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  Why did Porcupine do that? Stalker says he doesn’t know but thinks that perhaps Porcupine came to hate the Zone. He’s sitting down, doing something while the other two are shuffling about, having a look around, not knowing what to do. Writer wants to know about Porcupine. He was the one who taught Stalker things, opened his eyes—opened his eyes the way Tarkovsky has opened our eyes. He wasn’t called Porcupine back then, he was called Teacher and he kept coming back to the Zone, bringing people here. Then something broke in him. Possibly it was a punishment of some kind.

  Stalker asks Professor to help tie metal nuts (as in bolt) to some grubby white bandages while he goes for a walk. The wind moves through weeds and plants. The camera lingers on the wind moving through the weeds and plants, on the weeds and plants as the wind moves through them. Professor and Writer are a little uneasy now that they’re alone, but they take advantage of Stalker’s absence to indulge in that most unZonely of pleasures: talking about him behind his back. He’s different from what Writer thought he’d be. He was expecting something more like Chingachgook or Leatherstocking— from The Last of the Mohicans! Classic Zone, that, the way that it either reflects what you have been thinking or somehow prompts you to think what it will soon reveal. I mean, where did I get the idea that Porcupine had some-thing to do with James Fenimore Cooper? From seeing the film many times before, presumably, but this muddling of cause and effect will recur again and again. So Writer was hoping for more of a pathfinder, more of a Daniel Day-Lewis bounding through the Mannly wilderness than this anxious, furrow-browed zek who, in fairness, has cheered up considerably since getting into the Zone. We’re learning a lot in quite a short space of time. Stalker was in prison. To be a Stalker is a calling but he has paid a heavy price for his calling. He has a daughter, a Zone victim. And what about Porcupine? Professor has done his homework: one time Porcupine returned from the Zone and got fabulously rich overnight. What’s wrong with that?, Writer wants to know. (I sometimes think writers’ love of money is purer than that of hedgefund managers or bankers; only serious writers really appreciate the delicious, improbable perfection of getting paid.) A week later Porcupine hanged himself, Professor explains. Ah. The camera is sort of drifting back and forth, not going anywhere or doing anything much and nothing much is happening. The air is filled with a howl, the kind of howl the wind would make if a terrible gale were blowing (there isn’t a gale) and it (the wind) was the breath of an animal wounded by what it was hearing, by what was being said.19

  The howl dies down and segues into Artemiev’s drifty, enchanted electronica. ‘This isle is full of noises,’ says Caliban in The Tempest. ‘Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.’ The sounds in this quietest of places are not simply sweet and, at this point, no one is sure whether they will hurt. They have entered—we have entered—some subtly altered realm of consciousness in which the powers of the Zone can no longer be denied, but neither can they be proved. An amazing place where amazement is vain because everything is normal here.

  The camera glides over the grass, the tangled wreckage of metal and, as it tilts upwards we see, some way off—a hundred yards perhaps?—a ruined house, an unusual property which, while difficult of access (as we have seen) and in need of extensive renovation nevertheless has considerable potential for buyers who regard the rest of the world as a prison.

  Not that Stalker has any intention of buying, even though it is, in real estate terms, the house of his dreams. He sees it from amid a patch of dense weeds and collapses, first in an attitude of prayer and then on his stomach, into sleep. An ant crawls over his finger. There is no difference between the external world and the world in his head. Everything is reciprocated. He rolls over and, for the first time, the look of anxiety on his face is replaced by the flicker of contentment, even, possibly, of bliss. He has returned to the phenomenal Zone and, in spite of the massive weight of his expectations, it has not disappointed. It is still beautiful. The smell of the flowers may have gone but, unlike Gatsby, who is forced to accept the colossal vitality of his illusion, Stalker is still able to believe, to give himself totally to his idea of perfection. He may not be holding his hands together and muttering verses from some sacred text but for Stalker the rapture he feels at this moment is a form of prayer as defined by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience: the soul ‘putting itself in a personal relation with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence.’

  It will do no good if I keep saying that this sequence is among the greatest in cinema history, that this bit is profoundly moving. Those words serve as running heads for almost every page of this book and they apply to so many parts of the film that, from now on, I will try to refrain from using them. But there is no getting away from it: I find this scene, where we witness Stalker’s relief and share his bliss (I have been back to this cinematic Zone many times and have never been disappointed) so intensely moving that I cannot watch it without tears coming to my eyes. I’m worried that I’m overusing this tears-coming-to-the-eyes stuff but these are the facts and the fact of my tears—here and at Burning Man—is proof of the profundity of the experience that provokes them. In Diary of a Bad Year, J. M. Coetzee finds himself ‘sobbing uncontrollably’ when he rereads a passage from The Brothers Karamazov. ‘These are pages I have read innumerable times before, yet instead of becoming inured to their force I find myself more and more vulnerable before them. Why?’ That’s how I feel about Stalker, so I thought I’d ask that same question, to try to articulate both the film’s persistent mystery and my abiding gratitude to it.

  WRITER AND PROFESSOR, meanwhile, are not totally convinced. Far from it. Professor (i.e., a man used to lecturing) explains that a meteorite fell here about twenty years ago. Or maybe it wasn’t a meteorite. Whatever it was, something happened here to cause it to become abandoned. The paradox of abandonment soon kicked in: anywhere abandoned serves as a magnet. In cities unoccupied houses become crack dens; empty warehouses become venues for illegal parties. Leckhampton station became an unofficial adventure playground for my friends and me. People came here and started disappearing, Professor continues. The authorities surrounded the Zone with barbed wire to stop people coming (again, that mirror image of the Gulag: a place surrounded by barbed wire not to keep people in, but to keep them out). More generally, the Zone looks back to a vision of the future—another paradox—sketched in 1946 by the Swiss writer Max Frisch as he surveyed the devastation of postwar Europe. ‘This is what exists, the grass growing in the houses, the dandelions in the churches, and suddenly one can imagine how it might all continue to grow, how a forest might creep over our cities, slowly, inexorably, thriving unaided by human hands, a silence of thistles and moss, an earth without history, only the twittering of birds, spring, summer and autumn, the breathing of which there is no one to count any more.’

  Tremors from the future can be felt throughout Stalker. In less than a decade Professor’s summary of how the Zone came into existence had taken on the aura of a premonition fulfilled, and Stalker acquired yet another dimension of suggestiveness: in its foreshadowing of the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl, in Ukraine. Tarkovsky was not only a visionary, poet and mystic—he was also a prophet (of a future that now lies in the past).

  The damaged reactor and much of the radioactive material at Chernobyl were sealed in a huge concrete ‘sarcophagus’. Nearby towns such as Pripyat were evacuated and a thirty-kilometre Zone of Exclusion was established around the plant. Like Stalker’s child—a Zone victim, as Professor explains—large numbers of the children of parents who lived near Chernobyl had birth defects. After the evacuation the Zone of Exclusion was littered with the rusting remains of vehicles that had been used as part of the emergency cleanup. Plants stitched the empty roads and cracked concrete. Trees thrust through the warped floors of derelict buildings. Leaves changed shape. Veg-etation clambered up the crumbling walls of abandoned homes. Photographs taken by Robert Polidori of Pripyat and Chernobyl in 2001 (and collected i
n his book Zones of Exclusion) look like stills from a retrospective location shoot from the set of Stalker.20 Except it might not be quite as simple as Polidori and others documenting a world which had come to resemble a film made thirty years earlier. It could be that the photographers’ aesthetic—their tacit sense of what they were looking for—was partly formed by Stalker, so that the film has helped generate and shape the observed reality that succeeded it.

  Rumours began to circulate that within the Zone there was another place (in any magical realm there is always a deeper recess or chamber of more powerful magic) where your wishes could come true. There you have it. In the most concise form imaginable, Professor has outlined the birth of a myth and religion: a place where something may or may not have happened; a place with a power that was intensified—possibly even created—by being forbidden. That’s certainly the view of another professor, good old Slavoj Žižek, who reckons that the cordoning off is the defining aspect of the Zone: ‘What confers on it the aura of mystery is the Limit itself, i.e. the fact that the Zone is designated as inaccessible, as prohibited.’ In a classic Žižekian bit of reverse dialectics, ‘the Zone is not prohibited because it has certain properties which are “too strong” for our everyday sense of reality, it displays these properties because it is posited as prohibited. What comes first is the formal gesture of excluding a part of the real from our everyday reality and of proclaiming it the prohibited Zone.’

  Irrespective of how it was created, a cult grew around this Zone. Special powers were ascribed to it. Did it have these powers? It is not made clear. But the belief that such a thing or place exists can bring it into existence—as with the Unicorn in one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus: the animal that never was, but was loved just the same. That love, the love of the people who loved this thing that had not been, created a space in which it might be:

  They fed it, not with corn,

  but only with the possibility that it might be.

  And this gave the beast such strength

  that a horn grew from its brow.21

  It’s a gift, this place, the Zone, Professor continues, diligently tying bandages to the nuts. Some gift, says Writer, hand pressed to the side of his head as if talking on a mobile phone. Why would they give it to us? To make us happy, says Stalker, back from his walk, tail wagging. He’s in a really good mood now, smiling, clambering past the rotting telegraph poles (part of one actually falls apart as he goes past). Even a reprise of the spooky anguished animal howl does not dent his good humour. Yes, he’s having the time of his life—so much so that, without even checking his (wife’s) watch he declares, It’s time, and sends the trolley clanking back the way it came, along the curving rails, past an abandoned tanker, back into the mists, into the world of black-and-white, and ultimately out of sight, beyond the Zone, beyond the screen. He might just as easily have announced the opposite—it’s not time. Or at least it’s very difficult to work out how much or little of it is passing. Still, sending back the trolley like this begs an obvious question and Writer is the one who asks it: How are we going to return? (It is only now that I notice that they are literally at the end of the line; the rail, here, is blocked by debris. Either the Zone causes the railway to stop or the Zone begins wherever the railway ends. Either way, the Zone is a place you can’t pass through, only ever arrive at.) Stalker ignores the question but it seems possible that a well-read fellow like Writer has come across the answer before, in one of Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms: ‘Beyond a certain point there’s no return. That’s the point that must be reached.’ The surprising thing—they’ve only just got here—is that they’ve reached that point already.

  Stalker tells Professor to make his way to the last telegraph pole, by the abandoned car. The camera glides towards the car. Plants sway in the breeze a bit. We can hear the sound of footsteps on grass, can see tufts of grass being flattened at the bottom of the screen, so presum-ably, even though there is no attempt to visually convey the slight jolt of walking, this is the professor’s P.O.V. The vehicle, we can see now, contains the burned corpses of two figures hunched over the rusted remains of a machine gun. Scary. Hint of horror. These, I’m guessing, were some of the troops mentioned in the caption, sent into the Zone to…do what? To quell it, as the Soviet tanks did in Prague and Hungary? But what was there to quell? There was no uprising, no people on the streets—not even any streets. Nothing. The mere existence of the Zone was a threat. Through the window can be seen the hulks of burned-out tanks in the distance and, nearby, coming into frame, Stalker, Professor and, finally, Writer. So it was not Professor whose eyes we were seeing through. Or at least if it started out that way then it changed without our realizing. This happens repeatedly. We assume that we are sharing the view of one of the participants only to find that he comes into his own field of vision, thereby creating the sense that there is another watcher. The convention whereby the movements of a potential victim are tracked by a camera pregnant with menace—the camera as stalker—is common to all suspense films but here the movement from participants’ subjective view to that of an undisclosed third party creates a disquieting sense of there being an extra pair of eyes. There is never a sense that this is the point of view of an actual person, of someone who is stalking the Stalker: it is like an additional consciousness (that of the Zone itself?), alert and waiting. Perhaps this is what Tarkovsky meant when he said that he wanted us to ‘feel…that the Zone is there beside us.’ In other words, that extra person (that extra pair of eyes) is us (are ours). The Zone is film.

  STALKER THROWS ONE of the bandage-trailing nuts to indicate the route they must take. The three figures make their way towards moss-covered, rusting tanks, troop carriers and artillery pieces. All of this is observed, roughly, from the window of the burned-out vehicle with the charred figures hunched over the machine gun. Is theirs the consciousness implied by the camera’s silent watching and waiting?22 Is the Zone a place where the dead retain their ability to observe and to see, a consciousness absorbed by the twitching vegetation it apprehends?

  One by one they disappear from view into a dip, first Professor, then Writer, finally Stalker himself. We see, for the first time, that Stalker was right: there really is no one here, not a soul, only this graveyard of long-abandoned matériel, rotting in the grass, in the open air, just that and the breeze and the vegetation twitching in the breeze, watched and watching.

  A LONGISH SHOT of the three of them, framed by trees, plants, foliage, heading towards us, towards the place they’re heading. For the first time they seem not exactly dwarfed but diminished by their surroundings. The woody sound of a cuckoo, which might be a wood pigeon. Stalker throws another nut. As a method of route-finding this nut-thro wing is a bit puzzling. The suggestion is that they are at the mercy of the nut itself, of where it happens to land, as a gambler’s fate is decided by where the ball ends up on a roulette wheel. But unless Stalker is a complete klutz, the nuts always land within a few feet of where he intends them to, so there’s nothing random about the route. Maybe this is part of Stalker’s skill and vocation: reading the landscape, seeing the signs inscribed invisibly within it—like an old woman divining a future only she can see in the pattern of tea leaves in a cup—working out where to go and throwing the nuts as temporary signposts, signposts that are good for one journey only. Stalker said that Porcupine was the teacher who opened his eyes—opened them, presumably, to the mythic significance of certain places and landmarks, to the events that are indistinguishable from the places where they occurred. When did they occur? They occurred here, and here, and here. While Stalker went off on his own to commune with the Zone, Professor told Writer that the meteorite—which may not have been a meteorite—landed about twenty years ago but Stalker’s sense of what happened can’t be expressed or measured in these units. The story of the Zone, for him, is like Aboriginal Dreamtime: not a set of events that took place in the over-and-done-with past, but lurking in the permadepths of the present.

  Other t
han the nut-throwing not much is happening. Except the camera is closing in, so slowly and so slightly it makes almost no difference, other than to alert us— even if only subliminally—to the fact that something is always either happening or is about to happen or might happen. The Zone is a place—a state—of heightened alertness to everything. The tiniest movement makes a difference. Any deviation from the route indicated by the chucked nuts, Stalker claims, is dangerous. Stalker here is using the word route in precisely the opposite sense of Milan Kundera in Immortality. For Kundera a route ‘has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects.’ Whereas a road is ‘a tribute to space’, a route is ‘the triumphant devaluation of space.’ Kundera is using the word route in the sense of route map (which is actually a map of roads in the sense of highways). The route through the Zone is nothing if not a tribute to space. Be that as it may, Writer, having been initially fearful, is getting fed up with Stalker’s nutchucking idea of route planning. He might be Russian but he is the embodiment of a distinctly English attitude: fuck this for a game of soldiers! Why can’t we go straight to the Room? We could be there in a few minutes. In other words he’s impatient with the route precisely because it is not a route in Kundera’s sense. It’s dangerous, Stalker says again. Actually, the main danger seems to be coming from Stalker himself. When Writer starts idly tugging on a tree, vandalizing the place, Stalker (who, let’s not forget, had himself damaged a telegraph pole just a few minutes earlier) chucks a weighty metal tube at his head for being flippant.