Here, on the boundary of Europe, I see people on the beach, as beautiful as the Nereids or dryads of Greek mythology, hybridizing man with animals or plants to produce an immortal creature. Human beauty has a vulnerability, a presentiment of dying, which defines its individuality.
I see people playing golf, endlessly repeating a lesson in Cartesian geometry, the lesson of articulating space, capturing it in a grid of coordinates. I picture them in the middle of the tundra with ball and clubs—and I think that they would freeze in amazement: there can be so much space that you cannot master it even in your imagination; they would leave their game and go off in various directions to make sure that what they saw was not a stage set.
I see a café by the ocean where every evening the stiffening breeze mixes up snatches of conversation in ten languages, plays with them, like a simultaneous interpreter at a conference switching now to French, now German, now Polish—and I remember the cemetery of exiles where there is the same mixture of languages and dialects spoken by the man who became a watchman there of his own volition. There were no crosses, no peripheries, no graves, only barely visible ditches, covered by damp spring soil, over which he pronounced names from memory. The consonances, foreign to this area, fell into the soil like seeds, and it seemed that this was a prayer composed by an only survivor who had almost lost memory and reason in order to make room for those who had no other refuge in the world.
I see the smooth asphalt of the highway—and I recall the northern road that led to the gold mines. Along it drove long-haul Ural and Kamaz trucks, all-terrain vehicles, bulldozers, the road’s shoulders infused with diesel fumes, dried to an oily crust that crunched under your boot. The powerful machines traveled alone and in caravans; from the high cab you could see how the engine noise made tundra hares scatter, partridges fly up into the air, and fish flee upstream, barreling through the water; it seemed that this low-lying area, giving birth only to tubercular trees, froze at the sight of the ribbed wheels and shiny bulldozer blades, ready to trample mosses and berry patches, to rip open the thin soil.
Suddenly, after a steep downhill, the Tsar Puddle is revealed: all the drivers call it that. Some say that this spot is cursed by shamans in revenge for the mining tunnels hacked into the sacred mountain, others say that this was the site of a mass reindeer pestilence, still others that an entire transport of prisoners froze to death in a blizzard here, hundreds of men herded to the gold mines in the forties. In general drivers were a tough crowd, not superstitious, not believing in God or devil, but the human mind truly could not cope with the sight of the Tsar Puddle.
It was impossible to go around the Tsar Puddle: the long stretch of swampy land saturated with the water of melting permafrost extended for a hundred kilometers between two rows of hills. When the vehicles braked before reaching the edge of it, the drama of the place was revealed: all around the land seemed to be bouncing, everything was covered by rotting rusty water, jutting out from which were logs and boards smashed and turned into kindling by caterpillar treads, rocks scraped by metal, and squashed barrels of sapper pontoons that people had tried to use to pave the Puddle, vanishing islets of gravel and sand—traces of attempts to fill the gaping pit. In the distance the skeleton of a tractor cab, losing the last of its paint, rose out of the swamp, bent crane dangling. A bizarre forest grew along the shores of the Puddle: dozens of iron pipes and concrete reinforcements hammered into the ground, some torn and twisted out—drivers lassoed them with the winch loops of stuck trucks. Frayed, torn ropes, each with dozens of knots, unable to withstand the deadly clutches of the Puddle, were scattered about. If you come closer, stepping carefully so that your boots don’t land in the drying sticky ooze, you can see the remains of minor dramas, desperate attempts to restock when work stopped at the mines; they needed fuel, explosives, and food, but the weather conditions kept the helicopters on the runway at the airport, and the bosses sent two or three trucks out, promising the drivers whatever they wanted as long as the cargo made it through.
Thus was born a caste of drivers who knew the Puddle, northern augurs who told fortunes by the water level, by animal tracks on the Puddle surface—it was believed that elk and roe deer chose the driest path; some drove to the side to risk a new spot, and then tractors worked a long time to haul them to shore; the majority tried to get across along the old track. Remains of these restocking trips were visible from the edge of the Puddle: spilled cans, the metal siding of the vans, benches, heaters—everything was thrown into the ruts to let the truck drive over it, and everything was inexorably consumed by the Puddle. Sometimes the Puddle became bloated, and corpses of things, decayed and digested by the juices of the earth, appeared on the surface; as if choking, the Puddle disgorged tarps, slate, drill pipes, all stuck together, fused into gigantic likenesses of rooted-out stumps, spat out the garbage dumped into it, bottles, packages, hacked out with a clot of dirt a skeleton of a fox tempted by leftovers, and then once again, in the course of a day or two, swallowed everything it had purged.
I see a German shepherd on a leash following a man on the embankment; the dog is hot, it steps gingerly on the hot stone pavers, panting wildly, sticking out its tongue, pink with purple veins; the dog is pathetic, overfed and old, used to a collar, indifferent to the bloated pigeons searching for crumbs in the cracks, but I do not feel sorry for it: I remember other shepherds, I remember the thick, viscous saliva dripping from their upper fangs, the roseate upper palate, ribbed like butchered meat on a counter, in their jaws, I remember the bark, which had nothing canine about it.
Usually the sound of barking, however furious it may be, reminds you of a city square or a village street—the distant echoes of a dogfight heard on a night in the boggy woods, you realize that somewhere nearby there are houses, people, a place to spend the night. But the bark of a convoy shepherd is not the bark of a fight, skirmish, flight, or hunt. You don’t need to chase a prisoner, he is entirely at the dog’s mercy, however in the bulging eyes, the clumps of sounds torn out of its throat, the degree of hatred reaches human levels; human—by nature of the feeling—hatred, grafted on to the dog, becomes bigger and stronger than the creature, and it must unload it upon the prisoners. That is why the barking of convoy dogs immediately makes you think of fangs, yellowed as if by tobacco, of the hatred that separates man and animal more profoundly than it does man and man, because the animal follows it to the end, to destruction, to the crunch of tendons and vertebrae; about the hatred spilled out with the barking into the air of a thousand places, living in the canine and human descendants, absorbed with meager milk and the marrow of chewed bones.
I see fishermen, the tips of their long rods glowing in the twilight, as if they were catching flying fish with that greenish light; after fishing, the men go to the café on the shore, drink beer or wine while the fish is cleaned in the kitchen; a local white wine in bluish bottles goes very well with the fish, clean and light, slightly bitter; this wine does not intoxicate, agitate, or weigh you down, it seems to rinse the feelings.
You take a sip of that wine and the woman you met and fell in love with here, the soft bonds of bed sheets, doubly salty sweat, from the seawater, the reddish pollen of the shameless palm flowers on her skin—all this recedes, and desire itself suddenly turns into an almost sexless tenderness, the sense that she is merely the vessel of her life, inaccessible to you. You look not at her anymore but at how her life lives inside her, perhaps unfamiliar to her as well; how the blood ebbs and flows, the blush grows, the hair curls. This quotidian nature of her body becomes precious and necessary; you want to take her hand to feel her pulse: the beating of the heart that was conceived in her mother’s body, appearing out of nothing, out of a few cells.