were five trucks in the garage, and we knew the pros and cons of each. The Lancia was a good truck, not too tall and fully metal, no wood. The five-ton MAN, whose wheels came up to your chest, wasn’t as good. And with the Lancia came the driver Kobelian, who had a crooked mouth. He was a good-natured man.
When Kobelian said KIRPICH we understood he meant bricks, and that we would be driving through the boundless steppe to pick up a load. If it had rained the night before, the burned-out wreckage of automobiles and tanks would flash in the hollows. The steppe-dogs darted away from the wheels. Karli Halmen sat with Kobelian inside the cab. I preferred to stand in the truck bed and hold on to the top. In the distance I saw a seven-story redbrick tenement with empty windows and no roof. Half in ruins and all by itself, but very modern. Maybe it was the first building of a new settlement that had been scrapped overnight. Maybe the war had arrived before the roof.
The road was bumpy, the Lancia rattled past the scattered farms. Waist-high stinging nettle grew in some of the yards, and white chickens, thin as cloud wisps, roosted on iron bedsteads. Nettles only grow where there are people, my grandmother had told me, and burdocks only grow where there are sheep.
I never saw anyone in the farmyards. I wanted to see people who didn’t live in the camp, who had a home, a fence, a yard, a room with a carpet, maybe even a carpet beater. Where carpets are beaten, I thought, you can trust the peace. There, life is civilized. There, people are left alone.
On our very first drive with Kobelian I’d seen a frame for beating carpets in one of the farmyards. It had a roller so the carpet could be moved up and down. And next to that I saw a large white enameled watering can that looked like a swan, with its beak and slender neck and heavy belly. That was so beautiful that I kept a lookout for carpet-beating frames on every ride, even far out on the steppe, in the empty wind. But I never saw another carpet frame, or a swan.
Beyond the farmyards on the outskirts we came to a small town of yellow-ochre houses with crumbling stucco walls and rusty tin roofs. Streetcar rails could be seen in the remnants of asphalt, and now and then two-wheeled carts from the bread factory moved along the rails, pulled by horses. The carts were covered with white linen, like the bread cart in the camp. But the half-starved horses made me wonder whether it was bread the cloth was covering and not fully starved bodies.
Kobelian said: The town is called Novo-Gorlovka. So the town has the same name as the camp, I asked. He said: No, the camp has the same name as the town. There were no signs. Anyone who drove here knew the name of the place, just as Kobelian and the Lancia did. Strangers like Karli Halmen and myself had to ask. And whoever didn’t have anyone to ask didn’t wind up here and had no business being here in the first place.
We had to pass through the town to pick up the bricks. They take a while to load: one and a half hours, if you have two people and can park the Lancia close by. You carry four at a time, pressing them together like an accordion. Three are too few and five are too many. You could carry five, but the middle one would slip out. You’d need a third hand to hold it. You fill the entire truck bed, making sure there are no gaps, stacking the bricks in three or four layers. Bricks have a bright resonance, each one sounds a little different, but the red dust is always the same and settles on your clothes. Brick dust is dry, it doesn’t envelop you like cement dust, and it isn’t as oily as coal dust. The brick dust made me think of sweet red paprika, though it has no smell.
On the way back, the Lancia never rattled: it was too heavily weighed down. We again drove through Novo-Gorlovka, over the streetcar rails, past the farmyards in the outskirts, and down the road under the wisps of clouds drifting over the steppe. All the way to the camp. And then past the camp to the construction site.