The Volga flew up onto the railroad bridge—rail cars, cisterns, floodlights, squat cargo cranes flashed by—and raced down the potholed streets of the city. We had to press ahead, go some thirty kilometers, and arrive in another city, the one in the letter to Grandfather II; this town was low, the farther one arose in the distance with the smokestacks of a mining plant and beyond them gray sloping mounds enveloped in smoke and cumulus clouds.
The forest tundra began outside the city, but there wasn’t a single green tree there, only cliffs, stone rubble, and dead tree trunks; the prevailing wind was from the direction of the mining plant, and the smoke from the stacks precipitating with fog and rain had burned and killed every living thing over the decades. There should be no life in these places and they should not be seen—their picture has nothing to do even with the sight of natural catastrophes: just as a criminologist can tell murder from suicide, you can see murder, whether direct or indirect, in landscapes mutilated by humans, you can tell because in nature death is swift and not ugly, while murder done by people is marked by protracted deformity.
Then came warehouses, fences, fences, fences; in the distance there were mountains, night sky, and unfettered expanses, while here everything was fenced, separated by walls; barbed wire covered everything. There were barriers everywhere, warning signs, “no entry” symbols, guard booths and outside them, strays who rushed to bark at the car. Then suddenly, like an abyss, came an empty lot retaining only the start of work—here they excavated a hole, there they abandoned a pipe, there they set up strips of wood to mark out something or other; the lot was as dark as the dirt and you could dig into the darkness with a shovel. The car flew on, and once again there were fences, floodlights, workshops, pipes, smoke, steam, and light—and then another plunge into emptiness. Man defended himself, barricaded himself, he was not master of these lands, and the guard booths were the architectural descendants of prison camp guardhouses; this land was infected with a fungus, the fungus of the watchman, and all of this, the fences, wire, barricades, was like a single never-ending shout: “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
The car flew and it seemed that we lived on our land like occupiers; that we looked at one another through a prison door peephole; there was music, the singer rasped that all his friends were bulls, fists ready to fight, gun ready to blaze, there was no salvation from the bulls; when the driver switched stations I could see that he had tattoos on his fingers—amateur, pale, perhaps somebody had tried to remove them—and the music, jerky and undisciplined, and the words were strangely suited to the locale. We were racing through a prison camp zone, even though these were not prison factories; the zone was everywhere, its mark was on everything—three rows of barbed wire. It seemed that every object here had to be locked away from thieves, and the locks multiplied, locks, bolts, hasps, the next set of locks, in case the first ones are defeated, and so on; oncoming cars did not turn off their high beams, blinding me, but the driver did not turn away, he was used to it; the gun ready to blaze, no salvation from the bulls, the speakers roared, and we flew, senselessly fast, as if in a hurry to fight with someone, break bones, knock out teeth; the dark, the fences, the empty lots—everything chased after us, everything showed that you could not stop here, in a plague-ridden place, and that gave a sense of daring, a ruthless readiness to live at odds with everything, to chomp onto life like it was a tough piece of meat, with sinews and fur; I had frequently been in such places, but this was the first time I realized that the criminals had won, the camp had beaten the not-camp; the camp was not gone, it had smeared itself into the landscape, cut itself into parts, and each part settled in, changing everything around it, in the milieu of human habitation.
The toys I found in Grandfather II’s apartment suited this area very well—faceless figures, rifle, German shepherd, horse; they came from here. A bridge flashed by, the fences were left behind, and the town’s narrow streets wound around hills, signs, store windows, kiosks, bus stops, railroad tracks crossed the road several times, beyond the hills factories appeared then disappeared, and the mountains came closer, squashing the town into a hollow, with only one exit, across the bridge we had taken.
To the right appeared another abyss of darkness; but I could make out a big building. The driver explained that this was a train station, that previously commuter trains used to run here, but the branch was abandoned during perestroika and only freight lines were left; the station was unsupervised and there had been a fire. The road twisted up a slope, and the car flew right up to the station; the building was typical, with arches, columns, and very wide windows—a railroad temple from the forties or fifties, an altar of schedules. The fire had merely blackened the walls, and the station had the desecrated majesty of an abandoned church, as if the locals rejected a religion; I could not tell from his tone whether the driver was sorry or on the contrary was proud of the arson, his speech betrayed both.
I came back to the station in the daytime; I had a similar experience only once, in Istanbul by the Golden Gate; I saw what happened to a former crossroads of history, saw how the once-ruined is ruined a second time; at the fortress walls of the former Constantinople, vendors sold cell phone covers, broken kettles, bolts, nuts; here’s a defroster (the plastic yellowed by time or smoke), here’s a bent microscope, here’s a package of syringes. The users of the syringes had moved inside the walls, campfires sent up smoke, ragged bums, who gave off a vibe of cowardice and violence, wandered amid the collapsed battlements.
Depression hits you by the Golden Gate; a new horde, the nomads of the new world, traders in fake leather jackets huddle in the ruins, unable to take them apart completely and build something different; they have grown accustomed to disarray, to accepting crevices in the old walls as living space; to the fact that you can live without looking back at the past and assuming that the shade of ancient walls is convenient shade on a hot day and nothing more.
At the station I saw the same kind of abandoned crossroads, a silt-filled mouth of fate; the city cut off its own path to the outside, destroyed the window to the big world, and now lived like a blinded Cyclops deprived of its train headlight eye. But the station was burned, and the city was forced by the landscape, by the hollow in which it was situated, to shut down on itself; the place exerted a kind of terror against its populace, and people responded in kind: the walls of houses and garages were thickly covered in graffiti, curses addressed to no one in particular but directly at the environment; the scrawls were written over rectangles of fresh paint—the swear words were painted over—abundantly, fluently, and monotonously; evidence of petty revenge—knocked over garbage cans, broken streetlamps and windows, rubbish tossed on the side of the roads—showed that the residents were fighting a partisan war with the town.
Dropping me at the hotel, the driver left, and I started looking at the ads on the lamppost covered in white drips of glue; most were about apartment sales and exchanges, there were many, and they were glued on in layers, the lamppost was covered with a clustered fringe, and it seemed as if no one was comfortable living here, everyone wanted to change something, move, find a new view from the window even if it’s still within the same city limits.