I told the engraver the grave I sought, and he led me to a small hollow that looked like the earth’s lipless mouth. In those regions, permafrost could push out crosses and statues the way it pushes out foundations of buildings, or it could remain indifferent, or it could swallow a raised grave site. I recalled the photograph of Grandfather II taking the first shovelful of dirt at the quarry site and the feeling I had first looking at it returned: the shovel digs into the ground and it’s too late to put the soil back, to deny, refuse, say something; events linked up in ways that could not be unlinked, fate could not be stopped. Therefore the location of the grave had a dent in the surface that seemed to repeat—in one of many places—the funnel of the quarry begun by Grandfather II.
The engraver told me that one batch of prisoners brought to the camp were mental patients; the institution where they lived had been turned into a polling place because the village school, where people usually voted, had burned down with the kolkhoz office. The patients were naturally locked up, but they got out at night and tore down the posters hanging in the streets, to put them up in their own ward. One poster ripped and they hid it in the outhouse; it was a portrait of Stalin.
The engraver heard the story from an orderly in the institution, who was sent to serve time along with the mental patients. They could not remember their own names, did not respond at roll call, and the orderly was a valued worker: he replied for them all, combining the names of three dozen people with his own. The madmen were excellent laborers, perhaps the best at laying the foundation of the quarry: they did not know that somewhere outside there was freedom, they were not envious if someone got more food, they did not try to deceive, work less, pretend to be sick; through pickaxes and shovels, through unity of action and form—just as they were taught to use spoons—they acquired a small dose of reason, enough to merge with the tool and become one with it. The shaft of a shovel, the handle of a crowbar became their support, their earthly axis, and they dug, broke rock, made holes for explosives, giving themselves fully to the work, replacing their own existence. That’s what people called them—Pickaxe, Shovel, Wheelbarrow—and they quickly learned to respond to the nicknames.
Gradually the brigade of mental patients was noticed and given better rations—no other brigade suited the bosses as well—and the guard officers even joked that the experience should be extended, all the nuts throughout the land should be arrested: Where else could you find such obedient workers? The other prisoners called them the Psycho Brigade; the bosses had the sense not to hold up the mental patients as an example—the other prisoners would have killed them then—instead, people just took out their frustration on them, mocked them, but did not hurt them.
The officers who suggested using arrested mental patients did not know that all credit was due the orderly: he had understood intuitively that the repeated actions of simple labor with the soil could help those men get back into the world, at least partially, and he had spent years at the institution teaching them to work, first with four hands, the way you teach people to play piano, and then, when they understood the movement, independently. The orderly’s brother was among the madmen, they said it was hereditary, and he tried to save his brother and forestall his own madness; he had managed to instill the skills of simple labor in his patients, in muscle memory; but now his plan equated man and instrument.
Some of the patients had no guards—you could escape from here only if you had the intention to escape, it was impossible to get lost or go missing, so the patients were allowed to move freely; they were sent to the bosses’ houses to chop wood and haul water—the bosses liked these workers who made them feel even more important than did the usual prisoners; besides which the mental patients did not know to hate the bosses, the convoy guards, and their families, so the bosses could relax with them the way you do with a dog or cat—feeling superior and at peace.
The crazies came to Grandfather II’s apartment, too; his seven-year-old son, born near the camp, and knowing nothing but the camp and the camp people, unexpectedly grew attached to them; one of the madmen, whose name the engraver could not remember, used to carve wood and was the father of a large family; he had not seen children for two or three years. You couldn’t say he felt something for the boy, the son of the camp warden, for he had lost the ability to feel, but his fingers retained their own memory and carved—with a shard of glass, since the Psycho Brigade did not have knives or razors—a wooden bird whistle. He carved it mechanically, impartially, as if every child—the man knew what short stature meant—was supposed to have such a bird.
Grandfather II’s son, who had lived without toys—all the children of the camp guards grew up that way, they didn’t even know the usual children’s games like Cossacks-and-robbers, they played at the work of their fathers, being convoy guards or soldiers in the watchtowers—suddenly left his peers; the simple bird whistle touched something in him. No, he did not see the world in which he had been born and bred in a different light, he did not come to pity the prisoners or realize what his father was; the toy merely revealed that there could be another life, where the air can sing lightly; there are no songbirds in the tundra and the boy had never heard a lark or nightingale, nor did he know that people had songs: in his seven years he had heard only a few records and thought that singing was the work of a box with a handle and horn; the box knew how to sing in a human voice, that’s what it was made for, but people could not sing.
Lips touching the resonant opening, the exhalation giving birth to sound—the boy started breathing differently, certain powers within him, unrequired and dormant, awoke to life; he began seeking isolation, he made up simple melodies and whistled them, as if hypnotizing himself, summoning the unknown that arose inside him.
The way the engraver told it, there was something uncanny about how the boy grew attached to his whistle; the engraver recalled the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the children he led away with his flute; the crazy wood-carver had unwittingly made him a strange and scary gift. He came from the sticks, from the forests and swamps that three generations of irrigators, Tsarist and Soviet, had been unable to drain; he would run away from the orderlies and collect driftwood, burls and birch fungus, and carve the same things out of them: the mocking faces of forest spirits, distorted as if in a fun house mirror, and you could not say that he was making them up—he was releasing the features already in the wood, as if the forest truly were filled with taunting, beckoning faces, peering at people from behind trees and pretending to be clumsy growths should people turn back to look.
The boy was not losing his mind, but simply spent more and more time on his own; sometimes he mindlessly went off somewhere, as if the whistle of the singing toy extended a guiding thread visible to him alone, and an otherworldliness developed about him, as if he were here accidentally and would not stay long; the appearance of the bird whistle somehow stopped his growth, took away the powers of growth which children have in great abundance, with a reserve; these powers seemed to be exhausted in the vain and repeated attempts to breathe life into the wooden bird, which lived with another’s breath.