Oblivion

PART 6

I still had to go to the river and find the exiles’ island—I had to travel the entire trajectory of Grandfather II’s fate; I felt that there, in that nook that even he did not know fully, was a limit; I called it the limit of oblivion.

I was stepping into a space where there were no witnesses. The island mentioned by the engraver was a point—a pulsating point where everything begins and where everything ends.

Bidding the engraver farewell, I left the town; I needed to hurry, as if a deadline loomed; I remembered my dream, the island of faces, the barge with prisoners and convoy guards, the closing doors of the holds; the time for wandering was coming to a close for me, the town was pushing me onto the road. The inner state I had maintained since the decision to learn everything about Grandfather II’s past was also running out; if you understand “inner state” to mean a readiness for perception, a lasting effort to be open to events, it also has a time limit which should not overstepped, otherwise, it’s all artificial respiration, self-inducement, and naked dutifulness.

I did not think about how I would return; the thought of returning would have turned my search for the island into a round-trip. But you couldn’t reach the island and then come back the same way—that contradicted its finality, the point’s absoluteness.

I headed to the river along the roadbed of the former railroad; I turned off at times, climbing up on the hills to look around: the gravel bed was low and offered no view. The landscape was the work of a demented soul, continually repeating the same word, line, motif; tundra lakes, swamps, and hills were so similar that the concept of continuity vanished: the locale held nothing that the gaze could recognize as new or different, and you could not tell if you were traveling or marching in place.

You could measure distance only by the remnants of camps. The barracks and watchtowers had rotted; the post with barbed wire had fallen. There were only the outlines, which were visible in the distance, but for those inside a former camp, the camp did not exist: just dirt and more dirt, hummocks and more hummocks, except for a porcelain isolator or a shard of brick on the ground. I picked up an isolator; just as a meteorite found in the tundra is recognized by its alienness— cosmic speed cast in metal—a piece of carved white porcelain, looking like a chess piece, was alien here, and the place did not want to hide it, it turned it in the way people turned in fugitives for a sack of flour.

The rails and sleepers had been removed from the embankment; only the bridges across rivers remained. The five-meter earth rampart had been built by the hands of prisoners; the earth lay so densely here that the rampart had taken on the flow and unobtrusiveness of ancient burial mounds in the steppe: they were simultaneously man-made and natural.

“Built by the hands of prisoners …” I said to myself; there was too much in those words of culture and not enough of real sensation; the embankment was no longer horrifying, did not make you grieve. Like any large-scale structure, it commanded astonishment for itself, to be seen as a single whole in which the efforts of individuals could not be found, representing a visible, embodied gesture of superhuman creative will.

I walked along the embankment; it was hard for me to realize that there was nothing in this embankment except the time spent by forced labor, except hundreds of thousands of wheelbarrows of dirt. And if the embankment had any scale, it was the scale of the meaninglessness of what was done.

The fact that the embankment has been abandoned, that there was no railroad, was not seen as a mistake but as the consequence of the original meaninglessness; the embankment was a false path, and all the human effort expended on this path was spent for real but for nothing—the path was made to take away these efforts, devour them, and no more.

I imagined the wheels of the winches turning, the smithies with water hammers, all those capstans, pulleys, cables, blocks, gears, rollers, axes combined into a mechanism wasting real human effort, dispersing it into the wind—the efforts of labor, thought, the intention to be. It could have been creative, could have moved something, aided something, become something in historical time—but it all had passed through the mill in the name of this goal that was detached from human life, and that’s what killed it.

I walked; the parts frequented by hunters and fishermen were behind me; I was in uninhabited places. The difference between a place that is visited a few times a month and a place where no one goes for years is marked: it’s not in the sense of primordial nature—that is naive and it merely substitutes for another, deeper feeling: the absolute absence of another human being. Where you by yourself are the human race, you feel a strange longing that is impossible in other places: a longing not for warmth or socializing, but for humans in the anthropological sense; a footprint in the sand by a brook can make you alert—you don’t know who the stranger is: a solitary prospector, a fugitive, a seeker of peace or revelation in the tundra—but you will follow his tracks because even the possible evil you might encounter will at least come from a creature of your own breed.

It must be this longing that brings people together in a place where meetings as a fact of life do not exist; where it is much more likely to miss each other and almost impossible to meet; where two people is already too many for the rarefied spaces.

One day I went up yet another hill; the cold wind scudded light clouds in fast waves, making the earth even more still. Suddenly I felt a quiver in one of the spider threads your gaze wraps around the visible; a few kilometers away I saw a man walking.

I knew it was a man, even though it was just a dark spot— you couldn’t see an animal at that distance; they blend in, live near the ground, feed on the ground, and their every step repeats their gait, which like rhythm in music, exists in the extension of the landscape; an animal lives in the horizontal, its body is extended in it, while a human is a vertical milestone; his movement makes everything around him change, creating a moving axis of coordinates.

A man; I was interested and turned so that I would intersect with him. A half hour later I could observe the stranger.

Attached to his backpack were a large watering can and a strange short-handled rake with very fine teeth. He would stop, move on a bit, then remove moss and lichen from sloping, rounded stones, and then sparingly pour water on them from the can.

He was not young, he moved without quite trusting his body but depending on it; thin, gray-haired, wearing worn oilcloth and swamp boots, weaponless but with rake and watering can; his eyes were focused on the ground.

I have encountered very different tramps in the tundra; some sought precious stones in the hillsides, others rooted around in abandoned settlements for hidden caches; still others collected mammoth tusks in riverbeds, or the remains of an AN-2 which crashed while bringing gold dust from a mine, or just wandering around in the hope of grabbing someone else’s find, whatever it was. There were seekers of ancient pagan temples; madmen who wanted to found a state; collectors of meteorites; and free interpreters of history, looking for traces of Hyperborea.

The man I met—his skills, his experience—suggested he was a prospector, seeking something real; the rake and watering can no longer surprised me, they were clearly tools in his search, but I didn’t know what he was looking for.

Catching up with him, in a long declivity covered by hills from the embankment, I stumbled across a skull. It is impossible to dig a grave in a swamp, but here, in a valley between cliffs, stony soil had accumulated; in a few places it had sunk in even rectangles, the tundra foxes had burrowed in them, and the entrances were revealed by the trampled earth and tufts of fur; the skull was by one of the dens—the foxes had scratched it out of the depth of their burrow.

The fox burrows went into the softened dirt of camp graves; now, when my eyes knew what to look for, I found a rib, a vertebra, a tibia in the moss and rocks; the foxes had extracted and scattered them; the small rodents that destroyed bones were the foxes’ prey, so the bones remained; dirt filled the pores of the bones, which made them dark, primordial, and the rain could not wash them clean. A large orange-cap mushroom grew near a broken collarbone; the cap was contorted by the sun, revealing a sticky and slimy sponge underneath, and this bloodless flesh, which did not know pain, belonging to the lowest kingdom of living organisms, was repulsive; I remembered the mushroom near Grandfather II’s grave; white, doughy, like an old man’s wrinkled ear; human flesh rotted away, but the flesh of mushrooms was renewed, growing from the tiniest spores, and humans were very fragile compared to mushrooms.

We met at the bottom of the hill; the stranger was smoking and boiling water on a smokeless fire; I was walking, the sun shone brilliantly, but inside me was the darkness of the foxhole; the foxes waited for me to leave and leaped up on the hillock behind me, as agile as ghosts; they froze amid the stones, low to the ground, pointy-eared—not animals but hatchlings of tundra gods that feed on the misery of others, the aborigines of pestilential places.

The stranger was armed, after all; he was clever, people would think he was unarmed if they didn’t see a rifle, but he had a handgun, which he aimed at me while shading his eyes from the sun. The gun was no threat; I was in that state I had felt when the black dog attacked me—the man, sensing my weakness, put away the gun, gesturing at the stone slabs. He’d raked the turf and washed off what remained with water; now the water was evaporating on the slabs.

The light stone revealed chiseled drawings; some the size of my hand, others bigger than a man’s height. There were rolling wheels—suns with spokes; flowers with four petals, like a cross; large and small fish, swimming in various directions; crooked and straight lines, furrows in the stone; flattened beavers, the way skins are spread out; dozens of deer wandering in a long herd; hunters following the deer and catching them with unnaturally long spears; chains of bear tracks, birds with bony wings and harpy beaks; animals that look like an animated saw with a snail’s head; boats and snowshoes; dogs turned upside down as if in space orbit; triangular eyes with oval pupils; a gaping circle—the way the vagina is depicted in anatomical atlases; a round woman with short legs and arms, and inside her, head down, a child floats weightlessly; a man with an incredibly long, snake-like penis that makes him resemble a spermatozoon; axes and oars; animals, people, whales, pulled together by threads like umbilical cords growing out of one another, a mixture of differences, miscegenation of everything living.

The drawings were alive, breathing like fish roe in the warm water of shallows; it seemed they even had a fragrance, spicy, voluptuous; the figures and ornaments met, combined, flew apart, and it was a single act of creating life; the power of the drawings made the earthy black of the fox den vanish from within me; the drawings were not art, not depictions—they were elemental, as if the existence of the people who had made them was transferred completely, without remnant, into them.

They were petroglyphs; I knew they were occasionally found in the tundra here; they were left by tribes that had lived seven or eight thousand years before our era. But at the moment I wasn’t thinking about that.

There is a special sense of day in the tundra; a day is an enclosed space, something three-dimensional; in the tundra, where you need not glasses but binoculars, where the summer sun almost never sets, this room of the day is particularly spacious; here in the high latitudes where the meridians almost meet and the parallels are small circles, day reigns, an enormous vault, a single day for the entire world; astronomically that is not correct but that is the true impression.

The stranger gave me a mug; the overbrewed tea was bitter, but the bitterness gently and willfully prompted my heart, making it beat harder and faster, invigorating me and giving me strength.

“You’re not following me?” the man asked.

Despite his gun, he was afraid; he would not have hurt me and he knew it.

“People follow me,” the man said. “Think I’ll lead them to the petroglyphs.” He pointed to the drawings. “You can get money for them, if you can break them from the stone and get them out.”

The light and the shadows lessened at last; the stone suns dimmed and the earth’s darkness melted away. The tension of feeling eased and I saw the man clearly, in full detail.

He had cancer: his face seemed to be inflated from inside, like the caricatures made by street artists, exaggerating lips, cheeks, all the flesh of the face; the overgrown flesh of his lips sagged, the cheeks covered his eyes, the mouth was double in length, and not a single hair grew on his smooth sausage skin.

“This is from radiation,” he said. “What’s inside my body is worse. The gun—it was given to me as an award—is for shooting myself when I can’t stand it anymore.”

My unexpected comrade was a military man; long ago he had looked for places in this tundra for underground nuclear tests; he had come from a region with forests and did not know that the tundra could make you lost as well, like a forest, but in a different way: the forest changes where the light is coming from, confuses tracks, while the tundra is open, you can see everything, but suddenly you look around, nothing but hillocks, and your mind, busy with thoughts, has not retained any orientation markers.

And so, lost in the tundra, he found his first petroglyphs, signs of the sun, rolling sun wheels; later, when he was sick, after the surgery, after the chemotherapy, the former soldier returned to these parts, because the drawings chiseled in stone seemed to be the most essential things he had ever encountered; he did not collect petroglyphs, he did not make copies, he simply looked for them, following the path of the ancient artists, and gave the drawings a reason for existing— he looked at them.

We drank chifir, the extra-strong tea brew; I asked if it was possible to find someone who remembered this area from decades ago. He said that there were a few nomadic families left in the tundra, who had escaped being forced into a reindeer-breeding kolkhoz; now others tried to show the reindeer to tourists for money, so they moved deeper into the tundra and shot at helicopters that tried to land by their tents. They had no radios, nothing connected them to other people; they accepted only him—sick and looking for ancient drawings for their own sake; at this time of year I could probably run into them in the middle reaches of the river. There was also a village with descendants of the exiled prisoners, it was even farther; he had not been there in close to ten years, and when he was there, people were leaving, abandoning their houses.

The chifir was gone, the fire went out; we embraced, he did not ask me about anything and moved on along the slope, and I went back to the embankment and for a long time as I walked I could see his figure moving along the hills.

Three days later I came out at the former port, where the ruined railroad led; I came out by the river. The water flowed amid low banks in shallows, unattractive, reflecting the gray sky, with a paucity of reflections, sparkle, or light, and the river’s width was somehow lost in the rounded banks and unhurried current.

Hundreds of buoys lay in the shallows; they were made of plastic, like fishing floats, metal, and wood, like the top of a lighthouse—the entire history of river boating in one place. The river changed its course, washed up new shallows where never-flowering water lilies, trembling like a bird’s webbed foot, started to grow, banks collapsed, revealing the corpses of prehistoric animals, ancient deer, and time was broken open like a hunk of bread in those cliffs—pick it up, run your fingers through the stone age; the river changed its course, but the buoys no longer followed the changes, did not mark its depth, did not stretch out its thread, did not huddle in the dark; when navigation ceased here, the river returned to the complete control of the fish, the fin—forerunner of the oar— replaced the propeller, and the river waters were no longer troubled by the rotation of twisted blades.

Near the shore, only pilings were left of docks; they held trees brought by the river, the rubbish of high waters, and water was sucked beneath them with a slurp and whistle; farther along, in a broad cove formed in an old river bed, barges and tugs sat on the bottom.

Usually an abandoned ship is like an abandoned house; but the barges did not elicit that feeling; they were enormous rusty hulks, grim and clumsy arks; they sank slowly, pushing up a boggy ooze with their weight; the paint came off them unevenly, in layers—you could see that some painters did their work honestly, undercoating first, and others did not— and below the crumbling paint you could see a second layer, a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh; the aging metal was crumbling, rusted chunks of the sides fell into the boat, but the paint layers held on to one another; the barges were half-drawn, they had been used along the river three or four times beyond the limit of the metal’s exhaustion, repainting but not repairing, and the metal gave up first, while the baked paint survived.

The tugs were to the side of the barges, six boats: “ … omsom … lets,” “Sha …. ter,” “Gornya … ” “Pogranichn … Zapol … ,” “Kap … tan P … asolov,” and “Boe … ” is what could be read on their sides, as if the names were being transmitted by Morse code with a bad connection.

I walked from one to another and found the only dinghy that looked seaworthy; on the second tug I found oars, on the third a half-barrel of pitch to caulk the sides. I also discovered a rock-hard bag of salt, and I took it—I was sorry to see salt wasted; salt was the missing ingredient in local fresh water and skies, and I tossed it into the box on the dinghy.

I set off, the dinghy was too big for one person to steer normally, so I paddled to the middle of the river and let myself go with the flow; the boat settled, sucked up water once again, and the river carried me away from the old tugs, the buoys on the shore, and opened up a view of the hills beyond the bend; the tilt of the land bore its waters to the Arctic Ocean, and I followed gravity; there was no wind, and there was no time, either—the river had become time, and time inexorably headed for the river’s mouth.

Days passed; bare hills, no people, quiet, the measured flow of water, lulling me, telling me that everything in the world was peaceful, calm, and smooth. I made notches in the oar to mark the days, but then I dropped it in the water and it floated away; I ate very little, I wasn’t moving, using energy, and I lost my appetite; sometimes it seemed that I would soon become ethereal, transparent, or turn into a young water spirit; fish looked at me from the water, settling into the wake, as if awaiting my transformation. A two-meter pike accompanied me for a while—pikes live for hundreds of years and this one probably remembered people, fishermen, sailors; then it swam off to the side, and once again I saw only water and hills.

That is why I noticed the remains of a bridge—the river had once been crossed by a second branch of the railroad meant to extend to a future settlement in the tundra which had never been built—I first did not recognize it, that is, my eye did not accept it. I saw something odd, unnecessary, out of harmony, a mistake; that must be how animals see what humans build.

In the shallows, where the current is not strong even at high water, stood crates filled with earth and stones, looking like crosssections of log cabins; on the left bank rose the cones of chums, or tepees, essentially the enlarged hats of nomads, negating the idea of a house; wherever you toss your hat, there is your hearth. The area was hilly and the chums followed the lines of the bare hills as a wave follows another.

I landed close to the settlement. Below the railroad embankment, steam engines and trains were parked. They must have been abandoned when the bridges were washed away on the line, and now they were rusting and sinking into the tundra; strange only at first glance, it was the trains and not the chums that seemed a chronological inaccuracy.

The steam engines stood there like broken time machines, which they were in other places, where the railroad truly did accelerate time, opening a way through it, where the steam engine truly was seen as a symbol of the future happening now, where tracks, semaphores, and stations connected the scattered times of a big country into a shared ensemble. But here, in the middle of the tundra, those mechanisms did not work; here it was still the time before steam engines, time before whatever would be; I remembered the steam engine from my dream—this was its dead end, the end of its trip, and the tundra, indifferent to the cumbersome machine, extended itself tranquilly and in its entirety, not knowing about divisions into different sides of the world.

Near the chums, hunks of meat hung from sanded poles; the smoke from the campfire fed on wet willow was everywhere, more than was needed to smoke the meat and chase away midges and flies; it seemed it was intended to permeate people, to teach them to stop the flow of tears by willpower or to lose the ability to cry completely; the wind blew in steady gusts, and in rhythm with the gusts the coals flared red under the damp branches dripping boiling juice.

Reindeer grazed nearby; they walked around the pole, two or three hundred head—they had to be counted by the head because below their bodies melded into a single multilegged body, and each back was a bulging muscle; their gait resembled water flowing in a whirlpool. The deer walked by the pole to be free of the midges; the shepherd set the leader in motion and the herd followed. I imaged how it must look from the air and realized that I was looking at a clock, a clock without divisions; the pole was the only vertical point for dozens of kilometers, casting no shadow on the cloudy day, and around it flowed the seasons, measured by the height of the deer antlers.

People appeared suddenly, stepping out from behind the chums; the nomads did not mix blood with outsiders, and they were very similar, a single person in different ages, a bisexual creature as infant, girl, man, old man, old woman; one person, or they were all as one; their faces the color of tea, dressed in clothing that combined fabric with deerskins, they seemed to be living in order to perform the ritual of becoming one with animals, and I probably looked defective to them, lacking an animal half.

Seeing that I was alone, they invited me to the fire and fed me boiled deer meat; there was no rejection and no interest. They asked if I had any salt; I brought the bag from my dinghy and they changed, surrounded me; in this world devoid of material objects I realized salt was the power of bones, the power of what is solid in man, and the nomads felt it, too; now I could ask questions—we had become close, united by the salt, and I asked if they remembered anything about when the barges and people first appeared on the river, many, many years ago.

I was told the story of the barge caravan, not as a myth, not as a legend about floating river houses, yet still I felt that the man was talking from a distant shore, not because he was essentially indifferent but because the subject of the story was like a natural phenomenon or as a phenomenon of a world so alien that the world of nature was much closer to him.

The voice of the grandfather, who saw the barges full of people on the April river after the ice broke but did not understand what was happening, directed the grandson’s vocal cords; the nomad standing on the shore must have thought these were arks, entire worlds containing the absolute in life’s laws, and if some people threw other, weaker ones into the water, then these were the real laws of those worlds, this was their truth; thus, if all of Christopher Columbus’s men had limped, the natives would have probably imagined a land beyond the sea of limping men. And how could a man born where old people were sometimes left to die if the family was moving to new site, how could he disagree with throwing the weak overboard? I entered inside the viewpoint of the storyteller, like entering a room with a wide window, and looked out from there—but with my own vision, recognizing what my unwitting guide could not.

The barges docked at a big island in the middle of the river—that was more convenient for the tugboat captains; the people were left on the island, on the long beach where there was nothing but driftwood; it was a warm sunny day and the prisoners, even though the guards fired on them, jumped into the river to bathe. The water darkened from the filth of several thousand men, remnants of clothing that had been worn in the cramped holds where men stood shoulder to shoulder floated in the water; the icy water chilled them, and the men quickly ran back on shore, running along the sand, embracing, huddling for warmth.

The water, melt water of yesterday’s snows, water of new life, washed away the long journey, the rust and filth, and the sun played on the waves so that it seemed fish would appear to lay eggs at any moment; but the sunlight was brief, the nascent day was short, and the few who still had the strength to risk their lives jumped into the water, clutching trees floating by or floes of bottom ice, covered in silt and water grasses, that had bobbed to the surface and were carried by the current; the guards fired, the tight chilling air whipped eardrums, nostrils flared at the gun smoke, acrid and sharp.

Then the tugboats and barges left, and the men remained on the island. Night came, and in the morning it started to snow—storm clouds rolled in from the north; the snow was thick, it put out the feeble fires of wet logs; the exiles sought shelter in gullies, tried to dig burrows in the sand and add some protection from the snow, but the snow penetrated everywhere, even inside the hollow tree trunks where people squeezed in; the nomads could not cross the river in their light, flat-bottomed boats wrapped in skins, and so they could only watch the smoke and ashes thicken over the island, how flames flared and died out; for a few days while it snowed they heard screams, and then, on the coldest night, they could hear only moans; the snow stopped, the fog dispersed, but there was no one left alive on the island; you couldn’t see the bodies, people had hidden as best they could and died in earthen dugouts, digging with their hands, with branches, the few tools they had been given.

When the river calmed down, someone went over to the island; there was a stench, birds had gathered; they brought back sacks of flour (the exiles were given food, but no dishes), but they did not eat it; in subsequent years the island was flooded several times, the bones were washed away; only rarely did holes open up, with dead men lying deep in the permafrost.

The next settlers—and many traveled along the river—did not ask about their predecessors; they traveled past the island without noticing it; the island remained as it had been—a flat earthen pancake in the channel, and only the nomad family I met passed on the memory of what had happened there.

The ones I talked to could not say where the island was; I had passed sand spits, shallows, other islands—and they were all the same, all inconstant, all vanished and then were reborn with high waters; islands without features, islands of empty expanses; just islands.

I pushed off from the rocks in my dinghy; the current picked me up, and the people by the chums watched me go the way they had once watched those who were deposited on the island; the river, perturbed by the piers of the former bridge, calmed down, the rapids sank to the bottom, and the dinghy sailed steadily, as if propelled by flying clouds, the movements of the stars, the air currents high in the sky, reflected in the water.

A few days later I saw houses on a knoll; that was the village of exiles. The houses seemed transported by a mirage, an optical illusion; as if actually they were somewhere thousands of kilometers from here, near a small river and woods, and it was the play of light in the atmosphere this far north that placed them on a knoll where they could not be.

I left the dinghy and took a path that zigzagged up the hill. The village, a dozen houses, did not seem completely abandoned: clearly someone had walked down the road, splotches of spilled water dried in the sand. But the weeds were too thick in the gardens, the windows had been shut up too long ago, the nails were falling out of the wood; and most important, there was every indication that people had stopped caring about the place where they lived. Besides which, I couldn’t understand how there was dirt, how there were weeds here in the tundra; where did the soil come from?

At the well, which is always kept clean in villages, dogs had dug themselves a hollow, a dusty hole full of fur and scraps of bone; a torn wire hung down, easy to brush against, the pole was so crooked I longed to straighten it; every object in the village asked for human help: supporting, straightening, sawing, lifting. People here seemed to have forgotten all the verbs for creative activity, the sound of a hammer or the song of a saw, and had forgotten about themselves, too: being there was intolerable. There is a special color, the color of old fence boards that have been splashed all winter with the snowy mush underfoot, and in the spring the mud dries, turning earthy gray; the color of carelessness and indifference. The whole village was speckled with it, as if it had been sown over many years of drizzle; someone had hung a lantern by the gate and now its glass cover was filled with rainwater and the canvas wick bore filigree rust crystals. What was intolerable was not the neglect itself but that life could accommodate itself to neglect, take on its image, become identical to it.

One garden was tended: strangely, it was entirely planted with potatoes, leaving only a narrow walk to the house, every bed filled with potatoes, as if nothing else grew anywhere in the village. Someone was inside the house, smoke came out of the crumbling chimney that dropped pieces of brick onto the mossy roof, but the windows were shuttered tight.

Behind the house there was a creaking, grinding noise, metal on stone, ringing and then grinding again; the blue twilight that made the air thicken as it grew colder without losing its transparency settled on the village, and each screech caused goose bumps, warning me not to come closer—only forged steel could sound like that. Three apple trees by the house—how much effort had it taken to grow them here!— had gone wild, all their force going into offshoots and foliage, and the branches untouched by buds dropped brown leaves onto the ground; the color of dead leaves, the color of rotting apples was everywhere, giving the house and ground an aging, debilitated air. Old pruning cuts painted with pitch remained on the trees, but the pitch had cracked and fallen off, and even though the tree had grown a tight leathery circle around the cuts, the trunks were already crumbling and the roots were probably dying off. The wires holding branches that threatened to fall off dug too hard into the wood, cutting the bark.

I went into that small fallow garden, engulfed in the bitter-ash smoke that comes from a badly built or deteriorating stove; it was getting colder and the leaves fell less frequently, as if their twigs were growing torpid.

Behind the house, at a grinding machine made from a converted foot-operated sewing machine, sat a shaggy old man; I saw him from the back, broad and hunched, half covered by long, tangled, gray hair, with apple leaves nestled in them; I thought at first that he was a werewolf with claws, but then I realized they were fingernails, yellow, curved, broken or crookedly cut. The old man was sharpening an axe on a long handle, a lumberjack’s axe; it was badly chipped, someone had used it to chop up boards of an old structure and kept hitting nails; long streams of reddish sparks caused by the uneven blade edge on the whetstone flew in the air, illuminating nothing but merely sewing through the dark; the wheels turned and the dry belts creaked.

The old man, the sharpening wheel—rougher than needed for fine sharpening—and the axe; I went farther along, not ready to call out to the man, when I saw a second one. He was on the porch steps, bent over a fishing net on his knees, and the same kind of thick, unkempt hair covered his face. The old man was mending the net, unwinding rough thread from a spool the size of his hand, making loops with a curved faceted needle and muttering to himself—his beard stirred as if a mouse had moved into it. A third old man, also on the porch, just as gray and shaggy, was carving a boat frame; the wooden piece had a bend with an inconvenient elbow, and the old man clumsily moved his long knife along it.

I greeted them. The three old men turned to me, dropping their work. I still couldn’t make out their faces: their hair fell over their eyes. Their fingernails belonged to animals or birds, and their hair grew so thickly it could have been moss or weeds.

The old men were silent and uncomprehending. Telling them apart by their clothing was difficult: their padded jackets and trousers had not been washed in so long they had taken on the same indefinite color of grime, and new spots vanished among the old; the one with the axe had a scar across his palm, the one mending the net had a thimble that had become ingrown on a finger of his left hand and in the finger of the right, a fishhook that had jabbed his calloused skin, yellow as candle stearin, was hanging as if from the lip of an old fish; and the one who had been whittling wore a darkened ring.

“The dogs got themselves lost,” said the fisherman.

The man spoke as if they were still just three; as if they had always lived the three of them and a fourth never was and never could be, and thus I did not fit into his field of comprehension and he might not figure out for several days that there was a stranger among them. Their solitude together was older than they were, time had vanished within it, and the old men had aged not only with the years but because the days of their lives resembled one another, and the days did not bring new impressions but merely subtracted old ones from their memory.

“The dogs got themselves lost,” the fisherman repeated, and the other two replied, “Lost.”

Their voices were like old things being used after a long hiatus; the sounds did not fit together properly, hanging on by hook or crook, dangling like a loose button. They sounded like dead men who had acquired new flesh but could not adjust the new voice to the old words.

The man with the axe leaned against his sharpener, the fishermen stuck the needle in his jacket, and the whittler put the knife away inside his boot. Wind came from the higher reaches of the river, the wind moved the old men’s hair, pushing it from their eyes.

The men were blind; their minds were damaged and their gazes were stopped like a run-down clock. The lens, cornea, iris, the entire eye was whole, the visual core of the brain was whole, but the mind refused to allow the visible world in, refused to see. The eyes were those of a sleeping man whose lids were lifted without rousing him, and the pupils were like binoculars turned inward, into the head, the dark cosmos of dreams that is not accessible to the waking.

I waited, not knowing what time of day was in their heads, if they had any time at all, at what point they lost their sight, if they remembered the house, the apple trees, the village, the river, the land on both sides, if they understood where I was and who they were.

They were brothers, and no longer able to see, they came to resemble one another even more. Their faces fell into neglect; the unconsciousness that annihilated their lives also annihilated their distinguishing features. All that was left in their faces was what had been placed there by their parents’ blood: their faces had been taken over by their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and it seemed those figures would start coming out, opening the flesh like a door, and exiting one at a time, and once the last one was out, gaping emptiness would replace the face.

The old men finally understood that a stranger had come to the village; they surrounded me and ran their hands over my face and body; I stood and thought that I had truly reached the limit of memory; the blindness of the exiled old men, the blindness of Grandfather II all combined; this place did not exist in geography, an accidental traveler would not find this village, he would miss it; this was a country inhabited by people from the days of Grandfather II, an entire country that had protected itself from the present through blindness and then became trapped in it. While the old men molded my appearance for themselves with their hands, I thought about how not to linger here and destroy the insularity of this world.

Essentially, the old men had one memory for the three of them; separate them, and each one’s memory would not be enough for a complete description of the events, so they often spoke simultaneously, creating a collected field of memory that lived only in words. I asked about the apple trees, impossible to imagine here near the Arctic Circle, planted in permafrost that would not allow roots to penetrate, and they told me that the whole village stood on soil that was brought in, stolen— the exiles were not allowed to leave their place of exile.

For a dozen years the people secretly took boats to the upper reaches, where there were forests and soil, they chopped down trees, made rafts to float them down to build huts and sent soil on the rafts as well; it took ten years before the first garden bed appeared in the village—before that, the exiles had lived on imported food products and by hunting. The authorities had set up a cordon on the river to overturn the rafts—they allowed them to cut down trees but not to take away soil; the reindeer herders even wondered if the exiles ate the soil, they were bringing so much, and they couldn’t understand what for, since for nomads soil could not give birth to anything but reindeer moss. The villagers might have given up on the idea but most of them were kulak peasants and they put their entire organizing force, their passion for life into a calculated gathering of soil, real soil, without pity for themselves or others; they called the local soil mud, which it was, a runny liquid of mud on ice.

Later, when the village stood on fertile soil, some of the exiles were taken to town, that is, to the camp where Grandfather II had once been warden, where they started a botanical garden, planting flowers in heated greenhouses to show how new life was burgeoning in the Far North, and in the polar night prisoners in the barracks could see the glowing glass cubes behind three layers of barbed wire. The garden was part of the camp economy, and the locals hated it for devouring heat and light, a garden for baskets of red flowers to greet official airplanes that instantly turned to glass in the frost; high-ranking guards brought the flowers home later, and anything left over was taken to the statue of Lenin.

A war ensued over the right to work in the garden, in the steamy heat of the greenhouse, and the criminals won; the guards couldn’t do anything about it; the only gardener who knew the job, a former custodian of an arboretum, was soon killed by a live wire, and the garden began to fail; prisoners started eating the flowers, chopping them up with a knife like greens and boiling them in tin cans. The camp administrators, who could not retreat—the botanical garden was now celebrated in the ministry, they promised to send specialists, expand the garden, and turn it into a museum of polar agronomy and gardening—the administrators decided to gather the peasant exiles and staff the garden with them. They simply sent a convoy of guards to the exile village and, without arresting them, the leader picked out ten people to bring back to the camp.

The garden had trees—apple, cherry, plum; in winter they were wrapped in burlap, with straw piled around the trunks, but the burlap and straw were stolen to make clothing warmer; they had to keep a watchman by the trees. They were still too small to bear fruit, so when high-ranking visitors came, fruits were hung on the branches in any season; the fruits were counted, so that the staff would not appropriate any before returning them in compliance with an inventory list.

One time a guest decided to eat an apple and discovered the thin thread that tied its stem to the branch, and angrily threw the small Golden Chinese apple, glowing like a paper lantern, somewhere into the grass; the official was insulted, he had believed with childlike sincerity that he was in a polar paradise where trees bear fruit twelve months a year, and while he was used to human trickery, and an expert on faking reports himself, he was unpleasantly surprised to see that even nature can be involved in deceit. He walked around a few more trees, muttering “I didn’t expect this, I didn’t expect this,” as if the trees had pinned the fruit on themselves like false medals in order to greet him; one of the exiles assigned to the garden later picked up the apple the guest had tossed.

They wanted to eat the apple, it was the first fruit the exiles had held in their hands in many years; they were not trusted to hang the fruits on the trees. The very shape of it—the rounded ripeness—sated their hungry palms that had forgotten everything but tools; the exiles passed around the apple, as if it had just been born in the straw, passed it around and consumed it with their eyes—a case when a metaphor becomes the literal description of what happens: the apple was spiritual nourishment, food for the eyes, and there was enough for all of them.

One of the peasants, who was considered a sage, though this word is imprecise, was a reader and interpreter of the Scriptures, the kind of man who becomes a leader of a small peasant sect of somewhat twisted fanatics. If any of the educated prisoners talked to him about paleontological finds, about animals from other eras whose remains allow us to re-create the history of the earth and disprove the Bible, he would reply: “The Lord thought about you learned men as well when He created the world, he threw in some toys to keep you busy.” Among his fellow villagers who were exiled with him, his intellect was revered, for he had a unique way of understanding appearances and reality. This reader, this sect member-to-be, understood what had occurred: just as Christ had fed thousands with five loaves, he said, so are we, many, eating from one fruit and it is not diminished. For it not to be diminished ever, let us save it and send it back to the village—they stubbornly called the settlement in the tundra the village—and let them plant it in the soil so the fruit shall beget more fruit.

I could understand the peasant, even though I did not know peasant labor; I grew up together with the dacha apple trees and lived half the year by the apple calendar; I remember my childhood when the spring frosts occurred, and bonfires were lit in all the orchards, the light frosty fog mixing with smoke hugging the windless ground, and the trembling, flowing, warmed air enveloped the trees, protecting the buds. On a cold night smells unleash their invisible fans, but on a night like that the apple blossoms smelled of the bonfires, and it seemed that it was the fragrance of the stars, the fragrance of promise.

In August came the unremitting thudding—straw was placed under the trees, but the apples were too heavy, too ripe, and the straw did not soften the blow completely; apples fell, during the day the sound was muffled, but at night it seemed that a chronometer was beating in the garden, that a different time was beginning, the time of ripeness. And when I later read about the Transfiguration of the Lord, this incident helped me to understand it as much as I could: that old image of the apple orchard in August on the threshold between summer and autumn; the Transfiguration occurred when His time had come.

The apple is the fruit of time; and even though it is not said that Adam and Eve had eaten of the apple, what other fruit could have embodied the unknown fruit of the tree of knowledge in a painting? Human time began with the apple— Seth begat Enos, Enos begat Cainan.

So the old peasant ordered them to send the apple to the exile village in order that apples would grow there, he was trying to spark the time of the new village, the way you start a motor, the village that arose on carted-in soil, to put down roots in the place where it appeared by accident, by the will of those who sent the exiles; some settlements, even though a hundred years old, stand on bare earth, as if the huts had just been knocked together, while others accumulate time, grow into it.

And now the three old men told me: we had a reason for sharpening the axe today. We’ve decided to chop down three old apple trees: they no longer give fruit, we have no firewood, and we don’t have the strength to take apart the houses. Chop down the trees for us—you are a stranger, they don’t mean anything to you; you will leave, and we will have fire and warmth.

The old man handed me the axe with its long handle; an old tub with iron hoops was placed under the roof gutter, and since I didn’t know what to do, I moved toward it and leaned on it.

I told the old men that I would not chop down the trees and promised to gather driftwood by the river; then they said, cut our hair, and the fisherman handed me scissors, just like the ones on the wall at the dacha when Grandfather II suggested cutting off all my hair; darkened, charcoal colored, and ancient—you could tell from the shape of the scissors, which made me think people in the past cut fabric differently, touched objects differently, saw differently.

I froze; I thought that cutting their hair would be preparing them for death; they also asked for soap, and imagining its fragrance of artificial freshness, chemical cleanliness—the last cleanliness for them—I felt fear; but then I washed each of them in the barrel with rainwater, cut off their long matted hair, and the old men, changed into white cotton underwear, started touching one another, using one another as mirrors.

I brought them driftwood, sawed and chopped it into logs; the old men sat, getting used to their new selves, and they couldn’t, the power of adjusting had waned in them, so they just listened to the whine of the saw, the ringing sound of the axe on the tarry wood, and those sounds—the sounds of beginnings, work, construction—seemed to reach them less and less.

I did not ask them about the island; the past seemed very fragile and unstable to me; touch something in the past and there would be a collapse of honed memory and the heart that had lived with pain would grieve again.

The old men were silent, and I left; words of farewell would not have reached them. The dinghy picked up the bank current and sailed past quickly, the houses on the shore vanished in the twilight, the big apple moon cast shimmering light on the water, and I pointed the dinghy’s nose along the moonlight path.

I sailed all night; the river carried the boat over shallows and whirlpools, over the backs of fish; in the morning when a cold fog rose from the river bays, I saw the island.

I recognized it—rounded, unsightly, dividing the river in two; surrounded by fog, it seemed to have been born in the thickening of river evaporation and would vanish when the sun rose; the green shaggy locks of bottom grasses, the streams of the current, all moved toward it, everything pointed at it; it rose from the waters like the back of a whale. The dinghy poked into sand and I stepped on shore; the footprint etched in the sand immediately filled with water.

The island was just a surface, an oval; it felt as if the land had been cut out of the middle of Asian steppes where nomads traveled, bringing along their history, which existed only in the memory of the storytellers, a history that could be rolled and unrolled like a yurt; the land there was virgin soil not only because it was never touched by a plow—only human settlement gives a place existence in time, and where people never stopped time never began, and those places, like the island on which I stood, were not part of shared human memory.

Grass and occasional shrubs of dwarf birch grew on the island; you could see it all, there were no hills, no valleys. If I had hoped to find something, now I saw it was pointless: what had first been a dot on the map now had its real scale but remained just as virtual.

I walked around the island; the fog had lifted and a black kite scavenger appeared in the sky; it circled the island, then came lower, and dove down.

There was a black hole ahead.

A hundred steps more and I could see that it was an actual hole: the water must have seeped in, washing away the soil, creating a funnel with uneven edges, and moss fell into it in raggedy drapes. This pit in the middle of the flatness of the island was the whole point of my trip; it was the only mark, the only opening in the floating ground that the ground could not smooth over, and it beckoned dangerously and terribly. Something had happened inside the island, the ground had opened, from the bottom up.

The closer I came the stronger was the cold that blew from the hole—not imaginary cold arising from anxiety or fear, but real cold. It chased away the weak warmth of the northern summer, it chilled the blood, but also weakened, so that in it ghost smells, corpse smells slowly thawed; they floated, moved by waves of cold, and it seemed that I was approaching ancient, snow-covered ashes.

Hearing me, the kite flew out of the funnel; it had something in its beak, I couldn’t tell what; it rose higher, heavily gaining height, and flew in wide circles, seeing from above what I could not see: the bottom of the hole. The black bird drew the same funnel in the air, as if putting a spell on the wind spout or, on the contrary, as if it could not overcome the hole’s pull; the black bird, the diving scavenger, a creature that rots from inside and for which therefore corpses present no danger—I was afraid to think what it had it its beak, what it had found in the hole, but I continued.

I stopped a few steps away from the edge; I could see the walls of the hole, layers of ice mixed with soil, the walls were carved by water, but the permafrost did not melt, it simply floated, icing over, smooth and slippery; going to the edge was a mistake—the soil spread, revealing ice, the slope was steep, but it was impossible to remain within three steps and not look at the bottom: I had the feeling that if I went back for poles and ropes the hole would close and vanish, that you could look into it only the way you came, without any hope of survival.

Carefully, millimeters at a time, I moved closer to the lip of the hole; the funnel, like extended throat spasms, drew me in; the world was large, the pit was small, but close up it did not seem that way: its smallness was the dangerous smallness of jaws that would increase with every swallowed piece until it was the size of half the world and devoured the other half. For now, it waited, hiding on a remote deserted island, gathering strength, but the carrion-eating kite already knew where to go.

I do not remember looking over the edge; I was falling into the hole and falling into the dark hole inside me; the very ground of consciousness, so familiar, so reliable that you don’t feel it, suddenly faded, and darkness breathed beneath it; when you close your eyes, your inner gaze always finds some light, perhaps weak and distant, but there was no light here at all: it was as if my inner vision had been taken, my consciousness blinded, and I did not feel my fall to the bottom.

What happened next did not take place on the border between reality and delirium, nor alternating between reality and delirium; I was in both states simultaneously; blood from the gash in my hand made by an ice shard flowed onto the ice. The blood was warm but the ice did not melt; the funnel deepened, resembling a well, the circle of bright sky moved off, narrowed, and a black spot circled inside it—the kite. Around me were the pecked-over bodies of animals—foxes, wolves—all those that had crossed the frozen river to find fortune in this gully and then fell inside; the birds fed on the bodies, they were the only ones who could go down into the hole and come out again; the permafrost kept the bodies from rotting, the animals were curled up, their bodies diminishing in size, and it seemed that these children, kits and cubs, had been killed here in the hole-trap.

The dead animals—bird claws had ripped open the belly of one fox and undigested tundra mice fell out of the intestines, as if the fox had not eaten them but was pregnant with them— distracted me, did not let me see the funnel in its entirety, to see what had attracted the animals. The walls were uneven, there were charred logs poking out, and there were logs on the bottom, old logs brought by the water; there was order in how they lay, and I realized that someone had tried to create a dugout here, build a cover, and then light a fire; probably the heat of the flames melted the wall and the logs fell down, onto the people.

With that thought, my vision changed and in the black peaty protuberances, in the icy smears I saw the outlines of human bodies.

The funnel was filled with corpses; the permafrost had preserved them. The opening in the wall filled with grass turned out to be a mouth; a rounded bump was a head; mixed with dirt, dissolved in it, the dead seemed to be trying to step out, to break the ice crust; what I had taken for tree roots were arms; the dead flesh had taken on the color of the earth and you could recognize it only by its shape.

Black, gray, shades of brown—the spot of my blood was the only bright color in here; when I looked at the blood, I stopped seeing the corpses—the color blocked my vision, blinded me with its brightness; the dead had no color, and a long road of my gaze led to each one, gathering particle by particle the features of the body that separated the corpse from the twisted peat snags, boulders, and lumps of peat.

I was in the belly of the earth; my brothers lay here, and their imperishability was not the incorruptibility of sainthood, but the absence of death. They did not follow the path of corruption, they merged with the earth without becoming it; for all the world they had vanished without a trace, and even death was not the last message they could send; and that meant that death had not reached its conclusion; the dead remained only with the dead and the living only with the living. Death is not disappearance, it is not an instantaneous transition from presence to absence; a man dies but not the ones around him, they must complete the deceased’s terminal work with grief and bereavement: the services held on the ninth day, the fortieth day are part of the event of death performed by the living. If the living and the dead are separated, this incompletion, this endlessly lasting moment turned to ice stops the flow of time.

I could not climb out of the funnel; the smooth icy walls, licked flat by water, gave me no purchase; I had nothing with which to chop out steps. In my delirium I thought I could make a staircase out of corpses if I could get them out of the embrace of the ice; but then calmness descended—the way out was to dig deeper, not seeking salvation but deepening the hole. I found a broken branch and starting digging in the frozen peat; digging a grave in a grave.

I don’t remember how long this went on; I dug an opening, a well, I dug through coal, wood, rubble, I dug between frozen bodies, going around arms, shoulders, feet; and when my strength was gone, I fell into my well, fell on top of a corpse, and in the cold mist I saw my very distant childhood.

It was night, the middle of the night in autumn. I was on the prow of a boat, all its light was behind me, the passenger cabins and the deckhouse, but here where the boat was just beginning, where the oncoming wind blocked the sound of its machinery, where the only smell was that of the ship’s metal— here was the place that barely belonged to the ship; I moved together with the boat, but just a second ahead of it.

The river air and the darkness I sensed on that spot were different than what you saw from the cabin or the middle of the deck. Back there the light made out of the darkness a mere indicator of time; voices and music gave to the air the role of a waiter who serves up desired sounds; here, where the ship’s prow dug into the night’s flesh, and the night did not reel away but left open shell-like shutters revealing its moist, chilly interior, I looked at the night as if from inside it, while the other people on the boat looked at night from without.

Turning around, I perceived the boat the way the darkness ahead of us perceived it; it was gaining ground, I was retreating; I stood on the deck but all the passengers, all the tables in the restaurant, all the potted palm trees, all the beds in the cabins, all the pieces of hotel soap in the showers were attributes of a world to which I did not belong; imitating one another, losing distinguishing features, people seemed like insects crawling and flying toward the light, but there was no humiliation in that comparison: I also was not human, and blackness streamed between my ribs as if I had drowned in it, and my lungs were filled by the wild, wind-tossed air of the river channel.

I stood on the bow of the boat for so long that had I glanced at a watch I would not have understood the object’s meaning. I no longer noticed whether the boat was still moving or whether there was anything at all behind me; the rare flashes of buoys and house lights on shore seemed to be eons away from the boat. I no longer understood that had I been in my cabin, I would simply be seeing darkness, that is, I would see nothing and not know how close nonexistence comes to people, I would not feel the announcement of death in the dying of color and loss of features; I was completely in the night, wholly open to it.

I thought that the emptiness was crying out; when the wind died down a bit, I heard singing in lullaby tones resembling the sounds of stone Aeolian harps that never reached musicality but expressed the one-dimensional dreariness of being cast in crystal; the singing came from afar, as if through a series of windows that opened and closed; with that singing, sometimes close to a howl and sometimes thinning to the sound of a flute, I felt a primordial horror, the fear of nonbeing, so ancient that the feeling did not know itself, just as an animal does not know it is an animal. Probably this was what the first human who managed to separate himself from the fact of his existence felt, thus dooming himself to know death; a knowledge still unverbalized, piercing the vertebrae that united bones, muscles, and flesh into the body.

Suddenly out of the dancing darkness came something white and motionless in the river channel, resembling a gigantic bone with four joints. Its whiteness was the noble white of marble, which gives statues their aloofness from the world; the darkness tried to blacken it but could not: the white color did not glow but it did not allow other colors to mix with it.

The white pillar rose above the waters, it came closer, and the majestic calm of its lines became clearer. Five tiers rising one above the other, like sails, and now it seemed it was a ship, a tall ship coming toward us. Amid the chaos and discord of the night, amid the darkness that blurred all borders, all lines that destroyed the horizon and mixed up heaven and earth, the white pillar redefined the separation; its hanging levels, the bottom steps of a great staircase, built the tiers of the heavens, and its soaring line set the vertical axis. The three central levels had openings like keyholes; empty niches, the promise of invisible gates ready to open above the spire, at dizzying heights.

The roar of a foggy siren from the oncoming vessel deafened me, submerged my mental dread in the immediacy of physical fright, and I learned where I was. We were sailing over an old flooded town, of which only the bell tower remained, they had forgotten to blow it up and then left it as a marker for vessels; the Aeolian harps were clots of wind that formed under the vaults of the belfry, and the black ear on shore was a communications antenna.

Deep under the ship’s keel, foundations were covered by drifting sands, and drowned leaves floated over former streets; the river was enjoying its own underwater autumn, fish hid in the silt that had settled over the summer, crawfish dug habitats in the dirt of former gardens and during the day cleaned the hulls of boats onshore.

But there were also the white pillar, the white stairs to the invisible gates on high; they existed just as objectively as the bell tower—but the white staircase appeared to me at the bottom of the hole, and when I came to I sensed that the corpse on which I had fallen had been warmed by my body; he had an axe in his hands, the axes had been given to the exiles so they could build, and I could take it out of his dead fingers.

I chopped steps in the ice; I was the first one to get out of that hole, and I sensed that the pit would close and vanish, washed away by high tides; the living and the dead had met and my warmth became their warmth.

The dinghy carried me toward the Artic Ocean. I realized I was mad, I bore the virus of knowledge that should not be passed to the living; something was still not completely understood and without that understanding the knowledge was deadly.

The river grew broader, my wound ached, my temperature rose; madness throbbed in my temples, and I remembered a long-ago meeting with madmen and Grandfather II, when I felt the same fever, the same virus, the same fear.

When I was little we went for walks in the local park; it smelled of sour pea soup; the odor of that soup, wherever you smelled it, meant that a solid fence would soon materialize, sometimes covered with barbed wire; behind it would be a cement block or brick building. That was the situation here: beyond the concrete fence stood the psychiatric hospital.

I led Grandfather II along the paths and told him what I saw; suddenly I heard the bird-like screeches of the patients— they seemed to converse in their own language, inaccessible to the doctors, a language they spoke fluently, or else they had become somehow like gulls, and I thought they might fly up, settle on branches, and grow feathers. Grandfather II shuddered; that was so unusual that it scared me. He never shuddered, as if his body were frozen, and here some memory pushed him and bent him; he tried to pretend he was stretching out of weariness, but the pretense did not help: the squawks of the mental patients—a rare sound for the human voice—had reminded him of something in the past which had remained distinct, and Grandfather II whispered, thinking that I had moved away and could not hear him, “I won’t move, I won’t!” He whispered and stood stock-still, bringing his feet together as if he were standing in a narrow radiant place of his mind.

Later, when the screaming died down, Grandfather II asked me detailed questions about how the hospital looked and even, to my surprise, whether there was a crack in the wall to see what the patients looked like. I found a crack, but the patients had been taken away; all I saw were slate awnings— we had the same kind at our kindergarten—and two orderlies taking turns pushing each other in a wheelchair: they raced along the asphalt path, avoiding piles of bricks, laughing excitedly but joylessly.

I returned to the park as an adult: I came back gathering up all my memories of Grandfather II—and I met a patient escaping from the hospital.

The man was running through the woods, running like mad, as if it were not he, but somebody else twisted and cramped in the prison of his body; a man inside a man. This prisoner was running and trying to free something within himself; the fugitive fell on the ground, rolled in the leaves, banged against trees; his screams were muffled, as if he was screaming through his stomach. But his running and his fits were devoid of intensity, the body hindered him and sometimes, victorious, the man stopped, took a few disconnected steps, then hurtled himself into clumsy flight again; a person sewn into an animal skin or sack would run that way.

The fugitive came closer and I could see his face—empty of all emotion; his face, which had slipped lower under the weight of his own skull.

The madman ran toward the river; muddy, full of tires and rusty metal, but deep in places; deep enough to drown. You could surely see the river from the hospital windows; full of rubbish, filthy, with a stench of effluvia, steaming, it did not freeze in winter, and on frosty days a toxic fog the color of dog urine hovered over it; it emanated evil, like the filthy passage between garages, there was an affirmation of self-destruction about it, like alcoholics in the final stage of the disease; no wonder the local tramps drank along its shores, the men as murky as the water. The fugitive had not completely taken leave of reason, he could tell that here was the river and he ran toward it to die.

The orderlies cut him off; the fugitive grabbed a bottle, smashed it against a tree and stabbed himself, but the shards were too short, the pieces of glass merely pricked his tightened muscles.

I remembered that I had once seen a man running that way.

For several years I used to come out to work at a remote mountain mine; in those regions, roads exist only in the winter, when the swamps freeze and packed snow gives a better grip than asphalt; in summer you can get there only by helicopter. The remoteness turns these places into storehouses of time, cut off from the country’s overall life; the clubhouses still had red banners with white-lettered slogans hanging on the walls, ballot boxes were helicoptered in and police along with them, to deal with fights, thefts, and other minor crimes of the previous six months; essentially, there is no government except for the mine administration, there are no signs of the renewal of time, and people are drawn here from all over the country who could not fit in elsewhere, who are incapable of entering life, as if it were a revolving door that moved too quickly. There, in isolation, there is unity among people who have no one waiting for them, no one to write to.

These are strong men, but they are missing something; they are of necessity harsh but firmness and harshness do not let them feel or understand. These are strong men who secretly fear life; they gradually lose themselves, dissolving in particles; they could have mourned and suffered, but they didn’t have the ability to mourn or feel on a major scale, and so all they could do was drink and behave with reckless bravado.

In summer it is tolerable, there is the sense of space, changes in weather, and commensurate feelings. But in winter, when there is nothing but darkness, everything is snowed in and you are alone in the barracks, unspoken thoughts about the futility of life begin to eat at you. You don’t know what to do with these thoughts, you don’t have the habit of interacting with them, of safely releasing them into their orbits. You become superfluous; the protective carcass of strength and harshness comes off and you have no other defenses.

At the mine, the men lived in big railroad fuel cisterns which had been brought there suspended from helicopters; they cut out doors, laid a floor, insulated the metal walls, and added round windows; but still it was like living in a submarine in the middle of the mountains.

There were two inseparable friends there: Misha and Kolya, the local radio operator and one of the shaft diggers. People viewed them as one person; they jointly owned the only washing machine at the mine, which they used to brew their own beer, they hunted together—they joked that the double-barrel was invented for them. They were the only ones who never argued with each other, and in a fight they stood shoulder to shoulder; there was something strange and unnatural in their mutual sensitivity, as if there were no friction between them. I went there year after year, some things changed, people grew closer and drifted apart, but those two were always together, and at some point I started to think that it would not end well; that once—over some trifle—there would be an explosion, and the two would clash fiercely, making up for years of meekly putting up with each other’s weaknesses; I thought they already hated each other but did not know it yet, and every friendly gesture, every service, every word just added fuel to the future fire.

I don’t know why I thought that way; whether shadows of the future fell on their faces or if something in their lives gave off a hint; the radio operator had a doormat in front of his house that was actually a druse of centimeter-sized transparent crystals, for people to clean their shoes before entering; when it got dirty, he threw out the druse and put down a new one. The miner once saved and nurtured a dog that had its leg squashed by a truck. The lame dog repaid him once when the miner fell down drunk in the snow by running up to him and keeping him awake so he would not freeze to death; the next winter when the miner’s hat was worn out, he shot the dog for its fur. That crystal druse used for wiping feet, the lame dog shot for its fur—those were not random things, they revealed the inner bluster of decay; it passed for braggadocio, for tough manliness, and the poisonous rot infected them deeper and deeper.

It resolved itself one winter night; the radio operator and the miner were coming home drunk from the base; as the miner later told it, the radio man fell down and asked for matches to light a fire, it was very cold, but the miner refused, he had only one match left and he was planning to have a smoke halfway there; he was so looking forward to that cigarette that he wouldn’t give up the match, and he thought his friend was fooling and would get up; the radio operator cursed the miner—You won’t give up your match!—which made the miner angry. He burned the match and went on alone to the settlement, certain that the radio operator would follow. But the man was too drunk, he couldn’t get up, his cries were dispersed by the wind, and he froze, fell asleep turning stiff; they found the burned match in his fingers.

They called for a police helicopter; the miner locked himself in his metal cistern and shot at anyone who got close; they hauled the corpse with a tractor plow and placed it on the billiard table taken from the antechamber of the miners’ bathhouse. The diesel generator stopped at eight, and the men played billiards at night wearing miner’s caps; the nets in the pockets were torn, so the balls always rolled off into the gloom.

Now the table was outside the bathhouse, its legs deep in snow, and the corpse lay on it; the wind blew snow into his hair, and his head looked like a frozen cabbage—there is a variety of white crinkly cabbage, the leaves almost curly; the mouth and nostrils, everything, was filled with snow, and the head without orifices was sculptural, as if the artist had been called away and would be back any minute to make the eyes, mouth, and nostrils. The snow fell harder, there was a blizzard, and the police helicopter turned back, the mountains danced in waves, the metal cisterns rang when the wind hit them hard; for three days people stayed indoors, drinking to the dead man’s soul, and that’s when I remembered the radio operator’s story of his childhood.

He was born in the settlement where the police helicopter was kept, awaiting summer weather; his father was a radio operator in a polar station on one of the islands in the icy latitudes that were used to cartographically celebrate individuals; they were named in honor of princes and generals, forgotten politicians; captains of polar ships named them for their beloveds, scholars in honor of their teachers; the Soviet regime named them for newspapers, institutes, and anyone deemed worthy of award; the reality of the new era thus appeared on the map—there were islands called Bolshevik, Pioneer, Komsomol, and October Revolution.

One of these islands had a meteorological station; three men worked there—the station chief, the meteorologist, and the radio operator. Every six months, a plane flew in; a solid ice patch was the landing field, they flew in food, newspapers, smokes, and batteries for the radio transmitter. Twice a day the station broadcast the weather information; it was used with many others as a forecast for ships and airports. The radio operator and the station chief were Party members and held meetings, making the meteorologist wait outside; but one summer, when a plane could not land at the station since the ice was melting, the operator received a message: he, as a Party member, was told to arrest the station chief, now the former station chief, and an enemy of the people, and in the same message he was appointed acting chief; the man was to be arrested, isolated and sent to the mainland by plane, which would arrive two months hence.

To arrest and isolate on an island that had only one hut with one large room; arrest and isolate a man he had worked with for four years, four winters; arrest and isolate; the radio operator suspected that if he did not follow through, the meteorologist would later give him away; he had received the message and had confirmed receipt.

The radio operator arrested his chief and informed him of the contents of the message; together with the meteorologist, they made a dugout in the cold ground, built a stone stove and a bunk, and the former chief moved in there; they could have left him free on the island, for it was impossible to escape, they could have lived with him in the hut for two months, but the radio operator did not know what the meteorologist thought, the meteorologist did not know what the radio operator thought, and any question, any word could later mean their own arrest.

The radio operator thought that the chief would try to kill him; but he sat in the dugout, insulated by many layers of rubberized canvas, ate his portion of food—now referred to as rations—and asked only for the atlas. Once he got this, the chief rejected his comrades; he talked to himself, as if they were not there.

The night before the plane was due, in the white night of summer, the former chief tied them up; they had set up a watch to guard him, but the meteorologist fell asleep; he tied them up, took the carbine, clothing, and food, and went off into the ice, toward the Pole, taking along the atlas he had pored over for two months.

As the radio operator later told them, the chief took pity on them, kept them from having to turn him over to the police; the plane spent a long time circling over the ice but never did find the fugitive, the ice was breaking apart, long sheets of water, kilometers long, showed black everywhere. Perhaps some expedition would come across the man, his frozen body; did he shoot himself, drown, starve to death? The radio operator said the chief appeared like a raving lunatic when he left; they had placed him at the very edge of the inhabited world, locked him in a cage of words in the middle of the icy desert where he kept repeating lines from the radio message.

The radio operator was put on trial, and afterward he attempted to disappear in the most remote settlement, surrounded by taiga and mountains; he’d become frightened of open spaces, he imaged he was too visible, too noticeable; he lost his mind, he maintained that a circle was more than 360 degrees, that there were crevices between the degrees where one could squeeze in, and which only looked small and insignificant but were actually very wide; he was removed from work when he could only see one message in every radiogram, one message with an order to arrest himself, and he trembled, and he tore the transcription journal and tried sending a message to nowhere, claiming to know where to find his former chief, that the chief had escaped on the island through that very crevice between degrees, and if we studied this phenomenon it would be very useful because spies are surely using these crevices to get in; he died of a heart attack when crossing a summer field.

The son, also a radio operator, spoke about his father with detachment; he retold the father’s torment through his own, what it was like to have a father like him; his father told him everything, and the son was burdened by the trust, he didn’t know what to do with his father’s honesty, it oppressed him, he was ashamed of his father’s breakdown, he hurried to tell it all, to be free of it at least in part; and he died in just as disturbing a manner, incongruously, as if expiating his father’s sin; his life turned on a trifle, a burned match.

The blizzard lasted three days; then the snow quieted down, people dug out the entrances to their houses, the clouds passed quickly; the sun was threatening, primordial, as if it had been reborn over the three days of blizzard. The snow still fell, attacking in short raids, and in each raid I imagined the cavalry or flying figures.

The snowbanks in front of the miner’s house developed an icy crust, and suddenly everyone saw him running, running from the house, breaking through the crust and sinking, then pulling out his feet as if the earth were trapping him; he ran and shot at the sky, as if fending someone off, someone up there, elusive and light-winged. Shells fell from his pockets, he kept stumbling, his face was bloodied, his hands red, but he would reload the shotgun, take aim, and shoot, one barrel at a time, switching targets between shots as he ran; he shot and ran along a high cliff, its steep slopes overhanging a stream.

Thin beams of light caught the snow clouds, and deep flickering spots moved in the sky. The fugitive shot at anything he thought was approaching from above, catching up to him; every approach of shadow or sunbeam was a threat and he shot at it.

Someone said, with understanding, “He’s shooting at angels.”

The madman in the park also ran that way, as if it was not the orderlies chasing after him; and now, lying in the dinghy sailing to the ocean, feeling my own madness, I could see through that madness the wandering souls bearing the weight of sins and the unconsciousness of birth; how bound by the body they ran from angels—who alone could save them— thinking they were angels of vengeance come upon them; they hurried to tear the chains of life, but imprisoned in the fortress of their bodies, they were doomed to bear on their shoulders everything that had not happened, was not understood, was not discovered, without ever knowing what was tormenting them; and I felt my madness recede, its fever leave, and the blood of Grandfather II, who had imagined in the madman’s cry the scream of the carver crushed by a falling tree—there was no more of that blood in me.

I was picked up by a fishing trawler; the force of the pendulum dragged me from north to south, through trains, stations, airports, buses—to the shore of the Atlantic, near the edge of Africa; within me the march of time was reversed, unspooled, unwound, I was crumpled and tossed; and now I stand at the boundary of Europe and begin the return trip—in words.