The Tower

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Searching, the Great River seemed to tauten in the approaching night, its skin crinkled and crackled, as if it were trying to anticipate the wind that arose in the town when the traffic on the bridges had thinned to a few cars and the occasional tram, the wind from the sea surrounding the Socialist Union, the Red Empire, the archipelago riven, reft, rent by the arteries, veins, capillaries of the Great River, fed by the sea, the Great River that in the night carried the sounds and thoughts on its shimmering surface, the laughter and the gravity and the merriment, into the gathering dark; suspended matter down into the depths where the watercourses of the town mingled; in the deep-sea darkness the swill from the sewers crept, the dripping discharge from the houses and the VEBs, the state-owned factories, in the depths, where the wraiths dug, there was metallic sludge, heavy with oil, from the electroplating shops, water from restaurants and brown-coal power stations and large-scale industrial plants, streams of foam from the factories that produced cleaning products, effluents from the steel works, hospitals, iron foundries and industrial zones, radioactive outflow from the uranium mines, toxic waste from the Leuna, Buna, Halle chemical plants and the potash works, from Magnitogorsk and from the high-rise tenements, toxins from fertilizer plants, sulphuric-acid factories; in the night the Great River, the rivers of mud, slag, oil, cellulose branching out in all directions, fused into a huge ribbon, sluggish as pitch, on which the ships sailed through the rusty spiders’ webs of the bridges into the ore harbours grain harbours tropical-fruit harbours the harbours of the thousand little things

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