Driven in the police wagon, as though in a coffin with the lid slammed shut, he was able to conjecture about where he was only through sounds. Hearing the rumble of cobblestones below the wheels, he surmised that they were in a town: “On the sixth day I heard the rumble of cobblestones, it was Smolensk.” From the dark police wagon they transfer him directly into a dark cell, so that Kopeć cannot tell if it is day or night: “There were two windows with iron bars, nailed up with black wooden planks so that daylight couldn’t enter anywhere. One had to guess — night, or day? — the guards never wanted to say even a word to me.” Exhausted by the journey, Kopeć nevertheless cannot sleep — this rest stop on the road deep into Siberia turns out to be a place of torment: “I couldn’t sleep: I thought I heard beatings from beyond the walls next to me, the sounds of torture, and the clank of chains.”
They drag the general to an inquest. “They ask Kopeć,” Mickiewicz writes, “what was the cause of his rebellion. Love of the motherland, he answers. The commission becomes indignant at this answer and breaks off the interrogation, unable to suffer the prisoner’s pride.”
They drive Kopeć farther east. “From Smolensk to Irkutsk,” the general reminisces, “three soldiers from my escort died, others broke their legs or arms falling off my police wagon. Drunk and careless, they would speed down mountains, and it often happened that as the horses broke into a run, the wagon would flip over and the horses would drag it for a quarter of a mile, and I, shut inside, would smash around like a herring in a barrel. The fact that I was wrapped in a sack, chaff, and straw would save me.”
Despite being transported in a wagon-coffin, the general is aware of being in a certain way privileged — they are driving him; others they force to march for years on foot. “On the road I met several hundred people of both genders, being marched for deportation toward Irkutsk, under a very small guard, people they would send from settlement to settlement, and it is only at the end of the third year, if then, that they would arrive in Irkutsk from Europe. None can escape along the way, for there are no secondary settlements anywhere … if one of the enslaved wants to save himself by slipping away somewhere to the side, into the forest, he will be eaten by animals.…”
This wandering of the deportee is not only a displacement in space and in time. It is accompanied by a process of dehumanization: the one who reaches the end (if he doesn’t die along the way) has already been stripped of everything that is human. He has no surname; he does not know where he is; he does not know what they will do with him. His language has been taken away: no one will speak with him. He is a consignment; he is a thing; he is a trifle.
Later, they deprive the general of even the wagon; they force him along on foot: “We always walked from morning until evening without a break.”
And he adds: “No road of any kind, only through terrifying mountains and gorges.”
ULAN-UDE — KRASNOYARSK
“No road of any kind, only through terrifying mountains and gorges.”
I dreamed of seeing Lake Baikal, but it was night, a black stain on the frost-covered window frame. It wasn’t until morning that I caught a glimpse of mountains and gorges. Everything in snow.
Snow and snow.
It is January, the middle of the Siberian winter.
Outside the window everything appears stiff from the cold, even the firs, pines, and spruces look like great, petrified icicles, dark green stalagmites sticking out of the snow.
The immobility, the immobility of this landscape, as if the train were standing still, as if it too were a part of this region — also immobile.
And the whiteness — whiteness everywhere, blinding, unfathomable, absolute. A whiteness that draws one in, if someone lets himself be seduced by it, lets himself be caught in the trap and walks farther, deep into the whiteness — he will perish. The whiteness destroys all those who try to approach it, who try to decipher its mystery. It hurls them down from mountaintops, abandons them, frozen, on snowy plains. Siberian Buryats consider every white animal to be sacred; they believe that to kill one is to commit a sin and bring death upon oneself. They look upon white Siberia as a temple inhabited by a god. They bow to its plains, pay homage to its landscapes, continually frightened that from there, from the white depths, death will come.
Whiteness is often associated with finality, with the end, with death. In those cultures in which people live with the fear of death, mourners dress in black, to scare death away from themselves, isolate it, confine it to the deceased. But here, where death is regarded as another form, another shape of existence, mourners dress in white and dress the deceased in white: whiteness is here the color of acceptance, consent, of a surrender to fate.
There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is not created for such measurelessness. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship’s deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort.
KRASNOYARSK — NOVOSIBIRSK
Beyond Krasnoyarsk (is it already the fourth day of traveling?) it begins to grow lighter. (At this time of year, darkness prevails here for the greater part of the night and the day.) I drink tea and look out the window. The same snowy plains as yesterday, as the day before yesterday (and, I am tempted to add, as last year, as centuries ago). The same endless forest. The same forests and clearings, and in the open areas high snowdrifts, sculpted by the wind into the strangest of shapes.
Suddenly I remember Blaise Cendrars and his “Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France.” In this poem, written before World War I, Cendrars describes a journey on this same railroad line, but in the opposite direction — from Moscow to Harbin. The refrain of this poem is the incessantly repeated question asked by his frightened girlfriend, Jeanne:
“Blaise, say, are we really a long way from Montmartre?”
Jeanne experiences the same sensation that comes over everyone who plunges into Siberia’s white boundlessness — the sensation of sinking into nonbeing, of evanescing.
The author has nothing to cheer her up with:
A long way, Jeanne, you’ve been rolling along for seven days
You’re a long way from Montmartre …
Paris is the center of the world, the point of reference. How does one measure the sense of distance, remoteness? To be far from what, from what place? Where is that point on our planet from which people, as they move farther from it, would have the impression that they are closer and closer to the end of the world? Is it a point with only an emotional significance (my house as the center of the world)? Or cultural (for example, Greek civilization)? Or religious (for example, Mecca)? Most people, when asked which they consider the center of the world — Paris or Mexico — will answer: Paris. Why? After all, Mexico City is larger than Paris and also has a metro and magnificent monuments and great paintings and excellent writers. And yet they will say Paris. And what if someone declares that for him the center of the world is Cairo? It is, after all, larger than Paris and has monuments and a university and art. And yet how many people would vote for Cairo? And so it is Paris (in any event it was Paris when the frightened Jeanne was riding with her heart in her boots across Siberia). It is Europe. European civilization is the only one that has ever had global ambitions and (almost) realized them. Other civilizations either couldn’t satisfy such ambitions for technical reasons (for instance, the Maya), or simply didn’t have such interests (for instance, China), convinced that they themselves were the entire world.