A gigantic structure, something like the unfinished Tower of Babel (although all towers of Babel remain unfinished), stands on the picturesque shore of a southern sea. The multistoried conical tower of an already down-at-the- heels structure points to the sky, the black sockets of what were supposed to be windows look to the horizon, and wind whistles in the empty stone-lined labyrinths.
All around is a stilled realm of the rusted metal: high-priced cranes and cement mixers, beams, pipes, tanks, barrels, and cables. All these goods had been left chaotically, as if some terrible enemy were suddenly approaching. The pockmarked yard still shows the outlines of trampled lawns, while exotic trees and brushes, dried up without watering, line paths that lead nowhere. You stumble here and there over the remnants of a wrought-iron balustrade or the broken fragments of marble steps. The landscape is special in having a solitary pompous entrance gate: there is not or, maybe, has never been, any fence. The gate displays a sign reading, “Off limits,” and a small booth is always staffed by a guard, a little old lady absorbed nonchalantly in reading a thick novel, The Sufferings and Passions of a Noble Heart . Throngs of holiday-seekers hurry past her to the seaside.
Passing through the gates, surmounting several pits and the unfinished walls of some majestic pavilion, you reach the shore. The beach and the steep shore slopes are strewn with numerous self- catering vacationers. Some live in old Soviet-style tents, others just under picket-propped cellophane roofs, still others have built Uncle Tom’s cabins from tree branches, reeds (they grow here), and some metal structures brought from the Tower of Babel. Entropy shamelessly reigns supreme around each room of this makeshift hotel: a chaotic mess of dirty clothes, footwear, swimming suits, pots, bottles, rags, leftovers, diapers, children’s potties, and unwashed dishes, all heavily “seasoned” with flies. The food is cooked on bonfires fed with twigs cut unscrupulously from nearby trees. Water comes from a pipe connected to an unknown source somewhere above. The water does not flow but drips, and to fill a half-liter bottle, you have to sit for a solid fifteen minutes under the pipe. This is an always crowded, but not always peaceful, place. The vacationers wash their dishes in the sea in the same places they bathe. The garbage has not been disposed of for years: the camp’s boundaries are marked from all sides with mountains of refuse whose smell unambiguously warns the traveler from afar to keep clear. This is the way our fellow countrymen spend their vacations — in disorder and their own excrement. There are many old- timers here, who come every year, often with the families, to have a cheap and irritable holiday. But none of people has ever tried to organize even a temporary civil society here, to set up some elements of self-government and self-service, at least in order to solve the problem of waste.
There is a strange tendency: the more unfinished work there is in a certain country, the less order, the fewer material benefits and jobs, and the higher unemployment. This compels the citizens of such a land to go round the world in search of somebody else’s work; they find work precisely where people have long been living the good life. You cannot deny that it would be more logical the other way around: if citizens of those countries where everything has already been done, e.g., Belgium, Sweden, Germany, or the USA, would seek work in countries like ours with so much work still to be done. Perhaps something would have changed in this case, in particular, all our towers of Babel would have long been finished and populated by such wildcatters.
This surrealist composition, the dead skeleton of a hotel or health spa and a human anthill bustling in the mud beneath it, is no capricious fantasy in the style of Bosch or Dali. This is the true symbol of our reality, our industry and efficiency, let alone our orderliness. However, traditionally nothing depends here on anyone, no one is to blame for anything, and we are all but victims of historical circumstance.
I know two respectable and affluent Belgians who were keen on seeing the Soviet Far East and went there by on the Trans- Siberian Railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok. Warned beforehand about our train habits, the travelers were armed to the teeth and would begin each morning of their long journey in the same way. They would get up early, put on rubber gloves, take a large bag with lots of chemicals, brushes, and napkins, and go to wash up the toilet. Only after washing it and the vestibule from ceiling to floor did they start to attend to themselves. What strange people.
