Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  The old man talked; he knew that the end was near and that he could “confess,” and whatever he said, whatever he admitted, I would not even dare to berate him, so fragile was his health; perhaps this was the first time he could talk freely and he used that freedom to deal with me. “You want to stay clean,” he said. “It won’t work, I’ll dirty you up!”

  No, he didn’t see me as a pure boy whose naiveté was irritating; he didn’t want to prove that everyone is more likely to do evil rather than good, he didn’t want to make generalizations; nor did he try to justify himself through a person’s total dependence on circumstances. He hated me because I came from a world with mobile phones, foreign cars, Internet, Wi-Fi, trips abroad, bowling; the world had changed, people chose not to remember anything rather than remember with fear or remember with sorrow, and the old man whispered—thinking he was shouting—that he had been head of the execution squad, he had seen a bullet fly through the body of a goner and the goner did not die because while wounds endanger a healthy body, a person in extreme emaciation no longer senses a wound as a wound, he has great endurance in the face of death. The old man whispered, thinking he was shouting, that the abandoned slag heaps of the mine where they tossed the bodies attracted bears for many years; he whispered that he had shot people himself, with a Nagant rifle, he whispered that there are still undiscovered graves near the town, he knew where, he could show me if I didn’t believe him; the old man was scared.

  He wasn’t afraid of what he had done; he became frightened when he realized that he, head of the execution squad, was nothing in today’s world; they did not spit in his face but nor were they afraid of him. He, who had outlived not only his victims but those who could have served as witnesses about and for them, was alone; all the executions, all the murders were forgotten, an entire era had settled to the bottom of memory, and he, locked inside it, was trying to prove that he had existed; the old man could not tolerate the fact that the evil he had wrought no longer existed as evil; he had killed, and the world had finally shut its eyes and when it opened them again it was as if nothing had ever happened. The world did not notice, and the old man was deprived of the only, almost otherworldly, perverted spiritual support in a criminal’s self-perception: knowing that you have done something irreversible, irreparable, once and forever, that you took the place of God; that your act would not be smoothed over or forgotten.

  I managed to escape; the old woman unlocked the door and I ran down the stairs carrying the photograph, which I had forgotten to return. I planned to go back to the hotel and lock myself in—everything around me, everything I had seen and felt came back in one sensation, that this world was born of Grandfather II, that he had touched the ground with a shovel blade and the ground responded, opened up, and now it could not be closed, it could not be reversed; the town stood on a fault, and the past had more power over it than the present.

  I didn’t reach the hotel; the Volga I had taken from the station came out around a corner and blocked my way; if I hadn’t recognized the car I might have gotten away, instead for a few seconds I thought that the driver had also recognized me and wanted something; then three men jumped out of the car, and in the backseat I saw the captain from the address office; I ran, they caught me, hit me in the back, and bent back my arms.

  They opened the trunk about a half hour later; it was getting dark, the car was parked at an enormous man-made lake—one of the settling pools of the mining works, filled with greenish acidic mass; nearby a bird struggled in the chemical mixture—they said birds were poisoned by the pool’s evaporation and fell into it; the lump of dirt fluttered, gurgled, and only its beak—the sludge of the pool did not stick to it—opened and shut, a tiny bellows filling the lungs.

  They made me kneel at the edge of the pool; dried vomit and blood stained the concrete; apparently, this place had been used before.

  The captain and the driver stayed in the car; they smoked, the dashboard glowed green, the city lights flickered in the distance, a train carrying ore moved along the tracks, the diesel locomotive had long disappeared around the curve but the train kept going, and I suddenly realized that I was afraid I wouldn’t see the final train car; that fear hid the greater fear, that they would beat me, drop me over the edge and dip my face into the settling tank. I looked over my shoulder: three men behind me, I couldn’t tell which one was in charge; the tattoos on their hands were like stamps on the damp linens of platzkart railway bunk beds, the hands twitched and danced as if they’d undergone an electrical shock; the three were talking about what to do with me and the one missing the right ring finger was the most adamant.

  They had kept an eye out for me, the captain had mentioned something to somebody about the foolish heir, and they were going to torture me about nonexistent money, jewels, and safe deposit boxes; my entire inheritance was the photograph in my jacket pocket. And then I looked closer at the one missing a finger and I recognized the features of the fugitive I tried to feed in the distant mountains by the abandoned prison camp; this was his younger brother or twin, unless I was hallucinating.

  I started to talk; I told him that I knew how his brother died, knew the place where he was buried; I saw the stump of the ring finger and I thought that the one who had died nameless had left that notched ring behind.

  I was right: his brother really had escaped—that was the last they had heard of him—and vanished; they let me up and asked questions, I told them how I had found him and tried to save him and then buried him. My captors discussed whether or not I had turned him in to the cops and decided they would have heard that he was returned to the prison colony and given an extra term. Had I killed him? I told them to look at me: Did I look like a killer? They laughed.

  Things were turned around; the captors weren’t all that sure I was a rich heir, they were checking the captain’s tip; they drove me to a cheap eatery for me to draw a map of the fugitive’s grave; the captain sat next to me on the backseat and regarded me respectfully: he was certain that I had fooled the three men and was probably almost in awe of my cunning.

  They asked me what I was doing in the town; and contrary to reason, I gave them a quick version of the story. The adopted grandson of the camp warden—I told the bandits about Grandfather II and they listened with respect; I was one of them, I was related to the camp world and it turned out that barbed wire not only separates, it unites: they even apologized for twisting my arms. There was no distinction between prisoners and guards, thieves and turnkeys—in any case, in the past; there was only a man who had founded their town, a man in whom they sensed a greater, senior power—and they thought they could have found a common language with him. Grandfather II, like them, bent and broke people, and now that the old feuds were becoming insignificant, they missed the arbitrariness elevated into law—they thought they would have found a place for themselves in those days, a place on the side of force, and the reflection of the force would have lent legality and justification to their base passion for torture. “I would have worn a uniform in those days,” said one; and I saw that all three would have worked as guards—freedom did not interest them, power did; the fugitive, the big brother, would have killed anyone suggesting it, but these men, younger, would have accepted it as their due; they did serve, in fact, as private security at the plant.

  The dead man, almost against his will, protected me; that attempt at humanity had worked. If I had abandoned him, I would not have had the right—for myself—to refer to that incident; but I didn’t abandon him and I didn’t turn him in—and now I avoided the sludge of the settling tank where the deceived bird was dying in sticky bubbles.

  Their mood had changed sharply; I described the way to the abandoned camp as best I could, but I knew that the younger brother would not travel to rebury his big brother—he would only tell stories about how he grabbed an outside mark, and the mark turned out to be a guy who had seen his brother’s body; gradually the story would mutate to the point of unrecognizability—either I wou
ld become a traitor punished by the younger brother, or, on the contrary, I would have carried the fugitive on my back; but all that would be later and for now we drank at the eatery—to friends, to the failure of enemies—and the captain drank with everyone, as if he had never ratted on me.

  I planned to go to the cemetery in the morning, to the graves of Grandfather II’s wife and son, but I changed my mind; I sensed that the trip would be the end, that I would have to return after I did it—and I tried to postpone the end.

  I wanted to see the place where the old man who was chief of the execution squad got the dose of radiation. The town had its own radiation—the radioactivity of dysfunction, of strain and fracture; I wanted to compare the sensation of the two places to see if they were similar in any way.

  Not far out of town, in the mountains, was the ravine where the prisoners dug radioactive ore.

  When they were creating the nuclear bomb, every geological expedition looked for that ore whatever else they were doing. Here in the North, they found it. I imagined tens of thousands of people all over the country, in the steppes, the deserts, taiga, and tundra looking for the decaying substance that was fraught with chain reaction, searching for the yellow uranium tars the color of the spots on the skin of poisonous snakes; I pictured Geiger counter needles reacting when they found grains of minerals surrounded by the brown aureole of radioactivity and the sharpened tips of pencils marked the contours of future sites on faded pages of field diaries in graphite.

  Searching for substances whose life span is equivalent in duration with human life, searching for short-lived mineral compounds, betrayers of rock that has it own, long life of millions of years; searching for the key to the forces of nature; searching for the accelerator of decay, in a sense the philosopher’s stone commensurate with the philosophy of the new age that seeks means of destruction rather than construction; methods of stopping history, ending time.

  Uranium, an element named for the castrated god, the god of time who gave up his place to Cronus and by disappearing made possible the change of generations of the gods—uranium is a sterile creature that cannot give a start to a thing and cannot be smelted into a permanent form like copper or iron; uranium, discovered by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in the year of the start of the French Revolution, the year the Bastille was stormed and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was passed—did the German natural philosopher think that the black substance in his test tube would weigh more on the scales of history than all the gold ever extracted by humanity? That for the sake of this substance roads would be built and mines created? Did he hear in the sounds of that year the underground jolts that were predictions of future revolutions—and the revolution that would take up the French revolution’s red flag?

  To get to the ravine, you had to go past abandoned plants and an unfinished enrichment factory. It was the place where the outskirts of the city joined the mining plant’s territory, creating a no-man’s land where no one lived, not even tramps and feral dogs; while the ruins of factories and houses along the edge of town smelled of neglect, here it seemed that the space itself was decaying and filling up with caverns.

  There were fireplaces and rusted snarls of cord—the metal guts of tires—everywhere; splashes of rust, cisterns knocked on their sides, smashed power line towers, hunks of metal, twisted, bent, hacked by giant scissors; truck tire tracks that looked as if someone had intentionally tortured the earth. Among the skeletons of barracks, like trees chopped by mortars in a military dream, stood wastewater risers; huge fountains of water gushed pointlessly from forgotten wells. None of the usual litter there—cans, papers, wrappers, scraps of food—only the remains of former habitation, warped metal and murdered wood.

  I couldn’t walk through that space; here at the juncture of the town and the industrial zone, everything that in other places nearby was practically hidden, masked by architecture and landscape, was laid bare; the mutilated space itself did not elicit fear but the reality of the inner lives of the people whose effort and determination, or rather, lack of effort and absence of determination gave rise to it.

  Once, several geological institutes had their laboratories here; the barracks frames were all that was left, everything else was looted when the labs were closed. Among the chopped and charred slate were pieces of core samples—long cylinders of rock raised from the depths of holes. Usually they were laid out in special boxes meter by meter, and the meter columns of samples gave a reading of the entire vertical of the hole. Those abandoned core samples, overgrown with weeds, pointlessly removed from the ground, from great depths, showed that people left here as if rejecting their work, tossing it aside casually and hastily, and in the vacuum created by their departure, a different life began: the way bindweed takes over old ruins.

  Looking at the core samples, I remembered a story that used to be told as a joke; back in the 1980s, a retired driller applied to the Ministry of Geology. He had a project to make use of some of the old holes, which were usually filled with cement to keep the underground water strata from mixing. He proposed turning the holes into cemeteries: burying people vertically, lowering one on top of the other; there were thousands of such holes drilled all over the country, and his explanatory note stated that their total capacity would enable decades of burials, freeing up, he explained scrupulously, the workforce, the cemetery diggers and coffin makers, for other state needs, the word “state” underlined.

  The ministry had seen all kinds of proposals: the era had given rise to wild thoughts, the suppressed energy of restructuring and transformations found a way into apolitical and, in that sense, safe technological inventions. The more slowly time flowed, the more alleged inventions appeared that rejected the laws of science, overriding them out of the inventor’s desire, a desire so clearly inept and passionate that it was beyond science; people wanted to change something, and the laws of the natural sciences seemed more malleable than the laws of the social order. But the scientist who proposed vertical cemeteries amazed everyone; and now, standing before the abandoned core boxes, I sensed where that man had come from and what environment had addled his brain.

  To get around the ruined land that belonged to no one, I decided to follow the railroad track leading to the mine; women’s voices could be heard above the embankment; I couldn’t make out the words yet, but I could pick up the intonations. The voices did not come from any particular place—the air resonated with them, as if it contained them like a chemical cloud or steam.

  Two women were wearily discussing something. From the interjections that arise when vowels are pronounced, lighting a word from within with different emotional tones—a-a, u-u, o-o—you could tell what they were talking about. I got closer and the phrases were clearer. Yesterday Valera said … ate some hot dogs … I have to sleep with him when he’s drunk …. the kids are in the next room … he burned a hole in the pillowcase with his cigarette … started drinking first thing in the morning … he’s trying to get in my daughter’s room …

  The words were about human life, but they seemed to be spoken by the area; two women dispatchers sat in their respective booths, kilometers apart from each other, at two sets of crossroads, and now, as there was a break, there were no trains running carrying ore, they were having a conversation over the loudspeakers. No one could eavesdrop because there was no one around; day after day they chatted and it seemed there was nobody closer—among friends and neighbors—than each other.

  Maybe these conversations had been conducted for years, and had not changed; in rain and blizzard, in summer and winter, one woman said “he burned a hole in the pillowcase,” and it was always the same pillowcase and the same cigarette; and her friend said nothing in response, just listened.

  The same ruins, the same gouged earth, lay around the embankment, and the women’s conversation did not clash with it, the way a conversation about domestic things would, referring to home—in the sense of walls, roof, hearth—amid the abandoned buildings. On the contrary, t
his was the only conversation possible here.

  The voices carried from the loudspeakers up on posts, and it seemed that the words spoke themselves and there were no people at all, just a recording set on repeat in an empty dispatcher office.

  It was muggy in the ravine, low clouds were caught on the mountain peaks; it was raining but it felt as if the drops were already flying and had not yet reached the ground. The ruts of the old road were overgrown, and the bridges across the river had been washed away; a narrow path trampled in the rut showed that people came here for mushrooms or berries. The river water was mountain water, too transparent, too clear—it will never slake your thirst, you have to add salt or acid; bilberries ripened in the thickets; the ulcers of the industrial zone were just a half kilometer away, but nature here was untouched, in another decade the old road would disappear under new birches.

  The camp appeared after a turn; some of the houses were built out of river boulders, and now they looked like a parody of medieval architecture: two stories, hunkered down, without roofs, with narrow windows to keep in the heat. The wooden buildings had rotted or been burned down long ago, only the electric poles with crooked crossbeams remained, but the eye refused to see them as crosses, to take in the symbolism—they were just poles; it was the same with these buildings—I realized that someone seeing this without knowing it used to be a prison camp would never guess.

  Neither the masonry, not the black spots where they used to dump coal, nor the abandoned carts on the slope, nor the adits, nothing in and of itself was evidence. Even the roll of barbed wire, in which a hare had once gotten caught—rodents gradually carried out the tiny bleached bones, as if they had been dumped from a plate—was just a roll of barbed wire. In order to unwind it, like you unwind a thread from a ball of wool, pulling out the entire past, the entire image of this place six decades ago, and not only the image but the essence of what had gone on here—you needed to know something about it, you needed some sort of guidance.