I both liked and feared helping grandmother: engrossed in the monotonous sorting, I lost a clear consciousness of myself, but I could feel some alertness, someone’s invisible presence in the dark beyond the turn in the corridor.
There on the wall of grandmother’s room was something akin to an iconostasis of photographs. Pictures in six rows, in old carved frames, in simpler new frames, big and small—the photos that survived; several dozen people, men and women, in groups and alone, in civilian clothing and military uniforms; a wall of black and white faces.
Grandmother neatly avoided explaining who was in the pictures. I did not press her, out of my hidden horror: all the faces belonged to people who had never known old age—otherwise I would have met at least some of them. These were all interrupted lives, how else to explain that they were gone?
In the evening, in the circle of the lamplight, I could sense that the unknown and hidden were awakening in the dark and moving toward the edge of the light, drawn by the rustle of the grains.
In my daytime life I gave little thought to who they were, taking their secrecy as a given, as a rule of life, even though I guessed that they were my relatives, my closest ancestors.
Their absence was so absolute that it stopped being a negative concept. The world was constructed as a system of deficits that through their constancy became a quality of presence.
Picking through the grains with numbing fingers, pondering the significance of Grandmother’s silence, I would suddenly feel the weakness and baselessness of my own life, as if it were a random oversight of fate, and I wondered “Who am I? Who am I?”—testing the solidity of the silence.
“There once was a man in the land of Uz,” Grandmother Tanya would say, forgetting that she was talking to herself aloud, as if she were telling a fairy tale.
“There once was a man in the land of Uz” was her secret phrase, which she whispered when she was fighting an illness or her heart felt heavy. I looked for the land of Uz in encyclopedias, dictionaries, and atlases, I didn’t find it and decided that Grandmother had invented it, a land of losses, a shard of a land, with only one syllable left of its name. Nothing was left whole in that land, and in it lived a fractional man, like two-fifths of an earthmover, which happens if you do your math problem incorrectly in school. And this fractional man knows only the current name of the country, Uz, he doesn’t remember that it once had been longer, and he is not afraid of the fractional things in it, nor is he afraid of himself, shattered into pieces.
Grandmother would scoop my unsorted pile over to herself, and sensing that I need cheering up, declaim from Pushkin’s “Ruslan and Ludmila” with an ironic glance at the table with its mounds of buckwheat or wheat:
The stunned knight came upon a field
Where nothing lived, just scattered skulls and bones.
What battle had been fought, what did it yield?
No one remembered why the screams and groans.
Her voice would change and she’d always read the last lines gravely:
Why are you mute, field?
Why overgrown with grasses of oblivion?
“Why are you mute, field?” Grandmother would repeat, and I thought that she had in mind a specific field, but one that didn’t exist anywhere upon the land.
The field of Pushkin’s fairy tale with its severed heads, evil sorcerers in caves, dark rivers, traces of old battles, a field where everyone is alone—when Grandmother finished reciting, I imagined that I lived in that kind of field, the emotions were familiar, even though I couldn’t say why I experienced it that way.
I was overwhelmed by a numbing sense of being an orphan. I had two grandmothers, I had a father and a mother—and yet I was an orphan. Yet how, and why, could that be? The answer was hidden in a field of silence.
We finished up the grains, I sat down to my homework, and everything that had occurred at the table became unreal and vanished. But a week later Grandmother would bring another few kilos of buckwheat—my parents chided her for her excessive purchases—and it would all repeat: the lamplight, the photographs awakened in the dark, the horror of losses, “There once was a man in the land of Uz,” “Why are you mute, field,” and once again I tried to control the feeling that I had approached a most important truth.
I imagined that every old thing had an empty space, like that within a porcelain statuette, filled with silence; every person had a space like that. Not swallowed words, not a secret, but silence; it was a silence that did not require the nominative case—who or what?—but the prepositional—about whom or what?
I started looking for evidence that my intuitions, which I felt deeply but could not express clearly, were not delusional. I became a detective of the unknown: there were some words or some object that would confirm that my feelings were not lying to me, that what everyone was being silent about actually existed. I did not expect instant and full revelation, I needed just a hint, a sign.
Where could I seek it? I lived in a one-bedroom apartment, went to school, spent the summer at the dacha, occasionally visited my parents’ friends … I leafed through the books on our shelves: I might find a forgotten notation in the margins, an old note or receipt, a page from a calendar used as a bookmark; I pulled photos out of their frames, looking for a hidden second picture; since I was good at hiding places—I had several in the apartment—I looked for those that belonged to others, but found nothing more than presents bought ahead of time and money secreted away from burglars.
Actually, I didn’t believe the find would be in a hidden place; I rather expected that in deference to my persistence, a second face, a second bottom would be revealed to me. And the more ordinary and unobtrusive the object would be, the more unexpectedly and obviously would its ability as shape-shifter appear.
Naturally, these searches were not all I lived for; they occurred like bouts of fever, and between them my existence was the ordinary existence of a schoolboy. But I can’t remember anything about those long intervals, although I remember my desire to get evidence of the reality of the conspiracy of silence and the intensity of every moment of the search.
When I had searched the apartment and other accessible places many times without result, I almost lost faith in my suppositions. The world was so solidly constructed, so authentic in the poverty of its unambiguity that I grew depressed, sensing that my entire life was being decided, that if I gave up now and believed that there was no false bottom, then my guesses would retreat from me, choose another paladin, another detective.
Give up, all the circumstances, all my failed attempts, said: give up. And only the weakest, barely audible voice whispered: give up and you will be no more, because “you” are that inner ear and inner eye; you did not notice that each failure was a step; you are close, so very close to success, try again!
Try! And so one day when I was alone in the apartment I set the alarm clock in a visible place, marking time until Grandmother Tanya’s return, and started a new search. Despair, despair, I had fingered the lining of clothes in the wardrobe, removed books from the shelves, opened the forbidden drawers in the desk, discovered general and private secrets, learning who was hiding what from whom, opened jars of shoe polish, peeked behind mirrors, reached into the ventilator openings, studied the innards of the washing machine—despair, despair, despair, everything was empty and silent!
The minute hand was hurrying, catching up with the hour hand, I had fifteen minutes before Grandmother’s return, I had to put everything back the way it was, lock all the cabinet doors the correct number of turns, line up the shoes in the entry, wipe away my fingerprints in the dust—I would have to lie and say I thought I would do a bit of housecleaning—move the hangers in the closet to the exact intervals at which they hung before my incursion. Neither my grandmother nor mother would notice anything unless I left obvious traces, but my father with his passion for order would be affected by the smallest, most insignificant change that occurred in his absence; he would feel the difference, so I
had to use my fingertips to learn where a thing had properly lain and return it to that position.
Thirteen minutes, twelve, ten, nine, six—and suddenly in my rush to find clues I knew that grandmother would be late; she wasn’t aware of my plans and likely wouldn’t have approved but with blessed generosity she was giving me another half hour by walking from the metro.
And in that unaccounted-for half hour, when all signs of a search were removed, when the clock was ticking unhurriedly, I saw the apartment with new eyes, I saw that there were a few places, a few objects to which I had never paid attention, even though that seemed impossible.
For an instant it was like being inside a rebus or brain twister: a ray of light from the corridor pointed out the pier glass, which reflected the brass bell that Grandmother used to indicate the start or end of our games; I picked it up and rang it and the brass ding-ding began the countdown to a special time, when toys come alive.
They were right there, gathered in the corner of Grandmother’s couch: a rag clown with hook-nosed plastic boots; Timka, a stuffed dog with button eyes; Mymrik, a rubber man with a hedgehog-sharp nose who carried a first-aid pouch sewn by Grandmother over his shoulder; Bunny, a white winter hare, synthetic and bedraggled; and a few others, secondary, unnamed. They formed a partisan unit, the underground anti-Nazi fighters. Grandmother and I usually played war, and it never occurred to me to ask why these completely unwarlike creatures became partisans.
Evening after evening they crept through ravines in the folds of the blanket toward the back of the couch, where the railroad tracks were, laid mines under an important German train carrying tanks or weapons, retreated, binding the wounded with bandages from Mymrik’s pouch; the clown stayed behind to provide cover, led the Germans on a wild-goose chase, and died in the snow of the sheet billowing from beneath the blanket, only to be resurrected for the next day’s foray.
That day my entire toy army, my comrades, whose imaginary wounds were as my own, real ones, sat leaning against the back of the couch as if it were a log, and looked at a single point; the trajectory of their gaze indicated the edge of the bookshelf. There was a book, a big book bound in dark brown leather that blended with the shelf; there was no title on its spine. That must be why I glanced right past it so many times, as if it were insignificant.
I immediately remembered that I had seen Grandmother sitting at the table with the book in front of her. She masked those moments so deftly, making them accidental, meaningless, transitional between two pastimes, say, reading and darning, that I was completely fooled.
I took the book down from the shelf; there was no name on the cover, either. Heavy, resembling a barnyard ledger, the book opened, revealing the glazed whiteness of empty pages.
Could I have known that this was the printing house mock-up of an important edition? No. Instead, I made another assumption based on all the stories about revolutionaries who wrote their missives from prison with milk or invisible ink. There was a text, it just had to be developed! Grandmother had saved this wordless tome for some reason, set it on her shelf so that it was unnoticeable to others but not to her, perhaps as a reminder of something, always in view.
I was impressed by the gracefulness with which the book was hidden in plain sight; as I turned the empty pages, my excitement and anticipation made me see faded letters. They combined into words, words into lines, the lines filled the pages; the book flickered spectrally, and dissimilar handwriting, various fonts, pictures, photographs, footnotes appeared—all unintelligible, vanishing, slipping away. This was the book of books, an ark of texts that never were, written in accordance with the grammar rules and orthography of various ages; the texts crowded one another, merging, disappearing.
I turned—behind me was the wall of photographs, of silent faces, and I thought I saw a very thin connection between the faces and the handwriting, the phantom bits of text. I did not know whether my desire had given rise to this or whether I was just delirious. I knew it depended on me whether the lines appeared on the white pages; it depended on how I lived, what I sought, what I believed. It would be an original source, a material truth, the answer to my questions; a reward for my loyalty to myself.
Thus my life, without losing its habitual flow, took on a dimension of expectation, an anticipatory spirit of the promised encounter. I hid my knowledge of the mysterious book without letters deep inside me, understanding that faith in its special qualities should not be tested often, was fragile; but I did not give up my efforts.
Amid the household objects, I looked for ones that would take me beyond the quotidian, would open the limits of current history, geography, and destiny. A bronze mortar, an antique microscope, a compass, a Solingen straight razor in a leather sheath, a boot tree, a silver teaspoon, a worn leather cigar case, a prerevolutionary pocket watch with crossed cannons on the lid, a rusty cabbage chopper, heavy green glass apothecary bottles with incomprehensible labels, a forged four-sided nail—they were a vanishing breed, they lived as hangers-on, souvenirs, meaningless trifles; but I, on the contrary, recognized their seniority and wisdom: in the easiest form for a child they taught me about time, about what was authentic and real and how to recognize it.
You could even say that I now had two lives. In one, I was son, grandson, schoolboy, October Scout, pal of my peers, a boy of my age. In the other, when I was alone, I was no one, I enjoyed a blessed anonymity, as if everyone in the world was recognized, defined, attributed, while I was superfluous, auxiliary, unexpected, no one’s son and no one’s grandson; I was frightened by the ease with which I moved into that state, by the strength of the sense of my separateness.
Left alone, I turned into a greedy, indiscriminate seeker of knowledge. My hunger for interests and desires, my search for the heights of impressions, for feeling the meaning of existence spurred by the dreariness of life around me gave my search a savagery.
I raced around the apartment, opening adult books at random, marauding through dictionaries, mastering mysterious-sounding terms and concepts, stealing art books, committing paintings to memory—without any idea of subject or meaning, like a nomad filling saddlebags with booty that seems valuable—things that might change him in the future. I was given a very small interval to create myself out of the only materials available to me; if I didn’t manage it then, I never would.
LIFE WITHOUT SOUND
Grandmother Tanya was hard of hearing. She could hear only very loud sounds: breaking glass, sirens, locomotive whistles. You couldn’t call her on the telephone, get her attention from the next room, make a comment across the table, or reply with your back to her. To have a conversation you had to put your arm around her and speak into her ear. Later, as an adult, I realized that my special attachment to her, aside from other reasons, was the result of those embraces as we talked.
Grandmother Tanya’s deafness annoyed those around her, and she was often asked to use a hearing aid or an ear trumpet. There was a kind of envy in those requests, a secret wish for equality: the suspicion was that Grandmother Tanya, by not using a hearing aid, was making her life easier by excluding one of the most obnoxious components of Soviet reality—sound. Speeches on the radio and music from loudspeakers did not exist for her, and speeches on television and street conversation were nothing more than bare gesticulation.
The home radio was kept on, the old wartime habit, but muted. The television was for daily, ordinary news, but the radio muttered along just in case there was suddenly something incredibly important and fateful. I think the adults subconsciously trusted the radio more, it was older, and they thought that if war broke out, the television would present a soothing picture while the radio would “awaken” and start speaking in the old announcer Levitan’s remembered voice. The radio, the one that had been wired into every apartment, was perceived as the voice of the communal unconscious, like the shared neuron network of all the apartments, which on its own, without a central control, would sense danger and warn us.
I thought that
the radio not only broadcast programs but that it eavesdropped on us; it was part of the general conspiracy of vigilance. Grandmother Tanya had a friend who spent the war in the air defense corps charged with early plane detection. When she showed war photos, huge ear trumpets to detect the sound of plane engines, I saw an image of that universal listening, greater than necessary for everyday life, attention to words and sounds that saturated daily life like glue; the power of language, where every word contained a backward glance at itself. I sometimes wished that all the grown-ups would be like Grandmother Tanya; no, I did not wish them harm, I thought it would be better for them, too.
Grandmother Tanya could not hear me, and until my parents got home I had freedom that I didn’t even think about; I took it as a given. Her deafness gave me an early independence, a window of a few hours a day when I was on my own. My inner biography grew out of those hours of solitude.
Not only deaf, Grandmother Tanya also could not see well without her glasses: her vision had been damaged by the strain of editorial work. She was a pensioner, but continued to work at Politizdat; I didn’t know what the contraction stood for—Publishing House for Political Literature of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR—but I sensed the thrilling monumentality of the name.
I considered Soviet abbreviations and acronyms, offensive in their unnatural combinations of sounds and truncated syllables, as the names of beings that were part of the mysterious hierarchy of power, and Politizdat was, using Christian terms, an archangel, especially since it was located on no less than the Street of Truth, that is, Pravda Street.
The Year of the Comet Page 3
