The tugs were to the side of the barges, six boats: “ … omsom … lets,” “Sha …. ter,” “Gornya … ” “Pogranichn … Zapol … ,” “Kap … tan P … asolov,” and “Boe … ” is what could be read on their sides, as if the names were being transmitted by Morse code with a bad connection.
I walked from one to another and found the only dinghy that looked seaworthy; on the second tug I found oars, on the third a half-barrel of pitch to caulk the sides. I also discovered a rock-hard bag of salt, and I took it—I was sorry to see salt wasted; salt was the missing ingredient in local fresh water and skies, and I tossed it into the box on the dinghy.
I set off, the dinghy was too big for one person to steer normally, so I paddled to the middle of the river and let myself go with the flow; the boat settled, sucked up water once again, and the river carried me away from the old tugs, the buoys on the shore, and opened up a view of the hills beyond the bend; the tilt of the land bore its waters to the Arctic Ocean, and I followed gravity; there was no wind, and there was no time, either—the river had become time, and time inexorably headed for the river’s mouth.
Days passed; bare hills, no people, quiet, the measured flow of water, lulling me, telling me that everything in the world was peaceful, calm, and smooth. I made notches in the oar to mark the days, but then I dropped it in the water and it floated away; I ate very little, I wasn’t moving, using energy, and I lost my appetite; sometimes it seemed that I would soon become ethereal, transparent, or turn into a young water spirit; fish looked at me from the water, settling into the wake, as if awaiting my transformation. A two-meter pike accompanied me for a while—pikes live for hundreds of years and this one probably remembered people, fishermen, sailors; then it swam off to the side, and once again I saw only water and hills.
That is why I noticed the remains of a bridge—the river had once been crossed by a second branch of the railroad meant to extend to a future settlement in the tundra which had never been built—I first did not recognize it, that is, my eye did not accept it. I saw something odd, unnecessary, out of harmony, a mistake; that must be how animals see what humans build.
In the shallows, where the current is not strong even at high water, stood crates filled with earth and stones, looking like crosssections of log cabins; on the left bank rose the cones of chums, or tepees, essentially the enlarged hats of nomads, negating the idea of a house; wherever you toss your hat, there is your hearth. The area was hilly and the chums followed the lines of the bare hills as a wave follows another.
I landed close to the settlement. Below the railroad embankment, steam engines and trains were parked. They must have been abandoned when the bridges were washed away on the line, and now they were rusting and sinking into the tundra; strange only at first glance, it was the trains and not the chums that seemed a chronological inaccuracy.
The steam engines stood there like broken time machines, which they were in other places, where the railroad truly did accelerate time, opening a way through it, where the steam engine truly was seen as a symbol of the future happening now, where tracks, semaphores, and stations connected the scattered times of a big country into a shared ensemble. But here, in the middle of the tundra, those mechanisms did not work; here it was still the time before steam engines, time before whatever would be; I remembered the steam engine from my dream—this was its dead end, the end of its trip, and the tundra, indifferent to the cumbersome machine, extended itself tranquilly and in its entirety, not knowing about divisions into different sides of the world.
Near the chums, hunks of meat hung from sanded poles; the smoke from the campfire fed on wet willow was everywhere, more than was needed to smoke the meat and chase away midges and flies; it seemed it was intended to permeate people, to teach them to stop the flow of tears by willpower or to lose the ability to cry completely; the wind blew in steady gusts, and in rhythm with the gusts the coals flared red under the damp branches dripping boiling juice.
Reindeer grazed nearby; they walked around the pole, two or three hundred head—they had to be counted by the head because below their bodies melded into a single multilegged body, and each back was a bulging muscle; their gait resembled water flowing in a whirlpool. The deer walked by the pole to be free of the midges; the shepherd set the leader in motion and the herd followed. I imaged how it must look from the air and realized that I was looking at a clock, a clock without divisions; the pole was the only vertical point for dozens of kilometers, casting no shadow on the cloudy day, and around it flowed the seasons, measured by the height of the deer antlers.
People appeared suddenly, stepping out from behind the chums; the nomads did not mix blood with outsiders, and they were very similar, a single person in different ages, a bisexual creature as infant, girl, man, old man, old woman; one person, or they were all as one; their faces the color of tea, dressed in clothing that combined fabric with deerskins, they seemed to be living in order to perform the ritual of becoming one with animals, and I probably looked defective to them, lacking an animal half.
Seeing that I was alone, they invited me to the fire and fed me boiled deer meat; there was no rejection and no interest. They asked if I had any salt; I brought the bag from my dinghy and they changed, surrounded me; in this world devoid of material objects I realized salt was the power of bones, the power of what is solid in man, and the nomads felt it, too; now I could ask questions—we had become close, united by the salt, and I asked if they remembered anything about when the barges and people first appeared on the river, many, many years ago.
I was told the story of the barge caravan, not as a myth, not as a legend about floating river houses, yet still I felt that the man was talking from a distant shore, not because he was essentially indifferent but because the subject of the story was like a natural phenomenon or as a phenomenon of a world so alien that the world of nature was much closer to him.
The voice of the grandfather, who saw the barges full of people on the April river after the ice broke but did not understand what was happening, directed the grandson’s vocal cords; the nomad standing on the shore must have thought these were arks, entire worlds containing the absolute in life’s laws, and if some people threw other, weaker ones into the water, then these were the real laws of those worlds, this was their truth; thus, if all of Christopher Columbus’s men had limped, the natives would have probably imagined a land beyond the sea of limping men. And how could a man born where old people were sometimes left to die if the family was moving to new site, how could he disagree with throwing the weak overboard? I entered inside the viewpoint of the storyteller, like entering a room with a wide window, and looked out from there—but with my own vision, recognizing what my unwitting guide could not.
The barges docked at a big island in the middle of the river—that was more convenient for the tugboat captains; the people were left on the island, on the long beach where there was nothing but driftwood; it was a warm sunny day and the prisoners, even though the guards fired on them, jumped into the river to bathe. The water darkened from the filth of several thousand men, remnants of clothing that had been worn in the cramped holds where men stood shoulder to shoulder floated in the water; the icy water chilled them, and the men quickly ran back on shore, running along the sand, embracing, huddling for warmth.