We are in the USSR, sometime around the end of the Second World War; or rather sometimes, as the timeline shifts with deliberate ambiguity.
A self-propelled barge carrying explosives runs aground in the Sea of Japan. When the captain fails to return from seeking help, the only other crew member, Vasily Kharitonov, decides he, too, must look for assistance. But what about the explosives? His solution is to unravel a fuse (a Bickford fuse) behind him so that if instructed he can destroy the stockpile rather than let it fall into enemy hands.
He walks westwards, for years, unravelling what is now clearly a metaphorical (or metaphysical) fuse behind him. He encounters a range of typical Soviet nonsense – a ‘mulag’ imprisoning dissident musicians, a runway where no planes ever land but around which factions fight, a town whose inhabitants nearly all work in a factory producing straightjackets, and so on.
In parallel, there are a couple more wandering souls. A searchlight truck with a driver, Gorych, and a passenger sets off into the night. The night and their journey are unending, with the truck rolling on long after the fuel runs out; things happen occasionally. Elsewhere the one-legged Captain Koretsky is on a mission that requires him to deliver radio speakers to remote communities. In one such, he recruits an assistant, and they head eastwards.
Over it all, a powerless black airship floats at the mercy of the wind. On board, the father of the nation looks down on Kharatonov, Gorych and Koretsky, unable to intervene.
It is surely all very symbolic and it may be
cuttingly satirical if you are Russian; and in that language the prose may have
been less clunky than the translation. Otherwise, it can be enjoyed as a kind
of Russian magic realism where the impossibilities and strangeness are the
acceptable price of immersion in atmospheric settings and unusual characters.
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