The stranger was armed, after all; he was clever, people would think he was unarmed if they didn’t see a rifle, but he had a handgun, which he aimed at me while shading his eyes from the sun. The gun was no threat; I was in that state I had felt when the black dog attacked me—the man, sensing my weakness, put away the gun, gesturing at the stone slabs. He’d raked the turf and washed off what remained with water; now the water was evaporating on the slabs.
The light stone revealed chiseled drawings; some the size of my hand, others bigger than a man’s height. There were rolling wheels—suns with spokes; flowers with four petals, like a cross; large and small fish, swimming in various directions; crooked and straight lines, furrows in the stone; flattened beavers, the way skins are spread out; dozens of deer wandering in a long herd; hunters following the deer and catching them with unnaturally long spears; chains of bear tracks, birds with bony wings and harpy beaks; animals that look like an animated saw with a snail’s head; boats and snowshoes; dogs turned upside down as if in space orbit; triangular eyes with oval pupils; a gaping circle—the way the vagina is depicted in anatomical atlases; a round woman with short legs and arms, and inside her, head down, a child floats weightlessly; a man with an incredibly long, snake-like penis that makes him resemble a spermatozoon; axes and oars; animals, people, whales, pulled together by threads like umbilical cords growing out of one another, a mixture of differences, miscegenation of everything living.
The drawings were alive, breathing like fish roe in the warm water of shallows; it seemed they even had a fragrance, spicy, voluptuous; the figures and ornaments met, combined, flew apart, and it was a single act of creating life; the power of the drawings made the earthy black of the fox den vanish from within me; the drawings were not art, not depictions—they were elemental, as if the existence of the people who had made them was transferred completely, without remnant, into them.
They were petroglyphs; I knew they were occasionally found in the tundra here; they were left by tribes that had lived seven or eight thousand years before our era. But at the moment I wasn’t thinking about that.
There is a special sense of day in the tundra; a day is an enclosed space, something three-dimensional; in the tundra, where you need not glasses but binoculars, where the summer sun almost never sets, this room of the day is particularly spacious; here in the high latitudes where the meridians almost meet and the parallels are small circles, day reigns, an enormous vault, a single day for the entire world; astronomically that is not correct but that is the true impression.
The stranger gave me a mug; the overbrewed tea was bitter, but the bitterness gently and willfully prompted my heart, making it beat harder and faster, invigorating me and giving me strength.
“You’re not following me?” the man asked.
Despite his gun, he was afraid; he would not have hurt me and he knew it.
“People follow me,” the man said. “Think I’ll lead them to the petroglyphs.” He pointed to the drawings. “You can get money for them, if you can break them from the stone and get them out.”
The light and the shadows lessened at last; the stone suns dimmed and the earth’s darkness melted away. The tension of feeling eased and I saw the man clearly, in full detail.
He had cancer: his face seemed to be inflated from inside, like the caricatures made by street artists, exaggerating lips, cheeks, all the flesh of the face; the overgrown flesh of his lips sagged, the cheeks covered his eyes, the mouth was double in length, and not a single hair grew on his smooth sausage skin.
“This is from radiation,” he said. “What’s inside my body is worse. The gun—it was given to me as an award—is for shooting myself when I can’t stand it anymore.”
My unexpected comrade was a military man; long ago he had looked for places in this tundra for underground nuclear tests; he had come from a region with forests and did not know that the tundra could make you lost as well, like a forest, but in a different way: the forest changes where the light is coming from, confuses tracks, while the tundra is open, you can see everything, but suddenly you look around, nothing but hillocks, and your mind, busy with thoughts, has not retained any orientation markers.
And so, lost in the tundra, he found his first petroglyphs, signs of the sun, rolling sun wheels; later, when he was sick, after the surgery, after the chemotherapy, the former soldier returned to these parts, because the drawings chiseled in stone seemed to be the most essential things he had ever encountered; he did not collect petroglyphs, he did not make copies, he simply looked for them, following the path of the ancient artists, and gave the drawings a reason for existing— he looked at them.
We drank chifir, the extra-strong tea brew; I asked if it was possible to find someone who remembered this area from decades ago. He said that there were a few nomadic families left in the tundra, who had escaped being forced into a reindeer-breeding kolkhoz; now others tried to show the reindeer to tourists for money, so they moved deeper into the tundra and shot at helicopters that tried to land by their tents. They had no radios, nothing connected them to other people; they accepted only him—sick and looking for ancient drawings for their own sake; at this time of year I could probably run into them in the middle reaches of the river. There was also a village with descendants of the exiled prisoners, it was even farther; he had not been there in close to ten years, and when he was there, people were leaving, abandoning their houses.
The chifir was gone, the fire went out; we embraced, he did not ask me about anything and moved on along the slope, and I went back to the embankment and for a long time as I walked I could see his figure moving along the hills.
Three days later I came out at the former port, where the ruined railroad led; I came out by the river. The water flowed amid low banks in shallows, unattractive, reflecting the gray sky, with a paucity of reflections, sparkle, or light, and the river’s width was somehow lost in the rounded banks and unhurried current.
Hundreds of buoys lay in the shallows; they were made of plastic, like fishing floats, metal, and wood, like the top of a lighthouse—the entire history of river boating in one place. The river changed its course, washed up new shallows where never-flowering water lilies, trembling like a bird’s webbed foot, started to grow, banks collapsed, revealing the corpses of prehistoric animals, ancient deer, and time was broken open like a hunk of bread in those cliffs—pick it up, run your fingers through the stone age; the river changed its course, but the buoys no longer followed the changes, did not mark its depth, did not stretch out its thread, did not huddle in the dark; when navigation ceased here, the river returned to the complete control of the fish, the fin—forerunner of the oar— replaced the propeller, and the river waters were no longer troubled by the rotation of twisted blades.
Near the shore, only pilings were left of docks; they held trees brought by the river, the rubbish of high waters, and water was sucked beneath them with a slurp and whistle; farther along, in a broad cove formed in an old river bed, barges and tugs sat on the bottom.
Usually an abandoned ship is like an abandoned house; but the barges did not elicit that feeling; they were enormous rusty hulks, grim and clumsy arks; they sank slowly, pushing up a boggy ooze with their weight; the paint came off them unevenly, in layers—you could see that some painters did their work honestly, undercoating first, and others did not— and below the crumbling paint you could see a second layer, a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh; the aging metal was crumbling, rusted chunks of the sides fell into the boat, but the paint layers held on to one another; the barges were half-drawn, they had been used along the river three or four times beyond the limit of the metal’s exhaustion, repainting but not repairing, and the metal gave up first, while the baked paint survived.