Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

Sergei Lebedev

before that, the exiles had l ived on impor ted food products and by hunting. The authorities had set up a cordon on the river to over turn the raf ts—they allowed them to cut down trees but not to take away soil; the reindeer herders even wondered if the exiles ate the soil, they were bringing so much, and they couldn’t understand what for, since for nomads soil could not give birth to anything but reindeer moss. The villagers might have given up on the idea but most of them were kulak peasants and they put their entire organizing force, their passion for life into a calculated gathering of soil, real soil, without pity for themselves or others; they called the local soil mud, which it was, a runny liquid of mud on ice. Later, when the village stood

on fertile soil, some of the exiles were taken to town, that is, to the camp where Grandfather II had once been warden, where they started a botanical garden, planting flowers in heated greenhouses to show how new life was burgeoning in the Far North, and in the polar night prisoners in the barracks could see the glowing glass cubes behind three layers of barbed wire. The garden was part of the camp economy, and the locals hated it for devouring heat and light, a garden for baskets of red flowers to greet official airplanes that instantly turned to glass in the frost; high-ranking guards brought the flowers home later, and anything left over was taken to the statue of Lenin. A war ensued over the right to work in the garden, in

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