Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  I met tramps collecting metal; old men going into the tundra for mushrooms—the road to the best mushroom places crossed the quarry; workers who had hidden something on their shift and now were back to retrieve it; kids—they were on their way to play at war; a couple looking for a trysting spot; they all squeezed in habitually, clambered, pushed, dragging in a basket or some bottles; the tramps were hauling a spool of wire; I used their path into the quarry.

  I had seen quarries like this in Kazakhstan; but there it was hot, the air over the enormous pit boiled, turned white and opaque, and even the sound of the blasts were drowned, muffled by it. Here in the North, the pit opened all of itself at once, pulling you inside, into the five hundred-meter depth; the quarry was a mirror reflection—in terms of the earth’s surface—of the Tower of Babel, molded out of emptiness; the spirals of the quarry road, circling down from level to level, went to the bottom, so deep and narrow compared to the top of the quarry cut that there were only a few hours of sunlight a day down there.

  The gray quarry cliffs were covered by a coat of very fine stone dust that had been wetted and then dried; this coating, with pulverized minerals weakly reflecting the sun, gave the quarry this color; dust covered the dump trucks, huge Belazes, excavators with toothed jaws; here, where there was no soil but only solid rock, the sophisticated human mind discovered its predatory nature; the technology was ready to bite, chew, dig in, crumple, blow up; this mind—I thought of the museum—was close to the mind of the Neanderthal but on a new spiral of development; a mind that combined the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger, neck of a giraffe, and body of a woolly mammoth to create a hybrid, the excavator with gaping jaw; a mind motivated by an insatiable, hopeless desire to devour.

  My brain refused to recognize this five hundred-meter hole in the ground, these stalking excavators that embodied the stupid assiduousness of metal, as the work of humans. They must have been created by semirational animals or insects who preferred scale to accuracy or grace; creatures that did not know individuality and functioned only in quantity. The gigantic hole and the enormous trucks had a challenging but unarticulated manifesto, a heavy symbol; the practical meaning—extracting ore—took a backseat in this picture: human effort multiplied by mechanical power created inhuman effort and the quarry showed the volume and measure of that effort.

  There must be proportions that keep things made by human hands commensurate with man and when violated turn those things against him. It was not that you feel like a grain of sand or a dust mote at the quarry. The violation of the principle of proportionality separates people from what they are doing; it deprives them of significance in terms of labor. In fact, labor as such vanishes, if we understand it as a living connection between the worker and the result of his work, a connection that is mutually enriching and ennobling.

  The quarry boomed, thundered, and clanged metallically; the dump trucks and bulldozers bellowed, diesel exhaust floated in the air, water pumps rumbled; but the result was ephemeral: tons and percentages, units of measure.

  The whole city—streets, windows, bread and vegetables on a counter—was covered with a coating of gray quarry dust, giving it an aspect of death, like the cheap powder at the morgue, for the excessive scale of labor here left its trace on the residents.

  This was particularly noticeable in late August, on Miners Day. The whole city drank; they drank without abandon, ardor, zeal or the ordinary pleasure of drunkards. Time, as colorless as vodka, twisted like a filament in a bottle; the colorless day hung horribly, unnaturally long. Colorless people lay in the streets and others walked past; the connection of words fell apart, the alphabet fell apart, and people shouted and muttered vowels, clumps of words; the collapse of reason manifested in those sounds reached a peak. Then the final last silence settled over the town.

  On the day meant to celebrate their work, their labor, people vented on themselves what they couldn’t vent at the quarry, workshops, and pipes; on the day of legal and even approved drunkenness people felt an outburst of definite, collected, and predetermined self-destruction; this kind of suicide is not tried by healthy people but by legless cripples already a third dead—they only need to kill two-thirds of themselves, death had done part of its work, and they set to it with determination and facility, knowing that the mortal path is a third shorter.

  This was the ultimate rebellion, stifled almost in embryo; dozens of kilometers of tracks, hangars, pipe, factories, precipitation lakes, the quarry, the transporters of enrichment plants—it surrounded and divided up the city, it looked like a car after an accident in which living flesh is squashed and mutilated by metal. Only the quarry kept increasing, growing in width and depth, and all their labor went to using their own lives, the effort of the muscles, and the wear on their hearts to magnify the gaping hole in the ground. This was the most monstrous part––the extracted ore was broken up, turned into fertilizer, freight trains took it south—because what they saw, continually, daily, was the growing hole sucking up their work.

  The slopes of the mountains around the quarry had been blown up and it was called the “avalanche zone.” You could see the thrusting chunks of cliff flesh from every point in the town, the twisted, unnaturally smashed rock, moved by the centrifugal energy of the blasts; the avalanche zone took up three sides of the city horizon, the blown-up cliffs huddled on the slopes as if beyond the point of equilibrium, frozen in midfall.

  There are pictures, a combination of lines and angles, that humans should not see: looking at them is like chewing ground glass to see what flavor it is; they painfully damage the sensory foci of perception; the view of the avalanche zone was one such picture. The world after a catastrophe; the world cracked open, disjointed, with no possibility of bringing it together again; I was amazed to understand that the raw material extracted from the quarry is for fertilizer which is then sprinkled on fields; I saw the joyless cereals growing on those fields—as if sprinkled with ash from a crematorium.

  The gray bread of my childhood, the loaves of bread on the bakery counters, people lining up an hour before opening, the line darker than twilight; women in gray scarves, men in gray coats, faces gray with lack of sleep, and the gray salted urban snow; I understood now where that bread had come from, delivered in vans that looked like Black Marias; where that ubiquitous gray came from—not in a belittling sense but grayness as the absence of color or as the color of dust.

  You stood at the quarry edge and told yourself this is how hell looks; but the image of hell, the circles of hell marked by the spirals of the quarry road, came from culture; you were using it to save yourself from what could barely be described in artistic language, because the quarry was an anti-image, the negation of imagery as such.

  It was gaping; they say a gaping wound, and if you can move away from the details of the flesh you can see in a wound not the outline, not the shape, but the incursion of destructive shapelessness.

  The quarry sucked up your gaze, where it was lost; it encountered nothing but emptiness, traces of the work of emptying; it was impossible to deal with the absurd, to let your mind think about the volume of absence.

  Something was done in this place that should not be done; some line was crossed that should not be crossed in human nature—the hole of the quarry gathered the city around itself, pulled in the region.

  The view of the quarry materialized the hopelessness of life, verging on despair, translated this sensation into a visual one, existing in the world as a thing; the quarry did not threaten to swallow up anything, did not beckon with fatality, it simply was—in the dull steadiness of a hole, the most immutable thing, and that man is transient compared to its immutability was almost unbearable.

  I left the quarry, but I could have stayed; distances meant nothing here. The quarry was carved into my consciousness; before I did not know how the human world looked without humans; now I knew.

  At the bus stop—a shift had just ended—I heard that the rock in the quarry was deteriorating with every ye
ar; they were working with an ore content per ton that would have been considered without prospect in the past.

  This was another point of view—the impoverishment of the rock, the impoverishment of the urban environment, as if the two processes were connected, not directly, but connected. Old theater posters hung at the bus stop, two months old, and no one was putting up new ones; the city was as washed out as these posters and had nothing fresh on offer; its fate was covertly intertwined with the basic activity of the residents—extracting ore in the quarry in the mine that opened veins leading away from the main mass of ore. The rock was being depleted, and the city was being depleted, for it functioned as a factory, unable to create an urban environment on its own, and people were lost within it.

  It was evening; I walked along the outskirts of the town, past warehouses and garages, built close together, clinging to the neighboring wall, as if the building would fall down without it. There were rubbish heaps and packs of stray dogs, shaggy, with dried mud and burdock in their fur; each garage and each shed was built differently, but they had one thing in common: the garage and the shed were built while looking over the shoulder, with an uncertainty, with a sense that the construction was not quite legal—did you have to get permission or could you get away with it; and the sensation that the building did not quite trust the ground on which it stood combined with another sensation: that all the construction materials had been either blatantly stolen or picked up along the way. The combination of the two sensations created a third—the sensation of a life that did not look at itself, that had shrugged itself off.

  The garages and sheds had been built thirty or forty years ago; the five-story buildings of the town had moved right up close to them, and the balconies on their facades—as if by an airborne architectural virus—had turned into the same dilapidated sheds, slapped together and glassed in sloppily; the houses had looked at the sheds for so long they took on their features; people lived in the concrete boxes as best they could and they increased their living space by an extra forty-three square meters, and those balconies poking out of the building facade presented a pathetic, almost illegal private life, ubiquitous and unseen, like mold; life resembling something base, self-sowing, all-penetrating.

  People here bought cars to have a garage; in a city that did not know about beaches, in a city you could cross on foot in an hour, a car was just a form of winter clothing, fur-on-wheels. The crowded apartments, where men’s clothes and women’s clothes had to squeeze into a single closet, where everything was dual purpose, served two functions, like a double bed, and every spot always had more than one person—the crowded apartments got additional space with the garage, something that in the general asexuality of life, with the exception of the kitchen, had a gender specificity. Men visited one another in the garage; the garage was storage for everything that would not fit in the apartment, it was storeroom and cellar, for potatoes and pickling; a creature of the housing deficit, an appendix of lifestyle—a garage, a shed.

  The town’s five-story apartment houses were ugly in their anonymous similarity, while the garages stunned you with a different ugliness; monotonous and extremely functional—walls, roof, door, that is, simply useful cubic meters—they still differed a bit; every builder tried to create a distinguishing detail: make it stand out, different from the others, add a stovepipe, bending it a special way, attach a small overhang above the door, weld an iron corner over the lock so the lugs couldn’t be broken—and these small changes became unbearably noticeable. Accumulating in your view, they repeated as attempts to be different somehow, with no possibility of doing so. I sensed that boredom was more usual here than yearning, because yearning refers to something that does not exist in a given life, while boredom asserts that there is nothing to yearn for: there is nothing anywhere, every place is the same as here.

  I grew up in place just like this; it had a glue factory, and trucks from the slaughterhouse, carrying bones covered with a red-stained tarp, drove there along a pot-holed road. The trucks bounced, bones fell out, and all along the road dogs lay in the bushes waiting for a windfall; sometimes a clumsy old dog, perhaps wounded in the melee, slipped and fell under the wheels; dark wet tracks remained on the asphalt.

  In the winter, the trucks going to the factory were joined by others, carrying snow to the melting station, which was under our windows; snow fell, now was beautiful—but there, behind the fence of the snow-melting station, it lay dirty and splotchy, piled up like defective hides at a slaughterhouse, and all winter I watched the absurd transport of snow to be melted, another sign of quiet, habitual madness.

  Trucks carried snow, trucks carried bones, dogs, which lived in the winter by the snow-melting boilers, watched for the trucks, and everything around was waiting for something.

  This anticipation, like a secret ballot, selected two genii loci, two of its permanent residents.

  The old woman who came to the store with her old cat in a purse and showed him—as people came out of the store with their purchases—what she could have fed him if they increased her pension; and the old man who collected bottles in the morning and then used the kopecks he got for the movies, watching the same film a dozen times; everyone waited, everyone hoped silently; having read a lot of spy novels I hoped that a plane would accidentally drop a bundle with clothing, money, gun, and documents, a package with a different fate.

  There were a lot of poplars in the area, and in the summer the wind chased balls of dusty gray fluff along the sidewalks; later, in the Kazakhstan desert, I saw balls of tumbleweed and I learned that the infinity of boredom was the indifferent repetition of life. I understood that I had experienced that sensation before—it was the background of my childhood: trucks with bones, trucks with snow, stray dogs by the road, clumps of fluff in the gutter, carried by the wind.

  It wasn’t that nothing new ever happened in the neighborhood of my childhood; worse was that there was nothing old in it: its houses, built to depopulate the dormitories, communal flats, and rooms with eight people in eight square meters, started falling apart the moment they were built; they lacked the dignity of age. Life did not expand, it limped along, going nowhere.

  Now in this northern town, it was like returning to my childhood; I recognized the twisted backyards, delineated by laundry, the roofs over domino tables, the sandboxes—and right there, the garages and sheds; everything was so mixed up and stuck together, growing into one another, that I thought: it’s no wonder that the most attractive place of my childhood was the shooting gallery—a blue trailer behind the movie theater. There was always a long line, and from the number of people waiting—five kopecks a shot, moving targets attached to the ceiling, rabbits, boars, and wolves—you could guess that the shooting gallery served a special need; people lived among fences, alleys, dead ends, and went to the gallery for a gulp of straight shooting, to see the clarity of the goal.

  I went back once to my old place, where I had not been for over twenty years. Streets, houses, yards—everything seemed extremely small and miserable; you could imagine that I had grown up and what had seemed enormous to me was now in its normal size. But that explanation left something out, it was based on dry mathematical calculation; I thought that sometimes a child is forced to see not the geometry of space that exists but the one he creates in his gaze, increasing perspective, adding volume where it does not exist in reality.

  I realized that I simply could not have lived as a child in that courtyard, among those houses—they were too spiritually and visually insignificant even for a nine-year-old, and the exaggerated metamorphosis that I imposed on them was a question of salvation and self-preservation.

  I walked past sheds and garages; I needed to find out, to see the town from the inside out, walk the paths and tracks that its residents used, to re-create the drawing of their movements—that is how a place becomes familiar; on Friday nights they drank at the garages, spreading a newspaper on the hood of a car or on a crate; there was music—persistent music
that I had already heard in the taxi; its essence wasn’t in the melody but in the cheap voices, male and female.

  Cheap voices—men and women sang about love, separation, meetings, long sentences, prison, they sang as if the night before moving they’d heaped everything into a single pile without separating the rubbish from the essential. People drank and ate to those voices, cooking shashlik somewhere; the garages and sheds came to an end, the trampled thin woodland began, and on every meadow a bonfire burned.

  And suddenly, in the woods, I heard different voices—people conversing, how much to pour into whose glass, who wants the hotdog, give me a light, and this simple conversation was without the empty intonations that pretend to add some meaning.

  I turned from the road and saw five men sitting on logs. One, quite old, sliced up a sausage and then stuck the knife in his leg—no one winced, they all knew it was wooden; another, also an old man, sat aloofly, leaning on a stick made out of a bus handrail, bicycle reflectors sewn onto his faded overalls; the third, with a scar across his whole face covered with rough stubble, was pouring vodka into the glasses, the fourth I saw only from the back and he sat too still, as if paralyzed, and the fifth, on the contrary, was shaking, a subcutaneous tic ran all over his body, and his features winked at one another, made faces, and his left eyebrow teased the right.

  You could see their miners’ past in them; the horizon, or plane, is a work term for a miner; in order to reach the horizon—one of many—you have to go down into the mine, and often miners work on a single horizon for decades, limited for them by the end of the pit face; their horizon is a dead end, and people fight the rock in that dead end, but it merely retreats without ceasing to be a dead end, and labor in the pit face—even if the ore is hauled up to the surface—is labor that has no exit in itself.