Quite so. Everything we see in the Zone is conceivably just a part of nature. What seems a miracle is the ground rippling due to some geomorphologic activity that one cannot understand. The disappearing bird is a fluke of the light. The sudden gust of wind, blowing in from nowhere in the midst of a calm day, is a freak gust of wind. Anyway, some of Professor’s friends decided against blowing up the Zone, but that’s exactly what he’s here to do. Exactly in the sense of probably. He came here with the idea that his innermost wish was to blow up the Zone, to get in and slam the door behind him; to make sure that he was the last to avail himself of its promised magic. But even at this late stage there’s scope for doubt, even now that he’s made up his mind it’s possible his innermost wish won’t let him do what he’s determined he must do. This is one of the lessons of the Zone: sometimes a man doesn’t want to do what a man thinks he wants to do. Besides, there’s no guarantee that the physical destruction of the Room will diminish belief in its power. On the contrary, obliteration might generate more stories about it and heighten the mythical status of the place where it used to be until it is brought into re-existence on the site— and by virtue — of its own absence.
Stalker wanders off to consider what, from his point of view, both as a devotee of the Zone and as someone who earns his living from it, can only be very bad news. Then he spins round and tries to snatch the bomb from the Professor. They have an old-bloke scuffle, like an outtake from Bumfights, but then Writer wades in and — three times — chucks Stalker back into the murky water with all the lightbulbs and stuff from the chemistry set floating in it. Strangely, Professor objects to this intervention, even as Stalker comes back yet again, only to be flung into the foreground. Impossible, at this point, not to think of the bit near the end of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, when Willie Mink gives a deranged lecture on room behaviour: ‘The point of rooms is that they’re inside. No one should go into a room unless he understands this. People behave one way in rooms, another way in streets, parks and airports. To enter a room is to agree to a certain kind of behaviour. It follows that this would be the kind of behaviour that takes place in rooms.’
Which raises the question of whether, on the threshold of a room that is not just any room but the Room, all this talk of blowing the place to kingdom come, all this brawling and scuffling and throwing each other into puddles, is entirely appropriate.
Stalker would be the one to know but he’s had all the fight knocked out of him. He picks himself up again, wants to know why Professor wants to destroy people’s hope. This place that is all that’s left to them on earth, the only place they can come to. Why destroy their hope? The awfulness of what is about to be done revives Stalker sufficiently to make him rush Professor again — only to get thrown to the ground by Writer, who has grown increasingly angry. (Professor looks like he’s about to have a heart attack — the scuffling has knocked the puff out of him too.) Writer launches into a diatribe against Stalker. He’s a louse, enjoying the power of God almighty. No wonder he never enters the Room — he’s got everything he wants, all the power and mystery. Stalker has rarely looked happy; he has always appeared burdened by the job of being a Stalker, now — with his face bloodied and bruised, his eyes red with tears — he looks utterly dejected. And he’s literally snivelling whereas before he was just acting in a snivelling sort of way. Stalkers are not allowed to enter the Room, he snivels. They can’t even enter the Zone with any ulterior motive. But yes, you’re right, he tells Writer. I’m a louse, I’ve never done any good in this life, I’ve never even given anything to my wife. I don’t have any friends. But don’t take everything from me. Everything has been taken from me, on the other side of the barbed wire, he says. All that’s mine is here, in the Zone. My happiness, my freedom, my selfrespect. I bring people here, people like me — the desperate, the tormented. They have nothing else to hope for. And I bring them here. Only I, the louse, can help them.
Having got so much off their chests everyone simmers down. Writer is having doubts himself. Why did Porcupine hang himself? Because he came here with mercenary motives. So why didn’t he come back to repent? Because, he understands now, not all wishes will be granted here, only your innermost wish, which, in Porcupine’s case, was for money. Confronted by his true nature, he hanged himself. The truth revealed by the Room is ontological. ‘Each one of us comes into the world with her or his unique possibility — which is like an aim, or, if you wish, almost like a law,’ says a character in John Berger and Nella Bielski’s play A Question of Geography. ‘The job of our lives is to become — day by day, year by year, more conscious of this aim so that it can at last be realized.’ Unless you’re a paedophile, say, or any one of a dozen other types of sicko. Then the job of your life is to bury that urge, to make sure you never get near the gates of a primary school or anything that might turn out to be the Room.
Another, less dramatic, scenario: what if you got here and went into the Room, believing in it absolutely, and it turned out that you didn’t have an innermost wish, that all the things you thought you wished for you didn’t actually want? You leave the Room, leave the Zone and, unlike Porcupine, nothing happens. Jack shit. Would you con-clude from this that you were absolutely content, purring on a daily basis like a cat or a dog whose bowl of milk was constantly replenished? Unlikely. Or at least if you had been content — without realizing it — now you would most certainly be filled with discontent. You would conclude that the Room did not work. That you’d been sold a pup. That Stalker had not undergone the changes that he went through as Tarkovsky and the much-put-upon Strugatskys reworked, rewrote and reshot the film. You would phone him, demand a refund, threaten to blacken his name, turn him in to the authorities or, at the very least, refuse to recommend him to friends considering a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the much-vaunted Zone. Of course Stalker would have none of it. In the extremely unlikely event that he returned or even answered your calls he would insist that it had worked, that it was working perfectly. And so you would be left seething, dissatisfied, cheated, unable to accept that this was your innermost wish, your innermost nature.
They are all back where they were before Professor unveiled his bomb, his stainless steel IED, before the scuffle in this waterlogged place, on the threshold of the Room, whose light can be seen, off to the right. Stalker is on his knees, collapsed on the floor. Writer is holding forth like a detective who has just solved a difficult case, who has spotted the clues and unravelled the contradictions that escaped the attention of other, less subtle, minds. And he’s not finished. How do we know it’s true, that the Zone grants all your wishes? Who actually said that the Room granted these wishes? One assumes Writer is speaking to Stalker but Professor replies, He did, meaning Stalker, as if the whole idea of the Zone and the Room were entirely his invention.43