Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  I walked down the path, not looking around, bearing this new mood in me; there was only a slight sorrow that everything happened too easily and imperceptibly. The cemetery fences, crosses, trees—everything was freed of the heavy feeling created by memories and appeared with a new ease; I walked slowly, I wanted to stay longer, to remember it all anew. The cemetery had changed even in its color scheme, there were light green and straw tones I had never noticed before.

  Suddenly I saw an old crumbling stump and on it a floury and plicated tree mushroom, looking like a fat ear.

  An ear—the underground world was listening, it was here, I just hadn’t noticed it in the sunny omens of the day. It all came back: fear, loathing, chills; the mushroom looked like the flesh of a corpse and it lived a vegetative existence; Grandfather II had not let go of me.

  PART 3

  M

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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