The closer I came the stronger was the cold that blew from the hole—not imaginary cold arising from anxiety or fear, but real cold. It chased away the weak warmth of the northern summer, it chilled the blood, but also weakened, so that in it ghost smells, corpse smells slowly thawed; they floated, moved by waves of cold, and it seemed that I was approaching ancient, snow-covered ashes.
Hearing me, the kite flew out of the funnel; it had something in its beak, I couldn’t tell what; it rose higher, heavily gaining height, and flew in wide circles, seeing from above what I could not see: the bottom of the hole. The black bird drew the same funnel in the air, as if putting a spell on the wind spout or, on the contrary, as if it could not overcome the hole’s pull; the black bird, the diving scavenger, a creature that rots from inside and for which therefore corpses present no danger—I was afraid to think what it had it its beak, what it had found in the hole, but I continued.
I stopped a few steps away from the edge; I could see the walls of the hole, layers of ice mixed with soil, the walls were carved by water, but the permafrost did not melt, it simply floated, icing over, smooth and slippery; going to the edge was a mistake—the soil spread, revealing ice, the slope was steep, but it was impossible to remain within three steps and not look at the bottom: I had the feeling that if I went back for poles and ropes the hole would close and vanish, that you could look into it only the way you came, without any hope of survival.
Carefully, millimeters at a time, I moved closer to the lip of the hole; the funnel, like extended throat spasms, drew me in; the world was large, the pit was small, but close up it did not seem that way: its smallness was the dangerous smallness of jaws that would increase with every swallowed piece until it was the size of half the world and devoured the other half. For now, it waited, hiding on a remote deserted island, gathering strength, but the carrion-eating kite already knew where to go.
I do not remember looking over the edge; I was falling into the hole and falling into the dark hole inside me; the very ground of consciousness, so familiar, so reliable that you don’t feel it, suddenly faded, and darkness breathed beneath it; when you close your eyes, your inner gaze always finds some light, perhaps weak and distant, but there was no light here at alclass="underline" it was as if my inner vision had been taken, my consciousness blinded, and I did not feel my fall to the bottom.
What happened next did not take place on the border between reality and delirium, nor alternating between reality and delirium; I was in both states simultaneously; blood from the gash in my hand made by an ice shard flowed onto the ice. The blood was warm but the ice did not melt; the funnel deepened, resembling a well, the circle of bright sky moved off, narrowed, and a black spot circled inside it—the kite. Around me were the pecked-over bodies of animals—foxes, wolves—all those that had crossed the frozen river to find fortune in this gully and then fell inside; the birds fed on the bodies, they were the only ones who could go down into the hole and come out again; the permafrost kept the bodies from rotting, the animals were curled up, their bodies diminishing in size, and it seemed that these children, kits and cubs, had been killed here in the hole-trap.
The dead animals—bird claws had ripped open the belly of one fox and undigested tundra mice fell out of the intestines, as if the fox had not eaten them but was pregnant with them— distracted me, did not let me see the funnel in its entirety, to see what had attracted the animals. The walls were uneven, there were charred logs poking out, and there were logs on the bottom, old logs brought by the water; there was order in how they lay, and I realized that someone had tried to create a dugout here, build a cover, and then light a fire; probably the heat of the flames melted the wall and the logs fell down, onto the people.
With that thought, my vision changed and in the black peaty protuberances, in the icy smears I saw the outlines of human bodies.
The funnel was filled with corpses; the permafrost had preserved them. The opening in the wall filled with grass turned out to be a mouth; a rounded bump was a head; mixed with dirt, dissolved in it, the dead seemed to be trying to step out, to break the ice crust; what I had taken for tree roots were arms; the dead flesh had taken on the color of the earth and you could recognize it only by its shape.
Black, gray, shades of brown—the spot of my blood was the only bright color in here; when I looked at the blood, I stopped seeing the corpses—the color blocked my vision, blinded me with its brightness; the dead had no color, and a long road of my gaze led to each one, gathering particle by particle the features of the body that separated the corpse from the twisted peat snags, boulders, and lumps of peat.
I was in the belly of the earth; my brothers lay here, and their imperishability was not the incorruptibility of sainthood, but the absence of death. They did not follow the path of corruption, they merged with the earth without becoming it; for all the world they had vanished without a trace, and even death was not the last message they could send; and that meant that death had not reached its conclusion; the dead remained only with the dead and the living only with the living. Death is not disappearance, it is not an instantaneous transition from presence to absence; a man dies but not the ones around him, they must complete the deceased’s terminal work with grief and bereavement: the services held on the ninth day, the fortieth day are part of the event of death performed by the living. If the living and the dead are separated, this incompletion, this endlessly lasting moment turned to ice stops the flow of time.
I could not climb out of the funnel; the smooth icy walls, licked flat by water, gave me no purchase; I had nothing with which to chop out steps. In my delirium I thought I could make a staircase out of corpses if I could get them out of the embrace of the ice; but then calmness descended—the way out was to dig deeper, not seeking salvation but deepening the hole. I found a broken branch and starting digging in the frozen peat; digging a grave in a grave.
I don’t remember how long this went on; I dug an opening, a well, I dug through coal, wood, rubble, I dug between frozen bodies, going around arms, shoulders, feet; and when my strength was gone, I fell into my well, fell on top of a corpse, and in the cold mist I saw my very distant childhood.
It was night, the middle of the night in autumn. I was on the prow of a boat, all its light was behind me, the passenger cabins and the deckhouse, but here where the boat was just beginning, where the oncoming wind blocked the sound of its machinery, where the only smell was that of the ship’s metal— here was the place that barely belonged to the ship; I moved together with the boat, but just a second ahead of it.
The river air and the darkness I sensed on that spot were different than what you saw from the cabin or the middle of the deck. Back there the light made out of the darkness a mere indicator of time; voices and music gave to the air the role of a waiter who serves up desired sounds; here, where the ship’s prow dug into the night’s flesh, and the night did not reel away but left open shell-like shutters revealing its moist, chilly interior, I looked at the night as if from inside it, while the other people on the boat looked at night from without.
Turning around, I perceived the boat the way the darkness ahead of us perceived it; it was gaining ground, I was retreating; I stood on the deck but all the passengers, all the tables in the restaurant, all the potted palm trees, all the beds in the cabins, all the pieces of hotel soap in the showers were attributes of a world to which I did not belong; imitating one another, losing distinguishing features, people seemed like insects crawling and flying toward the light, but there was no humiliation in that comparison: I also was not human, and blackness streamed between my ribs as if I had drowned in it, and my lungs were filled by the wild, wind-tossed air of the river channel.