Oblivion by Sergei Lebedev

Author:Sergei Lebedev
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: e9781939931290
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

PART 5

T

he city cemetery where Grandfather II’s wife and son were buried was just a piece of land in the middle of the tundra. The graves, fences, and crosses unframed by trees looked as if patients in hospital beds had been brought outside; a cemetery without trees, without a brick wall around it, it seemed like a slum repeating the boredom of the garages and sheds. There was also the feeling that the deceased had settled themselves in a new place, and the result was a disorderly conglomeration of graves instead of a regular order; they huddled together like prisoners on bunk beds to keep warm, like people with bundles pushing into a train car until their ribs cracked, they buried others and then climbed into the ground themselves.

A little church was stuck on the edge of the cemetery; its red brick, which hadn’t yet turned dark, reminded me of the few big houses where the mine bosses lived, as you come into town; if not for the dome, it could have been yet another mansion, and it was probably built by the same crew of workers; the church was seen—by those who commissioned it, by the architect, and by the builders—as God’s mansion; it was strange that they hadn’t found a different kind of brick for the church, that they’d put it there like a guard hut without searching for the more perfect place, and so from whichever angle you looked in the cemetery, the church was pushed into the ground, destroyed by the power of the complex’s smokestacks, striped like prison garb, belching volcanic smoke, and dwarfing the cross and the gilded dome.

In the chaos of graves there was one section where the stones were higher and more massive; amid the rusted crosses and the low fences sinking into the boggy soil stood rectangles of black dolerite, brought here by railroad; the inscriptions on the stone were gilded. This is where the bosses were buried; oval frames showed portraits of men in uniform and suits, colonels, chief engineers, PhDs in technical sciences, and they looked at one another, because the stones had been placed in an imaginary circle, and no sightline could escape it.

The low clouds brought a June blizzard, snow blackened by the smokestacks fell on the graves, black snow. It looked like ashes from an old fire falling from the sky; then the stacks belched smoke the color of cinnabar, and the snow turned deep red, melting on my face, spotting the cemetery paths; a man ran out of the guard booth, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me under the roof; cinnabar snow can be dangerous, but I did not care.

The tundra around the cemetery reddened, as if watered-down blood had seeped from beneath the ground; red water flowed down my arms, my face; the color of brick dust, cinder with the bluish cast of gunpowder splashed across the landscape, colored the mountains and sky, and the monuments in the cemetery became islands in the high water of the color.

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