Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  Everyone else—many hundreds of people—avoided looking at the prisoners; the prisoners did not look out beyond the limits of their circle, and so the group completely fell out of the entire field of vision.

  I tried to hold my gaze and keep it from veering off—but like a compass needle following a magnet, it chased the directing vectors. To break out of the current of gazes that carried me to the exit, past the prisoners, I gazed through the station windows at the freight lines, and there I saw a steam engine that was the twin of the first engine, to which heated freight cars with barred windows were being coupled. At that moment I remembered—remembered in the local “induced” memory of the dream—that I had lived through this already the last time I had this dream, and I swore to watch the freight tracks, the areas of the dream that remained outside my view—swore because this second steam engine, this second train, was intended for the prisoners on the platform.

  They began bringing people into the freight cars and I realized that the ones who’d been arrested at the station were taken in order to fill the spots of people who hadn’t been arrested in the city. With the view beyond the borders of the station dome I saw the reason for this anxiety which had seized me when I first spotted the steam engine. The prison train was already in place when the train approached the station, the track curved, and for a period the passengers could see the freight cars from the windows; two different times, present and future, passed very close, like oncoming ships, but the present did not, could not, recognize the future, and the future seemed indifferent to the present. For the passengers, the freight cars were the last meaningless shots in a film of their journey, and if you were to ask any of them a few days later what they had seen when the train was pulling into the station, at best they would recall that there was another train nearby, but nothing more definite than that.

  But this particular, this meaningless detail—a prison train on the side tracks, a row of gray-green freight cars—became like cancer cells for those who were arrested, multiplying, devouring the healthy flesh of the universe, growing, blocking out the narrowing horizon, and turning into a single rusted jaw of the freight car.

  Along the same tracks that had brought them there, the prisoners would be taken back in the direction from which they had come. But although each of them had arrived as someone with a name, who could say I am so-and-so traveling from here-to-there, now they would become no one, they would not even know where they were being taken.

  I saw people moving from the clear bright station, whose dome of glass cells formed a network of coordinates on the platform, drawn with precision, as if in a math workbook, by the sun that had suddenly started to shine above the city’s morning fog, moving into the shadow of other buildings on the freight tracks, for the shadow of the twilight of the night still held sway, detained by the light frost.

  I saw the station, I saw the clock still resisting moving the minute hand to the next division, the enormous mosaic panel on the far inner wall of the station which was not yet completed and which made it look as if the headless red gigantic soldiers it depicted were building themselves, and that the construction scaffolding helped them stand up straight—I saw it all as one frozen instant.

  The border between light and shadow clarified the meaning of what was happening: people were being led out from the present tense; its territory ended where the encirclement began, gray soldiers stood with rifles and bayonets over their shoulders, and two convoy soldiers with a canvas bag took away the prisoners’ watches. The bag looked as if it would start wriggling, filled with puppies to be drowned, but no, it was just getting heavier and the soldier could no longer hold it with one hand.

  The watches fell into the bag and the days of life they measured vanished down its dark gullet. Next to them, soldiers removed wedding rings, breaking marriages; if the ring had grown tight, they called the field doctor; he had smelling salts in case someone passed out, but his bag also held oil and soap. The doctor greased the finger and twisted and turned the ring, which he gave to a special guard. He had a small plywood box with a slot hanging around his neck, and if the ring did not fit through the slot, the guard left it on the lid of the box, so as not to keep unlocking it, and the precious stones set in gold or silver, two or three diamonds, a ruby, a sapphire, looked like colored glass: their value meant nothing now.

  But this merely prepared the prisoners; the main thing occurred on the border of light and dark. The watches and rings were taken away in the daylight, and after that the person had to step into the semidarkness, knowing he would vanish in it the way the ones who entered before him had vanished.

  This was the most tormenting part of the dream: people did not die but they ceased existing in the present. The present went on quite well without them, every new moment pushed back the previous ones, in which those people still were.

  I sensed that oblivion does not come in gradualness, extension, or postponement, but that it is an integral part of time itself, whose unreasoning force makes it happen here and now; blind Cronus is continually devouring his children, and every new moment does not try to add to the last one but to destroy it. Only memory can resist forgetting; of course, not always.

  Deprived of names, deprived of liberty, torn from their families forever, people do not stop being people. But they vanish, the way a crashed plane vanishes from the radar, both for their families and for the generation of yet unborn descendants.

  The prisoners would be remembered the way the dead or those who moved to another continent are remembered: the memories are not added to, and consequently this break in memory is unlikely to be filled.

  As for us—we can judge the past only by the evidence that it preserved about itself.

  I had time only to see the faces, the most ordinary faces without beauty, or significance, or sharp features of breeding. In essence, the faces, despite the varying ages, were like the ones in their distant or not so distant youth: time had transformed them, compressed, stretched, wrinkled them, and the changes that were too easily noticeable made it difficult to see that if you were to remove all the wrinkles and signs of age in reverse order, like stage makeup, the faces would return precisely to their youthful images.

  Time had fallen into their facial features, but mechanically, like erosion that changes the shape of mountain chains; the events of inner life, which irreversibly change and mold the face and keep it from going into reverse aging, were not manifested here.

  And now when disaster came, people helplessly sought support within themselves—and could not find it. Past years came off, unpeeled like sunburned skin, to an age in which everything that happens is still perceived with an eye to the immeasurable duration of the future and when it seems that there will be enough time for a whole new different life, and more than one; an age which has no experience of finished and irredeemable events.

  People were lost—as if a person had been asked to show his papers and he reached into his pocket only to find that there were no pockets, no coat, no memory of where it all had gone. They did not dare seek sympathy from one another, as if suspecting the same loss of self in others.

  Perhaps if they had known of the arrest beforehand, some of them might have found the courage and will to resist, but this—coming off a train and seeing a soldier’s finger pointed at you—this was greater than just being caught unawares: it was an evil mockery of fate in general and of each individual fate in particular.

  The prisoners’ lives were smashed at such a quotidian, unremarkable moment that the very contrast between the event of the arrest, which sucks up the person whole, and the fact that it was not a link in any chain of events, was not preordained or predicted but happened out of nothing without reason or cause—this contrast did away with individual fate per se.

  The point was not the fatal injustice of the arrest; that was only one of the consequences of its gratuitousness. The soldier’s finger, randomly pointing at people walking past, became its presentation, embodiment, and symbol;
this was not that seeming gratuitousness when you wonder why it happened this way and not otherwise; the absolute absence of explanation elevated gratuitousness to the status of the sole reason for everything in the world; from now on any event in this upside down world occurred not by force of causation but by force of arbitrariness, and thus arbitrariness and violence became universal law.

  The red gigantic soldiers on the mosaic panel, their red bayonets scraping the station’s dome, headless guards, were an expression of that law; the fragmentation of the mosaic made it seem that they lacked human anatomy and consisted of cells of well-fed flesh; the panel was so huge that the red soldiers barely fit under the vaulted station roof, and the enormous building, full of air and light, was suddenly turned by association into a decrepit and vile cannibal’s cave.

  The last arrested man stood where they were confiscating watches. The train engineer and his assistant and stoker were walking that way to the train, accompanied by soldiers. And I knew—this knowledge had been incorporated into the dream but it did not appear right away—that the prisoner was the engineer’s younger brother and that they had not seen each other in a long time. The guards had turned the younger brother to face the wall, going through his pockets, while the steam engine whistled and began backing up, distracting the engineer’s attention, and the two brothers did not see each other. The engineer climbed into the cab, threw off his jacket, and while he was pulling a sweater over his head, his brother was led past the steam engine to the freight cars.

  Even in my sleep I was stunned by the ordinariness and ease with which this non-meeting transpired; events avoided joining up, they existed separately, unconnected, and what could have been a tragedy—brother recognizing brother at the fateful moment—did not become one.

  At that moment, a band set up on a far platform; they were rehearsing a welcome for some delegation. The music wasn’t coming together, it wasn’t that they were playing false notes, they just couldn’t elicit the melody. Then a boy came out, who was supposed to read a greeting from the Pioneers; but the rhymed speech staggered, too, it was as if he had swallowed half the text.

  No music, no poetry; for some reason, the poem caught my attention. I understood that the words were supposed to echo each other like watchmen through the rhymes, to see one another, and that it was the total vigilance of words, their mutual vision, that created the special cognitive optics of the text, the poetic insight.

  I knew that the engineer would never learn whom he hauled in the prison car, and his brother, exiled to live in a place where the transcripts of meetings of the regional party committee were recorded on birch bark and where paper was more valuable than nails, would never send a line about himself.

  The train started on the siding. As a child, when you went out to the railroad tracks to count railway cars and guess what was in them, you sometimes encountered a train so long it seemed never-ending, the only one in the world. The train extended and extended beyond the turn, steam puffed, semaphores glimmered; eventually the cars ended, and your eye was caught by the locked door of the last car; it seemed that it was slightly ajar, and that opening was the last chance to do something, to force the dream to change its course; but the train was leaving, and the door remained before your eyes: this was the beginning of the third dream.

  The door at first retained its look, then it became just a door, then it changed—it was different every time I had the dream; the door to a bedroom, living room, office; wood, metal, knob, lock—everything changed. Only one thing remained—it was ajar, as if the instant when the door was almost shut was plunged into subjective time that did not have the duration of a dream for the sleeper, and it lasted endlessly. The door was no longer open but not yet shut; and I knew that if it did close it would never open again, it would vanish leaving an impenetrable wall.

  I reached toward it, looking for a wedge to hammer between the door and the jamb—and I almost managed, but I didn’t; if only to save what was beyond the door with my gaze, I looked through the keyhole—and fell into it, flew through space with a multitude of other doors, shutters, gates, hatches, and well covers. Everything that could be closed was shut—desks, coffers with letters, mailboxes, safes, oven doors, notebooks, textbooks, stamp albums; the whole world was folding up like a big book that would be wrapped in iron strips, padlocked, and placed under a bushel.

  There, behind every door, things left behind by the people taken away in the train were dying; lenses in eyeglasses cracked, the thin wire frames of pince-nez bent out of shape, the amalgam came off mirrors in black cancerous spots, the images of faces once reflected in the mirrors faded and dissolved, wallpaper peeled from walls, twisting like ribbons of paper streamers; corroding the corks, iodine evaporated from dark yellow bottles, the belts in sewing machines fell apart, pencil lead crumbled, records shed black powder; wood and cement expelled nails and bolts, glue holding pages of photo albums dried out, elastic failed in underwear, buttons fell off clothing, and fur collars shed; the letters wore out on typewriters, piano strings burst, keys and pedals stuck, and pages eaten with the rust, like blood, of paper clips, released the faint aroma of handwritten letters as the ink faded.

  Not a single room in my dream had people; rooms, corridors, stairwells, attics, cellars, entryways, and cupboards alternately formed into a dizzying sequence and fell apart like shards, then joined up again, threaded onto the trajectory of my movement; but I did not encounter a single person. Their absence was the kind that happens only in dreams or in recollections of early childhood: it seems that people had just been here, had just left, hiding from you, and the more clearly the air holds the residual warmth of life and the echo of voices, and the floorboards remember recent steps, the more tormenting is the inability to understand where they went and where to look for them. In childhood this inability makes you bawl, for it is perhaps the first experience of despair: your mother and father are so obviously, so definitely not there, their absence is commensurate with the collapse of the universe; without finding them you cannot believe again in the world, you cannot acquire the strength to live, because not means that there is a hole in the world where people vanish—and you could vanish, too.

  Things did not die silently; almost every sound a thing makes comes because something is being done to it, but here things had their own voices; their speech is a thousand times slower and more protracted, and usually we do not hear the faint rustle of newspapers wrinkling, the quiet cracking of aging porcelain or glass, the mosquito whine of the filaments in lightbulbs. But in the empty rooms where time was rapidly running out, all these creaks, cracks, and rustles combined into a primal sound.

  Sometimes a dying person’s death rattle sounds as if the human and animal no longer live in him and only the third component of his being, unknown to him, is left, related to inanimate nature: this is the way clay in mud volcanoes pulsates and bubbles up in bursting blisters. And then, just before the end, speech returns to him.

  The objects also screamed at first, as if they had become feral, and then, on the contrary, acquired something human in the unity of their sounds; they had absorbed the voices of their owners, their intonations, and now, dying, they tried to speak in the rhythm of those intonations. A strange speech ensued: to the human ear it sounded like interjections of a pre-language that directly expressed emotion in sounds—be it a moan of pain or an exclamation of joy—without mediating it in words. The fourth string on a violin is closest to the human voice, and every object seemed to have discovered the gift of the fourth string; it seemed that silent tension had lived in them and it could become sound only through dying.

  Now it seemed that the things were falling into an abyss, bumping into one another, spinning, and screaming in horror almost like humans; the rooms and other spaces replaced one another infinitely, this sequence had no exit and no end.

  Suddenly, I recognized the cacophony, and at the point of recognition the movement through rooms slowed and soon stopped. From my childhood memory, f
rom the recollections of the same age as that of the apparent loss of my mother and father, came an image: a suspension bridge across the river, stretched on thick ropes, and the sinews of those ropes are severed by a saw with tiny, angry teeth like those of a mouse, the ropes break, but the bridge remains suspended in air as if by the power of habit of those who walked on it, and falls into the water only after a few seconds.

  Creaks and squeaks, a crackle and the long, feminine tender singing of the burst ropes extending in an arc over the river water as if in an attempt to recreate the bridge in sound, in the singing arc. And my internal cry, because I could not understand why they needed to destroy the old bridge in order to build a new one, and the firm conviction that the new one would not be better, even though there was no scarier trial than stepping onto the rotten boards and swaying over the rocks below the crossing in rhythm to someone’s heavy steps—would not be better because the ability to be better was taken away, just like that, in one instant, with a knacker’s ardor, with the desire for definitive change, by dumping the old bridge into the water, when they could have taken it apart, found a use for the wood and metal.

  My memory of the demolished bridge extricated from memories of long ago resembled a bush torn out of the ground with a ball of soil hiding the roots: the demolition of the bridge was the epicenter of the memory, and everything else moved into the shadow: the village houses on the riverbank vanished, the church vanished, and even the banks lost the contours of a strictly defined place, turning into an image of riverbanks in general.

  The river had risen, as if there was flooding; it was no longer water flowing in the river channel, but the entire world palpable in memory became the channel and the overflowing banks and the sky all became a single current in the midst of which the river was a chute, rapids that gather before a waterfall.