Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  This conversation settled it: she should have the baby; and this is how Grandfather II appeared among the people who stood at the source of my life. The contractions lasted a long time, I exhausted my mother; with every hour she grew weaker, we needed to be separated, she needed to be freed of me, but they couldn’t; she hemorrhaged, the bleeding would not stop, and the doctors later said that at one point they didn’t know whom to save, mother or child. I was born in part on the word of another, I was born a hair’s length away from death, mine and my mother’s; it was luck, but in hindsight it strengthened faith in Grandfather II’s successful presentiments.

  And so Grandfather II entered our family; it was unspoken, but I was established as his grandson; through me came the connection, through me this relationship was created and subsequently retained. With his words, his vital force, embodied as certainty, Grandfather II redeemed me from nonexistence, made me real, opened doors for me; the connection of savior and saved, creator and created. In some sense I was relinquished to Grandfather II; many disagreements among those bringing up a child are over who has the final right of ownership of the child, and Grandfather II held this right of mental property, creating a slavery more subtle than treating a human being like a thing.

  However, he did not rush to use it in my early years; as far as I understand, he removed himself, as if taking a break after the main deed was done. Additionally, he did not care for infants, he avoided being in the same room with them, as if they were disgusting to him, babbling, suckling, crying, screaming, unable to speak; unintelligible creatures to the ear.

  He must have been waiting for the infant to grow up quickly, acquiring reason and speech—then he could talk to him, treat him like a small adult—that is, behave as Grandfather II behaved with everyone else. Infancy requires a different attitude: you don’t have to adore, flirt, make kissy noises, you can be aloof but have an inner conviction about the scale of the event; this person had not existed and now here he is, called upon to live. In fact, infants are a gauge of the ability to have serious and altruistic feelings between people: he is yet no one and at the same time already someone completely autonomous, a concentrated “ego” that will only be dissolved by the years. And if an adult can truly comprehend the revelation of a new life that belongs only to itself, if he has the inner hearing and vision, he would never encroach on a relationship with another; the other for him is a goal, not a means. So when an adult absolutely must do something with a small child and he has no idea how—then you can presume that this person is a seeker of use and profit in relationships; none of his usual methods of secretly manipulating others works with infants, and he is lost, in an uncomfortable situation fraught with exposure.

  Thus, the fact that Grandfather II disappeared after my birth, which he had so wanted, could have been food for thought; could have, but was not.

  I’ve already said that Grandfather II lived like a man without a past; one external flaw—blindness—hid another: that absence of a past. A displacement occurred—it was impolite, uncomfortable asking a blind man what he had seen, how he had lived, what he used to do. The idea was that such questions would remind him of his handicap, his infirmity, and Grandfather II hid behind blindness so naturally that no one noticed the maneuver. He did not pretend to be powerless, he did not parade his lack of vision, demanding special attention—he merely did not see, did not see with all humility and realization of his inability; he did not grumble or complain and I was probably the only one who understood that Grandfather II had made himself an appendage to his own unseeing eyes; it is unlikely he could have restored his vision, the diagnosis was final, but his acceptance was feigned.

  He had the kind of pride that is unknown to ordinary people who cannot imagine that a person can be the sculptural shell of his pride; a pride so strong that its bearer would be humiliated to reveal it; pride and scorn.

  Later I managed to see all this only because Grandfather II’s habits, his scrupulous self-control, which was tripled or quadrupled by the need to keep in mind the accidental gaze that he could not notice, were all calculated for adults; they do not play hide-and-seek, do not sit silently, breathing through the nose, under the table when someone enters the room.

  Grandfather II seemed to have forgotten there was another pair of eyes in the house. He had never seen me from my very birth, and probably at the beginning I was something like a speaking breeze of air for him. He could follow my growth only in his mind, and not knowing how I looked, not being able to picture me made me—in his perception—a plant capable of reason or a domestic pet. Grandfather II concentrated too much on always appearing the way he wanted to adults, keeping a mental picture in his head built on sounds—who came and went, where they were going, where they were now, who might be looking at him—that I “fell out” of the picture, or rather, did not appear in it for some time. Grandfather II did not expect astuteness from me, did not target me as a possible danger; he could judge me only by the conversations adults had with me, and those conversations—for this is the common attitude in conversations with children, if you listen objectively—could create only the image of a dawdler and bumbler.

  Had Grandfather II been internally closer to his own childhood, had his memory not been so crammed with events that blocked one another, he might have understood that one should beware of a child most of all; that the absentmindedness for which I was always scolded was in fact a sign of a different sort of attention: not narrowed but expanded, embracing and absorbing the margins, the things that did not fit into a focused crystal. But Grandfather II—I guessed this only later—had lived the kind of life that separates a man from himself; he was unlikely to remember anything about his own perceptions in childhood.

  When I turned seven, Grandfather II at last laid claim to me. In the final dacha days—the family was already seeking suitable gladioli for a bouquet to bring to school—they found I had lice. There were only a few days left before class started, it would be impossible to get rid of them in that short time; the adults met to hold a council and I waited in the next room; I thought they would decide to cut my hair short, and I was already suffering: not only was my hair perhaps my only freedom, but I did not regard the whole haircutting business as something ordinary and safe.

  My inner anxiety was always disproportionately high before a haircut. The mended sheet that my mother used to cover me seemed like an ancient shroud, its whiteness no longer the familiar white of bed linens and it took on—probably because it was an old, much-washed sheet—the shade of invisible twilight that you catch on white death shrouds: they themselves are not touched by decay, but the shadow of decay lies upon them, as if sunlight from the cloth is absorbed into the air, leaving behind particles of the purplish blue that appears on the sharpened cheekbones of the dead.

  The loneliness—looking in the mirror—of the human head separated by the sheet, the nearness of scissor blades, hair falling on the floor which had just been part of you, and was already being swept up; a haircut seemed like a little death to me. I invented a hierarchy, and a haircut was on the same level as the death of a cat or dog; the animal dies, while a person is not killed by a death like that, a human needs a larger death—but I wasn’t very big, and so I froze on the chair, and to this day I have to walk anxiously past the barbershop several times before stepping inside. The scent of soap, powder, foam whipped up by the hot currents of the blowdryer, sweetness and stickiness all refer me to something else, two biblical stories merge into one: Delilah cutting Samson’s hair and Salomé carrying John the Baptist’s head upon a plate; cut off hair and the separation of head from body—something about life and death is understood in those images which is revealed in anxiety even to a child; I learned later how such feelings are euphemistically transformed in the Book.

  And then, when something had to be done with my head, Grandfather II proposed: shave it and smear it with kerosene.

  Shave. Completely.

  I was not worried that I would be tease
d for being bald; rather, a complete shave was equal and equivalent to death, not the little death, as in a haircut, but the full-sized real death. They were going to “nullify” me, turn me into an infant, that is, to deprive me of the little I had lived and which was expressed visually in the length of my hair.

  I got even more scared when I realized that the adults would not argue with Grandfather II; they were happy that he proposed what they were thinking but, out of pity, had not said. It was fitting for Grandfather II to propose it; lice, kerosene, shaving the head—it all smelled of ancient times, homeless children, severe measures; if anyone else had suggested it, the adults might have argued, but here we had the charm of severity; stop whining, shave the head, imagine you’re in the army, no one’s asking you, you’ve got to put up with things, learn to man up. This was all said as if he had right of age and experience, with the intonation of superficial and therefore cheerful people who like the phrase “don’t turn this into a tragedy.” People like that become sergeants, trainers, gym teachers, they don’t like sloppy and careless bums; they think that even feelings should be energetic and brief—three minutes for a farewell; nothing bothers them, nothing gets through to them, everything heals quickly. Grandfather II spoke that way, and the adults probably thought he was playacting, that this was the right tone to take to cheer me up, but I had the growing awareness that this wasn’t just about the haircut; Grandfather II had decided—and no one understood!—to take me in his power.

  There was a backstory to this feeling; I had noticed long ago that Grandfather II resented and even hated long hair.

  Blind, he could still guess whether the unknown woman who came into the room had her hair loose and not up in a knot. A woman, for instance, our new neighbor, would visit for the first time, and Grandfather II could sense the invisible agitation coming from the unbound, curly, long hair—and run his hand over his gray crew cut; that meant that Grandfather II was angry. In the liberated locks, in the lightness of tresses sweeping her shoulders, he probably sensed vague danger: a symbol and source of sensual freedom—that is why he really loved, forgetting his relatively masculine nature, all kinds of hairpins and slides, all the metal ammunition used to tame and restrain women’s hair. The housekeeper spent her life wearing kerchiefs, he bought them for her with almost every pension deposit; she used them to cover the television, laid them on shelves like little tablecloths, she secretly gave them away, for Grandfather II could not count them; much later I learned that Grandfather II burned her hair, allegedly by accident, with a curling iron. When Grandfather II hugged me and patted my head, his fingers grabbed my hair at the root and moved as if the middle and index fingers were scissors. In our dacha house, the scissors hung on a nail near the cupboard, and Grandfather II sometimes went over to check if they were in place. The fact that they hung on a nail and were not put into a drawer created a special sensation; they were old, made in an ironmonger’s workshop in the twenties—you could make out the mark—blackened, as if over the decades the metal had absorbed candle soot, stove smoke, and coal dust; the scissors hung on the wall like a sign and reminder, a sign of power. The only object equal in power was the pencil—once a year, on the eve of my birthday, Grandfather II stood me in the doorway, put a book on my head, then I stepped aside, and he made a pencil mark along the book—to mark how I had grown, and then he notched the line. How I feared that pencil, ribbed and sharpened: I thought that one day I would not meet the measure Grandfather II had already intended for me, and my failure—I could not grow, the bread of our house was wasted on me—would be so great that no one would even say a word to me: they would turn away, and that would be all.

  Scissors and pencil: if a coat of arms depicting Grandfather II’s power over me were needed, I would pick those two objects. Scissors and pencil, and maybe also a protractor: when I first saw the drafting tools in his room, when I saw the ascetic precision of the tools, the gaunt extension of the legs, I didn’t even understand at first that these items were meant for drawing on paper; I assumed that they were intended for drawing on a person, anthropometry, and decided that Grandfather II had called me in to compare me with those instruments to some diagram: Was I suitable to be a person, was there some discrepancy?

  So, I sensed that the haircut would have a second, additional meaning; in getting rid of the lice, Grandfather II actually wanted to get me in his power, and I saw my shaved head as the hairless head of an infant. I might not have felt this so acutely and morbidly were it not for yet another recollection.

  Besides hair, the second mysterious and special part of the body were nails; they were cut with small curved scissors, and for me it was a ritual of leave-taking, a ritual of growth and loss; sometimes there were white spots, like stars or clouds, on my nails, and I tried to tell my fortune by them, thinking they held signs of the future. I knew that nails continued to grow after death, and therefore thought they belonged in both worlds simultaneously, and that we without knowing were always standing before the veil of death and penetrating it with our fingertips. Those white dots and stars come from over there, from death, from the unity of time.

  I brought my hand very close to my eyes and looked at the nail as if it were a screen, the sky in the planetarium where messages were projected from the other, dead side, shadows of approaching events; that is why you can’t simply cut nails, you have to catch the mood and moment, do everything not to scare off the shadows; my nails seemed to be the most sensitive—if we mean premonitions and other sensations that combine feeling and time into one—and the almost forbidden part of my body that did not belong to me.

  So on a spring day when frogs were laying eggs and their gassy clouds, full of black dots that would turn into tadpoles, glowed in puddles, I ran into Grandfather II’s house; the house was illuminated, white woven curtains in the doorways rustled in the draft, and Grandfather II did not hear me. He was in the middle of the room on an oak stool, cutting his toenails; nails as yellow as last year’s fatback salo, ingrown, like bird claws. Grandfather II was soaking his feet in a tub of warm water and clicking his clippers; with the same indifference to yourself you could chip at a sugarloaf or slice a sausage. I was astonished: not only did he not see the signs I saw, he could not even imagine that these signs occur; he was snipping off particles of himself dispassionately, meaninglessly; he was a thing to himself.

  As I sat awaiting the haircut—the adults were consulting on where to get kerosene, there wasn’t enough left in the lantern—I recalled those moments; I was sure that Grandfather II wanted to make me just like him; a thing, a thing, a thing ran through my brain; I suddenly saw the room as a conspiracy of things; my steps had made a narrow bright path in their dark life, and I realized I was trapped; Grandfather II knew whom to leave me with, to whom to entrust me.

  He was the only adult who truly mastered things; the relationship between him and things was mastery, not possession or ownership.

  The difference is that possession and ownership deaden the object, root it in the ossified nature of matter; a person repeatedly enslaves things that are already there to serve him—out of fear that he will lose them, that they will refuse to serve him, that someone else will take them; he enslaves them without actually having real power over them.

  I watched Grandfather II pick up an axe, rusty, with a splintered handle, and it was suddenly clear that it was his axe, the way it was his arm which lifted the axe; the category of belonging did not apply here—Grandfather II and the axe became a single organism of flesh, wood, and metal, and the tool quickly regained the forgotten meaning of its form; I realized that Grandfather II could chop until the axe handle broke, but even then the axe—if things could speak—would bless the hands of Grandfather II, who had provisionally restored meaning to its existence.

  This happened with things other than tools: Grandfather II could pick up someone’s pen, a spoon in someone’s house—and I would have the feeling that he left those items happy, left them recruited by an idea, the c
onviction of agents, and the sugar bowl from which he took a cube of sugar was ready to drag its glass belly on its stubby nickel-plated feet to the telephone, to inform Grandfather II what people at the table said about him after he left. It seemed that things sought his patronage: they fell at his feet, rolled across the floor to him; he was blind but he constantly found things and never lost anything; and every rare loss turned out to be someone else’s oversight or error.

  I was alone in the room; I was not alone; things—Grandfather II’s eavesdroppers and servants surrounded me. I was caught; I was too scared to even think about running. I imagined that the couch upholstery and the old curtains were like the carnivorous sundew plant, electrified, sending out tiny threadlike whiskers that listened to my inner vacillations; a trap—I was trapped—I knew that Grandfather II had set it, and I even wondered if he had not given me head lice. He had told me how homeless children used to stop people on the street with a box of lice and threaten: We’ll shake them on you if you don’t give us money. I started looking for a hole I could escape through and got stuck even deeper in the feeling of being caught, identifying myself with mice, the house was riddled with their holes, mice, whose inconspicuousness I envied.

  Grandfather II killed the mice; some adults considered this hunt a manifestation of his preference for order: the mice in this case were something irregular, petty, and nasty; others—who thought they saw more deeply and accurately—assumed that the mice were too much a reminder of the days that Grandfather II never talked about; that in the image of mice creeping up on grains of sugar and wheat, Grandfather II saw the deprivations of his past.