NINE

by Svetlana Alexiyevich

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  The Ural Mountains, windswept and blanketed by smoke that passes through hundreds of gradations of gray, look like decorative park ruins. There's nothing for a painter to do amid this readymade lithic beauty. Every landscape, no matter where you look, already has its composition and basic colors, a characteristic correlation of parts that combine into a simple and recognizable Urals logo. The picturesqueness of the Ural Mountains seems intentional. Horizontals of gray boulders green with lichen and softened by slippery pillows of rusty needles are intersected by verticals of pines huddled in tight groups, and like everything in the landscape, they avoid simplistic uniformity; overall it seems to have been constructed according to the laws of the classic opera stage, with its unwieldy sets and choristers facing the parterre. The Urals' waters are also distributed for picturesque effect. Some streams, poisoned by industry, have the workaday appearance of a pipeline accident, but others have retained the architect's intent. Their banks, as a rule, are cliffs; the dark and fissured layers of slate look like stacks of printing spoilage whose dark layers probably contain illustrations; the pink-spotted cliffs seem stuck with pieces of cellophane; their pebbles, which retain as one the idea of a cube, pour abundantly from the fissures. Each bend in a stream reveals new likenesses of what was just seen, which is why the banks seem to be moving rather than the water, which itself seems to be straining to retain the reflection of the sky and the silvered clouds. The sky reflected in Ural waters is much bluer than it is in reality; this is because of the summer's northern chill that even on hot days can make itself felt in a gust of wind, in the vicinity of a deeply frozen bedrock. Gentle lizards bask on the heat-retaining outcroppings of gold-laden quartz; these are the Uraler's friends, living pointers to subterranean riches. The same is true of the grass-snakes and tiny dark vipers resting among the cliffs in shiny ringlets; at the slightest disturbance one will tense like an arrow against a bow-string, but usually they slither away peaceably into a stone crack, leaving behind a light rustling in the bitter green grass.

  The lakes in the Urals are many and huge. Their large, amazingly empty, glassy surface serves as a mirror not so much for material objects as for the weather. The slightest changes in the atmosphere are reflected there as incorporeal images with no counterpart on the shores, melting into dark oil and becoming solid at some indeterminate point. Often you can't see the boundary between water and land. At times the atmospheric specters are not just reflected but seen above lake surface quite distinctly. This Martian television is best observed from high up, where the boats near the cottage shore look like seed husks. Some lakes are stunningly clear: at a perfectly still midday, the sun-net on the sloping bottom achieves the perfection of gilt on porcelain; the fisherman in his sun-warmed flatboat, smelling of fish soup, sees through his own shadow the distant clump of bait and the dark backs of the large perch eager to taste it. On the Urals' bounteous southern reaches, where the homely forest strawberry, with fruit like nodules but amazingly aromatic, grows and the garden strawberry sometimes gets as big as a carrot, the lakes take up even more of the beautiful scenery. Looking down, you can't always tell what there's more of in front of you — water or land; they envelop each other, blend into each other. There are islands all over; one, like a cup, will hold another irregular oval of shining water, though this is not a part of the mother water world but its own internal lake, fed by its own springs, and inside it is yet another little island: a decorative cliff with a scattering of pebbles, looking like a broken piggy bank. From the cliff leading to the edge of a neck of land, circles of water, land, and stone seem once again to spread out over the entire expansive breadth; the place erases the boundary, the distinction between the named geographical location and the unnamed specific object — like the burly birch on the very smallest island whose stiff little leaves shimmer in the wind as if it were adorned, to supplement its own weeping mane, by tinsel-rain.

  The Ural range is undoubtedly situated in one of those enigmatic regions where the landscape has a direct effect on minds. For the true Uraler, the land is rock, not soil. Here, he is the possessor of a prof ound — in the literal and figurative sense of the word — geologically grounded truth. At the same time his land is also fruitful. Just as the inhabitant of Central Russia goes out «to nature» to pick berries and mushrooms, so the Uraler drives his old jalopy out looking for gems; to him, a place without deposits and veins makes no sense. Far from everyone who grows up in the Urals later joins the community of rock hounds — gem miners without a license who, while having other professions, often intellectual ones, in town, structure their budgets around their illegal endeavors, which spill over into a passion. However, virtually every Ural schoolboy goes through a collecting phase; it's the rare family whose attic isn't strewn with fused cobbles and malachite scales covered with black oxides, quartz druses that look like the city's spring ice, and polished chips of all the commonly found gemstones.

  Meanwhile, the Urals' subterranean riches are no longer what they once were. Everywhere they go on the territory of known deposits, professional rock hounds and even tourists stumble across old mining pits. These might be flat holes long since grown over with wet bracken and made impassible by wooly-leaved wild raspberries; only the experienced eye would discern the prospecting holes that date back to his great-grandfathers' day. Sometimes a hole in the ground that looks like an old man's toothless, sunken mouth leads the prospector to a mine from the century before last that looks like a buried, low hut half crushed by a rock: cold larch braces flaking with dead, time-eaten splints, varnished on top by soot from the torches that stole the miners' sweet subterranean oxygen, and noises that emanate from the darkness exactly as if someone were scuffling over the damp grainy stone. Sometimes the mine is located not in a remote mountain corner but on the edge of a potato field where a small tractor jolts around. It's a common occurrence: from the substrate leading to the prosaic collective gardens, another diverges, a little fainter, and quickly climbs the slope, and from the slope a view opens out onto an old surface mine that surrounds, bezel-like, a strangely harmonious volume of air, like a tear of nothingness. You can't tell right away that the surface mine is filled to a certain level with water. You can't see the water. The reflection of the quartz walls, one of them burning in the hot noonday and the other icy, is so detailed and perfect that your eye doesn't catch where the real cliff leaves off and its reflection begins. This marvelous symmetry is accomplished by the mirrored image of the reflected sky with the dots of birches leaning into it. You have to descend into the surface mine down a well-trodden, rustling path, one hand touching the wall that rises by your temple; sometimes a flat pink stone comes out in your hand like a book from a shelf, and when you throw it down, a raw, pipy sound leaps up. Only from the fat watery circles do you discover where you shouldn't step; the water, like clay on a potter's wheel, really seems to be trying to turn into a vessel. This doesn't happen, though. Slowly, almost infinitely, the disturbed perfection is restored — and suddenly the moment comes when the water disappears again literally beneath your feet. Once again the viewer is left with a stunning void where the mountain was taken out. The sunny wall, amazingly vivid and finely detailed, seems lit from below by powerful electricity, and the sugar vein in it sparks.

  Virtually everything that could be extracted from the top has been. The Urals' surface has been depleted. The same can be said of the surface of the Urals' natural beauty. The nature logos that make it so easy to assemble the components of a recognizable landscape on canvas have always encouraged amateur rather than professional painters. Realism, be it a method of art or — more broadly — a way of thinking, has here been a characteristic of fundamentally superficial people, well-intentioned dilettantes who take the use of ready-made forms for a type of patriotism. In this sense, the Urals proved cunning. From the very beginning there has been all the ready-made material you could want. As a result, there came to be a specific stratum of artists, poet-songwriters, collecto
rs, and ethnologists who were seized by splendid impulses. These serious-minded guys, who were old by the time they were thirty, wearing sardine-colored jackets and carrying various membership cards in their inside pockets, had the vague feeling that something was expected of them by all this stone and industrial might, the loaded sky above it that kept transporting tons and tons of clouds without end — but they never got past the surface, which seemed to satisfy the demands for artistry and Ural distinctiveness.

  When an ecological crisis came that was as real as can be, it became clear that the true Uraler's thinking was fantastic thinking. The farther from the soil, the better! It turned out that an anchorite living in some Lower Talda and studying Sanskrit expressed the essence of his little homeland more accurately than the peony-ruddy composer of songs for folk chorus.

  The authorities' pet idea was to restore the monastery where for the last forty years there had been a colony for juvenile delinquents. From a distance, the monastery looked like a huge dirty snowdrift that had settled. Close up you noticed the torn barbed wire and prison lamps in smashed cases that looked like its iron fruit. With the priest's blessing they began to build. For starters they razed the long barracks on the monastery territory and dragged off (to be carted away later to the dump) the rotting boards with the rusty nails poking out, which called to mind the remains of exhumed coffins, scraps of painted tin, and pieces of brick. Immediately after, an unprecedented fire broke out in the shantytown adjoining the monastery. That fateful night the fire flew, fanned by the wind, and the water thrown on it flew from the pails and troughs and turned into a hot exhale, as from a drunk's maw after a swallow of vodka. The black huts, sluiced from low-power hoses, squealed when they caught fire, and their pink frames collapsed with a hot rustle. In the morning, the surviving trees looked like bathhouse besoms, and in the ashes, amid the disintegrating wooden flesh, still red under the ash, the people wandered, digging their incinerated property out of the coals with sticks. Now another concern was tacked onto the authorities' list. With no hope, however, of a free hotel room, the locals dragged off the barracks' remains and in record time knocked together more shacks. After that, no matter how many subsidies were issued from the top, the population categorically drank them up, continuing to live in what they'd taken from the prison; even the barbed wire had a practical use: they wound it around their rather shaky constructions for stability, which made some of the huts, with their tiny skewed windows, look like hives being swarmed by iron bees. Financially, the shantytown and monastery became communicating vessels. It would have been awkward to finish building a church when right outside its walls all lay in ruin and ash. Bent old women cooked food in the hissing, smoking cracks of stove carcasses, and not far away, in the papery shade of desiccated birches, erstwhile breadwinners lounged on bare iron cots; the men themselves looked like bundles of salvaged but useless property. And this whole outrage was photographed by opposition journalists. By way of lowering the general level in their communicating vessels as much as possible, the burned-out residents dedicatedly stole everything that wasn't nailed down: sacks of cement, paint, work gloves. The unstable equilibrium, supported by two comparatively identical streams of financial infusions, threatened to turn into a catastrophe at any moment.

  All this had very little to do with the spiritual life of a Uraler, who put candles, by the way, in front of popular icons and during the Blessing of the Water at Epiphany readily took a dip in a moonlit ice-hole whose solid ice grabbed his wet soles like strong glue. No matter how far from his ordinary place and life a Uraler's intellectual interests strayed (many rock hounds, in the licit part of their lives, worked in space research and defense), he knew that the veins of ore and gems were the rock roots of his consciousness. The world of mountain spirits where the Uraler has always resided is a pagan world. It includes, specifically, UFOs three to fifteen meters in diameter whose movements through the air look like the bobbing of a spindle, as well as the silky green quasi-men that outsiders take for aliens. In fact, these are the locals: practical reptiles guarding semi-precious lenses. From time to time, prospectors get to see the Great Snake. This subterranean snake with the head of a gigantic old man looks like something straight out of Ruslan and Ludmila — except that the Great Snake's head is bald, with dark, burnished spots; his lips are mottled and fleshy, too, and he has a broken nose the size and shape of a boot. The Great Snake travels underground as if it were underwater. His body, stretching out in rings in front of the dumb-struck prospector, looks like a stream of thundering gravel being dumped from the back of a truck: dust rises, whitened bushes stir, the ground turns gray in spots, forming a wrinkly trench — and it is along this trench that one should search for the alluvial and vein gold that royally fills the prospector's ruined trousers.

  Sometimes a mountain spirit is hard to tell from a human. The Stone Maiden, also known as the Mistress of the Mountains, looks nothing like the beautiful actress in the fake blue eyelashes and green headdress who represents the Mistress in the matinees at the local drama theater. The Stone Maiden can appear to a rock hound in the most ordinary guise, for instance, as a middle-aged lady vacationer stained with berries, besieged by mosquitoes, and carrying a pail of cucumbers; or like the woman at the train station snack bar, with her starched tower of bleached hair and puffy, yearning eyes; or like a fifteen-year-old girl who has a breeze flying down the neck of her loose t-shirt as she bends over and works the pedals of her rickety bike. The Stone Maiden doesn't keep just to the remote parts of the forest and mountains. She's no beast. She feels perfectly free to appear in the city with its four million inhabitants, which is standing without realizing it on mighty knobs of malachite, like a subterranean cabbage field, and on fat gold in ribbed quartz.

  In the narrow eddies of the urban population the Stone Maiden is recognized only by whoever she has come to see. Suddenly, at the sight of a perfectly unremarkable woman, the rock hound's soul is strangely magnetized. Suddenly, unfamiliar features and gestures compose themselves into a dear and desired face, and to the atheist it seems as if literally before his very eyes, out of ordinary matter, of which there is so much in a crowd, God has created for him a unique and miraculous being, as if he has been presented with obvious proof of man's creation by divine sleight-of-hand. And the bearded fool can't stop himself from making a bee-line for the stranger, who is filled with inexpressible fascination, who serves as proof of his uniqueness among all other men, and who everyone else around him is prepared to reject.

  It's not true that the Mistress of the Mountains needs stone-cutting skill from a man. In reality, she, like any woman, needs love, but it must be real love of that special and genuine composition whose formula no one has ever been given. Any feeling has shadowy parts, sometimes it itself is a shadow. Lacking any basis for comparison or real expertise, the Stone Maiden's chosen one feels he has been granted much more than ever before. Doubts lay intersecting wrinkles on the chosen one's face, and the life lines that the ordinary man sees in his palm and in some sense holds in his hand appear on his brow. The subject alternatively does and does not believe in the authenticity of his own emotion; on a disturbing night, when his girlfriend's perfectly still body suddenly gets very heavy in her sleep and crushes her half of the bed, like a toppled statue, it occurs to the man that it would be easier to rip open his own belly than to open up and check on his own soul — at least the former is physically possible. Suicide over a happy love, over a fully reciprocated feeling, is not such a rarity in the Ural capital. If you dig in the police files, you'll find quite a few puzzling instances of suicide, when the deceased was found with a blissful smile on his petrified lips — that is, his mouth had literally turned into a mineral, into a hard stone flower, lying there as an eternal adornment on his sunken face. Somewhere nearby, in an obvious spot, there was a neat white document accompanying the deceased and lying parallel to the lines of the furniture and room — his suicide note, addressed to a woman and consisting for the most part of
mediocre verse. She whom the suicide addressed had vanished completely, as if she had fallen straight through the earth. Descriptions of her, related by the deceased's family and neighbors, proved so contradictory that it was a wonder how the powerful optics of their collective — and now even greater — dislike had distorted the suspect.