Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  The horizon of life, underground, dark, the daily descent into the mountain strata, where it is already warm from the heat of the depths, a descent along a long vertical; the people working in mines seem to hold the sky on their shoulders; the body remembers the pressure of the stone strata sensed by the spinal cord. Heavy muscles, heavy tread—they are like lead and platinum in the table of elements, they are compressed by pressure, they are nurtured by darkness. Underground walkers, receiving a miner’s headlight sturdier than a human body every twenty-four hours from the lamp room—they were people who live in two worlds, this one and that one, people whose daily path on the ground is shorter than their path under the ground—the side drifts are often several kilometers long, and the miners walk beneath their houses, the city, the suburbs, walk though stone, where there are only the mole tunnels of the drifts and the vertical conduit of the mine shaft—its throat, the only way up.

  All five had been miners, laborers of the underground; all five had been in accidents at different times. Now they stuck together—half-crippled, too strong to die; the mine tossed them out like slag, but there was enough power in their bodies for a long life—life after the collapse—and they gathered here in the woods, where they could see the quarry, the mine yard, the building of the shaft, the waste banks and refuse heaps; it seemed that the mine attracted them, lured them to this place.

  They noticed me and asked for cigarettes; I gave them mine and they offered me a drink. The vodka slid down to my stomach like a warm slug; they asked me who I was and where from—without curiosity, I had two legs and not one; I told them I was searching for at least a trace of a man who was long gone—and named Grandfather II.

  They were silent, the combination of letters did not move or upset them. Of course, I did not expect random people in the woods near the city limits to know Grandfather II’s biography, that the mystery of his life would be solved so easily; however, I kept still: for the first time it occurred to me that perhaps it was no longer possible to learn something about Grandfather II, that I was the only person who had part of the information about him and the rest was lost for good, dissolved, or else existed without any connection to him, for example, just as objects who knows from where, things among things; a photograph in somebody’s dresser drawer, a book on a shelf, a cup in the cupboard and no force of will, no insight could combine them, make them recognize one another and give evidence.

  I said nothing; they asked me what I wanted with this man who had died so reliably and so long ago, who was I?—grandson, great-grandson, distant relative, journalist, just curious? I replied that I hoped to understand what I wanted with him when I learned something about him; I repeated Grandfather II’s full name—out of hopelessness, because I saw myself then: behind the garages, among the thin birches, with a view of the mine, in a random place with chance acquaintances, at the end of a cul-de-sac; the man with the scar called to the legless one—try to remember, you know everything; try!

  The legless man seemed to wake up and gave him a sly look: first you tell me to forget everything and now I have to remember; the others began persuading him—it looked as if this was a favorite pastime, like spinning a top on a map to see where it lands, asking him to recall something, feeding their general interest which found no nourishment in their quotidian lives.

  As I later learned, the old man with the wooden leg was in charge of the mining office archives. “The archive is like the pit,” he told me, “except there’s paper instead of rock.” Every ton of ore extracted from the quarry and mine gave birth to numbers, ore demanded ink for the typewriters—and paper; pages of maps, work plans, reports, transcripts of thousands of meetings and thousands of committees settled in the archive, thickening, baking over the decades into boulders of paper; people rarely looked into the pages, but regulations required they be kept, and paper took up most of the room in the archive basement, the paths among cupboards and shelves narrowed, the light from the ceiling lamps could no longer reach the lower shelves or distant corners; the archive really did resemble a mine.

  The head of the archive received new documents once a quarter and the rest of the time he waged war against rats; the rats, apparently attracted by the smell of decomposing paper, crawled into the basement through pipes, chewed through wooden covers and doors, tried to jump into the pocket of his overalls when he went down from the common space to his work corner; the rats must have been lured by the warmth of the basement, the warmth of paper scraps, so good for creating a nest and bringing up baby rats, but they seemed to hate paper. Creatures of disasters and sorrows, wars and revolutions, creatures of the timeless times, they sensed that the archive was a warehouse of the past, even if the past was only data on ore excavation, and they tried to destroy, befoul, and shred the paper and bring up equally gluttonous progeny.

  The old man blocked entries with concrete, sprinkled poison in corners, set up homemade traps; he was afraid—said the miner with the scar, laughing—that the rats would chew his wooden leg if he fell asleep in the basement and would never be able to get back upstairs. But that was a funny fear, and the old man laughed, too—the battle with rats gave meaning to his life and maybe the other envied him. Upstairs, in the mining offices, there were engineers, geologists, surveyors, management; they passed around test ore, argued about spare parts for the Belazes, ordered carloads of explosives, made plans, and drew schemata—while below in the basement a mining engineer with a wooden leg, caught once in a mine collapse, was fighting off rat attacks, and he believed that the upper floors stood only thanks to his struggles. The administration building was set on a foundation of paper, and the old man who retained the reverence for paper that came from the olden days when it was a rarity, no matter what was written on it, and its appearance in some village almost meant a change in destiny—the old man, who knew the value of income and expenditure, selflessly protected the archive; the stamps, signatures, the lines of extractions let you re-create the architectonics of fates and the march of time.

  I told the old man Grandfather II’s surname again; he pondered, as if trying to remember on which shelf the documents could be.

  “He was the warden of the camp,” the old man said after a pause. “There was no town here yet, just the camp, the quarry, and the mine. He was in charge of it all. Fifteen thousand people. Two thousand guards and employees, the rest were prisoners. He was in charge for a long time, around ten years, from the first barracks to the first houses. Then something happened to him, I don’t remember what. I wasn’t there, I know this from documents and stories. I have very few papers from that time, they are all kept by the ministries.”

  “They called me in there once,” he added with a snigger. “They needed some reference about the factory. You know what’s there? The same kind of archive as mine, just bigger. Massive deposits of paper. It lives a long time, paper. And they sit there, pulling their dirty tricks, not human beings, just identification badges, but there they sit on that paper, on old files.”

  I remembered that building; the town had secret manufacturing plants, and that’s why there was a branch of that organization; I hadn’t gone there to ask about Grandfather II. The building was in the Constructivist style—a gray cube with an inner courtyard and a rectangular hanging arch; the cube seemed to be endowed with a special unloving life, and if it were fed, the building would grow, expanding to the size of the House on the Embankment, the warehouse of fates in Moscow, and then it would give birth to smaller cubes. There was something about that house, with its small inner courtyard shut by cast iron barred gates—something that exuded both prison and crematorium at the same time, two places where a person no longer belonged to himself; but that was the architecture speaking, the intention of previous times, but now—the old man was right—the building’s strength was only in the paper stored inside it.

  Of course, now, two decades since the former regime had ended, there was nothing shockingly new among the files in the cardboard folders; but the point w
as that none of the cases had seen the light of a uniquely precise moment of history, at the only time when they could have changed anything; not necessarily, in fact probably not, but still it was possible. But now it was only dead paper; no demonic spirit, no aura of horror surrounded the office—just dead paper; the archives held what was left of people, there were pages with sentences, and the office even let you look at them, let you make photocopies, but kept the actual papers as collateral; even in death the office controlled those people, otherworldly serfs; the office turned out to be—without irony—the only owner of the assembly of souls.

  All five former miners looked at me; now I couldn’t just up and leave, even if I had wanted to. What had happened to them—accidents, wounds, the life of a cripple—had happened to me; it was no longer the fact that the blood of Grandfather II who had started this place was in my blood; I had come here to rid myself of the shadow of Grandfather II, had come with an approximate idea of what I would learn, even though I had not imagined that Grandfather II was warden of a prison camp; I had come with an inner isolation from the place and its people and I had regarded the residents here only from one angle: what they could tell me. But here was the hellish hole in the ground and cripples damaged by a mine collapse, and I couldn’t learn anything dispassionately, first I had to reply to the question of who I was, before asking about Grandfather II; I had to stand beneath a mine collapse, call it down on myself, stay here—and only then something would be revealed to me, because I would become part of what was revealed.

  In the morning—for I spent the evening there in the woods, going out for a bottle a few times as the youngest one, drank, and listened to stories of how the mine grew and the quarry expanded—I went to look for the new address of the man who had written to Grandfather II. On the street someone told me that the city had a lost and found office, which included an address bureau.

  It was located in an old pump house; red brick with a pointy tin roof painted dark green, the pump house had been built by the steam engine depot, where there were garages now, and the water tower was given to the police for some reason. With narrow windows and brick crenellations, it looked like a fortress tower lost in geography. Inside it was cold—the cold water from the deep well had seeped into the bricks.

  The lost and found office and the address bureau were run by one man—a police captain with the manner of a pickpocket, skinny, tall, all cartilage and fluidity, unable to sit still, able to be in two or three places at once; he did well among the lost wallets and long narrow drawers with address cards: the town lost things, people got lost in the town, and they came to him with every loss, and he sat there looking as if he had stolen the items, had lured away a person, and then, befitting his job, was also involved in the search.

  The captain led me down a spiral staircase to the former pump room; now it was a storeroom for items and address files. Along the way he managed to complain that the lost and found wasn’t what it used to be—pronouncing “lost and found” with a special intonation; before, the captain said, people turned in more, whatever they found in the street, but now they would turn in a purse only if they’d found it on a bus and had called in the police to check whether it was a bomb; otherwise, nobody turned anything in.

  Of course, the captain was exaggerating: we walked past piles of unclaimed items, dusty bundles, gutted wallets, attaché cases, ladies’ bags; I saw cosmetic bags, a roll of roofing felt, a picnic cooler, drafting tools, baby carriages, downhill skis and even ice skates; a plastic horse on wheels, milk cans, pails, carts, a bag of cement. It looked like the antechamber of the world to come, which people reached after a long journey, accumulating stuff as they went, and then had to leave it all here. The objects stood there, huddled in bunches like sheep without a shepherd, and it seemed that if anyone whistled to them, the carriages and carts would roll on their own and the rest of the stuff would climb in, and the canes and crutches would hobble and the skis would slide. The things were afraid: they were abandoned and now, aged and old-fashioned, they didn’t know what would happen to them; I saw the captain with fresh eyes: Did he understand what service he was doing? The losses of the entire city were gathered here and there was something bitter in the fact that they were unnoticed; it was easier to accept, to just pay no mind to the loss, even though the lost items could be found and returned.

  While the captain rummaged in the drawers for the address of Grandfather II’s correspondent—if still alive—I thought about those things; once, when I was with a woman, I realized that we were both tired people who looked with pity upon our own bodies, and our embrace had a taste of that pity; we had lived so long that the only object from the past we had was the body: another city, another apartment—the body lives longer than contemporary objects made to be replaced. I wanted so much to tell it: here we are all alone, pal; here we are alone … I thought about things and the loneliness of man among them; of the fact that a person can be described as a selection of his important objects—but when someone else comes to this selection, what is he going to do? Create a puzzle out of a wristwatch, a cigarette case engraved From your coworkers, a wedding ring, and a validated ticket? And here I stand among lost objects when all I need is a person—one who might know and remember; I do not trust objects.

  The captain told me the address; the person I sought had moved from Red Kolkhoz Street. Then he suggested I take a look at the finds—if I liked something, I could buy it; sort of like a pawnshop, said the captain. I said no; he kept trying to interest me in a fishing rod left on a bus; he spun the gilt-edged lure and triple hook, showing me how the fish would swallow it; the pole was pathetic, homemade, but the captain took that into account, making up a story about how tackle that doesn’t look like much is really the best; the captain was a bullshitter, he spent the day among rubbish, trying to sell it and waiting for success—what if some fool brings him something truly valuable; at the door we ran into the next visitor with something under his arm; the captain bustled and rushed me out the door, these were probably stolen goods for sale. I gave the captain some money, he perked up and stopped rushing me, the money received as a bribe equalized me with the rest of his visitors and created a relationship—I gave, he took—and he probably wanted to introduce me to the petty thief, out of boredom, to see what would happen.

  It was sunny. The city authorities had started the fountains six weeks late and the pipes were not yet cleared; rusty, murky water rose to the sky; I bought an ice cream and then the captain caught up with me. “Lunch,” he said. “Shall we have lunch?”

  We went to a café; over lunch the captain asked me in a seemingly confused way but actually quite cautiously why I was looking for that person; seeing that I did not understand where he was going, the captain spoke more clearly: in this town many old men have a lot of money; if someone, for example, had a good job in the business sector, he retired a millionaire; kickbacks, accounts, faked documents, construction materials sold on the side—there were plenty of ways of getting rich, the mining plant was too big, too dark and convoluted even for the people managing it, and “many, many”—as the captain repeated—managed to use their jobs to their advantage. And if I, say, were looking for that kind of man, being related to him in some way, and having expectations of money, then I should get myself some friends first.

  The captain told me as an aside the story of a young city slicker who asked him for an address, he had come for his inheritance, but, alas, he never got it—something happened to him. “I gave him the address all right,” the captain said, “but he refused to have lunch with me.”

  The captain was probably lying; he lied the way he ate—not concerned with the taste, hurrying to get it into his gullet and take another bite; in essence, he was chewing price lists, swallowing rubles, he wanted to have an expensive lunch at my expense; he was cowardly, the captain, used to looking over his shoulder and making do with small change; I noticed that the suitcases and bags at the lost and found had their side seams undone�
��the captain had sliced the stitching with a razor in case something was sewn into the lining. He was giving me a similar once-over; but it was clear that the captain was not alone, he could get in touch with others and make it seem that I really was a future heir.

  It was too late to tell the captain I was only looking for someone who could tell me about the former camp warden; too late to pretend to be a historian or a journalist. The captain believed what he had made up about me, his guesses and fantasies were reinforced, and any attempt to be anyone but a seeker of inheritance would only make him suspect that I was trying to get him off track. The captain had waited so long among the old bags, among the card files, alone in his robber’s tower, had spent so much time buying up rags and stolen electronics, all small-time, all secretly, that now he saw me as his one and only sparkly, shiny, precious opportunity. I realized that believing his own fantasy, he would tell his fellow crooks I was a rich heir, not even realizing that he was lying; the captain ate olives, sucking the pits and neatly placing them on the edge of his plate; he was eating me, he was a local and I was a stranger, and he knew that very well.

  I could only pretend to accept his offer; I was counting on his greed—he would pretend to have told the gang when in fact he would not because he knew that he would get nothing, being an idle blabbermouth; the captain replied that he would find out where I was staying and come visit me that evening. I got up, put money for both of us under the ashtray, into which the captain, smiling, dropped an olive pit.

  I went to the address the captain had given me. In the nominal center of town there was a block of Stalinist houses; in Moscow they’re just a fragment of architectural history, one style among others, but here the Stalinist buildings comprised the only architecture there was. Wind, snow, and rain did not spare their excesses: the stucco moldings and decorative balconies were flaking, the white trim of the windows had vanished, and the wall paint had peeled; damp drafts filled the broad and high-ceiling lobbies, wind moved through vaulted arches, the concrete, lime, and brick crumbled, mold the color of pond scum covered the bottom of the walls, and moss spread in the cracks; rust dripped everywhere, and where the stone was broken the reinforcement rods stuck out, and in places you could see that the concrete was reinforced with tightly wrapped barbed wire instead of rods—they must have run out of metal.