The tundra around the cemetery reddened, as if watered-down blood had seeped from beneath the ground; red water flowed down my arms, my face; the color of brick dust, cinder with the bluish cast of gunpowder splashed across the landscape, colored the mountains and sky, and the monuments in the cemetery became islands in the high water of the color. I understood that this was coincidence, a burst of snow that was imbued with smoke from the stacks; but a red polar hare ran in the tundra, looping around, escaping an imagined hunter, the madness of red, and it turned out it was running in circles; the hare tried to escape the red blizzard not knowing what its own color was, leaping aside, trying to confuse the trail, going low and then jumping back up on the graves.
Finally the hare wearied and collapsed in a mossy hole; only its ears were visible. I realized that it was pointless to run like the hare if you were to see red water on your hands; pointless to say that this is just pollution from the complex when in your gut you know what the red snow is about; you are called, and you can only experience your own shock, follow its path—without trying to understand it, break it up into its components. Only then will the red snow covering the cemetery become something deeper than an image or a metaphor—it will become an opening door leading to the space of growing destiny; the words of Gilgamesh came to mind, his response to the Scorpion-Man:
Red snow fell over the tundra to the Arctic Ocean; the land was red, and the water devoured it, and dark mirrored rivers flowed unperturbed; red drops fell from wires, snow melted on stone in the quarry, and red rivulets ran along cracks and fissures, as if the blood-carrying veins of the earth had been cut here to extract it; red foam appeared on the oil rigs that looked like camp watchtowers and in the mouths of the wells, and the gas torches over the tundra cavities turned crimson; the chain saw at the felling site splattered red sawdust, and the excavator shovel dug into darkness where something slurped viscously; bedbugs under the boards of the collapsed barracks awoke from their half-century sleep, and bears whose ancestors grew fat on human flesh returned to the slag heaps where the executed bodies were dumped; human blood flowed in the wires, the tree trunks, in the arteries of animals, in the emptiness of the land, as if the world had turned into a bleeding tumor, a tangle of blood vessels, and only the rivers flowed unperturbed.
Then the red snow melted completely; there was a light ringing in my head, as if capillary strings had burst from the tension. We went outside.
The watchman’s left arm was artificial, and his uncreased shoes revealed that his legs were also prosthetic; the wrinkles on his face were deep and aged, he could no longer smooth the skin in order to shave, it was baked like skin after a burn, so that uneven gray bristles peeked out; thin, once very tall—any line arranged according to height would start with him—the man was now bent over, and the hump on his back was like an incipient second head; his eyes belonged to a different face, a different body: life had wearied the flesh, but the eyes, their red, ulcerated whites, held something sleepless, remembering, always awake but expecting nothing.
The watchman was not one by profession or calling; he was a watchman without verbs, if I could put it that way: he did not watch, he did not guard, he did not execute the duties of a watchman, but nevertheless he was one, in a different sense.
When the cemetery had been part of the camp, he, an invalid who had been a stone mason and engraver in his past, was sent here to make headstones; for decades he carved out names, ranks, and positions, as if he worked in the posthumous human resources department; he kept his own records of those who had arrested him and guarded him, kept his book of life and death—a pile of pages in a cardboard file labeled “Case No. … , ” in which he listed all the dead.
Later, when the town grew bigger than the camp, his quarter-century sentence came to an end, but he remained; the engraver said he had nowhere to go, which was true, but that was not the real reason: he had merged with the cemetery, gotten used to standing at the gate hunched over, grown deaf from the whine of the saws on stone; former camp bosses retired and sooner or later, with an honorary salute or not, with medals on a cushion or not, the officials were lowered into the unyielding, stony earth, where a meter down the hoe hit the ice of permafrost; the engraver picked up his instruments and chiseled the dates of the life on the stone.
There was not much flesh left on him, a third of his body was metal, wood, and plastic—the engraver had been treated with care; the flesh that remained was imbued with the dust of stone and abrasives, stone dust was in his lungs, he had become almost mineral, the way the bodies of miners who died in salt mines turned into salt formations found decades later. His name was Petr, rock, and he was no longer subject to physiology, he belonged to petrography, the study of mountain ores. Having spent much more time with rock than with people, he had learned its slow power, the power of pressure that bends strata, the power of hidden, seething pressures; he turned the power on himself, overcame the weakness of expectation, and surpassed the strain of patience; he was simply the cemetery stone carver, he lived at the cemetery, and even in his extreme old age he cut the letters smoothly and evenly into the stone.
His vision and sense of proportion established the same precision within him, letters requiring accurate delineation subjected his body to the service of lines; maybe he survived only thanks to those letters, their graphics; he stood on two borders simultaneously—the line between life and death and the threshold at which the invisible word becomes visible, captured in the graphic cluster of letters; letters became his prison camp rations, and he did not depend on meager calories, he was fed by the alphabet both in the practical and spiritual sense. He lived without dreaming of revenge, he lived a solitary and isolated life, and his life went on as long as there were still people alive who had served in the camp as guards; he met them at the cemetery gate the way they had met him at the camp gate; he stood on borrowed legs of metal and wood, while they lay on their backs and their feet were in shoes bought for the burial. He was not in the thrall of vengeance or justice being meted out—he simply watched how they left in a line that extended for years, left as if they had lived ordinary lives, had been ordinary men—and it had to be him, he had to chisel out the numbers, the farewell words of wives and children on their headstones, so that their deeds, almost forgotten, not having become guilt, not having elicited repentance or expiation, would be fixed, confirmed as something that had really happened; confirmed not in human memory, but as something that did not depend on memory, on being “multiplied” in reminiscences, but was just a fact of life.
One engraving, one line, was enough to keep a thing from vanishing. It needed only one person to take on the labor of remembering; remembering means being connected with reality, even being that connection; we do not preserve the reality of the past in our memories, the past itself, having occurred, speaks through human memory, and the speech is exactly as clear as the person is honest, not in the sense of following the truth but in the sense of absolutely allowing it to speak through him.
In the back of the workshop, the engraver tried to make a memorial for his long-dead comrades; but his ability to convey the proportions of the human body was in inverse proportion to the precision of his hand at making letters; he treated the human form like a letter, so that the body was racked, stretched on imaginary axes as if crucified on the letter; unfinished statues lay by the wall like executed bodies, and that probably was a memorial fully suited to the times and events—a memorial existing in numerous attempts but never succeeding; a memorial no one would see.