Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  Usually the sound of barking, however furious it may be, reminds you of a city square or a village street—the distant echoes of a dogfight heard on a night in the boggy woods, you realize that somewhere nearby there are houses, people, a place to spend the night. But the bark of a convoy shepherd is not the bark of a fight, skirmish, flight, or hunt. You don’t need to chase a prisoner, he is entirely at the dog’s mercy, however in the bulging eyes, the clumps of sounds torn out of its throat, the degree of hatred reaches human levels; human—by nature of the feeling—hatred, grafted on to the dog, becomes bigger and stronger than the creature, and it must unload it upon the prisoners. That is why the barking of convoy dogs immediately makes you think of fangs, yellowed as if by tobacco, of the hatred that separates man and animal more profoundly than it does man and man, because the animal follows it to the end, to destruction, to the crunch of tendons and vertebrae; about the hatred spilled out with the barking into the air of a thousand places, living in the canine and human descendants, absorbed with meager milk and the marrow of chewed bones.

  I see fishermen, the tips of their long rods glowing in the twilight, as if they were catching flying fish with that greenish light; after fishing, the men go to the café on the shore, drink beer or wine while the fish is cleaned in the kitchen; a local white wine in bluish bottles goes very well with the fish, clean and light, slightly bitter; this wine does not intoxicate, agitate, or weigh you down, it seems to rinse the feelings.

  You take a sip of that wine and the woman you met and fell in love with here, the soft bonds of bed sheets, doubly salty sweat, from the seawater, the reddish pollen of the shameless palm flowers on her skin—all this recedes, and desire itself suddenly turns into an almost sexless tenderness, the sense that she is merely the vessel of her life, inaccessible to you. You look not at her anymore but at how her life lives inside her, perhaps unfamiliar to her as well; how the blood ebbs and flows, the blush grows, the hair curls. This quotidian nature of her body becomes precious and necessary; you want to take her hand to feel her pulse: the beating of the heart that was conceived in her mother’s body, appearing out of nothing, out of a few cells.

  You know that no one was ever closer to you than she is; but even she is not close. They bring the fish, dorade for her, swordfish for you, because swordfish does not resemble the flesh of fish; it has large fibers, it looks like bleached beef, and that is why you can eat it. You could tell her why you turn away from her plate, drink wine, and stare at the ocean, and she—sensitive and understanding—would empathize, but it would be only a story; there is the final definitiveness of experience that cannot be shared.

  So you watch the fishermen on the beach, watch their rods tremble and bend when they drag the fish to shore. Farther along the transparency moves into darkness and then into color: there is a whirlpool, and the water spins slowly, thickly, and light circles float on the surface, like traces of drops fallen into hardening molten glass—the grayling snatching insects.

  The summer is coming to an end, the early darkness thickens, the mornings grow cooler, and the winds toss the light-winged dragonflies onto the water, as if sweeping out rubbish—skins, wings—from the space between window frames; the grayling is the fish of death, the river hunter—it swallows up flies, mosquitoes, dragonflies, so that soon it can go downstream and huddle in the holes in the riverbed, to lie dormant until spring; the rainbow wings splash, and the rainbow bodies of the fish flash through the water.

  A pause. A pot steams on a rod, fish soup cooking; grayling is tender, it should not be overcooked. As a treat, we have raw fish, rubbed with salt and pepper and marinated under a press to release its juices. But then you follow the route along the river, the path leaps from bank to bank, and in one of the fords someone steps on a human skull trapped among the stones, covered with slimy green weeds.

  A skull. A skull in the water. Higher upstream, we see a crumbling cliff and a black peaty carcass. In the peat there are more skulls, bones, flesh half-decayed, flabby like berries that spent the winter under snow; a camp cemetery that was being washed away when the river changed its course and began a new tributary. And you vomit the fish, that flesh is the grayling meat, and now you are a cannibal, all of you are cannibals because you ate that fish, drank that water, in which the dead are dissolved. You threw up, but the uncleanliness remains, it is in your body, in your blood forever.

  And now you curse the rod, the line, and the bait: a barbed hook is stuck in your lip, you swallowed the fly that is tearing up your intestines. Fish skeletons tossed into the river and human bones—you suddenly realize that you had always been a link in the food chain, your memory had been a weapon of destruction.

  And then you understand that the deathly communion was not accidental. Through it, as through newly granted vision, you see your body, your memory, your fate as predestination: the inheritance of blood, the inheritance of memories, the inheritance of other lives—everything wants to speak, seeks to complete itself, to happen to the end, to be recognized and mourned.

  You see and remember; this text is a memorial, a wailing wall, for the dead and the mourners have no other place to meet except by the wall of words—the wall that unites the living and the dead.

  PART 2

  S

  ummer days, long, expansive, like an enfilade of bright rooms; days when nothing is missing in nature and wakening comes with the dawn—summer days, the summer of life!

  Autumn memory absorbs nature’s decline, the transition from volumes of foliage to the emptiness of bare forests, and this disembodiment continues, as if its strength were undermined by disease.

  The darkness of winter days multiplies the lacunae of memory, confined to the circle of light from the desk lamp; you travel from one memory to the next as if from village to village in the snow, sinking, losing the road, barely hearing the guiding thread—the hum of the power lines.

  The memory of spring is timid, unsure, resembling the dreams of a recovering patient, as fragile as the ice of morning frosts, unsupported by the body’s strength.

  Only the memory of summer says: remember, all this has happened to you and will not be repeated, but there will be room for everything in your reminiscences; remember—here’s a blue spike of delphinium, bowing under the density of color, here are the smoky blue juniper berries smelling of tar, clean arboreal sweat, here is a butterfly flying without will, like a bit of white cloth carried by the wind; remember and it will be you: delphinium, juniper, and butterfly, they will become the rigging of your feelings and thoughts, they will help you when feeling will seek words and thought—images.

  August is the month of your appearance in the world; you were born in the summer, and the world appeared summery to you. It was hot, the thermometer kept climbing; body temperature coincided with air temperature, and you must have felt the world accepting you.

  August—in August you fell, climbing up on the handle of the stroller, and crashed with it onto stone; blood spurted from your smashed lips, your mouth turned into a wound, your milk teeth crumbled; you sensed pain that years later returned with the metal wires of braces retaining the metallic taste of blood; pain that deformed and paralyzed speech, as if every word was pushed through the bars of its cage.

  The unspoken words when you wanted to say them accumulated in you; other children collected cars and the older ones, stamps, but you started collecting words. Just as the rectangle of a stamp held out for some the promise of another life, other countries, where fame and glory were so great and triumphant that the hero’s face radiating his portrait into space was captured on stamps, the smallest part of the world’s mosaic—so for you every word reflected the bigger life that had produced it.

  Hidden beneath my childish appearance was a real and profound age of silence and life among words and conversation with words that allowed all the insights that shaped my early development.

  A man whom I will call Grandfather II insisted on my birth—I called him that to myself as a chi
ld; naturally, he had a name, patronymic, and surname, but they are inessential; my receptivity accurately sensed this man’s extreme alienation, hidden by politeness. It wasn’t that he kept himself aloof, taciturn, it wasn’t about his behavior or character; he was alienated from life almost in the legal sense of the word and only as a consequence of that was he alienated from people as well. Everything that happened in the present did not involve him directly but only brushed against him—not because he was unreceptive but because he seemed to have already lived his life, his existence outlasting his destiny, and no event could touch him now; he was omitted from the blueprints of daily life as if he was being punished—left out—denied.

  Grandfather II was blind. It is difficult to give a physical description of a blind man; sightless eyes not only deprive a person of one of the usual features, they create the sensation that the defect is greater than an external one, in the organs of sensation, that the blind man is lacking something more than the inability to orient himself in space.

  The eyes are something unusual for the human body, smooth, solid, as impenetrable as a wall; they seem to be clots of energy of a different sort than the energies found in blood and muscle. There you find blood corpuscles and formulas for breakdown and conversion; the eyes contain something of an order more mysterious for all their obvious openness. Time is light, the physicists say, light enters a person through the eye; perhaps they are the organ of time.

  The blind seem lost in time, they are not entirely present in every moment; being lost blurred his features, as if he had moved while being photographed.

  That is why Grandfather II did not persist in the viewer’s retina, he seeped through it, remaining a vague silhouette; you remember his profile better than his face, he somehow was always turned sideways, behind something, as if in a crowd, among others, even when he was alone; you remembered his clothing, perhaps the set of his shoulders, something of his walk, but that did not create a whole portrait.

  Now trying to picture his face, I see some moment of recollection in which everything should be there, I see it with photographic precision, but there is no face; it could be overexposed. I can list external features—medium height, thin, gray-haired, but the key to description is not there; rather it lies in the layer of perception where the impression is no longer directly tied to what we see.

  Grandfather II—that was the only way; when you spoke his real name, you felt that you were throwing a letter across the fallow no-man’s land by a border, and the letter never made it, falling halfway; you call the man by his name, but the sound of that name does not create a link between you, no closeness; the anonymous numeral—Grandfather II—corresponded to your actual feeling.

  Grandfather II was not a relative; he was a neighbor at the dacha, an old blind gardener. Apparently having spent his past life encased by the harsh contours of an army or some other uniform, he now wore only soft linen that followed the lines of the body; he had lost his vision long ago, decades before my birth; he had gone beyond his blindness, beyond the habits that trap the blind in their blindness, and he was free in his inability to see; he reduced his life to a few routes, the main one being the route from his apartment in the city to the dacha and back. He relied on a cleaning woman for the housekeeping—and over the years by ear and touch created an image in his mind of the limited space he allowed himself for habitation.

  In essence, he lived on a few islands with the solid ground of familiar sounds, smells, and touch; you might say he lived in the midst of this ground, perceiving it with his entire body, leaning on it, and in that sense his situation was more stable than that of the sighted. The only danger for him was something new. A new bridge across the ravine, a new front door, a changed bus stop destroyed the dummy Grandfather II had created out of sounds and physical impressions; for the sighted this destruction is not visible as destruction, they see only a change, while the blind are closer to the true understanding of things; new means death, innovation is murder; and therefore, although not only because of this, Grandfather II treated the past more seriously than others.

  What Grandfather II had been earlier, no one knew; there were almost no old-timers left at the dacha settlement to ask. Dacha life predisposes people to friendliness, to collecting biographies and the names of local celebrities—and this is where so-and-so lives!—but Grandfather II was always beyond such inquiries.

  He was alluringly uninteresting; next to him everyone seemed a bit more significant than they actually were; Grandfather II blended into the background, the epitome of obscurity—not modesty, not discretion, but obscurity; modesty and discretion are distinctive traits, and he had none of those. Grandfather II sought to pass through life by never drawing attention to himself and achieved this with almost monastic perfection.

  As the senior bookkeeper of a concern, remnants of the managerial habit appeared in him, but very weakly, when he sat down in a specially important way, weighing the pen in his fingers before signing a receipt; it seemed that the eyes behind his smoky eyeglasses had been eaten by the ciphers. Yet some of the old villagers—the dachas were built on the site of a mushroom woodland beyond the village—said that Grandfather II was no bookkeeper at all. The village gives you a different vantage point on people, a different sensitivity to destiny, than the city, its inhabitants have a different sense of a person’s belonging to the state, whether he had been only a mailman or a forest ranger—and the old men thought that there was a stench about Grandfather II; he had “the stench of official boots.” Of course, the villagers did not go far in their thinking—a police accountant or administrator; official boots, in their opinion, did not have a powerful odor.

  The dacha residents did not judge by city standards, but by those of dacha life. Owning a dacha in those days and among those people was considered a kind of amnesty, an absolution of the past, whatever it had been; not of imagined or actual sins, but of the past per se.

  One’s past life became a treat that could be served up as something light and tasty with tea, for an evening chat; people moved to the dacha in order to reexamine their memory, reorganize it through a retrospective gaze, to be assured thoroughly and meticulously of its fine quality. The dacha residents sensed a vague similarity of fates, an affinity in attitude toward life; finding themselves in proximity, they discovered that they were a community; and dacha life in that sense was perceived as a different life—following upon the one already lived and separate from it.

  It is unlikely that morally inexcusable acts were among the things they wanted to remember. Rather, the very position in the middle rungs of authority, which presumed a slightly greater moral conformity than what a person could exhibit without having to inwardly justify himself, forced them to assume a dignified air. They were the abstract “elderly” who were supposed to be given seats on the train and bus, according to the proper rules.

  Naturally, the question of what Grandfather II used to be simply could not be uttered in this circle—the sound would be lost in the air; everyone there was a decent person, and this combination of words—decent person, not “worthy,” not “good,” but decent—was the highest praise at the dachas. In essence, this is what united all the residents: they managed to come out of difficult times as decent men—that is, people about whom for a variety of reasons you couldn’t say anything bad.

  At first glance, the dachas were an oasis, an island of conciliation, tranquility, amiability. But the children—the children sensed that it was all a sham, a show: we were brought up too strictly and fervently, shown no forgiveness or mercy in moral issues. The adults had a clearly marked area of eclipse in their heads, and if that eclipse came on—if you stole, lied, didn’t keep your promise—the punishment was so incommensurate—not in cruelty, but in readiness to deny your son or daughter, to become strangers instantly—that it seemed you weren’t a child but an enemy who had sneaked into the family, a changeling from the maternity hospital.

  The family played out an entire scene: Is this
our son? Is this our daughter? I remember how my friend, eight years old, unable to stand these questions—they were investigating the theft of plums—suddenly came up to his parents and repeated loudly: I’m your son! I’m your son! I’m your son!—and they stepped back, they didn’t know what to do with the little boy who was shaking, missing an unbuckled sandal, and shouting without anger, without stubbornness but with the sudden firmness of the weak: I’m your son! I’m your son! I’m your son! They, the adults, were at the moment afraid of an eight-year-old child, they stood there, mother, father, and the person whose garden the plums had come from, until the boy quieted down, climbed into a ditch, and started to cry.

  Children were seemingly being prepared for a life in which any misdeed was not in and of itself bad but bad because it cast a shadow on the family, made people take a closer look at them—Who brought up a child like this?—and the family did not want to be looked at closely; the result was forced morality, and reciprocal hypocrisy permeated everything: the order not to lie, accompanied by fear, only multiplies the lie and forces to you operate within it.

  Childhood in those dachas—they are long gone, they have become the suburbs, the houses have changed, been renovated, there are solid fences—childhood was a school of hypocrisy; I cannot say that in full measure about my own family or the families of some of my friends—but the general field of relations was like that. Every one of us dacha kids led a double life to some degree; I’m not talking about secret mischief, rule breaking, omissions, or enforced furtiveness. We—each in his own way—were betrayed by our families, who saw all too clearly other children we were supposed to become.

  However, I am thankful for my childhood; if not for the enforced study of split personality almost to the point of schizophrenia, I would not have become who I am; and certainly I would not have been able to see and figure out Grandfather II’s real nature.