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oblivion
had come to the village; they
surrounded me and ran their
hands over my face and body;
I stood and thought that I
had truly reached the limit
of memory; the blindness
of the exiled old men, the
blindness of Grandfather II
all combined; this place did
not exist in geography, an
accidental traveler would
not find this village, he would
miss it; this was a country
inhabited by people from
the days of Grandfather II,
an entire country that had
protected itself from the
present through blindness
and then became trapped
in it. While the old men
molded my appearance for
themselves with their hands,
I thought about how not to
linger here and destroy the
insularity of this world.
Essentially, the old men had
one memory for the three
of them; separate them,
and each one’s memory
would not be enough for a
complete description of the
events, so they often spoke
simultaneously, creating a
collected field of memory
that lived only in words.
I asked about the apple
trees, impossible to imagine
here near the Arctic Circle,
planted in permafrost that
would not allow roots to
penetrate, and they told me
that the whole village stood
on soil that was brought in,
stolen—the exiles were not
allowed to leave their place
of exile.
For a dozen years the people
secretly took boats to the
upper reaches, where there
were forests and soil, they
chopped down trees, made
rafts to float them down to
build huts and sent soil on
the rafts as well; it took ten
years before the first garden
bed appeared in the village—