Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  I went through the camp workshops, the trestle beds were still there, to the compressor room where rusty pipes stretched up to the adits leading into the mine; the only thing I found was a button, a homemade button carved out of a piece of tin can; a comprehensible and simultaneously useless object without clothes. The impression of the place was the same; it was a button: real, indubitable, yet torn from something more important, too small, hopelessly lost.

  But the button in my hand reminded me of something; I remembered that I had stood in the mountains on this latitude but a thousand kilometers to the east, and I had seen the remains of this camp in the broad saddle of the pass, and the rusted pipes from the compressor room had stretched along the slopes.

  The button had two holes made with an awl or nail; I remember the nail I had held in my hand then as evidence that a trace is always left, what remains is what held together the building of the past, and these things, as a special material, always live longer than the building itself. But now I held not a nail but a hole made by a nail; the situation had reversed itself. I began looking through the button, like miniature binoculars, and its two openings suddenly joined up with two spots, the openings of adits on the ravine slope.

  I did not want to go up there; but every dark hole in the ground attracts you, as if it were the opening into the underside of the world, an addition to three-dimensionality. I also remembered the goal of this walk into the mountains: the adits were tunnels to the places they excavated the mineral that then yielded uranium.

  The disfigured no man’s land, the disintegrating speech of two women on the railroad had not yet become even a recent memory, they were still part of the present moment, and the source of all this impoverishment, destitution, and privation beckoned the way a struck dog on the side of the road, flies in its exposed guts, catches your eye; it attracted your imagination by the honest openness of ugliness. To see not the consequences but the original cause; to see the belly of the collapse—to enter it!

  I climbed up to the adits; once, they had been blocked by stones and crossed by welded rails; but the water dripping from them dug out a road, created collapses, and you could gain entry. I expected to find the center of danger, the source of the murk that filled the region; nothing of the kind. At first, being underground made no impression at all; then I realized that I was wrong to look for something noticeable; something else was more important, but what?

  In abandoned adits where there are no currents, no drafts, the immobilized air gradually loses its flow and begins to resemble frozen colorless fog: each breath you take creates an emptiness, a hole, and in order to breathe a second time, you have to take a step.

  Disintegrated air, decomposed: your voice sticks in it, light diffuses, and the watery dust from drops falling from the ceiling creates rainbows in the flashlight beam, as joyless as the wing of a dead butterfly.

  The blackness had penetrated its very being, corroding it from within, the way rust corrodes iron: it falls apart at your touch. It seemed that every molecule, every atom was enveloped in black, could not see one another; you suddenly feel that the air is blind, the way a person can be blind from internal disarray: the coherence of the world is beyond his ability to see.

  What I sought was what I was breathing in: I should have brought a respirator. No one had breathed this air for decades and it preserved everything, like virus strains in a test tube; not thoughts and voices, but the toxin of the era, the exhalation of destruction and decay. I was filling my lungs with something that should not be touched by man; my breath caught, as if I had seen that the meat I was eating was rotten and filled with maggots, even more repulsive than worms: the maggot turns into a worm inside your flesh.

  I lit a cigarette, letting the strong tobacco disperse the miasma; no strange whispers, no sense of someone’s presence, only the air, empty, preserving nothing but decay, and time, for I realized that this tunnel was a cellar where the air remained from specific years gone by, numbered just like a prisoner.

  Time did not stop here—the word stop implies a fixed moment when movement ends; it had never moved here at all, it stood like water in black caves where the movement is from striped fish. I thought that if this adit could be tipped like a bottle, the air and the time would flow out; they would mix with today’s time and recognize each other as past and present.

  Coming back out into the light, I heard a helicopter. An Mi-8 from the local airport landed not far from the ruins of the stone barracks; people came out—not people, just splotches of color so bright and radiating that it hid the outline of their figures; yellow, red, violet, light blue, emerald, navy blue, and orange jackets, trousers, backpacks, and hats; they moved the way people do with cameras and video cameras, looking for the best angle for a shot and where to best pose for a photograph; they separated, mentally dividing up the valley with their angles, and no one looked at the ground. The wind carried English words; in the city I would have perceived it as foreign, but here in the ravine, it seemed even more alien, doubly strange, as if people who spoke a foreign language decided to imitate tropical birds.

  Streams of hot air came from the helicopter’s exhaust vents; the foreigners, who had been brought here for an excursion—I’d seen the sign in town for “camp tours”—wore protective footgear and tried not to touch the soil or the buildings, they must have been warned about radiation. I stood on the mountain slope, by the adits, like a savage witnessing the landing of a spaceship; their clothing came from a different, full-color world, and I wanted to shout that you can’t come here in a helicopter, you can’t land for an hour to take pictures and pick up a souvenir that the tour organizers left for you to find. If I’d had a gun, I would have chased them away with a shot; instead all I could do was watch and understand that despite the spirit of the our times which insisted not just on the equality but on the total conformity of people, there were insuperable barriers, indelible differences deeper than religion, culture, or prosperity; the colored jackets negated the area, protected against its colorlessness, and I saw—through color—that we were born in different times, even though they coincided chronologically. This difference—between those born in the same years but in different times—was so powerful that it elicited denial. The two women at the railroad and the three bandits from the night before were closer to me—it was not that we were surrounded by the same realities of life, but that we were born of those realities, we carried their deficiencies and could speak in the language of deficiencies; but the people in the colored jackets with cameras were whole and in that sense, estranged.

  The helicopter flew away; I went down, down, down the stones, the river channels, and it seemed that now there was only descent for me, down the dried channels, the crunchy moss, down, down, down.

  PART 5

  T

  he city cemetery where Grandfather II’s wife and son were buried was just a piece of land in the middle of the tundra. The graves, fences, and crosses unframed by trees looked as if patients in hospital beds had been brought outside; a cemetery without trees, without a brick wall around it, it seemed like a slum repeating the boredom of the garages and sheds. There was also the feeling that the deceased had settled themselves in a new place, and the result was a disorderly conglomeration of graves instead of a regular order; they huddled together like prisoners on bunk beds to keep warm, like people with bundles pushing into a train car until their ribs cracked, they buried others and then climbed into the ground themselves.

  A little church was stuck on the edge of the cemetery; its red brick, which hadn’t yet turned dark, reminded me of the few big houses where the mine bosses lived, as you come into town; if not for the dome, it could have been yet another mansion, and it was probably built by the same crew of workers; the church was seen—by those who commissioned it, by the architect, and by the builders—as God’s mansion; it was strange that they hadn’t found a different kind of brick for the church, that they’d put it there like a guard hut without searching for the
more perfect place, and so from whichever angle you looked in the cemetery, the church was pushed into the ground, destroyed by the power of the complex’s smokestacks, striped like prison garb, belching volcanic smoke, and dwarfing the cross and the gilded dome.

  In the chaos of graves there was one section where the stones were higher and more massive; amid the rusted crosses and the low fences sinking into the boggy soil stood rectangles of black dolerite, brought here by railroad; the inscriptions on the stone were gilded. This is where the bosses were buried; oval frames showed portraits of men in uniform and suits, colonels, chief engineers, PhDs in technical sciences, and they looked at one another, because the stones had been placed in an imaginary circle, and no sightline could escape it.

  The low clouds brought a June blizzard, snow blackened by the smokestacks fell on the graves, black snow. It looked like ashes from an old fire falling from the sky; then the stacks belched smoke the color of cinnabar, and the snow turned deep red, melting on my face, spotting the cemetery paths; a man ran out of the guard booth, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me under the roof; cinnabar snow can be dangerous, but I did not care.

  The tundra around the cemetery reddened, as if watered-down blood had seeped from beneath the ground; red water flowed down my arms, my face; the color of brick dust, cinder with the bluish cast of gunpowder splashed across the landscape, colored the mountains and sky, and the monuments in the cemetery became islands in the high water of the color. I understood that this was coincidence, a burst of snow that was imbued with smoke from the stacks; but a red polar hare ran in the tundra, looping around, escaping an imagined hunter, the madness of red, and it turned out it was running in circles; the hare tried to escape the red blizzard not knowing what its own color was, leaping aside, trying to confuse the trail, going low and then jumping back up on the graves.

  Finally the hare wearied and collapsed in a mossy hole; only its ears were visible. I realized that it was pointless to run like the hare if you were to see red water on your hands; pointless to say that this is just pollution from the complex when in your gut you know what the red snow is about; you are called, and you can only experience your own shock, follow its path—without trying to understand it, break it up into its components. Only then will the red snow covering the cemetery become something deeper than an image or a metaphor—it will become an opening door leading to the space of growing destiny; the words of Gilgamesh came to mind, his response to the Scorpion-Man:

  “Whether it be in sorrow,

  Whether it be in pain,

  In cold, in heat,

  In sighing, in weeping,

  I will go!

  Let the gate of the mountain now be opened!”

  Red snow fell over the tundra to the Arctic Ocean; the land was red, and the water devoured it, and dark mirrored rivers flowed unperturbed; red drops fell from wires, snow melted on stone in the quarry, and red rivulets ran along cracks and fissures, as if the blood-carrying veins of the earth had been cut here to extract it; red foam appeared on the oil rigs that looked like camp watchtowers and in the mouths of the wells, and the gas torches over the tundra cavities turned crimson; the chain saw at the felling site splattered red sawdust, and the excavator shovel dug into darkness where something slurped viscously; bedbugs under the boards of the collapsed barracks awoke from their half-century sleep, and bears whose ancestors grew fat on human flesh returned to the slag heaps where the executed bodies were dumped; human blood flowed in the wires, the tree trunks, in the arteries of animals, in the emptiness of the land, as if the world had turned into a bleeding tumor, a tangle of blood vessels, and only the rivers flowed unperturbed.

  Then the red snow melted completely; there was a light ringing in my head, as if capillary strings had burst from the tension. We went outside.

  The watchman’s left arm was artificial, and his uncreased shoes revealed that his legs were also prosthetic; the wrinkles on his face were deep and aged, he could no longer smooth the skin in order to shave, it was baked like skin after a burn, so that uneven gray bristles peeked out; thin, once very tall—any line arranged according to height would start with him—the man was now bent over, and the hump on his back was like an incipient second head; his eyes belonged to a different face, a different body: life had wearied the flesh, but the eyes, their red, ulcerated whites, held something sleepless, remembering, always awake but expecting nothing.

  The watchman was not one by profession or calling; he was a watchman without verbs, if I could put it that way: he did not watch, he did not guard, he did not execute the duties of a watchman, but nevertheless he was one, in a different sense.

  When the cemetery had been part of the camp, he, an invalid who had been a stone mason and engraver in his past, was sent here to make headstones; for decades he carved out names, ranks, and positions, as if he worked in the posthumous human resources department; he kept his own records of those who had arrested him and guarded him, kept his book of life and death—a pile of pages in a cardboard file labeled “Case No. … , ” in which he listed all the dead.

  Later, when the town grew bigger than the camp, his quarter-century sentence came to an end, but he remained; the engraver said he had nowhere to go, which was true, but that was not the real reason: he had merged with the cemetery, gotten used to standing at the gate hunched over, grown deaf from the whine of the saws on stone; former camp bosses retired and sooner or later, with an honorary salute or not, with medals on a cushion or not, the officials were lowered into the unyielding, stony earth, where a meter down the hoe hit the ice of permafrost; the engraver picked up his instruments and chiseled the dates of the life on the stone.

  There was not much flesh left on him, a third of his body was metal, wood, and plastic—the engraver had been treated with care; the flesh that remained was imbued with the dust of stone and abrasives, stone dust was in his lungs, he had become almost mineral, the way the bodies of miners who died in salt mines turned into salt formations found decades later. His name was Petr, rock, and he was no longer subject to physiology, he belonged to petrography, the study of mountain ores. Having spent much more time with rock than with people, he had learned its slow power, the power of pressure that bends strata, the power of hidden, seething pressures; he turned the power on himself, overcame the weakness of expectation, and surpassed the strain of patience; he was simply the cemetery stone carver, he lived at the cemetery, and even in his extreme old age he cut the letters smoothly and evenly into the stone.

  His vision and sense of proportion established the same precision within him, letters requiring accurate delineation subjected his body to the service of lines; maybe he survived only thanks to those letters, their graphics; he stood on two borders simultaneously—the line between life and death and the threshold at which the invisible word becomes visible, captured in the graphic cluster of letters; letters became his prison camp rations, and he did not depend on meager calories, he was fed by the alphabet both in the practical and spiritual sense. He lived without dreaming of revenge, he lived a solitary and isolated life, and his life went on as long as there were still people alive who had served in the camp as guards; he met them at the cemetery gate the way they had met him at the camp gate; he stood on borrowed legs of metal and wood, while they lay on their backs and their feet were in shoes bought for the burial. He was not in the thrall of vengeance or justice being meted out—he simply watched how they left in a line that extended for years, left as if they had lived ordinary lives, had been ordinary men—and it had to be him, he had to chisel out the numbers, the farewell words of wives and children on their headstones, so that their deeds, almost forgotten, not having become guilt, not having elicited repentance or expiation, would be fixed, confirmed as something that had really happened; confirmed not in human memory, but as something that did not depend on memory, on being “multiplied” in reminiscences, but was just a fact of life.

  One engraving, one line, was enough to keep a thing from va
nishing. It needed only one person to take on the labor of remembering; remembering means being connected with reality, even being that connection; we do not preserve the reality of the past in our memories, the past itself, having occurred, speaks through human memory, and the speech is exactly as clear as the person is honest, not in the sense of following the truth but in the sense of absolutely allowing it to speak through him.

  In the back of the workshop, the engraver tried to make a memorial for his long-dead comrades; but his ability to convey the proportions of the human body was in inverse proportion to the precision of his hand at making letters; he treated the human form like a letter, so that the body was racked, stretched on imaginary axes as if crucified on the letter; unfinished statues lay by the wall like executed bodies, and that probably was a memorial fully suited to the times and events—a memorial existing in numerous attempts but never succeeding; a memorial no one would see.

  I told the engraver the grave I sought, and he led me to a small hollow that looked like the earth’s lipless mouth. In those regions, permafrost could push out crosses and statues the way it pushes out foundations of buildings, or it could remain indifferent, or it could swallow a raised grave site. I recalled the photograph of Grandfather II taking the first shovelful of dirt at the quarry site and the feeling I had first looking at it returned: the shovel digs into the ground and it’s too late to put the soil back, to deny, refuse, say something; events linked up in ways that could not be unlinked, fate could not be stopped. Therefore the location of the grave had a dent in the surface that seemed to repeat—in one of many places—the funnel of the quarry begun by Grandfather II.

  The engraver told me that one batch of prisoners brought to the camp were mental patients; the institution where they lived had been turned into a polling place because the village school, where people usually voted, had burned down with the kolkhoz office. The patients were naturally locked up, but they got out at night and tore down the posters hanging in the streets, to put them up in their own ward. One poster ripped and they hid it in the outhouse; it was a portrait of Stalin.