I asked her some more about the town, where I could look for the people who moved, what they lived on now; the old woman told me to go the quarry—I would understand everything there, about the people who moved and the ones who didn’t; the quarry for her was an answer that obviated the very possibility of a question.
She, a former weaver, the guardian of someone else’s memory, who had lived a life different from the rest, protected by the newspaper clipping on the wall, replied as if I had asked her where her peers where, where her husband and children were and whether she had had any; where was her generation, what had it left behind, where were the survivors, the last ones, what could they tell me; “Go to the quarry,” she said and closed the door, then bolted it.
I walked through town again; I was just strolling, keeping the general direction in mind, and realized something I had noted but had no words to describe: the town was planned for people walking in columns and turning at right angles; a single person, a single dweller with irregular routes was apparently too minor for the planners’ focus, they lacked the vision to see the human figure through the plan; as a result, the city was divided up by plants and factories and the person—an ordinary person—seemed to be there illegally.
I saw how “zones,” walled off by fences and barbed wire, whether a prison camp or a closed, restricted enterprise, entered the public and private space and distorted it. In essence, the town as town did not exist—there was a territory on which private interests were permitted selectively, stores, schools, nurseries, but this was a necessary concession; things were not intended for humans here, and thus the locale resembled a beam chewed up by a wood borer; everything was illegal, crooked, roundabout, and under the table; cut this corner, move this board, go through the dump; across the lot, in the hole in the fence, and back alleys, alleys, alleys.
You couldn’t get to the quarry just like that, it was guarded—including against people like me, simple gawkers, who could be hurt in a blast; but the higher the fences and the more guards, the more varied the loopholes; I didn’t even have to search—any spot used frequently gives itself away, by a path leading to it, or clothing wrapped around bars that are just a little wider apart so that a person can squeeze through; or by signs of useless fortification, soldered strips of metal, piles of concrete beams, “no entry” signs; but there was a path that disappeared inside the labyrinth of beams; these people who erected these barriers also lacked vision with the correct resolving power, so there was always a crack—sidle in, losing buttons, pull yourself up, and get through somehow.
I met tramps collecting metal; old men going into the tundra for mushrooms—the road to the best mushroom places crossed the quarry; workers who had hidden something on their shift and now were back to retrieve it; kids—they were on their way to play at war; a couple looking for a trysting spot; they all squeezed in habitually, clambered, pushed, dragging in a basket or some bottles; the tramps were hauling a spool of wire; I used their path into the quarry.
I had seen quarries like this in Kazakhstan; but there it was hot, the air over the enormous pit boiled, turned white and opaque, and even the sound of the blasts were drowned, muffled by it. Here in the North, the pit opened all of itself at once, pulling you inside, into the five hundred-meter depth; the quarry was a mirror reflection—in terms of the earth’s surface—of the Tower of Babel, molded out of emptiness; the spirals of the quarry road, circling down from level to level, went to the bottom, so deep and narrow compared to the top of the quarry cut that there were only a few hours of sunlight a day down there.
The gray quarry cliffs were covered by a coat of very fine stone dust that had been wetted and then dried; this coating, with pulverized minerals weakly reflecting the sun, gave the quarry this color; dust covered the dump trucks, huge Belazes, excavators with toothed jaws; here, where there was no soil but only solid rock, the sophisticated human mind discovered its predatory nature; the technology was ready to bite, chew, dig in, crumple, blow up; this mind—I thought of the museum—was close to the mind of the Neanderthal but on a new spiral of development; a mind that combined the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger, neck of a giraffe, and body of a woolly mammoth to create a hybrid, the excavator with gaping jaw; a mind motivated by an insatiable, hopeless desire to devour.
My brain refused to recognize this five hundred-meter hole in the ground, these stalking excavators that embodied the stupid assiduousness of metal, as the work of humans. They must have been created by semirational animals or insects who preferred scale to accuracy or grace; creatures that did not know individuality and functioned only in quantity. The gigantic hole and the enormous trucks had a challenging but unarticulated manifesto, a heavy symbol; the practical meaning—extracting ore—took a backseat in this picture: human effort multiplied by mechanical power created inhuman effort and the quarry showed the volume and measure of that effort.
There must be proportions that keep things made by human hands commensurate with man and when violated turn those things against him. It was not that you feel like a grain of sand or a dust mote at the quarry. The violation of the principle of proportionality separates people from what they are doing; it deprives them of significance in terms of labor. In fact, labor as such vanishes, if we understand it as a living connection between the worker and the result of his work, a connection that is mutually enriching and ennobling.
The quarry boomed, thundered, and clanged metallically; the dump trucks and bulldozers bellowed, diesel exhaust floated in the air, water pumps rumbled; but the result was ephemeraclass="underline" tons and percentages, units of measure.
The whole city—streets, windows, bread and vegetables on a counter—was covered with a coating of gray quarry dust, giving it an aspect of death, like the cheap powder at the morgue, for the excessive scale of labor here left its trace on the residents.
This was particularly noticeable in late August, on Miners Day. The whole city drank; they drank without abandon, ardor, zeal or the ordinary pleasure of drunkards. Time, as colorless as vodka, twisted like a filament in a bottle; the colorless day hung horribly, unnaturally long. Colorless people lay in the streets and others walked past; the connection of words fell apart, the alphabet fell apart, and people shouted and muttered vowels, clumps of words; the collapse of reason manifested in those sounds reached a peak. Then the final last silence settled over the town.
On the day meant to celebrate their work, their labor, people vented on themselves what they couldn’t vent at the quarry, workshops, and pipes; on the day of legal and even approved drunkenness people felt an outburst of definite, collected, and predetermined self-destruction; this kind of suicide is not tried by healthy people but by legless cripples already a third dead—they only need to kill two-thirds of themselves, death had done part of its work, and they set to it with determination and facility, knowing that the mortal path is a third shorter.
This was the ultimate rebellion, stifled almost in embryo; dozens of kilometers of tracks, hangars, pipe, factories, precipitation lakes, the quarry, the transporters of enrichment plants—it surrounded and divided up the city, it looked like a car after an accident in which living flesh is squashed and mutilated by metal. Only the quarry kept increasing, growing in width and depth, and all their labor went to using their own lives, the effort of the muscles, and the wear on their hearts to magnify the gaping hole in the ground. This was the most monstrous part––the extracted ore was broken up, turned into fertilizer, freight trains took it south—because what they saw, continually, daily, was the growing hole sucking up their work.