Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  Later, when the village stood on fertile soil, some of the exiles were taken to town, that is, to the camp where Grandfather II had once been warden, where they started a botanical garden, planting flowers in heated greenhouses to show how new life was burgeoning in the Far North, and in the polar night prisoners in the barracks could see the glowing glass cubes behind three layers of barbed wire. The garden was part of the camp economy, and the locals hated it for devouring heat and light, a garden for baskets of red flowers to greet official airplanes that instantly turned to glass in the frost; high-ranking guards brought the flowers home later, and anything left over was taken to the statue of Lenin.

  A war ensued over the right to work in the garden, in the steamy heat of the greenhouse, and the criminals won; the guards couldn’t do anything about it; the only gardener who knew the job, a former custodian of an arboretum, was soon killed by a live wire, and the garden began to fail; prisoners started eating the flowers, chopping them up with a knife like greens and boiling them in tin cans. The camp administrators, who could not retreat—the botanical garden was now celebrated in the ministry, they promised to send specialists, expand the garden, and turn it into a museum of polar agronomy and gardening—the administrators decided to gather the peasant exiles and staff the garden with them. They simply sent a convoy of guards to the exile village and, without arresting them, the leader picked out ten people to bring back to the camp.

  The garden had trees—apple, cherry, plum; in winter they were wrapped in burlap, with straw piled around the trunks, but the burlap and straw were stolen to make clothing warmer; they had to keep a watchman by the trees. They were still too small to bear fruit, so when high-ranking visitors came, fruits were hung on the branches in any season; the fruits were counted, so that the staff would not appropriate any before returning them in compliance with an inventory list.

  One time a guest decided to eat an apple and discovered the thin thread that tied its stem to the branch, and angrily threw the small Golden Chinese apple, glowing like a paper lantern, somewhere into the grass; the official was insulted, he had believed with childlike sincerity that he was in a polar paradise where trees bear fruit twelve months a year, and while he was used to human trickery, and an expert on faking reports himself, he was unpleasantly surprised to see that even nature can be involved in deceit. He walked around a few more trees, muttering “I didn’t expect this, I didn’t expect this,” as if the trees had pinned the fruit on themselves like false medals in order to greet him; one of the exiles assigned to the garden later picked up the apple the guest had tossed.

  They wanted to eat the apple, it was the first fruit the exiles had held in their hands in many years; they were not trusted to hang the fruits on the trees. The very shape of it—the rounded ripeness—sated their hungry palms that had forgotten everything but tools; the exiles passed around the apple, as if it had just been born in the straw, passed it around and consumed it with their eyes—a case when a metaphor becomes the literal description of what happens: the apple was spiritual nourishment, food for the eyes, and there was enough for all of them.

  One of the peasants, who was considered a sage, though this word is imprecise, was a reader and interpreter of the Scriptures, the kind of man who becomes a leader of a small peasant sect of somewhat twisted fanatics. If any of the educated prisoners talked to him about paleontological finds, about animals from other eras whose remains allow us to re-create the history of the earth and disprove the Bible, he would reply: “The Lord thought about you learned men as well when He created the world, he threw in some toys to keep you busy.” Among his fellow villagers who were exiled with him, his intellect was revered, for he had a unique way of understanding appearances and reality. This reader, this sect member-to-be, understood what had occurred: just as Christ had fed thousands with five loaves, he said, so are we, many, eating from one fruit and it is not diminished. For it not to be diminished ever, let us save it and send it back to the village—they stubbornly called the settlement in the tundra the village—and let them plant it in the soil so the fruit shall beget more fruit.

  I could understand the peasant, even though I did not know peasant labor; I grew up together with the dacha apple trees and lived half the year by the apple calendar; I remember my childhood when the spring frosts occurred, and bonfires were lit in all the orchards, the light frosty fog mixing with smoke hugging the windless ground, and the trembling, flowing, warmed air enveloped the trees, protecting the buds. On a cold night smells unleash their invisible fans, but on a night like that the apple blossoms smelled of the bonfires, and it seemed that it was the fragrance of the stars, the fragrance of promise.

  In August came the unremitting thudding—straw was placed under the trees, but the apples were too heavy, too ripe, and the straw did not soften the blow completely; apples fell, during the day the sound was muffled, but at night it seemed that a chronometer was beating in the garden, that a different time was beginning, the time of ripeness. And when I later read about the Transfiguration of the Lord, this incident helped me to understand it as much as I could: that old image of the apple orchard in August on the threshold between summer and autumn; the Transfiguration occurred when His time had come.

  The apple is the fruit of time; and even though it is not said that Adam and Eve had eaten of the apple, what other fruit could have embodied the unknown fruit of the tree of knowledge in a painting? Human time began with the apple— Seth begat Enos, Enos begat Cainan.

  So the old peasant ordered them to send the apple to the exile village in order that apples would grow there, he was trying to spark the time of the new village, the way you start a motor, the village that arose on carted-in soil, to put down roots in the place where it appeared by accident, by the will of those who sent the exiles; some settlements, even though a hundred years old, stand on bare earth, as if the huts had just been knocked together, while others accumulate time, grow into it.

  And now the three old men told me: we had a reason for sharpening the axe today. We’ve decided to chop down three old apple trees: they no longer give fruit, we have no firewood, and we don’t have the strength to take apart the houses. Chop down the trees for us—you are a stranger, they don’t mean anything to you; you will leave, and we will have fire and warmth.

  The old man handed me the axe with its long handle; an old tub with iron hoops was placed under the roof gutter, and since I didn’t know what to do, I moved toward it and leaned on it.

  I told the old men that I would not chop down the trees and promised to gather driftwood by the river; then they said, cut our hair, and the fisherman handed me scissors, just like the ones on the wall at the dacha when Grandfather II suggested cutting off all my hair; darkened, charcoal colored, and ancient—you could tell from the shape of the scissors, which made me think people in the past cut fabric differently, touched objects differently, saw differently.

  I froze; I thought that cutting their hair would be preparing them for death; they also asked for soap, and imagining its fragrance of artificial freshness, chemical cleanliness—the last cleanliness for them—I felt fear; but then I washed each of them in the barrel with rainwater, cut off their long matted hair, and the old men, changed into white cotton underwear, started touching one another, using one another as mirrors.

  I brought them driftwood, sawed and chopped it into logs; the old men sat, getting used to their new selves, and they couldn’t, the power of adjusting had waned in them, so they just listened to the whine of the saw, the ringing sound of the axe on the tarry wood, and those sounds—the sounds of beginnings, work, construction—seemed to reach them less and less.

  I did not ask them about the island; the past seemed very fragile and unstable to me; touch something in the past and there would be a collapse of honed memory and the heart that had lived with pain would grieve again.

  The old men were silent, and I left; words of farewell would not have reached them. The dinghy picked up the bank cu
rrent and sailed past quickly, the houses on the shore vanished in the twilight, the big apple moon cast shimmering light on the water, and I pointed the dinghy’s nose along the moonlight path.

  I sailed all night; the river carried the boat over shallows and whirlpools, over the backs of fish; in the morning when a cold fog rose from the river bays, I saw the island.

  I recognized it—rounded, unsightly, dividing the river in two; surrounded by fog, it seemed to have been born in the thickening of river evaporation and would vanish when the sun rose; the green shaggy locks of bottom grasses, the streams of the current, all moved toward it, everything pointed at it; it rose from the waters like the back of a whale. The dinghy poked into sand and I stepped on shore; the footprint etched in the sand immediately filled with water.

  The island was just a surface, an oval; it felt as if the land had been cut out of the middle of Asian steppes where nomads traveled, bringing along their history, which existed only in the memory of the storytellers, a history that could be rolled and unrolled like a yurt; the land there was virgin soil not only because it was never touched by a plow—only human settlement gives a place existence in time, and where people never stopped time never began, and those places, like the island on which I stood, were not part of shared human memory.

  Grass and occasional shrubs of dwarf birch grew on the island; you could see it all, there were no hills, no valleys. If I had hoped to find something, now I saw it was pointless: what had first been a dot on the map now had its real scale but remained just as virtual.

  I walked around the island; the fog had lifted and a black kite scavenger appeared in the sky; it circled the island, then came lower, and dove down.

  There was a black hole ahead.

  A hundred steps more and I could see that it was an actual hole: the water must have seeped in, washing away the soil, creating a funnel with uneven edges, and moss fell into it in raggedy drapes. This pit in the middle of the flatness of the island was the whole point of my trip; it was the only mark, the only opening in the floating ground that the ground could not smooth over, and it beckoned dangerously and terribly. Something had happened inside the island, the ground had opened, from the bottom up.

  The closer I came the stronger was the cold that blew from the hole—not imaginary cold arising from anxiety or fear, but real cold. It chased away the weak warmth of the northern summer, it chilled the blood, but also weakened, so that in it ghost smells, corpse smells slowly thawed; they floated, moved by waves of cold, and it seemed that I was approaching ancient, snow-covered ashes.

  Hearing me, the kite flew out of the funnel; it had something in its beak, I couldn’t tell what; it rose higher, heavily gaining height, and flew in wide circles, seeing from above what I could not see: the bottom of the hole. The black bird drew the same funnel in the air, as if putting a spell on the wind spout or, on the contrary, as if it could not overcome the hole’s pull; the black bird, the diving scavenger, a creature that rots from inside and for which therefore corpses present no danger—I was afraid to think what it had it its beak, what it had found in the hole, but I continued.

  I stopped a few steps away from the edge; I could see the walls of the hole, layers of ice mixed with soil, the walls were carved by water, but the permafrost did not melt, it simply floated, icing over, smooth and slippery; going to the edge was a mistake—the soil spread, revealing ice, the slope was steep, but it was impossible to remain within three steps and not look at the bottom: I had the feeling that if I went back for poles and ropes the hole would close and vanish, that you could look into it only the way you came, without any hope of survival.

  Carefully, millimeters at a time, I moved closer to the lip of the hole; the funnel, like extended throat spasms, drew me in; the world was large, the pit was small, but close up it did not seem that way: its smallness was the dangerous smallness of jaws that would increase with every swallowed piece until it was the size of half the world and devoured the other half. For now, it waited, hiding on a remote deserted island, gathering strength, but the carrion-eating kite already knew where to go.

  I do not remember looking over the edge; I was falling into the hole and falling into the dark hole inside me; the very ground of consciousness, so familiar, so reliable that you don’t feel it, suddenly faded, and darkness breathed beneath it; when you close your eyes, your inner gaze always finds some light, perhaps weak and distant, but there was no light here at all: it was as if my inner vision had been taken, my consciousness blinded, and I did not feel my fall to the bottom.

  What happened next did not take place on the border between reality and delirium, nor alternating between reality and delirium; I was in both states simultaneously; blood from the gash in my hand made by an ice shard flowed onto the ice. The blood was warm but the ice did not melt; the funnel deepened, resembling a well, the circle of bright sky moved off, narrowed, and a black spot circled inside it—the kite. Around me were the pecked-over bodies of animals—foxes, wolves—all those that had crossed the frozen river to find fortune in this gully and then fell inside; the birds fed on the bodies, they were the only ones who could go down into the hole and come out again; the permafrost kept the bodies from rotting, the animals were curled up, their bodies diminishing in size, and it seemed that these children, kits and cubs, had been killed here in the hole-trap.

  The dead animals—bird claws had ripped open the belly of one fox and undigested tundra mice fell out of the intestines, as if the fox had not eaten them but was pregnant with them— distracted me, did not let me see the funnel in its entirety, to see what had attracted the animals. The walls were uneven, there were charred logs poking out, and there were logs on the bottom, old logs brought by the water; there was order in how they lay, and I realized that someone had tried to create a dugout here, build a cover, and then light a fire; probably the heat of the flames melted the wall and the logs fell down, onto the people.

  With that thought, my vision changed and in the black peaty protuberances, in the icy smears I saw the outlines of human bodies.

  The funnel was filled with corpses; the permafrost had preserved them. The opening in the wall filled with grass turned out to be a mouth; a rounded bump was a head; mixed with dirt, dissolved in it, the dead seemed to be trying to step out, to break the ice crust; what I had taken for tree roots were arms; the dead flesh had taken on the color of the earth and you could recognize it only by its shape.

  Black, gray, shades of brown—the spot of my blood was the only bright color in here; when I looked at the blood, I stopped seeing the corpses—the color blocked my vision, blinded me with its brightness; the dead had no color, and a long road of my gaze led to each one, gathering particle by particle the features of the body that separated the corpse from the twisted peat snags, boulders, and lumps of peat.

  I was in the belly of the earth; my brothers lay here, and their imperishability was not the incorruptibility of sainthood, but the absence of death. They did not follow the path of corruption, they merged with the earth without becoming it; for all the world they had vanished without a trace, and even death was not the last message they could send; and that meant that death had not reached its conclusion; the dead remained only with the dead and the living only with the living. Death is not disappearance, it is not an instantaneous transition from presence to absence; a man dies but not the ones around him, they must complete the deceased’s terminal work with grief and bereavement: the services held on the ninth day, the fortieth day are part of the event of death performed by the living. If the living and the dead are separated, this incompletion, this endlessly lasting moment turned to ice stops the flow of time.

  I could not climb out of the funnel; the smooth icy walls, licked flat by water, gave me no purchase; I had nothing with which to chop out steps. In my delirium I thought I could make a staircase out of corpses if I could get them out of the embrace of the ice; but then calmness descended—the way out was to dig deeper, not seeking salvation bu
t deepening the hole. I found a broken branch and starting digging in the frozen peat; digging a grave in a grave.

  I don’t remember how long this went on; I dug an opening, a well, I dug through coal, wood, rubble, I dug between frozen bodies, going around arms, shoulders, feet; and when my strength was gone, I fell into my well, fell on top of a corpse, and in the cold mist I saw my very distant childhood.

  It was night, the middle of the night in autumn. I was on the prow of a boat, all its light was behind me, the passenger cabins and the deckhouse, but here where the boat was just beginning, where the oncoming wind blocked the sound of its machinery, where the only smell was that of the ship’s metal— here was the place that barely belonged to the ship; I moved together with the boat, but just a second ahead of it.

  The river air and the darkness I sensed on that spot were different than what you saw from the cabin or the middle of the deck. Back there the light made out of the darkness a mere indicator of time; voices and music gave to the air the role of a waiter who serves up desired sounds; here, where the ship’s prow dug into the night’s flesh, and the night did not reel away but left open shell-like shutters revealing its moist, chilly interior, I looked at the night as if from inside it, while the other people on the boat looked at night from without.

  Turning around, I perceived the boat the way the darkness ahead of us perceived it; it was gaining ground, I was retreating; I stood on the deck but all the passengers, all the tables in the restaurant, all the potted palm trees, all the beds in the cabins, all the pieces of hotel soap in the showers were attributes of a world to which I did not belong; imitating one another, losing distinguishing features, people seemed like insects crawling and flying toward the light, but there was no humiliation in that comparison: I also was not human, and blackness streamed between my ribs as if I had drowned in it, and my lungs were filled by the wild, wind-tossed air of the river channel.