SY/DA/0001_DD — From the diary of Diana Antonoff
Date: 1 June 2034, 21:50 Location: houseboat, near bank of the Żerań canal, across from the power plant Conditions: clear, mist rising off the canal at dusk, no wind Temperature: 11°C Pressure: 1018 hPa, steady Flood: stable. Waterline reported unchanged nine days.
I'm in.
I did the last stretch by water, before first light, lying flat in the bottom of a reed boat while a man I will never see again worked the oars without sound. I had thought I would be frightened on the water and I was not. The mist sat on the canal the way breath sits on glass. The reeds went on a long time. When the light began the far bank came up out of it green, very green, greener than anything has a right to be in a drowned city, and I lay there and looked at it and thought, foolishly, that it was almost beautiful. The water beneath the green is dark and there is an oil to it that catches the light wrong. I have written that down and I do not yet know what it means. The chimney of the power station stood up out of the mist further north and took the first of the sun while everything under it was still grey.
They were waiting where the reeds give out. Two of them. Scouts. I had crossed sixty kilometres of open country alone, slept in barns, read the ground, and within a hundred metres of their water I was handed from one keeper to another like a parcel that had been expected. I understand it. I don't have to like it. They asked me three questions, told me four rules, and did not introduce themselves. We walked.
Getting to the OP took most of the morning and I will set down what I saw because that is the work. A city with the colour drained out of it. Whole streets gone under and the streets that remain the colour of weather, grey on grey, the render off the buildings, the glass long gone. Steam coming up out of the road in places where the plant still pushes heat through the old pipes, so that you pass through warm patches and cold ones, and the warm ones smell of rust and something underneath the rust. Hardly anyone. A face at a window. A man mending a net who did not look up. The faces that did turn to me were not hostile. They were sullen in a way I have not seen before and could not place, a flatness, as if the muscles that make an expression had been let go. I noted it. I will watch for it.
OP-Żerań came alive around me the moment we arrived, which after the dead streets was a shock. I had expected, I think, something medieval. People scratching at the mud. What I walked into was the opposite. There was a radio, and it was not a salvaged household thing but something built, an assembly of boards and scavenged parts and hand-wound coils mounted in a gutted instrument case, and a boy of about twelve had it open and was doing something to its inside with a tool he had clearly made himself. Cable ran up the stairwell and out toward the chimney. There was power here, routed and managed, in a city where I had not seen a working light in sixty kilometres. It was all made of other things. Nothing was what it had been built to be. I have seen field hospitals in Ukraine but I have never seen anything improvised at this level, and I stood in the doorway longer than was polite, recalibrating what kind of place I had come to. Not primitive. The reverse. Something had taught these people to be very, very clever with very little, and I'm not yet sure whether that something was the war or the thing in the water.
The scouts handed me up the chain and there was a discussion about me I was not part of, and at the end of it a woman took me out and showed me where I was to live, and it was not at the OP at all. To reach my boat you leave Żerań and go south, down toward the Vistula, and cross at the one bridge they still hold, and come back up the wrong side of the water through the trees. An hour, maybe more, for a place I could throw a stone at from the dock if the stone could cross water. The boat sits low on the near bank in a tangle of green so thick you are on top of it before you see it, willow and reed and something else with broad pale leaves that has come up through everything since the floods, and you would pass within twenty metres and never know a hull was there, never know a person was. One other boat lies moored further along that I think has someone in it. Otherwise the green has it all.
And yet I can see them from my deck. That is the strange part. Across the water the chimneys of the power plant stand up plain against the sky, striped red and white, smoking, the whole working heart of this place in full view, and at night I will hear the hum of it carry across. Hidden in the trees and in plain sight of everything. I understood from the way she showed me the boat that it was a thing of value, the safest moorage they had, and that I was meant to feel the size of the gift. I did. I thanked her properly. What I did not say is that they had set me as far from themselves as the zone allows, where the green closes over a person and the water keeps them, in sight of the OP and an hour's hard walk from a single soul, and that I couldn't yet tell whether that was trust or its opposite. Then she went back toward the bridge and the light went down toward evening and it was done. I was given. I was placed. I was, after all that distance under my own power, somewhere I had been put.
The boat has not been lived in for a long time. Stepping down into it was like stepping into a held breath. Everything as someone left it, years ago, before any of this, a cup on its side, a calendar on the wall with a month on it that means nothing now. Dust standing in the long bar of sun that comes through the western window, turning slowly, going nowhere. The bed is a settee that folds out and the cover on it has gone to threads, soft as moth-wing, and when I sat down on it the give of it under me and the smell of the room, dust and damp wood and old fabric and the river, undid something I had been holding all the way from the border. I haven't been this tired in a long time. The far chimney hums. Under the hum, when the air moves, there is another sound I can't account for, lower, that comes and goes, almost like a great many people groaning together a long way off, and then the breeze drops and it is gone and there is only the hum and the water against the hull.
It is the plant, probably. Or the wind in the structures. I will find out.
I am writing this before I sleep because if I don't write it now I'll sleep for a day and lose the shape of it, and the shape is the thing. My father kept his log every night of his life no matter the hour, the readings first, always the readings first, then the day. I have the readings above. Now I have the day. Tomorrow I begin.
