MIRNY
We were both trying not to think about her. Innokenti Terekhov – fifth fastest ore hauler in Mirny, was doing better than I.
He lit a cigarette, then planted a mudded boot over the steering wheel, where it joined its mate, above a mosque wall pattern of dried foot prints, fanning out towards the night – a work in progress.
Innokenti, at last, began to relax and with his denim legs forming an inverted hammock over the steering column, gently rocked his mistreated knees. Beneath the cab his truck’s elephantine engine ticked over, calmly drowning out the mining outside.
This is when the real damage is done to my face, between the hours of one day and the next, in the small circle of time between night and morning. This is when most atrocities have happened, not just to holes in the ground, but to people, too.
I am still thinking about her; she never once thinks about me.
Everything must come to rest at some point. That is when the worst things happen and when the most cunning people do their business. I don’t blame Innokenti - he merely transports what others have already taken away.
Though the radio was not switched on, its dial still urgently needed addressing. An adjacent heating control knob was awkwardly set far right, to warm. Very awkward. No changing a heating knob away from warm, not at four AM, not in North Eastern Siberia.
Small, tangible symmetries were very important to Innokenti, or rather, had become important, not just to him with his bad knees, but to all Russian men of his generation. I used to think in this way, but then I started getting bigger. Now, I am a big round mess, with no time for straight lines.
Zoya, a dark matte-haired half-wolf, (too old for active service, but still continent and mobile) yawned from the cabs floor, repositioning her light khaki belly fluff tantalisingly close to her master’s free hand. Innokenti obliged, with several scratches and a tickle. Zoya rolled and went back to her dream, Innokenti to his symmetries.
At the apex of a quiet moment that comes only towards the end of a hard fought cigarette, before it fizzles against some undeserving surface, Innokenti heard the noise again, the treacherous middle-aged noise.
You should imagine a sound akin (timbre wise) to that which a tuneful person creates with a moistened finger upon the rim of a glass. Or, say, when a bored and lonesome drunk realises the orchestral potential in the tops of his empties and starts to blow.
Much like its cause, the noise is hesitant, universal and broad, a rumble reprise. At first, like all people, he mistook it for a slight loss of hearing, a bad reaction to a night of loudness - a foreign machine firing too close to the brain. After a time living with the noise though, there could be no mistaking its meaning – Time to slow down!
Zoya, despite the large lupine ears and a genetic love of hearing, is not interested – she is a dog well past the worries of middle-age.
Only two things hear it, one; the man it is meant for and two; the intangible atmosphere, the space that sustains it. I am the second of these. I am Mirny, the hole Innokenti is about to leave behind.
At the bottom there are four rounds of men working my ugly face with their machines; red, black and yellow engines of extraction - making me bigger, making me deeper by the day.
A curiously feminine crane - half the size of those happy blue ones seen above ground, that lift the spirits of cities and watch over young sports stadiums - swings a large head of pneumatic metal gears and teeth, its three mouths all capable of different degrees of face chomping. The most vicious of the three is used at the start of a new layer of the mines cast, skinning my face grey for further consumption.
Violent claret screams cut through the night. Some replaceable worker had severed a pair of forefingers, lost forever in the shadow between some oily levers (the life of a night-shift mine mechanic is primarily a battle against the statistical inevitability of serious injury).
A safety official - some high cheeked young Nazarov, part of the unavoidable Nazarov family, a mainstay of all North Eastern Siberian mining jobs of decent pay and low risk - trots over safely behind an expensive head torch and a company clipboard.
The mechanic is replaced, the clipboard is opened, a pen is clicked into service. As vodka is poured into the screaming miner, a family of numbers is taken down on the company crested accident form - four numbers for the time, one for the injury category and a long string for employee identification. Young Nazarov finishes quickly and follows his expensive head torch back to safety. Mining resumes. My abuse continues.
At night, they all concentrate on two things: the spaces illuminated by their lights and the straps of leather/plastic on their wrists. The latter being checked with clockwork regularity.
None of them can look back. None can look to the centre, they pretend nothing is here, but there is, there is me, the real me, not my face - my heart, the black ice and snow of a frozen lake. A lake signals the end for any Diamond Mine.
In the midst of me, in this dark mirror, burns a strip of full moon between two stormy clouds – ash coloured cumuli, both of them jostling for a prime raining position above the city. Around this bright pupil motif, there is reflected the rest of my being, in totality. The truth of the hole, the size of the crime; the background, the landscape, the hellish spiral of architecture they have sunk deep into the world, with nothing but diesel power and greed.
Me. All me. I am getting bigger all the time; nine linking circles of dirt, dust and rock. A pathway to the sky, perfectly hewn, made visible at night by the mines twirling halogen beacons and flickering red danger strips.
Innokenti Terekhova, with his back wisely to the lake and a large vodka barrel chest keeping his heart warm, checked his watch again. Four and fifteen.
With the precision that only comes with a repetitive job, Oleg Kizilov- a month under half of Innokenti’s age, but only six months and a ceremonial safety certificate from Innokenti’s position in the world of diamond mining- climbed up the passenger side of the two-storey truck, his toe caps tunefully ringing out a bang on each steel rung.
-Commander Terekov. Good morning! Do I have permission to board yellow submarine?
-Yes, yes. Close it up, put those somewhere else please, do not sit on this, please reconfigure the corner page of my novel, stow it there. Good, yes, and before you try, do not put mud and feet upon the dash, it is quite the juvenile action. Also, while legally it is perhaps morning, Oleg Kizilov, spiritually it is still evening.
-Then, I shall pray for our safe passage into purgatory.
-Perfect, but do not pray for my Zoya, she is a pagan, she would not appreciate it.
-Zoya, cleverest girl in all of Mirny and the cutest, are you not? (an ear ruffle and a dusty back pat)
-She sleeps the most.
-Exactly. When I die I am going to find you in hell Zoya and then you can tell me what your dreams were about.
The truck heaved, moaned and - after an anxious few seconds - slowly pulled away.
-Oleg Kizilov - tell me, how is the sister fixed this Sunday? (as casually as possible)
-Fixed good. You cannot see her later, she is already busy.
-I have a particular arrangement, anyways. I am finishing the book you placed into the wrong compartment.
-What is it? What is it about?
-Fathers and Sons, on both counts.
The radio, quite without Innokenti Terekhov noticing, was subtly clicked on and tuned to a station near the wrong end of the dial. Bleeping modern music pulsed perfectly within the metric bass of the trucks engine - a twelve ton rhythm section.
A waved flashlight sent the truck onto the second circle, the yellow behemoth’s three meter wheels slowly finding their tread again in the dark, second gear. Somewhere near the face, another set of demolition men walked onto their shift, their red shadows cast by the truck’s theatrical rear lamps - giants walking four storeys high up the first circle and a quarter mile wide along my face. This is the best I ever look.
Of the twelve gears available to Innokenti, only the first four are of any use during ascent. Oleg triangled his leg modern style and pragmatically started rolling a series of ever thinning cigarettes to smoke across the coming morning.
These circles make me what I am. They each have their own pop-up book story - lists of safety reports and balance sheets, depth charts and efficiency graphs, all filed in company files. One grey scratch on a circle wall is the blunt end of a million man-hours and ten thousand blisters.
This is not meant to make any sense, this is mining. A mindless obsession, it has nothing to do with real economics or any special love of diamonds.
You should know (you probably have not been told) – those shiny stones are meaningless in the scheme of preciousness; especially in such a nuclear age, so very far from one of stone. If, for an example, Innokenti’s big yellow tipper truck contains the makings of a billion carats or a billion carrots, it makes no difference. Mining is about making a hole, about leaving a mark and then going for breakfast afterwards.
Every twenty meters further into the ground, the possibility of damage to machinery and labour force increases by a factor of fourteen. The alchemy of risk into reward is the secret rite all big mine operators pretend to have initiation in, I don’t believe it. All I see is digging, severed fingers, frozen lakes and me, flashes of me in the dark, getting bigger all the time.
After tearing around the fifth circle, Oleg decided to ask Innokenti about the helicopter crashes again, a favourite subject of the old driver, who took the opportunity to crease some of the valleys in his stressful forehead and utter a few mutterings on the fragility of life. A short and fiery story, though narrated in the Terekhov style, that of a forensic doctor’s seminar, rather than the vivid horror show Oleg fancied.
- A mine worker is only as good as the catastrophes he has avoided.
Innokenti began, tapping the dash in divine punctuation, lectern of the common man.
Some time into the ensuing discourse on the effects of artificially created downdraft on the atmospheric patterns of localised weather systems, Oleg fell warmly asleep, his hands under his jacket and his feet under Zoya.
When the ground levelled and fourth gear was at last cranked into life, Innokenti kissed the place on his finger where a ring should have been and began to sing a symmetrical, Orthodox carol with which to wake his passenger.
Oncoming lights, rendered amber and brass by refraction and diffusion signalled the end of Mirny the hole and the start of Mirny the city.
As good a place to stop as any.
Oleg bid his driver goodbye and gave him the familiar conciliatory shoulder rub- the one that middle aged men dislike, but seem to attract.
Innokenti’s still had to haul his ore to processing, to water-blasting and grading, where the worth of a thousand man-hours would be tallied in small round boxes - then logged into computer files by a bored, short woman named Tamara (mother of two sickly religious boys, whose uncle had been a famous man in local Sakha Republic circles until he had come to rest, in tragic fashion, at the stick of his prized personal helicopter) and changed accordingly when it was tax paying time.
Walking towards where he knew the terraced company canteen was, Oleg started thinking about her too - Olya, his sister - just as I was, right then, just as I always do.
An icy prickle suddenly crept over his face- rain, freezing slightly on the Sunday air. Despite the temperature and the time, he forgot his pragmatism, smiled at the gap in the sky, forgot about the rain and beheld, again, the stars.
***
A good start to a day is starlight and a shift in perspective.
From the Mirny that is me, to the Mirny that was built because of me and the diamonds I contain.
To facilitate my sparkly contents, within Mirny (the city), there are many plants. Some new, some old. Many grey process houses and many silver grading centres, the latter coming with white overalls and a workforce of furrow-browed men and women who could have done college, but never had the choice.
Conveyer belts, inspection points, water and oil separation treatments, life- long employees with failing eyesight staring at microscopes, vibrating sediment-sifter trays, security check lists, ex-army types with random pocket searches, target incentive schemes, stern penalties and monthly raffles - all for the Diamonds, all the time. Just like me, this city never really sleeps.
That is all boring though, it has nothing to do with her. This is why I much prefer the blue canteen and its leaky staff toilet block - the most interesting thing in a city is never the city itself.
Olya (the ten minute older, cleaner, finer featured, brighter, less pragmatic though twice as downcast, twin to Oleg) was hard at work in stall four - staff toilets being important to all modern amateur poets.
Stall four was the best, she thought; the rhyming squeaky door, the romantic pleasure chart diagram, the modern phone numbers, the imagist caricatures, the Byronic glue stain - left of a long-lost poster, the cracked Shakespearean tiles by her tragic left boot, the boot with the torn, split and retied brown lace, the iambic metric drip of the failing pipes behind her, the tantalisingly symbolic, loose-locking latch and the stylistic paper holder, which held paper, but not the poetic kind. Then, just like that, it was all over, with a flush and slam - there were tomatoes to be simmered, though not boiled.
- Twenty, twenty. Twenty one. Twenty one.
At the hot plate, beautiful Olya counted everything twice and re-arranged anything unfitting - limp or daringly shaped lumps of carbohydrate, upstanding vegetable matter, or protein slices jaunting from their dishes fill-line of perspective.
As with everything Olya does, taste and temperature matter less than look.
Wages in Mirny are dependent more on design than on quality or expertise (culinary or otherwise). Communism may have been booted, but many of its greatest strengths remain.
You see, she is, of course, beautiful too. That is why she is watched, by me, by everyone. A starving blonde lioness of beauty, typical Russian height and poise, though with the unexpected twist of a pair of big hazel eyes and supple, sculpted portions of energetic flesh in the areas where most girls got lazy. Olya Kizilova is easily the most interesting and beautiful girl in Mirny Administrative District and is probably the third most beautiful girl in all of the Sakha Republic’s speck of the Russian Federation, or so she gets told, by all the wrong men.
Strips of gun silver ceiling align with stripes of browned brittle bacon. The bulbs of over-food lights are mirrored in the placement of bare plates - stacks of twenty in spring loaded lifters with only the top five cleaned regularly.
Oleg smiled across at his sister and loaded his tray with an extra dollop of something brown and overcooked. He wondered, could she join them for a bit of food? Yes, she thought she could, why not.
Already waiting for the twins were their breakfast family; Sasha, Leo and Anatoly Grinko. The last of them, Anatoly (pale water skinned son of a banished ideologue), stifled a cough and started his breakfast joke. A joke always for Olya and Oleg’s benefit, though rarely to their appreciation.
-What is your favourite type of apple, asks a long collar Frenchman of a blue collar American and a red collar Russian.
-This joke is from your father?
-Yes, no nudity.
-Finish it quickly then, I cannot eat when I am being told a joke, the suspense ruins my palette.
-The Frenchman begins by saying that le favourite apple is le apple tart, because this is tres hilarious, no?
-And so, naturally.
-Yes, next the American, he says, ‘my favourite be the big Apple, because it be darn biggest’.
-And so, last, your line of comedy ends with the Russian, he says?
-The one I am eating.
-Very sophisticated.
The quarter to five family (Anatoly - now back to finishing stew, aside Leo - about to begin porridge, Oleg - next to Olya, and Sasha - the most heavily religious of the five, drinking heavily and praising Christ, at regular intervals) wove itself in a tired bower around one of the good tables, far away from the icy door.
Opposite them, some grainy soccer game silently kicked around, within the four walls of the television, noisy enough, but none of them listened nor watched.
A cat purred into a warm corner, its ginger tail over a delicate pink nose. It was far better fed than everyone else in the room - Mirny’s mice outweighing canteen pies, for protein content, by two grammes.
-Praise his holy feet, and his Jewish beard!
-Be quiet Sasha, what were you about to say Olya?
-Merely that I wrote another, see.
-Then let her launch away, raise the tone, raise the tone!
A polite hush is made.
Two candles slide
Pass me by.
White blossoms pile
High from on high.
Snowed under.
Dug in.
Taiga is sleeping.
So I sleep a while longer.
A polite applause is made.
-Much shorter than yesterday.
-Yes Oleg...and?
-But much better also. (An arm over the shoulder, a brotherly smile)
-Soon, I feel, I will write one but a single line, but also perfect.
-That is more sculpture than anything else.
-I’ll take what I can get Anatoly Grinko.
-My sister, a plastic toilet seat based poet. (A curl of blonde hair around a dusty finger)
-She is far from debased! I salute all of you!
-The more Sasha swilled, the more agreeable a pig he became. There is your line of poetry Olya? What’s wrong?
-Tomato! (long gone)
The worth of moments between a night and a morning are made up of more than a list of hours and the stamping of a card. They are the time to re-tie a snapped broken brown bootlace, added to the years it took that brown bootlace to break through. No one understands her but me.
Apart from the cat, no one stays in the canteen long enough to get a feel for its sterile, corporate form - a slap of neutral blue paint away from its former, sterile, communist form. Oleg drowned the last of his tea, got up and, as he passed them, said warmly insincere good mornings to the men waiting for over-boiled tomato soup – this was the five o-clock family (an unimportant group, containing no beautiful poets, comedians or heavy drinking theologians).
Clouds really dislike me, cumuli - doubly so. I am nothing special, yet I am regularly treated by them to these localised storms. Vigilantes of the sky, perhaps attempting to fill gaps in the land made without their prior consent? Rain - everything mining related was now ten times more dangerous than on the drier day and night, before.
Down at the face, a young Nazarov gravely checked the statistic in his starch- yellow pocket folder, it dictated that, due to rain, one face level mine worker will suffer a serious injury, death being an each-way bet - I will be full of puddles and even uglier than usual.
By comparison, communal shower and cleanliness centre B (more conceptual vestiges of the red old era) makes Oleg Kizilova almost beautiful again. Though he and Olya are not the mirror type twins one sees sometimes, they both have the same rare sets of eyes; the tawny brown irises, set in creamy white sclerae. He put his towel over the immodest thigh high slats, stepped under the hot stuff and began to scrub.
Across the span of the grey tiles, seven rows of greening, brass double faucets drop from stainless steel trusses, piping down modest jets of forever running waters.
All of the other trickling shower users are older than Oleg. For the most part, they have the soft look of better paid hands - diamond counters, with their saggy skin arranging falling waters into small channels and gullies around their guts and grey backsides. Diamond counters have no need for a daily shower; theirs is a wet work to begin with, and never dusty.
In a surprising display of tone, one not lost on older men eyeing him, Oleg’s young skin quickly threw off the black blasts of the night shift. With two hands more of company shampoo and an industrial brush, he became a uniform grade of clear silk ivory.
A few of the trickling men asked Oleg (as casually as possible) about his sister, Olya, and her possible plans for the rest of the Sunday in hand. Between rubs and more lathering, Oleg lets them down gently, just as he always did.
Stepping out from the happiness orange painted terrace of the cleanliness centre, Oleg shone, bright and regenerated in the morning air. The city’s morning no longer contained any rain to frost him, but now provided that strange memory of rain which aids any sunlight in the act of day breaking.
It was ten below the zero. However, this is Siberia and so, though impressive, not too much should be made of this reading.
Running his chipped but clean nails within his head of new foliage, he checked his strap on the opposing hand. Some time after six, he would have to wait for his sister, but that was nothing new. Scuffing in the frozen dirt, he stood and smoked at the gap in the sky he had gazed at earlier - now brimming with the risen sun, which had quickly come into its own.
Now I am laid quite bare. I am wet, gaping at the glory of the sky - the worst kind of scar or sore any landscape ever had.
I can’t look, and I urge you not to. It is easy to get sucked in, downdraft and everything, but, it is hard not to, after all, this is me, this is Mirny and I am at the centre of it, getting bigger all the time.
You should not blame the Sun for this, for its spin and span. That is the way of great lights, illuminating things, good, bad, young and blonde or old and unsightly. The Sun is what it is, and that is something brightly apt for the mounting of stars.
**
Later, and on one of the edges of Mirny - not my edges - the city’s edges, the better edge, Gregori Nazarov was office golfing.
His stance was half eastern (evolutionarily unavoidable- father being of red scarf and beret Petersburg / mother being of old smiling fur traders stock, from parts still unregistered and as yet, un-administered) the knees, cocked slightly, the legs amateurish and much too far apart, the arms too thickly set in their money counting ways, the tan lotion chest too big and flabby, still dangerous, perhaps, in its military way, though clearly lacking the fidelity needed for precision sports.
The Gregorian permafrosted eyes crossed on the unsuspecting ball, a white virgin sphere fresh from its mail order packaging, the Wilson Diamond Eagle Pro™ ball, chosen for a variety of superstitious and indulgent reasons. Barely it formed a right angled triangle with the out of step and poorly placed long, flat feet, feet sheathed proudly in the maroon chequered wool of the Ping Highland Classics™ clothing range.
Sometime before his fiftieth birthday, Gregori had started to suspect he had watched all the worst films, dated the most improper mistresses and listened to the lousiest music. Now, a decade and a pale paunch tugging at his sternum later, he was sure of it. Still, it could have been worse, at least he had her.
Hole five, par three; Tricky narrow drive for the bathroom cubicle, followed by feather pitches into the chrome bidet. A bead of cold vodka sweat landed next to the ball, he erred on the matter of club selection.
Re-centring his belly button over a, free to move, blemished penis, he chewed down his underlip with sporting application, winked an eyelid heavily closed for accuracy (his left eye was untrustworthy and more trouble than it was worth) and with a sudden lateral act of dynamism, he fluttered the three wood titanium driver up, violently flexed his considerable bare buttocks in unison and begun the strokes downward phase; the important phase - the phase of greatest Gregorian motion. Fairway, a perfect approach, he clenched a fist and, in the modern golfer style, pumped the air.
Sunday, his favourite day of the week, (for all the worst reasons). He couldn’t stop thinking about her - and neither can I.
The swooping of a bird outside threw the zebra lights of his office into disarray. Gregori called a time out and used his four iron to pick up some fetching silky male underwear. Ten in the AM and still a few hours from the highlight of his weekly Gregorian calendar - his little treat, his little brush with paradise.
Innokenti waited nervously beside one of Mirny’s better trees, tennis ball in hand. Zoya was taking longer than usual with her canine pursuits. He stiffened in awkwardness as a brief gaggle of church school children passed him - all giggling at the cloud of uric steam rising from behind the tree.
Moments on, and quite to his surprise, Olya Kizilova, too, passed him by - bouncing on her heels and wearing a defiantly short skirt over a thick pair of sensible stockings.
He thought about calling out, but looked down at the still squatting dog and stayed silent. Besides, the girl was clearly in a hurry and after all they had the walk to finish and really, he had that book to be on with, the one about fathers and sons, called fathers and sons.
Nevertheless, he watched the fabric of her slight hips flicker in the wind until they disappeared down a side street, off towards the better edge of town. Finished and relieved, Zoya tugged and they continued with the Sunday walk, one man and his half wolf, a pair of bad knees leading four cold paws homeward, to a tin of something awful and a snooze beneath his legs.
It had been when he was over-shouldering his son and his son’s clipboard, a canteen check, back in that particularly snow-entombed month of March, two years past - when Gregori Nazarov first saw Olya. Just like it was with me, he was entranced, intrigued, he knew he had to have her.
The news that she was a precious commodity available on the open market, procurable through her pragmatic brother, was among the high points of his life, to date, right up in the reckoning with his first millionth Ruble and the arrival of the set of titanium golf clubs, with their mink hats, all mail ordered directly from Pebble Beach, California.
Olya put her hands inside his coat and kissed professionally amidst the thick skin of his neck. When possible, prostitution was better done outside, so much cleaner than paying someone to visit him in his dead apartment or his sweaty office.
She let him say what he needed to say and laughed in all the right places. A twist of blonde hair pulled tight, a small locket, a nibble on the ear, a predictable switching of places, a raising of legs and denim, a lowering of stockings, a whisper - this was for her, something with diamonds, nothing really, she had to have it, he wanted her to, she pretended to protest, but zipped it away, all the same, just as another zip sprang into life.
You should understand, I don’t really want to know, neither should you, but what are we to do? When my unsightliness is illuminated and I have to look to the city for distraction, what else is there, really but moments like this? Slices of lives, a dirty old mans heaven and a twin brother’s business.
I know how poor Olya feels, a hole in the ground, being dug without any care or affection. It is nothing special, it is nothing extraordinary, dramatic and awful things like this happen everyday, whenever the wind changes, I think it has something to do with downdraught, but it isn’t my fault.
Olya gazed up, high into the gap a great bird had left behind and then, in one of those strange twists of perception, her sky took on a whole new light - a diamond light.
In her racing mind a shining crystalline idea was born, something beyond the plain fiction of good and evil, the pale storytelling of old and young, the narratives of fathers and sons, of brothers and sisters.
It would make a perfect poem, a poem of one single sentence, an expression, a shiver of truth in the cold, the pure and simple of the being alive and the not being dead, of life and of consciousness. The universal voice, beyond hell, purgatory and heaven; the love which moves the Sun and the other stars.
*
© Ziggy Evitts 2011 All Rights Reserved |
