Stalker utters this cosy sentiment after stretching his arms, as though he has been sleeping, like one awakened from the dream of life. But it’s not only him: the whole landscape seems to be emerging from sleep, rubbing the mist from its eyes, as if it has been stirred into consciousness by the fact of being seen, appreciated, visited, needed. We have only just arrived and already there is a sense, dormant and untapped, of slumbering sentience about the place. How quiet it is, says Stalker. The quietest place on earth. One sees what he means even though, strictly speaking, it’s not quiet at all. There are the sounds of birds, wind, flowing water, sounds that emphasize the lack of other sounds, the sounds that constitute noise, industrialization, cities, traffic, stress. As with the unquiet quiet, so with the solitude: Not a single soul here, says Stalker. What about us? asks Writer, logically enough.17
Stalker is overwhelmed by his return to the Zone, struggling to compute and explain the way that it compares with his memories of earlier visits. The flowers don’t seem to smell. Partly because — this is Writer again — there’s a pervasive smell of damp bog. No, that’s the river, says Stalker quickly, like an estate agent assuaging the doubts of a potential buyer. But Writer has made his point: to him, the Zone looks like a bit of a dump. He doesn’t feel at all like he’s home. On the contrary: at this point, he understands exactly what Heidegger meant when he said that ‘the unhomely does not allow us to be at home.’ Writer, evidently, is in a bad way. He’s one of those people who could wake up in paradise but wouldn’t know he was there unless he found something to grumble about. There were flower beds here, Stalker says, but Porcupine trampled them down. (This is the first we’ve heard of Porcupine, a name which has vague asso-ciations with The Last of the Mohicans or something like that.) The smell lingered for years after the flowers were gone.18
Why did Porcupine do that? Stalker says he doesn’t know but thinks that perhaps Porcupine came to hate the Zone. He’s sitting down, doing something while the other two are shuffling about, having a look around, not knowing what to do. Writer wants to know about Porcupine. He was the one who taught Stalker things, opened his eyes — opened his eyes the way Tarkovsky has opened our eyes. He wasn’t called Porcupine back then, he was called Teacher and he kept coming back to the Zone, bringing people here. Then something broke in him. Possibly it was a punishment of some kind.
Stalker asks Professor to help tie metal nuts (as in bolt) to some grubby white bandages while he goes for a walk. The wind moves through weeds and plants. The camera lingers on the wind moving through the weeds and plants, on the weeds and plants as the wind moves through them. Professor and Writer are a little uneasy now that they’re alone, but they take advantage of Stalker’s absence to indulge in that most unZonely of pleasures: talking about him behind his back. He’s different from what Writer thought he’d be. He was expecting something more like Chingachgook or Leatherstocking— from The Last of the Mohicans! Classic Zone, that, the way that it either reflects what you have been thinking or somehow prompts you to think what it will soon reveal. I mean, where did I get the idea that Porcupine had some-thing to do with James Fenimore Cooper? From seeing the film many times before, presumably, but this muddling of cause and effect will recur again and again. So Writer was hoping for more of a pathfinder, more of a Daniel Day-Lewis bounding through the Mannly wilderness than this anxious, furrow-browed zek who, in fairness, has cheered up considerably since getting into the Zone. We’re learning a lot in quite a short space of time. Stalker was in prison. To be a Stalker is a calling but he has paid a heavy price for his calling. He has a daughter, a Zone victim. And what about Porcupine? Professor has done his homework: one time Porcupine returned from the Zone and got fabulously rich overnight. What’s wrong with that? Writer wants to know. (I sometimes think writers’ love of money is purer than that of hedgefund managers or bankers; only serious writers really appreciate the delicious, improbable perfection of getting paid.) A week later Porcupine hanged himself, Professor explains. Ah. The camera is sort of drifting back and forth, not going anywhere or doing anything much and nothing much is happening. The air is filled with a howl, the kind of howl the wind would make if a terrible gale were blowing (there isn’t a gale) and it (the wind) was the breath of an animal wounded by what it was hearing, by what was being said.19
The howl dies down and segues into Artemiev’s drifty, enchanted electronica. ‘This isle is full of noises,’ says Caliban in The Tempest. ‘Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.’ The sounds in this quietest of places are not simply sweet and, at this point, no one is sure whether they will hurt. They have entered—we have entered — some subtly altered realm of consciousness in which the powers of the Zone can no longer be denied, but neither can they be proved. An amazing place where amazement is vain because everything is normal here.
The camera glides over the grass, the tangled wreckage of metal and, as it tilts upwards we see, some way off — a hundred yards perhaps? — a ruined house, an unusual property which, while difficult of access (as we have seen) and in need of extensive renovation nevertheless has considerable potential for buyers who regard the rest of the world as a prison.
Not that Stalker has any intention of buying, even though it is, in real estate terms, the house of his dreams. He sees it from amid a patch of dense weeds and collapses, first in an attitude of prayer and then on his stomach, into sleep. An ant crawls over his finger. There is no difference between the external world and the world in his head. Everything is reciprocated. He rolls over and, for the first time, the look of anxiety on his face is replaced by the flicker of contentment, even, possibly, of bliss. He has returned to the phenomenal Zone and, in spite of the massive weight of his expectations, it has not disappointed. It is still beautiful. The smell of the flowers may have gone but, unlike Gatsby, who is forced to accept the colossal vitality of his illusion, Stalker is still able to believe, to give himself totally to his idea of perfection. He may not be holding his hands together and muttering verses from some sacred text but for Stalker the rapture he feels at this moment is a form of prayer as defined by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience: the soul ‘putting itself in a personal relation with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence.’
It will do no good if I keep saying that this sequence is among the greatest in cinema history, that this bit is profoundly moving. Those words serve as running heads for almost every page of this book and they apply to so many parts of the film that, from now on, I will try to refrain from using them. But there is no getting away from it: I find this scene, where we witness Stalker’s relief and share his bliss (I have been back to this cinematic Zone many times and have never been disappointed) so intensely moving that I cannot watch it without tears coming to my eyes. I’m worried that I’m overusing this tears-coming-to-the-eyes stuff but these are the facts and the fact of my tears — here and at Burning Man — is proof of the profundity of the experience that provokes them. In Diary of a Bad Year, J. M. Coetzee finds himself ‘sobbing uncontrollably’ when he rereads a passage from The Brothers Karamazov. ‘These are pages I have read innumerable times before, yet instead of becoming inured to their force I find myself more and more vulnerable before them. Why?’ That’s how I feel about Stalker, so I thought I’d ask that same question, to try to articulate both the film’s persistent mystery and my abiding gratitude to it.