The water, melt water of yesterday’s snows, water of new life, washed away the long journey, the rust and filth, and the sun played on the waves so that it seemed fish would appear to lay eggs at any moment; but the sunlight was brief, the nascent day was short, and the few who still had the strength to risk their lives jumped into the water, clutching trees floating by or floes of bottom ice, covered in silt and water grasses, that had bobbed to the surface and were carried by the current; the guards fired, the tight chilling air whipped eardrums, nostrils flared at the gun smoke, acrid and sharp.
Then the tugboats and barges left, and the men remained on the island. Night came, and in the morning it started to snow—storm clouds rolled in from the north; the snow was thick, it put out the feeble fires of wet logs; the exiles sought shelter in gullies, tried to dig burrows in the sand and add some protection from the snow, but the snow penetrated everywhere, even inside the hollow tree trunks where people squeezed in; the nomads could not cross the river in their light, flat-bottomed boats wrapped in skins, and so they could only watch the smoke and ashes thicken over the island, how flames flared and died out; for a few days while it snowed they heard screams, and then, on the coldest night, they could hear only moans; the snow stopped, the fog dispersed, but there was no one left alive on the island; you couldn’t see the bodies, people had hidden as best they could and died in earthen dugouts, digging with their hands, with branches, the few tools they had been given.
When the river calmed down, someone went over to the island; there was a stench, birds had gathered; they brought back sacks of flour (the exiles were given food, but no dishes), but they did not eat it; in subsequent years the island was flooded several times, the bones were washed away; only rarely did holes open up, with dead men lying deep in the permafrost.
The next settlers—and many traveled along the river—did not ask about their predecessors; they traveled past the island without noticing it; the island remained as it had been—a flat earthen pancake in the channel, and only the nomad family I met passed on the memory of what had happened there.
The ones I talked to could not say where the island was; I had passed sand spits, shallows, other islands—and they were all the same, all inconstant, all vanished and then were reborn with high waters; islands without features, islands of empty expanses; just islands.
I pushed off from the rocks in my dinghy; the current picked me up, and the people by the chums watched me go the way they had once watched those who were deposited on the island; the river, perturbed by the piers of the former bridge, calmed down, the rapids sank to the bottom, and the dinghy sailed steadily, as if propelled by flying clouds, the movements of the stars, the air currents high in the sky, reflected in the water.
A few days later I saw houses on a knoll; that was the village of exiles. The houses seemed transported by a mirage, an optical illusion; as if actually they were somewhere thousands of kilometers from here, near a small river and woods, and it was the play of light in the atmosphere this far north that placed them on a knoll where they could not be.
I left the dinghy and took a path that zigzagged up the hill. The village, a dozen houses, did not seem completely abandoned: clearly someone had walked down the road, splotches of spilled water dried in the sand. But the weeds were too thick in the gardens, the windows had been shut up too long ago, the nails were falling out of the wood; and most important, there was every indication that people had stopped caring about the place where they lived. Besides which, I couldn’t understand how there was dirt, how there were weeds here in the tundra; where did the soil come from?
At the well, which is always kept clean in villages, dogs had dug themselves a hollow, a dusty hole full of fur and scraps of bone; a torn wire hung down, easy to brush against, the pole was so crooked I longed to straighten it; every object in the village asked for human help: supporting, straightening, sawing, lifting. People here seemed to have forgotten all the verbs for creative activity, the sound of a hammer or the song of a saw, and had forgotten about themselves, too: being there was intolerable. There is a special color, the color of old fence boards that have been splashed all winter with the snowy mush underfoot, and in the spring the mud dries, turning earthy gray; the color of carelessness and indifference. The whole village was speckled with it, as if it had been sown over many years of drizzle; someone had hung a lantern by the gate and now its glass cover was filled with rainwater and the canvas wick bore filigree rust crystals. What was intolerable was not the neglect itself but that life could accommodate itself to neglect, take on its image, become identical to it.
One garden was tended: strangely, it was entirely planted with potatoes, leaving only a narrow walk to the house, every bed filled with potatoes, as if nothing else grew anywhere in the village. Someone was inside the house, smoke came out of the crumbling chimney that dropped pieces of brick onto the mossy roof, but the windows were shuttered tight.
Behind the house there was a creaking, grinding noise, metal on stone, ringing and then grinding again; the blue twilight that made the air thicken as it grew colder without losing its transparency settled on the village, and each screech caused goose bumps, warning me not to come closer—only forged steel could sound like that. Three apple trees by the house—how much effort had it taken to grow them here!— had gone wild, all their force going into offshoots and foliage, and the branches untouched by buds dropped brown leaves onto the ground; the color of dead leaves, the color of rotting apples was everywhere, giving the house and ground an aging, debilitated air. Old pruning cuts painted with pitch remained on the trees, but the pitch had cracked and fallen off, and even though the tree had grown a tight leathery circle around the cuts, the trunks were already crumbling and the roots were probably dying off. The wires holding branches that threatened to fall off dug too hard into the wood, cutting the bark.
I went into that small fallow garden, engulfed in the bitter-ash smoke that comes from a badly built or deteriorating stove; it was getting colder and the leaves fell less frequently, as if their twigs were growing torpid.
Behind the house, at a grinding machine made from a converted foot-operated sewing machine, sat a shaggy old man; I saw him from the back, broad and hunched, half covered by long, tangled, gray hair, with apple leaves nestled in them; I thought at first that he was a werewolf with claws, but then I realized they were fingernails, yellow, curved, broken or crookedly cut. The old man was sharpening an axe on a long handle, a lumberjack’s axe; it was badly chipped, someone had used it to chop up boards of an old structure and kept hitting nails; long streams of reddish sparks caused by the uneven blade edge on the whetstone flew in the air, illuminating nothing but merely sewing through the dark; the wheels turned and the dry belts creaked.
The old man, the sharpening wheel—rougher than needed for fine sharpening—and the axe; I went farther along, not ready to call out to the man, when I saw a second one. He was on the porch steps, bent over a fishing net on his knees, and the same kind of thick, unkempt hair covered his face. The old man was mending the net, unwinding rough thread from a spool the size of his hand, making loops with a curved faceted needle and muttering to himself—his beard stirred as if a mouse had moved into it. A third old man, also on the porch, just as gray and shaggy, was carving a boat frame; the wooden piece had a bend with an inconvenient elbow, and the old man clumsily moved his long knife along it.