Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  I remember the time on an expedition after a long period of hunger we shot a deer and started eating the fresh liver; after a week of bad weather the sun was flickering in the leaves, and I felt the same warm flicker inside me of the life force, how the fading life of the deer was directly passing into my muscles, and the muscles were responding with readiness to race, grab, tear apart. The sun illuminated the river bottom, and the smooth deep water gave off the power of the current, the wind bent the birches, and I felt the current of natural forces passing through me, I was one with the water, the wind, I was a cluster of desires, translucent and thick, like the sunlight of August in the taiga. I was running and grabbing—and a minute later, I got a cramp, not from the raw liver, my stomach had accepted that, but because I had fallen into an animal state and now my humanity was being painfully restored.

  Seal blubber, bear fat, the secret of Grandfather II’s longevity smelled of ancient blood, the letters smelled of blood, and I no longer wanted to know what was in his past; just to leave the apartment, throw away the keys, let it stay there like a forgotten mousetrap, locked and sealed; if it had been a house instead of an apartment, I would have burned it down, like a plague house. Once again I sensed Grandfather II’s blood circulating in me, I could feel the short animal hairs growing, the too-hard nails growing; I wanted to gnaw meat from bones, ooze blood, suck out the marrow.

  I recalled how once at the dacha an old woman from the village, who did not like the dacha owners for parceling out their garden allotments on the best berry and mushroom spot on the edge of the woods, in the most damp spot where she gathered St. John’s wort, chamomile, coltsfoot, melilot, bur-marigold, clover, raspberry leaf, and linden flowers, the old woman once met Grandfather II on the forest path. I was creeping after him and saw the look she gave him, with his folding chair, jug, and fishing reels, neat, with a handkerchief in his pocket, she looked at him and said loudly, “Werewolf!” Grandfather II unexpectedly replied loudly, “You’re demented, old woman,” and went on; he replied rather aloofly and rather disdainfully, the way a cranky old man might have responded to a nasty old woman he knew—she’ll wear you out with her nagging—but the old woman was neither nasty nor a nag, she was known for her silence, and she and Grandfather II had never exchanged a word before; I sat in the bushes, so the herb woman would not see me, Grandfather II walked on, and she watched him go, whispering something to herself.

  Later I tried to get into her house; someone was sick and I offered to go get some herbs for a cold. The old woman let me into the house, too spacious for her alone; the timbered izba dwelling was big, made of logs you could barely embrace, and you could see that it had been built by a big family. In the middle stood an enormous whitewashed stove, which had spread like a woman of a certain age, cosmic in sensibility—everything rotated around it, it was the axis and the support, inside its womb buckwheat porridge stewed, soups cooked, and bread was born—karavai, a loaf as round as the fruitful sun, peasant bread; but the stove just made the emptiness of the rooms more pronounced and bitter. Through a hanging I saw a wall of photographs in one of the rooms—dozens of male and female faces, with the peasant gaze, concentrated and severe, as if having your photograph taken was hard work to be approached with full cognizance; for an instant the photographs made the izba full of people, talking, eating, coming in from the gardens, the fields, it filled up and emptied. While the woman went through her herbs, I searched for my knowledge of the force that swept all those people away, leaving the old woman to maintain the house as a memory of the departed; she gave me the herbs, dried, prickly, and explained how to pour boiling water over them; I wanted to say something consoling but realized that there is a deadline for sympathy and condolences, there is a deadline for commiseration and compassion, and it had long passed; my words would have no effect, because nothing had been said earlier, and not by me.

  The old house was hopeless, the stove was hopeless, it took so many logs, the crooked fence where the bottles dried, and the lame cat that warmed itself behind the stove; I left thanking her and promising myself to visit the old woman again, but I did not keep my promise—everything I could have felt fit into that single impression, and it could not expand or even repeat itself; there was a precision in the singularity of the meeting, in the fact that it did not turn into a kindhearted caretaking; the old woman did not need it the way a praying person does not need encouragement, and after a few years I forgot her, immersed as I was in the well-being of childhood which avoids problems of the old.

  And now years later—life sometimes anticipates our questions by decades—I remembered her, remembered her cry of “Werewolf!”; it coincided with my insight, my sensation of the thick impure blood; I fled the apartment, I locked the door and threw the key in the river, choosing that route intentionally; I went to my parents’ house with the firm determination not to accept my inheritance, to have nothing to do with that apartment, to sell or exchange it—let it be, shut, empty, lost among the other apartments, buildings, and streets, let it recede to a dot; I had understood something, and my history was over.

  I was alone then in my parents’ house; when I came in I started seeking support in books, as usual—you pick up a book, open it at random, and get into the plot to break up the whirlwind of your thoughts; but this time I intentionally selected a book to be as far away as possible from the present and not get the least echo or coincidence from the text; I chose The Epic of Gilgamesh, He Who Saw the Unknown, a dark-green, swampy colored volume; I took it remembering the description of Uruk, the humanization of Enkidu, the expedition against Humbaba; but the book did not open there at all. I read:

  The Scorpion-Man opened his mouth to speak, said to Gilgamesh:

  ‘There never was a mortal, Gilgamesh,

  Never one who could do that.

  No one has travelled the mountain’s path.

  For twelve double-hours its bowels . . .

  Dense is the darkness and there is no light.

  To the rising of the Sun …

  To the setting of the Sun …

  To the setting of the Sun …’

  Gilgamesh said to the Scorpion-Man:

  ‘Whether it be in sorrow,

  Whether it be in pain,

  In cold, in heat,

  In sighing, in weeping,

  I will go!

  Let the gate of the mountain now be opened!’

  “Let the gate of the mountain now be opened!” I repeated; I thought about the Yakut tales of mammoths living underground, and if the tundra buckled from the ice freezing in the soil, the Yakuts believed that mammoths had walked deep underground; if they found a mammoth carcass in a precipice, they thought it had died by accidentally stepping out into the sunlight. I sensed that this imagery was right—going through land, through mountain, through accumulated ossified time; but I did not yet know what I would have to do, how to act.

  Nights were dreamless, but close to dawn dreams came, three dreams; they repeated in the same order. Sometimes a dream extends into the deepest layers of consciousness that lie beside the main well through which we dive into ourselves; it is they, and not the popular ideas of the moment, that in many ways determine our belonging to a certain historical time.

  Military brass bands have different sounds in different years, and depend not only on the hearer; there is a silence on the eve of war that can be torn by the sound of a single bugle, and there is a silence after a defeat in which the sound of an entire band will be muted and lost.

  There are times of light and times of darkness; the general tone changes, the illumination changes, and the same color looks different as if in different optical media: the red banners of the Civil War, which had more scarlet, and the red banners of the thirties, which had more crimson, look the same in black-and-white newsreels.

  It turned out that the portion of the past that is extant and unnoticed in the present, diffused in it, is very great; it was the voice of grains, the argument under the bench, the v
oice of random people, chords of random melodies through the rasp of the loudspeaker, the voice of boarded-up windows. Sand, dust, ashes, remains, bone meal, salt, sugar, kerosene, soap, matches spoke; old houses, river bends, rotting sunken ships, coal burned in furnaces, gunpowder pushing bullets out of barrels, and the greenish metal of casings all spoke; everything that vanished, disintegrated, was drunk, eaten, lost, and used up also spoke, and it was lost, it echoed in the dream gathering strength; it would not yield to daytime consciousness, only to sleep.

  The first dream started: I saw the springtime river ice, mushy from the weakened inner tension, and still solid only in one place, a strip across the river.

  There was a ford there in winter, the trampled snow hardly melted, and the ruts made by wheels, runners, horseshoes, boots, and children’s shoes stood out more. They took on additional meaning: the people were dead—that was the knowledge of the dream—but their footprints accidentally survived.

  An archaeologist finds a declivity in hardened sand, a footprint, and in the unimaginably distant past, where you can’t even imagine human existence, a notch appears for counting to begin, a sign of affirmation: I was. This phenomenon, which has a dual nature of fact and symbol—one reinforcing the other—graphically approaches the pulsating point in the middle of the page, without any neighboring points; the starting point.

  The footprints on the ice also pulsated, but they were not just points: voluminous letters of set type, forming words, lines, text. It seemed that each had been left deliberately: people could have walked without a trace and in general life is such that no traces are left if you don’t make an effort—but the ones who had walked on the ice had stepped intentionally so that the wet snow of the thaw would accept the body’s weight and take a cast of their soles.

  The words frozen in the ice were bitter; every print meant a step, and the step brought them closer to vanishing, which the print resisted. They were repeated—thus a desperate person keeps repeating the same thing, and a recitative appeared composed of many repetitions.

  Hasty, overlapping, overflowing, like a lament, the prints joined up a multitude of fates and the single path. It seemed that an unremitting threat had accompanied the travelers, pushing them from behind, keeping them from turning off.

  Later—the guess arose one night and then kept appearing every time—I realized that somewhere in the snowy mush were prints of the guards’ boots, who were unlikely to have walked on the untouched snow, but they were no longer recognizable: they were lost, blended into the whole. This indistinguishability of prisoners and guards—when you can’t tell which was which—elicited horror, even though there was a hint in it: it was not the convoy of guards that pointed out the direction, for the threat that forced people to walk on the ice hovered over them as well.

  Here the dream changed; somewhere so far away that its small universe barely accommodated such a distance, something collapsed, the concussion accelerated time that had been imperceptible until then, an icy crashing roar grew—and a crack zigzagging along the line of the river channel broke the ice of the ford in two.

  The crack expanded rapidly, turning into an ice hole, foaming water bursting from it; the ice fragmented, chewed up by the ice holes, tearing the solid picture of the ford into shreds; floes tumbled and the water pushed with greater strength, inundating all the traces, all the prints. This was water of the bottom currents that avoided the ice holes, that had settled in the deep holes beneath the steep banks, oily and stale, as if the drowned had decomposed in it slowly—because of the cold—it was like the emptiness of an undiscerning gaze in which things, phenomena, and events are lost and cease to exist.

  Suddenly in a single movement, the weight of the ice as yet untouched by cracks in the channel moved forward, which revealed how wide the channel was. What had seemed to be a sloping bank turned out to be ice hummocks, while the banks were so far away that they could not be seen by the eye or captured by the mind. The movement of the ice knocked me off my feet and then the ice holes moved out beneath me.

  This is where I woke up, but I woke from one dream into the next. Both—and there is still the third—were related to each other like several spheres with a single center. Moving from dream to dream you were always in the heart, in the epicenter of events expressed differently in each of the spheres of the joint three-part dream.

  I was on a train platform, seeing it not with the vision of an eyewitness, but somehow from inside the event. And so the dream began: a train approached the platform; two dozen cars seemed insignificant compared to the steam engine. The smoke, imbued with soot, was stifling; the dull cutting edge of the wheels, their red spokes, the grease like a bodily discharge oozing from the pistons; the ruby star at the end of the headless torso was like a brand on a powerful animal that consisted only of muscles, branded by a five-pointed cut, and the power of the muscles pushed red meat through the wound, creating a mark that was a convex star—this all overwhelmed me and deprived me of will.

  I—the me who existed outside the dream—naturally knew how the old steam engines looked: I’d had a childhood full of technology, of enormous machines made to scale as toys. But in my time steam engines were different. The imperfection of construction—the way dinosaurs are imperfect from the point of view of evolution—made that mass of metal seem alive somehow; technology and primal force.

  The steam engine gave rise to a time whose aesthetics looked to industrial labor for inspiration, a time of the triumph of mechanics; mechanics gave poets metaphors, it was entrusted with the setup of human life, and they tried to take humans apart and put them back together in a new way, to create a homunculus of steel and aluminum with a motor for a heart. The steam engine became a marvelous symbol, the triumph of creative power—but now, as I sensed in my dream, time itself feared it, the way the ancient gods feared the hundred-armed giants they created.

  In its furnace, the unbelieving martyrs of the revolution burned as if in a fiery oven, the steam engine brought the body of the leader assigned to be immortal to the capital, and the steam engine itself became one of the minor gods of the new pantheistic religion. Now at the station the arrival of the train spread a sense of dread: the steam engine seemed to have its own understanding of where to go and whom to take, and the trip turned into anxious anticipation—you can never tell at what moment you are traveling at the will of another, elevated above everything else.

  The train stopped at the platform and people came out of the cars. The glass dome of the station, the iron beams, all the rivets were covered in the cold sweat of hoar frost on the foggy morning that settled on the smoke particles. Something stuck in the works of the station clock; the minute hand froze, trembling, and the face resembled the round window of baggage scales.

  At the very end of the platform, near the steam engine, a few men in uniform appeared; the color and style were not important: amid the overcoats, sheepskin jackets, raincoats, and quilted jackets the essential detail was the uniform itself, identical, anonymous, and severe. It was an image—the image of power, universal, like the law of gravity, so all-encompassing that it has no recognizable features.

  The proximity of the steam engine and uniformed soldiers was not accidental: its red star made the stars on the cockades of their caps all the more visible. When they appeared, blocking the exit from the platform, the people who came off the train already belonged to the kind of crowd that appears briefly when a large number of people forced to spend a long time together start to move. This vaguely friendly crowd where the weak attraction of accidental acquaintance was still maintained, moved in a businesslike and almost joyous fashion—the long anticipation was over—and simultaneously each person was separate from his fellow travelers, walking in his own rhythm, and the farther from the wagon, the less this community of people could be called a crowd, for each person was individualized, walking his own road for which the train station was only the starting point, and the law determining the behavior of a crowd did not govern him
.

  But as soon as the soldiers appeared, the people coming out of the train first slowed down imperceptibly, then each person turned, stumbled, lost his rhythm in order to hide from the soldiers behind the person walking in front. It looked as if a number of targets set at various distances had sidled along in order to hide behind one another. A person walked, hidden behind another’s back, and did not see that behind him someone was walking in his footsteps, and behind him, another, and behind him, yet another … The raucous, cheerful crowd that had filled the platform suddenly squeezed itself into many uneven chains, as if after a chemical reaction that made human atoms combine into extended weaving molecules.

  I waited to sense the fear of all those people—it should have erupted, transforming the station air, which had been turned into a trap. However, instead of a sharp eruption I sensed a sedative; there was fear, but it was usual, ordinary, only slightly elevated; there was no tension, it was as if people were rejecting themselves, bidding themselves farewell—and carried themselves to the exit like a pile of folded clothing in an army steam bath, or a prison.

  Even though people hid, there was no more intelligence behind it than in the movements of a worm chopped in half by a shovel. Real fear comes in expectation of direct loss of life—here the separation seemed to have taken place much earlier than when the people came out on the platform or even got into the train; it happened almost at birth. Their lives had been taken away from them and returned in the form of a peacoat from naval supply, for temporary use; now, on the platform, their lives were being demanded back—perhaps unexpectedly but with every right to do so.

  A separate corner was created next to the soldiers: huddled together were the ones pulled out of the crowd; by its density, the group made an island in the relatively uncongested human sea, but there was no impression of an island at all; you immediately registered one peculiarity—it was as if these people were not there, and only later did you understand why.