The Stone Bridge

A problem

A PROBLEM

I am thirty eight years old. i have two children. i have many grey hairs. I regard them with resignation, like snow lying on a roof — this will melt! — or like a scrape that is healing.

Five years ago I was reading a newspaper in the metro, on my way to work: several thousand years from now (or several tens of thousands of years), the Milky Way galaxy, where we live, will collide with the Andromeda nebula. We are barrelling towards each other at the speed of five hundred kilometers an hour. Or five thousand kilometers an hour. But by the time we collide, the Earth will have been a dead body for a long time. The Sun will run out of heat, and the Earth will turn into an icy crag.

For some reason, this did something to me, induced the sort of terror I had only ever felt as a child, and only on the metro, and only when I thought about the death of my parents. When I read the article, I immediately thought of my daughter. I felt death so strongly that it seemed this feeling would never go away. But ten minutes went by, and by the time I walked into my office, I felt better. But then later that summer there was a day when my daughter and I turned off into a ravine to look for mushrooms.

“Dad, is it true what they say, that someday the Earth won’t exist?”

I played for time, pointlessly — ”Who told you that?” I asked — but there, on the slope of that ravine I realized it fully and irretrievably: yes. There will no longer be anything. Everything will rot away like the grass. Yet this seemed impossible to reconcile with the fact of my daughter’s existence, with the dear, sweaty smell of her head next to me. I turned out to be unprepared for eternal annihilation.

In the mornings and at night, I would think about it. Sometimes, the despair could be ameliorated by simple fatigue, or over-eating, by the catharsis of s*x, by the sound of my son turning and breathing in his sleep. I moved carefully and tried to sleep more, but it was no good; the despair endured beyond consolation.

When I was young, I could rely on youth itself and the uncharted territories it still contained. When I was a child, life appeared a wilderness ahead, a dense forest, but now the forest had become thinner, and between the trunks I could glimpse what lay before me. It was as if I’d climbed a hill, and could suddenly see a black sea in the distance. There are other hills between here and there, smaller hills, and they would never again hide from me the sea into which I’m doomed to walk.

I took note: I still wasn’t prepared to recognize that my son would someday die, that his elderly face would appear in an oval photograph worked into the cross on his grave, and then the cross would fall down and the grave would be plowed under. I wasn’t ready to accept the appearance of other, new boys who would take their turn in living. I didn’t want other boys, other old men, another spring, apart from mine, ours. I had to admit to myself: I wanted to take all of this and rush to my mother, to snuggle up against her, to run up to her and burrow into her. But I couldn’t, Mama was dead.

I looked into people’s faces, particularly old people, and saw how they smiled, sitting on the benches in bathhouses or on the soft seats of shuttle buses. They must know a secret that I don’t know. The same death that I face awaits them, and earlier at that, as soon as tomorrow. So what were they smiling about, why weren’t they hurrying, why weren’t they devoured by fear? What did they hope for?

I saw death so clearly that nothing more remained before my eyes. My eyes were seared once and for all by the flame of my burning life, and I was irked by questions: Why should I think of it only now? How could I have lived without noticing this before?

Life for me will end when I die, and the consolations of succession, of children and grandchildren living on, will be mere anaesthesia, a palliative to keep me from causing a ruckus when I croak.

But it won’t work, because I don’t want not to be forever, I don’t want the markers of my time to drift into oblivion, the blue school uniforms with metal buttons, coin- changing machines in the metro, parades on Red Square, cosmonauts, the invaluable newspaper Football & Hockey, tram #26, the voices of Levitan and Vysotsky… I don’t want our time to petrify, abandoned to the elements by the young, who have learned to suppress the voices of the sick and the dying, and to ignore the hopes of the dead. These young people have bullied everyone into living by their rules, into living as if there were no death. There aren’t that many old people, after all, and all they do is pat their dogs on park benches, rosy-cheeked and slightly foolish and ripe for mockery. And there aren’t any dead people at all. They’ve been carried off and buried, they are neither shown to us nor contemplated. They’re the majority, but they have nothing to speak with. No one wants to release the decaying from the earth. No one hears the subterranean groan of the great majority: bring us back!

What am I to do with this? I still have the gauzy curtain of time on my side the great not yet. And there’s the thirst for powerful distractors: alcohol, skiing. Sky-diving. Or inspiration could be gleaned from various models of healthy longevity and excellent working capacities into old age.

There are also convenient forms of internalizing death, such as family, the nation (this one’s a bit tougher), history. At least this last you can enter, albeit namelessly, as a mineral dissolved in water. Blood in the veins of your relatives. A hooked family nose.

Family, nation, history. Fine. But I don’t consent to dying just so all of this can keep barrelling on while on a collision course with the Andromeda nebula! Nothing can bring back that old, sleepy vision of the future with its ordinary human limits: my son, my grandson, the apple trees that will grow without me, and the May beetles that will come back to the birches in the city park as they always have.

God is also a fine consolation, the idea that we’ll die in our meted-out suffering, but then rise in physical form, with skin and hair (although our age will be uncertain), to enter eternity. Still, it’s a labor-intensive business to get there: standing through services, repenting in your old age, mortifying the flesh, guessing at semi-familiar words in Old Church Slavonic, bequeathing a chandelier to a monastery…

But then there’s such uncertainty about the proper place of cherries and girls in short skirts. Not to mention the territorial disagreements: billions believe in one thing, billions in another. Some sort of Islam, lamas, Catholics. Admittedly you don’t see them fighting too much — they’ve divvied up the market.

I suppose I just have a bad feeling about it all for the simple reason that there is no practical evidence, not even the Pope can heal rectal cancer, and astrophysics does not confirm anything — it’s quiet out there, God is silent for some reason, it’s been a while since anyone had any revelations. And the shroud of Turin proved not to be old enough. No, I believe that there is consolation. There are saints, the Russian Orthodox Church, free meals for the poor. Orthodox nurses are kinder, as a rule, but also more expensive, and you do feel better when you place a candle for fifty kopecks, the fatter kind, and you light it for the repose of the soul of whomever. And it is true succor when the people flow around the church on Easter night… But I fear that there is no rising from the dead after all.

In the end, it seems, one thing remains, and it is a mighty beast of burden: the future. It carries everything that we pile on to it. In the future, science will develop and doctors will bring us all back to life! But that’s hard to believe. What if they only grant eternity to themselves, their relatives and friends? How do we, the dead, keep track, stand up for ourselves and make sure they drag up everyone? We have no party, no constituency, and they, the people of the future, will be their own bosses. They’ll probably skip the Neanderthals, and then crunch some numbers and tell the Middle Ages to stay dead, and then they’ll decide only to preserve the ones who are alive, and not even all of them, just the lucky few. Although if I were lucky, and the administration made me an offer — we’ll leave you personally, but not your grandfathers and grandmothers — I would agree, the bastard that I am. What choice would I have? At least I could remember them — forever! That’d be better than nothing at all.

There’s nothing left but lies.