Once, hungry and desperate, we approached the soldiers guarding the entrance to the barracks. Tovarishch, said Hubert, day pokushat, and mimed putting a piece of bread into his mouth. But the guards only shrugged their shoulders. Finally, one of the sentries reached into his pocket and instead of bread pulled out a little linen sack and handed it to us without a word. Inside were dark brown, almost black, finely chopped stems of tobacco leaves. The Red Army man also gave us a piece of newspaper, showed us how to twist it into a cone and pour into it the damp, foul-smelling tobacco gruel. Cigarettes made out of good tobacco and cigarette paper, in other words normal cigarettes, were unobtainable then.
We began to smoke. The smoke scratched our throats and stung our eyes. The world started to swirl, rock, and was turned upside down. I vomited, and my skull was splitting from pain. But the all-consuming, gnawing sensation of hunger eased, weakened. Despite the nasty taste, despite the tormenting nausea, this was more bearable than the sharp, insistent need, tearing at our guts, to fill our stomachs.
MY CLASS had dwindled by a half. Our teacher sat me on a bench with a boy whose name was Orion. We liked each other at once and began walking home together. One day Orion told me that on Zawalna Street they were supposed to be selling candy and that if I wanted to, we could go stand in line together. It was a beautiful gesture, his telling me about this candy, for we had stopped even dreaming of sweets long ago. Mother gave me permission, and we went to Zawalna Street. It was dark and snow was falling. In front of the shop, there was already a long line of children, stretching the length of several houses. The shop was closed with wooden shutters. The children standing at the head of the line said that it wouldn’t open until tomorrow and that one had to stand here all night. Distressed, we returned to our place at the end of the queue. But new children were arriving continually; the line grew into infinity.
It became even colder than it had been during the day, the frost sharp, piercing, biting. As the minutes passed, then the hours, it was increasingly difficult to stand. I had had for some time very painful abscesses on my legs and hands, burning, swollen with pus. Now the icy cold made the pain unbearable. I moaned with every movement.
Meantime one fragment of the line after another would break away and scatter over the snowy, frozen street. To warm themselves the children played tag. They tussled, wrestled, rolled in the white powder. Then they returned to the line, and the next group would sally forth, yelling. In the middle of the night someone lit a fire. A delicious, luxuriant flame burst out. One by one we took turns beside it so as to warm our hands if only for a moment. The faces of the children who managed to push their way to the fire reflected a golden glow. In this glow their faces thawed, flushed with warmth. Thus warmed, they returned to their places and passed on to us, still standing in line, the rays of their heat.
Toward morning sleep overcame the line. Warnings about how one shouldn’t sleep in freezing temperatures, for that means death, were of no use. No one had the strength anymore to look for firewood or play our game, the square circle. The cold pierced through to the bone, cruel, crackling. Hands and feet went numb. To save ourselves, to last the night, we stood in line huddled tightly together, one close upon the other. Despite the chain in which we locked fiercely and desperately together, all remaining warmth was escaping. The snow was burying us more and more, blanketing us with a white, soft sheepskin.
IN THE MORNING darkness, two women wrapped in thick scarves arrived and started to open the shop. The line sprang to life. We dreamed mountains of candies, magnificent chocolate palaces. We dreamed marzipan princesses and gingerbread pages. Our imagination was afire; everything in it sparkled, radiated. Finally the doors of the shop opened and the line moved. Everyone was pushing so as to warm himself and get to the front. But in the shop there was neither candy nor chocolate palaces. The women were selling empty fruit-candy tins. One for each. They were round, large cans, their sides painted with colorful, cocky roosters and an inscription in Polish — E. WEDEL.
At first we were extremely disappointed and depressed. Orion was crying. But when we began to inspect our loot more closely, we slowly cheered up. On the inside walls of these cans there remained after the candy a sweet deposit, fine, multicolored chips, a thick residue smelling of fruit. Why, our mothers could boil some water in these cans and offer us a sweet, aromatic drink! Already appeased, contented even, instead of going straight home we turned into the park, at the place where the circus stood during the summer. The circus had departed long ago, but it had gone in a hurry and left behind the carousel. The motor from the carousel had been stolen, as had almost all the seats. But one seat remained, and if one gathered together several boys, they could get the carousel moving with a rod in such a way that it spun like mad.
It is empty and silent in the park, so we run to the carousel and start turning it. It is already stirring, creaking. I jump into the seat and buckle myself with the chain. Orion gives the orders, shouts, fires up the boys, urges them on, and they, like galley slaves, push on the rod with all their might, faster and faster and faster! Orion, all in a fever, shouts at the top of his lungs, a madness has already seized the other boys too, the carousel rushes round, I feel a stinging, frosty wind, which lashes my face, a gusting and increasingly stronger wind, on whose wings I rise like a pilot, like a bird, like a cloud.
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN, ’58
THE PLACE of my second encounter with the Imperium: far away, in the steppes and snows of Asia, in a land difficult of access, whose entire geography consists of unfamiliar and extraordinary names — rivers called Argun, Unda, Chaychar; mountains, Chingan, Ilchuri, Dzagdy; and cities, Kilkok, Tungir, and Bukachacha. From these names alone one could compose sonorous, exotic poems.
The train of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which set out the previous day from Peking and is making the nine-day trip to Moscow, after Harbin, China, pulls into Zabaykal’sk, the border station of the USSR. At the approach to every border, tension rises within us; emotions heighten. People are not made to live in borderline situations; they avoid them or try to flee from them as quickly as possible. And yet man encounters them everywhere, sees and feels them everywhere. Let us take the atlas of the world: it is all borders. Borders of oceans and continents. Deserts and forests. Precipitations, monsoons, typhoons, cultivated land and fallow land, permafrost and bog, rocky soil and clay. Let us add the borders of the Quaternary deposits and volcanic flows, of basalt, chalk, and trachyte. We can also see the borders of the Patagonian plate and the Canadian plate, the zones of tropical climates and of Arctic ones, the borders of the erosion zones of the Adycha watershed and of Lake Chad. The borders demarcating the habitats of certain mammals. Certain insects. Certain reptiles and amphibians, including the extremely dangerous black cobra, as well as the frightening — although, fortunately, lazy — anaconda.
And the borders of monarchies and republics? Kingdoms remote in time and lost civilizations? Pacts, treaties, and alliances? Black tribes and red? Human migrations? The borders to which the Mongols reached. The Khazars. The Huns.