Tanya analyzes and judges all this in a very adult fashion.
She applies the same reasoning to jumping over puddles. One must jump so precisely and accurately as not to get one’s shoes wet, because where would one get another pair to change into?
“Of course,” I agree, “and furthermore you could catch cold and get the flu.”
“Catch cold?” The girl is amazed. “Now, when the ice is already melting and it’s getting warm? You probably don’t know what real cold is.”
And the little Siberian looks with unmistakable although discreet superiority at the man who is plainly older yet seems to have no idea what great cold is.
ONE CAN RECOGNIZE a great cold, she explains to me, by the bright, shining mist that hangs in the air. When a person walks, a corridor forms in this mist. The corridor has the shape of that person’s silhouette. The person passes, but the corridor remains, immobile in the mist. A large man makes a huge corridor, and a small child — a small corridor. Tanya makes a narrow corridor, because she is slender, but, for her age, it is a high one — which is understandable; she is after all the tallest in her class. Walking out in the morning, Tanya can tell from these corridors whether her girlfriends have already gone to school — they all know what the corridors of their closest neighbors and friends look like.
Here is a wide, low corridor with a distinct, resolute line — the sign that Claudia Matveyevna, the school principal, has already gone.
If in the morning there are no corridors that correspond to the stature of students from the elementary school, it means that the cold is so great that classes have been canceled and the children are staying home.
Sometimes one sees a corridor that is very crooked and then abruptly stops. It means — Tanya lowers her voice — that some drunk was walking, tripped, and fell. In a great cold, drunks frequently freeze to death. Then such a corridor looks like a deadend street.
I DO NOT at all regret coming to Yakutsk, since I was able to meet here such a splendid, wise girl, and to meet her accidentally, while I was walking the streets of the neighborhood that is called Zalozhnaya. Tanya was simply the only living creature that I saw in the vacant landscape of this neighborhood (it was noon; people are at work at that hour), and, since I had lost my way, I wanted to ask for directions to Krupska Street, where I had an appointment.
“I will take you there,” Tanya volunteered cheerfully, “because you might not find it yourself.” In practice this meant that I had to join in her game, because one could reach Krupska Street in only one way — by jumping over puddles.
This is the Zalozhnaya neighborhood: wide streets at right angles to one another, no asphalt, not even cobblestones. Each street is a long, flat archipelago of puddles, mud holes, swampy pools. There are no sidewalks; there aren’t even any footbridges made of planks, which we had at home in Pinsk. Along the streets stand wooden, single-story little houses. They are old; their wood is blackened, wet, rotting. Tiny windows, the panes thick, in frames lined with cotton wool, felt, rags. Because of these panes one has the impression that these houses are looking at one through the kind of thick glasses worn by old women who can barely see.
In Zalozhnaya, the cold is salvation.
The cold maintains the surroundings, the environment, the soil, in a rigorous discipline, in an ironclad order, in a strong and stable balance. Embedded in the frozen earth, which is hard as concrete, the houses stand straight and sure; one can walk and drive over the streets; the wheels don’t sink into slimy quagmires; shoes don’t stay behind in gooey sludge.
Yet all it takes is a day like the one on which I met Tanya, meaning: all it takes is for warmth to arrive.
Released from the grip of the cold, the houses become limp and slide deep into the earth. For many years they have been standing considerably below street level; that is because they were built on permafrost and the warmth they have radiated over time has hollowed out niches for them in the icy soil, and with each year they sink into these more and more. Each little house stands in a separate and increasingly deep hole.
Now the wave of April warmth hits Zalozhnaya, and its lopsided, poor little houses twist, grow misshapen, sprawl, and squat ever closer to the earth. The entire neighborhood shrinks, diminishes, sinks in such a way that in some places only the roofs are visible — as if a great fleet of submarines were gradually submerging into the sea.
“And do you see that?” Tanya asks.
I looked in the direction she is indicating with her hand and see the following: the thawing, loosened muck is starting to flow, snaking its way in little streams, channels, chinks, straight down into the houses. Nature in Siberia is extreme, everything here is violent and radical, and therefore if the mud in Yakutsk is threatening houses, it is not a dripping, trickling, watery dark-gray goo, but a loosened avalanche that suddenly and irresistibly takes off in the direction of porches and doors, fills passageways and yards. It is as if the streets were overflowing their banks and pouring themselves into the houses of Zalozhnaya.
Inside the house one walks in mud; mud covers the floors; it is everywhere. “It smells a little unpleasant,” Tanya adds, “for Zalozhnaya has no sewage system, so in all of this there are various things.…” She wrinkles her forehead, searches for the appropriate words, finally capitulates and repeats—“simply various things.”
I am supposed to pay attention to one other thing, to the signs thrust here and there into the ground, warning that one cannot dig anywhere. Why? Well, because the electrical wiring runs just underfoot, simply placed into the ground, and so if someone drives in a shovel and hits a wire, the current will kill him. In Zalozhnaya, therefore, one can not only get soaked up to one’s waist, soiled, and smeared in mud, but also fall into a sewage drain and — even — electrocute oneself. That is why it is safer in the winter; in the winter it wouldn’t occur to anyone to dig in the ground.
Nearing Krupska Street, we encounter an old woman outside a little house who is trying with the energetic strokes of a broom to halt the muddy deluge crawling onto the porch.
“Hard work,” I say, to start a conversation.
“Ah,” she replies, shrugging her shoulders, “spring is always terrible. Everything flows.”
Silence falls.
“How’s life?” I ask the most banal and idiotic question, just to keep the conversation going somehow.
The granny straightens up, leans her hands on the broom handle, looks at me, smiles even. “Kak zyviom?” she repeats thoughtfully, and then in a voice full of pride and determination and suffering and joy she offers in reply what is the crux of the Russian philosophy of life—“Dyshym!” (We breathe!)
LIKE THE SLUM neighborhoods in Latin America (favelas in Rio de Janeiro, callapas in Santiago in Chile, and so on), Zalozhnaya in Yakutsk is a closed structure. Poverty, dirt, and mud create here a homogeneous, coherent, consistent landscape in which all the elements are linked to one another, are correlative. As far as the eye can see, there are no contrasts here, no symbols of prosperity rising above the panorama of penury. The essence of such a closed structure is that one cannot improve one individual thing — the other links in the chain will immediately stand in the way. One cannot, for example, bring about that people have clean shoes: the ubiquitous muck will not allow it.