It was a place where being human was the same as being an animal. The government housing and factories were little more than large concrete blocks with holes in them, the streets were full of dry dirt, and the squares were deserted and barren. The air stunk of burning coal and rot. The women hung rags to dry, the dogs moved in packs and barked at the trucks that drove through the streets lifting spirals of dust. The people no longer knew what to do, children and dogs curled up to sleep in the cavernous hallways of buildings that had been schools or government housing. The boy listened to the men speak but didn’t say a word.
The tip of his father’s boot woke him.
He looked up and saw his father standing over him.
I sold you to Ananiy, from now on you do as he says.
Ananiy told him to pack his things and move it, there was no time to lose.
The boy didn’t have things to pack so he just followed his new master. They walked for five days because they didn’t have a horse or a car or a motorbike and they walked along a road that cut through a plain of grass and mud. The grass was yellow and leathery, the wind knotted it like the mats in an animal’s pelt but it was an animal that never ended, it was all back with no head and no tail, they walked on it by day and slept on it by night, beside a fire just big enough to warm them a little and then die out.
Where are we going?
North, said Ananiy.
When will we get there?
North.
What do you want me to do for you?
North.
The boy was used to not getting answers. The last person who gave him answers was his mother but his mother died giving birth to his sister and his sister died a few hours later because she didn’t have a mother to look after her. So the boy walked with no answers as if the answer was in the ground or in his feet or in those large vertical clouds that towered over the horizon and slowly flew past like drifting icebergs.
Stop, we wait here, said Ananiy.
They waited until dark and then they waited in the dark until the stars in the sky grew long and discoloured like fingernails on a dead body. They were strange stars, but two of them were stranger than all the rest because they came from the horizon and got closer and closer.
The truck braked and Ananiy and the boy jumped on. The truck started up again and for a while the boy tried to watch the back of the animal they’d walked on but it was no longer an animal, only a plain of grass and mud as far as the eye could see and nothing else. The other people on the truck looked at them once and then went back to nodding their heads as if they’d surrendered to the truck’s movements. The boy looked at them and saw that none of them were Russian. They were all Sakha, dressed in rags, almost none of them had things with them. Ananiy had a bag. Two other men also had bags. The boy realised from their bags that they were the ones in charge. Soon he fell asleep.
They got to Mirny at sundown the next day. Trucks carrying piles of dirt were the only things to be heard in a city that was almost identical to the one the boy came from, except for the mine that went into the earth like an upside-down mountain. Its entrance looked like a gigantic belly button.
For an hour, after the truck stopped and some people got off and others got on, the boy thought he’d been sold to Ananiy so Ananiy could resell him to someone from the mine. But no one told him to get off and the truck got going again and he left the belly button in the earth behind him like something you remember as you wake from a fever dream, and your mother won’t come to you because she’s not there.
The land outside the truck made small waves. Then the truck broke down and they had to wait two days before it was fixed. When the twilight came some lit a fire and some took out a bottle they’d hidden who-knows-where, and the truck’s owner said I don’t know and swore, his back filthy with dust and his hands black with grease. When they got going again the land made small waves same as before.
One dawn, who knows which dawn, they arrived in a village with concrete houses and tents and lamps hanging from wires suspended between poles. Ananiy told the boy to get off his ass, they had to board a new truck. The new truck arrived in the afternoon and it looked like the first, only the people were different, though they were still poor with no bags. The new truck got going. They changed trucks five times in a month. They drove over rivers on rafts and saw marshes and only two or three clusters of huts. They stopped at Ust-Yansky, in a land made up of lakes and marshes. The lakes were blue blotches and the marshes were bruises in the earth left by great glacial shields that once pressed onto the earth like stones on an empty stomach. Now the earth was full of gigantic dead bodies which for generations locals had thought of as frozen monsters, but which now were just something you could sell to get another shot at life after the mines in the North had closed and you could no longer fish in the river.
When he got off the boy didn’t think he could use his legs anymore, not even to go and take a piss.
Let’s go, said Ananiy.
I need to piss.
After.
I need to.
Ananiy waited for him and after that they went to see a man called Karl. Karl had a samovar and a rug and a desk at which he sat as he looked at them, and behind the desk he had stacks of elephant teeth, orange, red, black, stacked, whole, broken, the larger ones wrapped in bags for protection.
What do you want? Karl asked.
He didn’t even look at the boy. Karl looked at Ananiy and already knew what Ananiy would say and how it would go.
Work, said Ananiy.
You know the kind of work it is?
My brother worked for you.
Who was your brother?
Ananiy said his brother’s name but Karl said he’d never heard of him and if they wanted to work for him they’d have to look after themselves because out there no one would help them.
We can do that.
So Karl gave Ananiy his terms.
I give you the pump, and zerofive percent.
That was ok with Ananiy and the next day they got started.
They left on a truck all their own, and even though it was small and looked like it would leave them stranded any minute it took them exactly where they wanted: North. They had a pump, a tent, fuel tanks, shovels, axes, firewood, enough food for a month or so. It was all Karl’s stuff and he’d deduct it from the first month’s pay. Except for the food, which Ananiy bought with the last of his money.
Two years to pay back what I spent on you, said Ananiy to the boy. Then you can make some money of your own and if you give me enough of that you can fuck off where you want.
The land was always the same, a flat expanse of grass and mud with water like mirrors and streams that went in and out of the earth forming dark and smelly ditches. If you walked on that earth you’d find it as soft as a damp mattress but underneath it was hard as stone, even though locals said it was melting and it didn’t freeze as much as it used to in the winter.
We start here, said Ananiy.
They took the pump and they dragged it near a fairly large water mirror. They connected the tube that was supposed to take the water from the marsh but the tube that was supposed to shoot it out was too short and they had to look for a watery place that was closer but also deep enough to shoot the water against the wall of dirt that Ananiy had decided to create. Then they turned on the pump and began to dismantle and scrape the layers with the water jet, which went through the earth like piss through snow. They dug at that spot for seventeen days and they couldn’t find anything so they put everything back on the truck and moved fifty kilometres North.
The new place was like the last. Except that the soil was darker and stank of dead bodies, like a fridge that’s been unplugged with everything inside left to rot. The water jet scraped it like a forceps scrapes a foetus off a womb, but the crumbling dirt and the mud that got torn away forming slimy pools contained nothing but stones and sometimes fragments of waterlogged wood.
The boy held the pump for hours until his forearms and shoulders and back and buttocks filled with lactic acid. He’d watch the earth dissolve as if mesmerised and after a few hours the earth was all he knew and the green grass all around looked to him as if it came from a different planet. At the end of the day they’d cook something and eat in silence and soon after they’d fall asleep on the ground under the tent’s military canvas and the petrol lamp that stank of engine. Above them the skies were always strange.
But Ananiy’s luck was bad. They couldn’t find anything in the second place either. They loaded the truck and saw that the food was running out. So they went northeast and drove past the huts of Yukagir. After forty days in the tundra, when the boy saw those huts, they looked to him like they were pregnant with life. They bartered an axe for some dried fish and drove northeast for another forty kilometres. They camped two kilometres from the shore in a place where the earth looked like cracked potato skin.
There the ground was harder. There was more water and they almost lost the truck in a pond covered in grass that looked like it was just grass with earth underneath. They set up camp and started digging. This time the earth was strange. It didn’t stink anymore and it was harder, it took a whole day to dig three feet down. But then they started finding interesting things that looked like bones, and maybe they were bones but not yet the kind of bones they’d come for.
They were always covered in clouds of mosquitoes and soon Ananiy stopped working. He’d tell the boy don’t just stand there with your dick in your hand and he would walk to the shore where he’d hunt for the seagulls they would eat in the evening, burnt over their electric heater or raw after leaving them to ferment for a few days. Then one afternoon Ananiy came back excited and told the boy they had to move the camp.
We need to go.
But it’s good here.
Pack up.
You found something?
The shore.
What is it?
The shore. It’s melting.
Did you find one?
The tusk stuck out of the earth. The earth wasn’t too frozen and the undertow had dug directly into the soil. For hundreds of feet the earth and the grass overlooked the shoreline like a dark wall shaped by the sea. Sometimes large chunks of earth fell off, slid into the water and melted into a brown sludge. And exactly three feet over the water, in a small, newly formed hole, the tusk jutted out like a twisted root. The tip was red and cracks ran down its length and it looked like it was missing some pieces. Maybe the sea had taken them but in that moment small things like that didn’t matter.
Ananiy and the boy started digging down to the tusk but soon their shovels clanged as if they’d hit a concrete block. The permafrost was hard and intact and it took them almost two days to extract the tusk. They put it in the tent and hid it under a bag they’d used for rice. They went back to where they’d dug and it looked like an empty dental cavity.
They built a barricade of stones and driftwood they’d found along the shore and they put the pump over it. The pump sucked water directly from the sea and pummelled the earth with it like salt fists. Sooner or later the salt would fuck up the pump. They’d have to take it apart and clean it and put it back together again. But they were managing to melt the ice core much more quickly and one windy afternoon, while a storm was brewing a few kilometres away and green blotches were forming in the sea in the distance like spots of mould, the earth they were digging into with the water changed colour and when they stopped to see what it was they saw that the dirty ice contained long chunks of hair.
The hair was brown but as it dried in the sea wind it revealed red and even blondish strands.
They didn’t know what to do with this hair so they threw it away. They were hoping to extract more ivory but Ananiy’s luck was bad and after about a week of work all they could find was a leg bone with some skin still stuck to it and some rotting meat. They cleaned the bone in the sea and kept it. It was a mystery. No head. No ivory. Nothing. Only a tusk and a leg.
Ananiy was strange the next few days. He would go search the shore and be gone longer and longer. One day he left at sunup and didn’t come back until after sundown, when the stars in the sky were like milk teeth. His eyes were crazed as if he’d drunk a lot but the boy knew that they didn’t have any booze and he realised that Ananiy was going insane. He was possessed by ivory, he only talked about where to look for it, where they’d be sure to find it, how the ghost elephant was making fools of them and how a thousand ghost elephants haunted the permafrost and would soon come out from underneath their tent and stomp them into a pulp.
Then they ran out of rice and Ananiy sat in his tent brooding, angry, and quiet. The boy went looking for eggs in a rocky part of the shore where the birds nested and when he got back to camp Ananiy was gone. He’d taken everything but the pump, which now looked like a fossil from a forgotten age. The tube that went into the sea looked like a mutilated trunk screwed onto a metal skull.
Ananiy had taken everything. He’d have to give the equipment back to Karl and he hadn’t even left the boy a knife. The boy sat down. He thought of Ananiy talking to Karl and telling him some bullshit about how the boy had died somewhere or walked too far along the shore and never came back. Then he thought about Ananiy selling the tusk, using the money to pay for the equipment and the pump he’d abandoned and then spending whatever little he had left on a couple of bottles of vodka and a whore with weather-beaten skin.
The boy sat for a long time and realised that he was fucked but also free.
If he’d ever run into him again Ananiy would look away and pretend not to know him. He was free.
The twilight was already descending on the shore. The nights were getting longer. Seabirds flew down from the cliffs and sizzled like fat over a shoal of fish. The air smelled of earth and rot but also moss and salt. The seal pups began to quieten in the semidarkness and the sea predators made a temporary return to their shadowy lairs. The boy walked along the grassy shore. He took care not to set foot on the edge because a piece of cliff could crumble off and he’d break his neck on the rocks. The noise of the sea dug into the earth and peopled it with giants rolling in the mud like biscuits in lard and the boy sucked on his thoughts as if they were fingers. He passed a hump in the earth that could be an elephant’s hump and he passed a dead truck that had been rusting in that same spot for half a century. The light from a small perfect sun suddenly peeked from the horizon over the grassy flatlands and the boy sat on the yellow heath and ate an egg he found not long ago.
Those early days were the hardest because knowing what to do in those kinds of circumstances is always harder than doing it. He decided to dig himself a shelter and he chose a patch of ground that was soft but not squishy. When the flattened stone he used as a shovel hit against the earth’s frozen core the boy stopped. The hole he dug was no deeper than twice the distance between his thumb and little finger but then he raised its height by the same distance, building a small dry-stone wall around it. Then he gathered driftwood on the shore and also found a long thin bone that must have been an elephant rib. He placed the driftwood and the rib over the wall and covered the structure with shrubs and grass. Then he dug out grassy clods of dirt from the ground and used them to cover the roof and pressed a few against the wall as well. This way, he could slide inside the shelter and fall asleep even in the coldest hours. The permafrost melted a little in reaction to his body heat and then froze again, sealing itself off. Then he covered it with moss and dried grass and finally he was warm.
Walking along the shore he discovered a new cliff area. The shapes of the stones did not allow the birds to nest but he found edible mollusks instead. Between the mollusks from No-Birds Shore and the eggs from Iron Shore the boy kept the hunger at bay for a while.
Once he solved the problems of where to sleep and what to eat he could afford to explore. Within a week he knew where the good water was and where the bad water was, and he found a river as deep as his leg and as narrow as his trunk, where fish with small spots on their sides lived under large pebbles. With a little practice he learned to catch them with his hands but he decided to catch them only every now and then because he didn’t want to finish them.
The biggest problem was what to wear.
Without a needle and thread to repair them, his clothes were falling to pieces, but the boy remembered the dead truck and decided to poke around inside it. For a few days he had put that idea away because the wreck polluted his thoughts like something returning from a shadowy past. One night he’d dreamt it, the truck, and on the driver’s seat a woman sat trembling wrapped in a cloth and it was his mother and she had a dead baby girl in her arms that stared at him like an animal.
But in the end he worked up his courage and decided to go and see. There was nothing there. A few bags that fell to pieces as soon as he opened them and some electric cables. The boy was about to leave when he remembered his dream. He went to the driver’s side and looked in. The skin on the seat was cracked and the yellow stuffing had crumbled like cheese. Like a curious animal encountering an unknown technology he lifted the seat. Underneath he found a compartment with a long, narrow metal box. He flipped the two latches that kept it shut and found a large sheet of tarp that was completely dry. He unfolded the sheet and found a blanket and he realised that it was the same as the one that had wrapped his mother in his dream. There was also a torch that no longer worked, a folding shovel, a pencil, a notebook, a compass, and a knife. He took the blanket, the shovel, and the knife, and the cables from the back of the truck. Then he went back to Moss Shelter.
The days passed. The first snow came.
After the snow settled on the tundra the boy knew he wouldn’t be able to survive the winter at Moss Shelter so he decided to go to Yukagir. He walked for a few days and for the last two he didn’t eat. But he was sure he’d get there if he followed the shoreline and after seven days and seven nights of walking he got there. The people who saw him saw a naked boy wrapped in a blanket. The blanket was tied around his waist with a cable. He was barefoot and his feet bled from the ice and the hard snow but the people of Yukagir welcomed him and gave him something to eat and a family took him in.
He spent the winter with a woman who treated him like a son and with boys who treated him like a brother and taught him how to hunt seals.
When spring came he said his goodbyes and went back to Moss Shelter. So it was for five years. Winter in Yukagir, summer on the Elephant Shore. Eventually he became a man. The truck journey and Ananiy’s disappearance were only memories from a world that could no longer touch him.
One day he found a part of the shore where he’d never been. He immediately saw what he’d stopped looking for the day Ananiy left.
Clouds contorted over the waves like the guts of seals as lightning lit up their insides, revealing monstrous shapes within. Squeezed and abused by the wind, they moved southwest, and as soon as they reached unthinkable but not impossible distances they melted like pale shit. Then the night came. And the stars went from high and crystal-like in the sky’s dark pupil to glowing spots on the flanks of flying trout. A gray light rose.
Five days later, he was digging.
Two tusks stabbed out of the ground like curved wooden pillars. Their shadows reached across the drenched grass and mud puddles. A stream ran nearby and partly exposed a large yellow bone suggesting there had once been more bones but they’d slipped elsewhere in one of the earth’s shudders.
The shovel was like a scalpel. Shredded fur and skin floated in the cracked melted ice and the cloudy water soon took on the scent of rot and a light brown colouring. There was no wind.
It was like opening the case beneath the driver’s seat of the dead truck. Once he’d lifted the first layer of soil and the first layer of skin he saw the ribs all lined up as if ready to rise and fall as the lungs breathed in and breathed out the plants of the tundra. Different smells spread through the air. As the ice melted and the animal’s tissues warmed in the spring air the smell of rotting flesh was replaced by the scent of berries and dwarf willows and lichens chewed millennia before. The man’s hands touched the animal’s layers and the animal’s layers touched his fingers damp with black blood. Then, after plum-coloured guts came undone like a woman’s tresses, the placenta’s rubbery balloon flashed a distant blue. The man pressed with his fingers and his fingers touched in that darkness of animal fluids a curled-up body no bigger than a dog. It was covered in fur. Shifting aside the mother’s tissues the man from Moss Shelter saw the son’s half-open eye flash from its barren pickling, and as soon as the air reached it, it clouded over and withered.
*
But he saw me, I’m sure, and before retreating to his nothingness, our gazes met, and as I poured my past into his pupil, the lands crossed and the winters spent burning humankind’s winter, he poured his story into me, the unpeopled lands, the herd’s migration along the continent’s veins in the wake of retreating glaciers, the yellowing moors, the forbs and rockfoil, and after twenty-two months fleeing North, the birth of the species’ final remnants, marching slowly, seeking cold, finding me.
*
The man stopped and pulled back his hands as if the elephant mummy could swallow him and bury him for two thousand years of darkness in the frozen dirt.
He went down to the sea and washed himself. He sat on the wet pebbles. He looked at the sea and the colours of the water that changed as the clouds changed.
From his coat pocket he took out a cigarette that he’d stolen from Ananiy a geological era before. He didn’t have a lighter. He put it in his mouth and chewed it. He chewed it until it was a small bitter wad and he let it rest between his gums and the inside of his cheek.
Then he woke up.
*
The tip of his father’s boot pressed against his ribs and it hurt like a life of shit.
I sold you to Ananiy, from now on you do as he says.
Ananiy told him to pack his things and get a move on, there was no time to lose.
They walked for five days on a dirt road that they don’t know was once an elephant trail.
The grass was yellow and leathery, the wind knotted it like the mats in an animal’s pelt but it is an animal that never ended, it was all back with no head and no tail, they walked on it by day and slept on it by night, beside a fire just big enough to warm them and then die out.
The man and the boy lit fires like the last elephant hunters did, not knowing they were following the great herd as it walked North towards extinction.
Where are we going?
North, said Ananiy.
When will we get there?
North.
What do you want me to do for you?
North.
It is hard to know where stories go, whether they’ve already happened or haven’t happened yet.
Sometimes they end where they begin, like men that look for the same thing and make the same mistakes generation after thousandth generation. Sometimes someone sees something new but then people forget and start over from the beginning.
This story ends at dawn, with a man dragging his slave down the side of a mountain. On the plain behind them, some look for bones and some don’t. All are propelled by a biological indifference towards love and beauty, and they either repeat exactly what they did ten thousand years ago following the elephants’ tracks or they completely forget. No one knows what the elephants are, but their suffering and death were real, just like their bodies are real, even though they no longer exist. Their trunks and their fur and even their tusks sold on the border to Chinese craftsmen to decorate the offices and mansions of the Republic’s newly minted capitalists aren’t a test or a proof of principle, nor are they an ephemeral trace of what we are. So we keep going forwards without thinking, and no one holds the awe-inspiring power to bring them back to life.
