In the afternoon, Vasily arranged for us to borrow bikes from a friend, and the three of us rode the ten or so kilometres north to Sekirnaya Gora, Hatchet Hill. Oleg and I followed Vasily along a dirt track carving its way, an adder through grass, across the forest floor. Our path was obstructed sometimes by fallen logs, dense clumps of pine needles, and roots crawling out of the ground and over the earth. Once or twice a rabbit stopped suddenly to stare at us, apparently horrified, before disappearing into the trees. I passed close by the hanging branches of a pine and saw, up close, the remnants of the night’s rain clinging in droplets. And in the weight of that forest air I felt strangely moved, as if those drops had run down a face that I knew.
When we stopped for a rest, sitting on a few fallen logs with cigarettes, and tea from a thermos, Vasily told us about the winters on Solovetsky.
The way to recognise the truly cold days, he said, is when you see a bright, shining mist that completely fills the air. And when a person walks through it, their body forms a corridor in the thick whiteness, like a passageway. It holds the shape of their body in silhouette. After they have passed, the corridor remains and the silhouette of the vanished person is still present in the mist. You know, I remember looking out the window of our house as a boy, and I watched the town walk around without ever seeing a person. You could tell by the shapes in the mist whether a child, or a tall person, or two adults, had not long ago passed by.
Meanwhile, Vasily continued, those wooden cottages, just as you are staying in here, gradually they blacken a bit more each year. The wet wood is never able to dry. Each season those houses are victims of more rot and decay. And when the winds are thick, draughts of deathly cold come in through every gap in every windowsill, no matter how many layers of cotton wool, felt, rags you try to press into the edges.
And when the spring comes, said Vasily, his features crumpling as if in disgust, the earth moves as it warms and the permafrost in the earth releases its frozen pressure. The earth sags and the houses, my house, slide into the ground. Gradually they’re taken downwards, while the roads and yards wilt into the mud.
We took up our bikes again and rode for another twenty minutes or so, eventually slowing as we reached Ascension Skete at the top of the mountain. Long grass rose to our knees, forcing us to perform a disconcerting walk, goosestepping like soldiers. A small white church clung to the summit. It was crumbling from inside. Fresco faces clung in patches to the domed ceilings, as if disintegrating before our eyes. But if I focused on the scattered remains of paint, I could sometimes make out the side of a face, an eye or cheek, and then it seemed as though they were becoming more clearly defined, the faces emerging one after the other over the walls as if reappearing from oblivion, responding to our presence.
Behind the church, a tall flight of steps stretched up through the trees, seemingly infinite. It was called the Torturer’s Stair, Vasily told us without further comment. I looked up at that forest staircase and my gaze wavered with a strange feeling of vertigo as I tried to count the steps, one then another, losing track of the number and then beginning again, which caused them to jar out of focus, as if toppling out of control down towards us.
The mountain, Hatchet Hill, gazed over the waters and islands surrounding Solovetsky. I looked out across the green tops of the trees. Lakes cut patches in the forest like blue sky breaking through teal clouds. The ocean was faintly visible below us. In the streaks of grey water, I pictured the beluga whales with their doughy white skin. I imagined them turning over in their cool fluid world, both heavy and weightless, rolling their bodies and pushing forwards through the water. I knew they arrived in early summer, the belugi; they could have arrived already, or perhaps we’d just missed them. They were said to have a birdlike, twittering call, but we couldn’t hear it from where we were, up on the heights. Their sounds were said to travel faster than our human ears could catch; their call hitting objects in the water and then returning as echoes that only other belugi could understand.
We stood, three diminutive figures in the high landscape, water and forest appearing like a map below us. The environment was at times overwhelming, almost as if I truly was nothing without this presence, the absolute clarity of watery lake sheets and shifting winds and quiet soil.
And in that brief clarity I saw my confused mind as being like the layers underground. We must have as our perception a palimpsest—must be conscious of the space beyond the one we’re in, and pasts beyond the time we experience. Somehow, surely, we don’t forget everything.
Solovetsky seemed to bring out Oleg’s memories for him and he sometimes spoke about his father. Oleg told me for the first time that his father had been imprisoned when Oleg was a boy. We had been on the island a few days and were sitting outside, near a woodpile at the back of Vasily’s house. There was no fence bordering his property, so the rocky ground stretched on as if to the sea.
To see it all, Pasha. It’s good to finally see it, said Oleg.
He looked out over the ground, perhaps gazing all the way to the water.
I feel I’ve been walking towards this place for a long while, said Oleg. Since 1956, in fact. The year of Khrushchev’s famous Secret Speech. I suppose I would be what they now call a detya dvatsatovo syezda, a child of the Twentieth Party Congress, when Khrushchev made that speech condemning Stalin. That was the year I learnt there was something behind the silence around my own father’s imprisonment. The speech made me understand that the leader, not my father, was to blame and that it was not right for me to feel ashamed. They called those years the Thaw.
My parents, I think, had long settled into silence. I doubt it entered their minds to test the consequences of the Thaw. To them, any suggestion of public discussion about what they’d been through must have seemed both sudden and uncertain. In the silence of ice, to go with the metaphor, that frozen space felt safe for them, I suppose. It was all they knew. A thaw suggests uncertain ground, and nasty hidden cracks, sharp jagged things that might or might not be visible to the eye.
Whereas I was captivated by it all. I was just a young man. I read ravenously the discussion in the papers on the cult of Stalin, the letters about suffering. Letters from people feeling suddenly betrayed because of all they did not know; what had been done in the name of the system to which they had given their whole lives. And that was before we really knew the scale of death—it was nothing quite like glasnost. I brought the newspapers into the house but, almost as if they were stuck in a lake of ice themselves, they never moved from where I placed them on the table or the floor. My parents wouldn’t touch them. My mother once said, It was the time, and shrugged. It was the time. But she didn’t say any more.
I was so struck by the revelations, I think, because it opened the possibility of another life for me, one that meant I did not have to find a story to explain my father’s absence or his inability to work when he returned from the Gulag, or why my parents were so reclusive. For me it was connected to my need to live more truthfully.
I knew of others who, as far as I could see, denied the true identity of their parents for their whole lives. I had a friend at university whose father was in a camp, and if he ever had to fill out a form or submit anything official, he wrote that his father had died in 1942; an easy year in which to hide him, amid so much death.