One day—I am getting ahead of myself—I understood, naively, childishly, that seeing is a mirror; we see not people but how people are reflected in us; I thought I had discovered a secret and all I needed was to figure out how to get beyond my own gaze to see what you’re not supposed to be able to see.
I began playing with my shadow: I tried to stand so that you could not tell who my shadow belonged to; I stood next to the stump of an apple tree, a barrel, a scarecrow, held my head down, hid my hands, and tried to make my shadow look like theirs; I played for several days, choosing the evening when the shadows were clear, thick, and long, I played madly, forgetting the time. And suddenly, weary and just fooling around, I turned and froze; my shadow was not mine. I had missed the moment of the switch and stood there, afraid to move: what if moving didn’t help, what if that alien shadow followed, but remained alien? But I had frozen in a very uncomfortable position, I moved my feet as soon as I shut my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw that it was my shadow.
The game now had a dangerous meaning: I consciously sought the state of excited oblivion when I was playing so hard, so inside the movements and the last rays of the sun, that I lost consciousness for a second and became a stranger to myself; I acquired another’s shadow.
Of course, I never experienced that state again; then I started studying the grown-ups’ shadows—this wasn’t an amusement, not a game, but a path to knowledge. I thought that their shadows differed in more than outline: my father’s shadow was much bigger than he was, and when he put the light out in my room after wishing me good night, I imagined that it remained, dissolved in the dark, growing and threatening, watching if I was really asleep. Mother’s shadow was fluid, musical in outline, I thought if you touched it, it would respond in a singing tone like a cello; grandmother’s was flickering, like a spindle, like knitting needles—a kind shadow.
I couldn’t get a feel for Grandfather II’s shadow; it did not respond to my imagination, no matter how hard I tried to find something in it; I couldn’t say that it was ordinary, average, without a hook for my fantasy; it seemed that Grandfather II knew what his shadow was like, that he directed it and watched that it did not tell anything more about him, that he was constantly pulling it closer, like the skirts of a long raincoat.
However, this is a subject for later; I merely needed to clarify the circumstances of my childhood and the starting point of the story—the story of Grandfather II’s gradual entry into our family, my birth, and my separate and special relationship with him.
Our dacha plot was next to Grandfather II’s; there was no fence between them, the water pipe served us both, and somehow it turned out that the sellers of our dacha also passed along the voluntary obligation to take care of Grandfather II. All the separation of the dacha lots, the delineations between neighbors depended on visual clues—fences and pipes, in our case. What can you expect from someone who can’t see? So the border did not work, and relations with Grandfather II crossed the line of neighborliness.
As far as I can judge Grandfather II had no obvious interest in being close to us; he was not looking for listeners and he didn’t need comrades; it happened on its own, Grandfather II even subtly pretended that he was acceding to neighborly socializing under pressure. Now I think that this nearness was a test: he had lived privately for decades, outliving the past, and now he was trying to be close with strangers so that he could use their eyes and their feelings to check just how well hidden were the things that needed to be hidden.
However, that’s too simple an explanation; there were other reasons. Grandfather II’s health was excellent; nature, having taken his vision, seemed to have exhausted the bodily harm due him, and the woes of aging passed him by; only his bones ached when bad weather was coming—he must have suffered freezing temperatures long ago and now his body warned him of cold. Grandfather II sought—and found in my family—people among whom he could die; what he sought most was not reliability, not help “if something happens,” but fastidiousness toward other people’s secrets.
He was building a relationship—not for life, but for his postponed death; this vantage point, this turn of events was hard to see from inside the relationship, and I can judge it only in memory. Grandfather II didn’t join the family, he didn’t try to become a dependent—on the contrary, he tried not to be a burden, not to beg for intimacy, and did it all without stress or artificiality, without engendering pity. Yet there was something of a well-rehearsed dramatic role about it, when the actor never makes the slightest deviation from his chosen method.
Of course, this could be the behavior of a man of impeccably noble objectives; however, such a man would have been natural in his nobility, while Grandfather II’s actions always seemed slightly off, dissociated from himself.
However, this remark is from subsequent times—back then no one thought this way; on the contrary, as far as I can tell, the family considered Grandfather II a sincere man, albeit rather reticent.
Grandfather II knew how to be useful—with considered advice or needed information; his presence elicited the sense of the steadfastness of life arising when you know that next to you is a man who has been through a lot and learned to live amid adversity. Both my real grandfathers had died in the war, and Grandfather II gradually took the place of the oldest man in the family, even though he did not openly count himself a family member; he did not seek to replace them, did not try to block the memory of the real grandfathers, on the contrary he treated them respectfully. Slowly, over years, he worked his way in: gave up some land for a garden, taught us how to graft trees, selecting the most viable cutting, grafting it to the trunk, covering it with tar, and tending it the first few years—and he gradually grafted himself to us, joining us, as if he knew the long power of time, which does not tolerate haste but allows only the small daily effort—the way texts are written, the way impossibilities and contradictions in relations are solved—a small effort creating and increasing the field; the field that first grows quantitatively and at some point takes on its own qualities, creating new connections, new events, incidents, thoughts, and actions, previously impossible.
At the end of summer, we made jam at the dacha—Grandfather II helped, washing the copper tubs; foods were canned—he brought over jars sterilized by boiling. Gooseberries, currants, apples—the fruity summer moisture, the summery juice was boiled, thickened, the summery fruitful time was canned for winter, cold and dark; the summery aromatic herbs were put into jars with cucumbers, tomatoes, and squash, they were used to separate layers of mushrooms in pails, which emitted burbling, drooling juices.
A family is made up of various people with a shared attitude toward time, and Grandfather II was gradually accepted into that circle, first as not a stranger and then as one of us. Novels, magazines, and newspapers were read aloud to him—his housekeeper read woodenly, without intonation, the book did not let her inside—and he talked about the past, very abruptly, as if constantly bumping into the borders of an area he had promised himself not to discuss, and my family formed the opinion that somewhere in his past there was a drama, an injustice, perhaps an arrest, an exile, a prison term. Grandfather II liked table games, lotto, cards, but someone had to sit with him and with a touch tell him what move to make, and the dacha evening under the cloth lamp shade became quite proper thanks to him—the way evenings at the dacha should be when people of different generations got together, when no gaps existed in the generations, and everyone was kindheartedly connected because there was a person whose need was appropriate, not burdensome and who could be easily helped; the tubby lotto barrels tumbled along the table, the cards were placed on the tablecloth, it grew late, and it was probably even too agreeable to sense that evening was closer for some and farther for others; the evening of life.
Thus, bit by bit, Grandfather II entered our family. Of course, he never interfered in affairs that were profoundly personal; if something important was discussed in his presence, he settled himself in the chair i
n a way that showed that he considered himself properly present but without a say; with each year in these situations he sat ever more confidently in the chair, millimeter by millimeter approaching the stance of a family member and not just a friend; he became something like a notary, and he was invited when there was a serious conversation to be had.
And then once, when my mother was pregnant with me, the doctors said that giving birth was very risky and recommended an abortion; naturally, this was not discussed at the table, but the whole family knew and worried. Unborn, I was already present, grandmother was already searching the trunks for old diapers and wool to knit a cap and socks; but everything vacillated, grew, and the family—belatedly—tried to be more careful in their speech and controlled their gazes; a life was being decided and no one wanted to place the wrong calibration on the scales.
Everyone expected the decision to ripen and occur on its own; life in the household changed, swollen like a pregnant belly, filled with the murky waters of expectation. Mother was determined to give birth, but too many unspoken concerns, unfinished questions had accumulated in the house. The closer the day approached when an abortion would no longer be possible, the more some members of the family, who felt she should not carry the baby, watched with frightened and squeamish astonishment—as if looking at jars in a medical museum—as the new life, still totally belonging to physiology and therefore comparable to a disease, a tumor, prepared to appear at the cost of the possible death of the person bearing it.
All the old grievances between the two branches of the family, mother’s and father’s, manifested themselves; two bloods, two heritages met, and the fact that I—still nothing, still only a fetus in the womb—was preparing to be born this way, through mortal danger, exposed old contradictions; pitting blood against blood, family against family.
Father bore the receding, weakening blood of an ancient noble dynasty; my three great uncles on my father’s side died missing in action during the war—having set down roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the line was dying out, finding itself in an alien time and conditions.
Mother had the blood of a southern family in which every generation bore at least ten children, and each child was much more someone’s brother or sister than himself or herself; where, if the whole family gathered, they set tables in the garden; where they were strong bodied, and when they died, they were not lost or unknown, as if the family ties—direct, second cousin, third cousin—left no one unsupervised, did not permit them to vanish without a trace; as if the blood of this family in some sense ignored the individual person, and new shoots came up, as it did after grass was mown—three times as thick.
Two bloods, two family fates were mixed in me; two past tenses sought the future verbs in me. Two forces, related to me but not to each other, my mother’s family and my father’s, came together implacably in me: Which was I to be, whom would I take after? Each side was prepared to fight to the death to keep the other from winning. People were merely weapons of those forces, blood donors.
I know that this incompatibility, just as objective as the incompatibility of proteins, this irreconcilability of two sources, not opposite but different in some other way and therefore unable to become one whole, forms the contradictions of my life today. Two loves, two hatreds, two fears—from my mother, from my father. The feeling of disunity in myself, desire bifurcated—two different desires for the same thing, arguing and competing; and fear multiplied by two. Twice as much strength to quell, stifle, sate; half as much confidence, validity, firmness; two bloods—tenacity and vulnerability, lust for life and openness to mortality—two bloods, two mutually exclusive legacies. Even when my mother was pregnant with me, they grappled with each other, tying the knot of the delayed event—the threat of death in childbirth.
It was then that Grandfather II came to our house. Unable to see the tension of the hidden conflict manifested in every look, gesture, and pose, he nevertheless learned of the argument or disagreement. In the timbres of voices, in the changed sounds at home—What do we know of what a blind person learns from the sharp and fractured sound of a fork on porcelain, the strained creak of door hinges, water pouring more voluminously and loudly than usual from the kitchen tap?—Grandfather II sensed the score of discord in the changed sounds (the way animals sense an earthquake, hear the noise of the future, for every catastrophe is also a catastrophe of time, violating its smooth flow). Silence and quiet for a blind man are material phenomena, objects grow still for him, and the edge of a chair or table is the acute angle of silence; Grandfather II recognized changes in the silence of the furniture, the drapes, chandeliers, doors, and parquet; he recognized it and like an engineer, a composer in steel and concrete who sensed that the construction did not sound right, he tried to find the region of altered sound, the region of the cavern, the split, the crack. He sought it in questions—he must have heard not only the words but also how they bumped into one another, head-on or obliquely, in passing, swallowed by the atmosphere or on the contrary, forcing it to resonate; words for him were those invisible particles whose existence physicists can determine only by the sum of the effects they produce, and these effects, of intonation, of meaning, Grandfather II literally absorbed; he straightened up, as if listening with his whole body, turning it into a resonator or radar, and he received hidden currents of events with the surface of his body.
Quite quickly—they had been at table about an hour—Grandfather II must have comprehended the situation; one remark about mothers not eating spicy food, and the tone in which it was said, was enough for him to see that pregnancy was dangerous for her. And here—everyone knew that Grandfather II was childless—he unexpectedly, after a long pause for thought, delivered a speech, revealing everything that was hidden, bringing himself into the family with full and permanent rights.
Grandfather II spoke hesitatingly, jumping from one subject to another, which in itself was amazing. His judgments, for all their reason and experience, were always somehow memorized, rote; he never supposed, never considered possibilities and probabilities, as if his blindness had taught him to trust only hard—in every sense of the word—facts. He valued the hardness as a quality even more perhaps than the content of the fact, which gave the impression that he was an encyclopedia reader, a lover of dates, metrical information, and legal definitions; but here he stepped onto the unfamiliar ground of conversation about life per se, and this gave his speech an additional sense of sincerity.
He spoke the way one might conjure away a toothache—repeating intentionally, leading away from the present with its constant reminders of the pain; lulling, calming the unborn child, as if giving the mother a relaxing massage. He began for some reason with the thirties in the village where he had lived; the former landowner there had a huge apple orchard. In the olden days, he let in the villagers, giving them a third of the harvest, and even though he always offered people allotments, no one took them—it was more familiar and easier to gather apples in someone else’s orchard in the fall. After the revolution the orchard belonged to the public, and every village family decided to have an apple tree in their yard; the old orchard trees were dug out and brought by cart to the village. It was fall, harvest time for trees, and the yellow-leaved crowns of the apple trees floated across the fields as if the orchard had decided to leave the area; not a single tree took—they were the wrong age, even though the villagers had dug big holes and lined them with hay and manure; the apple trees froze the first winter.
Grandfather II spoke with a sense of having been injured by the apple trees, by the laws of nature, according to which an old tree cannot take root in a new place; then he spoke of the North, of the fish spawn coming from the ocean, where the whole world becomes a fishing net, and it tries to break through the nets, seines, swim upstream through rapids, overcome the force of the flow, and its movements are so powerful that it breaks through—but it breaks through into death, it dies creating its descendants, as if there are obstacles that ca
nnot be overcome without accepting first that you will die if you do.
But note that from Grandfather II’s speech it was impossible to tell whether he sympathized with the apple trees and the fish that died in the nets; they were echoes of his thoughts about himself. He had something planned and was now trying to prepare my family to accept his idea without naming it. He could barely keep up with his own speech, he had spent too much time, perhaps decades, deciding something and now the energy of those unspoken deliberations, liberated, unleashed, poured out of him, and he could only manage to place dams along the way, to separate it into flows, cover them with masks and euphemisms, so that whatever he had said to himself clearly and directly should not be heard in that directness.
Of course, it was listened to and heard differently; the people gathered around the family table sensed that Grandfather II was searching for an approach to what could resolve the general tension of many days, and they interpreted his speech as he was speaking not about himself but exclusively about the situation in which he found himself. The no longer fruitful apple trees, the dying fish spawning—there was something vague in this and it was not clear onto which side of the scales his words were to go. But suddenly, coming to his senses, he sharply changed course: to everyone’s surprise, he began to speak as if he had discovered all the unspoken trepidations—and tossed them aside. He said that she should definitely have the baby, medicine was advanced now, and the doctors were being overly cautious—he listed births in trolley cars, the lamp room of a mine shaft, a cornfield, on a Central Asian steppe near the space center, in a bakery, a dentist’s chair, a bomb shelter. A more attentive listener would have realized that Grandfather II was inventing these incidents, choosing the locations from the life he knew or from newspapers, but he filled and overpopulated the room with these unexpectedly born infants, the endless contractions of birth, until the listeners’ focus dissolved. Grandfather II was already promising to get Mother into the best hospital, an exclusive clinic for the elite, promising that everything would go well, as if he were a midwife himself; he spoke of himself, his childlessness—I end with myself and there is no continuation of me—and asked and begged her so persistently to have the baby, pleaded with her to fear nothing, that no one ever thought he was asking for himself.
Oblivion Page 3
