They were places that we barely knew, were barely familiar with, yet entered apprehensively, reluctantly, for months and years, our hands grimed with dirt and oil. No other landscape would ever be that vast, that endless, that absolute. No journey more desperate or charged with hope. We crossed clumps of frozen mud during the winter months, icy meadows in November and damp meadows in May, stopping at piles of strewn objects and loose gravel, or running along the banks of some sleepy canal, where dozens, no, hundreds of faces leapt from the pages of books and were met in silence. The Russian countryside in flames, men solitary and despondent, women devastated, explorers. Michael Strogoff walked blindfold in tatters, led by the exile Nadia; fugitives dropped to the ground to avoid being seen by paramilitary thugs; the student Raskolnikov, wrapped in a cape, ranted deliriously; Cesare Pavese ran his hand over a hill.
God knows which one of us decided that the two German boys, who lived in a remote house down there in the middle of the dirt road, were Nazis: one thin, tall, suspicious-looking; the other stocky and—given his uncommon physical strength, his pug nose, his small eye—frightening to behold. We crept toward them across the stubbled field. It must have been our first recon mission, and what would come of it we had yet to decide. Suddenly, having gotten halfway by stealth, there appeared, as if risen from a cavity in the earth, the younger of the two, short and fierce, with his wide neck and simian arms. He’d been expecting us, had mysteriously sensed that we were coming, had guessed, by some terrifying animal intelligence, our vague intentions. He didn’t say a word, just glared at us defiantly, with his legs spread out, nailed to the ground, wildly twirling an iron bar above his head, the whistle of which I still seem to recall. We ran, and not a trace of that strange and inexplicable episode is left, nor do I remember what came of it. The pair must have moved away shortly after; we never crossed paths with them again. Or, if we did, nobody mentioned the incident, as if whatever happened during our adventures belonged to a parallel world, which did not intersect with our ordinary reality and yet, because of that, was more significant and indelible. The boys grew up. One became a fiduciary, I believe. Of the other I haven’t had word for a long time.
Crept across the stubbled field: the words are right, there was actual stubble. Yet it wasn’t the country; the ravaged area that we tore through was not the country anymore, if it ever had been. There was no sweeping plain, no actual expanse; on the contrary, it was as if what may have once been called a plain or expanse or landscape had shrunk and withered and was now on the verge of disappearing forever. Hemmed in by roads and train tracks, a sloping forest to the south, a highway to the north, the turf of our adventures was retreating from the city, heading west, toward hills that would never be reached, enclosed as they were by a wide semicircular stretch of railroad. That place hung on amid heavily trafficked arterial roads and the screech of brakes, and slowly, imperceptibly, got filled in with the scraps deposited in it, which would one day blanket everything and precipitate its disappearance. The objects ranged from broken umbrellas to battered suitcases to tools that had fallen out of use. An ominous fence (which, we knew, could be circumvented by various gaps) enclosed a junkyard of trailers and abandoned cars, where with a little luck we could find engines to disassemble, carburetors to carry off, piston rods. Farther on, two major attractions: a mysterious cache of old clothes and bales of paper, where sometimes, on Sundays, we would spend hours hopping from pile to pile, scaling pyramids on the point of collapse, then jumping down onto loads of frayed, stained textiles, which released a dense ancient dust that made you choke. On the other side, concealed by a forest, where a valley fell steeply into scrubland, the forbidden stink of an open-air landfill—almost always unguarded—beckoned to be searched and explored. On rare occasions, you might find a doll or semi-new toy amid pungent cooking foil and trash and barely broken secrets that someone had tossed out. We were chased off just once, by a guard who took his job seriously and shouted at us that we’d get sick. Cholera! he shouted, waving his arms. Don’t you know you’ll get cholera here? And he kept shouting, even after we were long gone. Cholera! Cholera!
Stubble, then: it was there, in the dwindling fields, the moldering, hastily built wooden constructions, the traces of a world on the brink of vanishing. It spoke, for me, the hard-bitten, big-sky language of the American books that I was then reading, the mixture of tenderness and violence found in the pages of Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell and the mysterious and terrifying Faulkner. Yet it also spoke of something else, hinted at a metamorphosis already underway, one that was perhaps crueler and definitely could not be forgotten or avoided or detached from the reality in which that stubble continued to fight for its existence. During ancient geologic eras, the small plain we ran in, and the surrounding hills, formed the bottom of a sea: fossil imprints can still be found in a nearby cave, ammonites trapped in clay. In more recent history, it was made up of small ponds and swamps, barrens, a few ash trees and poplars, reedbeds. Today it’s full of puddles, which for lack of sun can stagnate for months before congealing into a hard, yellowish, cracked soil. From a sea to puddles: the land was gradually suffocating, the grass and stubble were partly to blame, and feeling nostalgic about the place made no sense. What was there to be nostalgic about? The world was this reticulum of roads and merchandise, and for a time, between the roads and merchandise, little holes—yes, puddles—were parked on the edges. There were stubbled fields, pheasants, trash, the shuttle of automobiles and large passenger trains or convoys whose cars you could go on counting for minutes as they lurched toward their sorting stations. What they carried we couldn’t say. And in the middle was us, ignorant of almost everything yet perfectly aware of it all. But the straight road, which seemed, when the sun went down, to stretch on forever, could still open up a new perspective, the dim possibility of vastness; you came up short of breath and felt torn inside. Ahead of you, as you straddled a bike or a scooter, you saw something thrust open, the sky turning red and, when it was windy out, the last clouds unraveling and speeding away. Behind you lay an intersection where a truck had run over a boy and dragged his body several feet, the first sense of our atrocious, un-innocent, random fortunes, which were neither absolute nor superhuman but rooted here, in the shape of the present day and of life at present. Just down there, in the arid heart of some larger thing we could barely intuit, we detected an unbearable tenderness, an unbearable desperation, an unbearable sense of longing. And because of that, we would pause for a moment, our chests exploding with a sense of disquiet and hope, on the side of a long road that either led to the future or to nothing at all.
