I headed to the river along the roadbed of the former railroad; I turned off at times, climbing up on the hills to look around: the gravel bed was low and offered no view. The landscape was the work of a demented soul, continually repeating the same word, line, motif; tundra lakes, swamps, and hills were so similar that the concept of continuity vanished: the locale held nothing that the gaze could recognize as new or different, and you could not tell if you were traveling or marching in place.
You could measure distance only by the remnants of camps. The barracks and watchtowers had rotted; the post with barbed wire had fallen. There were only the outlines, which were visible in the distance, but for those inside a former camp, the camp did not exist: just dirt and more dirt, hummocks and more hummocks, except for a porcelain isolator or a shard of brick on the ground. I picked up an isolator; just as a meteorite found in the tundra is recognized by its alienness— cosmic speed cast in metal—a piece of carved white porcelain, looking like a chess piece, was alien here, and the place did not want to hide it, it turned it in the way people turned in fugitives for a sack of flour.
The rails and sleepers had been removed from the embankment; only the bridges across rivers remained. The five-meter earth rampart had been built by the hands of prisoners; the earth lay so densely here that the rampart had taken on the flow and unobtrusiveness of ancient burial mounds in the steppe: they were simultaneously man-made and natural.
“Built by the hands of prisoners …” I said to myself; there was too much in those words of culture and not enough of real sensation; the embankment was no longer horrifying, did not make you grieve. Like any large-scale structure, it commanded astonishment for itself, to be seen as a single whole in which the efforts of individuals could not be found, representing a visible, embodied gesture of superhuman creative will.
I walked along the embankment; it was hard for me to realize that there was nothing in this embankment except the time spent by forced labor, except hundreds of thousands of wheelbarrows of dirt. And if the embankment had any scale, it was the scale of the meaninglessness of what was done.
The fact that the embankment has been abandoned, that there was no railroad, was not seen as a mistake but as the consequence of the original meaninglessness; the embankment was a false path, and all the human effort expended on this path was spent for real but for nothing—the path was made to take away these efforts, devour them, and no more.
I imagined the wheels of the winches turning, the smithies with water hammers, all those capstans, pulleys, cables, blocks, gears, rollers, axes combined into a mechanism wasting real human effort, dispersing it into the wind—the efforts of labor, thought, the intention to be. It could have been creative, could have moved something, aided something, become something in historical time—but it all had passed through the mill in the name of this goal that was detached from human life, and that’s what killed it.
I walked; the parts frequented by hunters and fishermen were behind me; I was in uninhabited places. The difference between a place that is visited a few times a month and a place where no one goes for years is marked: it’s not in the sense of primordial nature—that is naive and it merely substitutes for another, deeper feeling: the absolute absence of another human being. Where you by yourself are the human race, you feel a strange longing that is impossible in other places: a longing not for warmth or socializing, but for humans in the anthropological sense; a footprint in the sand by a brook can make you alert—you don’t know who the stranger is: a solitary prospector, a fugitive, a seeker of peace or revelation in the tundra—but you will follow his tracks because even the possible evil you might encounter will at least come from a creature of your own breed.
It must be this longing that brings people together in a place where meetings as a fact of life do not exist; where it is much more likely to miss each other and almost impossible to meet; where two people is already too many for the rarefied spaces.
One day I went up yet another hill; the cold wind scudded light clouds in fast waves, making the earth even more still. Suddenly I felt a quiver in one of the spider threads your gaze wraps around the visible; a few kilometers away I saw a man walking.
I knew it was a man, even though it was just a dark spot— you couldn’t see an animal at that distance; they blend in, live near the ground, feed on the ground, and their every step repeats their gait, which like rhythm in music, exists in the extension of the landscape; an animal lives in the horizontal, its body is extended in it, while a human is a vertical milestone; his movement makes everything around him change, creating a moving axis of coordinates.
A man; I was interested and turned so that I would intersect with him. A half hour later I could observe the stranger.
Attached to his backpack were a large watering can and a strange short-handled rake with very fine teeth. He would stop, move on a bit, then remove moss and lichen from sloping, rounded stones, and then sparingly pour water on them from the can.
He was not young, he moved without quite trusting his body but depending on it; thin, gray-haired, wearing worn oilcloth and swamp boots, weaponless but with rake and watering can; his eyes were focused on the ground.
I have encountered very different tramps in the tundra; some sought precious stones in the hillsides, others rooted around in abandoned settlements for hidden caches; still others collected mammoth tusks in riverbeds, or the remains of an AN-2 which crashed while bringing gold dust from a mine, or just wandering around in the hope of grabbing someone else’s find, whatever it was. There were seekers of ancient pagan temples; madmen who wanted to found a state; collectors of meteorites; and free interpreters of history, looking for traces of Hyperborea.
The man I met—his skills, his experience—suggested he was a prospector, seeking something real; the rake and watering can no longer surprised me, they were clearly tools in his search, but I didn’t know what he was looking for.
Catching up with him, in a long declivity covered by hills from the embankment, I stumbled across a skull. It is impossible to dig a grave in a swamp, but here, in a valley between cliffs, stony soil had accumulated; in a few places it had sunk in even rectangles, the tundra foxes had burrowed in them, and the entrances were revealed by the trampled earth and tufts of fur; the skull was by one of the dens—the foxes had scratched it out of the depth of their burrow.
The fox burrows went into the softened dirt of camp graves; now, when my eyes knew what to look for, I found a rib, a vertebra, a tibia in the moss and rocks; the foxes had extracted and scattered them; the small rodents that destroyed bones were the foxes’ prey, so the bones remained; dirt filled the pores of the bones, which made them dark, primordial, and the rain could not wash them clean. A large orange-cap mushroom grew near a broken collarbone; the cap was contorted by the sun, revealing a sticky and slimy sponge underneath, and this bloodless flesh, which did not know pain, belonging to the lowest kingdom of living organisms, was repulsive; I remembered the mushroom near Grandfather II’s grave; white, doughy, like an old man’s wrinkled ear; human flesh rotted away, but the flesh of mushrooms was renewed, growing from the tiniest spores, and humans were very fragile compared to mushrooms.
We met at the bottom of the hill; the stranger was smoking and boiling water on a smokeless fire; I was walking, the sun shone brilliantly, but inside me was the darkness of the foxhole; the foxes waited for me to leave and leaped up on the hillock behind me, as agile as ghosts; they froze amid the stones, low to the ground, pointy-eared—not animals but hatchlings of tundra gods that feed on the misery of others, the aborigines of pestilential places.