From the outside our connection looked like the friendship of an old man and a boy; everyone thought so, explaining Grandfather II’s good feeling for me by his reserved complaints about being childless. This explanation obligated me even more: it was assumed that Grandfather II—soon, not soon—was close to the grave, and therefore I was not supposed to “upset,” “anger,” “let him down,” or “make him worry.” I knew that Grandfather II was completely healthy, and my family knew it, too, but still they made him out to be a helpless old man who could be killed by any strong emotion—that was more convenient, it was a wonderful way of bringing my life into a subordinate state.
As a result, Grandfather II strengthened his power over me; every action, every word was evaluated by what effect it would have on Grandfather II. Interestingly, despite all this, no one particularly loved him; even I at some moments, when he seemed a completely harmless person, wondered why I couldn’t like him—it would save me from the constant feeling that he was trying to dominate me, and maybe I would be able to accept his power gladly. I even—quite childishly—tried to love him; I tried to clarify the map of my inner workings, find the area on it where the physiological background of love is located—warmth, a sense of openness, as if shutters were flung back; I tried, but failed—it was impossible to love Grandfather II.
I think no one actually had any feelings for Grandfather II, the attitude came from the mind rather than the heart; probably everyone was ashamed of this, thinking it was his own fault and not Grandfather II’s, and tried to express false emotions—you don’t want to hurt the old man, who didn’t deserve it. Maybe if members of my family had once talked to one another frankly and discovered that no one liked the old man, even though there was no reason, they would have stopped to think; but there was no conversation, and each one added his or her lines to the illusion of universal liking of the old man, never imagining that the rest were also pretending.
I thought a lot about why it was impossible to like Grandfather II; I realized that love could not arise in his vicinity. If you take cowardice to be the highest degree of egotism, Grandfather II was a coward; he could exhibit many different qualities, including self-sacrifice and concern, but they all served his cowardice: to preserve himself as he was. No one could love him: he loved himself so much, not in the sense of emotion but in the sense of self-preservation, that there didn’t seem to be any love that could be added, it was excessive as it was; and almost all his actions had a thin layer of fear for himself, the apprehension that events could interfere with his plans and destroy his plots.
I understood this when I was still a child; I had often asked Grandfather II if he had fought in the war and he replied that they didn’t take him in the army. But I knew from his cleaning woman that he kept his medals in an old candy box; I decided that Grandfather II had done something horrible in the war, never spoken, never reckoned with, which was behind all the films, paintings, and stories; I thought that those heroes killed the enemy with a first death—the one that happens on paper, canvas, on film; but there had to have been someone outside the pages of the book, the frame of the shot, who killed Germans with a real, fatal death, and I thought that Grandfather II could have been one of them, one of a few.
One day we kids were playing with Uncle Vanya the Iron Neck, who came from the village; right by his carotid artery he had a piece of shrapnel which doctors would not risk removing, and our favorite game was putting magnets on his neck, for they stuck right on living flesh. Uncle Vanya was an old man who had been burned in a tank; they tried to keep him away from children because his face and head were disfigured by drop-like growths that resembled the flesh of a rooster comb, missing a layer of skin and covered by blood vessels; it looked as if his face was melting and the flesh had frozen in those drops, trembling, hanging on thick threads, repulsive because they revealed—on his face!—the reverse, animal side of the body, like the rooster comb.
But children were not afraid or repulsed; Uncle Vanya the Iron Neck seemed to us to be the only person we knew who had something significant happen; we knew—and we could see—that he had been in the war. Of course, children avoid the pathetic and the sick, unconsciously protecting trust in life and in the future; but Uncle Vanya was so ugly that it was almost a caricature of ugliness; the destruction of his face was so horrible that it didn’t seem striking.
And then—he didn’t need pity or sympathy; Uncle Vanya carried a postponed death of 1944 in his body, a death that had killed four of his comrades; it had needed just a few more millimeters to get through his flesh, but the shrapnel was moving slowly through his body, like a drifting continent, heading toward the artery, and essentially, that explosion that hit the tank still existed for Uncle Vanya—he had carried away the trajectory of the shrapnel’s flight and lived in that trajectory.
Another person who survived death and was then disfigured by disease would probably have formulated a supporting philosophy, with the disease interpreted as the cost of his survival; commander of a tank that burned German dugouts, pillboxes, and trenches along with the soldiers, who crossed the battlefield in flames, flames that punished Germans, and who before the war had been fire chief of the district, Uncle Vanya didn’t even remove the mirror in his village house. Probably those flames destroyed all concepts of proportion, of beauty and ugliness; only one thing remained—man was not meat, even though he saw more burned men than live ones; the spirit of life breathed in him freely and easily.
We played with Uncle Vanya; he taught us to make stilts, nailing planks for our feet on long poles; we walked around him on our wooden legs, passed a ball, and he kept bending his neck so that the magnet stuck to the shard under his skin but did not fall. Grandfather II came over to us; he was looking for me, and Uncle Vanya said hello. By the way Grandfather II replied to the greeting and the way he asked when I would be back, I suddenly realized that Grandfather II was afraid; afraid that I would get too attached to Uncle Vanya, that I would not return, would slip away, taking advantage of his blindness. So blatant was that childish, offended fear in an adult next to the benevolent friendliness of Uncle Vanya, that I—from that single feeling—sensed that Grandfather II truly had not fought in the war, that he was of a different human breed than Uncle Vanya.
I was struck by the realization that Uncle Vanya was sick, that his life was ruined by his ugliness, while Grandfather II was marked by a tidy, unnoticeable blindness; I suddenly saw—again by intuition—that Uncle Vanya’s face, a face in meaty drops, should belong to Grandfather II, and the clean, untouched face of Grandfather II should be Uncle Vanya’s.
I decided then and there to learn Grandfather II’s past. I thought that every adult in our house was privately glad that Grandfather II was secretive and that any potential knowledge of his past remained unexposed.
The adults tried if not to forget the time about which Grandfather II could have spoken, then to at least make it palatable for their own private memory. They broke it up into small impressions, personal stories—what an ice hill there was by the ravine, now covered up; what nuts, all with rotten, wrinkled kernels, they once bought at the market to make jam; what pale, water-diluted ink they used to pour into the inkwells at school, and then the teacher complained that she couldn’t read anything in their notebooks. That kind of past was like keys, wallet, and papers that you can stuff into your pockets when you go out; it was small, domesticated—everyone diligently reinforced the little sport of personal memory, and no one remembered for the collective.
Looking around mentally, I realized I could not combine the stories of the past into something general; people remembered their families, remembered their youth, but it was all narrow, cramped, like the rooms in the new neighborhoods built in the sixties and seventies in the outskirts on empty lots where it was so hard to get rid of dusty soil, burdock, and weeds; new houses came up, and in them, new life, separated by thin walls, and everyone learned to live quietly—how else when the neighbors could hear you cou
gh—quietly and separately; live the way survivors do, stunned by having survived and forever maintaining the apartness of survivors.
I wanted to learn about Grandfather II’s past, but all I could manage I already knew; I was his guide, I walked the same roads, I put his few letters in the mailbox; there was only one area where he would not let me in: his passion for fishing. He went to the pond alone and returned alone; it was wholly his time. Once I crept after him, but halfway there he heard me and ordered me to return home. I had only wanted to see how a blind man could fish, but Grandfather II clearly sensed in my attempt the desire to spy out something else that he knew and I did not. I came up with a circular approach so that I would not be following his footsteps. Alders and sedges grew along the banks, and every fisherman had his spot, hidden from view and reached by squeezing through branches.
A blind fisherman, yet Grandfather II did not look silly—you couldn’t find a feature or detail that made him vulnerable to being a laughingstock. For all the potential ridiculousness of the image—canvas trousers, patched jacket, straw hat—he did not look ridiculous; even the bamboo rods, which always seem unserious and boyish in a grown man, were somehow separate from him, did not add another brushstroke to his look, even though he carried them in his hand.
He was not part of the brethren of fishermen, he had his place at the pond which no one else used, and the other fishermen did not come to him for bait or a cigarette or even to chat; he had set himself apart from the first day.
I started sneaking up to the pond and sitting at a distance from him. If you got too close, no matter how carefully you crept, Grandfather II would turn and fix his sightless eyes on you; at the moment you felt like a water rat that crawled out of its hole right in front of a hunting dog. I was amazed by the sensitivity in that self-contained and passionless man, whose movements were so measured you thought he was turning a windup handle, like on an old gramophone, inside himself that moved the various parts of his aged but still solid body. I even thought that he was expecting someone; someone who was supposed to come and ask him about something; waiting so as not to be caught unawares.
The more I sat at the pond watching Grandfather II catch fish, the more clearly—slowly, day by day—I understood that there was no mystery in Grandfather II’s character; there was only a strong ban, a securely locked door, the metal bolt, the heavy curve of the padlock’s shackle. There, behind the door, was something that had no place in the present; Grandfather II carried all his past with him, like a refugee at a short halt who does not unpack all the stuff from his city life.
Once I caught a glimpse of Grandfather II writing a letter; he must have written so much that blindness did not hinder him, the memory in his fingers connected the letters correctly. At the end of one sentence he placed a special question mark, drawn with additional meaning.
Grandfather II used a fountain pen, and the evaporating violet ink made the letter seem prematurely aged, and the sharp nib, divided like a snake’s tongue, gave the drawn letters a persistent intonation. The question mark, which I had written in school exercises so many times, appearing like the contour of a hot air balloon from the basket’s point of view or an ear with a drop earring—the sign suddenly appeared in a new meaning which I could not explain to myself then.
It was only later, at the pond, watching Grandfather II tie the hook to the float that I recognized the question mark from the letter—I recognized it in the snagged hook that sticks in the fish’s belly and does not let the creature escape.
Grandfather II had a strange way of fishing; I could see but I couldn’t tell from the movement of the float that the fish was biting, that its lips had touched the bait, I thought that the float was bobbing from wind puffs, but Grandfather II was already changing his grip on the pole the better to make the pull. He seemed to have a special sense of when the carp touched the bait; he could feel the live beating of the fish, he could feel it with the seeing fingers of a blind man, it reverberated moistly and sweetly in a hidden, clearly constructed corner of his soul.
A voluptuary of death, Grandfather II could feel—in general could feel—only through the mechanism of the fishing pole, in which the pain and fear of a living creature was transmitted by the tension of the line, the bend of the bamboo; he felt those surges, the thrashing weight of the fish as a caught life; without a fishing pole, touching live flesh, he apparently felt nothing.
I remember his fingers—I crept close and watched him put a worm on the hook. There is a peasant skill for killing chickens, breaking necks of geese, sticking pigs; the rough, domestic, accustomed dealing with death, without an admixture of martyrdom, of dependent animals and birds. This was something entirely different—Grandfather II’s fingers moved as if he was threading a needle, and not for work but out of curiosity—will the thread pass the eye or will he need a needle two numbers larger?
Worms have red blood, and the worm sullied his fingers. When you’re fishing your fingers are constantly covered with dirt or fish slime, and wiping them on grass or your clothes is automatic, repeated dozens of times. But Grandfather II took out his handkerchief and wiped his fingers thoroughly. There wasn’t an iota of squeamishness or excessive fastidiousness in this, it was an inappropriate and marked thoroughness, which he did not notice; thoroughness, which was only an edge, an unexpected protuberance—the way a sharp angle of a sculpture sticks out from a cloth tossed over it—of his real nature. Behind the thoroughness was his knowledge of himself, so habitual for him, albeit hidden, that being blind and not seeing himself from outside, he did not catch it motivating the gesture: to clean his fingers.
Did he feel blood on his fingers, did he sense something wet, or did he understand, with his mind, that it was blood? I don’t know: maybe the feeling of wetness on his hands fit some picture from his visual memory in his mind.
Deprived of light, most of his visions from the past must have fallen apart into dust; he was healthy for the present moment, but in the measure of the past he was sick, his visual memory, if I can put it this way, was going crazy: a live amputation, a stump, left alone with itself. The gap in time remained—and grew!—in his mind: his past, wrapped up in darkness, could not meet the present. And when it tried, the blind memory took what reached it through smell, touch, and hearing, and fit it into and rhymed it with a few remaining pictures where it fit; but the meeting of times could not take place this way: only the blind past via hidden fear directed the blind present.
Now I think that the blood of the worm he set on the hook seemed like human blood to him; externally he remained the same, unflappable, inspiring caution more than respect, as if he would open his eyes and say “I saw everything!” and that “everything” would be X-ray knowledge of what you hide in deep inner shame, which should never be revealed, because that which you experience so painfully may in fact be the reason you have a conscience, and revealing it would be moral murder; externally Grandfather II remained the same but I think inside, condemned to darkness, he was sentenced to being torn apart by the manifestations of his memory.
Now I understand why some of his memories seemed more stable through time than all the rest. These were memories leading beyond the border of life; killing and destruction contradict the work of memory—to preserve whole, which is why the memory of a death in which you are involved is a tragic oxymoron; if you clear away the component of external action from this memory, its foundation will not be the bas relief of presence, the existence of something, but a gutter of absence, unfillable but never-ending like the water in the Danaides’ vessels. Such a memory is not quite a memory; it is fed by an unrealizable desire, used to punish sinners; it does not strengthen, it weakens existence in a person.
But Grandfather II—it seems to me—did not regret anything; you couldn’t approach him from the moral side. However, the categories of being and nonbeing are more primary than moral ones, and vengeance got him through a fear of death; the worm’s blood did not remind him of the blood of his victims
or of their suffering—the less he could feel the horror of his deeds, the more palpably did death, as a naked, dispassionate fact arise before him, elicited by that blood; what had previously served as a defense—perceiving it that way—turned against him and became the only weapon that could hurt him.
This explains the death of Grandfather II and our posthumous blood tie.
It all took place at the dacha, in early August, the day before my birthday. It was so hot that the chocolate candies in the hutch were melting, sticking to their wrappers; the bread kvass in the crawl space fermented, popping their corks, and the sour intoxication spread through the floorboards into the house, dozens of flies were dying on the sticky paper, so many that the paper ribbons moved as if in a breeze; but the air was heavy, unmoving, stale, like the water in a glass for dentures; grass flopped heavily, breaking at the geniculum, the pond grew shallow and fish rotted in the dark green, dried slime, bubbling on the surface; crows gathered at the pond, perching on the low trees on the shore, digging in the slime, untangling fish innards with their beaks; sated, the crows flew to the high-voltage lines and it seemed that the lines were drooping under the weight of the heavy bird mass and not the heat; the crows sat in silence, burping occasionally; Grandfather II walked along the bank of the stinking pond, feeling the presence of the birds above, and he threatened them with his cane, copper-clad, knotty, darkened by the tar the wood had absorbed, resembling a mummy’s sinew-wrapped bone.
In the dachas, where behind the white swoon of lace curtains old people breathed heavily, the thermometer’s red thread trembled and crawled upward; all the thermometers looked like glass tubes for collecting blood, and all the thermometers measured life and death. Blood pushed at calcified arteries, flushing faces, pumping into weak, flabby hearts; blood seemed to be dispersed in the air, and the dogs, hiding in jasmine bushes, in pipes and ditches, swollen tongues lolling, clawed at the dry earth. The heat cracked the tender skin of cherries, unpicked for several weeks—and dark ichor dropped from the cherries, making spots on the eggshells tossed beneath the trees; the sweltering heat accumulated in the sky, and feeble, age-spotted hands touched the body, which had become alien and distant—farther than the tubular metal pillbox, farther than the voice which could no longer call for help.
Oblivion Page 6
