They wanted to eat the apple, it was the first fruit the exiles had held in their hands in many years; they were not trusted to hang the fruits on the trees. The very shape of it—the rounded ripeness—sated their hungry palms that had forgotten everything but tools; the exiles passed around the apple, as if it had just been born in the straw, passed it around and consumed it with their eyes—a case when a metaphor becomes the literal description of what happens: the apple was spiritual nourishment, food for the eyes, and there was enough for all of them.
One of the peasants, who was considered a sage, though this word is imprecise, was a reader and interpreter of the Scriptures, the kind of man who becomes a leader of a small peasant sect of somewhat twisted fanatics. If any of the educated prisoners talked to him about paleontological finds, about animals from other eras whose remains allow us to re-create the history of the earth and disprove the Bible, he would reply: “The Lord thought about you learned men as well when He created the world, he threw in some toys to keep you busy.” Among his fellow villagers who were exiled with him, his intellect was revered, for he had a unique way of understanding appearances and reality. This reader, this sect member-to-be, understood what had occurred: just as Christ had fed thousands with five loaves, he said, so are we, many, eating from one fruit and it is not diminished. For it not to be diminished ever, let us save it and send it back to the village—they stubbornly called the settlement in the tundra the village—and let them plant it in the soil so the fruit shall beget more fruit.
I could understand the peasant, even though I did not know peasant labor; I grew up together with the dacha apple trees and lived half the year by the apple calendar; I remember my childhood when the spring frosts occurred, and bonfires were lit in all the orchards, the light frosty fog mixing with smoke hugging the windless ground, and the trembling, flowing, warmed air enveloped the trees, protecting the buds. On a cold night smells unleash their invisible fans, but on a night like that the apple blossoms smelled of the bonfires, and it seemed that it was the fragrance of the stars, the fragrance of promise.
In August came the unremitting thudding—straw was placed under the trees, but the apples were too heavy, too ripe, and the straw did not soften the blow completely; apples fell, during the day the sound was muffled, but at night it seemed that a chronometer was beating in the garden, that a different time was beginning, the time of ripeness. And when I later read about the Transfiguration of the Lord, this incident helped me to understand it as much as I could: that old image of the apple orchard in August on the threshold between summer and autumn; the Transfiguration occurred when His time had come.
The apple is the fruit of time; and even though it is not said that Adam and Eve had eaten of the apple, what other fruit could have embodied the unknown fruit of the tree of knowledge in a painting? Human time began with the apple— Seth begat Enos, Enos begat Cainan.
So the old peasant ordered them to send the apple to the exile village in order that apples would grow there, he was trying to spark the time of the new village, the way you start a motor, the village that arose on carted-in soil, to put down roots in the place where it appeared by accident, by the will of those who sent the exiles; some settlements, even though a hundred years old, stand on bare earth, as if the huts had just been knocked together, while others accumulate time, grow into it.
And now the three old men told me: we had a reason for sharpening the axe today. We’ve decided to chop down three old apple trees: they no longer give fruit, we have no firewood, and we don’t have the strength to take apart the houses. Chop down the trees for us—you are a stranger, they don’t mean anything to you; you will leave, and we will have fire and warmth.
The old man handed me the axe with its long handle; an old tub with iron hoops was placed under the roof gutter, and since I didn’t know what to do, I moved toward it and leaned on it.
I told the old men that I would not chop down the trees and promised to gather driftwood by the river; then they said, cut our hair, and the fisherman handed me scissors, just like the ones on the wall at the dacha when Grandfather II suggested cutting off all my hair; darkened, charcoal colored, and ancient—you could tell from the shape of the scissors, which made me think people in the past cut fabric differently, touched objects differently, saw differently.
I froze; I thought that cutting their hair would be preparing them for death; they also asked for soap, and imagining its fragrance of artificial freshness, chemical cleanliness—the last cleanliness for them—I felt fear; but then I washed each of them in the barrel with rainwater, cut off their long matted hair, and the old men, changed into white cotton underwear, started touching one another, using one another as mirrors.
I brought them driftwood, sawed and chopped it into logs; the old men sat, getting used to their new selves, and they couldn’t, the power of adjusting had waned in them, so they just listened to the whine of the saw, the ringing sound of the axe on the tarry wood, and those sounds—the sounds of beginnings, work, construction—seemed to reach them less and less.
I did not ask them about the island; the past seemed very fragile and unstable to me; touch something in the past and there would be a collapse of honed memory and the heart that had lived with pain would grieve again.
The old men were silent, and I left; words of farewell would not have reached them. The dinghy picked up the bank current and sailed past quickly, the houses on the shore vanished in the twilight, the big apple moon cast shimmering light on the water, and I pointed the dinghy’s nose along the moonlight path.
I sailed all night; the river carried the boat over shallows and whirlpools, over the backs of fish; in the morning when a cold fog rose from the river bays, I saw the island.
I recognized it—rounded, unsightly, dividing the river in two; surrounded by fog, it seemed to have been born in the thickening of river evaporation and would vanish when the sun rose; the green shaggy locks of bottom grasses, the streams of the current, all moved toward it, everything pointed at it; it rose from the waters like the back of a whale. The dinghy poked into sand and I stepped on shore; the footprint etched in the sand immediately filled with water.
The island was just a surface, an oval; it felt as if the land had been cut out of the middle of Asian steppes where nomads traveled, bringing along their history, which existed only in the memory of the storytellers, a history that could be rolled and unrolled like a yurt; the land there was virgin soil not only because it was never touched by a plow—only human settlement gives a place existence in time, and where people never stopped time never began, and those places, like the island on which I stood, were not part of shared human memory.
Grass and occasional shrubs of dwarf birch grew on the island; you could see it all, there were no hills, no valleys. If I had hoped to find something, now I saw it was pointless: what had first been a dot on the map now had its real scale but remained just as virtual.
I walked around the island; the fog had lifted and a black kite scavenger appeared in the sky; it circled the island, then came lower, and dove down.
There was a black hole ahead.
A hundred steps more and I could see that it was an actual hole: the water must have seeped in, washing away the soil, creating a funnel with uneven edges, and moss fell into it in raggedy drapes. This pit in the middle of the flatness of the island was the whole point of my trip; it was the only mark, the only opening in the floating ground that the ground could not smooth over, and it beckoned dangerously and terribly. Something had happened inside the island, the ground had opened, from the bottom up.