The four sat like gatekeepers of the world I was entering; the waiting room stank of belching, of sour saliva dripping from a snoozing drunk, and then of smoke; people accustomed to sleeping rough—on the floor, on trunks, on the luggage rack of a train car, on dormitory cots, on plank beds in holding cells—lay on the benches, heads covered; everyone was bent over and rolled up for warmth, but it seemed they wanted to look as if they had already been hit, no need to hit them anymore. I knew how to sleep like that—sensing not my heart but my wallet in my sleep; I had slept in worse places, but here, walking through the station, I was still off the train, where you’re a passenger and think you have some rights—and for the four men at the table I was also a passenger: criminal slang is precise in its aphoristic scorn for those who think they are going somewhere and not being taken there.
The bus to town had already left or had not yet come. By the bus stop, painted tires were used for flower beds; I had laid out similar ones on “volunteer Saturdays” in school. I recognized the familiar poverty, the second life of things that substitute for needed objects; flowerbeds made out of tires or upside-down bottles dug into the ground, a feeding bowl out of a cardboard milk packet, ashtrays out of food tins. Born and bred among them, I now wondered: Does that happen only with things? What if my feelings and thoughts are also a forced substitution for something real? What if my love isn’t love at all, but another flower bed of tires with spittle-covered marigolds?
A car pulled up to the bus stop; a black Volga with an antenna—someone’s driver was making money in the morning. The door opened; the inside of the Volga was like a den: slipcovers of dark, fuzzy, fake fur, tinted windows, everything slightly worn, slightly unclean, smelling stale from the heater; the driver was like that, too—in a wooly vest that left his elbows bare, corduroy trousers, fat, with gold teeth, unshaven, with squinty eyes in the rearview mirror, clearly just barely awake but quick, the kind of guy who likes juggling—flicking a cigarette out of a pack and catching it in his mouth—thinking that was cool; these kind usually become taxi drivers rather than personal chauffeurs, they huddle together meeting trains in small towns, but you think twice before getting into the car. A taxi like that doesn’t drive you, it takes you away, and even a familiar road seems slightly unfamiliar; the driver gives off a sense not of danger but of unease—maybe he ran down someone on a rainy night and drove away, maybe he robbed a drunk passenger, maybe he’s selling something—and the money he gives you in change will always be ancient, greasy, wrinkled as if it never had a chance to lie in a wallet but kept making the rounds, over and over, folded, crumpled and greedily stuffed into a pocket. The bills—one torn, the second with a drop of blood, the third with some numbers written on it—will also smell of something pathetically forbidden, drunken conspiracies, hangover disputes, called-in debts, the worn oilcloth on a store counter spotted with herring brine; and you will imagine that for half the trip the driver kept deciding whether to drive you where you needed to go or to turn off into an alley or lonely spot you don’t know, tell you he has a flat, and see what you do …
The Volga flew up onto the railroad bridge—rail cars, cisterns, floodlights, squat cargo cranes flashed by—and raced down the potholed streets of the city. We had to press ahead, go some thirty kilometers, and arrive in another city, the one in the letter to Grandfather II; this town was low, the farther one arose in the distance with the smokestacks of a mining plant and beyond them gray sloping mounds enveloped in smoke and cumulus clouds.
The forest tundra began outside the city, but there wasn’t a single green tree there, only cliffs, stone rubble, and dead tree trunks; the prevailing wind was from the direction of the mining plant, and the smoke from the stacks precipitating with fog and rain had burned and killed every living thing over the decades. There should be no life in these places and they should not be seen—their picture has nothing to do even with the sight of natural catastrophes: just as a criminologist can tell murder from suicide, you can see murder, whether direct or indirect, in landscapes mutilated by humans, you can tell because in nature death is swift and not ugly, while murder done by people is marked by protracted deformity.
Then came warehouses, fences, fences, fences; in the distance there were mountains, night sky, and unfettered expanses, while here everything was fenced, separated by walls; barbed wire covered everything. There were barriers everywhere, warning signs, “no entry” symbols, guard booths and outside them, strays who rushed to bark at the car. Then suddenly, like an abyss, came an empty lot retaining only the start of work—here they excavated a hole, there they abandoned a pipe, there they set up strips of wood to mark out something or other; the lot was as dark as the dirt and you could dig into the darkness with a shovel. The car flew on, and once again there were fences, floodlights, workshops, pipes, smoke, steam, and light—and then another plunge into emptiness. Man defended himself, barricaded himself, he was not master of these lands, and the guard booths were the architectural descendants of prison camp guardhouses; this land was infected with a fungus, the fungus of the watchman, and all of this, the fences, wire, barricades, was like a single never-ending shout: “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
The car flew and it seemed that we lived on our land like occupiers; that we looked at one another through a prison door peephole; there was music, the singer rasped that all his friends were bulls, fists ready to fight, gun ready to blaze, there was no salvation from the bulls; when the driver switched stations I could see that he had tattoos on his fingers—amateur, pale, perhaps somebody had tried to remove them—and the music, jerky and undisciplined, and the words were strangely suited to the locale. We were racing through a prison camp zone, even though these were not prison factories; the zone was everywhere, its mark was on everything—three rows of barbed wire. It seemed that every object here had to be locked away from thieves, and the locks multiplied, locks, bolts, hasps, the next set of locks, in case the first ones are defeated, and so on; oncoming cars did not turn off their high beams, blinding me, but the driver did not turn away, he was used to it; the gun ready to blaze, no salvation from the bulls, the speakers roared, and we flew, senselessly fast, as if in a hurry to fight with someone, break bones, knock out teeth; the dark, the fences, the empty lots—everything chased after us, everything showed that you could not stop here, in a plague-ridden place, and that gave a sense of daring, a ruthless readiness to live at odds with everything, to chomp onto life like it was a tough piece of meat, with sinews and fur; I had frequently been in such places, but this was the first time I realized that the criminals had won, the camp had beaten the not-camp; the camp was not gone, it had smeared itself into the landscape, cut itself into parts, and each part settled in, changing everything around it, in the milieu of human habitation.
The toys I found in Grandfather II’s apartment suited this area very well—faceless figures, rifle, German shepherd, horse; they came from here. A bridge flashed by, the fences were left behind, and the town’s narrow streets wound around hills, signs, store windows, kiosks, bus stops, railroad tracks crossed the road several times, beyond the hills factories appeared then disappeared, and the mountains came closer, squashing the town into a hollow, with only one exit, across the bridge we had taken.
To the right appeared another abyss of darkness; but I could make out a big building. The driver explained that this was a train station, that previously commuter trains used to run here, but the branch was abandoned during perestroika and only freight lines were left; the station was unsupervised and there had been a fire. The road twisted up a slope, and the car flew right up to the station; the building was typical, with arches, columns, and very wide windows—a railroad temple from the forties or fifties, an altar of schedules. The fire had merely blackened the walls, and the station had the desecrated majesty of an abandoned church, as if the locals rejected a religion; I could not tell from his tone whether the driver was sorry or on the contrary was proud of the arson, his speech betrayed both.
Depression hits you by the Golden Gate; a new horde, the nomads of the new world, traders in fake leather jackets huddle in the ruins, unable to take them apart completely and build something different; they have grown accustomed to disarray, to accepting crevices in the old walls as living space; to the fact that you can live without looking back at the past and assuming that the shade of ancient walls is convenient shade on a hot day and nothing more.
At the station I saw the same kind of abandoned crossroads, a silt-filled mouth of fate; the city cut off its own path to the outside, destroyed the window to the big world, and now lived like a blinded Cyclops deprived of its train headlight eye. But the station was burned, and the city was forced by the landscape, by the hollow in which it was situated, to shut down on itself; the place exerted a kind of terror against its populace, and people responded in kind: the walls of houses and garages were thickly covered in graffiti, curses addressed to no one in particular but directly at the environment; the scrawls were written over rectangles of fresh paint—the swear words were painted over—abundantly, fluently, and monotonously; evidence of petty revenge—knocked over garbage cans, broken streetlamps and windows, rubbish tossed on the side of the roads—showed that the residents were fighting a partisan war with the town.
Dropping me at the hotel, the driver left, and I started looking at the ads on the lamppost covered in white drips of glue; most were about apartment sales and exchanges, there were many, and they were glued on in layers, the lamppost was covered with a clustered fringe, and it seemed as if no one was comfortable living here, everyone wanted to change something, move, find a new view from the window even if it’s still within the same city limits.
In towns like this above the polar circle, the hotel is called either “North” or “Arktika”—this one was Arktika. These hotels have a special kind of discomfort; most guests are there on business, there are no insouciant vacationers.
Here dreams are laconic, like a still life of a pitcher and two glasses, but you still have to bring dreams, like food for the train, from home. In your room, you find yourself on the unfurnished margin of life. There are too few objects—tray, electric kettle, ashtray—the distance is too great between them, like in the desert, it takes a half day to get from one to the other, and they are all not quite real. In a room like that you can lay out your things, toss a book on the nightstand and cigarettes on the table, but it still feels as if you’ve stopped in some uninhabited area. All around, as in nature, only monotonous surfaces; out there—hills and valleys, here—horizontals and right angles; it’s a kind of new wilderness, a new wildness; the best reading here is a geometry textbook.
The hotel windows opened on a blank wall of the building next door; it was about ten meters to the wall, and there were no curtains—why bother, when the brickwork was so close?
Forced to live with a view of the wall, I read it like a book, the book of the wall. It’s good to look at a town from the point of view of buildings; from the point of view of bricks; then you are not an observer, you are one with the spirits of the place. But this wall did not allow me to mentally move into it, it repelled my gaze; the brick was not laid evenly, the lines were crooked, and the wall wavered; all you could learn was how gradually it was laid and how the people worked on the construction.
It seemed to me that the intention to build was missing from their actions; each brick was laid not even automatically but with a thought that was as far from construction as possible—a thought about home or about the evening’s pay packet. As a result, you could not say about the wall or the whole house that they were actually built; you could not say that the house was solid on the ground. The wall before me blocked my view but at the same time was not convincing; it seemed that it could collapse at any moment because they had not put in that something that holds a house together along with brick and mortar.
I saw that a great force of compulsion had erected the town, cleared the forest, laid the roads, dug the canals, and built the factories; but it turned out that compulsion is incapable of one thing: the effort a person brings to work freely chosen. Without that effort, without that bit of spiritual labor that merges with physical labor, all the roads, bridges, cities, and factories were held up only by the will of the state that had them built. When that will vanished, when its time has passed, people were left with a legacy of great construction in which spiritually they were not involved; they were left among houses, stations, and streets built under duress.
Sleeping in a room with a view of the wall was good; dreaming was a way of leaving the building. The dreams—the three dreams I had at home—did not come anymore; they could not exist in this hotel room, they were too personal for this commonplace setting; the dreams I had after the train were not even dreams but just preparation, clean sheets of paper for dreaming on which light, unrecognizable shadows flitted; I could not expect more than that for now.
I had decided ahead of time that I would not go looking for the man who wrote to Grandfather II right away; I wanted to see the town first, see its present—and only then disturb its past.
The town was named for a Bolshevik killed in the mid-1930s; the name of the town communicated nothing to the place, or the place to its name. They spoke different languages and avoided each other.
The area’s mountains bore names given to them by local ethnic groups; these names left the sensation of raw meat and gnawed bones in your throat; reading a dozen names in a row from the map was like drinking thick blood that was steaming in the cold; the names were redolent of campfire smoke, fish scales, rawhide, canine and human sweat, they were long and the syllables joined up like reindeer or dogs in harness.
The town name—two syllables, with an sk ending—gave away its alienness, the Bolshevik’s name looked good on a big map of the country where the names of his comrades formed a toponymic constellation, a lifetime and posthumous pantheon, but up close the name seemed ridiculous, a random collection of letters which the residents got used to and considered themselves dwellers of Abracadabra-sk.
All the original foundations of the town lay outside it, first it appeared in a plan, on a map, and only then in the area. No matter how it grew, how it developed, it remained a papier-mâché town. There were houses, stores, streets, trees, intersections, and streetlights—but it was inherently ephemeral; the town existed as long as the ore lasted next to it; of itself, without the ore, it meant nothing. It did not arise at a focus point of historical fates, or at the crossroads of trade and military interests, but near a giant pocket of land from which riches could be mined; it was created according to the will of the regime that moved thousands of workers to the north, it grew out of barracks, temporary huts, and that spirit had not dissipated; stale, uninhabited, the spirit of a new construction, of a workshop, oiled rags, and rotting pipes.
I left the hotel in search of the library; I hoped to read something written by regional historians and then to go find the city museum, if there was one.
It was too dark to read in the library, damp and green; there were flowers everywhere in pots, vines, sharp-leaved plants, and the books seemed to get lost in the jungle; the librarian, who did not see me, walked past with her watering can, and the pots stood as if she was watering books instead of flowers, adding the water of words to old, dried out volumes. The wall calendar was from two years ago; charts with letters—А, Б, В—stuck out from the shelves into
the aisles, rabbit ears of the alphabet; it was classroom-like, pathetic.
There were no works on the town history in the library; instead, the librarian showed me old editions, prerevolutionary and from the 1920s, with half-erased ex libris inscriptions; books were taken away from those sent here, and that created the first collection for the library.
Local history could be learned only from the newspaper archives. The pages, as fragile as dried seaweed, kept the hieroglyphs of the past’s daily news; photographs turned into black-and white underwater photography; you could barely make out a few details—the corner of a house, a man’s silhouette, but that was all—through a murky substance, like water at a silty river bottom; the view into the photograph was the view through the glass of a diving suit—you expected a deep-water fish to swim by, a bottom angler with glassy beads on its whiskers. I realized the substance was time, and I was a diver who could speak only to himself—the deep diving suit does not let sound escape.
The newspapers lay before me, but they did not let me inside; they joined up in columns of letters, bristled with names, details, dates, decrees, announcements, and holiday editorials; Dumin’s brigade overfulfilled the plan for skidding logs, excavator Rutin got a state award, the separation line was started up in Mine 3a—the newspaper pages reported only ancient news, news, news; news items crowded, chatted, hustled one another, there were so many, as if everything done was done for the sake of creating news, and even better, for creating two or three stories, news that the previous story, just a day later, was obsolete and here is something even newer; the newspaper pages flashed by like an express train you couldn’t jump on to from the platform. The surnames and names also flashed by, unless it was an article about some production worker; the thin sheet of paper—a vertical slice of time a micron thick—was stacked with others just like it, the newspaper lay in thick piles, but there was no temporal volume; I needed a book in three dimensions, a book as a collected, repackaged rethinking of time, but no one ever wrote a book about the town. “There isn’t enough of us for a book,” said the librarian. “We haven’t accumulated enough, we’re too thin on the ground, too thin.”
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