The old house was hopeless, the stove was hopeless, it took so many logs, the crooked fence where the bottles dried, and the lame cat that warmed itself behind the stove; I left thanking her and promising myself to visit the old woman again, but I did not keep my promise—everything I could have felt fit into that single impression, and it could not expand or even repeat itself; there was a precision in the singularity of the meeting, in the fact that it did not turn into a kindhearted caretaking; the old woman did not need it the way a praying person does not need encouragement, and after a few years I forgot her, immersed as I was in the well-being of childhood which avoids problems of the old.
And now years later—life sometimes anticipates our questions by decades—I remembered her, remembered her cry of “Werewolf!”; it coincided with my insight, my sensation of the thick impure blood; I fled the apartment, I locked the door and threw the key in the river, choosing that route intentionally; I went to my parents’ house with the firm determination not to accept my inheritance, to have nothing to do with that apartment, to sell or exchange it—let it be, shut, empty, lost among the other apartments, buildings, and streets, let it recede to a dot; I had understood something, and my history was over.
I was alone then in my parents’ house; when I came in I started seeking support in books, as usual—you pick up a book, open it at random, and get into the plot to break up the whirlwind of your thoughts; but this time I intentionally selected a book to be as far away as possible from the present and not get the least echo or coincidence from the text; I chose The Epic of Gilgamesh, He Who Saw the Unknown, a dark-green, swampy colored volume; I took it remembering the description of Uruk, the humanization of Enkidu, the expedition against Humbaba; but the book did not open there at all. I read:
“Let the gate of the mountain now be opened!” I repeated; I thought about the Yakut tales of mammoths living underground, and if the tundra buckled from the ice freezing in the soil, the Yakuts believed that mammoths had walked deep underground; if they found a mammoth carcass in a precipice, they thought it had died by accidentally stepping out into the sunlight. I sensed that this imagery was right—going through land, through mountain, through accumulated ossified time; but I did not yet know what I would have to do, how to act.
Nights were dreamless, but close to dawn dreams came, three dreams; they repeated in the same order. Sometimes a dream extends into the deepest layers of consciousness that lie beside the main well through which we dive into ourselves; it is they, and not the popular ideas of the moment, that in many ways determine our belonging to a certain historical time.
Military brass bands have different sounds in different years, and depend not only on the hearer; there is a silence on the eve of war that can be torn by the sound of a single bugle, and there is a silence after a defeat in which the sound of an entire band will be muted and lost.
There are times of light and times of darkness; the general tone changes, the illumination changes, and the same color looks different as if in different optical media: the red banners of the Civil War, which had more scarlet, and the red banners of the thirties, which had more crimson, look the same in black-and-white newsreels.
It turned out that the portion of the past that is extant and unnoticed in the present, diffused in it, is very great; it was the voice of grains, the argument under the bench, the voice of random people, chords of random melodies through the rasp of the loudspeaker, the voice of boarded-up windows. Sand, dust, ashes, remains, bone meal, salt, sugar, kerosene, soap, matches spoke; old houses, river bends, rotting sunken ships, coal burned in furnaces, gunpowder pushing bullets out of barrels, and the greenish metal of casings all spoke; everything that vanished, disintegrated, was drunk, eaten, lost, and used up also spoke, and it was lost, it echoed in the dream gathering strength; it would not yield to daytime consciousness, only to sleep.
The first dream started: I saw the springtime river ice, mushy from the weakened inner tension, and still solid only in one place, a strip across the river.
There was a ford there in winter, the trampled snow hardly melted, and the ruts made by wheels, runners, horseshoes, boots, and children’s shoes stood out more. They took on additional meaning: the people were dead—that was the knowledge of the dream—but their footprints accidentally survived.
An archaeologist finds a declivity in hardened sand, a footprint, and in the unimaginably distant past, where you can’t even imagine human existence, a notch appears for counting to begin, a sign of affirmation: I was. This phenomenon, which has a dual nature of fact and symbol—one reinforcing the other—graphically approaches the pulsating point in the middle of the page, without any neighboring points; the starting point.
The footprints on the ice also pulsated, but they were not just points: voluminous letters of set type, forming words, lines, text. It seemed that each had been left deliberately: people could have walked without a trace and in general life is such that no traces are left if you don’t make an effort—but the ones who had walked on the ice had stepped intentionally so that the wet snow of the thaw would accept the body’s weight and take a cast of their soles.
The words frozen in the ice were bitter; every print meant a step, and the step brought them closer to vanishing, which the print resisted. They were repeated—thus a desperate person keeps repeating the same thing, and a recitative appeared composed of many repetitions.
Hasty, overlapping, overflowing, like a lament, the prints joined up a multitude of fates and the single path. It seemed that an unremitting threat had accompanied the travelers, pushing them from behind, keeping them from turning off.
Later—the guess arose one night and then kept appearing every time—I realized that somewhere in the snowy mush were prints of the guards’ boots, who were unlikely to have walked on the untouched snow, but they were no longer recognizable: they were lost, blended into the whole. This indistinguishability of prisoners and guards—when you can’t tell which was which—elicited horror, even though there was a hint in it: it was not the convoy of guards that pointed out the direction, for the threat that forced people to walk on the ice hovered over them as well.
Here the dream changed; somewhere so far away that its small universe barely accommodated such a distance, something collapsed, the concussion accelerated time that had been imperceptible until then, an icy crashing roar grew—and a crack zigzagging along the line of the river channel broke the ice of the ford in two.
The crack expanded rapidly, turning into an ice hole, foaming water bursting from it; the ice fragmented, chewed up by the ice holes, tearing the solid picture of the ford into shreds; floes tumbled and the water pushed with greater strength, inundating all the traces, all the prints. This was water of the bottom currents that avoided the ice holes, that had settled in the deep holes beneath the steep banks, oily and stale, as if the drowned had decomposed in it slowly—because of the cold—it was like the emptiness of an undiscerning gaze in which things, phenomena, and events are lost and cease to exist.