2007

June 2007

The railyard is swamped with copper coloured tailing ponds that are trapped between gravel embankments, the result of relentless erosion. Traces of wasted industry are everywhere, left to fester and rot. The earth is red, the mud a thick oxide clay, filled with copper, iron and carbon; puddles of stagnant water ooze with rainbows of spilt oil. The rails themselves are flaking and disintegrating in the moist air. There is a complex interleaving of raw steel rail -- a boundless maze. The sky is crisscrossed with entangled systems of power and motion; as many forgotten lines as functioning ones slice across the grey sky in chaos and disorder. Trains wait while cargo is loaded and unloaded, and passengers shuffle silently in and out, while pneumatic brakes hiss and worn doors creak open and closed. Alien soviet locomotives with bulbous bullheaded noses sit forgotten on dead end tracks. Rust flakes and floats on the breeze like discarded feathers. Ghosts shimmer along the surface of the ponds and evaporate into wisps of steam. Soviet ghosts, romantic eastern ghouls that make real communist literature and the wistful idealizing of the east block, but also the ghouls of the transported, displaced and murdered.

Meanwhile, in another world nearby, a swan swims lazily towards the edge of a marble lined pond. With a slow reach of it’s crooked neck, it grabs a scrap of bread off the edge of a reflecting pool. The water is part of a park, which leads for miles down the center of a germanic town, lined with neatly planted trees which sway gently in the breeze. Groups of young men run in circles playing soccer on long evenly cut grass lawns, while cyclists glide smoothly down the paved paths that crisscross the highly designed space. 

Yet in the trainyard a young man, a teenager, sits at the window of a stopped passenger car, staring out the window with sullen eyes. His face shows the wear of travel, his hair matted and long, his beard unkempt and forgotten, and his clothes worn thin and unwashed. His mind has wandered from the view outside, to the ghosts of thin bodied Jews in pajama stripes, being marched in droves through the cattle gates and loading docks of these rail sites. His mind is on black and white photos seen as a child, of piles of clothing and goods stripped from his family and left to decay -- forgotten in transport. Now the blood red earth holds the traces of their journeys, not of their bodies, but of the cruel and deliberate efficiency of their passing. 

With a violent shudder, a squeak and a tremendous thump the old train moves on, the bodies of the passengers being carried eastward, but the mind of the young boy lost somewhere between.