Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  The movement halted by the memory of the bridge began again, but in a different iteration; the river, which was part of the dream, suddenly became bigger than it, as if the place where dreams are unfolded has images that cannot be seen awake, that exist only as abstract concepts; images all the more reliable and expressive because familiar real objects serve as their base but which in dreams are perceived not visually but sensually, not as symbols but as forces to which you and the world of the dream are subject.

  My consciousness—the consciousness of the sleeper, sensed as light that makes the dream’s reality visible—contracted to a nutshell; the current seized me; it was a strange current, a current in place, as if the source and mouth were both here; the current carried me not away but deeper, a current without distance. However, the current did not only disembody. There was a hint in it, as in rain or wind, of another presence; there was a vague yet clear sense that “someone is there.”

  Someone fought the current wordlessly, did not want to yield to it; someone’s exploit was taking place—long ago, forgotten, but still continuing. I understood that there were people there; the ones who left the emptied rooms, to whom the dying things addressed their scream; the bridge—a road to them—had collapsed, but I had managed to cross it.

  Thus, through dreams, a person gets the insight of memory: he senses the ominous presence of shaded areas of the past untouched by the light of consciousness; there, in the prison of time, are people, events, and knowledge of oneself that is excluded from the sphere of inner life.

  The clairvoyant of memory—that’s who I became in my sleep. The flow of the river into which my dream had turned divided me from myself, tore all the threads that connected consciousness and memory, which allow you to know who you are at any moment in the details of the past; having become no one, devoid of the selectivity in memory predetermined by a personality, I acquired my memory whole all at once.

  The power of the water receded; and I learned that the memory of a single man is not a fragile boat. Memory—the way it was revealed to me—was an ark.

  In the current, in the movement of water that had seemed empty, islands appeared, banks arose in the distance, and the river became a river again; I had reached the very bottom of the dream where images had no concrete features and now I was returning, moving closer to being awake.

  The islands, flat and sad, resemble the islands of northern rivers; consisting of gravel, sand, and soil, they are washed away by every flood, and they wander along the riverbed, cursed by pilots and buoy keepers. These islands are big sometimes, but people don’t even put fishing huts on them; sometimes, if the island has been around a long time, held by river rot, grass runs riot greedily, and tempted by the thick grass, people carry haystacks on wide boats, like wagons, down the river. But cattle eat this grass reluctantly, as if sensing that the stalks and leaves came from empty water, that the grass is extremely hungry and will take away strength without giving a drop, it will not sate them; it will dilute the blood and make watery milk. The next year you won’t be able to find the grass meadow, only shoals instead of an island; islands like this are not mapped and only the villagers near the banks remember where they were.

  I noticed that the water was carrying some islands—huge peat floats; somewhere upriver the water was washing away peat deposits; old, darkened wooden crosses stood on one of the peat islands—the river had torn off a piece of a cemetery.

  The other islands did not move; their banks seemed to be held down by boulders, fortified. When I got close to one of them, I saw that it was a shore of human faces; people were close together, the first row in water up to their throats, the next stood higher on the sloping bottom, the next even higher, and many rows were only faces for someone looking from the river.

  The water did not reflect these faces: the power of regeneration seemed to have been exhausted by the river, and it carried old reflections, blurry and unclear, in which you just make out a cloud, or the blue and white side of a ship, or the rain-gray pine forest on a cliff.

  The river water flowed without urgency or pressure, like blood in the veins of a sleeping person; if it were possible to transfer this river from dream to reality, to separate it from the vague banks of dreams and insert it, as into a frame, into the hills and cliffs of any known valley, from a distance it would look like an ordinary river. But on its bank, a person would suddenly sense that it was yesterday’s river; it merely flowed in these parts but no tributary would feed into it, no spring would break through its bottom sands.

  The faces of the people in the water and near the water were dark; the current suddenly picked up one or another of them, and his place was taken by the one who had been a step behind him; this is how the river washes away the shore, quietly undercutting the ground beneath the stones. The faces were so dark that it seemed the people had walked underground, not in a tunnel, but through the ground, and particles of dirt had eaten into the skin; there was dirt in their mouths, in their stomachs and lungs, all the body’s spaces were filled by it.

  The people were buried alive but did not die in their graves, wandering underground until they reached the riverbank and opened the ground like a door. They came out into a world where a note next to their names on long-ago faded lists asserted their nonexistence, and now death was completing the postponed work in just a few seconds. They saw me, they were all looking at me, and the combined force of their gaze created a vision inside the dream: sandy shoals, fog and smoke, a tall iron boat, the splash of water, huge iron gates open on the hold of the barge, a gangplank with ropes above the water. Up the gangplank in a single file came prisoners, guards, officers, sailors, and engineers—they walked without turning and vanished in the hold, where only the bent metallic ribs were visible. Then the metal doors began to close—on their own, no one set them in motion, neither people nor mechanisms—and they looked back, prisoners and guards together, but there were fewer of them—the others were blocked from my view by the meeting gates. Once again I wanted to stop the gates, insert a wedge, reach out—and woke up, my gaze not recognizing the house because my gaze—like an ark—was full of faces seeking salvation in it.

  The dreams came for three days; on the fourth, I realized I had to go to the city where the letters found in Grandfather II’s desk were written, I had to find the one who sent them. That this was the only way to find out something from the past was already clear, but now I sensed that this path had opened; we were mutually ready, I to set out and the path to let me pass.

  PART 4

  W

  hen you wake up in a train that left a big city in the night, you are surrounded by only vast, expansive things: power lines, rivers, roads, fields. The country comes to the embankment to watch the railcars with the kindly mockery of the permanent toward the transient, and hills and forest edges learn how to be the view from the window; the triangulation towers on local heights—points for attaching geographical coordinates—look like Martian tripods after a failed invasion, but the crosses on churches give optical axes and space is formulated from these buildings; a cross here is not only a symbol of faith but a land surveying tool.

  When I opened my eyes we had already passed the central zone and reached the taiga; the train was climbing up the globe, north, along the great canal; somewhere there, beyond the pine forest, waters borrowed from lakes flowed in wooden sluices, the water traveled across granite watersheds; the ships in the narrow canal seemed to be traveling on dry land, the masts high above the trees, and the ship horn chased a long echo; the towns and cities near the railroad stood on the edges of lakes, threaded on the line of the canal, and crane booms and tall trees loomed above the low houses, and it all seemed too big for village life; but the lakes saved everything—spread out with hilly shores.

  The canal led to the northern sea; its predecessors were ancient portage routes, the old river paths that were perhaps walked much more than dry land. Probably there was more unconscious symbolism in the creation of the canal—
let the water through, let it flow rather than stand—than actual necessity; the locks with their added columns and arches, the temples of cargo delivery, the tabernacles of river ships—the life of the big country was supposed to flow into these parts through the canal, as if through a catheter; a cellulose paper plant was built on the shore of one of the lakes: the trees were cut down for the sake of the word, and power over these regions shifted from timber to paper.

  Now the villages and towns were situated on two sides of the road—of the tracks and the canal; ships went past, trains went past—two flows, two directions, two currents bearing away; life gradually took on the features of platform and wharf, wharf and platform, depending on which way you turned; the residents were not fed by the land on which their houses stood but by the water and land roads; sometimes loaded, sometimes empty; the canal and railroad tracks were surrounded by zones of alienation, and the residents were icebound between the two zones.

  The train reached a big station; twenty minutes’ wait and a locomotive change. On the low platform, shin-high, sellers bustled, knowing where the car doors would be; most were female, old women and kids; paastrees, paastrees, cowoldbeer, cowoldbeer, fish, fish, fish, kefir whowantskefir, berries, berries, hotpotates, hotpotates, getcher chips, chips, chips, mineral water—dozens of selling patters, pattering sellers, hurry-hurry, hurryitup, mister, wheresyourbag, costsmore withthejar, swallowing letters hungrily. But each face, every figure that had acquired the platform whirl and bustle suggested another face and figure—the real ones they would be back home; God knows what awaited them there—an old woman’s corner with a view of the empty vegetable plot, an apartment in a boarded-up two-story barracks, where everything is in everyone’s face, and the yellowed sheets of a bedridden man hang on the same wash line as the yellow diapers of an infant.

  The locomotive was coupled, the conductors were hurrying people to get in, the sellers were rushing to the next track, the express was approaching from the north, its high beam and red double whiskers appeared around the turn, while I stood, finishing my cigarette; for some reason I always need to use up all the time allotted for a stop.

  An old woman walked along the next platform; she carried a bouquet of peonies, the stems already fading and losing their firmness, but the flowers were still living, deep claret and fully opened. I knew those flowers—I had dug them out and rinsed the tangled roots in a pinkish manganese solution, the tubers like knotted flesh—and by early July the tight glossy buds exploded in a single day into large purple petals, tenfold folded, crumpled, and now falling apart like a pomegranate shattered by its overripeness, almost vulgar in its lack of restraint in proportion, but gorgeous because of that lack of strictness, lushness, loss of form, reduced by the glowing darkness of the depth of its color.

  Peonies like that—I knew this—brought from the dacha were now flowering on Grandfather II’s grave, their sensitive leathery roots going deep; they are death flowers, which are not only appropriate in the face of a death, but somehow crown and attenuate it; the ones whose vegetative flesh is closest to human flesh and can therefore stand in for it in the funeral ritual, grow in the soil of the cemetery, which does not tolerate random plantings; claret peonies—tiny black ants often crawled into their buds; a dark spot on the green, a herald of future decay.

  The old woman’s fingers clumsily held the flowers bound by a scrap of ribbon; the peonies were falling apart, bending in various directions, and it seemed that the same thing was happening inside the old woman: her life was about to fall apart, and the old woman was just trying to get into the cover of her house and be alone with the hardship of dying. The unsold flowers were in the way, her hands could not contain them, the hands were almost dead, life had gathered closer to the heart, to the belly.

  I realized that I could not get into the train leaving her on the platform; I recognized her the way you recognize people who appear to us only a few times, and they are different, but in relation to use they are the same person—confidante, wordless advisor and comforter.

  I had seen her only two times before—in the underground passage of the metro near my house. She healed me from the self-love of grief and self-reliance of insulted injury; they were late evenings of a hot and dusty summer and something was fermenting in people, flaring up in meaningless fights, or cursing, or broken glass; the air was stifling, flowers faded quickly, leaves drooped; I was coming home, wrapped up in my grief and injury, so furious that I was stumbling—everything was in the way, not handy, rubbing me the wrong way—and both times late in the metro passage the old woman was there dressed in a child’s knit cap and a very old dress, in the fashion of her youth, threadbare from washing. There was something of a fastidious mouse used to living with people about her; the gray hairs on her lip, the worn fabric where threads held other threads at a third of their power, her poor vision, her weakness, her clarity of mind in the tiny area, about the size of eyeglasses, of her daily cares. She stood there neither meekly nor pleadingly, but without catching anyone’s attention; before her on a cardboard box were seedlings of houseplants in plastic cups and separately in a jar the claw-like feather of a century plant.

  She had meekness before God; we think that meekness means being ready to bear everything, but that is our pride speaking, our accountant’s concept of justice and revenge; true meekness is where the contradiction is gone—bear it or not, put up with it or not, where there is an equal possibility of one or the other—but you do not raise your voice against God. And meeting that old woman you knew that nothing would befall her in the nasty nighttime metro; all your injuries, anxieties, and sorrow were shamefully tiny in her presence—they became insignificant and nonexistent; just before you had been suffering, a cold, slippery, poisonous lump had filled your solar plexus, and now it was all gone.

  “I’ll get there myself,” the old woman said on the platform, guessing my intention. I bought the peonies; the southbound express hid her from me, the step of my train car began to move.

  It happens that an accidental meeting, for a short second, creates a nearness that does not occur in ordinary life; you suddenly learn that there are no distances, no defenses—they are illusory—there is only the most profound kinship; no risk is needed, no overcoming obstacles or going beyond your boundaries to meet another—the meeting has taken place; it is greater than any of us, we live inside it, we have already met; meeting is not an accident, it is a law, a means and an environment for existence: it is not between us, we are in it.

  The train had left the station; the flowers were on the table in my compartment as a greeting and sign of farewell simultaneously in saturated colors of purplish claret.

  The flowers breathed; their excessive sweetness reminded me of the cemetery, Grandfather II’s grave; evening was descending and the train flew out onto a bridge, and the bolted steel girders stood along the sides of the tracks like enormous letters. Below was the broad river, and the river was still, the current could be felt only near the bottom, under the tense smoothness of the water; the train moved for several minutes in emptiness, the bridge itself was not visible, only the supports and the river, and my heart beat harder, feeling this interruption. The river was turned to glass by the sunset and a long fishing boat powered by a single rower moved across the current, slowly, heavily, as if the oars were scooping mercury.

  I recognized the boat from the mosaics on the vault near Grandfather II’s grave, the long shadows of poplars that seemed to have fallen once and for all and could not get any longer; but there Charon transported a shade wrapped in a long shroud, while here the ferryman or fisherman was alone.

  The near bank was still illuminated, molten in the sunset, while the far bank was hidden by the dark, and it was where the rower was headed; a deep ravine bisected the darkened bank, and a tongue of blackness fell from it into the river.

  The train rushed ahead and its speed made everything outside seem slow; the rower could not turn, the wind could not ruffle the water, the ray of
light could not chase away the dark, and we moved to the dark bank, and we moved through the foggy water meadows, where everything was as velvety as a bat’s wing, silent and immobile; people in the last cars could still see the river, the rowboat, the light, but the head of the train had plunged into twilight, into the winged silence of birds circling above the meadows; a few oxbows shimmered, giving off the heat of the day, and it was only these rising mists that showed that this light was still here, that the cold of night was not eternal here.

  Sensing night, the flowers by the window began folding up their petals; the scent also fell asleep, its discharge ended; the glow of the river, the dark spot of the boat and rower, and the long shadows of the trees remained only in my eyes until I fell asleep. Wherever I looked, everything was blocked by the golden river and the movement of the oars, the world moved into the background, something you remember only through another memory and which moves away like the shore for someone on a boat; and through the water’s glow I could see my former life, suddenly very distant and less palpable than the funnels left by the oars on the smoky volcanic glass of the water.

  I got off the train early in the morning, dark with rain; the passengers—and there were quite a few—vanished with amazing deftness. They were just there, coughing, grunting, swearing, with clumsy travel gear, boxes, backpacks, bags, carts, always more than there was room for, traveling hard, in stress, spitting every minute, working their muscles and elbows; they were just getting red in the face, bending over, carrying, dragging, pushing things somewhere, and suddenly there was no one, just a few taxi drivers without passengers smoking by their cars and watching dogs snarl in the empty lot near the station.

  I went into the station. Sitting at a table in the café were two policemen and two guys in leather jackets; all four were the same. People who start growing quickly at the age of thirteen or fourteen have faces like that: physical grace cannot keep up with growing muscles and for a year or two the teenager turns into a lout. Their faces still had that expression of adolescent dullness—as if each of them, because of an excess of flesh, felt only with his stomach and penis; the table was covered with plates of shashlik and fried potatoes and a bottle of vodka, the waitress watched from the doorway.