Birth of a Bridge

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IN THE BEGINNING, IT WAS HIM AND THE GROUND. Northern Yakutia, where he worked for three years — Mirny, a diamond mine to crack open beneath the glacial crust, grey, dirty, desperate tundra trashed with old wasted coal and refugee camps, deserted ground bathed in nights of chilblains, sheared eleven months of the year by a skull-splitting blizzard beneath which still sleep great beasts, scattered limbs and giant beautifully curving horns — furred rhinoceros, woolly belugas, and frozen caribou — he imagined them in the evenings while sitting at the hotel bar with a glass of strong translucent alcohol as the same surreptitious hooker lavished him with caresses, all the while pleading for a marriage in Europe, in exchange for loyal services, of course, but never did he touch her, couldn’t, rather have nothing than fuck this woman who didn’t really want him, he left it at that. So — the diamonds of Mirny. They had to dig to find them, break the permafrost with dynamite blasts, bore a Dantesque hole as big as the city itself — you could have tossed in headfirst the fifty-storey apartment buildings that already sprout up all around — and, equipped with headlamps, descend to the farthest depths of the orifice, pickaxe the walls, excavate the earth, branch the galleries into a subterranean arborescence lateralized to the furthest, hardest, darkest extent, reinforce the corridors and put down rails, electrify the mud, and then dig in the glebe, scratch the scree, and sift the guts, keep watch for the marvellous sparkle. Three years.

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