That may be why his wife, before becoming barren, had two stillborn children after the boy. She gave birth, and then her female nature died, became insensible, as if her body was horrified by her husband’s true desires.
The boy did not come out of the room for two days; he refused food the first morning, and Grandfather II ordered that he not be fed forcibly. He knew that the boy would rebel at first—it came out the way he wanted—and then the arrest would undermine his strength, and the more the boy believed he could prove something to his father, to stand up for himself, the faster his resistance would die out.
In the two days that the door was locked, the boy used his penknife to pry up a rotten floorboard and he squeezed into a space leading under the house. Grandfather II was at a loss for the first time: he couldn’t call out a search party for his son. But it wasn’t necessary—the boy was found.
The camp quarry, wide and deep, even in those days seemed to tilt the surrounding mountains, tilt the plain on which the nascent town stood. If a man, either drunk, or from joy or grief walked so that his legs carried him on their own, he would end up at the quarry.
The boy who ran out into the night not knowing where to go was doomed to end up at the quarry because of the town’s configuration; the quarry was not guarded at night. At that hour it was the eye of the earth for the boy, it saw the boy everywhere, he had nowhere to hide. The quarry was his father’s creature, and the fear of his sleeping father was transferred to the sleepless eye of the quarry; Grandfather II had brought his son there, to the edge of the top ledge, and the boy thought there was a general madness in the stubbornness with which people, obeying his father, dug a pit, and the spirals of the quarry ledges seemed like a reflection of his father’s will twisted into a spring. The boy went to the quarry because it was only there, in the center of the pupil, that he could he hide from the all-penetrating gaze; the pupil saw everything but not itself.
The work brigades found him in the morning; a sand bed had collapsed beneath him and he’d fallen; the body lay on the stones in a pile of sand. He had fallen by the wall they were dynamiting to find ore with eudialyte—a bright red transparent mineral; in daylight the whole side of the quarry was covered with red splotches. Eudialyte was called shaman’s blood by the local tribes, who believed it to be the traces of a battle with a dark shaman, conquered and secured into the cliff over the lake; the eudialyte now flared, as if the boy’s death had strengthened its glow, and it was impossible to chip out all the grains of the mineral from the ore, as the foreman had wanted to do at first, realizing what Grandfather II would see. He was afraid—the stone was a witness, the stone was an accuser.
Grandfather II went down into the quarry; the brigades were led out, and only the doctor was with him. Soon the camp warden came back up; the body was left on the stones, left to the doctor and orderlies. Grandfather II banished his son—the boy had tried once again to go against his will. Grandfather II did not believe the boy’s death was an accident, but he himself was the least at fault: he blamed it on impudence, disobedience, stubbornness, not knowing the value of life; now he sought reasons that forced the boy to do that, but he did not seek them in himself: someone had spoiled the boy, set him against his father, confused, bewitched, plunged him into madness; Grandfather II considered the destroyed toy camp a sign of madness, of spiritual illness.
Grandfather II banished the dead boy, returning to the memories of the obedient, proper son he had been just a few months earlier, and when he thought of the boy, he thought of the former boy; his son lay on the rocks amid the bloody shimmer of eudialyte, but Grandfather II no longer could see him. The eudialyte burned his eyes, eternal, indestructible, and he left the quarry, ordering the chief of construction to blow up the spot where his son died. They made vertical blast holes in order to slice off a thick layer, the dynamiters laid the charge, but when the roar of the boulders ceased and the dust and smoke were carried away by the wind, they all saw that the eudialyte vein was revealed as being bigger and more powerful; the fresh grains of it, not yet muddied by the cold and rain, glowed red in the gray rock. Grandfather II ordered a second blast, but the stone would not yield, merely showing deep cracks; after that, the camp commandant never looked at the north wall of the quarry, and even the observation platform was moved so that the place where the boy died could not be seen.
His son died in an accident; his wife died soon after: the two stillborn babies shortened her life, her strength had gone into pregnancies, births, and it turned out that the boy was the only thing keeping her in this world. Her life poured into him at birth, more than usual with mother and child; the boy, firstborn and only son, absorbed too much of his mother—not in looks or personality, but in the ability to live, the life force, and she was an accidental victim.
When he was ill, so was she—her inner state was a mirror of his; you could put two thermometers next to each other, and the mercury was always in the same place, as if only one person’s temperature had been taken. The mother seemed to have yielded life to her son; without the intervention of doctors and a caesarean birth he would have died in her womb, and so he lived illegally, on the margin; there was no place for him in life, life did not open for him, welcoming him, giving him a place, and so the boy was defenseless, without the protection everyone has as a birthright. Everything was dangerous and hazardous for him—nails, slippery ice, drafts; every accident, everything unforeseen or unprepared was attracted to him; the boy lived using his life strength faster than it could be replenished, and his mother—his mother depended on him, and when he died in the quarry, she did not survive it.
Grandfather II was left alone; he seemed not to have noticed his wife’s death, but in fact it changed him. He had met his wife before becoming the man he now was, sacrificing his son to the camp and the quarry; his wife remembered the former man, and her memory, which he had no control over even had he wished for it, was an obstacle, it held him back; their joint life created borders, limits for his inner changes.
Grandfather II had simply chosen her—in his insensitive male simplicity—and she married him for life until death, and the fact that her womb was dead and she no longer had children by him did not yet mean that their connection was lost; a woman creates a man not through her wishes but by the moral impossibilities that her presence entails. When the connection between a man and a woman is broken by her disappearance, the man can quickly fall apart morally, if his surroundings are conducive to that, because he no longer encounters the honesty of flesh, fidelity, and the woman no longer supports him invisibly, he no longer has the support of even the habit of her existence.
For Grandfather II the collapse was manifested in this manner: he moved entirely into the realm of death, now certain that only death was constant and not subject to randomness; he started testing people with death—will the person succumb or not—as if trying to understand why his son died.
At that time a group of kulak peasants arrived at the camp; they were not supposed to be used in the works—the order was to send them even farther, to the low reaches of the river not far from the town; the idea was for the kulaks to colonize a wild region, but anyone who was aware that downriver was just forest and tundra all the way to the ocean knew that colonize was just a euphemism.
The echelons arrived when the rivers had opened from the ice; just then there was a collapse in a recently started shaft.