The lake with its thick, almost pastry-like icing of sunny light seemed like a monstrous monument, monstrous because the natural forms easily and willingly took on the features of something man-made, and this acceptance, without coercion, clearly evinced the meaningless, memory-less existence of nature, which we had anthropomorphized much too frequently.
Seeing this betrayal of matter—betrayal of the men who climbed up to the heaps every day from the barracks, looking at the profile of the dead leader in whose name they were forced to labor—I rejected the feeling of closeness with these mountains, from the line of imagination that had anthropomorphized them. A different, older feeling arose: the possible humanity of nature was just a mockery, a devilish joke; man can count on no one in nature except himself.
Soon after—the expedition was continuing work in the area of the abandoned camp—I went out on a solitary hike. Two days into the trip rain clouds settled over the mountains and it rained, the wind blowing the drops horizontally, parallel to the ground; I was wearing good weatherproof gear but still I felt chilled. The bad weather was here to stay, the mountain tundra was soaked, and everything that was good for the campfire—old logs, reindeer moss, and switches of polar birch—was damp; a heavy front was coming from the west, and it was clear that by nightfall the rain would change over to snow, a northern summer blizzard, and the rocks in the mountain passes would be icy.
I was about to turn back when I noticed an awning of boards and tar paper over an old test tunnel, one of many such holes made all over the slopes for several kilometers around the camp; the prisoners opened up the ground and rubble to reach the indigenous rock for testing. The canopy had been made recently, otherwise the wind and snow would have destroyed it; someone without a tent was sheltering from the weather.
A fugitive prisoner, a zek, lay beneath the awning; the pea jacket, tattoos, everything gave him away; the soles had come off his tarpaulin boots, tied with a cord, and his feet were bleeding; he couldn’t go on without shoes, he had torn pieces from his jacket and wrapped them around his feet, but the fabric with cotton batting fell apart in the rain; he saw the snow clouds over the top of his tunnel and he probably knew he would die that night.
I knew what he would have done to me if he had found me asleep in my tent; the fugitive was very skinny, his face was overgrown with hair with bits of moss, leaves, wood chips, and dirt in it: he had been wandering in the taiga for a month or more, having decided to run not toward the railroad but over the mountains to a different region where they would not be looking for him. He huddled in the hole, bent over, holding a three-sided shiv made from a file, no longer human or even humanoid; he was a wood spirit crawled up from underground. If I had had a rifle, I would have shot him and covered him with stones—out of fear, out of the sensation that this really was an underground creature that had killed an escaped prisoner.
But I didn’t have a rifle; I went down into the hole. The fugitive pushed the shiv aside; he was too weak to kill me with any benefit to him. I could simply go away, as if I hadn’t seen the canopy, and the fugitive would freeze to death; who knew why he was in prison, how he had escaped, if he had comrades and where they were; what he ate, mushrooms or human flesh; I went down, turned on my gas stove and started some bouillon cube broth. I realized that I was probably saving a murderer, maybe a rapist, robber, cannibal; he had been in the taiga too long to have had enough food in his pockets for that period, he was giving me too wild a look—as if he saw me gutted, freshly butchered. I should have left, gone back to our camp, radioed for a police helicopter, but I couldn’t do it; I tried to imagine his victims, whether they would have been prepared to kill him in revenge—but that had no direct bearing on the hole, the icy rain, the approaching snow front. It could be that the death awaiting the fugitive was just retribution, and that most likely he deserved it; but the idea of retribution was coming from my mind, wondering how to get out of this hole clean, without getting involved or taking anything on. “This is retribution, it is just, go away, and let it happen,” I told myself but kept cooking the broth. It turned out that there are situations from which you cannot make an exit without soiling your morality and the point was not in a choice of a number of evils but in the fact that once you’ve gone down into the hole, you can’t pretend you’re still standing atop it.
The fugitive drank the bouillon from the edge of the pot; the tin should have burned his fingers, but it didn’t: they had toughened, covered with layers of horny skin. We had nothing to say; he knew what I would ask, I knew how he would lie.
I left the fugitive my climbing boots, the pot, food, matches, two packs of cigarettes, my change of clothes, and my medicine chest. I knew that if he survived he would laugh over the idiot he had met and regret that he had not met me sooner when he was strong enough to rob and kill me, so that I would not turn him in. Calling for a police helicopter was my most frequent thought, and I sometimes imagined hearing the propeller blades through the rain, that it was passing by and would land, and that others would make the decision for me and drag him onboard. But for me to go through the pass and tell our radioman to call for a copter—here, near the former camp—it all took on another meaning; here the echo would have responded too readily to the barking of guard dogs and shots, if the fugitive tried to hide; here it was fundamentally wrong to appeal to the authorities, to the state, its court and justice; this place had its history, and it very strongly defined what was allowable here and what was not.
I climbed out of the hole to see how far the clouds were; behind me I heard metal—the fugitive was opening cans. I turned; the broth had given him a little strength, enough to use the shiv; I couldn’t jump into the hole, he would kill me, he thought I wanted to take away the food; all the same, I jumped in to get my backpack, and he threw a rock at me; I tried to pull him away from the cans, but he poked at me with the shiv, growled, kicked, grabbed me with his free hand and held me down with his knee; I hit him, I was stronger, but strength meant nothing here—he was frenzied, he was guarding the hole, guarding the food; I knocked him down, but he rose and threw himself at my feet, biting down on my trousers, and tore deep into my calf with the shiv; I got out of the hole, and he began tossing out the pot, clothing, shoes, bandages—everything but the food; he no longer knew what things meant, and his mind still only recognized food as food. I bandaged my leg while he growled and choked down tinned meat, drank evaporated milk from a perforated can, and gulped down crackers with the wrapping paper; he was killing himself, after a long fast he would get twisted bowels, but he couldn’t stop.
He died in an hour; even in convulsions he wouldn’t let me approach; even dying, when I tried to press down on his belly, stick my fingers in his mouth to make him vomit, he hit and bit me; in his jacket pocket I later found an empty matchbox and three fingers smoked over a campfire; the meat was preserved and did not rot.
My mind was so debilitated and my emotions so drained that I actually wondered whether the fingers should be buried separately or with him in one grave; then I realized that the second, eaten fugitive was already inseparable from the first; I piled stones over the dead man and added some soil with my sapper’s shovel; I did not try to remove the empty cans and wrappers—I couldn’t go down there again.
It was snowing; the low front had scattered the small foggy clouds and behind the blizzard, still quiet, transparent, I could see the ruins of the camp; a sunbeam broke through the clouds, illuminating the ruins, and it seemed that they were swallowing the cold glow of the snowy sun, the way light falls inside the rear of a sandstorm; in that space of distortion and loss, the human does not function, there can be no care, or gift, or compassion—the distortions pull them into their orbits and swirl them into unwilling collaboration with evil.
That is how I see that camp and lake in the valley; there I understood everything that subsequently served as a guiding light.
Back from the expedition, I learned that the housekeeper had died; the apartment passed
to me by Grandfather II’s will. I delayed a long time before going there; I knew it wasn’t a question of the apartment itself; I could not accept those square meters, they did not belong to me, nor could they—life was returning me to what I had left: the personality of Grandfather II. I sensed that nothing good would come of it; the camp barracks, the fugitive who had lost all human semblance—sometimes you look back and see how life is bringing you toward understanding, how nothing is random but is interconnected, and if you live with an ear for that causality—not to mystical perceptions that are an imitation of direct conversation with life, but for perceiving what is given to you and how—you cannot select a path, a path and time select you; there is nothing messianic, or being chosen, or fatalistic about this; it is a very hidden, profoundly private sensation: your turn, your time, your deed.
I eventually did go to the old address; on one hand, I felt uncomfortable entering the empty apartment; there was a sense that it was a bit too easy, as if the apartment would have gotten used to the housekeeper’s departure, gotten over her death—and only then, carefully, without touching anything, could one go inside. But on the other hand, I was prompted by the feeling that at a moment when death is still nearby, when all the objects are exposed by the departure, you may be able to see and sense things that evaporate and settle down later; the objects will be objects once again, they will shut down, and you won’t hear anything, only the given state of mute objects.
As a child, I liked to eavesdrop on objects; I pretended to be leaving the house, fussing over my shoelaces in the entry, opening and shutting the door, so that the objects would think I had left—and then I would hide among the clothes and shoes. Never quite separate from the people who wore them, by virtue of their predestination they were forced to be double agents, my secret helpers; cut to fit the human body, they made me invisible to the vague vision of the object world, for which the main thing, I thought, was the silhouette, the contour.
I often imagined what went on in the apartment when no one was there, and I thought that after a certain time—in case one of the people returned for something—the objects, like crabs on the seafloor exposed by low tide, scurried from place to place, peeking up from below, planning, conspiring, hiding something under the shell of their usual ordinary appearance, and always ready to pretend to be the obedient, weak-willed things that my parents knew.
Upon entering Grandfather II’s apartment, I remembered my childhood game, which was no game; I crossed the threshold of his possessions as heir, belated, awkward, having lived a different, nomadic, life, feeling burdened by property and not knowing why I needed a one-bedroom apartment in a luxurious Stalinist building, where the telephone was a relic, heavy black plastic hanging on the wall, as if the words that might come through the receiver should be heard standing at attention; I picked up the receiver like a shell on the beach—to listen to the hoarse breathing of a time past.
In the rooms where Grandfather II’s housekeeper—she lived the way petitioners sit, on the edge of the chair, as something second-rate compared to the objects—lived after his death, Grandfather II’s life manifested itself in the placement of the furniture seen anew with a fresh view, his habits, his domestic routes, his imperious character: the furniture was sturdy and heavy, on the shelves thick shot glasses on skinny stems shone dully, and I didn’t want to touch them with my fingers or lips—what had people toasted to with these, with what thoughts, with what in their hearts had they drunk from them? I found a vodka bottle, closed with a twist of paper, in the sideboard, but the paper crumbled into the lightest brown flakes and the vodka must have evaporated, leaving tasteless water.
Things looked at me—there was only one piece of furniture from the last half of the century, a nightstand made of particleboard; I pulled it away from the wall and on the back plywood panel there was a yellow label: “article, nightstand, 24 rubles,” and I sensed that this was my only ally here, and if not an ally, then at least not an enemy; “article, nightstand” was a word combination that had something familiar from the time in which I was born, a time of plywood and particleboard, particularly pathetic materials without pedigree, as if all the more solid and significant things had been used up mindlessly, leaving only sawdust and splinters from which people had learned to make furniture and partitions in their houses. But the cupboard and sideboard, the couches and shelves came from the 1930s; generously lacquered, they were more solid than me, they got you with their weight and bulk, their glass dimmed by innumerable reflections that left particles on the glass, while I was a balloon, something weightless and insignificant in this preserve of other times.
There wasn’t a single book in the house and there wasn’t any place to put one, not a shelf or a nook, just depositories for clothing and dishes, and beds wide and high—such beds are good for loving a woman, joining blood with blood, crumpling and bunching up the hot sweaty sheets, and for dying unfettered on those same sheets, hot and damp from fever. There were mounds of bed linens in the closets, enough for a large family, and this warehouse of sheets, blanket covers, and pillowcases revealed a time when clean linen meant more than just clean linen; there was the smell that a hot iron gives off when it’s filled with coal, the smell of plain soap, the ribbed washboard, running water and wooden mangle. A clean white tablecloth, one without a spot or pulled thread, starched, made a color pair for the main state color of the times—red. White was the mainstay of home; for some because they had come from dirt and remembered it all too well; for others because they sensed the impurity of the times and not seeing a way of staying clean themselves, sought external cleanliness. This drive for cleanliness remained throughout life: the closet had mops, buckets, rags, brooms—the housekeeper had scoured the house until her final hour.
Besides the blatant hostility of the furniture, I felt something else; it was like a message, a letter that lay in the “For Pickup” nook at the post office for ten years. In leaving me his house, Grandfather II considered it a message that only I would understand. Somewhere in here, either in plain sight or under the wallpaper, in the seams of his clothes, in the design of the parquet floor, there was a sign, a sign in invisible ink that had to be heated or wetted or held up to the light at a certain angle; the apartment was not empty, the message awaited its hour—a sleeping seed, a grain of an instant in which fate slept.
I started going through things in the sideboard and cupboards, random things tossed ashore by the tide of life; keys to unknown locks, no longer existing doors, forks and spoons, survivors of sets bought two-thirds of a century ago, lost in moves to various towns; I found the handle from a broken cup—that cup was valuable, memorable somehow; I found bent or broken frames for eyeglasses and pince-nez; coins, kopecks from forgotten years that were somehow selected from the rest and settled in the sideboard; buttons, rusted hooks, single cuff links—one with mother-of-pearl blackened like a damaged fingernail, the other homemade, carved ivory with Grandfather II’s initials; it was like the rubbish in a magpie’s nest, or the stuff that scatters on the asphalt after a crash, unremarkable, usually found in pockets and the bottom of bags and briefcases, but here taking on the significance of unused punctuation marks: everything is said, the sentence is complete, and the excess commas are strewn on the ground.
What is left when nothing is left is this clean nonrubbishy rubbish, arrayed like evidence on a policeman’s desk; what’s left despite our vain hopes is evidence of minor mishaps—broke my glasses, cracked the cup, lost my cuff link—as if life was intentionally collecting them, giving us back our unworthy agitation in the face of trivial difficulties; what is left is the biography of objects, which shows that essentially nothing happens to us, nothing really happens; the dry residue that remains are these mementoes, penknife notches on a school desk.
There could be no special testimony, no secret message among these scattered things on their own, away from the hierarchy of objects, the order of things, where there are pairs, dozens, settings, and sets. Sometim
es such trifles can form a rebus, but here there was only one uniting trait: all these things were cracked, broken, bent, or spoiled—the sideboard drawer held three watches that had stopped in different decades—and whatever evidence they bore spoke of only one thing: no one slips out of life unbroken, and its effect is mechanical and automatic but inevitable and irreparable. Broken connections, disrupted unity, lost community; interrupted events, vague, having lost their own name; a hole in the pocket, a rent in a raincoat, and everything falls out, and you can catch only a few things in your fingers. It is not a mystery but the negation of a mystery; the apotheosis of ordinariness, the manifestation of mass consumption.
Well, this merely proved (things are the most impartial biographers) that Grandfather II, whatever his past, whatever he had hidden behind his blindness, had in many ways lived the most ordinary life; his things were as harmless as rattles, teething rings, and baby bottles, while I had expected in accordance with my childhood memories for them to at least partially take on his scale. But there was no real scale either—he was not great, but small, a blind old man who knew how to do only one thing—elicit fear, not fright which we often confuse with fear, especially as children, but fear—the oppressive living essence that forces the psyche into an unnatural state and forces a person to stifle himself; fear, the optical lenses of fear increased Grandfather II’s figure, gave it a demonic, creepy glow. The real horror was in the useless keys, the saucers from beat-up tea sets, in worn coins—in the anonymity of existence, in the impossibility of learning anything morally from these remains, which could have been caught in an archaeologist’s sieve, about a person who seemed to blend into the general background of an era, lost amid the trifles, who had taken on the quotidian as a scheme, or even more accurately, had always lived by it; a person about whom you sensed great evil but whom you could never call great or even having scale in that evil. Not minor, not great—average; his personality had lost the element that gives the potential for the grotesque, for playing with scale, for the chance to turn into a dwarf or a giant. He was like the monuments that filled the country, not big, not small, but which won by repetition, the power of the commonplace.
Oblivion Page 10
