The next day at 9:00 a.m. Masha and I entered the building housing the Mining Institute. We walked down a dim hallway and soon stopped near a door with a new copper plate that read METEORITE DEPARTMENT. The plate looked unusual. Masha knocked on the door. No one answered. She put her ear to the door.
“Lord, don’t tell me he’s already in a meeting!”
“Not yet, but he’ll definitely be heading there soon,” came a slightly haughty, high-pitched voice behind our backs.
We turned around. Before us stood a thin man with glasses and thick, light-brown mustaches à la Nietzsche. He was dressed in an emphatically casual manner.
“Leonid Andreich!” Masha prattled, and I realized that she was deeply in love with Kulik.
“This is your protégé?” asked Kulik, glancing at me with his intelligent, piercing, and somewhat mocking eyes. “He’s the one who was born June 30, 1908?”
“Yes...this is Snegirev. He’s been dismissed from the university, but he’s — ” Masha muttered, but Kulik interrupted her.
“I don’t care about that. Have you been on an expedition before?”
“No.”
“All right,” Kulik’s eyes drilled right through me. “Do you know how to dig?”
“Well...” I faltered.
“Haul heavy loads?”
“In principle...yes.”
“In principle! Well, I’ll tell you the way it goes.” Kulik took out a worn, gilded watch, looked at it, and put it back. “In principle, I’ll get rid of you halfway there. And now — follow me.”
He turned sharply on his thin legs and took off in a sweeping stride, almost running along the hallway. Masha and I hurried after him. Kulik turned once, twice, ran up a staircase, and disappeared into the open doors of an auditorium. We ran in after him.
“Close the door!” he shouted from the rostrum.
With a habitual movement Masha fastened the hook. I sat at the edge of the room, half turned, and surveyed the place: there were sixteen people sitting in the spacious lecture hall.
Kulik took out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped his glasses. He put them on, immediately took complete control of the rostrum with his long, wiry fingers, and began speaking.
“Hello, comrades. Now then, today we will get acquainted with our greenhorn meteorologists, that is, the newcomers, and we’ll correct the vector of our route to the place where the Tungus meteorite fell. Considering that only three of you remain from last year’s expedition, since the rest I had to throw out to the dogs, I’ll begin by introducing each of you.”
He opened a thick, well-thumbed notebook and introduced everyone, naming each person’s surname and profession. He didn’t mention me. Closing the notebook with a bang, Kulik continued.
“Now I will permit myself to make a short announcement about the so-called Tungus meteorite, because of which so many spades have been broken and so many kilometers traversed. Thus, on June 30, 1908, a huge fireball fell to earth in eastern Siberia. Siberians saw and heard its fall; it created quite a hullabaloo and left incredible traces: a powerful wave of sound carried across all Siberia, forests were felled over hundreds of square kilometers, and there was a huge flash of light and an earthquake, recorded by an impartial seismograph in the basement of the Irkutsk observatory. The meteorite was seen not only by thousands of illiterate and superstitious inhabitants of eastern Siberia but by completely civilized people looking out the window of a train near Kansk — with whom I have had lengthy discussions. To summarize the accounts of eyewitnesses, it can be confidently stated that a huge meteorite fell in Siberia, probably one of the largest that has ever plummeted to earth. But twenty years ago meteorite studies had not yet won irrefutable rights to citizenship as an independent science. Meteorites were studied not only by scientists but by blatant charlatans, who introduced many lies and much confusion into the story of the Tungus meteorite. To the shame of our native science, no one even tried to organize an expedition in the hot traces, literally speaking, of the meteorite: the whole thing ended with a dozen newspaper articles and pseudoscientific publications. And it was only under Soviet power that your humble servant was able to organize the first meteorite expedition, in the difficult year of 1921, thanks to the personal support of People’s Commissar Lunacharsky. Comrade Lunacharsky got the necessary sums of money through Narkompros, and NKPS — the Commissariat of Communications — sent a train car for the expedition and provided the necessary equipment. Nikolai Savelevich Trifonov, who is here with us, is the next-to-the-last of the Mohicans of that legendary expedition — en route he will tell you in more detail about the first campaign for the Tungus marvel. The first expedition didn’t find the meteorite, but was able to precisely define the area of its fall: the basin of the Stony Tunguska River, or Katanga as the Evenki people call it. Having systematically analyzed the eyewitness evidence of the fall, I came to the conclusion presented in my article for the journal Earth Science: a meteorite of colossal size fell in eastern Siberia in 1908. Unfortunately, for a number of objective and subjective reasons, one of which was NEP, the next expedition was able to leave Leningrad for Siberia only last year. This time we were aided by the academician Vernadsky and by Comrade Bukharin personally. Expedition No. 2 almost made it to the place where the meteorite fell. But ‘almost’ doesn’t count in science, comrade meteorologists. The mistake of the second expedition was in its choice of time. In order to get through the swamps of the taiga, we decided to leave for Katanga in February, when the ice would establish a natural means of access across the bogs. On the one hand, this helped; on the other, it hindered us. The horses couldn’t make it from Vanavara along the deer trails to the place where the forest had been felled: there was too much snow. Making an agreement with the Evenki, Trifonov and I traveled on reindeer, sending the whiners and panic-mongers back to Taishet. Alas, not every scientist is prepared to suffer in the name of science! After three days of the most difficult route across the snow-covered taiga, our indefatigable Evenki guide, Vasily Okhchen, brought us to the edge of the collapsed forest. When Nikolai Savelevich and I climbed a hill and saw the felled, broken trees stretching to the very horizon, we felt genuine terror and joy: such a phenomenal destruction of the taiga could have happened only by the volition of an enormous meteorite! What an incredible spectacle! Centuries-old trees had been snapped like pencils! That was the power of a messenger from space that fell to earth! No wonder that the Evenki refused to go farther — the shamans forbade them to enter the ‘accursed place.’ When the meteorite fell, some of them had deer that perished there and tents that burned. Okhchen will forever remember the terrible rumble and the fire from the sky. Yes! Not only was the forest felled, it burned, was scorched by the fierce fire from the explosion. And so, comrades, the second expedition turned back. Expedition No. 3 is now in this auditorium. And I would verrrry much like to hope that it will not be overtaken by the sad fate of the second expedition! Henceforth, I will be merciless toward whiners and panic-mongers. I am certain that there are none among you. And so! There are more of us this time. There are people here of different professions: astronomers, geophysicists, meteorologists, drillers, and even a cameraman. The student enthusiasts desiring to come with us will, I hope, satisfy their longing for discoveries and adventures. We are taking serious gear with us: equipment for meteorological, hydrological, geological, and photographic work, sets of drills, a water pump, and various other instruments. Now, about the route...”
Kulik stepped down from the podium, unrolled a map lying on the table, hung it on a blackboard, and picked up a wooden pointer.
“We leave tomorrow from Moscow station. We will travel by train to Taishet. There we will be met by thirty wagons, which will take us and the equipment four hundred kilometers along the horse route to the village of Kezhma on the Angara River, where we will change horses, saddle up, and ride over the taiga path another two hundred kilometers to the village of Vanavara on the banks of the Stony Tunguska. There is a Gostorg trading station in that settlement that supplies the Evenki with goods, gunpowder, and small shot in exchange for fur pelts. The last outpost of civilization, so to speak. The location of the meteorite’s landing is eighty kilometers to the north of Vanavara. We will get there on foot, following the reindeer trail. On passing into the forest blast zone and determining the exact place where the meteorite landed, we will build a barracks from the timber the meteorite has already felled for us, have a housewarming party, and begin our scientific activity. Any questions?”
The plump astronomer Ikhilevich raised his hand. “How long might the expedition last?”
“Colleague, don’t pose metaphysical questions,” Kulik retorted. “Until we find it!”
“As long as the provisions last,” smiled the homely Trifonov.
“Until the cold hits!” the small, fidgety driller Gridiukh added.
A slouching student enthusiast with a barely distinguishable beard stood up. “Comrade Kulik, is it true that smokers...well...you don’t take them?”
“That’s the genuine truth, young man! I cannot abide tobacco smoke. And I believe smoking to be a most harmful habit of the old world. You and I are building a new world. So make your choice — tobacco or the Tungus meteorite!”
Everyone laughed. The student scratched his chin. “Well, I guess ...the meteorite.”
“An excellent choice, young man!” Kulik exclaimed.
Everyone laughed even louder.
“Oh, God.” Masha shook her head. “How awful that he doesn’t take women on expeditions. It’s such a mistake! I would keep a journal...”
“One more thing, comrades!” said Kulik, growing serious. “The local population that we will be working with — the Evenki and Angara peoples — prefer goods to money, and most of all gunpowder, shot, and alcohol. We have an abundance of ammunition, but we aren’t getting much alcohol. So if each of you could bring a flask of alcohol, it would noticeably hasten our progress across the taiga. Questions? No? Then — to work, comrades! Nikolai Savelevich will instruct you further.”
“I’ll ask everyone to proceed to packing the baggage,” said Trifonov, standing.
The group stood up and people began talking. Kulik took off his glasses and wiped them, squinting shortsightedly.
“Oh, yes! One more thing...”
Everyone immediately fell silent. Kulik put his glasses on and looked at me. “Among us there will be a person who was born at the moment the Tungus meteorite fell.”
And I realized that Kulik had accepted me on the expedition only because of this. Everyone turned toward me with curiosity.
“Where were you born?” asked Trifonov.
“About thirty versts north of Petersburg,” I answered.
“Kilometers, kilometers, young man!” Kulik corrected me. “Your mother heard the thunder during the birth?”
“She did hear it. And she wasn’t the only one,” I answered.
“It was heard all over Russia that day,” the glum geologist Yankovsky spoke up.
“And what else were you told about the day of your birth? Was there anything else unusual?” asked Kulik, staring intently at me.
“Unusual...” I thought a minute and suddenly remembered. “Of course. There was something. My family said that there was no night at all. And the sky was lit up.”
“Absolutely right!” Kulik raised a long finger. “This phenomenon was noted along the entire coast of the Baltic Sea, in the northern parts of Europe and Russia — from Copenhagen to Yeniseisk! An anomalous luminescence of the atmosphere!”
“Which Torvald Kohl and Herman Seidel wrote about,” nodded Ikhilevich. “A bright dawn and dusk, a massive development of silvery clouds...”
“The mass accumulation of silvery clouds...” Kulik repeated in a loud voice. He grew thoughtful and suddenly banged his fist on the rostrum. “This time we are obliged to find the meteorite!”
“We’ll find it! It won’t get away from us! That’s why we’re going!” Everyone began talking at once.
“Sasha, Sasha, it’s so wonderful!” Masha turned her reddened face toward me. “Find it, find the Tungus meteorite!”
“I’ll try,” I muttered without much enthusiasm.
I just wanted to travel somewhere. To travel and travel, as I did back then.
The next day we left on the Leningrad–Moscow–Irkutsk train, in which we had been assigned an entire car. The four days to Taishet passed in conversations and arguments in which I was a passive listener. In our car, No. 12, they argued about topical questions: Communism, free love, industrialization, world revolution, the structure of the atom, and, of course, the Tungus meteorite. All this was accompanied by what was excellent food for that time, and endless drinking of tea with unlimited sugar, which for me, after my half-starved existence, was particularly pleasant. Having stuffed myself with horse sausage, Baltic herring, boiled eggs, and bread with cow’s milk butter, and drunk my fill of strong tea, I climbed onto the top bunk and, half asleep, looked out the window where the endless Vologodsky and Viatsky forests sailed by. After the low Ural Mountains, that view was replaced by the incomparable Siberian landscape. From Chelyabinsk all the way to Novosibirsk the depths of an ancient sea, according to Kulik, stretched in boundless breadth, overgrown with pine and larch. Gazing at these expanses I fell asleep.
Relations among members of the expedition were good, everyone was friendly and well disposed. The mysterious meteorite, which the Soviet newspapers had begun to write about, thanks to Kulik, captivated and excited the imagination. I liked to think about it when I lay on the top bunk. But I always imagined it still gliding through the Universe. That way was even more pleasurable for me. Arguments about its composition, velocity, and size went on endlessly. Kulik infected everyone with his enthusiasm, which bordered on fanaticism. For this everyone forgave him his dictatorial manner, his everyday terrorism and intolerance in discussion. On the expedition he called everyone “comrade,” as a matter of principle, ignoring names and patronymics. After the victory of the Soviets in Russia, his “scientific Marxism” grew even stronger. Kulik deified “Stalin’s iron consistency” and believed in a coming Soviet economic leap capable of “proving to the whole world the dialectical objectivity of our path.”
We arrived in Taishet in the morning.
We were met by men driving solid Siberian carts, hot sunny weather, and clouds of mosquitoes. I had never seen such quantities of bloodsucking insects in the air before. Everyone was given a panama hat with cheesecloth netting, manufactured according to Kulik’s design, since he had a great deal of experience in dealing with the local mosquitoes. In these identical gray panamas we looked like Chinese peasants. Loading ourselves onto the carts, we set off for our distant destination along a tract that our drivers called “the highway” — a wide but uneven packed-earth road, pocked with ruts and potholes. Fortunately for us, June 1928 turned out dry in eastern Siberia, and the mud puddles on the road were entirely surmountable. The bridges over small rivers, however, were almost all in a sorry state and required repair. Some of them had been almost completely destroyed by the spring floods. We had to go around them and cross at a ford. When, once more pushing our carts over a shaky bridge in a hurry, Kulik would quote a French traveler: “And along the way we came across constructions that had to be circumvented, and which in Russian were called ‘Le Most.’”
The road lay through the hilly taiga, where a mixed forest grew. But the summits of these smooth hills, which the locals called mounds, were entirely covered in thick pine growth. These amazing virgin woodlands reminded me of the manes of sleeping monsters. The slender ship timber grew incredibly thick, and when the wind began to toss the trees, they came alive, and with them the whole mound appeared to awaken, and it seemed that a sleeping monster was just about to rise up, straighten himself out, and fill the taiga expanses with a powerful, resounding roar.
Despite the primeval nature of this region, we rarely came across actual animals: someone spotted a marten once, and a moose.
We traveled very slowly, taking almost a week, spending the nights in small villages that looked like northern Russian farmsteads. The endless taiga spread out around five or six isbas made of hundred-year-old pines, enclosed with high pike fences to keep out animals. The locals were always happy to see us. Simple-hearted people, inured to hardship by Siberia’s harshness, they lived primarily by hunting, fishing, and income from people passing along the “highway,” for whom a separate hut with a stove and bunks always stood ready. We paid them with gunpowder and alcohol. Soviet money was still rare here, and Stalin’s program of mass collectivization had not yet reached these wild places. The villagers fed us freshly caught fish, fried mushrooms, dried game, and the customary flour-meal soup, spiced with wild garlic, wild onions, dried carrots, and salted deer or moose. We slept side by side in huts, bathhouses, sheepfolds, and haylofts. But our undemanding drivers would place their carts in a circle at night, bring all the horses inside the circle, light campfires in a circle around them, and sleep on the carts, covering themselves, despite the summer weather, with the ever-present sheepskin.
On the sixth day our wagon train arrived in Kezhma.
A large settlement with a hundred or so houses stood on a high, beautiful bank of the Angara — a wide, powerful river. Dropping off sharply, the banks turned into a small shoal beyond which this mighty river flowed. The water in it, as in all Siberian rivers, was cold and unbelievably pure. The wooded shore on the other side stretched steeply into the distance.
The village was inhabited primarily by Russians, who were called Angars, and the rare, Russianized Evenki. Everyone worked in hunting and fishing. The hunted pelts were handed over to the government for very small sums, and fish, moose, and reindeer fed them reliably all year long. The Angars did not keep domesticated animals.
In Kezhma our expedition’s Gostorg credit kicked in: we received eight sacks of dried pike, muksun whitefish, and peled whitefish; three barrels of salted white salmon; a small barrel of lard; and a couple of bags of fish flour. Having bathed and sat in the Siberian steam bath, we gave ourselves over to the hospitality of the local leader, a former chairman of the agricultural soviet and local director of Gostorg. He treated Kulik like an old pal, showed him an article clipped from a Taishet newspaper about last year’s expedition. The fellow was most happy that we had “made it all the way here from Petersburg, where Ilyich set up a real carousel for the bourgeois.” A former Red partisan who had fought in the Urals, after the Bolsheviks’ victory they sent him to distant Kezhma “to carry out the Party line.” Arriving here with a cavalry squadron, he “definitively and irreversibly decided the question of Soviet power in Kezhma” over the course of three days: he shot twelve people.
“Now I understand — I should have shot more,” he admitted to us candidly over a glass of alcohol diluted with the cold Angara river water.
In Kezhma he had two wives — the old one and a new one — who got along wonderfully and made a real feast for us: the long, crude table in the director’s isba was groaning with victuals. Here, for the first time in my life, I tried dumplings with bear lard and shangi — little wheat cakes fried on a skillet and covered with sour cream. The boss knew only one thing about the meteorite: “Something crashed there and knocked the forest down.” He was categorical in his parting words, advised us not to stand on ceremony with the Evenki, and if necessary to “beat them between their slanted eyes with a rifle butt.” He attributed the failure of last year’s expedition entirely to the sabotage of the native population and Kulik’s “rotten softheartedness.” He referred to the Evenki as Tunguses and saw them as hidden enemies of Soviet rule.
“At first I thought: they live in tents in the taiga, eat simple, dress simple, shit in the open — of course they’ll support Soviet power. But it turns out they’re more kulak than the worst kulaks! All they do is count who has the most reindeer. They need their own revolution! A Tungus Lenin is what they need!”
Kulik tried to object, saying that the main problem of the backward peoples of the USSR was general illiteracy, which had been advantageous to the czarist regime for exploiting them; that the Party had already begun working on this, organizing isba reading rooms and schools for the indigenous people; and that the Evenki, like all the peasants and animal herders, would soon be collectivized. But the headman was unswayable.
“Andreich, if it was my job, I’d collectivize them in my own way: into a cart, to the city with them, do the dirty work, the digging. The shovel will reeducate them! And I’d slaughter all the reindeer and send them off to the starving peasants of the Volga region.”
“We conquered famine in the Volga region two years ago,” Kulik informed him proudly.
“Really?” smiled the tipsy, red-faced boss. “Well, then, we’ll eat the reindeer ourselves.”
In the morning we donned our backpacks, having placed in them only the necessary provisions, saddled up the local horses, and set off along a narrow path beaten down by the reindeer. From Kezhma to the Stony Tungus River we had another two hundred kilometers north to travel. The wagon train with the main baggage took off after us.
The tract passed through hills and mounds. Uphill we rode at a walk, going down we drove our slow, broad-chested horses as fast as we could. They got extremely frightened when there was a long descent. Then — up a hill once again, and so on, endlessly.
On the mounds the taiga changed: pine gave way quickly to conifers, and the mixed forest crawled down into a valley; the land gradually became covered with moss and lichen. Animals could be seen frequently. The men met them with cries. Wild birds flew up from the thickets, flapping their heavy wings. I saw Siberian weasels and ermines several times. Scared by us, they shot up the trees in a flash and disappeared in the branches. There were two inveterate hunters among us: the driller Petrenko and the geologist Molik. At the first stop they set off for game and returned fairly quickly with a wood grouse. The large, beautiful bird was plucked, gutted, cut in strips, and boiled with wheat porridge, but its meat turned out to be tough and tasted like pine. During the first expedition Kulik had staked a lot on the local game, hoping to supplement the food with it. But he’d had no luck: during the expedition they had shot only an inedible fox and a few ducks. Our first night in the taiga wasn’t easy: we cut off pine branches and constructed beds for ourselves, lay down around the fire, and tried to fall asleep, covering ourselves with our outer clothing. But despite the warm summer weather an eternal cold was exuded by the stony, mossy earth, and it seeped through our clothes. From above, we were harassed by mosquitoes, which didn’t diminish in number even at night. Among the tribe of mosquitoes appeared tiny, nimble, furious individuals called midges. With a revolting whine they found their way up sleeves and crawled into the eyes and nostrils. It was impossible to fight them off. We took Kulik’s advice and rubbed our wrists and necks with kerosene. Soon the whole expedition began to stink like a kerosene shop. The next three nights were just as hard: people didn’t get enough sleep; they cussed and tried to escape the night cold and mosquitoes; during the day they shivered half asleep in their saddles. But Kulik was inflexible. He woke us at exactly six o’clock with the whistle he carried in his breast pocket, keeping the expedition on an iron schedule. He gave the commands for starting up and for stopping with this whistle. His main motto was: For the sake of a great goal you can put up with everything. In people he valued willpower and focus above all, and in the material world — books. Sitting with us at the campfire, he told us how Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation helped him to stop smoking when he was in exile.
“I had been reading it for days on end, and one morning I left my shack, walked over to the ice hole, and poured out an entire year’s supply of tobacco with the words: ‘Let the fish smoke. I — am a man of will.’”
Like other social democrats who became Bolshevik, he lived for the future, piously believing in the new Soviet Russia.
“Science should help the Revolution,” he would say.
He thought GOELRO, Lenin’s plan to bring electricity to the whole country, was brilliant and prophetic, and that Stalin’s program of industrialization and collectivization was simply the dictate of the time. But his primary passion was still the Tungus meteorite. When he started talking about it, Kulik completely forgot about Stalin and GOELRO.
“Just imagine, comrades, a piece of another planet, separated from us by millions of kilometers, broke off and is lying somewhere here, not far away.” Kulik paused, straightened his glasses, which reflected the flame of the campfire, and raised his head slightly toward the pale Siberian stars. “And in it is the material of other worlds!”
This phrase gave me goose bumps: the familiar, beloved world of the planets surfaced in my memory. Falling asleep on a pile of pine branches, covering myself from the head down to escape the midges, I imagined that mysterious piece of other worlds in black airless space as it flew toward the Earth and shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. It spun in my head. Plunging into sleep, I counted its corners...
Finally, toward the evening of the fourth day, swollen from midge bites and badly bruised from the jolting ride across the mounds, we approached Vanavara.
A dozen new wooden houses clung to the very shores of the Stony Tungus River: a few years earlier the trading station at Vanavara had been rebuilt. The biggest, sturdiest log house had the word GOSTORG inscribed on it in large white letters, and a faded red flag hung nearby. Around the settlement spread a marvelously beautiful landscape: the very high, sharply descending cliffs of the river’s shore were surrounded by thick taiga. The opposite, southern shore, on the contrary, was fairly low, and beyond it, all the way to the horizon itself, blue-green waves of hills scampered endlessly, flooded by the rays of the sunset. Eagles glided in the rosy-blue evening sky where the moon was becoming faintly visible. Their short cries were the only sounds that disturbed the absolute silence.
But then dogs, spying us, began to bark, and people came out of the houses. They greeted Kulik and Trifonov like family. For this trading post isolated in the taiga, our arrival was an event. A bath was fired up in the bathhouse that stood below on the riverbank. They didn’t begrudge firewood for it, and the steam filled the room in thick whirls. When we had sat in the steam so long our skin was wrinkled and our eyes dimmed, we ran out on a little wooden dock and jumped into the cold Tungus. It was already getting dark. The northern white nights had passed, and a dark-blue sky scattered with stars hung over our heads. Turning onto my back and feeling the strong current of the river, I gazed at the stars. In Siberia they were higher up and seemed very far away.
They fed us fish stew and shangi and put us to bed. In the morning I looked over the trading post. Twenty-eight Russians lived there, along with sixteen Evenki, three Chinese, and two Chechens who had been exiled to Siberia during the czarist regime for a blood feud. Here they were blacksmiths. Gostorg bought up fur pelts from local hunters and the Evenki for a song, as it did everywhere in Siberia, and traded them for what was brought in by wagon train. During the winter, the pelts were taken to Kezhma on reindeer sleds.
Our wagon train arrived a couple of days later. It had had its share of adventures along the way: a horse had broken its leg and they’d had to shoot it, and two drivers had run off, taking three guns and a rucksack of ammunition with them. But Kulik wasn’t particularly upset: he was happy that they had brought the equipment and provisions. After our arrival in Vanavara, he had become quite nervous and often grew furious over trivial things. He yelled at me when I dropped a barometer, and he threatened two of the drillers with exile for carelessness with the baggage. Yakov Ikhilevich, the thirty-year-old astronomer, carried on constant professional “meteorological” conversations with Kulik. They almost always ended in arguments with raised voices, and Kulik was the first to explode, reproaching Ikhilevich for “narrow-mindedness and metaphysical thinking.” Ikhilevich had been educated as a mathematician; in calculating the fall of meteorites, he had come up with his own universal formula, according to which a meteorite larger than 248.17 tons could not fall to earth without breaking up into very small pieces. He was absolutely convinced that almost nothing remained of the Tungus meteorite and was in the expedition only to confirm his own theory. Kulik, however, longing to find “material from other worlds” fallen to earth in the form of a huge block, or many-ton pieces, had taken “the bore Ikhilevich” with him in order to “laugh at all the cabinet scientist-worms in the person of ‘the bore Ikhilevich.’” Falling asleep by the campfire, I could often hear Ikhilevich’s dull, nauseatingly detailed muttering and Kulik’s sharp, high voice through my sleep.
But in Vanavara the endless discussion with Ikhilevich came to an end. The moment the short Yakov Iosifovich Ikhilevich, resembling an owl in his pince-nez, opened his mouth about the “crumbling of the hyper-meteorite mass on impact,” Kulik interrupted him: “Colleague, if you have come with us in order to get in our way, I will send you back.”
That was too much. Ikhilevich got mad and stopped talking to Kulik. The falling-out strengthened the general excitement. We were only eighty kilometers from the forest collapse zone. The young people were chomping at the bit to go on, but given his past scientific experience Kulik wanted to calculate and prepare everything this time. Farther on we would have to move along a narrow reindeer trail. The wagons couldn’t follow. All the baggage was loaded onto horses. It was decided that we’d travel in two groups: the first, with light luggage, would set off on horseback, make camp and pitch tents twenty versts along, prepare food and night quarters; the second group would lead heavily loaded horses on foot and arrive at the camp by evening; everyone would spend the night there, and in the morning the groups would change places — those who led the horses the first day would ride ahead in order to pitch a new camp. Kulik planned to cover the “Okhchen path” in four days. One third of the provisions would remain at the trading post and would have to be brought to us by the Vanavara people.
Vasily Okhchen himself, Kulik’s guide from the previous year, showed up in Vanavara the day after our arrival. The fifty-year-old Evenki came from his camp. As he put it: “Okhchen feel big man lord master come.” The lord Kulik was glad to see him, although it was in part because of Okhchen’s fear of the “cursed place” that expedition No. 2 had turned back. Okhchen was a man of few words. But our alcohol untied his tongue. They asked him, of course, about the “fireball.”
“Mine then there with reindeer camp at Chamba. Mine brother left Khushma with wife, fishing there. Then all fast it attack. Made very much lotta noise, break forest, dig up earth, finish off reindeers. Brother break arm, lose wife. We run here to Katanga. Now no one people there — no man, no reindeer.” He spoke the words through clenched teeth, sucking on his narrow bone pipe.
Okhchen was certain that nothing fell from the sky, but simply that the terrible beast Kholi (a mammoth), who lived in the underground world Khergui, where the shamans used to go to swallow his breath and build up their powers, got angry at the people and shook the earth. And the heavenly birds, the agdy, their beaks blazing with flames, went with Kholi’s brother Uchir the dust devil to pull down the forest and set fire to it. This happened because the shamans had started drinking firewater (alcohol) too often and had forgotten Kholi. When he was totally drunk, Okhchen told us about hearing Kholi’s voice once when he was a boy.
“Winter were very strong, big pine he cracking, reindeer no going. When Elk” — Ursa Major — “stand on back legs” — at midnight — “earth open on Khushma, steam come out, and Kholi yell: ‘Ooooo!’ Mine fall down lay down no move. Mine very ’fraid Kholi.”
Instead of himself, Okhchen offered his eighteen-year-old nephew Fyodor as a guide.
“He know taiga very good.”
Fyodor said nothing, merely nodded and smiled. Okhchen gave him a red Berdan rifle and two knives.
Early the next morning the first group left camp, led by Kulik and Fyodor. I was in the second group. We set off at noon. Trifonov led us. The loaded horses walked slowly. We led them by the bridle along the reindeer trail. Each winter the deer trampled down the bushes and saplings, and for this reason the path was never completely overgrown during the summer. In some places even this path was invisible, but the two Vanavarans who walked ahead with axes easily cut a way through. The taiga here was thicker than the Angara taiga. White, gray, and green moss covered the ground underfoot. I noticed for the first time that there are no meadows or grassy clearings in the taiga: empty space is immediately overgrown with bushes and other undergrowth. The sole places that aren’t overgrown are ponds and swamps. One can move rapidly only along the animal trails. But we hadn’t gone halfway to the camp when a heavy rain shower began. We had to put on our peacoats and move ahead at a goose’s pace. We arrived at the camp long after midnight. The first group had also been rained on and had lost an ammunition belt. A wet, angry Kulik shouted at everyone. Having eaten wheat porridge with lard and drunk our tea, we fell asleep in wet tents. Kulik woke us up at six.
Despite all this, we made it to the border of the collapsed forest in four days, just as planned.
But along the road something began to happen to me. The third night I suddenly dreamed my recurring childhood dream, which hadn’t happened for at least ten years. Once again I stood at the foot of my great Mountain, lifting my gaze with difficulty along its endless slopes toward the summit. And again I crumbled, like a bread roll in milk. Again I shook before the huge and incomprehensible. Again I had to lift my head with my hands. But the light that poured down on me from the summit was faint and somehow timid, as though the Mountain was fading, was being extinguished like a volcano. I didn’t disappear in the Light, as I did in childhood, didn’t dissolve into it; I didn’t die from its immense power. There was a sort of sorrowful doom to the entire dream. Something was dying and departing forever. This stunned me: my Mountain was dying. Sobbing, I stood in front of it, holding my head. I gazed at the summit. And nothing happened to me! I saw the Light going out. But I couldn’t allow that to happen. I had to help the Mountain, to save it. I had to exert all my strength, I had to do something, do, do, do, do something, in myself. Like in childhood dreams, when you wave your arms, wave, wave, wave, and suddenly you fly off. I mustered all my strength. The Light of the Mountain was going out. I waved my arms, roared, jumped up and down. But I could feel that my muscles, bones, brain, and voice weren’t connected to the Mountain. They had no influence on it at all. However, there was something in me that was directly connected to the Mountain. But what? The Light was disappearing! It was melting, going away. I understood that it was leaving FOREVER! Sobbing with helplessness, I leaped, wailed, and kicked the ground. It didn’t do any good. I grabbed my body, began to punch it and tear at it, looking for its connection to the Mountain. I looked in my body the way you search for a treasure. My fingers tore at my muscles, pierced the skin. It became painful. Very painful. That didn’t stop me. The Mountain was dying. “Don’t die!” I sobbed, mangling my body. Suddenly, a finger passed through my ribs and touched my heart. Something in my heart moved, shifted. As though something sleeping had shuddered but didn’t awake. Something else, other was living in the heart, something other than my heart itself. And it was precisely this that was connected to the Mountain. I had to wake this up! But — how? I began to beat my chest with my fists, to scream at my heart. It didn’t help. The Light was departing! I thrust my fingers into my chest, grabbed my ribs, and pulled. The ribs cracked. Breaking the ribs and screaming from pain, I stuck my hand into my chest and felt my heart. Warm and resilient, it beat indifferently beneath my fingers. I squeezed it hard. My heart hurt unbearably. But the pain didn’t awaken the something other that dozed in my heart! It lived on its own! I squeezed my heart as hard as I could. I cried out and woke up.
“What is it, a nightmare?” the unruffled, unflappable cameraman Chistiakov asked me sleepily; he and I shared a tent.
“Yes, yes,” I mumbled.
“Take some iodide before bedtime, young man...”
I was hot and suffocating. My hands shook in the darkness and my mouth was dry. I touched my chest: it was whole. Somehow managing to get out of my sleeping bag, I crawled from the tent. The taiga was growing light. I sat on the moist, soft moss near the tent. Its coolness calmed me. My shaking fingers nestled in it. Sweat rolled down my face. Growing calm, I drank some water and touched my chest. It hurt, as though I had actually tried to break my breastbone.
When we set off that day, I felt a certain alarm and agitation. These feelings grew with each step the horse took. Everyone made the last crossing together. Kulik hurried us, the guide Fyodor sang something in his own language, Chistiakov took photographs, and Ikhilevich told the students about the Galileo comet. The taiga grew rosy, small swamps came into view, overgrown with tussocks. On rest breaks we gathered blueberries and whortleberries. Our path widened and it became easier to walk. Everyone was anticipating the encounter with the unknown and talked excitedly. I walked along, silent, leading my homely, piebald horse by the reins. My agitation grew, my heart beat more rapidly. This made me remember the glass of spirits and the cocaine brought to me, when I was thirteen, by the porter Samson at the Krasnoye station. At that point I hadn’t slept all night; I’d been energetically arguing for a ridiculously long time with half-literate carpetbaggers who were laughing at me. Right now I didn’t feel like talking at all. I walked and walked along the mossy path, going around the trees, listening to the beat of my heart.
That evening we entered the forest impact zone. For me it was unexpected. Our expedition caravan had stretched out: the impatient Kulik had gone ahead with Fyodor, and the young people were trying to catch up with them. I wandered along at the end of the caravan with my horse, looking glumly at my feet and remembering the strange dream. Suddenly the sun struck me in the eyes. It was strange and I was unprepared; usually the eternal taiga hid the sun, the rays got stuck in the thick pines. For a moment I thought it was now early morning: the inadequate sleep of the last few nights was making itself felt. Remembering that we were walking northwest, however, I collected myself and raised my head.
There was no eternal forest surrounding me! Instead, all the trees lay on the ground, and a young, low, sparse undergrowth had taken root. In front of us it was as though a curtain had been drawn open. It was possible to see far ahead: the sun was setting between hillocks that stood bare all the way to the horizon, without the taiga growth, just lightly covered in green. I could see our expedition, which had moved far ahead. The tiny figure of Kulik took a gun off his shoulder and shot in the air. All the others cried out victoriously. The path crossed the first prone tree. I walked up to it and squatted down. The powerful fir tree lay in all its thirty-meter length, pulled out by the roots. In places its trunk was touched with rot, the bark had peeled almost everywhere, and the branches had been broken off. Nearby, almost parallel to it, lay a similarly thick, long Angara pine. Its trunk, snapped off midway, was now covered in moss and mushrooms. Farther on, the felled forest began in earnest. All the trees lay with their crowns pointing toward me, and their roots toward the setting sun. Sticking up here and there were the trunks of broken giants whose roots had held fast in the earth but whose crowns had not been spared by the terrible impact of the air waves. The dead forest impressed one with the scale and force of its sudden demise. I placed my hand on the graying, cracking fir, dappled by timber worms. My heart fluttered, my eyes grew dim. And suddenly I felt wonderful, terribly wonderful, as one can only feel in childhood, when everything around you is big and loud and you are really small, but there’s a profoundly familiar palm that will warm and protect you, in which you lie as though in a shell. My eyes filled with tears. An involuntary stream of urine flowed with warmth and tenderness down my legs. I began to sob. The horse looked askance at me, stretched its indifferent muzzle, and grabbed a sprig of Saint-John’s-wort growing on the rotten side of the pine. I sobbed and urinated, completely forgetting who and where I was. The urine stopped running. I sniffled and stood up. My legs trembled. I wiped the tears away and looked at my black woolen pants. Urine seeped from them. I unbuttoned my pants, took them off, and squeezed them out as well as I could. My head was empty and my heart was beating fast. The horse chewed. I held it by the bridle and led it between two prostrate trees. Their menacing, deracinated root systems almost closed in on one another. The horse, still chewing, loaded down with provisions, snorted as we squeezed between them.
Reaching the others, I stood a ways off with my horse. Everyone was celebrating noisily and their amazement at the fantastical landscape knew no bounds. Kulik was so excited that he was ready to move farther on. But the sun was going down. They set up camp and lit a large campfire from the dry branches of fallen trees. In honor of reaching the site, Kulik allowed everyone to drink some spirits. The group quickly grew jolly and noisy, and began singing songs. Slightly tipsy himself, Kulik sang an old prison-camp song that he had heard while in exile. I kept my distance and remained silent. I had no desire to talk. I just stared into the campfire flames. People handed me a flask with spirits, pushed food at me. I shook my head: I didn’t feel like eating, either. I felt good. A pleasant stupor engulfed my body. No one paid any attention to me. My heart pounded, I listened to it. Soon I climbed into the tent and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
I awoke rested but still uneasy. Looking at the rising sun, I suddenly understood that it was no accident that I had ended up in this strange place. I had some strong connection to this lifeless landscape. And something awaited me ahead.
We made the campfire and heated the tea. But again I didn’t feel like talking during our quick field breakfast. I still didn’t have any appetite. I took a cracker, dunked it in the tea, and sucked on it.
“What do you think, Snegirev, is it iron or stone?” asked the student Anikin.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“For some reason I’m certain that it’s stone,” said Anikin, his glasses glinting just above the thin stubble that had grown on his face. I shrugged my shoulders again.
We set off.
Kulik determined the route according to the direction of the fallen trees. We had to move from the tops to the roots, that is, in the direction from which the blast had come. Traveling about five kilometers across the dead taiga, I suddenly noticed that the clouds of midges that had constantly pursued us had disappeared. And the birds had stopped singing. Young saplings grew bashfully between fallen giants. There was absolute silence all around. Within it, our steps, voices, and the snorting horses sounded timidly. The silence was much greater than us. The voices gradually fell silent, and people walked along quietly, spellbound and overwhelmed. Every so often we came across reindeer skulls and bones, and a couple of times I saw moose antlers sticking up out of the moss. Not a single crackle of an animal’s step disturbed the silence. There was only the dead forest drifting past.
Gradually the hillocks flattened out and there were more swamps. We went around them. In the evening, as usual, we stopped for the night. But the previous gaiety was gone. Everyone around the campfire looked tired, they ate without talking. Even Kulik was subdued. Thin and sharp-nosed, with a thick, bristling mustache, wearing his large, round eyeglasses, he looked like a frightened animal.
At the campfire I once again felt a growing agitation. But it was no longer accompanied by fear and malaise. I was calm. And I was not the least bit tired, although I had walked fifteen kilometers with my horse, skirting swamps, making my way over storm-tossed trees, stepping over mossy tree stumps.
This time Anikin and I were in the same tent. He tossed and turned and pestered me with conversation. I groaned something in reply, lying in the dark with open eyes. I wasn’t at all sleepy.
“It’s really rather scary here, isn’t it, Snegirev? Some kind of vacuum,” Anikin muttered as he was falling asleep. “No wonder the Evenki don’t come here. Although, of course, superstitions...” He yawned. “But still, damn it, what powerful energy there is in space! That’s what man has to conquer...” He yawned again.
He fell asleep.
I lay there, yielding to my feeling. Something pleasantly agonizing was awakening inside me. I didn’t understand what it was, but it was connected to this place I found myself in. I felt that with certainty. Somehow my heart was beating in a new key. And it froze, stopping. And in this there was a joyous premonition of something enormous and innately and naturally new. It was growing like a heavy wave. And approaching implacably. I touched myself and tried to breathe carefully. I didn’t fall asleep at all that night. And the night passed quickly. I rose earlier than the others, made the campfire, which had gone out overnight, took our large kettle to the swamp for water, and, hanging it above the fire, sat down nearby. Gazing at the tongues of flame climbing up the dry branches, I remembered my past. It seemed spectral and unstable to me. It stood before me like a frozen picture under glass, like a herbarium in a museum. And the picture didn’t elicit any feelings. My happy childhood, the tornado of the Revolution, the loss of my family, the wanderings, studies, loneliness, and orphanhood — it had all hardened under glass forever. It all became the past. And detached itself from me. The present was only the new joy of my heart. It was more powerful than everything.
The kettle boiled and steam escaped from the spout. It looked menacing and silly. And I began to laugh.
“What are you laughing at, Comrade Snegirev?” came Kulik’s voice from behind me.
I didn’t even turn around. Kulik had also become the past, as had the entire expedition. Over that night I had lost all interest in it. It had become small and helplessly menacing. Like the kettle. Laughing, I threw a branch in the fire.
“Get a move on, wake the others,” said Kulik, handing me his whistle.
I stood up silently, took the whistle, and blew it deafeningly. I blew the whistle for a long time. Kulik looked at me attentively.
“Is everything all right?” he asked, when I stopped.
I didn’t answer. I really didn’t want to talk. Every word returned me to the past. To answer Kulik with “Thank you, everything is just fine” would have meant to turn back, behind the glass. I was silent again at breakfast. They handed me a piece of dry bread and smoked fish. The food looked beggarly. I didn’t touch it, just put it on the cloth. I poured some bilberries into my palm from the elm basket, ate them, and washed them down with tea. Kulik held a short meeting, saying that “the secret is very close.” And we set off.
Once again I walked behind. The surrounding landscape hadn’t changed. The expedition made its way through felled forest. And the farther into the forest it went, the more exalted and strong I became inside myself. I led my horse without tiring, helping it to step over the trunks lying on the ground, picking my way around obstructions, pulling my horse out of the swamp water. The swampiness of the place made itself apparent: by dinnertime everyone was dirty — the people and the horses. In contrast to me, everyone began to tire quickly and became irritable. Furthermore, the general sense of oppression grew: the dead zone put everyone on his guard. Arguments flared. Yankovsky accused Urnov from Vanavara of stealing sugar. The Vanavaran crossed himself and swore to God he hadn’t taken any. Ikhilevich, who had been quiet in recent days, suddenly burst out with a semi-hysterical lecture on the theory of stellar explosions, at the end of which he was almost screaming that “science won’t allow fools to joke around.” Kulik made fun of him maliciously. Two students continually argued until they were nearly hoarse about who would lead which horse and what to carry on it. They were nicknamed “the Gracchi brothers.” The hunters Petrenko and Molik flushed ducks from the swamps four times in one day, but only killed one. Something had broken in Chistiakov’s movie camera; he was continually repairing it and swearing up a storm. Trifonov kept criticizing him.
Soon my unwillingness to talk was noticed. People also noticed that I had practically stopped eating. They looked at one another and whispered behind my back. Kulik and Trifonov tried to get me to talk; they asked how I was feeling. I just shrugged my shoulders and smiled. During the camp dinner, when everyone greedily devoured wheat kasha with lard and smoked fish, I ate berries and drank tea. At mealtimes a large oilcloth was usually spread out and the food placed on it; no one would sit there. Crackers, smoked fish, lard, onions, and lumps of sugar lay on the cloth. In the center, on a board, they placed the cauldron with the wheat kasha, flavored with lard and dried carrots. Everyone dug it out with wooden spoons. There were no bowls on the expedition; Kulik said that they would just make a racket on the way and washing up would take time. After the kasha, a thick tea was poured into tin cups. It was drunk holding lumps of sugar between the teeth; Kulik had forbidden drinking tea with sugar dissolved in it. Sitting in the circle, I drank tea from a cup and looked at the people eating. Their food seem abnormal to me. For the first time in my not very long life I suddenly paid attention to what people were eating. What they ate was either dead or processed, chopped up, ground, or dried. The smoked wrinkled fish and dried crackers were equally distasteful to me. Of everything that was put out on the oilcloth during dinner, only the onion and berries did not disgust me. They were normal food. Sometimes I would take an onion and eat it, washing it down with tea. Everyone looked askance at me. Anikin, with whom I slept in the tent, became terse and almost stopped talking to me. He no longer theorized about meteorites and comets. Lying in the tent one night, I heard a conversation between Kulik and Trifonov.
“It appears that Snegirev has gone crackers. We have to do something about him.”
“What? Isolate him from the group? And how?”
“Hmm, you’re right. There’s nowhere. Keep an eye on him. After all, he’s our talisman.”
“Have you become superstitious?”
“While the expedition is going on. Do you disapprove?”
“Not a bit. I’m a dialectician, you know.”
“Well, old man, I’m no metaphysician, either!”
They laughed in the darkness.
The second night I spent in a half sleep. I was in wonderful form. Good spirits and energy filled me to the brim. And I was living only in the present: the past was forgotten. I wanted one thing alone: for the joy my body felt to go on forever. For that I was ready to do anything...
The morning meeting was anxious. Grumbling began among the members of the expedition: they were thirty kilometers into the felled-forest zone, and there were no traces of the meteorite’s fall. Ikhilevich and Potresov tried to convince everyone that the meteorite exploded in the air. Kulik tore them apart rudely, calling them “craven renegades.” The geologists proposed going a bit farther and beginning the construction of the barracks. The drillers, who tired more easily than anyone else for some reason, advised that we begin building right in this spot. The students, mesmerized by the strange place and exhausted by the trip, were ready for anything. But Kulik and Trifonov insisted on moving ahead. I listened to the quarrels and arguments, happy that I wasn’t like the others, that I had been given something that made my body sing. In contrast to the rest of them, I was happy. And I didn’t care whether we went ahead or stopped here.
Finally Kulik couldn’t stand it and he blew the whistle, signaling that the day’s trek was starting. It was useless to argue with him — he was the leader of the expedition. The baggage was loaded onto the horses, and the expedition set out again. The horses themselves felt pretty good: in the marshes there was enough juicy grass; they grazed there at night and during stops.
About six kilometers along, the felled forest changed: almost all the trunks were broken in half, there were practically no trees torn out by the roots anymore. It was as though the forest had been resurrected, but as tall tree stumps. These stumps began to grow upward with every kilometer. And after another six kilometers the old forest rose up: the trees were whole but were mortally burned. They had all dried out and died. This standing dead forest looked even more unusual than the felled forest. There was hardly any young undergrowth here.
The expedition halted. Kulik gave the order to make camp. While we were putting up tents and preparing food, he, Trifonov, and Chistiakov went ahead on horseback. They returned toward evening. Kulik directed everyone to gather and made an important announcement: ahead lay a large swamp. Around it — burned forest. Judging by what they had seen, the meteorite had exploded high above the swamp. If it had fallen to earth, the forest around there would have been completely decimated. The forest directly under the explosion had been burned by the blast but had withstood it, since the direction of the shock wave had been strictly vertical, coming from the sky. Kulik proposed spending the night and heading for the swamp the next day, building a permanent camp there, constructing a barracks, and beginning the search for shards of the meteorite. Concluding his speech, he congratulated the expedition for arriving at the location of the descent. Everyone except me applauded and shouted joyfully. The drillers proposed drinking a toast for the occasion, but Kulik silenced them.
“No drinking! We’ll celebrate when we find pieces of it.”
Ikhilevich was happier than all the others: his hypothesis on the explosion of hyper-meteorites had proved valid. But Kulik didn’t appear disappointed. He was certain that there were large chunks of the meteorite scattered in the swamp. Everyone began arguing again, this time about the pieces. The argument dragged on. I wandered around the campsite in the darkness. Dead forest stood everywhere. The moon illuminated bare, charred tree trunks. I felt very good: the joy of belonging to this extraordinary place filled me. Each of my movements, each turn of my body, each breath, each time my finger touched the grass or trunks of the trees elicited an excited burst in my heart. My heart quivered and sang. My blood pounded in my temples, played rainbows in front of my eyes, and sounded in the shells of my ears. Wandering through the tree trunks, I felt that somewhere here, very close now, something was waiting for me, something enormous and dear. That’s what made my heart sing. I came here because of it. And it was waiting for me. For me and me alone!
That night I was again unable to sleep.
The next morning we set off earlier than usual. Kulik said that it was about eight kilometers to the swamp. This gave the expedition new life. Everyone walked joyfully and talked animatedly, breaking the dead silence. For that matter, it wasn’t entirely dead. The scorched forest harbored a real danger: for more than twenty years the trees had been rotting. When there was a strong winter gust, some of them collapsed to the ground. The sound of a falling tree carried a long distance as an echo. Everyone froze, listening to yet another giant toppling. Then they continued moving, looking over their shoulders. The weather was marvelous: it was summery, and the sun warmed.
By about three o’clock in the afternoon we arrived at the swamp. It stretched out ahead for several kilometers. Beyond it, through a light, marshy fog, distant hillocks could be seen. Scorched forest surrounded the swamp. Chistiakov, walking off a ways to answer nature’s call, found a spring that gushed from the stony soil and ran toward the swamp in a meandering stream. The water in it was amazingly pure and delicious. Tired of boiled swamp water, everyone drank his fill of spring water for the first time in several days. The spring was immediately named Chistiakov Spring. Kulik walked over to a burned pine with its crown snapped off, pulled his homemade Celtic ax from his belt, and stuck it in the trunk.
“Here a campsite will be founded!”
The travelers all cried “Hurrah!,” removed their “Chinese” hats, and threw them in the air. A banquet was announced in celebration. All the victuals that the expedition possessed turned up on the oilcloth. Buckwheat groats were boiled on the fire, seasoned with lard, onion, and salted white salmon. Flasks of spirits were handed around. I sat eating berries and drinking water. No one paid me any attention. Everyone quickly got tipsy. Toasts were proposed: Kulik was praised for his sagacity and correct choice of route, they drank to the “smart and bold” guide Fyodor, to the inexhaustible Trifonov, the fanatical Ikhilevich, the unbending Chistiakov, the brave Molik and Petrenko, the courageous Yankovsky and Potresov. The students drank toasts to the drillers, the drillers drank to the geologists, the geologists to the astronomers. Okhchen’s nephew quickly became very drunk, sang Tungus songs, clicked his tongue, and giggled stupidly. The driller Gridiukh sang along with him in Ukrainian, eliciting general hilarity. In the end, two of the students felt sick. The only ones not to drink were myself, Ikhilevich (who couldn’t stand alcohol), and the prudish geologist Voronin. It all ended long after midnight.
When the camp was finally snoring, I again began to walk around. The stars and moon were hidden behind clouds. But the northern sky was light even at night. I wandered among charred trees, touched their trunks, sat down on the mossy earth, then stood up, strolled over to the swamp, to the stream, and touched the water. The huge and intimate was somewhere close by. It was waiting for me. It banished sleep from my body, leaving only the excitement of anticipation. It made my heart thrill and tremble.
I met the dawn among dead trees.
In the morning Kulik announced the order of the day to everyone: he and Trifonov, Fyodor, and Chistiakov would head out in search of remnants of the meteorite and draw up a map of the area; all the rest would erect a barracks under the direction of the builder Martynov.
The construction began after breakfast. The stocky, pockmarked, taciturn Martynov finally felt that his time had come: his face reddened from shouting. In a loud voice he ordered everyone around right up until dinnertime. Under his command, the scholars and seasoned geologists looked like pitiful apprentices. First we dug holes for the posts of the barracks, then we knocked down charred trunks, sawed them, and rolled them to the construction site. We chose the deciduous trees because almost all the pines were moldering. The larch trees had been wonderfully preserved over twenty years and sounded like iron when they fell. Only their tops had rotted and broken off. It was difficult to saw them: dried out at the root, they had become harder than the saws we used to cut them. We drove thick-bottomed logs into the pits and crowned them with the first charred crossbeams. The barracks began to grow quickly; the crowns, naturally, were not planed — no ax could manage the hard dry wood. Kulik had given Martynov the directive: build simply, not for posterity. But the meticulous Martynov forgot this admonition: he shouted and demanded the highest quality from us. Finally, the driller Mishin told Martynov that if he didn’t stop bossing them around, he would end up building the whole thing by himself. Martynov quieted down, but not for long. By dinner five rows of logs had been erected. The barracks ended up being spacious.
After the sun went down, the happy explorers returned. Four kilometers to the southwest they had detected three large craters.
The next day three drillers, and Anikin and I as diggers, set off to the site with Kulik. The craters were more or less identical — about twenty meters in diameter and about three meters deep. Water stood at the bottom of them from the melting ice of the permafrost. At first we bailed out pails of it from the largest crater. Then a driller began to drill the sludgy bottom of the crater with a hand drill. Less than a meter down, the bore came up against something hard. Kulik was ecstatic. Everyone grabbed shovels and pails: some dug, others bailed out the water. Kulik worked along with us. I dug, standing up to my knees in swampy ground. I did everything I was asked without thinking about it. I was indifferent: no work could distract me from my inner rapture. My heart continued to sing while, splattered with mud, I scooped out the bog. After about three hours something large and formless turned up in the black water. Kulik tapped on it with his shovel. The sound was muffled, obviously not stone and not metal. Kulik hit harder and the shovel sank into a rotten tree: an enormous larch stump turned out to be in the crater. Checking another crater with the drill, the bore also hit a tree. Kulik was depressed, but he tried to keep himself in hand.
“Well, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” he said, wiping the spattered mud from his face with a handkerchief.
The evening meeting became a kind of scientific advisory council on the tree stumps. The geologists asserted that the craters and the stumps lodged in them were the result of melting permafrost. Kulik didn’t argue with them. He was interested in the meteorite.
Another night passed. I spent it inside the tent dozing. My heart’s ecstatic state wouldn’t let me sleep deeply. I prayed for one thing — that my ecstasy would never end. The expedition members tried not to talk about me and paid me no attention, but they took me on all the jobs. Once I heard Kulik say, “We can thank the stars that Snegirev is a peaceable madman.”
In the morning Kulik set off with Fyodor and Molik to reconnoiter; the rest continued building the barracks.
By the evening all ten rows of logs had been laid. The building of charred logs looked ominous. Between the rows of logs you could see large cracks. We decided to lay a shallow-pitch lean-to roof of slender trees, place the tarp we’d brought over it, and cover the whole thing with mossy turf and weigh it down with stones.
Sitting in the evening by the campfire and looking at the flames while the others ate, I suddenly experienced an unusual feeling. It was as though I had lost my body. The only thing remaining was my heart, which was hanging in the emptiness. I felt my heart. It resembled a fetus. Life pulsed evenly in it. But it was sleeping, as yet unborn. And the most striking thing was that I felt the hearts of everyone sitting around the fire. They were exactly the same as mine. They pulsed the same way. And they were asleep as well. Our hearts had not yet been born! This discovery struck me like lightning.
After that I fell into a trance. I not only stopped talking but didn’t react to questions and requests. I just sat, hugging my knees, staring into the fire with unseeing eyes. I saw only the not-yet-born hearts. They carried me into a tent and poured opium into my mouth. I fell into a deep sleep.
I awoke three days later to the sound of cries and shots. I was calm. But the joy had deserted me. Making my way out of the tent, I saw the entire expedition standing around the finished barracks. They shouted joyously and shot their guns in the air. I walked over to them. They ran up to me, began to hug me. It turned out that there were three causes for joy: the barrack had been built, a huge crater had been found not far away, and that morning a wagon loaded with provisions had arrived from Vanavara. I listened, but had difficulty understanding. I was drained and indifferent. Kulik approached me.
“So then, Snegirev, are you better now?”
He looked me straight in the eyes, all attention. I answered him with my own look.
“So this is what’s going to happen, young man,” Kulik said to me, “from now on you are going to eat well, under my supervision. We don’t need anyone fasting here. Is that clear?”
I looked him in the eye silently. Kulik took my gaze as agreement. They had already had dinner, so the time for force-feeding me was put off until the evening. After the wagon train was unloaded and its drivers rested, it returned to Vanavara with half our horses, two sick people — the geologist Voronin (he had bad diarrhea and a high fever) and the student Berelovich (who had hurt his eye during the construction) — and the mail. They didn’t send me back with the wagon train, feeling that, despite my quiet lunacy, I was capable of being useful. Or perhaps Kulik really did believe that I was a talisman. Soon he gathered everyone and gave an inspired speech. He said that everything was going according to plan, everything was working out in the best possible way: a fifty-meter crater had been found — clearly of meteoritic origin — the bores hadn’t located any tree stumps at the bottom of it, therefore something more important would be found; the geologists had panned the local soil in Chistiakov Spring and found microscopic metallic spheres in it, each no more than two millimeters in diameter; these spheres were scattered almost everywhere and provided evidence of the metallic nature of the Tungus meteorite; the barrack had been built and was being equipped for living, all the provisions were being transferred there. Three men would remain in the camp to set up the living quarters, the rest would move to the crater, which was located only three kilometers away, and would work on excavations until evening.
Martynov, Anikin, and I were left in the camp. The barrack was divided into storage and living sections: one for keeping provisions and equipment, the other for sleeping. First we carried over all our supplies and put them into the storage section; then we began to construct bunks from young trees and to caulk the chinks in the walls with moss. Two small windows were cut through the barrack walls. The weather continued to be warm and dry. Martynov and Anikin set off to look for young trees around the edge of the swamp. Sticking white moss into the chinks between the charred, wormhole-ridden beams, I mechanically watched the two receding figures through the cracks. The ax in Martynov’s hand sparkled in the sun. And this flash of light suddenly awakened me. My heart quivered, my brain began to work. And I finally understood with my entire being WHY people had come here! They came in order to find the enormous and intimate. And to take it away from me forever! I trembled in terror. The clod of moss and the hammer fell from my hands. Why did they take so much time coming here? Why did they put up with such hardships? Why had this barrack been built? In order to find my joy! In order to prevent me from meeting it FOREVER!
A cold sweat broke out on my lips. I licked it away. I had to act. I looked around: the barrack. It had been built by people to help them find the enormous and intimate. Without it they were helpless in the taiga. I ran out of the barrack. A little ways off stood a barrel of kerosene. Kulik forbade storing it in the barrack. I rolled the barrel over and dragged it inside. I broke the stopper and leaned the barrel over a pail. The kerosene ran into the pail. I grabbed the pail and splashed it on a pile of boxes and sacks. Then I filled a second pail and poured it on the walls. I splashed a third and fourth pail onto the walls from outside. I took some matches and left the barrack. I lit a match and threw it at the black wall. The barrack caught fire.
I turned and walked into the taiga. Choosing a direction opposite from the one where the people had headed, I walked between the blackened trees. My heart quivered again, stronger and more urgently than before. It beat in my chest as though it wanted to break my rib cage and jump out. I understood that I had to hurry and I ran. Time stopped, the black forest jumped around in front of my eyes, sweat poured down my face. I ran and ran and ran. This lasted for an eternity. The sun was setting; the dead taiga was plunged into twilight. The stars sparkled above the charred treetops. My legs began to give way. The breath burst from my dried lips. Suddenly, in front of me, a felled tree appeared — the only one in the entire dead standing forest. An old, thick deciduous tree lay on the ground in its full length, broken in the middle. The huge roots, not completely pulled from the ground, had frozen, raised just above the earth. With my last breath, I fell on the earth, crawled under the hanging roots, and lost consciousness.