The orderlies cut him off; the fugitive grabbed a bottle, smashed it against a tree and stabbed himself, but the shards were too short, the pieces of glass merely pricked his tightened muscles.
I remembered that I had once seen a man running that way.
For several years I used to come out to work at a remote mountain mine; in those regions, roads exist only in the winter, when the swamps freeze and packed snow gives a better grip than asphalt; in summer you can get there only by helicopter. The remoteness turns these places into storehouses of time, cut off from the country’s overall life; the clubhouses still had red banners with white-lettered slogans hanging on the walls, ballot boxes were helicoptered in and police along with them, to deal with fights, thefts, and other minor crimes of the previous six months; essentially, there is no government except for the mine administration, there are no signs of the renewal of time, and people are drawn here from all over the country who could not fit in elsewhere, who are incapable of entering life, as if it were a revolving door that moved too quickly. There, in isolation, there is unity among people who have no one waiting for them, no one to write to.
These are strong men, but they are missing something; they are of necessity harsh but firmness and harshness do not let them feel or understand. These are strong men who secretly fear life; they gradually lose themselves, dissolving in particles; they could have mourned and suffered, but they didn’t have the ability to mourn or feel on a major scale, and so all they could do was drink and behave with reckless bravado.
In summer it is tolerable, there is the sense of space, changes in weather, and commensurate feelings. But in winter, when there is nothing but darkness, everything is snowed in and you are alone in the barracks, unspoken thoughts about the futility of life begin to eat at you. You don’t know what to do with these thoughts, you don’t have the habit of interacting with them, of safely releasing them into their orbits. You become superfluous; the protective carcass of strength and harshness comes off and you have no other defenses.
At the mine, the men lived in big railroad fuel cisterns which had been brought there suspended from helicopters; they cut out doors, laid a floor, insulated the metal walls, and added round windows; but still it was like living in a submarine in the middle of the mountains.
There were two inseparable friends there: Misha and Kolya, the local radio operator and one of the shaft diggers. People viewed them as one person; they jointly owned the only washing machine at the mine, which they used to brew their own beer, they hunted together—they joked that the double-barrel was invented for them. They were the only ones who never argued with each other, and in a fight they stood shoulder to shoulder; there was something strange and unnatural in their mutual sensitivity, as if there were no friction between them. I went there year after year, some things changed, people grew closer and drifted apart, but those two were always together, and at some point I started to think that it would not end well; that once—over some trifle—there would be an explosion, and the two would clash fiercely, making up for years of meekly putting up with each other’s weaknesses; I thought they already hated each other but did not know it yet, and every friendly gesture, every service, every word just added fuel to the future fire.
I don’t know why I thought that way; whether shadows of the future fell on their faces or if something in their lives gave off a hint; the radio operator had a doormat in front of his house that was actually a druse of centimeter-sized transparent crystals, for people to clean their shoes before entering; when it got dirty, he threw out the druse and put down a new one. The miner once saved and nurtured a dog that had its leg squashed by a truck. The lame dog repaid him once when the miner fell down drunk in the snow by running up to him and keeping him awake so he would not freeze to death; the next winter when the miner’s hat was worn out, he shot the dog for its fur. That crystal druse used for wiping feet, the lame dog shot for its fur—those were not random things, they revealed the inner bluster of decay; it passed for braggadocio, for tough manliness, and the poisonous rot infected them deeper and deeper.
It resolved itself one winter night; the radio operator and the miner were coming home drunk from the base; as the miner later told it, the radio man fell down and asked for matches to light a fire, it was very cold, but the miner refused, he had only one match left and he was planning to have a smoke halfway there; he was so looking forward to that cigarette that he wouldn’t give up the match, and he thought his friend was fooling and would get up; the radio operator cursed the miner—You won’t give up your match!—which made the miner angry. He burned the match and went on alone to the settlement, certain that the radio operator would follow. But the man was too drunk, he couldn’t get up, his cries were dispersed by the wind, and he froze, fell asleep turning stiff; they found the burned match in his fingers.
They called for a police helicopter; the miner locked himself in his metal cistern and shot at anyone who got close; they hauled the corpse with a tractor plow and placed it on the billiard table taken from the antechamber of the miners’ bathhouse. The diesel generator stopped at eight, and the men played billiards at night wearing miner’s caps; the nets in the pockets were torn, so the balls always rolled off into the gloom.
Now the table was outside the bathhouse, its legs deep in snow, and the corpse lay on it; the wind blew snow into his hair, and his head looked like a frozen cabbage—there is a variety of white crinkly cabbage, the leaves almost curly; the mouth and nostrils, everything, was filled with snow, and the head without orifices was sculptural, as if the artist had been called away and would be back any minute to make the eyes, mouth, and nostrils. The snow fell harder, there was a blizzard, and the police helicopter turned back, the mountains danced in waves, the metal cisterns rang when the wind hit them hard; for three days people stayed indoors, drinking to the dead man’s soul, and that’s when I remembered the radio operator’s story of his childhood.
He was born in the settlement where the police helicopter was kept, awaiting summer weather; his father was a radio operator in a polar station on one of the islands in the icy latitudes that were used to cartographically celebrate individuals; they were named in honor of princes and generals, forgotten politicians; captains of polar ships named them for their beloveds, scholars in honor of their teachers; the Soviet regime named them for newspapers, institutes, and anyone deemed worthy of award; the reality of the new era thus appeared on the map—there were islands called Bolshevik, Pioneer, Komsomol, and October Revolution.
One of these islands had a meteorological station; three men worked there—the station chief, the meteorologist, and the radio operator. Every six months, a plane flew in; a solid ice patch was the landing field, they flew in food, newspapers, smokes, and batteries for the radio transmitter. Twice a day the station broadcast the weather information; it was used with many others as a forecast for ships and airports. The radio operator and the station chief were Party members and held meetings, making the meteorologist wait outside; but one summer, when a plane could not land at the station since the ice was melting, the operator received a message: he, as a Party member, was told to arrest the station chief, now the former station chief, and an enemy of the people, and in the same message he was appointed acting chief; the man was to be arrested, isolated and sent to the mainland by plane, which would arrive two months hence.