Vladimir Sorokin - The Blizzard

“Three versts … We’ll get there if’n we don’t lose the road…,” he thought, fighting to keep his eyes open as they stuck together from the snow and exhaustion.

About half a verst on, when the fir forest ended and a clear field began, they strayed off track. Crouper wandered around and found the road. They set off but lost the road again. And, again, Crouper found the road. The doctor no longer bothered to get off the sled; he just sat, covered with snow, praying and stiffening with fear. They rode on successfully for another half a verst, but suddenly there was a crack, and the sled listed treacherously to the right: they had run off the road into a gully, and the repaired runner broke.

“It broke off!” Crouper shouted, as he fussed about in the snow.

“Just you…” The doctor had been motionless the whole way, but he suddenly jumped down from his seat; up to his knees in snow, he hurried to the trunk and began furiously unfastening his travel bags.

“Go to hell, you idiot … Go to hell with your sled … and your stinking runner…” He untied the snow-covered travel bags, grabbed them, and walked off.

Crouper didn’t stop him. He no longer had the strength to stand, so he slumped down next to the sled, leaning his back against it; he held onto the broken runner as though it were a broken leg.

“I could have walked there faster!” the doctor shouted without turning around.

He strode ahead along the snowy road.

“Listening to idiots and assholes my whole life!” he muttered angrily to himself as he moved along through the thick snowfall and darkness. “Listening to idiots! And assholes! What kind of life is that?! My God, what kind of life is that?!”

His indignation energized him as he moved through the whooshing snow, his boots stirring up an endless white porridge. He could feel the road with his feet, the well-traveled crust of ice covered with fresh snow.

“Straight on, just keep going straight on…,” thought the doctor, keeping up his pace.

He realized that he shouldn’t fear this lifeless, cold element, but should simply keep moving and moving, overcoming it.

The snowy dark enveloped Dr. Garin. He walked and walked. The sled, Crouper, the little horses—all that was behind him, like a disappointing past; ahead was the road that he had to travel.

“Dolgoye is close … I should have left that fool and walked … I would have reached it long ago…”

He took a step, sank into a ditch, and fell, losing his travel bags. Floundering in the snow, he found the bags, clambered out of the ditch and went back a bit, barely able to make out his tracks in the darkness. He found the road and kept to the right, but again he fell into a ditch, deeper than the first one.

“A ravine…,” he thought.

Apparently, the road passed through a ravine.

“A bend in the road,” thought the panting doctor.

He climbed out of the ditch, took a few steps, and sank into the snow again. There were gullies on all sides.

“Where is the road?” He straightened his hat, which had slipped down over his eyes.

He began to feel carefully for the road with his foot, trying not to sink into the snow. There was something uneven under the snow, and it didn’t feel at all like a road. The road seemed to dissolve into gullies. Searching for the road, the doctor lost all strength and sat down on the snow. His legs grew cold.

“Damnation…,” he muttered.

He sat awhile, then stood up and grabbed his travel bags. He decided to go straight through the damned ravines, in the hope of coming out onto the road. This turned out to be a difficult proposition: he walked, falling and getting up, sinking into the snow and climbing out. But he couldn’t find the road. It was as though ravines had devoured it.

Utterly exhausted, he sat down. The snow, the endless snow, kept falling in heaps from the dark sky, covering the doctor and his tracks.

The doctor started to doze off, and he shivered.

“Just don’t fall asleep…,” he muttered. He stood up and, barely moving, walked on.

There was no end to the gullies. Sinking into the snow yet another time, he lay on his side and crawled ahead, pulling his heavy bags after him.

Suddenly, he felt something even and hard underfoot.

“Here it is!” he exclaimed hoarsely.

Climbing out of the ravine onto the road, he stood a moment, breathing heavily; he set the bags down and crossed himself: “Thank the Lord.”

He picked up his travel bags and walked on ahead. He hadn’t gone more than twenty steps when something moved toward him out of the snowy darkness and appeared to hang right overhead. Staring with wide-open eyes, the doctor could make out something like the trunk of a bent tree overhead, plastered in snow. He began to go around from the left when suddenly he noticed something behind the trunk, something huge and wide that occupied the entire road and from which this trunk extended. The doctor approached cautiously. The huge, wide object was completely covered in snow and rose up and up. Throwing his travel bags down in the snow, the doctor wiped his pince-nez with his scarf and tilted his head back. He couldn’t understand what was in front of him. At first he thought it was a pointed haystack covered in snow. But he touched it and realized that it wasn’t made of hay, just snow. His eyes agog, the doctor stepped farther back. Suddenly, at the top of the strange, vast, snowy shape, he made out the likeness of a human face. He realized that he was standing in front of a snowman of monstrous proportions, with a huge, erect phallus of snow.

“Lord Almighty…,” the doctor mumbled, and crossed himself.

The snowman was the height of a two-story building. Its phallus hung threateningly over Dr. Garin’s head. The snowman looked out of the darkness through two round cobblestone eyes pressed into the snow by a powerful, unknown sculptor. An aspen root protruded in place of a nose.

“God Almighty…,” the doctor muttered, and took off his hat.

He felt hot. He remembered the giant’s corpse and realized that the big one, into whose nose the sled had driven not long ago, was the sculptor of this snow monster. Before his drunken death, he had decided to make something for indifferent and distant humanity from the materials on hand.

The doctor reached up and swung his hat, trying to reach the white phallus above. But he couldn’t. The huge pole hung over him, aimed ominously at the darkness. Snow whirled about, falling on the phallus and on Garin’s uncovered head. The doctor realized that the giant had stuck a tree trunk in the snowman’s belly and packed snow around it. The result resembled an aroused male reproductive organ. The blizzard snowfall had made it even thicker.

Garin took a few steps back to look at the snow giant. It stood with a sort of unflinching readiness to pierce the surrounding world with its phallus. The doctor met the gaze of the cobblestone eyes. The snowman looked at Garin. The hair on the doctor’s head tingled. Terror seized him.

He screamed and ran away.

He ran, stumbled, fell, got up, and, moaning with fear, ran and kept on running.

Finally, he ran into something at chest level and fell flat on his back. It was a forceful blow; it knocked the breath out of him, and colored lights swam before his eyes. He groaned in pain. He gradually caught his breath. He was cold; he looked around and saw that his right hand was holding his hat. He sat up and pulled the hat on his head.

He shivered. Shaking and holding his injured chest, he stood up. In front of him, sticking out of the snow like a milepost, was the broken trunk from an old birch tree. The doctor held on to it, afraid of collapsing in the snow. He pressed against the birch and stood still, breathing heavily. The birch was old, and the bark was puckered. Holding on to the birch, the doctor breathed on it and inhaled its fragrance. The frozen birch smelled like the bathhouse.