Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  But I saw that he found a special eerie pleasure in how the mice died in the traps he, a blind man, set out; he did not need to see their holes, or seek the right place to put the mousetrap, or select the right bait—it was enough to set down the mousetrap and the mouse would find it, as if it was not the bait but the trap that attracted it by its very existence. Grandfather II was not killing mice, he probably did not care about them at all—he was seeking over and over confirmation of the law he discovered by intuition: the trap is important, not the quarry, it is important to insert the spring, raise the toothed arch, and the victim will appear—only because the trap was there.

  Now in the room—there was silence behind the door, they had made a decision about the kerosene and they would call me in at any moment—I sensed that I was right; Grandfather II had a trap for every person. I realized that if I allowed them to cut my hair, if I sat in the chair, snuggled into the sheet, the scissors snipping metallically by my ear, my hair falling to the floor like rubbish, the blue blade, which made a ringing sound if you snapped it with a fingernail and which was honed on the suede reverse of a belt strap—if the dangerous razor touched my scalp, I would lose the future. The future tense—in premonition—was taken away, petrified, lost its visual perspective; it was taken away in language, too, verbs became a third lighter in weight. I sensed that if the scissors divided time into “before” and “after,” the “after” would be alien to me, but I would not know that it was not mine, I would not remember how I had been afraid and wanted to run and thought about the trap. Acting on my own, not giving in did not mean exercising my own will; it was not will—it was life versus not-life, in which I could be taken like a thing, shaved and acquired.

  Suddenly the presence of spirit, previously unknown, appeared, as if in that moment my entire future was being decided, and the person I was and would be in every moment of my life stepped into the compressed moment of the present, in the room that was a trap—and the trap cracked and fell apart. It did not require courage or boldness—just the presence of spirit; I saw that I was more extended than any particular moment of the present; and this extended “ego” in three tenses banished fear and opened up the conspiracy of things.

  Hair—growth—time; razor and strap; a minute ago I had considered slashing my throat with the razor, hanging myself with the strap; but now I simply left the room. The adults told me to sit at the table, but I promised to be back in five minutes; they stayed in the house, and I unlatched the gate and went into the woods.

  This wasn’t running away; I had run away many times, hiding, but this time I simply needed to walk through the woods to the field. Something had happened inside me that needed space so it could complete itself and start living and breathing, and so I walked to the field; rye grew there every year, it was the end of summer, but it had not yet been harvested, and I soon crossed the twisted, cracked earthen lips of the fire ditch.

  The grains slept in the dry grass spikes; the road cut into the field like a long tongue, disappearing beyond the edge; beyond the woods the commuter train moved, picking up speed; and I felt that I was alone; this was probably the first time I felt the sentiment—Where are the adults?—without fear, without an instinctive wary look.

  They looked for me; they told me later that Grandfather II blamed himself, said it was all his fault; he was so frightened it seemed that some time in the past he had previously suggested shaving some other boy’s head and smearing it with kerosene and then some accident befell the boy, not related to the shave, but the two events were so close together that they were somehow combined; Grandfather II roused everyone, sent them out searching, but he wasn’t concerned by the insult I suffered; my hurt did not worry him—he just needed to know I was alive.

  After my flight, Grandfather II stopped noticing me for a while; I think he realized that I had figured out his ulterior motive, and now we were united by that knowledge; my family fussed about my oversensitivity, my unacceptable childishness, but Grandfather II kept quiet; he probably understood that I would be thinking about him, that I would risk trying to find an explanation; he was sure I would not talk about it with the other adults—it was one thing to be scared of a haircut, another to even hint that you suspect Grandfather II of something.

  He started behaving so that we were alone more often. I remember the dacha room that had pieces of carpet runner, probably bought from a hotel that had remainders—wine red with a dark green border; all the rooms of our house had them, we were used to them and did not notice that along with them unheard steps had crept in, and long corridors with nowhere to sit. The runners—which Grandfather II had obtained through his connections—were reminiscent not of a hotel but of Party headquarters, ministries, even the agency that people preferred not to mention; you could say that Grandfather II let them in along those paths—what a gift, what a service!—but I thought he had them laid because they were more familiar to the soles of his feet than painted floorboards.

  I remember the room where I was alone—I had to work on my English, which I was taught in summer, and Grandfather II came in and stopped at the window. He did not pretend to have been passing, did not hide behind some errand—he simply stood there and allowed me to regard him; I was supposed to see something in him, be enticed in the neutral examination, gradually shortening the distance between us, coming closer and closer—in my gaze; like a big fish with its jaws wide open stopping in the water so that the small fry can swim in on its own.

  And so it went: Grandfather II no longer tried to influence me directly; he appeared on the periphery of my vision in the house, in the garden, as if trying to soap up my eyes—or, despite his own unobtrusiveness, enter my retina piece by piece. I soon discovered that he appeared in many separate moments of my day, like photographs. He did not try to make his presence known—he seemed to be counting on peripheral vision, knowing that it was a crack through which he could sneak into my awareness, just by visual repetition.

  Grandfather II had figured it out correctly, but he underestimated my fright over shaving my head; of course, the fear receded over time, but the caution remained, and now trying to behave differently, but still with some sleight of hand, he merely heightened my wariness and essentially set in motion my formation in feeling and thought.

  When we speak of a child’s liveliness of perception, we think that liveliness is practically a synonym for friskiness; that it is alive in the sense of being changeable, distractible, unstable. But perhaps a child’s perception is really alive, that is, endowed not with the gift of subtle differentiation but the gift of sensing—the game of “hot or cold” is not accidental here—what is alive and what is not in the ordinary sense; to see through the substitute image, to feel not nuances but the very nature of human relations.

  This ability to understand the nature of relations, recognizing the live and the not-live is what bound me to Grandfather II with ties that could not be broken then.

  I sensed that he was dead inside, unconnected to the world of the living; not a ghost, not a specter—but a solid, physical, long-lived (what could happen to him?) corpse; yet he had a strange concern for me and in his own way a liking. He—perhaps unconsciously—tried to bring me up in order to untie some knot in the past, to solve a drama that made him what he was. But in the present there were no explanations for his actions, from insisting on my birth to the haircut and kerosene for lice. My family got used to accepting current events as a given without seeking reasons, but if you looked at things from a different angle, the whole story between Grandfather II and me seemed superfluous, like a goiter or an appendix; he could have lived perfectly well without me and no circumstances forced him to have a relationship with me.

  I felt that there was no life, nothing living in Grandfather II’s attitude toward me; there was something else, unnamed; and I understood it only twenty years later.

  A woman loved me; she confessed her feelings to me and not finding reciprocity tried to receive it with extreme persis
tence for a while; she called at night, wrote letters allegedly from my girlfriend, and then stopped, and I thought that her passion was spent or she had found someone else.

  A few years later she died in an accident but was not immediately identified, and we, her coworkers, began searching for her while she was still missing; we got the police to open the door to her apartment, in case something had happened to her at home.

  When I saw what was inside, I asked my friends and the policeman to wait outside.

  My scarf hung in the coatrack; it had disappeared from our coatroom at work, worn and inexpensive, and I wondered who could have wanted it. The table and windowsills held pages with my handwritten notes, drafts of scholarly works. Everything that could be borrowed or taken unobserved she had gathered in her apartment; my pens, lighter, a pack of cigarettes; CDs, key chain, driver’s manual, pocket calendar, the five hundred ruble note with a torn corner which she’d borrowed for a taxi.

  She created a phantom of my presence out of those trifles. She lived her real life here with me, and in her ordinary life she was just a shadow. I suddenly realized how great was the constant tension with which she created—out of insignificant things!—this life of a double.

  Her inner existence was revealed to me: desire, passion, jealousy twisted into a tight whip. Inside, there was another life in which I was a slave of this woman, the more obedient the farther apart we were in fact. That was the locus of the forces that were unleashed by her death; they had vision that did not see other people or were totally blind, blinded at the birth of her irrational choice rejecting other men. The eyeless hunting dogs followed the scent, hurried to fulfill their destiny, to pass unto me the passion that had created them—and at the same time to attach themselves to something in this world, the world of the living.

  She had killed herself while alive, destroyed herself in order to live through me alone, and therefore her love was the love of a corpse; an almost otherworldly equivalent of emotions, which however were capable of participating in the entwining of fate.

  Grandfather II’s attitude toward me was of this nature. Back then, as a child, I felt only this nameless, unknown force; I couldn’t have imagined that there was another life in which I was the star unwinding in Grandfather II’s mind, and that he no longer correlated it with reality, like that woman who loved me many years later. In his head—blindness in this case played into his hands—I was already the person he wanted me to be; and the way he behaved in real life—which I took as the only behavior—was merely an edited, partial reflection of his plan.

  Grandfather II carefully brought me closer; he asked that I accompany him when possible on his walks and errands, and my parents consented. I became more than his guide, I perforce walked his paths, moved in his orbits. Some would have thought that I was leading him, a blind man, but in fact he led me; we could go mushroom hunting, I looked for porcini or orange caps, Grandfather II carried the basket, and the mushroomers we met were touched, praising me for my kindness and care; but I knew that I was the blind one and Grandfather II saw what he was doing, saw his own intentions, invisible to me. In the woods on a hot day a spiderweb stuck to my face, and I thought that the web was the materialization of Grandfather II’s plans, and I removed it, washing with black musty water from ground puddles, just to keep from feeling those threads; in the early twilight—we could go out for long periods—the forest turned into a layering of shadows, inky springs of darkness appeared between tree trunks, and I would relax—I didn’t have to watch out for a trick anymore, I no longer felt that the sunny day was just a cover-up, that the two of us were moving in a different space that only seemed light. I wandered after the figure showing white in the twilight and I knew that this is how everything really looked—dark, formless, with the invisible touch of grass and branches.

  My age gave Grandfather II power; whatever happened, he would be believed, not I. And Grandfather II, moving beyond making me his guide, began playing a game with me. It began by the well; we had gone for water, Grandfather II turned the handle and I filled the buckets. “Do you want to get in the bucket and I’ll send you down?” Grandfather II said. “You can see the stars from the well even in daytime.”

  I looked into the well. It was hot, flies were swarming—the cows had been herded nearby recently; everything was burning, sparkling, heating up; the world itched like a scratched bite, blistering, stinging with nettles, dusting, shimmering, but under the well roof, pulling back the lid, you were suddenly, without transition, on the underside of that overheated world.

  I was always a bit afraid of well water—I thought you shouldn’t drink it until it had been in the light for a while, had gotten used to air and space. The buckets were covered, and I secretly removed the lid so that the water would not keep what it had absorbed underground; my parents told me once about groundwater, how it collects, dripping along layers of rock, forming underground rivers and lakes; a second landscape was revealed to me, a second world which contained the mysteries of the circle of matter, everything that was washed away, carried, dissolved, everything that the water had seen with its transparent tight eyeball-drops; it contained decomposed fallen leaves, spring-melted snow, the rain from two days ago; there, beneath the present was the past, flowing its own way, and the well water in a bucket seemed different than water from the tap—thicker, like a trembling ingot, as if the attraction of molecules was stronger in it. And now Grandfather II offered to lower me down there, into the round hold of the well, into the cold of yesterday’s water.

  I was afraid of being near the water that had not yet been brought to the surface, still underground and dark. Grandfather II said: if you don’t want to go down there, just have some water—it’s hot. I wasn’t allowed to drink water from the well for fear of catching cold, and Grandfather II’s suggestion seemed such an understanding gesture: go ahead and drink, I know you do when no one’s watching, go on; but I knew that I had never in fact had a drink of water like that.

  A tin cup was attached to the well by a chain, Grandfather II scooped it full and handed it to me.

  There were many cups on chains later—by wells, by the hot water urns in rickety trains, by cisterns in Kazakhstan mines; the water in them either had a musty smell, or had been boiled a dozen times, or had a rusty aftertaste; a prison camp, shackled kind of mug, dented, scratched, wrapped in dirty adhesive tape, with an uneven bottom and edge shiny from many lips; but this was the first, most memorable mug.

  I didn’t dare refuse and took a tiny sip; the icy water burned my lips the way metal does in winter, and Grandfather II started telling me how in the North water can be so cold even in summer that it can stop a man’s heart; it wasn’t water anymore but the embodiment of cold. I drank from the cup and Grandfather II waited; then he scooped up more and drank himself.

  After his mention of the icy water of the North, our relationship was firmly established, strange, full of unspoken words, pauses, and tensions. Grandfather II had selected me to be a junior comrade, a confidant, knowing that I would understand very little of what would be revealed to me in hints, circumlocutions, and riddles; it was my inability to understand that must have tempted him to begin a conversation extended over time.

  Sometimes he gave me “a sip from the mug”—as if he was giving me communion, permitting me a sip of the past, which I could neither picture accurately nor fit into a bigger picture. Grandfather II told me about polar nights, when people went mad and could be saved only by showing them a picture of a new, different face cut from a magazine; about mountains that were always hidden by thick clouds, where German planes had crashed during the war; about gnats and midges that could get past any mosquito net, crawling over your face and neck, seeking dead meat. It was all carefully selected to suit my age—distant parts, extraordinary events—but the more Grandfather II told me, the more I felt that all these stories were just the edge of the envelope; Grandfather II set out the hunting flags consistently and irreversibly, turning my perception
in the right direction; he sketched the contours of an unknown continent, Atlantis, which would float up on his command, gradually preparing me to step on its soil.

  Occasionally he said nothing, stopped maintaining the image that he was presenting, and those were moments of stupefaction. His features did not change, but he stopped radiating familiarity and he appeared as a stranger.

  That happens when you’re exhausted and look at someone you’ve known a long time, but you are completely drained and the comprehension of the gaze ceases; someone new and unknown appears before you. But in this case my vision did not lose its clarity and strength, did not fail me—it was Grandfather II’s inner tension, which twisted him like a cramp, letting him loose, and you could see another old man who sat inside Grandfather II.

  This could happen anywhere, on the platform between train cars, in line at the doctor’s office, in the woods, at the pond. Grandfather II, knowing that I could see, would suddenly start touching his face, fingering the lapels of his jacket, bending over to fix his shoelace, run his hand along the row of buttons, as if checking that everything was buttoned and covered. If strangers saw him, they would think it the necessary habit of a blind man, but I knew that in just a minute Grandfather II would turn, stand so that I could not see him whole, he would be in a space between bodies, trees, or furniture, as if in a random photo, fleetingly, for a second, and I would not recognize him, neither his clothes nor the location would help. He would be a stranger from a different era, he would be years behind, and then, covered by a chance passerby, he would return to my field of vision as his former self, as if he had changed outer shells, time-traveled, behind the screen of someone’s body.