How many victims, how much blood and suffering, are connected with this business of borders! There is no end to the cemeteries of those who have been killed the world over in the defense of borders. Equally boundless are the cemeteries of the audacious who attempted to expand their borders. It is safe to assume that half of those who have ever walked upon our planet and lost their lives in the field of glory gave up the ghost in battles begun over a question of borders.
This sensitivity to the border issue, this untiring enthusiasm for constantly marking them out, widening them, or defending them, are characteristic not only of man, but all animate nature, of everything that moves on land, in water and air. Various mammals, in defense of the borders of their grazing lands, will let themselves be torn to pieces. Various beasts of prey, so as to secure new hunting grounds, will bite their adversaries to death. And even our quiet and meek kitten, how he labors, how he compresses and torments himself, to squeeze out a few drops with which to mark, here and there, the borders of his territory.
And our brains? Encoded in them, after all, is an infinite diversity of borders. Between the left and the right hemispheres, between the frontal and the temporal lobes, between the corpus callosum and the cerebellum. And the borders between ventricles, meninx, and convolutions? Between the lumbar region and the spinal cord? Notice the way in which we think. For instance, we think: That’s the limit; beyond that — no. Or we say: Be careful that you don’t go too far, for you will overstep the mark! Moreover, all these boundaries of thought and feeling, injunctions and interdictions, are constantly shifting, crossing and permeating one another, piling up. In our brains there is ceaseless border movement — across borders, near borders, over borders. Hence our headaches and migraines, hence the tumult in our heads; but pearls can also be produced: visions, dazzlements, flashes of inspiration, and — unfortunately more rarely — genius.
The border is stress — fear, even (significantly more rarely: liberation). The concept of the border can include a kind of finality; the doors can slam shut behind us forever: such is the border between life and death. The gods know about such anxieties, and that is why they try to win adherents by promising people that as a reward that they will enter the divine kingdom — which will have no borders. The paradise of the Christian God, the paradise of Yahweh and Allah, all have no borders. Buddhists know that the state of nirvana is the state of blissful happiness without limits. In short, that which is most desired, awaited, and longed for by everyone is precisely this unconditional, total, absolute — boundlessness.
ZABAYKAL’SK — CHITA
Barbed wire. Barbed-wire barriers are what you see first. They protrude out of the snow, hover over it — lines, trestles, fences of barbed wire. What extraordinary combinations, knots, billows, entire constructions of barbed wire clasping together the sky and the earth, clinging to every bit of frozen field, to the white landscape, to the icy horizon. On the face of it, this thorny, rapacious barrier stretching along the border seems like an absurd and surreal idea, for who would force his way through here? As far as the eye can see there is only a desert of snow, no roads, no people, and the snow is two meters high; taking a single step is impossible. And yet these walls of barbed wire have something to say to you, have something to communicate. They are saying: Be careful, you are crossing the border into a different world. You will not escape from here; you will not get away. It is a world of deadly seriousness, orders, and obedience. Learn to listen, learn humility, learn to occupy the least amount of space possible. Best mind your own business. Best be silent. Best not ask questions.
The barbed wire instructs you the whole time the train is rolling toward the station; it imprints upon your mind everything which you should from now on remember, and it does so relentlessly, but after all it is for your own good that it pounds into your head the long litany of limitations, prohibitions, and instructions.
Then come the dogs. German shepherds, furious, trembling, frenzied; the train has barely stopped when they throw themselves under the cars, barking, baying. But who could be riding underneath the wagon, in minus forty degrees Celsius? No matter how many sheepskin coats he had on him, he would freeze in an hour, and we have already been rolling nonstop for an entire day. The sight of the ferreting dogs is so absorbing that for a while one doesn’t notice the next image — soldiers have sprung up as if from beneath the earth and have instantaneously lined up on both sides of the train. They stand in such a way that the train cars are under total surveillance, and if, for example, a passenger — a madman (or perhaps an agent, an infiltrator, a spy) — decided to jump out of any one of the cars and throw himself into the immense, snowy, ice-cold space, he would be immediately spotted and shot.
All the same, who could shoot him, just like that, instantly? Well, the sentries who stand on the lookout towers and have their rifles aimed at the doors and windows of the train cars could do so without a moment’s delay (because I am looking out the window just now, one of the rifles is aimed at me — yes, directly at me!). On the other hand, however, no madman (or agent, or infiltrator, or spy) could jump out and throw himself into the snowbound space, for all the doors and windows of the cars are tightly, carefully shut.
In short, the total surveillance clearly plays the same persuasive role as those one-story-high, thick billows of barbed wire: it is simply a silent but emphatic warning, lest some preposterous idea accidentally enter your head!
But that’s not the end of it. For barely has the pack of high-strung and possibly hungry German shepherds passed beneath the train, barely have the soldiers arranged themselves vigilantly along the tracks, and the sentries at the lookout posts aimed the barrels of their rifles at us, than patrols enter the cars (in one hand a flashlight, in the other a long steel skewer), throwing all the passengers out into the corridor. A search of the compartments begins, a rooting about on the shelves, under the seats, in nooks and crannies, in ashtrays. The sounding of the walls, the ceiling, the floor begins. The examining, looking, touching, smelling.
Now the passengers take everything they have — suitcases, bags, packages, bundles — and carry them to the station building, in which stand long metal tables. Everywhere, red banners joyfully welcome us to the Soviet Union. Beneath the banners, in a row, customs inspectors, men and women, without exception fierce looking, severe, almost as though they were bearing some sort of grudge, yes, very clearly a grudge. I search among them for a face with even slightly more gentle, relaxed, open features, for by this time I myself would like to relax a little, to forget for a moment that I am surrounded by barbed wire and lookouts, fierce dogs, sentries stiff as stone; I would like to establish any kind of contact, exchange a courtesy, talk a little; it’s something I always need very much.
“You, what are you grinning at?” A customs inspector inquires sharply and suspiciously.
A chill goes through me. Power is seriousness: in an encounter with power, a smile is tactless, it demonstrates a lack of respect. Similarly, one must not stare too long at someone who has power. But I already know about this from the army. Our corporal, Jan Pokrywka, punished everyone who looked at him too long. “Come on over here!” he would shout. “What are you staring at me like that for?” And as punishment he would send the offender to clean the latrines.
Now it begins. The opening, the unfastening, the untying, the disemboweling. The rummaging, the plunging in, the pulling out, the shaking about. And what is this? And what is that? And what is that for? And this? And that? And this one? And that one? And which way? And what for? Worst of all are the books. What a curse to be traveling with a book! You could be carrying a suitcase of cocaine and keep a book on top of it. The cocaine wouldn’t arouse the least bit of interest; all the customs inspectors would throw themselves upon the book. And what — God forbid! — if you’re carrying a book in English? Then the real running, checking, paging through, reading would begin.