The Zero of the Gauge

by Andrei Tarkovsky, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

A Screenplay in Four Sequences

Krutets, a village on the left bank of the Lemsha, a small river of the upper Volga. October 1956 to May 1957. Downstream, a dam has been closed, and the water behind it is rising.

CAST

PRASKOVYA ILYINICHNA LOBANOVA, 64, observer of hydrological post No. 17 since 1924
ZOYA NIKOLAEVNA FERAPONTOVA, 23, technician of the regional hydrometeorological observatory
TIMOFEI KUZMICH BYKOV, 46, foreman of the clearing brigade, born in Krutets
FEDYA, 12, his nephew
AGAFYA, past eighty, a neighbour
BRIGADE MEN, A BOATMAN

SEQUENCE ONE — EIGHT O'CLOCK

EXT. KRUTETS, THE BANK ROAD — MORNING

Fog so thick that the river cannot be seen, only heard: not a rushing, a long low breathing on the other side of the whiteness.

A log house stands at the edge of the road. Its neighbour has no roof. The one beyond has no walls either: a white stove stands in the open with its chimney, and nettles round it, and nothing else.

On every log of the roofless house a number is chalked, 14, 15, 16, up to the eaves that are no longer there. The chalk has run a little in the damp.

INT. PRASKOVYA'S HOUSE — MORNING

PRASKOVYA ILYINICHNA LOBANOVA, sixty-four, small, already dressed, sits at the table with a man's pocket watch in her palm. It hangs from a cord round her neck. She winds it. We hear the winding: eleven turns of the crown, none of them hurried. She looks at the dial, then out of the window at the fog, as if the fog could confirm it.

Seven fifty-two.

She puts on a quilted jacket, takes from the shelf a ledger bound in grey cloth, with a pencil tied to it by a string, and a thermometer in a wooden case. She goes out. The door is not locked.

EXT. THE PATH TO THE RIVER — MORNING

The camera goes with her, a little behind, at her pace. It does not overtake her.

The path runs down between apple trees. Somewhere ahead, in the fog, an axe is working. The axe stops. A long creaking, then a whole tree going over, its branches thrashing the air on the way down, and the thud coming up through the ground. Praskovya does not turn her head.

The fog thins as she comes down. Water appears: grey, wide, moving from left to right without a single ripple, as though the whole surface were sliding on one piece.

EXT. POST NO. 17 — MORNING

An oak pile driven into the shallows, black with wet. Nailed to it, a narrow board painted in alternating black and white centimetres, with figures at every ten. The water stands low on the board; she has to lean to see where.

She steps onto a plank laid across two stones at the edge, bends with her hands on her knees, and looks. A long while. We look with her. The water touches a line on the board, draws back a hair, touches it again.

PRASKOVYA
Hundred and eighteen.

She says it to no one. There is no one.

She lowers the thermometer on its string into the river and stands holding it, counting. Her lips move; there is no sound.

Six metres up the bank a block of granite sits in the grass, squared on two faces, too clean to be a field stone. A bronze plug is set into its top. Beside the plug, in red paint renewed over and over, the figure 17 and an arrow pointing down.

She draws up the thermometer, reads it, and sits on an upturned box under a scrap of plank roof nailed to a post. She opens the ledger on her knee. We see the page: ruled columns, dates, her handwriting, small and upright.

25.X.56 — 8 h — 118 — 4.2° — fog — calm.

She closes the ledger. Going back up, she passes the granite block and lays her palm flat on it for a moment without stopping, the way one touches a door frame on the way through.

EXT. THE ORCHARD — DAY

The fog has lifted to the height of the trees and stays there, a low ceiling. Apple trees lie in rows, all fallen the same way, toward the river. BRIGADE MEN in padded jackets saw the trunks into lengths. The stumps are cut low, white and wet.

TIMOFEI KUZMICH BYKOV, forty-six, the foreman, stands among them with his left sleeve pinned up to the shoulder. He holds a list in his one hand and a pencil in his teeth. FEDYA, twelve, follows him with a box of chalk.

Praskovya comes up the path with the ledger under her arm. Bykov takes the pencil out of his mouth.

BYKOV
Ilyinichna. How is she this morning?

PRASKOVYA
Hundred and eighteen.

BYKOV
Falling?

PRASKOVYA
Two since last night.

BYKOV
Let her fall. She'll be at your windows by summer whatever she does now.

He laughs. Nobody else does. He looks past her at her own three trees behind the house, old, crooked, with a few apples on them that nobody has picked.

BYKOV
Yours I'll do last.

PRASKOVYA
Do them when you like. They don't bear.

She goes on. Bykov watches her go, then points the pencil at the next house. Fedya runs to it and begins chalking numbers on the corner logs, from the bottom up, standing on his toes for the high ones.

EXT. THE RIVER — DAY

From downstream, out of the low cloud over the water, an engine, long before anything can be seen. Then the district launch, small and grey, its bow folding the water back in two thin wings.

It noses into the bank by the post. A young woman steps off onto the plank: ZOYA NIKOLAEVNA FERAPONTOVA, twenty-three, in a town coat too thin for the river, and a beret. The boatman hands down to her a wooden case with brass corners, a tripod, and a long folding rod painted in red and white blocks. She stands them on the bank and looks first at the staff on its pile, before she looks round for anyone.

The launch backs off and turns. Its wake comes in, slaps the pile, runs up the board and down again. For a moment the staff reads a dozen figures at once.

Then the rain comes in earnest. Rings over the whole river, thousands of them, opening and widening and erasing one another.

INT. PRASKOVYA'S HOUSE — DAY

Rain on the window. Zoya's coat steams on a nail by the stove. On the table: two cups, a saucer of lump sugar, the grey ledger, and a typed sheet with a round violet stamp.

Praskovya reads the sheet with her spectacles held to her eyes rather than worn. Zoya waits, both hands round her cup.

We read over Praskovya's shoulder, in typewriter letters: ... observation post No. 17 (Krutets, r. Lemsha) to be closed 31.III.1957 ... a new staff gauge to be set at Gorka at the projected shoreline ... parallel observations at both gauges from 1.I.1957 ... observer P. I. Lobanova ...

The text stops at the foot of the page. Praskovya turns the sheet over. The back is blank. She turns it face up again and lays it on the table, squaring it to the edge.

PRASKOVYA
The evening reading is at eight.

ZOYA
I know.

PRASKOVYA
You'll want to see it.

ZOYA
I came to see it.

The rain.

ZOYA
At the observatory they show your tables to the students. Thirty-two years and not one reading missing. They call Krutets the cleanest series in the province.

Praskovya puts a second lump of sugar on Zoya's saucer, though Zoya has not taken the first.

PRASKOVYA
Drink. You came up the river in that coat.

EXT. POST NO. 17 — NIGHT

Darkness and rain. A kerosene lantern comes down the path, swinging. Zoya carries it held out to the side, as she has been told, so that the light falls ahead of Praskovya's feet and not into her eyes. Praskovya has the watch open in her hand.

They reach the plank. The pile is a black upright in black water. Zoya lifts the lantern, and the staff comes out of the dark, white and black, wet, shining, and the water at its foot shines too, so that it is hard to say where the board ends and its reflection begins.

Praskovya looks at the watch. She waits. We wait with her. There is nothing to see but the rain falling through the lit circle and the water moving through it.

She snaps the watch shut and bends to the staff.

PRASKOVYA
Hundred and sixteen.

Zoya leans in over her shoulder, the lantern high.

ZOYA
Seventeen.

PRASKOVYA
Sixteen. You're reading the top of the splash. Get down to her.

Zoya hesitates, then crouches on the wet plank, the hem of her coat in the mud, and brings her eye down to the water. The rain runs off her beret. A pause.

ZOYA
Sixteen.

Praskovya is already writing, the ledger sheltered under the flap of her jacket.

They start back up. The lantern swings with Zoya's steps, and its light slides over the bank, the wet grass, the flank of the granite block. For an instant it falls full on the stone: the bronze plug, the red 17, and lower down, under the lichen, a groove cut across the grain and some small scratched figures beside it. Then the light swings on and the stone goes back into the dark. Neither woman looks at it.

EXT. THE RIVER BY THE ORCHARD — NIGHT

No lantern now. Only what light comes from the sky through the rain, enough to see the water by.

A little upstream of the post, one of the apple trees felled this morning lies with its crown in the river. The current goes through the branches and combs them all one way, steadily, and they spring back and are combed again.

An apple comes loose. It turns once, rides out of the branches, and goes past the pile, close enough to touch the board, and on into the dark.

The shot is held as long as the river needs to carry it out of sight. Nothing is added.

SEQUENCE TWO — ICE

EXT. POST NO. 17 — MORNING

Darkness still, and a sound before anything: iron on ice. A blow. A pause, long enough to draw breath. A blow.

The light comes up blue, very slowly. The river is white from bank to bank, and it has no edge: the snow on the ice and the snow on the meadows across are one snow. Only the oak pile, standing up out of the white with its board, says where the water is. Ice has cased the board to the height of a knee.

Praskovya, in felt boots, a shawl over her quilted jacket, stands beside the pile with an iron bar and breaks open the hole she cut yesterday. The night's ice comes up in grey plates. Under them the water is black, and it smokes in the frost.

She lays the bar down on the snow. From under her arm she takes a short rod, painted like the staff, rests it on the head of the stake driven beside the pile, and waits for the water in the hole to stop rocking. It rocks a long while. Then it is still, a black disc with the rod standing in it.

She opens the watch, looks, closes it.

PRASKOVYA
Hundred and four.

She pulls off one mitten with her teeth and writes, the pencil held in a bare red hand.

14.I.57 — 8 h — 104 — ice 41 — snow — N, light.

EXT. THE SLOPE BELOW GORKA — MORNING

Halfway up the hill, in a field of unbroken snow, a new pile of raw yellow pine with a new staff nailed to it, the paint bright, the figures sharp. There is no water anywhere near it. The river lies far below, a white floor.

Praskovya climbs to it, her own footprints from yesterday filled in by the night. She stands in front of the new staff exactly as she stood before the old one, hands on her knees, and looks at its foot, where there is only snow.

She takes out a second ledger, new, its cover stamped in violet. She writes the date and the hour, and in the column for the level she draws a short dash.

EXT. PRASKOVYA'S HOUSE — DAY

The roof is gone. Two BRIGADE MEN stand on the top of the walls and pass a rope over a block hung from a tripod of poles. A log comes free, swings, and is lowered onto a sledge in the road.

BYKOV
Twenty-six.

FEDYA, below, finds the chalk figure on the log end and nods. The next log.

BYKOV
Twenty-five.

So the house goes down, from the top, in order. Through the empty windows we see the inside of the room in open daylight: the stove, a calendar from 1951, a pale square on the wall where something hung.

Praskovya comes out of the doorway pulling a child's sledge. On it, tied with string, a stack of ledgers in grey cloth, thirty or more, the years inked on their spines. She pulls it past Bykov without stopping.

BYKOV
Ilyinichna. There's a room at Gorka with a stove that draws.

PRASKOVYA
The bathhouse draws.

BYKOV
It's a black bathhouse. You'll come out black.

PRASKOVYA
Till March.

She goes on toward the river. Bykov looks after her, then past her, at her three apple trees behind the house, standing in snow to the knee, each branch carrying a line of white. A brigade man with a bow saw on his shoulder starts toward them. Bykov shakes his head. The man stops and turns back.

EXT. THE RIVER — DAY

Far down the white river, a dark figure walking on the ice road, small, pulling a hand sledge, a rod across the shoulder. The wind blows the snow off the ice in long low streamers that cross the figure and go on.

The figure does not get bigger for a long while.

EXT. THE CHURCH STONE — DAY

Zoya, in a sheepskin coat now and a man's fur hat, sets the tripod in the snow beside the granite block, screws the instrument on to it, and turns the small screws one by one, her eye on the bubble. She breathes on her fingers between screws.

ZOYA
Fedya. The rod on the plug. Upright. There's a bubble on the side of it. Keep it in the middle.

Fedya stands the striped rod on the bronze plug and holds it with both hands, his face screwed up with care. Zoya bends to the eyepiece, reads, writes in her field book.

ZOYA
Hold it. Once more.

While she reads again, Fedya, bored, scuffs at the snow banked against the face of the stone with the toe of his boot, then scrapes at the lichen with his mitten. Under the lichen: a groove, cut across the grain, and beside it figures scratched with something hard.

14.IV.42

Zoya looks up from the eyepiece. She comes round the tripod and crouches by the stone. She pulls off her glove and runs a fingernail along the groove from one end to the other.

She takes a folded typed sheet from her field book and opens it on her knee. A column of years and figures. Her finger goes down the column and stops.

1942 — max. 431 — 18.IV.

At the top of the sheet, typed: Benchmark (plug) 512.

She unfolds a carpenter's rule, sets its end on the plug and lays it down the face of the stone to the groove. She reads it. In her field book, in pencil, small:

512 − 35 = 477

She looks at the two numbers, the one in her book and the one on the sheet, for a while.

At the door of the bathhouse, twenty metres upstream, Praskovya stands with an armful of birch logs and watches her.

ZOYA
Praskovya Ilyinichna. What is this line?

PRASKOVYA
Ice.

She goes in with the logs. The door shuts.

Zoya stays crouched by the stone. She looks at the groove, then down the bank at the river, then at the groove again. She folds the sheet into the field book and stands.

ZOYA
Fedya. Forty paces up. Same thing.

EXT. THE SLOPE — DAY

A wide shot, from below, held. The whole hillside, white. The instrument and the rod go up it by turns: Fedya runs ahead with the rod and plants it, Zoya carries the tripod after him and sets it up, reads behind, reads ahead; then the rod comes past her and goes up again. Their voices come down thin and exact through the wind.

ZOYA (far off)
Back sight. Fourteen eighty-two.

FEDYA (far off)
Is it straight?

ZOYA (far off)
It's straight.

The wind lifts the snow off the drifts and drags it across them, so that at moments they are gone, and then are there again, a little higher. At the top they reach the yellow pile and stand by it, two dots. Then they turn and begin to come down the same way, measuring back.

INT. THE BATHHOUSE — NIGHT

Low, very low. Ceiling and walls black with soot, soft, matt, drinking the light. A small stove of stones in the corner, its door open, the fire inside it. The ledgers stand stacked on the bench. A kerosene lamp.

Zoya sits on the lower shelf with her field book on her knees, adding columns in pencil, her lips moving. She wears mittens with the fingers cut off. Praskovya sits on a block of wood by the stove with the watch open in her palm.

The fire. Zoya's pencil. The watch.

Zoya stops writing. She checks the last line again.

ZOYA
Three millimetres.

PRASKOVYA
Is that good?

ZOYA
It's allowed.

She closes the field book. Her eyes go to the stack of ledgers on the bench, to the inked spines, and stay there. Praskovya shuts the watch, stands, bending under the ceiling, and pulls on her boots.

PRASKOVYA
Eight o'clock.

EXT. POST NO. 17 — NIGHT

Frost so hard the snow squeals under their boots. The lantern. Praskovya breaks the hole again; the skin that has formed since morning is thin and goes with one blow. The rod. The black water rocking, then still.

PRASKOVYA
Hundred and four.

She writes. They go back up the bank toward the low lit door of the bathhouse, and the lantern goes with them.

The camera stays at the hole.

Starlight on the black water. The rod has gone up the bank with them; there is nothing in the hole now but the water. Far off along the river the ice makes a sound, a long settling boom that travels from one bank to the other under the snow. The water in the hole shivers once, and is still.

From the edges a grey skin begins to form, very slowly, in fine needles that reach toward the middle. We watch them reach. They meet.

SEQUENCE THREE — BREAK-UP

EXT. POST NO. 17 — DAY

Full daylight, and the whole river moving.

The ice goes past in plates as wide as floors, grey, rotten at the edges, some still carrying the snow of the winter road and the runner tracks in it. They do not hurry. They turn as they come and lean on one another, and where two of them meet the edges grind and break off into a slush that hisses. Upstream something cracks like a rifle shot. Then nothing, and the plates go on.

The oak pile stands in it. A floe comes up against it and stops, and the whole board shudders. The floe climbs a little way up the pile, tilts, shows its dirty underside, slides off to one side and goes on.

The plank is under water. Praskovya stands on the bank above it, in rubber boots, and reads from where she is, leaning out, the watch open in her hand.

PRASKOVYA
Two hundred and ninety.

She writes. The floes go by behind her while she writes, and go on going by when she has finished.

11.IV.57 — 8 h — 290 — ice run — clear — S, light.

EXT. THE BATHHOUSE — DAY

Tacked to the door frame, a telegram form, swollen with damp, its pasted strips lifting at the corners: PARALLEL OBSERVATIONS POST 17 TO CONTINUE UNTIL CLEARANCE OF ICE TECHNICIAN FERAPONTOVA TO REMAIN.

Zoya sits on the doorstep with her field book on her knee. Her boots dry beside her on two sticks pushed into the ground; on her feet, Praskovya's felt boots. Meltwater runs down the bank past her in a hundred small channels, all going the same way.

Bykov comes along the bank, stepping over the channels.

BYKOV
It's April, Ilyinichna. You said March.

Praskovya, on the path behind him, the ledger under her arm.

PRASKOVYA
She went late.

Bykov turns and looks at the river, as if to check.

EXT. THE LANDING BELOW THE ORCHARD — DAY

A raft of numbered logs lies against the bank, tied to a stump. On it, bundles, a table on its back with its legs in the air, a sewing machine wrapped in a quilt.

AGAFYA, past eighty, in three shawls, stands on the raft with a rope in her hand. At the other end of the rope a red cow has planted her forefeet in the mud and will not take another step. Two BRIGADE MEN lean on her haunches. She lows, a long complaining note that goes out over the water and does not come back.

Agafya unwinds her outermost shawl, puts it over the cow's head and knots it under the jaw. She speaks into the shawl, close, too low to hear. Then she steps back onto the raft and draws on the rope, and the cow lifts one foot, blind, and puts it down on the logs.

The raft dips. Water runs over the logs and round the hooves. The cow stands. Agafya sits down on a bundle beside her and keeps a hand on her neck, and the men pole off into the current.

EXT. RIVER, POST NO. 17 — NIGHT

The ice has gone. The water is high, dark, fast, and full of small sounds.

The post's flat boat. Zoya at the oars, rowing against the current to hold them in place. Praskovya in the bow, one hand on the pile, the lantern on the thwart beside her. The board shows only its upper part now. The rest goes down into the black.

She has the watch open. She waits. The oars knock in the rowlocks. Zoya's breath.

PRASKOVYA
Four hundred and sixty-one.

She lets go of the pile. The boat drifts back. As it turns, the lantern light goes up the bank and finds the granite block: the water is at its foot, lapping, and above the water the groove and the scratched figures, clean, where Fedya scraped them in January.

INT. THE BATHHOUSE — NIGHT

The lamp. Praskovya writes, the ledger on the upper shelf. We see the column of levels down the page, one under another, in her small upright hand:

290 · 303 · 318 · 341 · 369 · 394 · 412 · 429 · 436 · 447 · 455 · 461.

Zoya sits on the lower shelf with her coat round her shoulders. Her eyes go down the column and stop, near the foot of it, and stay.

Praskovya closes the ledger. She sits still for a while with her hand on it. Then she gets up, bent under the black ceiling, goes to the stack on the bench and runs her finger down the spines until it stops. She draws one out. On the spine, in ink gone brown: 1942.

She opens it, turns the leaves, finds April, and lays it open across Zoya's knees, the right way up for her.

The page. Ruled columns, the same small hand. The level column:

336 · 341 · 346 · 351 · 356 · 361 · 366 · 371 · 376 · 381 · 386 · 391 · 396 · 401 · 406 · 411 · 416 · 421 · 426 · 431.

Zoya's finger goes down it, line by line. Eighteen readings, each five above the last. Then 431. Her finger stops there.

PRASKOVYA
I was not here.

Zoya looks up at her. Praskovya is looking at the lamp.

PRASKOVYA
Nine days.

Zoya looks back at the page. She does not write anything. After a while she closes the book and holds it out. Praskovya takes it and puts it back in the stack, in its place between 1941 and 1943, and squares the stack with both hands.

She lies down on the upper shelf with her face to the wall.

Zoya stays sitting. Outside, close now, the river: not the open breathing of the autumn, but a small busy sound right against the bank, as of something being tried and tried again.

EXT. THE CHURCH STONE — MORNING

The water has come up the face of the stone in the night. It stands a hand's breadth below the groove, rising and falling there a little with the current.

Out on the river Bykov sculls the flat boat to the pile one-armed, a single oar over the stern. Praskovya in the bow. Her voice comes across the water, small and exact.

PRASKOVYA (far off)
Four hundred and seventy.

On the bank above the stone Zoya has set the tripod in the wet grass and is levelling the instrument, screw by screw. Fedya stands at the foot of the stone, ankle-deep in his uncle's boots, holding the striped rod upright on the bronze plug.

ZOYA
Hold it.

She reads. She writes.

ZOYA
Now down. The foot of the rod on the line. On the line, Fedya.

Fedya feels down the face of the stone with his fingers under the water's edge and above it, finds the groove, sets the foot of the rod into it and holds it there, his arms shaking. The water nudges his boots. Zoya bends to the eyepiece.

ZOYA
Again.

She reads. The same figure. She writes, and we see the page of the field book:

17.IV.57. Groove on benchmark stone, cut "14.IV.42".
Back sight (plug) 1306 · fore sight (groove) 1658.
512.0 − 35.2 = 476.8

Under it she writes her name, Z. N. Ferapontova, and the date again.

ZOYA
That's all. Come out of the water.

Fedya wades out. Zoya does not take the instrument off the tripod yet. She stays looking at the stone, at the water standing below the line, rising a little and falling back.

EXT. THE BATHHOUSE — DAY

The water is at the sill. Two BRIGADE MEN on the roof lift off the boards. Bykov calls the numbers. Each log, as it comes free, goes straight down onto a raft moored at the doorstep. The door frame comes down with the telegram still tacked to it.

Praskovya carries the ledgers up the bank to a cart, armful by armful, and stacks them in order of the years. Zoya carries the last armful.

The stove of stones is left where it stood. The water goes in at its door.

EXT. RIVER, POST NO. 17 — NIGHT

The boat again. Zoya rowing. The lantern. Of the board there is only the top left: a few white and black centimetres, the figure 500, and then the bare wood of the pile.

Praskovya holds the pile. The watch. Eight o'clock.

PRASKOVYA
Four hundred and ninety-six.

She writes it, the ledger on her knee, the pencil moving slowly.

Zoya lifts the lantern toward the bank. The light goes over the water to the stone. The water stands over the groove now; under it the scratched figures can just be seen, wavering. Above, the bronze plug and the red 17 are still dry.

Zoya lowers the lantern. She rows them in.

EXT. THE PATH TO THE RIVER — MORNING

Praskovya comes down from Gorka through the orchard stumps, the ledger under her arm, the watch on its cord. Seven fifty-eight.

The path goes down to the river and does not stop at the bank as it used to. It goes on into the water.

She stops where the water begins. Far out, the head of the oak pile shows above the surface, a hand's height, bare. No board. The current stands up behind it in a single fold and holds there.

She opens the watch. She waits until it is eight. She looks out at the pile for a long while.

Then she opens the ledger on her forearm and writes.

18.IV.57 — 8 h — staff under water.

She closes the ledger and stays.

The camera leaves her and goes down the path, slowly, at the height of a walking person, to the edge, and does not stop. Under the clear new water the path goes on: the two pale ruts of the cart, a dropped nail, the grass along the verges lifted off the ground, every blade upright, and moving very slightly, all together.

SEQUENCE FOUR — STILL WATER

EXT. BELOW GORKA — MORNING

No river can be heard. A lark, very high, and under it nothing.

Water to the far edge of the frame, so still that the clouds lie in it whole. Near the shore a birch stump stands under the surface, white, its saw-cut clean, as plain as if it stood in air. A small fish holds still above it, then is not there.

The pile of yellow pine stands in the water a few steps out from the grass. The new staff is wet to its lower figures. Its reflection hangs beneath it, upside down, black and white, and joins it at the surface without a seam.

Praskovya stands at the edge in rubber boots, the watch open. Behind her on the slope, the houses of Gorka, new and old at once: log walls with the chalk numbers still on them, the window frames raw.

She waits for eight. She steps in to the ankles, bends, looks.

PRASKOVYA
Sixty-four.

She opens the violet-stamped ledger and writes. The line:

28.V.57 — 8 h — 64 — 11.0° — clear — calm.

INT. PRASKOVYA'S ROOM, GORKA — DAY

A room in a reassembled house. On the logs, in chalk gone faint, their numbers: 31, 32, 33, and one upside down where a log went back the wrong way round. A bed, a table, the stove that draws. On a shelf along the wall, the grey ledgers, stood upright in the order of the years.

Zoya at the table, in a cotton dress and the same beret, writing on a printed form. Her case and tripod stand by the door. Through the window, below, the district launch lies at the new landing with its engine ticking over.

Over her shoulder, in her round hand, the blanks filling:

ACT of closure of hydrological post No. 17 (Krutets, r. Lemsha). Observations at the staff gauge discontinued 18.IV.1957 (staff under water). Observations transferred to the staff gauge at Gorka, in operation from 9.V.1957. Observer: P. I. Lobanova. Ledgers 1924–1956 handed over to the observatory. Ledger 1957 to follow with the monthly tables.

She signs. She looks up at the shelf.

ZOYA
Forty-two.

Praskovya, at the window, does not turn round at once. Then she goes to the shelf, runs a finger along it, and takes the book down. She does not open it. She puts it on the table in front of Zoya and steps back to the window.

Zoya opens it and turns to April. The same page. She takes the pencil from behind her ear and, in the narrow column at the right edge headed Remarks, beside the nine days, begins to write. The pencil is small; she writes small:

Readings 9–17.IV.42 not observed. Max. of the spring flood 476.8 (14.IV.42), from a mark on the benchmark stone, levelled 17.IV.57. Z. N. F.

She blows on the page, though there is nothing to dry, and closes the book.

Praskovya has watched all of it from the window. Her face does not change. Outside, the launch gives one short hoot.

ZOYA
That's me.

PRASKOVYA
Your boots are dry.

Zoya looks down at her own feet, in town shoes. She laughs, once.

EXT. THE NEW LANDING — DAY

Fedya and the boatman pass the grey ledgers from a handcart down into the launch, in armfuls. Zoya stands on the deck and takes them, and lays them in a crate in order, checking the spines.

Bykov on the landing, his one hand in his pocket.

BYKOV
You'll come and check us, will you? See she stays where she's put.

ZOYA
Every spring.

The launch backs off. Praskovya is not on the landing. Zoya looks up the slope for her and does not find her. The wake runs out over the still water a long way, and the clouds in it shake, and settle.

EXT. THE RESERVOIR — EVENING

The post's flat boat, low in the water, a sounding line coiled on the thwart: a thin cord with a lead weight, marked every ten centimetres with knots of red thread. Praskovya rows alone, short pulls, looking back over her shoulder at the shore.

She is rowing out over Krutets. Below her, under clear water going green and then dark, the bank road; the square of a house's footing; a stove of stones, its door open.

Ahead, three things stand up out of the surface: crooked tops of apple trees, a hand's height of twig each. On the twigs there is blossom, white, a few flowers only.

She ships the oars between them and lets the boat come to rest. She looks from the trees to the roofs of Gorka and back, and moves the boat a few strokes nearer the old bank with one oar. Then she pays the line out over the side, hand under hand.

It goes down a long way. It stops. She lifts it a little and lets it fall, and lifts and lets fall, feeling. Then a small hard knock comes up the cord into her hand: lead on granite. She holds it there.

She opens the watch on her knee. The second hand goes round. Eight o'clock.

She pinches the cord at the surface between finger and thumb and draws it up, wet, knot by knot, counting under her breath, and looks at the last few centimetres between her fingers.

PRASKOVYA
Three hundred and eighty-four.

She says it to the water.

The grey ledger for 1957 is on the thwart beside her. She opens it at the last entry: 18.IV.57 — 8 h — staff under water. Under it, with the book on her knee and the line still wet in her lap, she writes:

28.V.57 — 20 h — 512 + 384 = 896.

She closes the ledger and puts both hands on it.

The wind comes. It comes from the far shore, out of sight, and we see it coming: the clouds in the water break up into small moving light, and the light runs toward her across the whole surface, and reaches the three trees and shakes the blossom on them, and reaches the boat and turns it, slowly, a quarter round.

She lets it turn her.

FADE OUT.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Andreā Tarkovskiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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