The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [34]
“How long has the dump been here?” I asked in Russian.
“After the war,” Lev said. He raised his camera, snapped a photo of the vista. “Right after the war they made this dump.”
“But why? Why exactly here? Right over the graves?”
Lev’s bushy eyebrows shot up. He shook his head. “This site wasn’t chosen at random,” he said. “Remember, this was an area the Soviets wanted to keep quiet about.” It was the site of many political assassinations. Locating a dump here after the war was part of the cover-up, part of the scheme to keep people out. Just after the war, the forest had been isolated, supposedly as part of a military project. It had been surrounded with barbed wire and posted with signs that ordered, STOP. NO TRESPASSING. THEY SHOOT HERE.
“That gave the impression that the place was a military shooting range,” Lev said. “But no, it was already a dump. They didn’t want people nosing around here.”
I recalled the memorial a few miles up the road, the marble column on the hill I’d visited with Natasha.
“Is that why they set up that monument so far from the graves?” I asked Lev. “They didn’t want people coming here?”
“Da, da,” he said, nodding vehemently. “The monument was erected in a place that’s got nothing to do with the killings.”
The three of us stood gazing over the city, the sun warming our backs, until Lev pointed down the slope, where a man was trudging across the path near the car, rooting out objects and dropping them into his sack. Lev jogged toward the man and called out a greeting. Marina and I tagged along close behind. As the man glanced up with expressionless red-rimmed eyes, my heart raced. The spirits of the place felt suddenly close by. Without a word the old man sloshed on across the mountain in his yellow rain cap and oversize boots.
“He’s deaf,” Lev said offhandedly. “I don’t think he heard me.”
As I watched the old man’s figure receding, his yellow cap blurring into the rubble, I thought of my father, Proteus, the old shape-shifter, and my final glimpse of him vanishing down the alley pushing his cartload of relics. Although Proteus could not have known of this place, he must have understood what had befallen his mother after his failed rescue attempt. Perhaps his efforts to save my grandmother had been half-hearted. Maybe he’d waited too long. When the agent’s yellow cable arrived in 1941, Proteus must have felt himself his own mother’s murderer. Was this the image in the mirror that he fled? The unbearable knowledge that drove him from one protean incarnation to another and ultimately turned him away from the world?
“I want my body burned,” his will had read. “I want my ashes taken out with the trash.”
Shrieks filled the air, disrupting my reverie. A fresh cloud of gulls dove and receded, dove and receded, their sharp cries adding an eerie counterpoint to the low-pitched rumbling of machinery.
Lev had wandered away from Marina and me. He was snapping pictures—a box tumbling by, the clean-picked skeleton of an animal—a cat perhaps or small dog, a drift of feathers, a cart-wheeling newspaper. He scooped up a dirt-filled jar from the rubbish, shook out the dirt, and trudged back toward the summit, stooping now and then to ferret out some small fragment and drop it into the jar.
The earth was slick underfoot, and Marina slipped as we clambered down the mountain to meet Lev. I took her hand, helped her up. Her hand was cold, trembling.
“I feel it through my shoes,” she murmured. Her soft voice trailed off. I felt it too. Numbness was gone, replaced by what I can only call an aching homesickness. We were standing on the horrors of history, leaning against one another in silence. There were no words for it.
Suddenly a shout rang out, and a thick, uniformed figure appeared from behind some barrels.