The lakes in the Urals are many and huge. Their large, amazingly empty, glassy surface serves as a mirror not so much for material objects as for the weather. The slightest changes in the atmosphere are reflected there as incorporeal images with no counterpart on the shores, melting into dark oil and becoming solid at some indeterminate point. Often you can't see the boundary between water and land. At times the atmospheric specters are not just reflected but seen above lake surface quite distinctly. This Martian television is best observed from high up, where the boats near the cottage shore look like seed husks. Some lakes are stunningly clear: at a perfectly still midday, the sun-net on the sloping bottom achieves the perfection of gilt on porcelain; the fisherman in his sun-warmed flatboat, smelling of fish soup, sees through his own shadow the distant clump of bait and the dark backs of the large perch eager to taste it. On the Urals' bounteous southern reaches, where the homely forest strawberry, with fruit like nodules but amazingly aromatic, grows and the garden strawberry sometimes gets as big as a carrot, the lakes take up even more of the beautiful scenery. Looking down, you can't always tell what there's more of in front of you — water or land; they envelop each other, blend into each other. There are islands all over; one, like a cup, will hold another irregular oval of shining water, though this is not a part of the mother water world but its own internal lake, fed by its own springs, and inside it is yet another little island: a decorative cliff with a scattering of pebbles, looking like a broken piggy bank. From the cliff leading to the edge of a neck of land, circles of water, land, and stone seem once again to spread out over the entire expansive breadth; the place erases the boundary, the distinction between the named geographical location and the unnamed specific object — like the burly birch on the very smallest island whose stiff little leaves shimmer in the wind as if it were adorned, to supplement its own weeping mane, by tinsel-rain.
The Ural range is undoubtedly situated in one of those enigmatic regions where the landscape has a direct effect on minds. For the true Uraler, the land is rock, not soil. Here, he is the possessor of a prof ound — in the literal and figurative sense of the word — geologically grounded truth. At the same time his land is also fruitful. Just as the inhabitant of Central Russia goes out «to nature» to pick berries and mushrooms, so the Uraler drives his old jalopy out looking for gems; to him, a place without deposits and veins makes no sense. Far from everyone who grows up in the Urals later joins the community of rock hounds — gem miners without a license who, while having other professions, often intellectual ones, in town, structure their budgets around their illegal endeavors, which spill over into a passion. However, virtually every Ural schoolboy goes through a collecting phase; it's the rare family whose attic isn't strewn with fused cobbles and malachite scales covered with black oxides, quartz druses that look like the city's spring ice, and polished chips of all the commonly found gemstones.
Meanwhile, the Urals' subterranean riches are no longer what they once were. Everywhere they go on the territory of known deposits, professional rock hounds and even tourists stumble across old mining pits. These might be flat holes long since grown over with wet bracken and made impassible by wooly-leaved wild raspberries; only the experienced eye would discern the prospecting holes that date back to his great-grandfathers' day. Sometimes a hole in the ground that looks like an old man's toothless, sunken mouth leads the prospector to a mine from the century before last that looks like a buried, low hut half crushed by a rock: cold larch braces flaking with dead, time-eaten splints, varnished on top by soot from the torches that stole the miners' sweet subterranean oxygen, and noises that emanate from the darkness exactly as if someone were scuffling over the damp grainy stone. Sometimes the mine is located not in a remote mountain corner but on the edge of a potato field where a small tractor jolts around. It's a common occurrence: from the substrate leading to the prosaic collective gardens, another diverges, a little fainter, and quickly climbs the slope, and from the slope a view opens out onto an old surface mine that surrounds, bezel-like, a strangely harmonious volume of air, like a tear of nothingness. You can't tell right away that the surface mine is filled to a certain level with water. You can't see the water. The reflection of the quartz walls, one of them burning in the hot noonday and the other icy, is so detailed and perfect that your eye doesn't catch where the real cliff leaves off and its reflection begins. This marvelous symmetry is accomplished by the mirrored image of the reflected sky with the dots of birches leaning into it. You have to descend into the surface mine down a well-trodden, rustling path, one hand touching the wall that rises by your temple; sometimes a flat pink stone comes out in your hand like a book from a shelf, and when you throw it down, a raw, pipy sound leaps up. Only from the fat watery circles do you discover where you shouldn't step; the water, like clay on a potter's wheel, really seems to be trying to turn into a vessel. This doesn't happen, though. Slowly, almost infinitely, the disturbed perfection is restored — and suddenly the moment comes when the water disappears again literally beneath your feet. Once again the viewer is left with a stunning void where the mountain was taken out. The sunny wall, amazingly vivid and finely detailed, seems lit from below by powerful electricity, and the sugar vein in it sparks.
Virtually everything that could be extracted from the top has been. The Urals' surface has been depleted. The same can be said of the surface of the Urals' natural beauty. The nature logos that make it so easy to assemble the components of a recognizable landscape on canvas have always encouraged amateur rather than professional painters. Realism, be it a method of art or — more broadly — a way of thinking, has here been a characteristic of fundamentally superficial people, well-intentioned dilettantes who take the use of ready-made forms for a type of patriotism. In this sense, the Urals proved cunning. From the very beginning there has been all the ready-made material you could want. As a result, there came to be a specific stratum of artists, poet-songwriters, collectors, and ethnologists who were seized by splendid impulses. These serious-minded guys, who were old by the time they were thirty, wearing sardine-colored jackets and carrying various membership cards in their inside pockets, had the vague feeling that something was expected of them by all this stone and industrial might, the loaded sky above it that kept transporting tons and tons of clouds without end — but they never got past the surface, which seemed to satisfy the demands for artistry and Ural distinctiveness.
When an ecological crisis came that was as real as can be, it became clear that the true Uraler's thinking was fantastic thinking. The farther from the soil, the better! It turned out that an anchorite living in some Lower Talda and studying Sanskrit expressed the essence of his little homeland more accurately than the peony-ruddy composer of songs for folk chorus.
The authorities' pet idea was to restore the monastery where for the last forty years there had been a colony for juvenile delinquents. From a distance, the monastery looked like a huge dirty snowdrift that had settled. Close up you noticed the torn barbed wire and prison lamps in smashed cases that looked like its iron fruit. With the priest's blessing they began to build. For starters they razed the long barracks on the monastery territory and dragged off (to be carted away later to the dump) the rotting boards with the rusty nails poking out, which called to mind the remains of exhumed coffins, scraps of painted tin, and pieces of brick. Immediately after, an unprecedented fire broke out in the shantytown adjoining the monastery. That fateful night the fire flew, fanned by the wind, and the water thrown on it flew from the pails and troughs and turned into a hot exhale, as from a drunk's maw after a swallow of vodka. The black huts, sluiced from low-power hoses, squealed when they caught fire, and their pink frames collapsed with a hot rustle. In the morning, the surviving trees looked like bathhouse besoms, and in the ashes, amid the disintegrating wooden flesh, still red under the ash, the people wandered, digging their incinerated property out of the coals with sticks. Now another concern was tacked onto the authorities' list. With no hope, however, of a free hotel room, the locals dragged off the barracks' remains and in record time knocked together more shacks. After that, no matter how many subsidies were issued from the top, the population categorically drank them up, continuing to live in what they'd taken from the prison; even the barbed wire had a practical use: they wound it around their rather shaky constructions for stability, which made some of the huts, with their tiny skewed windows, look like hives being swarmed by iron bees. Financially, the shantytown and monastery became communicating vessels. It would have been awkward to finish building a church when right outside its walls all lay in ruin and ash. Bent old women cooked food in the hissing, smoking cracks of stove carcasses, and not far away, in the papery shade of desiccated birches, erstwhile breadwinners lounged on bare iron cots; the men themselves looked like bundles of salvaged but useless property. And this whole outrage was photographed by opposition journalists. By way of lowering the general level in their communicating vessels as much as possible, the burned-out residents dedicatedly stole everything that wasn't nailed down: sacks of cement, paint, work gloves. The unstable equilibrium, supported by two comparatively identical streams of financial infusions, threatened to turn into a catastrophe at any moment.