Work stopped in the pit face; the geologists agreed that one more round of detonations would get them past the danger zone, and the collapsed rock could be reinforced, held by steel supports, welded with cement. But someone had to go into the pit and drill openings, five-meter blast holes for the charge; they couldn’t reinforce anything before the repeated round of explosions, because it would destroy the reinforcement.
The men who had survived the collapse refused to go; Grandfather II drove to the mine. Everyone thought he would threaten them with execution and wondered which death—bullet or rock—would triumph. But Grandfather II did not send the surviving miners into the pit; he stood at the opening, which even on a hot day sends out a cool dampness, inhaling the mineral smell of smashed shale mixed with the stink of explosives; water dripped from all the cracks, and rocks fell from the vault, and it seemed that underground the mountain’s heavy, slow mind moved damply; it did not avenge or threaten—it simply turned over, unable to comprehend its own existence. The growth of crystals, the movement of rock is measured in so many years that the stone would not notice human events; while we, going underground, enter compressed eras, find ourselves in a past so remote that the length of our lives is reduced to zero.
That is why it is so scary when stone separates, crumbles, comes alive, there is something that is not quite a natural catastrophe about it—it is ossified time falling apart, the very foundation of the world, what is supposed to be solid and hold the rest; you have to be a demiurge, a titan, to step into that catastrophe and find what inner resources are needed to withstand it.
I don’t know what Grandfather II was feeling as he looked into the opening; but he ordered the kulaks brought there, the ones who were supposed to be sent to the lower reaches of the river. They were brought over, still in their old clothes; the prisoners were as worn as objects can be, as if they’d been rubbed out on the wooden bunks, yet they stood casually, some buttoned up, some not, they stood too freely; Grandfather II ordered the announcement to be made—whoever takes the risk and enters the mine, drills the blast holes to create a second, artificial collapse, will not be sent to the tundra, but kept in the camp.
Grandfather II probably figured that if anyone did accept, he would die in the mine. But ten men headed by the former village elder, who had never seen a mine drill before, managed to move quietly through the shaft, freezing at every creak, drill the wall as indicated on the map, and return unharmed; death did not take the exiles.
Maybe Grandfather II would have kept his promise, but he learned there at the mine that all ten came from the same region as the carver who had made the whistle and had been sent to fell trees; the former elder even had time to be pleased that the camp warden knew their home places, he thought there might be a possibility of leniency in that—but Grandfather II was already in the car giving orders to prepare the next step.
All the exiles were taken along the embankment of the railroad under construction to the river, where they were loaded on barges; the convoy soldiers returned alone and they said nothing—the people were dropped off on an island and the tugboats and barges left; since then many others were sent there, some managed to survive and start a settlement, but no one knew anything about the fate of that first group; where the island was or what had happened.
About a year later Grandfather II went blind. In late spring when there is still snow on the tundra but the sun shines brightly, the snow, icy, sugary, brilliant, reflects the harsh light, and a haze of light hangs over the tundra. It does not envelop the eyes like fog, it burns them like a magnifying glass on wood; the flood of light, anticipating the high water, gives birth to an inflamed day, and the eyes become inflamed by the unnatural whiteness.
In late spring Grandfather II traveled by car to a distant village along the ice road, still unmelted and made by trucks, like a log road through the impassable tundra swamps. A stream undermined the ice, washed out the road, and Grandfather II’s car crashed, the concussed driver drowned, and Grandfather II was left in the tundra dozens of kilometers from anywhere.
It was not a great distance, a few days’ walk, but the sun was so strong, the snows had still not melted, and the rays of reflected light turned into razor blades; whiteness looked into Grandfather II’s eyes—not the blurred, myopic whiteness of snowfall but the morbid whiteness of sparkling ice that steals the color of the sky.
Nature’s white is blind, it has no depth or perspective as does black, for instance; white in the North is the profound color of nonexistence, the color of death, a color wall that removes the distinctions of closer and farther, and locks a person inside it. The world turns into a sphere without horizon, and eyes ache because while seeing they do not see, there is nothing to see except the color white, which drives you insane with its stolidity, its indivisibility into shades, its thing-like solidness—it feels as if you could tear it apart with your hands, chop it with an ax. You fall into a coloristic trance, into monotonous color madness; whiteness enters the visual nerve as a blinding injection, and only the emptiness of white remains, smooth and scorching.
In two days, Grandfather II went blind: the tundra took away his eyes. He was found by men sent from the village he was traveling to, they found him by accident: one of the men in the truck was a soldier of the “flying” squads that went out to catch fugitives; a lot of people tried escaping over the spring snow crust, and the soldier knew how to look and still protect his eyes from the sun and ice—through smoked glass; and through the smoked glass he saw a dark dot far from the road in a long declivity; if he had just been looking with his naked eye, even with his hand shading his eyes, the black dot would have been swallowed and dissolved by the glare.
Grandfather II almost died; he dared to test death on others and was thrown into it himself; he was pulled out, as if by his umbilical cord, by the sharp eyes of the searcher, but he paid for his salvation with blindness. His vision returned slightly, he nearly overcame the weakness, but then he lost his sight completely.
Now I knew what he always saw before him, the last thing his memory had retained—the color white; he tried to trick fate by inscribing characters upon the blank background; get back his son, and his vision would return, his past, too, and the years he did not see would vanish, as if they had never been.
PART 6
I still had to go to the river and find the exiles’ island—I had to travel the entire trajectory of Grandfather II’s fate; I felt that there, in that nook that even he did not know fully, was a limit; I called it the limit of oblivion.
I was stepping into a space where there were no witnesses. The island mentioned by the engraver was a point—a pulsating point where everything begins and where everything ends.
Bidding the engraver farewell, I left the town; I needed to hurry, as if a deadline loomed; I remembered my dream, the island of faces, the barge with prisoners and convoy guards, the closing doors of the holds; the time for wandering was coming to a close for me, the town was pushing me onto the road. The inner state I had maintained since the decision to learn everything about Grandfather II’s past was also running out; if you understand “inner state” to mean a readiness for perception, a lasting effort to be open to events, it also has a time limit which should not overstepped, otherwise, it’s all artificial respiration, self-inducement, and naked dutifulness.
I did not think about how I would return; the thought of returning would have turned my search for the island into a round-trip. But you couldn’t reach the island and then come back the same way—that contradicted its finality, the point’s absoluteness.