Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  That is why I noticed the remains of a bridge—the river had once been crossed by a second branch of the railroad meant to extend to a future settlement in the tundra which had never been built—I first did not recognize it, that is, my eye did not accept it. I saw something odd, unnecessary, out of harmony, a mistake; that must be how animals see what humans build.

  In the shallows, where the current is not strong even at high water, stood crates filled with earth and stones, looking like crosssections of log cabins; on the left bank rose the cones of chums, or tepees, essentially the enlarged hats of nomads, negating the idea of a house; wherever you toss your hat, there is your hearth. The area was hilly and the chums followed the lines of the bare hills as a wave follows another.

  I landed close to the settlement. Below the railroad embankment, steam engines and trains were parked. They must have been abandoned when the bridges were washed away on the line, and now they were rusting and sinking into the tundra; strange only at first glance, it was the trains and not the chums that seemed a chronological inaccuracy.

  The steam engines stood there like broken time machines, which they were in other places, where the railroad truly did accelerate time, opening a way through it, where the steam engine truly was seen as a symbol of the future happening now, where tracks, semaphores, and stations connected the scattered times of a big country into a shared ensemble. But here, in the middle of the tundra, those mechanisms did not work; here it was still the time before steam engines, time before whatever would be; I remembered the steam engine from my dream—this was its dead end, the end of its trip, and the tundra, indifferent to the cumbersome machine, extended itself tranquilly and in its entirety, not knowing about divisions into different sides of the world.

  Near the chums, hunks of meat hung from sanded poles; the smoke from the campfire fed on wet willow was everywhere, more than was needed to smoke the meat and chase away midges and flies; it seemed it was intended to permeate people, to teach them to stop the flow of tears by willpower or to lose the ability to cry completely; the wind blew in steady gusts, and in rhythm with the gusts the coals flared red under the damp branches dripping boiling juice.

  Reindeer grazed nearby; they walked around the pole, two or three hundred head—they had to be counted by the head because below their bodies melded into a single multilegged body, and each back was a bulging muscle; their gait resembled water flowing in a whirlpool. The deer walked by the pole to be free of the midges; the shepherd set the leader in motion and the herd followed. I imaged how it must look from the air and realized that I was looking at a clock, a clock without divisions; the pole was the only vertical point for dozens of kilometers, casting no shadow on the cloudy day, and around it flowed the seasons, measured by the height of the deer antlers.

  People appeared suddenly, stepping out from behind the chums; the nomads did not mix blood with outsiders, and they were very similar, a single person in different ages, a bisexual creature as infant, girl, man, old man, old woman; one person, or they were all as one; their faces the color of tea, dressed in clothing that combined fabric with deerskins, they seemed to be living in order to perform the ritual of becoming one with animals, and I probably looked defective to them, lacking an animal half.

  Seeing that I was alone, they invited me to the fire and fed me boiled deer meat; there was no rejection and no interest. They asked if I had any salt; I brought the bag from my dinghy and they changed, surrounded me; in this world devoid of material objects I realized salt was the power of bones, the power of what is solid in man, and the nomads felt it, too; now I could ask questions—we had become close, united by the salt, and I asked if they remembered anything about when the barges and people first appeared on the river, many, many years ago.

  I was told the story of the barge caravan, not as a myth, not as a legend about floating river houses, yet still I felt that the man was talking from a distant shore, not because he was essentially indifferent but because the subject of the story was like a natural phenomenon or as a phenomenon of a world so alien that the world of nature was much closer to him.

  The voice of the grandfather, who saw the barges full of people on the April river after the ice broke but did not understand what was happening, directed the grandson’s vocal cords; the nomad standing on the shore must have thought these were arks, entire worlds containing the absolute in life’s laws, and if some people threw other, weaker ones into the water, then these were the real laws of those worlds, this was their truth; thus, if all of Christopher Columbus’s men had limped, the natives would have probably imagined a land beyond the sea of limping men. And how could a man born where old people were sometimes left to die if the family was moving to new site, how could he disagree with throwing the weak overboard? I entered inside the viewpoint of the storyteller, like entering a room with a wide window, and looked out from there—but with my own vision, recognizing what my unwitting guide could not.

  The barges docked at a big island in the middle of the river—that was more convenient for the tugboat captains; the people were left on the island, on the long beach where there was nothing but driftwood; it was a warm sunny day and the prisoners, even though the guards fired on them, jumped into the river to bathe. The water darkened from the filth of several thousand men, remnants of clothing that had been worn in the cramped holds where men stood shoulder to shoulder floated in the water; the icy water chilled them, and the men quickly ran back on shore, running along the sand, embracing, huddling for warmth.

  The water, melt water of yesterday’s snows, water of new life, washed away the long journey, the rust and filth, and the sun played on the waves so that it seemed fish would appear to lay eggs at any moment; but the sunlight was brief, the nascent day was short, and the few who still had the strength to risk their lives jumped into the water, clutching trees floating by or floes of bottom ice, covered in silt and water grasses, that had bobbed to the surface and were carried by the current; the guards fired, the tight chilling air whipped eardrums, nostrils flared at the gun smoke, acrid and sharp.

  Then the tugboats and barges left, and the men remained on the island. Night came, and in the morning it started to snow—storm clouds rolled in from the north; the snow was thick, it put out the feeble fires of wet logs; the exiles sought shelter in gullies, tried to dig burrows in the sand and add some protection from the snow, but the snow penetrated everywhere, even inside the hollow tree trunks where people squeezed in; the nomads could not cross the river in their light, flat-bottomed boats wrapped in skins, and so they could only watch the smoke and ashes thicken over the island, how flames flared and died out; for a few days while it snowed they heard screams, and then, on the coldest night, they could hear only moans; the snow stopped, the fog dispersed, but there was no one left alive on the island; you couldn’t see the bodies, people had hidden as best they could and died in earthen dugouts, digging with their hands, with branches, the few tools they had been given.

  When the river calmed down, someone went over to the island; there was a stench, birds had gathered; they brought back sacks of flour (the exiles were given food, but no dishes), but they did not eat it; in subsequent years the island was flooded several times, the bones were washed away; only rarely did holes open up, with dead men lying deep in the permafrost.

  The next settlers—and many traveled along the river—did not ask about their predecessors; they traveled past the island without noticing it; the island remained as it had been—a flat earthen pancake in the channel, and only the nomad family I met passed on the memory of what had happened there.

  The ones I talked to could not say where the island was; I had passed sand spits, shallows, other islands—and they were all the same, all inconstant, all vanished and then were reborn with high waters; islands without features, islands of empty expanses; just islands.

  I pushed off from the rocks in my dinghy; the current picked me up, and the people by the chums watched me go the way they had once wa
tched those who were deposited on the island; the river, perturbed by the piers of the former bridge, calmed down, the rapids sank to the bottom, and the dinghy sailed steadily, as if propelled by flying clouds, the movements of the stars, the air currents high in the sky, reflected in the water.

  A few days later I saw houses on a knoll; that was the village of exiles. The houses seemed transported by a mirage, an optical illusion; as if actually they were somewhere thousands of kilometers from here, near a small river and woods, and it was the play of light in the atmosphere this far north that placed them on a knoll where they could not be.

  I left the dinghy and took a path that zigzagged up the hill. The village, a dozen houses, did not seem completely abandoned: clearly someone had walked down the road, splotches of spilled water dried in the sand. But the weeds were too thick in the gardens, the windows had been shut up too long ago, the nails were falling out of the wood; and most important, there was every indication that people had stopped caring about the place where they lived. Besides which, I couldn’t understand how there was dirt, how there were weeds here in the tundra; where did the soil come from?

  At the well, which is always kept clean in villages, dogs had dug themselves a hollow, a dusty hole full of fur and scraps of bone; a torn wire hung down, easy to brush against, the pole was so crooked I longed to straighten it; every object in the village asked for human help: supporting, straightening, sawing, lifting. People here seemed to have forgotten all the verbs for creative activity, the sound of a hammer or the song of a saw, and had forgotten about themselves, too: being there was intolerable. There is a special color, the color of old fence boards that have been splashed all winter with the snowy mush underfoot, and in the spring the mud dries, turning earthy gray; the color of carelessness and indifference. The whole village was speckled with it, as if it had been sown over many years of drizzle; someone had hung a lantern by the gate and now its glass cover was filled with rainwater and the canvas wick bore filigree rust crystals. What was intolerable was not the neglect itself but that life could accommodate itself to neglect, take on its image, become identical to it.

  One garden was tended: strangely, it was entirely planted with potatoes, leaving only a narrow walk to the house, every bed filled with potatoes, as if nothing else grew anywhere in the village. Someone was inside the house, smoke came out of the crumbling chimney that dropped pieces of brick onto the mossy roof, but the windows were shuttered tight.

  Behind the house there was a creaking, grinding noise, metal on stone, ringing and then grinding again; the blue twilight that made the air thicken as it grew colder without losing its transparency settled on the village, and each screech caused goose bumps, warning me not to come closer—only forged steel could sound like that. Three apple trees by the house—how much effort had it taken to grow them here!— had gone wild, all their force going into offshoots and foliage, and the branches untouched by buds dropped brown leaves onto the ground; the color of dead leaves, the color of rotting apples was everywhere, giving the house and ground an aging, debilitated air. Old pruning cuts painted with pitch remained on the trees, but the pitch had cracked and fallen off, and even though the tree had grown a tight leathery circle around the cuts, the trunks were already crumbling and the roots were probably dying off. The wires holding branches that threatened to fall off dug too hard into the wood, cutting the bark.

  I went into that small fallow garden, engulfed in the bitter-ash smoke that comes from a badly built or deteriorating stove; it was getting colder and the leaves fell less frequently, as if their twigs were growing torpid.

  Behind the house, at a grinding machine made from a converted foot-operated sewing machine, sat a shaggy old man; I saw him from the back, broad and hunched, half covered by long, tangled, gray hair, with apple leaves nestled in them; I thought at first that he was a werewolf with claws, but then I realized they were fingernails, yellow, curved, broken or crookedly cut. The old man was sharpening an axe on a long handle, a lumberjack’s axe; it was badly chipped, someone had used it to chop up boards of an old structure and kept hitting nails; long streams of reddish sparks caused by the uneven blade edge on the whetstone flew in the air, illuminating nothing but merely sewing through the dark; the wheels turned and the dry belts creaked.

  The old man, the sharpening wheel—rougher than needed for fine sharpening—and the axe; I went farther along, not ready to call out to the man, when I saw a second one. He was on the porch steps, bent over a fishing net on his knees, and the same kind of thick, unkempt hair covered his face. The old man was mending the net, unwinding rough thread from a spool the size of his hand, making loops with a curved faceted needle and muttering to himself—his beard stirred as if a mouse had moved into it. A third old man, also on the porch, just as gray and shaggy, was carving a boat frame; the wooden piece had a bend with an inconvenient elbow, and the old man clumsily moved his long knife along it.

  I greeted them. The three old men turned to me, dropping their work. I still couldn’t make out their faces: their hair fell over their eyes. Their fingernails belonged to animals or birds, and their hair grew so thickly it could have been moss or weeds.

  The old men were silent and uncomprehending. Telling them apart by their clothing was difficult: their padded jackets and trousers had not been washed in so long they had taken on the same indefinite color of grime, and new spots vanished among the old; the one with the axe had a scar across his palm, the one mending the net had a thimble that had become ingrown on a finger of his left hand and in the finger of the right, a fishhook that had jabbed his calloused skin, yellow as candle stearin, was hanging as if from the lip of an old fish; and the one who had been whittling wore a darkened ring.

  “The dogs got themselves lost,” said the fisherman.

  The man spoke as if they were still just three; as if they had always lived the three of them and a fourth never was and never could be, and thus I did not fit into his field of comprehension and he might not figure out for several days that there was a stranger among them. Their solitude together was older than they were, time had vanished within it, and the old men had aged not only with the years but because the days of their lives resembled one another, and the days did not bring new impressions but merely subtracted old ones from their memory.

  “The dogs got themselves lost,” the fisherman repeated, and the other two replied, “Lost.”

  Their voices were like old things being used after a long hiatus; the sounds did not fit together properly, hanging on by hook or crook, dangling like a loose button. They sounded like dead men who had acquired new flesh but could not adjust the new voice to the old words.

  The man with the axe leaned against his sharpener, the fishermen stuck the needle in his jacket, and the whittler put the knife away inside his boot. Wind came from the higher reaches of the river, the wind moved the old men’s hair, pushing it from their eyes.

  The men were blind; their minds were damaged and their gazes were stopped like a run-down clock. The lens, cornea, iris, the entire eye was whole, the visual core of the brain was whole, but the mind refused to allow the visible world in, refused to see. The eyes were those of a sleeping man whose lids were lifted without rousing him, and the pupils were like binoculars turned inward, into the head, the dark cosmos of dreams that is not accessible to the waking.

  I waited, not knowing what time of day was in their heads, if they had any time at all, at what point they lost their sight, if they remembered the house, the apple trees, the village, the river, the land on both sides, if they understood where I was and who they were.

  They were brothers, and no longer able to see, they came to resemble one another even more. Their faces fell into neglect; the unconsciousness that annihilated their lives also annihilated their distinguishing features. All that was left in their faces was what had been placed there by their parents’ blood: their faces had been taken over by their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and it seemed tho
se figures would start coming out, opening the flesh like a door, and exiting one at a time, and once the last one was out, gaping emptiness would replace the face.

  The old men finally understood that a stranger had come to the village; they surrounded me and ran their hands over my face and body; I stood and thought that I had truly reached the limit of memory; the blindness of the exiled old men, the blindness of Grandfather II all combined; this place did not exist in geography, an accidental traveler would not find this village, he would miss it; this was a country inhabited by people from the days of Grandfather II, an entire country that had protected itself from the present through blindness and then became trapped in it. While the old men molded my appearance for themselves with their hands, I thought about how not to linger here and destroy the insularity of this world.

  Essentially, the old men had one memory for the three of them; separate them, and each one’s memory would not be enough for a complete description of the events, so they often spoke simultaneously, creating a collected field of memory that lived only in words. I asked about the apple trees, impossible to imagine here near the Arctic Circle, planted in permafrost that would not allow roots to penetrate, and they told me that the whole village stood on soil that was brought in, stolen— the exiles were not allowed to leave their place of exile.

  For a dozen years the people secretly took boats to the upper reaches, where there were forests and soil, they chopped down trees, made rafts to float them down to build huts and sent soil on the rafts as well; it took ten years before the first garden bed appeared in the village—before that, the exiles had lived on imported food products and by hunting. The authorities had set up a cordon on the river to overturn the rafts—they allowed them to cut down trees but not to take away soil; the reindeer herders even wondered if the exiles ate the soil, they were bringing so much, and they couldn’t understand what for, since for nomads soil could not give birth to anything but reindeer moss. The villagers might have given up on the idea but most of them were kulak peasants and they put their entire organizing force, their passion for life into a calculated gathering of soil, real soil, without pity for themselves or others; they called the local soil mud, which it was, a runny liquid of mud on ice.