Once, several geological institutes had their laboratories here; the barracks frames were all that was left, everything else was looted when the labs were closed. Among the chopped and charred slate were pieces of core samples—long cylinders of rock raised from the depths of holes. Usually they were laid out in special boxes meter by meter, and the meter columns of samples gave a reading of the entire vertical of the hole. Those abandoned core samples, overgrown with weeds, pointlessly removed from the ground, from great depths, showed that people left here as if rejecting their work, tossing it aside casually and hastily, and in the vacuum created by their departure, a different life began: the way bindweed takes over old ruins.
Looking at the core samples, I remembered a story that used to be told as a joke; back in the 1980s, a retired driller applied to the Ministry of Geology. He had a project to make use of some of the old holes, which were usually filled with cement to keep the underground water strata from mixing. He proposed turning the holes into cemeteries: burying people vertically, lowering one on top of the other; there were thousands of such holes drilled all over the country, and his explanatory note stated that their total capacity would enable decades of burials, freeing up, he explained scrupulously, the workforce, the cemetery diggers and coffin makers, for other state needs, the word “state” underlined.
The ministry had seen all kinds of proposals: the era had given rise to wild thoughts, the suppressed energy of restructuring and transformations found a way into apolitical and, in that sense, safe technological inventions. The more slowly time flowed, the more alleged inventions appeared that rejected the laws of science, overriding them out of the inventor’s desire, a desire so clearly inept and passionate that it was beyond science; people wanted to change something, and the laws of the natural sciences seemed more malleable than the laws of the social order. But the scientist who proposed vertical cemeteries amazed everyone; and now, standing before the abandoned core boxes, I sensed where that man had come from and what environment had addled his brain.
To get around the ruined land that belonged to no one, I decided to follow the railroad track leading to the mine; women’s voices could be heard above the embankment; I couldn’t make out the words yet, but I could pick up the intonations. The voices did not come from any particular place—the air resonated with them, as if it contained them like a chemical cloud or steam.
Two women were wearily discussing something. From the interjections that arise when vowels are pronounced, lighting a word from within with different emotional tones—a-a, u-u, o-o—you could tell what they were talking about. I got closer and the phrases were clearer. Yesterday Valera said … ate some hot dogs … I have to sleep with him when he’s drunk …. the kids are in the next room … he burned a hole in the pillowcase with his cigarette … started drinking first thing in the morning … he’s trying to get in my daughter’s room …
The words were about human life, but they seemed to be spoken by the area; two women dispatchers sat in their respective booths, kilometers apart from each other, at two sets of crossroads, and now, as there was a break, there were no trains running carrying ore, they were having a conversation over the loudspeakers. No one could eavesdrop because there was no one around; day after day they chatted and it seemed there was nobody closer—among friends and neighbors—than each other.
Maybe these conversations had been conducted for years, and had not changed; in rain and blizzard, in summer and winter, one woman said “he burned a hole in the pillowcase,” and it was always the same pillowcase and the same cigarette; and her friend said nothing in response, just listened.
The same ruins, the same gouged earth, lay around the embankment, and the women’s conversation did not clash with it, the way a conversation about domestic things would, referring to home—in the sense of walls, roof, hearth—amid the abandoned buildings. On the contrary, this was the only conversation possible here.
The voices carried from the loudspeakers up on posts, and it seemed that the words spoke themselves and there were no people at all, just a recording set on repeat in an empty dispatcher office.
It was muggy in the ravine, low clouds were caught on the mountain peaks; it was raining but it felt as if the drops were already flying and had not yet reached the ground. The ruts of the old road were overgrown, and the bridges across the river had been washed away; a narrow path trampled in the rut showed that people came here for mushrooms or berries. The river water was mountain water, too transparent, too clear—it will never slake your thirst, you have to add salt or acid; bilberries ripened in the thickets; the ulcers of the industrial zone were just a half kilometer away, but nature here was untouched, in another decade the old road would disappear under new birches.
The camp appeared after a turn; some of the houses were built out of river boulders, and now they looked like a parody of medieval architecture: two stories, hunkered down, without roofs, with narrow windows to keep in the heat. The wooden buildings had rotted or been burned down long ago, only the electric poles with crooked crossbeams remained, but the eye refused to see them as crosses, to take in the symbolism—they were just poles; it was the same with these buildings—I realized that someone seeing this without knowing it used to be a prison camp would never guess.
Neither the masonry, not the black spots where they used to dump coal, nor the abandoned carts on the slope, nor the adits, nothing in and of itself was evidence. Even the roll of barbed wire, in which a hare had once gotten caught—rodents gradually carried out the tiny bleached bones, as if they had been dumped from a plate—was just a roll of barbed wire. In order to unwind it, like you unwind a thread from a ball of wool, pulling out the entire past, the entire image of this place six decades ago, and not only the image but the essence of what had gone on here—you needed to know something about it, you needed some sort of guidance.
I went through the camp workshops, the trestle beds were still there, to the compressor room where rusty pipes stretched up to the adits leading into the mine; the only thing I found was a button, a homemade button carved out of a piece of tin can; a comprehensible and simultaneously useless object without clothes. The impression of the place was the same; it was a button: real, indubitable, yet torn from something more important, too small, hopelessly lost.
But the button in my hand reminded me of something; I remembered that I had stood in the mountains on this latitude but a thousand kilometers to the east, and I had seen the remains of this camp in the broad saddle of the pass, and the rusted pipes from the compressor room had stretched along the slopes.
The button had two holes made with an awl or nail; I remember the nail I had held in my hand then as evidence that a trace is always left, what remains is what held together the building of the past, and these things, as a special material, always live longer than the building itself. But now I held not a nail but a hole made by a nail; the situation had reversed itself. I began looking through the button, like miniature binoculars, and its two openings suddenly joined up with two spots, the openings of adits on the ravine slope.
I did not want to go up there; but every dark hole in the ground attracts you, as if it were the opening into the underside of the world, an addition to three-dimensionality. I also remembered the goal of this walk into the mountains: the adits were tunnels to the places they excavated the mineral that then yielded uranium.