Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  The library as entrée to the past did not work. The museum was even more hopeless; it was too new, that museum, and its creators were too concerned with having a good, trustworthy past; so the whole thing was a stage set, newly minted: the way restaurants are decorated in “olde time” fashion. In the middle there was a reconstruction of an earthen house in which the first settlers allegedly lived—they called the prisoners “settlers”; the house was made of first-class logs, with glass in the low windows, the roof covered with even sod; this was a historical attraction, an attempt to amend one’s genealogy.

  A glass case displayed a kettle made out of a can, an explorer’s rubber boots chewed up by rats, a rusty lantern, and some other objects, real ones, not fakes, but placed under glass and brightly illuminated, they appeared to be frozen lumps of mud from a tractor rut exhibited in a museum for some reason. The past did not come closer, on the contrary, it was moving away, and the exhibits were presented as evidence of a civilization—earthly or not—to which we now living had no relation; “Look, they also had a life” said the glass cases, and the respectable present, ashamed of the rough past (which is why the earth house was made of the highest-quality wood) showed them in their best light and rushed to announce that the past was in the past and shoved it deeper away, into the stifling sack, the sleeve, the cellar.

  Next to the cases representing the history of the town were cases with archeological exhibits; a spoon hand-carved out of wood, a lighter made out of a shell case—and nearby bone arrow and spearheads, sharpened cutting stones, fish bone needles, clay beads; it was strange to see that, despite the difference in intention and materials, both types of objects lagged behind us by an immeasurable period of time and were closer to each other than to us.

  The prisoners of the 1930s and 1940s lived in foxholes before they built barracks; the fishermen and hunters of the Neolithic period who left drawings and petroglyphs in the nearby mountains, hunters of the sun and pilots of the moon—they were related by the dark of the cave, where the first rational feeling was pain; and I thought of an old acquaintance, a professor of archaeology who studied Neanderthal culture and was then arrested and sent to the camps.

  We met in the region where he had been exiled and later remained; there he studied the history of local tribes inhabiting the long and narrow sandbars in the thousands of kilometers of swamps. In times closer to our own, an epic was being created by people’s lives, and big events, wars and revolutions were woven into its pattern and reinterpreted as a mythological scene; Nicholas II, Lenin, and Stalin were turned into heroes of the middle world, Bolsheviks were born out of the ground; battles and clashes reached them like a wave striking a distant shore, the receptive myth reworked them without destroying its own wholeness; the GOERLO plan for national electrification was turned into combat over the sun, collectivization into a clash between the spirits of the land and the spirits of war who destroyed all the fruits of the earth for the work of death.

  The professor studied these tribes without scientific detachment, rather, he did not separate his perceptions from those of the people whose minds created the myths; the professor said that he tested the effectiveness and saving power of a mythical perception of reality, turning it into a battle of the ancient polymorphic forces of good and evil, a struggle without distinction of warring sides. In this consciousness, good is not yet separated from evil, they grow out of the same life root and easily flow into each other, they are close and fraternal; for instance, what is really evil is presented as good and what is seen as a victory of good is actually the triumph of evil. This is how the mind protects itself, the professor thought, extending the spectral presence of good through mythology, when facing the totality of evil without the distorting lens of myth would destroy you.

  Yet the professor did not forget his prior scientific interests and liked to tell me that since he had been in the few caves with Neanderthal remains and had studied their skeletons in order to establish what the creatures looked like, in the camps he had the feeling he was surrounded by those he thought had become extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

  The discovery, in the final years of the professor’s life, that Neanderthals were not ancestors of man, but were an independent subspecies and warred with humans, confirmed his unscientific hypothesis, which was nevertheless exact in a different way: the ancient anthropoid races did not vanish, they learned to coexist with humans, grew to look like them, but their cannibalistic nature remained the same; when the human qualities in humans are abused, that nature is revealed and manifests itself: the cannibals openly practice their cannibalism. However, the professor used this hypothesis metaphorically as well: “It’s easier this way than accepting that everything I have seen belongs to human nature.”

  The town also had a geological museum; the main exhibits were the local ores used to make fertilizer and the minerals with rare earth metals.

  All were ugly, here was one homely stone and oddly, a whole city, tens of thousands of people, arose just to mine that stone, so ordinary looking; when you look at the minerals cerium or scandium, you understand that they have an admixture of metals that are extremely expensive, but their value is profoundly conceptual.

  Of course, you are judging like an ordinary person expecting an obvious depiction of value that would justify the massive expenditures—processing plants, quarries, mines—but at the same time there is something very true in the ordinary view; it was telling you that labor here has a specific meaning and there is no point in judging it by its fruits.

  Even coal extracted from a mine is a compressed form of the fierce sun of the Jurassic period, the sun of gigantic creatures and vegetation, it remembers the shimmer of scaly skin, the heat of the sun that was younger by hundreds of millions of years, coal—and there is a reason why heat and food is calculated in calories—seems to be the food of fire, and the ancient respect for fire makes coal the bread of flames, a significant presence in the business of life. The rocks and minerals in the museum did not speak to the heart, they could become valuable only in a chain of chemical transformations, traveling along several conveyor belts, and it seemed that a miner who cut out a rock like that with his jackhammer should ask himself why he’s done so and should have to persuade himself that his work has meaning and is useful—for the distance is too great between a piece of gray dull rock and the extraction of a useful substance.

  After the library and museums I decided after all to visit the street where the man who wrote to Grandfather II lived; not drop in on him, not ask about him, just walk down the street, as if by chance; bring the future a little closer, but not enter it; see what that man sees—or saw—every day, his store, his tobacco kiosk, his bus stop, his front door; take a good look—for now as a casual stroller—at the street that would irreversibly become that street, look at it freely as one of many streets, and maybe it would tell me something, warn me.

  I wanted to ask for a map at the newspaper counter, but realized that the town did not need to see itself from the outside; they would hardly publish a map here, it was all known, all the corners, intersections, alleys, and courtyards; people don’t look at maps here, they ask the way; and so did I.

  No one knew the street indicated in the letter; people tried to remember, stopped others, one even called home—there was no such street; of course, it wasn’t hard to get mixed up: it was called Red Kolkhoz Street, and the town had many other streets with red in the name: Red Army, Red Partisans, Red Lighthouse, Red Dawn; none of them had anything to do—by name—with the locale, creating a parallel system of ideological cosmogony in which Red Dawns rose above the country and the Red Lighthouse lit the way for the Red Partisans for some reason; people were trapped in this net of non-reality, and they lived in it, pronouncing the names and extending the existence of this hassle. I remembered a village outside Moscow where I was visiting friends in their dacha and I awoke in the morning with the horrible realization that I was in a place called Lenin’s Precepts, and t
he very possibility of living there, of saying “We live in the Precepts” or “The population of the Precepts,”—it was detrimental to sanity to live in something that was doubly fictitious because Lenin never left any precepts. Now I was dealing with the topography of an entire town that was deprived of its own voice, drawn on a grid, and the streets intersected like footnotes in articles of the latest mythological dictionary.

  At last someone recalled that Red Kolkhoz Street had existed but then the old buildings were razed, they were some of the first built in the town, and the Rainbow neighborhood was created, and the street was now called First Rainbow.

  Hoping that maybe Grandfather II’s correspondent had been given an apartment in one of the new buildings, I went to First Rainbow. They were multistoried houses painted in bright colors copying one of the big northern cities; orange, pink, and violet nine-story buildings. They were no longer new—it was fifteen or twenty years later, but the cheerful colors denied the possibility of a man from the past choosing to live here; there were no old people in the courtyards, they apparently did not manage to live here among walls the color of fruit-flavored gum.

  For this place, the local past did not exist; the residents were not miners but factory managers, they had forced out the former owners on Red Kolkhoz Street and planned their own, separate neighborhood free of mine dust, and the times were such that you could change the name from the straw and manure Red Kolkhoz to Rainbow. Actually, you could gauge the attitude toward the past by the name change: moving into new apartments—this was during perestroika—people were moving into the future, they called it Rainbow, and even though they couldn’t get paint in the entire rainbow spectrum, they could set themselves apart, legalize their caste, and probably no one saw that the neighborhood looked like a dollhouse in a filthy wasteland.

  Beyond the last buildings there was one more, a village house, low, its shingles blue-gray with lichen; it had not been torn down for some reason. I went there—the house was from former times, it was the same age as the letters that were dropped into a mailbox around here by the man who wrote to Grandfather II.

  An old woman was hilling potatoes in the garden; there are old woman like that—eighty, ninety years old, who lost their husbands a long time ago at war or in the mines, so long ago that others manage to live an entire life, from birth to death, in that period of time. The past—marriage, motherhood—is so distant that either the person or the past has to die, and if the person lives, the past dies. These old women are a special breed—they don’t get tired, life to them is a daily chore—dig, water, hill, weed; they harness themselves habitually and probably only for themselves, without hope, without expectation, without haste. After all, you get tired when the work is hard and rest is far away, but they truly do not understand the meaning of rest, and no work is hard for them because in order to sense its difficulty you have to know the meaning of idleness, which they have never experienced. They are not inspired to work—people like that eventually tire; they work like abstract forces in textbooks—they press, haul, accelerate, move; there is horsepower and there is human power—and that power alone is what keeps them alive.

  I said hello; the old woman yelled at me to go away—she wasn’t going to sell the house. I replied that I didn’t need the house, I was looking for the people who lived here twenty years ago, before the new neighborhood. She unlatched the gate and led me into the house; she didn’t quite believe me and kept expecting me to start talking about buying, to name a sum, but there was something else as well that made her mood change so readily.

  The house was a kingdom of hand-knit rugs, coverlets, and curtains: a sewing machine, an old Singer, stood in a prominent place and it seemed that the old woman had gotten a magical spool with never-ending thread; she sewed, spun, knitted, and never ran out of thread, and she did not know what to do with it, but she was afraid to turn off the machine and spindle or put down her knitting needles: What if the thread was her life?

  A framed newspaper clipping hung on the wall, wreathed in paper flowers, an atheist shrine; that clipping—the woman started telling me about it—determined her fate. There she was in the photo, a young weaver, the only one in the entire town to have ever personally seen the Bolshevik in whose honor the town was named, and she was even photographed with him; he received a delegation of shock worker weavers and they brought her, a girl, as an example of youth labor; then the Bolshevik was killed, and she moved to the place bearing his name—and in this town the newspaper clipping served to ensure her well-being. While the town bore that name, the authorities—both Soviet and the ones who came after—took good care of her; the old woman—I was told this later—gave talks about the Bolshevik in schools and kindergartens, at municipal meetings and anniversaries; her own life was insignificant, she had become something like a film strip or a gramophone recording that captured the image and voice of the deceased; she did not embroider or invent things; she toiled as an eyewitness.

  Yet no one thought to find out how she felt about the man for whose posthumous existence she had stifled her own life; it was only much later, in the new times, that they learned he had sent her parents to the camps; but she had continued talking about him, witnessing those eight minutes she had been next to him; first the newspaper clipping saved her from being sent away and turned her into a visual aid for schoolchildren; then she became an eight-minute segment of newsreel, and then she no longer could change.

  Telling me about her past life, she spoke as if she sensed the time was coming when her newspaper clipping would mean nothing, no matter what the town used to be called; her house was standing thanks to that clipping, she was the only one who hadn’t been moved out of Red Kolkhoz Street, and now the framed newspaper wreathed in flowers looked more like an idol of a forgotten deity; the face, the font—they were all too long ago and it kept moving away, not forgotten but losing its meaning, turning into a curiosity, and if people learned that she had seen the man for whom the town was named, they were only surprised that she was still alive.

  When she heard I was looking for someone, the old woman hoped I would bring changes, that an old relationship would be rekindled, time would turn back; but seeing that my interest was not in that, she seemed to regret letting me in; she said only that people from Red Kolkhoz Street were resettled in various places, these had been the oldest buildings in the town, and some had gotten good apartments in the center, in the Stalinist houses; apparently the managers of the factory had enough power to move out the former owners but had to humor the former higher officers of the camp guards; basically, that was the plan—to divide the town’s past from the town’s present, to separate so that it would be easier for some to forget the others.

  I asked her some more about the town, where I could look for the people who moved, what they lived on now; the old woman told me to go the quarry—I would understand everything there, about the people who moved and the ones who didn’t; the quarry for her was an answer that obviated the very possibility of a question.

  She, a former weaver, the guardian of someone else’s memory, who had lived a life different from the rest, protected by the newspaper clipping on the wall, replied as if I had asked her where her peers where, where her husband and children were and whether she had had any; where was her generation, what had it left behind, where were the survivors, the last ones, what could they tell me; “Go to the quarry,” she said and closed the door, then bolted it.

  I walked through town again; I was just strolling, keeping the general direction in mind, and realized something I had noted but had no words to describe: the town was planned for people walking in columns and turning at right angles; a single person, a single dweller with irregular routes was apparently too minor for the planners’ focus, they lacked the vision to see the human figure through the plan; as a result, the city was divided up by plants and factories and the person—an ordinary person—seemed to be there illegally.

  I saw how “zones,” walled off by fences an
d barbed wire, whether a prison camp or a closed, restricted enterprise, entered the public and private space and distorted it. In essence, the town as town did not exist—there was a territory on which private interests were permitted selectively, stores, schools, nurseries, but this was a necessary concession; things were not intended for humans here, and thus the locale resembled a beam chewed up by a wood borer; everything was illegal, crooked, roundabout, and under the table; cut this corner, move this board, go through the dump; across the lot, in the hole in the fence, and back alleys, alleys, alleys.

  You couldn’t get to the quarry just like that, it was guarded—including against people like me, simple gawkers, who could be hurt in a blast; but the higher the fences and the more guards, the more varied the loopholes; I didn’t even have to search—any spot used frequently gives itself away, by a path leading to it, or clothing wrapped around bars that are just a little wider apart so that a person can squeeze through; or by signs of useless fortification, soldered strips of metal, piles of concrete beams, “no entry” signs; but there was a path that disappeared inside the labyrinth of beams; these people who erected these barriers also lacked vision with the correct resolving power, so there was always a crack—sidle in, losing buttons, pull yourself up, and get through somehow.