dome, it could have been yet another mansion, and it was probably built by the same crew of workers; the church was seen—by those who commissioned it, by the architect, and by the builders—as God’s mansion; it was strange that they hadn’t found a different kind of brick for the church, that they’d put it there like a guard hut without searching for the more perfect place, and so from whichever angle you looked in the cemetery, the church was pushed into the ground, destroyed by the power of the complex’s smokestacks, striped like prison garb, belching volcanic smoke, and dwarfing the cross and the gilded dome.

In the chaos of graves there was one section where the stones were higher and more massive; amid the rusted crosses and the low fences sinking into the boggy soil stood rectangles of black dolerite, brought here by railroad; the inscriptions on the stone were gilded. This is where the bosses were buried; oval frames showed portraits of men in uniform and suits, colonels, chief engineers, PhDs in technical sciences, and they looked at one another, because the stones had been placed in an imaginary circle, and no sightline could escape it.

The low clouds brought a June blizzard, snow blackened by the smokestacks fell on the graves, black snow. It looked like ashes from an old fire falling from the sky; then the stacks belched smoke the color of cinnabar, and the snow turned deep red, melting on my face, spotting the cemetery paths; a man ran out of the guard booth, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me under the roof; cinnabar snow can be dangerous, but I did not care.

The tundra around the cemetery reddened, as if watered-down blood had seeped from beneath the ground; red water flowed down my arms, my face; the color of brick dust, cinder with the bluish cast of gunpowder splashed across the landscape, colored the mountains and sky, and the monuments in the cemetery became islands in the high water of the color. I understood that this was coincidence, a burst of snow that was imbued with smoke from the stacks; but a red polar hare ran in the tundra, looping around, escaping an imagined hunter, the madness of red, and it turned out it was running in circles; the hare tried to escape the red blizzard not knowing what its own color was, leaping aside, trying to confuse the trail, going low and then jumping back up on the graves.

Finally the hare wearied and collapsed in a mossy hole; only its ears were visible. I realized that it was pointless to run like the hare if you were to see red water on your hands; pointless to say that this is just pollution from the complex when in your gut you know what the red snow is about; you are called, and you can only experience your own shock, follow its path—without trying to understand it, break it up into its components. Only then will the red snow covering the cemetery become something deeper than an image or a metaphor—it will become an opening door leading to the space of growing destiny; the words of Gilgamesh came to mind, his response to the Scorpion-Man:

Red snow fell over the tundra to the Arctic Ocean; the land was red, and the water devoured it, and dark mirrored rivers flowed unperturbed; red drops fell from wires, snow melted on stone in the quarry, and red rivulets ran along cracks and fissures, as if the blood-carrying veins of the earth had been cut here to extract it; red foam appeared on the oil rigs that looked like camp watchtowers and in the mouths of the wells, and the gas torches over the tundra cavities turned crimson; the chain saw at the felling site splattered red sawdust, and the excavator shovel dug into darkness where something slurped viscously; bedbugs under the boards of the collapsed barracks awoke from their half-century sleep, and bears whose ancestors grew fat on human flesh returned to the slag heaps where the executed bodies were dumped; human blood flowed in the wires, the tree trunks, in the arteries of animals, in the emptiness of the land, as if the world had turned into a bleeding tumor, a tangle of blood vessels, and only the rivers flowed unperturbed.

Then the red snow melted completely; there was a light ringing in my head, as if capillary strings had burst from the tension. We went outside.

The watchman’s left arm was artificial, and his uncreased shoes revealed that his legs were also prosthetic; the wrinkles on his face were deep and aged, he could no longer smooth the skin in order to shave, it was baked like skin after a burn, so that uneven gray bristles peeked out; thin, once very tall—any line arranged according to height would start with him—the man was now bent over, and the hump on his back was like an incipient second head; his eyes belonged to a different face, a different body: life had wearied the flesh, but the eyes, their red, ulcerated whites, held something sleepless, remembering, always awake but expecting nothing.

The watchman was not one by profession or calling; he was a watchman without verbs, if I could put it that way: he did not watch, he did not guard, he did not execute the duties of a watchman, but nevertheless he was one, in a different sense.

When the cemetery had been part of the camp, he, an invalid who had been a stone mason and engraver in his past, was sent here to make headstones; for decades he carved out names, ranks, and positions, as if he worked in the posthumous human resources department; he kept his own records of those who had arrested him and guarded him, kept his book of life and death—a pile of pages in a cardboard file labeled “Case No. … , ” in which he listed all the dead.

Later, when the town grew bigger than the camp, his quarter-century sentence came to an end, but he remained; the engraver said he had nowhere to go, which was true, but that was not the real reason: he had merged with the cemetery, gotten used to standing at the gate hunched over, grown deaf from the whine of the saws on stone; former camp bosses retired and sooner or later, with an honorary salute or not, with medals on a cushion or not, the officials were lowered into the unyielding, stony earth, where a meter down the hoe hit the ice of permafrost; the engraver picked up his instruments and chiseled the dates of the life on the stone.

There was not much flesh left on him, a third of his body was metal, wood, and plastic—the engraver had been treated with care; the flesh that remained was imbued with the dust of stone and abrasives, stone dust was in his lungs, he had become almost mineral, the way the bodies of miners who died in salt mines turned into salt formations found decades later. His name was Petr, rock, and he was no longer subject to physiology, he belonged to petrography, the study of mountain ores. Having spent much more time with rock than with people, he had learned its slow power, the power of pressure that bends strata, the power of hidden, seething pressures; he turned the power on himself, overcame the weakness of expectation, and surpassed the strain of patience; he was simply the cemetery stone carver, he lived at the cemetery, and even in his extreme old age he cut the letters smoothly and evenly into the stone.

His vision and sense of proportion established the same precision within him, letters requiring accurate delineation subjected his body to the service of lines; maybe he survived only thanks to those letters, their graphics; he stood on two borders simultaneously—the line between life and death and the threshold at which the invisible word becomes visible, captured in the graphic cluster of letters; letters became his prison camp rations, and he did not depend on meager calories, he was fed by the alphabet both in the practical and spiritual sense. He lived without dreaming of revenge, he lived a solitary and isolated life, and his life went on as long as there were still people alive who had served in the camp as guards; he met them at the cemetery gate the way they had met him at the camp gate; he stood on borrowed legs of metal and wood, while they lay on their backs and their feet were in shoes bought for the burial. He was not in the thrall of vengeance or justice being meted out—he simply watched how they left in a line that extended for years, left as if they had lived ordinary lives, had been ordinary men—and it had to be him, he had to chisel out the numbers, the farewell words of wives and children on their headstones, so that their deeds, almost forgotten, not having become guilt, not having elicited repentance or expiation, would be fixed, confirmed as something that had really happened; confirmed not in human memory, but as something that did not depend on memory, on being “multiplied” in reminiscences, but was just a fact of life.

One engraving, one line, was enough to keep a thing from vanishing. It needed only one person to take on the labor of remembering; remembering means being connected with reality, even being that connection; we do not preserve the reality of the past in our memories, the past itself, having occurred, speaks through human memory, and the speech is exactly as clear as the person is honest, not in the sense of following the truth but in the sense of absolutely allowing it to speak through him.

In the back of the workshop, the engraver tried to make a memorial for his long-dead comrades; but his ability to convey the proportions of the human body was in inverse proportion to the precision of his hand at making letters; he treated the human form like a letter, so that the body was racked, stretched on imaginary axes as if crucified on the letter; unfinished statues lay by the wall like executed bodies, and that probably was a memorial fully suited to the times and events—a memorial existing in numerous attempts but never succeeding; a memorial no one would see.

I told the engraver the grave I sought, and he led me to a small hollow that looked like the earth’s lipless mouth. In those regions, permafrost could push out crosses and statues the way it pushes out foundations of buildings, or it could remain indifferent, or it could swallow a raised grave site. I recalled the photograph of Grandfather II taking the first shovelful of dirt at the quarry site and the feeling I had first looking at it returned: the shovel digs into the ground and it’s too late to put the soil back, to deny, refuse, say something; events linked up in ways that could not be unlinked, fate could not be stopped. Therefore the location of the grave had a dent in the surface that seemed to repeat—in one of many places—the funnel of the quarry begun by Grandfather II.

The engraver told me that one batch of prisoners brought to the camp were mental patients; the institution where they lived had been turned into a polling place because the village school, where people usually voted, had burned down with the kolkhoz office. The patients were naturally locked up, but they got out at night and tore down the posters hanging in the streets, to put them up in their own ward. One poster ripped and they hid it in the outhouse; it was a portrait of Stalin.

The engraver heard the story from an orderly in the institution, who was sent to serve time along with the mental patients. They could not remember their own names, did not respond at roll call, and the orderly was a valued worker: he replied for them all, combining the names of three dozen people with his own. The madmen were excellent laborers, perhaps the best at laying the foundation of the quarry: they did not know that somewhere outside there was freedom, they were not envious if someone got more food, they did not try to deceive, work less, pretend to be sick; through pickaxes and shovels, through unity of action and form—just as they were taught to use spoons—they acquired a small dose of reason, enough to merge with the tool and become one with it. The shaft of a shovel, the handle of a crowbar became their support, their earthly axis, and they dug, broke rock, made holes for explosives, giving themselves fully to the work, replacing their own existence. That’s what people called them—Pickaxe, Shovel, Wheelbarrow—and they quickly learned to respond to the nicknames.

Gradually the brigade of mental patients was noticed and given better rations—no other brigade suited the bosses as well—and the guard officers even joked that the experience should be extended, all the nuts throughout the land should be arrested: Where else could you find such obedient workers? The other prisoners called them the Psycho Brigade; the bosses had the sense not to hold up the mental patients as an example—the other prisoners would have killed them then—instead, people just took out their frustration on them, mocked them, but did not hurt them.

The officers who suggested using arrested mental patients did not know that all credit was due the orderly: he had understood intuitively that the repeated actions of simple labor with the soil could help those men get back into the world, at least partially, and he had spent years at the institution teaching them to work, first with four hands, the way you teach people to play piano, and then, when they understood the movement, independently. The orderly’s brother was among the madmen, they said it was hereditary, and he tried to save his brother and forestall his own madness; he had managed to instill the skills of simple labor in his patients, in muscle memory; but now his plan equated man and instrument.

Some of the patients had no guards—you could escape from here only if you had the intention to escape, it was impossible to get lost or go missing, so the patients were allowed to move freely; they were sent to the bosses’ houses to chop wood and haul water—the bosses liked these workers who made them feel even more important than did the usual prisoners; besides which the mental patients did not know to hate the bosses, the convoy guards, and their families, so the bosses could relax with them the way you do with a dog or cat—feeling superior and at peace.

The crazies came to Grandfather II’s apartment, too; his seven-year-old son, born near the camp, and knowing nothing but the camp and the camp people, unexpectedly grew attached to them; one of the madmen, whose name the engraver could not remember, used to carve wood and was the father of a large family; he had not seen children for two or three years. You couldn’t say he felt something for the boy, the son of the camp warden, for he had lost the ability to feel, but his fingers retained their own memory and carved—with a shard of glass, since the Psycho Brigade did not have knives or razors—a wooden bird whistle. He carved it mechanically, impartially, as if every child—the man knew what short stature meant—was supposed to have such a bird.

Grandfather II’s son, who had lived without toys—all the children of the camp guards grew up that way, they didn’t even know the usual children’s games like Cossacks-and-robbers, they played at the work of their fathers, being convoy guards or soldiers in the watchtowers—suddenly left his peers; the simple bird whistle touched something in him. No, he did not see the world in which he had been born and bred in a different light, he did not come to pity the prisoners or realize what his father was; the toy merely revealed that there could be another life, where the air can sing lightly; there are no songbirds in the tundra and the boy had never heard a lark or nightingale, nor did he know that people had songs: in his seven years he had heard only a few records and thought that singing was the work of a box with a handle and horn; the box knew how to sing in a human voice, that’s what it was made for, but people could not sing.

Lips touching the resonant opening, the exhalation giving birth to sound—the boy started breathing differently, certain powers within him, unrequired and dormant, awoke to life; he began seeking isolation, he made up simple melodies and whistled them, as if hypnotizing himself, summoning the unknown that arose inside him.

The way the engraver told it, there was something uncanny about how the boy grew attached to his whistle; the engraver recalled the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the children he led away with his flute; the crazy wood-carver had unwittingly made him a strange and scary gift. He came from the sticks, from the forests and swamps that three generations of irrigators, Tsarist and Soviet, had been unable to drain; he would run away from the orderlies and collect driftwood, burls and birch fungus, and carve the same things out of them: the mocking faces of forest spirits, distorted as if in a fun house mirror, and you could not say that he was making them up—he was releasing the features already in the wood, as if the forest truly were filled with taunting, beckoning faces, peering at people from behind trees and pretending to be clumsy growths should people turn back to look.

The boy was not losing his mind, but simply spent more and more time on his own; sometimes he mindlessly went off somewhere, as if the whistle of the singing toy extended a guiding thread visible to him alone, and an otherworldliness developed about him, as if he were here accidentally and would not stay long; the appearance of the bird whistle somehow stopped his growth, took away the powers of growth which children have in great abundance, with a reserve; these powers seemed to be exhausted in the vain and repeated attempts to breathe life into the wooden bird, which lived with another’s breath.

Finally, Grandfather II noticed that something was wrong with his son; he noticed too late and then acted with great persistence. The boy could not explain to his father—children do not have the language for expressing inner states—and even if he had, what would he have said? That he was enchanted by a toy made by a crazy prisoner? Grandfather II, thanks to the boy’s friends, learned about the whistle and took it away; he learned who had made it and summoned the crazy carver under guard; he no longer remembered the gift or the boy, and his fingers palpated the wood of the boss’s desk, as if trying to measure what could be done with such a thick oak plank if you cut it up and used it for various small items.

Grandfather II, given the limits of his perspective, decided that the carver was only pretending to be mad, that he was actually rational since he’d tried to gain the graces of a child who was the son of the camp warden; he became sophisticated in his cruelty: the miserable madman dared to think he could benefit this way, manipulating Grandfather II through his son.

He sent the carver to the distant timber area, where they prepared the beams for future mines. “Let him work with trees,” Grandfather II said, knowing that the madman would probably be squashed by a falling tree; he could have simply ordered him shot, but that would have been direct murder, and Grandfather II liked to act so that his sentences were executed by the apparent course of events, the forces of nature, postponed and removed: it was not his personal intention to send the man to his death, but the man fell into the whirlpool of fate, from which he could not escape.

Grandfather II’s son did not know what had happened to the carver; when they took away his whistle, he fell gravely ill. For a week the boy had a dry fever, his body tense and ossified; he cried out, struggling with something in his delirium. The doctor said that the child’s face changed so sharply and wildly, it seemed that two different people were arguing inside the boy, each appearing alternately in his face. One clearly showed the harsh pedigree of Grandfather II, who was born in a village by chalk cliffs over a river, where the soil was so imbued with lime that only cherries could grow there; the other face was tender as an infant, a vague face, as if he had just arrived in the world without a line of ancestors whose features could have shaped his. The one who had Grandfather II’s blood in his veins, thick and as viscous as the sap of cherry trees, was trying to push out this infant from the boy’s body, chase it away, toss it like a bird from the nest.

After a week, the boy awoke recovered, thinner and almost without memory; many memories did not survive the fever and had dematerialized, or maybe it was a part of his soul, the finest, purest, and childlike part that had dematerialized; he regained his health and forgot about the whistle, but he had become angular, wooden in his movements, as if the liveliness that gave fluidity to his body had been lost, and every scrape and bruise now lasted a long time on his skin.

He returned to his peers, but it was out of a sense of duty to be friends with boys his age; he played with them indifferently, without passion, and only hide-and-seek responded with his new sensibility: he searched badly, without focus, but he hid so well that it seemed he had not hidden himself at all, had no intention to hide—he simply vanished into a crack, like a coin into the floorboards, and when the seeker gave up, they all went looking for him, finding him only by accident. The boy had stopped wanting to be, his inner state was that of an old man; something extremely important had burned away in that illness, when Grandfather II sat at his bedside. He lost the gift awakened by the bird whistle, the gift of his own life, not subjected to anyone else, a life about which the boy had known nothing except the enchanting foretaste of it; the boy emptied out, grew as light as a wrapper, and that is why he did not hide playing hide-and-seek, rather he fell into empty spots, holes in the universe, like a random object that had no place of its own.

Grandfather II did not give up; he saw that the boy was still not himself, and he thought it was because he was taking a long time—an incommensurately long time—getting over the loss of the toy. He behaved as most adults would—he decided to replace the toy he took away with a present, to intercept the inner gaze focused on the loss with something new, significant, and valuable. This is the action of people for whom all life events are basically equivalent, one easily replaced by another; used to dealing this way with people, Grandfather II probably did not know that there were things that were irreversible—not physically, like death or injury—but because the most important aspect of a relationship happens in a single moment, beyond which everything has a future dimension based on trust, or else everything is forever too late.

Grandfather II started the quarry—and everything was too late, the town was doomed to the funnel; for him and his son the moment—everything is too late—had also come, but he thought and thought about what present would please the boy, how to show a father’s generosity, and at last came up with a gift with a significance that would define his son’s adolescence and maturity.

On Grandfather II’s orders, they searched the camp and found another carver, this one in his right mind. For several months he did not go out to the sites, slept only three hours a night, at work on his assignment; Grandfather II looked in occasionally to check up and give advice, leaving enough shag for a couple of cigarettes: he didn’t have to pay the carver too much, his life was in Grandfather II’s hands as it was, and the carver labored, extending his existence with each curl of wood, with each movement of his knife—Grandfather II could send him to the mines, and the elderly prisoner would die after a month of digging.

But despite his desire to live, despite his desire to please Grandfather II, the work did not go well; the commission was beyond the prisoner’s abilities: he was supposed to create the camp in miniature. Use a cobbler’s hammer to knock together barracks with wooden bunks, erect watchtowers, make the delousing room, the gun room, the steam bath, warehouse, and other buildings—all tiny, to fit a special base and be placed on a table; he had to carve and paint the convoy soldiers, sheepdogs, cooks, steam bath attendants, all the service people, and most important, the prisoners; make wheelbarrows with buttons for wheels, pickaxes out of furniture nails, shovels out of tin, boilers, furnaces; my new friend the engraver was assigned to help him in the fine work. The engraver used a magnifying glass to model the soldiers’ guns, fashioned bits of a broken cup into porcelain isolators for wooden poles using the finest wire which pricked your finger if you touched the end, and one of the free seamstresses sewed sheepskin jackets and peacoats for the guards and prisoners. Snow banks of cotton were placed around the camp; it was meant to be eternal winter, but the electrician made a dull, cheese-yellow sun from a 20-watt bulb that moved around the camp on a special arm the way the sun moves across the tundra in summer without going below the horizon.

The entire camp universe was being created by the efforts of the carver, engraver, and seamstress, but the further they worked, the more they felt they were doing something unseemly, almost forbidden; they were violating some unclear law; the carver and engraver confessed this to each other and even considered burning the toy camp by starting a fire in the workshop, but fear stopped them; they saw how excessively attached Grandfather II was to his idea, he came by more frequently, stayed longer, examining the toy, and it seemed that he had forgotten it was intended for his son. Grandfather II would chase them out of the workshop and remain there alone, they watched through a crack how the warden, illuminated by the flames of oil lamps and the fire of the opened furnace, with a dark face, too tall for the low ceiling, moved the figures of prisoners and soldiers, halting like God above the newly created earth, and deciding something in those moments when he silently smoked, exhaling on the toy barracks, as if their chimneys were smoking, and the draft blew smoke onto the cotton snow.

Three months later the toy camp was ready; Grandfather II organized a viewing of the work. A windup locomotive ran down wire tracks with wagons loaded with real ore, billowing caustic soot: inside it was a boiler with burning tar; the electric sun made its slow orbit; the excavator could bend and unbend, the guards could aim their rifles, and the toy shepherd jaws opened revealing red mouths—the seamstress had used red calico freely; the toy camp was exactly like the real one, except for one missing figure—Grandfather II was not there, even though inside the camp office there was a thimble-sized bust of Lenin, carved from dog bone—that was the only bone there was—and on the wall a poster with Stalin’s profile, made from a postage stamp.

Grandfather II decided that the gift had to be a surprise; the anniversary was approaching of the day when the quarry gave its first ton of ore, and they were planning to celebrate. Grandfather II took these production anniversaries very seriously, they meant more to him than birthdays or other holidays like May Day. He usually celebrated in the laboratory where they tested the quality of the ore; however, he decided to betray his habit.

That evening Grandfather II brought the gift into the boy’s room; his son, he thought, was sleeping, and he set up the toy camp on the table and covered it with canvas, so the boy could open it himself.

But the morning brought something else: they found the boy shivering in the corner, wrapped in the canvas; the first snowy dawn was trying to break through the thick clouds, a watery, yellow blister of light appeared in the sky, and that light poured into the room through the rectangle of the window, illuminating the table and Grandfather II’s present.

The camp was smashed—everything down to the last connection, nail, thread knot, wire twist; the boy must have worked all night, destroying the toy, putting all of himself into the destruction, and now he trembled with sleeplessness, exhaustion, and fear. His fingers were bleeding, his nails were torn, the canvas was splotched with blood; he had managed to break it all noiselessly, silently, as if performing the greatest exploit of his life—not just the seven years he had lived, but for his whole life going forward; he was afraid, the room smelled of urine, and perhaps he was ready to give up his free will and wished it all to come back together, for the camp to rebuild itself, but the dawn entered the room, and the fluid objects of the night acquired their final, hard, daytime shapes, and not even the specter of desperation could re-create the broken camp.

Grandfather II staggered in the doorway. He would probably have been less shocked had the real camp been destroyed. On the evenings when he came to the workshop and threw out the carver and engraver to be alone with the toy, he enjoyed his own idea so much that he might have kept the toy camp in his office if that pleasure—as perceived by others—did not smack of eccentricity.

This miniaturized, facsimile camp truly did belong to Grandfather II. There was something not in the least metaphorical about the change in scale, in the optical magnification of his own figure, not from pure narcissism but as an expression of the correct proportions in his view: Grandfather II in his own estimation was not a god, not a master, he was himself, a man, and the fact that he was master of life and death over other men without considering himself something more simply proved to him that in fact he was truly greater. He gave his son a toy camp so that he would share his father’s destiny, accept his own from his father’s hands. Barracks outside the windows, whichever way you looked, barracks on the table—Grandfather II had sent his son to prison camp, excluding everything that was not-camp.

This can be called a crime against reality; a rather naive formulation, but one which accurately reflects the essence and can be interpreted more fully: much of what Grandfather II and those like him did was a crime against reality.

Reality always takes revenge on those who cut it down, who simplify it, who deny its multiplicity; it avenges as implacably as do the laws of nature; we are not always able to recognize events not as random but in accordance with the laws of nature.

With his commission of the miniature camp, Grandfather II had without realizing it overwound a tight spring; before he was a camp warden among others, not the best, and not the worst in those times, where the moving force was a depersonalized bureaucratic cruelty; he was also depersonalized, he did not stand out, his shoulder boards and uniform spoke for him, managed for him, while he was merely the wearer of the uniform, something secondary in relation to his rank and duty. But now—and there was a reason the craftsmen felt they were doing something inappropriate—now he had crossed the line of his work and tied his fate and his son’s fate with the camp, in life and death.

Had Grandfather II been simpler and more volatile, he might have beaten his son, expressed his anger, shouted; but his anger was not expressed directly, it was held inside, ripening; the anger went through the coils of his inner being, acquiring a toxic thickness and essentially ceasing to be anger. It was transmuted into the ability to take a person to the most painful limit, force him to confront himself; the ability to make the most extreme and truthful deed meaningless.

Anger openly expressed reinforces the event that caused it; that is why Grandfather II, who knew the fury he felt instantly, as if it was always on a boil under his skin, burning his tongue, blistering his fingers, remained outwardly calm. A person who acted against Grandfather II’s will had to undo it himself, as if sincere repentance was not enough: Grandfather II did not believe in words. He needed the action to be overturned by a counteraction, the antipode of the deed; Grandfather II swept away the traces, leaving no signs in memory that evinced his evildoing: the witness destroyed his witnessing, went backward over the path of his intention, undoing it.

Grandfather II said the boy had to repair the toy camp; he would not leave the room until he had done so, he would not go to school, and food would be brought to his room. Grandfather II locked the door with such force that the key got bent in the lock, the lock was broken, and the boy was truly locked in. Grandfather II did not believe that his son would escape through the window: he must have felt his will was a force like gravity which locked the boy up, squeezed him inside the room as if in his fist, and now he decided to wait, without loosening his grip, to wait and let time do its work.

Left alone with the inability to do what was demanded, the boy was supposed to feel time collapsing upon him, bringing no reprieve now or in the distant future; you sit there, knowing there is no way out, and the passing hours exacerbate your condition, exhausting and destructive.

Grandfather II saw his son as a traitor, he would have disowned him had there been examples of that, but in those days it was only sons who disowned their fathers. So Grandfather II did not punish the boy—he was forcing the boy to disown himself.

Seven was no age at all, thought Grandfather II, who was used to reckoning time in prison terms—ten years, fifteen, and you still have time after that to live—so a seven-year-old had to reject himself and curse himself daily, and then Grandfather II would take him, drained, limp inside, and mold himself another son.

His wife could no longer have children, and the barrenness of her womb depressed Grandfather II, who still felt the desire for fatherhood. Fatherhood he imagined was a plastic process, similar to sculpting, and he wanted to bring into the world not a new life—a living thing while it is alive cannot be molded, it has its own laws—but something meek, suitable for his creative efforts.

That may be why his wife, before becoming barren, had two stillborn children after the boy. She gave birth, and then her female nature died, became insensible, as if her body was horrified by her husband’s true desires.

The boy did not come out of the room for two days; he refused food the first morning, and Grandfather II ordered that he not be fed forcibly. He knew that the boy would rebel at first—it came out the way he wanted—and then the arrest would undermine his strength, and the more the boy believed he could prove something to his father, to stand up for himself, the faster his resistance would die out.

In the two days that the door was locked, the boy used his penknife to pry up a rotten floorboard and he squeezed into a space leading under the house. Grandfather II was at a loss for the first time: he couldn’t call out a search party for his son. But it wasn’t necessary—the boy was found.

The camp quarry, wide and deep, even in those days seemed to tilt the surrounding mountains, tilt the plain on which the nascent town stood. If a man, either drunk, or from joy or grief walked so that his legs carried him on their own, he would end up at the quarry.

The boy who ran out into the night not knowing where to go was doomed to end up at the quarry because of the town’s configuration; the quarry was not guarded at night. At that hour it was the eye of the earth for the boy, it saw the boy everywhere, he had nowhere to hide. The quarry was his father’s creature, and the fear of his sleeping father was transferred to the sleepless eye of the quarry; Grandfather II had brought his son there, to the edge of the top ledge, and the boy thought there was a general madness in the stubbornness with which people, obeying his father, dug a pit, and the spirals of the quarry ledges seemed like a reflection of his father’s will twisted into a spring. The boy went to the quarry because it was only there, in the center of the pupil, that he could he hide from the all-penetrating gaze; the pupil saw everything but not itself.

The work brigades found him in the morning; a sand bed had collapsed beneath him and he’d fallen; the body lay on the stones in a pile of sand. He had fallen by the wall they were dynamiting to find ore with eudialyte—a bright red transparent mineral; in daylight the whole side of the quarry was covered with red splotches. Eudialyte was called shaman’s blood by the local tribes, who believed it to be the traces of a battle with a dark shaman, conquered and secured into the cliff over the lake; the eudialyte now flared, as if the boy’s death had strengthened its glow, and it was impossible to chip out all the grains of the mineral from the ore, as the foreman had wanted to do at first, realizing what Grandfather II would see. He was afraid—the stone was a witness, the stone was an accuser.

Grandfather II went down into the quarry; the brigades were led out, and only the doctor was with him. Soon the camp warden came back up; the body was left on the stones, left to the doctor and orderlies. Grandfather II banished his son—the boy had tried once again to go against his will. Grandfather II did not believe the boy’s death was an accident, but he himself was the least at fault: he blamed it on impudence, disobedience, stubbornness, not knowing the value of life; now he sought reasons that forced the boy to do that, but he did not seek them in himself: someone had spoiled the boy, set him against his father, confused, bewitched, plunged him into madness; Grandfather II considered the destroyed toy camp a sign of madness, of spiritual illness.

Grandfather II banished the dead boy, returning to the memories of the obedient, proper son he had been just a few months earlier, and when he thought of the boy, he thought of the former boy; his son lay on the rocks amid the bloody shimmer of eudialyte, but Grandfather II no longer could see him. The eudialyte burned his eyes, eternal, indestructible, and he left the quarry, ordering the chief of construction to blow up the spot where his son died. They made vertical blast holes in order to slice off a thick layer, the dynamiters laid the charge, but when the roar of the boulders ceased and the dust and smoke were carried away by the wind, they all saw that the eudialyte vein was revealed as being bigger and more powerful; the fresh grains of it, not yet muddied by the cold and rain, glowed red in the gray rock. Grandfather II ordered a second blast, but the stone would not yield, merely showing deep cracks; after that, the camp commandant never looked at the north wall of the quarry, and even the observation platform was moved so that the place where the boy died could not be seen.

His son died in an accident; his wife died soon after: the two stillborn babies shortened her life, her strength had gone into pregnancies, births, and it turned out that the boy was the only thing keeping her in this world. Her life poured into him at birth, more than usual with mother and child; the boy, firstborn and only son, absorbed too much of his mother—not in looks or personality, but in the ability to live, the life force, and she was an accidental victim.

When he was ill, so was she—her inner state was a mirror of his; you could put two thermometers next to each other, and the mercury was always in the same place, as if only one person’s temperature had been taken. The mother seemed to have yielded life to her son; without the intervention of doctors and a caesarean birth he would have died in her womb, and so he lived illegally, on the margin; there was no place for him in life, life did not open for him, welcoming him, giving him a place, and so the boy was defenseless, without the protection everyone has as a birthright. Everything was dangerous and hazardous for him—nails, slippery ice, drafts; every accident, everything unforeseen or unprepared was attracted to him; the boy lived using his life strength faster than it could be replenished, and his mother—his mother depended on him, and when he died in the quarry, she did not survive it.

Grandfather II was left alone; he seemed not to have noticed his wife’s death, but in fact it changed him. He had met his wife before becoming the man he now was, sacrificing his son to the camp and the quarry; his wife remembered the former man, and her memory, which he had no control over even had he wished for it, was an obstacle, it held him back; their joint life created borders, limits for his inner changes.

Grandfather II had simply chosen her—in his insensitive male simplicity—and she married him for life until death, and the fact that her womb was dead and she no longer had children by him did not yet mean that their connection was lost; a woman creates a man not through her wishes but by the moral impossibilities that her presence entails. When the connection between a man and a woman is broken by her disappearance, the man can quickly fall apart morally, if his surroundings are conducive to that, because he no longer encounters the honesty of flesh, fidelity, and the woman no longer supports him invisibly, he no longer has the support of even the habit of her existence.

For Grandfather II the collapse was manifested in this manner: he moved entirely into the realm of death, now certain that only death was constant and not subject to randomness; he started testing people with death—will the person succumb or not—as if trying to understand why his son died.

At that time a group of kulak peasants arrived at the camp; they were not supposed to be used in the works—the order was to send them even farther, to the low reaches of the river not far from the town; the idea was for the kulaks to colonize a wild region, but anyone who was aware that downriver was just forest and tundra all the way to the ocean knew that colonize was just a euphemism.

The echelons arrived when the rivers had opened from the ice; just then there was a collapse in a recently started shaft.

Work stopped in the pit face; the geologists agreed that one more round of detonations would get them past the danger zone, and the collapsed rock could be reinforced, held by steel supports, welded with cement. But someone had to go into the pit and drill openings, five-meter blast holes for the charge; they couldn’t reinforce anything before the repeated round of explosions, because it would destroy the reinforcement.

The men who had survived the collapse refused to go; Grandfather II drove to the mine. Everyone thought he would threaten them with execution and wondered which death—bullet or rock—would triumph. But Grandfather II did not send the surviving miners into the pit; he stood at the opening, which even on a hot day sends out a cool dampness, inhaling the mineral smell of smashed shale mixed with the stink of explosives; water dripped from all the cracks, and rocks fell from the vault, and it seemed that underground the mountain’s heavy, slow mind moved damply; it did not avenge or threaten—it simply turned over, unable to comprehend its own existence. The growth of crystals, the movement of rock is measured in so many years that the stone would not notice human events; while we, going underground, enter compressed eras, find ourselves in a past so remote that the length of our lives is reduced to zero.

That is why it is so scary when stone separates, crumbles, comes alive, there is something that is not quite a natural catastrophe about it—it is ossified time falling apart, the very foundation of the world, what is supposed to be solid and hold the rest; you have to be a demiurge, a titan, to step into that catastrophe and find what inner resources are needed to withstand it.

I don’t know what Grandfather II was feeling as he looked into the opening; but he ordered the kulaks brought there, the ones who were supposed to be sent to the lower reaches of the river. They were brought over, still in their old clothes; the prisoners were as worn as objects can be, as if they’d been rubbed out on the wooden bunks, yet they stood casually, some buttoned up, some not, they stood too freely; Grandfather II ordered the announcement to be made—whoever takes the risk and enters the mine, drills the blast holes to create a second, artificial collapse, will not be sent to the tundra, but kept in the camp.

Grandfather II probably figured that if anyone did accept, he would die in the mine. But ten men headed by the former village elder, who had never seen a mine drill before, managed to move quietly through the shaft, freezing at every creak, drill the wall as indicated on the map, and return unharmed; death did not take the exiles.

Maybe Grandfather II would have kept his promise, but he learned there at the mine that all ten came from the same region as the carver who had made the whistle and had been sent to fell trees; the former elder even had time to be pleased that the camp warden knew their home places, he thought there might be a possibility of leniency in that—but Grandfather II was already in the car giving orders to prepare the next step.

All the exiles were taken along the embankment of the railroad under construction to the river, where they were loaded on barges; the convoy soldiers returned alone and they said nothing—the people were dropped off on an island and the tugboats and barges left; since then many others were sent there, some managed to survive and start a settlement, but no one knew anything about the fate of that first group; where the island was or what had happened.

About a year later Grandfather II went blind. In late spring when there is still snow on the tundra but the sun shines brightly, the snow, icy, sugary, brilliant, reflects the harsh light, and a haze of light hangs over the tundra. It does not envelop the eyes like fog, it burns them like a magnifying glass on wood; the flood of light, anticipating the high water, gives birth to an inflamed day, and the eyes become inflamed by the unnatural whiteness.

In late spring Grandfather II traveled by car to a distant village along the ice road, still unmelted and made by trucks, like a log road through the impassable tundra swamps. A stream undermined the ice, washed out the road, and Grandfather II’s car crashed, the concussed driver drowned, and Grandfather II was left in the tundra dozens of kilometers from anywhere.

It was not a great distance, a few days’ walk, but the sun was so strong, the snows had still not melted, and the rays of reflected light turned into razor blades; whiteness looked into Grandfather II’s eyes—not the blurred, myopic whiteness of snowfall but the morbid whiteness of sparkling ice that steals the color of the sky.

Nature’s white is blind, it has no depth or perspective as does black, for instance; white in the North is the profound color of nonexistence, the color of death, a color wall that removes the distinctions of closer and farther, and locks a person inside it. The world turns into a sphere without horizon, and eyes ache because while seeing they do not see, there is nothing to see except the color white, which drives you insane with its stolidity, its indivisibility into shades, its thing-like solidness—it feels as if you could tear it apart with your hands, chop it with an ax. You fall into a coloristic trance, into monotonous color madness; whiteness enters the visual nerve as a blinding injection, and only the emptiness of white remains, smooth and scorching.

In two days, Grandfather II went blind: the tundra took away his eyes. He was found by men sent from the village he was traveling to, they found him by accident: one of the men in the truck was a soldier of the “flying” squads that went out to catch fugitives; a lot of people tried escaping over the spring snow crust, and the soldier knew how to look and still protect his eyes from the sun and ice—through smoked glass; and through the smoked glass he saw a dark dot far from the road in a long declivity; if he had just been looking with his naked eye, even with his hand shading his eyes, the black dot would have been swallowed and dissolved by the glare.

Grandfather II almost died; he dared to test death on others and was thrown into it himself; he was pulled out, as if by his umbilical cord, by the sharp eyes of the searcher, but he paid for his salvation with blindness. His vision returned slightly, he nearly overcame the weakness, but then he lost his sight completely.

Now I knew what he always saw before him, the last thing his memory had retained—the color white; he tried to trick fate by inscribing characters upon the blank background; get back his son, and his vision would return, his past, too, and the years he did not see would vanish, as if they had never been.