The Wolves of Eternity, page 79
‘Me neither,’ I said.
We laughed and he gave me a hand securing it before I headed off, following the ring roads to the outskirts on the far side of the city. It was a lot further than Viktor had said. When I got there, it turned out to be little more than a village, the sun had just about set, only the rim of the flaming sphere still visible, and the dusk had already come creeping.
I couldn’t find the premises. The satnav led me to a sloping field surrounded by trees. The properties across the road belonged to a different address.
I climbed out and lit a smoke as the sun disappeared behind the forest in the distance. The field looked like it had just been mown. An old woman was pottering about, picking up sticks in a wheelbarrow she kept shoving on ahead of her.
I phoned Vika. He asked for the address I’d been given. It turned out there was a discrepancy, the one he’d got was slightly different, and when I plotted it into the satnav it said I was thirty kilometres off. I got in again, and as I pulled away I could see the darkness was really setting in. When I got there, it was pitch-black.
It was an old farm by the looks of it, and quite secluded. There was plenty of room out front, so I pulled up and parked, no need to go and knock, they’d have heard me come, if they hadn’t seen me.
A fat guy my own age appeared in the door of the main house and came towards me. Sweat had soaked through his T-shirt. His face was round, with a small mouth, his skin red with sunburn.
‘A tank for you,’ I said. ‘Where do you want it?’
‘Ah, good,’ he said. ‘It’s to go in the shed there.’
I turned my head in the direction he indicated.
‘It won’t go in there.’
‘Put it down in front of the doors. They’ll take care of it.’
I wondered who they might be, and backed the lorry as close as I could get.
When I got out, the man had gone. Looking at it again, maybe it would go inside, I thought. The shed doors looked both wide enough and tall enough.
I drew the bolt back and opened them, then threw the light switch on the wall inside.
The space was nearly empty apart from three tanks the same as the one I’d brought, standing next to each other at the far end.
What could be in them?
I went and stared up at them, put my hand against the metal, which was nice and cold. I tapped my knuckles against the side. Solid.
I went outside again. The air was completely still, so hot it felt almost unreal now that the sun had gone down. Some distance away, a bird sang. It sounded like a whistle. A reply came immediately from a different place.
The trees surrounding the property loomed like giants in the dark, as if bending forwards to examine something I couldn’t see.
I went up to the house and knocked.
The man came to the door.
‘Yes?’ he said. He wasn’t hostile, he just wasn’t that friendly.
‘I think I can get it inside for you after all. Do you want me to do that?’
‘That’d be fine,’ he said.
I hesitated.
‘Can I ask you something?’
He looked at me and blinked three times in quick succession.
‘What’s in those tanks?’
‘Dead bodies,’ he said.
‘Dead bodies?’ I said.
‘Yes. Human corpses. Six in each tank. Plus a few heads.’
‘Are you having me on?’
‘No. They’re frozen. People pay a lot of money. And I’m paid a lot of money for having them here. Was there anything else?’
‘Jeez . . . I mean, no. Do you want me to let you know when I’m done?’
‘No, not necessary.’
‘I’ll need you to sign for it now, then.’
He nodded and I went over to the cab to get the documents and a pen. He signed his name with a sigh and asked if that was all. I said it was, and he closed the door in my face.
I set the stabilisers and hooked things up, raised the tank a couple of metres, then went over to guide it as I swung it over the side. As I began lowering it to get it through the doors, I became aware of a bright light at the edges of my vision. I put the remote down on the ground and stepped away from the shed so I could see what it was.
It looked like the forest was on fire over there.
Hardly surprising in this weather.
Only then I realised it wasn’t a fire at all, the light was rising into the sky. It looked almost like the sun had decided to come up again.
What on earth was it?
A sphere of some sort. And it was ascending with great speed, already clear of the trees.
Was it something to do with the military?
The field and the premises I was standing on were illuminated now as if by the most powerful full moon.
It was so quiet I could hear myself breathing.
Without taking my eyes off the sky, I picked a cigarette out of the packet in my shirt pocket and lit one.
It was like being the last person alive on earth. As if there was only me and the star, or whatever it was. It felt like it was looking back at me, as intensely as I was looking at it.
I’d be able to read about it in the morning, I told myself, crushing the end of my cigarette under the sole of my boot and returning to the job at hand. The tank touched down with a hollow clang. I undid the hooks and retracted the crane. Bolting the heavy shed doors again, I looked up once more at the sky.
And then, a sound from inside.
I stopped and listened.
A thudding of some sort. Faint, as if from somewhere far away.
No rat or mouse would make such a sound.
I opened the doors again, switched on the lights and went inside.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
It was coming from the tanks.
I stepped closer.
Thud.
I put my ear to the one nearest.
Thud. Thud.
There was someone in there. Or something.
I looked around. The place was as empty as before.
They must have livestock in them, I told myself. He’d been pulling my leg when he said it was dead bodies.
Maybe someone was watching on closed circuit, having a good laugh at me.
I wasn’t going to fall for it.
I went back out, closed and bolted the doors again and climbed up into the cab. My hands were shaking as I turned the ignition. I’d never been as relieved in all my life when I got back onto the main road and picked up speed to get the hell away.
VASILISA
I was a poor sleeper at the best of times, waking every other hour through the night, and tormented by it, too. But I’d never known nights like the nights this summer. It was the heat, of course. It made everything so unpleasant. The sheet clung to my skin, which was so horribly sweaty, and I suffered constant headaches. Yet the worst thing was the claustrophobia, the sense that the heat was inescapable. It made my thoughts claustrophobic too, they churned, the same paltry trivialities, things I’d said or done once, and would not be controlled but led their own small and worthless lives inside the confines of my mind.
I cycled to the village one day to see if they might have a fan in the shop there, but of course they did not. The radio spoke constantly of record temperatures. Fifty degrees had already been surpassed in Yevpatoria and Makhachkala. The water pressure in the taps was so low it took five minutes to fill a small saucepan. For the garden it was disastrous. The grass crunched underfoot. But I had managed to rescue the fruit bushes, the vegetables and most of the perennials. I bound a pole to the handlebars and cycled the two kilometres to the river with a bucket at each end. The river had shrunk into a shallow stream, islands and banks had emerged where normally its waters gushed, but there was enough for my own purposes. I filled the buckets, hung them from the pole and walked the bicycle back home again. The last part of the way was along a surfaced road, and I mounted then, cycling without wobbles or swerves as I had learned from practice.
My feelings as I poured the water onto the rows of potato plants, for instance, were ambivalent: it was so marvellous to see it run out and be swallowed by the greedy soil, the transformation from pale, dusty dirt to dark, moisture-filled earth, yet so frustrating at the same time to see how little such a bucketful could stretch.
In a few weeks, perhaps even a few days, the low front would arrive. It had to. A rumbling in the distance, a bank of black cloud slowly approaching, plummeting temperatures, rising winds – and then the cacophony of lightning, thunder and pouring rain. It had happened last year, and it would happen this.
As I awaited the release, I plodded on. My days are ordered meticulously, it is most important to me. I rise at four, having slept or not, give the cat some food and water, then sit down at my rickety table and write for a couple of hours. Writing is a cooling activity, if one does it right. It cools the mind, it cools the soul. That is how I, at least, see it. Haste gives rise to friction, friction gives rise to heat, and this is true also of one’s thoughts, which so easily become frenzied and unhealthy when allowed too much leeway in a confined space. Writing slows them down, straightens them out, leads them with a gentle hand to places new, whose landscapes are open and free. Thereby comes the realisation that what exists here is by no means everything. And being here then becomes bearable, occasionally even meaningful.
At six o’clock I drink a cup of tea and eat some buttered bread before continuing my writing until ten. Then I will wash myself at the sink, get dressed and go out. If I need to buy groceries, I cycle to the shop, stopping off at the post office too, in case there are books for me to collect there, though otherwise it is to the river I go. Sometimes – every day in this period of hot weather – I walk along the bank to one of the few pools that are as yet deep enough for me to take a dip. How splendid it is, with the willow and the oak, and the meadows beyond, and the thought of how polluted the water is finds no traction, which is just as well.
Each afternoon, I sit out in the camping chair in the shade of the woodshed and read until I fall asleep. If fortune is with me, I may sleep two or even three hours. Then follows the time of day I care for the least, evening and night, before everything begins again the next morning.
It is not as I had imagined my life would be, and yet I have a hunch that it is as good as I could have expected, with the starting point I was allotted. To live is to adapt, adjust, amend; to use one’s abilities and skills, and accept one’s limitations. We cannot choose life, life chooses us. I could not have children, but I could write. I could not set boundaries, and so I moved to a place that did so for me.
Happiness is not to get what you want. Happiness is to get what you do not want, and learn to appreciate it.
I know people who got everything they wanted. What they have in common is that they don’t know they’ve even got it. One of the best examples is Alya, my old student friend. She is beautiful, men look at her, admire her, want her. She had a child when she was twenty, and a midlife crisis when she was forty, which she resolved by having another child. It will keep her young for another fifteen years and give meaning to her later days. She appreciates none of these things, for the simple reason that they have always been available to her. A bit like water in the tap. Only when it isn’t there do we miss it, only then does it become valuable to us – even if it has been keeping us alive the whole time.
I will not go as far as Cicero, who wrote that whoever owns a garden and a library will be happy. Now and then it feels as if a shotgun and a library would be more appropriate. But as an ideal, I believe it. A garden is life, the world, always different, always the same. A library is hope, but also comfort.
To pull up carrots when they are ready to be harvested, their tufty tops of green bringing to mind medieval knights, their slender orange bodies gleaming in their conical shape as they release the dark, fat soil, is not only an aesthetically beautiful and ethically satisfying act – I have grown them myself in my own garden – it is also profoundly meaningful. The same is true of the raspberries that sit so crimson in all the green, rumpled and matt with their many small pads of refreshing juice and tiny dry seeds; or the smooth, glassy casing of the redcurrants, startling red among their verdant foliage; or, for that matter, the potatoes that lie blind and mute under the soil and have themselves become earthlike in their dark, dry skins, staunchly concealing their secret, which is that their flesh is as creamy white as the wood beneath the overlaying bark of a tree, or the teeth behind the lips of almost anyone a hundred years ago. To dig in the soil, to grow fruit and vegetables, to see the cycle of the seasons, is to belong to the world, to be a part of what the carrots, the raspberries, the redcurrants and the potatoes too are a part of.
But how long can one be sustained by such a feeling?
Not long.
The meaning it carries comes in the blink of an eye, and is gone in the blink of an eye.
I potter about here, tidying up and clearing away now and again, reading and writing, thinking, perhaps thinking too much. But what is my experience, my understanding, my insight worth if I cannot share it with someone? I’m thinking not of friends and acquaintances, who I can phone or go and see any time I like, but of a son or a daughter. No one will inherit the insights I have gained. No one will embrace them or distance themselves from them. They mean nothing to anyone but me.
Is that why meaning fails, because I am the end of the line?
Alya once spoke to me about her father, a colossal reader of literature who never put what he gleaned there to any use, never put pen to paper, for instance, in that respect. His reading, so unique to the person he was, came as it were to nothing, everything he gained from it was gone when he died in the spring this year. What good did such a large-scale acquisition of knowledge do anyone in the end?
This of course is true of all of us. What is our hard-won experience worth, if we are only to die? What value can be attached to the things we have seen and done? What were they for?
Some years ago I wrote a preface to a book about Fyodorov and Russian cosmism and was gripped by Fyodorov’s idea of reviving all those who have ever lived. My preface was rejected, but my editor asked me to elaborate and expand upon it. With the exception of two month-long hiatuses during which time I devoted myself to writing poetry, that work has been my work in progress ever since. What do we lose when we lose a person to death? That is its focus. I have written about the final days of a handful of individuals. Some from my own life – my grandmother and grandfather, my mother and my younger brother – some from history – Tolstoy, Napoleon, Woolf, Curie, Tsvetaeva, Rilke. The days leading up to their crossing the bridge into the realm of death, the days prior to life’s flame being extinguished, of what they carry within, that cannot go with them, and yet cannot be left behind for the benefit of others.
Would I have been writing such a monograph if I’d had a daughter?
Would it have been necessary for me then?
I don’t know.
But I have a garden and I have a library. And the longing for everything else. It would be easy to believe that longing is that which is not, that which is absent, but it is not the case, longing too is something that is, and it too is valuable. I use it in order to write.
Longing is something. Death is something
My younger brother. Mikhail was his name. Little Misha. He was nine years old when he died, and his death tore the family to pieces. I was fifteen at the time. Writing about his life, as I have done, was not the healing activity I had anticipated it would be. All it was was dreadful.
He had been playing on his own, had found a length of rope and hanged himself.
Had he simply been playing a game, without realising how dangerous it was?
Or had he, oh God, done it intentionally?
I remember Mama and Papa coming home with him, my new baby brother. I remember the first steps he took, I remember his first words, and I remember his infectious laughter.
And then: nothing more.
He has been with me in all I have written, as he is with me now, as I write these words. When the darkness opens, it opens and can never be forgotten. One may tell oneself that death is part of life, and indeed I tell myself that it is so, for there is certainly a truth in it, but it is not the case that death is an inversion of life, its shadow as it were. Rather, the opposite is true. Life is an inversion of death. It is death that rules. We are all of us death’s children.
* * *
*
I forgot to mention the trains here. The ones that come in the night, one-eyed as the Cyclops, rushing through the landscape on their iron rails. I like them best in winter when the snow cloaks the locomotive in a thin, transluscent shroud of white, cast from the blades of its plough, but also in summer I like them, not so much in the day as in the night, in the darkness, for the trains belong to the dark. That evening, when the new star appeared, it was the train that woke me up. I’d been sitting in the chair with my book on my lap, my bucket hat on my head, and had slept for some hours, until a train tooted in the distance and everything seemed to tremble in anticipation of its appearance. I didn’t know who or where I was, for the darkness in the garden where I sat was dense, yet the fields were illuminated in a ghostly light, as if by a full moon, and the fact that I had never seen such a light before, infused my first conscious thoughts with a fundamental uncertainty. But my chair was familiar, my little garden was familiar, and when I got to my feet and went over to the fence, already confident in myself again, the only thing I did not recognise was the new star, shining magnificently from an otherwise inky night sky.
The train approached, a metallic whoosh that rose in intensity as it emerged from out of the darkness, a beam of light projecting from its headlamps, the windows of its carriages a glow, and then it was past and all its noise subsided.
