Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  The engraver heard the story from an orderly in the institution, who was sent to serve time along with the mental patients. They could not remember their own names, did not respond at roll call, and the orderly was a valued worker: he replied for them all, combining the names of three dozen people with his own. The madmen were excellent laborers, perhaps the best at laying the foundation of the quarry: they did not know that somewhere outside there was freedom, they were not envious if someone got more food, they did not try to deceive, work less, pretend to be sick; through pickaxes and shovels, through unity of action and form—just as they were taught to use spoons—they acquired a small dose of reason, enough to merge with the tool and become one with it. The shaft of a shovel, the handle of a crowbar became their support, their earthly axis, and they dug, broke rock, made holes for explosives, giving themselves fully to the work, replacing their own existence. That’s what people called them—Pickaxe, Shovel, Wheelbarrow—and they quickly learned to respond to the nicknames.

  Gradually the brigade of mental patients was noticed and given better rations—no other brigade suited the bosses as well—and the guard officers even joked that the experience should be extended, all the nuts throughout the land should be arrested: Where else could you find such obedient workers? The other prisoners called them the Psycho Brigade; the bosses had the sense not to hold up the mental patients as an example—the other prisoners would have killed them then—instead, people just took out their frustration on them, mocked them, but did not hurt them.

  The officers who suggested using arrested mental patients did not know that all credit was due the orderly: he had understood intuitively that the repeated actions of simple labor with the soil could help those men get back into the world, at least partially, and he had spent years at the institution teaching them to work, first with four hands, the way you teach people to play piano, and then, when they understood the movement, independently. The orderly’s brother was among the madmen, they said it was hereditary, and he tried to save his brother and forestall his own madness; he had managed to instill the skills of simple labor in his patients, in muscle memory; but now his plan equated man and instrument.

  Some of the patients had no guards—you could escape from here only if you had the intention to escape, it was impossible to get lost or go missing, so the patients were allowed to move freely; they were sent to the bosses’ houses to chop wood and haul water—the bosses liked these workers who made them feel even more important than did the usual prisoners; besides which the mental patients did not know to hate the bosses, the convoy guards, and their families, so the bosses could relax with them the way you do with a dog or cat—feeling superior and at peace.

  The crazies came to Grandfather II’s apartment, too; his seven-year-old son, born near the camp, and knowing nothing but the camp and the camp people, unexpectedly grew attached to them; one of the madmen, whose name the engraver could not remember, used to carve wood and was the father of a large family; he had not seen children for two or three years. You couldn’t say he felt something for the boy, the son of the camp warden, for he had lost the ability to feel, but his fingers retained their own memory and carved—with a shard of glass, since the Psycho Brigade did not have knives or razors—a wooden bird whistle. He carved it mechanically, impartially, as if every child—the man knew what short stature meant—was supposed to have such a bird.

  Grandfather II’s son, who had lived without toys—all the children of the camp guards grew up that way, they didn’t even know the usual children’s games like Cossacks-and-robbers, they played at the work of their fathers, being convoy guards or soldiers in the watchtowers—suddenly left his peers; the simple bird whistle touched something in him. No, he did not see the world in which he had been born and bred in a different light, he did not come to pity the prisoners or realize what his father was; the toy merely revealed that there could be another life, where the air can sing lightly; there are no songbirds in the tundra and the boy had never heard a lark or nightingale, nor did he know that people had songs: in his seven years he had heard only a few records and thought that singing was the work of a box with a handle and horn; the box knew how to sing in a human voice, that’s what it was made for, but people could not sing.

  Lips touching the resonant opening, the exhalation giving birth to sound—the boy started breathing differently, certain powers within him, unrequired and dormant, awoke to life; he began seeking isolation, he made up simple melodies and whistled them, as if hypnotizing himself, summoning the unknown that arose inside him.

  The way the engraver told it, there was something uncanny about how the boy grew attached to his whistle; the engraver recalled the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the children he led away with his flute; the crazy wood-carver had unwittingly made him a strange and scary gift. He came from the sticks, from the forests and swamps that three generations of irrigators, Tsarist and Soviet, had been unable to drain; he would run away from the orderlies and collect driftwood, burls and birch fungus, and carve the same things out of them: the mocking faces of forest spirits, distorted as if in a fun house mirror, and you could not say that he was making them up—he was releasing the features already in the wood, as if the forest truly were filled with taunting, beckoning faces, peering at people from behind trees and pretending to be clumsy growths should people turn back to look.

  The boy was not losing his mind, but simply spent more and more time on his own; sometimes he mindlessly went off somewhere, as if the whistle of the singing toy extended a guiding thread visible to him alone, and an otherworldliness developed about him, as if he were here accidentally and would not stay long; the appearance of the bird whistle somehow stopped his growth, took away the powers of growth which children have in great abundance, with a reserve; these powers seemed to be exhausted in the vain and repeated attempts to breathe life into the wooden bird, which lived with another’s breath.

  Finally, Grandfather II noticed that something was wrong with his son; he noticed too late and then acted with great persistence. The boy could not explain to his father—children do not have the language for expressing inner states—and even if he had, what would he have said? That he was enchanted by a toy made by a crazy prisoner? Grandfather II, thanks to the boy’s friends, learned about the whistle and took it away; he learned who had made it and summoned the crazy carver under guard; he no longer remembered the gift or the boy, and his fingers palpated the wood of the boss’s desk, as if trying to measure what could be done with such a thick oak plank if you cut it up and used it for various small items.

  Grandfather II, given the limits of his perspective, decided that the carver was only pretending to be mad, that he was actually rational since he’d tried to gain the graces of a child who was the son of the camp warden; he became sophisticated in his cruelty: the miserable madman dared to think he could benefit this way, manipulating Grandfather II through his son.

  He sent the carver to the distant timber area, where they prepared the beams for future mines. “Let him work with trees,” Grandfather II said, knowing that the madman would probably be squashed by a falling tree; he could have simply ordered him shot, but that would have been direct murder, and Grandfather II liked to act so that his sentences were executed by the apparent course of events, the forces of nature, postponed and removed: it was not his personal intention to send the man to his death, but the man fell into the whirlpool of fate, from which he could not escape.

  Grandfather II’s son did not know what had happened to the carver; when they took away his whistle, he fell gravely ill. For a week the boy had a dry fever, his body tense and ossified; he cried out, struggling with something in his delirium. The doctor said that the child’s face changed so sharply and wildly, it seemed that two different people were arguing inside the boy, each appearing alternately in his face. One clearly showed the harsh pedigree of Grandfather II, who was born in a village by chalk cliffs over a river, where the soil was so imb
ued with lime that only cherries could grow there; the other face was tender as an infant, a vague face, as if he had just arrived in the world without a line of ancestors whose features could have shaped his. The one who had Grandfather II’s blood in his veins, thick and as viscous as the sap of cherry trees, was trying to push out this infant from the boy’s body, chase it away, toss it like a bird from the nest.

  After a week, the boy awoke recovered, thinner and almost without memory; many memories did not survive the fever and had dematerialized, or maybe it was a part of his soul, the finest, purest, and childlike part that had dematerialized; he regained his health and forgot about the whistle, but he had become angular, wooden in his movements, as if the liveliness that gave fluidity to his body had been lost, and every scrape and bruise now lasted a long time on his skin.

  He returned to his peers, but it was out of a sense of duty to be friends with boys his age; he played with them indifferently, without passion, and only hide-and-seek responded with his new sensibility: he searched badly, without focus, but he hid so well that it seemed he had not hidden himself at all, had no intention to hide—he simply vanished into a crack, like a coin into the floorboards, and when the seeker gave up, they all went looking for him, finding him only by accident. The boy had stopped wanting to be, his inner state was that of an old man; something extremely important had burned away in that illness, when Grandfather II sat at his bedside. He lost the gift awakened by the bird whistle, the gift of his own life, not subjected to anyone else, a life about which the boy had known nothing except the enchanting foretaste of it; the boy emptied out, grew as light as a wrapper, and that is why he did not hide playing hide-and-seek, rather he fell into empty spots, holes in the universe, like a random object that had no place of its own.

  Grandfather II did not give up; he saw that the boy was still not himself, and he thought it was because he was taking a long time—an incommensurately long time—getting over the loss of the toy. He behaved as most adults would—he decided to replace the toy he took away with a present, to intercept the inner gaze focused on the loss with something new, significant, and valuable. This is the action of people for whom all life events are basically equivalent, one easily replaced by another; used to dealing this way with people, Grandfather II probably did not know that there were things that were irreversible—not physically, like death or injury—but because the most important aspect of a relationship happens in a single moment, beyond which everything has a future dimension based on trust, or else everything is forever too late.

  Grandfather II started the quarry—and everything was too late, the town was doomed to the funnel; for him and his son the moment—everything is too late—had also come, but he thought and thought about what present would please the boy, how to show a father’s generosity, and at last came up with a gift with a significance that would define his son’s adolescence and maturity.

  On Grandfather II’s orders, they searched the camp and found another carver, this one in his right mind. For several months he did not go out to the sites, slept only three hours a night, at work on his assignment; Grandfather II looked in occasionally to check up and give advice, leaving enough shag for a couple of cigarettes: he didn’t have to pay the carver too much, his life was in Grandfather II’s hands as it was, and the carver labored, extending his existence with each curl of wood, with each movement of his knife—Grandfather II could send him to the mines, and the elderly prisoner would die after a month of digging.

  But despite his desire to live, despite his desire to please Grandfather II, the work did not go well; the commission was beyond the prisoner’s abilities: he was supposed to create the camp in miniature. Use a cobbler’s hammer to knock together barracks with wooden bunks, erect watchtowers, make the delousing room, the gun room, the steam bath, warehouse, and other buildings—all tiny, to fit a special base and be placed on a table; he had to carve and paint the convoy soldiers, sheepdogs, cooks, steam bath attendants, all the service people, and most important, the prisoners; make wheelbarrows with buttons for wheels, pickaxes out of furniture nails, shovels out of tin, boilers, furnaces; my new friend the engraver was assigned to help him in the fine work. The engraver used a magnifying glass to model the soldiers’ guns, fashioned bits of a broken cup into porcelain isolators for wooden poles using the finest wire which pricked your finger if you touched the end, and one of the free seamstresses sewed sheepskin jackets and peacoats for the guards and prisoners. Snow banks of cotton were placed around the camp; it was meant to be eternal winter, but the electrician made a dull, cheese-yellow sun from a 20-watt bulb that moved around the camp on a special arm the way the sun moves across the tundra in summer without going below the horizon.

  The entire camp universe was being created by the efforts of the carver, engraver, and seamstress, but the further they worked, the more they felt they were doing something unseemly, almost forbidden; they were violating some unclear law; the carver and engraver confessed this to each other and even considered burning the toy camp by starting a fire in the workshop, but fear stopped them; they saw how excessively attached Grandfather II was to his idea, he came by more frequently, stayed longer, examining the toy, and it seemed that he had forgotten it was intended for his son. Grandfather II would chase them out of the workshop and remain there alone, they watched through a crack how the warden, illuminated by the flames of oil lamps and the fire of the opened furnace, with a dark face, too tall for the low ceiling, moved the figures of prisoners and soldiers, halting like God above the newly created earth, and deciding something in those moments when he silently smoked, exhaling on the toy barracks, as if their chimneys were smoking, and the draft blew smoke onto the cotton snow.

  Three months later the toy camp was ready; Grandfather II organized a viewing of the work. A windup locomotive ran down wire tracks with wagons loaded with real ore, billowing caustic soot: inside it was a boiler with burning tar; the electric sun made its slow orbit; the excavator could bend and unbend, the guards could aim their rifles, and the toy shepherd jaws opened revealing red mouths—the seamstress had used red calico freely; the toy camp was exactly like the real one, except for one missing figure—Grandfather II was not there, even though inside the camp office there was a thimble-sized bust of Lenin, carved from dog bone—that was the only bone there was—and on the wall a poster with Stalin’s profile, made from a postage stamp.

  Grandfather II decided that the gift had to be a surprise; the anniversary was approaching of the day when the quarry gave its first ton of ore, and they were planning to celebrate. Grandfather II took these production anniversaries very seriously, they meant more to him than birthdays or other holidays like May Day. He usually celebrated in the laboratory where they tested the quality of the ore; however, he decided to betray his habit.

  That evening Grandfather II brought the gift into the boy’s room; his son, he thought, was sleeping, and he set up the toy camp on the table and covered it with canvas, so the boy could open it himself.

  But the morning brought something else: they found the boy shivering in the corner, wrapped in the canvas; the first snowy dawn was trying to break through the thick clouds, a watery, yellow blister of light appeared in the sky, and that light poured into the room through the rectangle of the window, illuminating the table and Grandfather II’s present.

  The camp was smashed—everything down to the last connection, nail, thread knot, wire twist; the boy must have worked all night, destroying the toy, putting all of himself into the destruction, and now he trembled with sleeplessness, exhaustion, and fear. His fingers were bleeding, his nails were torn, the canvas was splotched with blood; he had managed to break it all noiselessly, silently, as if performing the greatest exploit of his life—not just the seven years he had lived, but for his whole life going forward; he was afraid, the room smelled of urine, and perhaps he was ready to give up his free will and wished it all to come back together, for the camp to rebuild itself, but the dawn ent
ered the room, and the fluid objects of the night acquired their final, hard, daytime shapes, and not even the specter of desperation could re-create the broken camp.

  Grandfather II staggered in the doorway. He would probably have been less shocked had the real camp been destroyed. On the evenings when he came to the workshop and threw out the carver and engraver to be alone with the toy, he enjoyed his own idea so much that he might have kept the toy camp in his office if that pleasure—as perceived by others—did not smack of eccentricity.

  This miniaturized, facsimile camp truly did belong to Grandfather II. There was something not in the least metaphorical about the change in scale, in the optical magnification of his own figure, not from pure narcissism but as an expression of the correct proportions in his view: Grandfather II in his own estimation was not a god, not a master, he was himself, a man, and the fact that he was master of life and death over other men without considering himself something more simply proved to him that in fact he was truly greater. He gave his son a toy camp so that he would share his father’s destiny, accept his own from his father’s hands. Barracks outside the windows, whichever way you looked, barracks on the table—Grandfather II had sent his son to prison camp, excluding everything that was not-camp.

  This can be called a crime against reality; a rather naive formulation, but one which accurately reflects the essence and can be interpreted more fully: much of what Grandfather II and those like him did was a crime against reality.

  Reality always takes revenge on those who cut it down, who simplify it, who deny its multiplicity; it avenges as implacably as do the laws of nature; we are not always able to recognize events not as random but in accordance with the laws of nature.