August days last a long time; in the distant fields beyond the hospital windows, they were harvesting the rye, and two different types of vehicles, as different as predators and herbivores, tanks and combines, seemed to look at each other in amazement, discovering that there were others types of mechanical creatures. Young soldiers waiting for the tank in front to restart its ignition amused themselves by turning their turrets toward the field, aiming at combines and trucks, which kept moving away, until work stopped completely. The combines ended up wedged at the very edge of the fields, the necks of their chutes raised; cars were parked along the sides of the road, one had a sofa on the roof and it looked as if the stuffed, plush creature had climbed up to save itself from the tank treads. An agricultural plane circled in the air senselessly, like a bumblebee on a string.
The rumble of the tanks and their number—there must have been a hundred vehicles—first overfilled the day and then, when the column had passed, emptied it the way a house stands after it’s been slated for demolition, when the people move out, finally and irretrievably. It feels like that when you are on the edge of sleep, dozing, and the pause between heartbeats seems unbearably long, you fall into it, cease existing, until a pulse of blood comes from deep inside your body; you feel like a shoreline: the heart is located outside, the blood wanes and waxes like a wave, and consciousness grasps at the tide, in the emptiness of the interval. That day, after the passage of the tanks, became such an interval: the past had finished but the new had not yet started. Even noises seemed not to know how to sound, as if the hospital’s glass vessels had forgotten how to clink and the floorboards how to creak.
The hospital was old, wooden, full of cracks; and mice began emerging out of the cracks. The wood of the walls and floors was so brittle that it was pointless to fill mouse holes with ground glass, and the mice ran sidling along walls and occasionally darted diagonally across the floor. But now, feeling something that people didn’t, the mice grew cold and came outside. They sniffed and ran around, they were chased with mops and rags, they brought in a cat, but the mice did not leave, and the cat got under the wardrobe and sat there, not afraid but as if he knew something, too. The mice climbed up the curtains, the legs of the beds, there were hundreds of them and it was suddenly clear that there were many more mice than people, this was their abode, and the hospital had rotted down to the last board; I imagined that mice were climbing out in all the other houses in the district, mice that had seen only old newspapers that lined the walls beneath the wallpaper and were now seeing the world.
Of course, the mice had been upset by the tanks, the noise chased them out of cracks and nests, but their exodus was an accurate reflection of people’s reaction: the nurses stopped struggling against the mice and tried to find something monotonous to do, but nothing worked: the mop end came off the mop, the water splashed, dishes fell from their hands. There was no anxiety or excessive concern in this: every action is a link in a chain extending from yesterday into tomorrow, and every action is given meaning by the proximity of other actions, proximity repeated and fixed in time; wash the floor, iron clothes, water flowers, take a temperature, give a shot—each action on an ordinary day exists in a series of others, in the outline of time moving in order, a series that imperceptibly supports you, does not let you feel that time is in the least benign, that midnight is breathing down the neck of noon, and that at every moment an internal light is extinguished.
That day time stopped for everyone; each was left with what was in his hand—a scalpel or a mop; no action became meaningless but it did become unclear in which greater time these actions were taking place—the past and present no longer gave a clear image of the near future.
The hospital was housed in a former estate; space opened up too generously from its windows, the view was meant for a park that had already been cut down, and now it seemed bizarre that the architect had decided to reveal all that emptiness lying in front of the grain fields, the emptiness now crowded with self-allotted garden plots: their fences were hammered together out of crooked planks, wrapped in wire used for fruit crates and scraps of barbed wire, reinforced with uneven sheets of rusted iron hanging so crookedly that they could have been thrown against the fence by a gust of wind; beyond the garden beds—and always in a corner—were windowless tool sheds just as sloppily constructed.
The egg-yellow hospital building with its two wings, four columns at the entrance, and tall windows—if all were opened, the house would splash out the foam of the curtains and become airy, swaying like a sailboat—shrank at the sight of the tanks beyond the gardens; it seemed as though the ceiling moved closer to my face.
The tanks left, and the garden allotments filled with people; someone started a bonfire, the smoke of rotting matter rose up, and in that smoke—it was a weekday, the gardens should have been deserted—men and women bustled around with shovels, not quite sure what to do: it was too early to dig up potatoes and the cucumbers had been harvested. Some were digging things out, others digging holes for compost, and it felt as if the tanks had awakened memories that they were too young to have; a little more and one of them would realize that he was digging a trench or a foxhole; the soft soil, worked for many years, seemed to be calling, offering shelter inside its womb. At first the shovel bayonets dug up dusty chunks, but then the moist interior was revealed, untouched by drought, embedded with thin, white, grass roots, and riddled with the pathways of worms and beetles.
There is something indecent in soil unearthed by a shovel, in its friability, as if it were black farmer’s cheese, black buttermilk from a black cow; in its formlessness, readiness to fall apart—and in the cold wet grasp of its chunks clinging to a boot. I once saw flooded tank trenches in the woods, filled with impenetrable water, oily as overbrewed tea, which had absorbed rotting aspen leaves, year after year, until they dissolved; the water was a deadly infusion as deep as a coma, and in the midst of the clear leafy forest full of sunny glancing light, each trench was like a death cup filled with the earth’s juices.
People were striving to reach that dissolving blackness, its shelter; the village was emptying, the garden plots filling up, as if the residents had smelled the diesel fuel of the tanks, the smell of war and disaster, and were leaving their houses and everything that meant their ordinary lives—to temporary shelter by the garden plots.
The ambulatory patients understood that the medical strictures were suspended for the moment and also headed out to the gardens; they walked cautiously, attuned to their diseases, trying to catch the secret signals, hear the flaw in their heartbeat, the additional twist in the rhythm caused by the illness; the illness hid itself, and the patients tried to find it, to see how far it had spread, which territories it occupied; the patients stretched their necks, straightened up and stood on one leg, in an unstable position, so that fundamental support would not hinder the perception of what can be perceived only in nonequilibrium, in turning yourself into the fine needle of a recorder that registers the quakes of the earth’s core unfelt by humans.
However, an observer would not need to search for the illness, so clearly evident was it in their faces and figures. What I saw was beyond the limits of ugly and repulsive; freed of aesthetic significance, it was a sculpture, a plastic picture of what life can do to people if they don’t have inner changes that give them the strength to withstand it and not give in.
Bulging bellies, sunken cheeks, drooping breasts, paralyzed arms—the injuries were so varied that they read as monotony. The hospital, a sorrowful house, gathered all possible traumas; but the missing fingers chopped off by an ax, or a leg severed by a train were just the visible extremes among them; the general human figure suggested that people lived in a concentration of constant pressure in different directions, which broke, bent, sprained, and twisted them; people were crushed, pushed, stretched, they expended labor and exhausted themselves in effort, and now when they couldn’t hammer in a nail without clutching their hearts or falling into a coughing fit
, it turned out that the labor had not strengthened them internally. People were used to the form created by the pressure; and when the pressure vanished and a long pause ensued, a rarefication of time—then people walked as if they had forgotten how to walk unaided.
Sick and healthy—everyone gathered at the garden plots, trestle beds were quickly covered in newspapers and the vodka appeared; someone had brought a battery-powered radio and a television and people clustered around them, no one tried to leave, or follow the tanks, or take part in anything—they all watched the TV or stared at the woods, beyond which the plane engines at the military air base warmed up, and there was the sense that the television and the radio were the latest secret mechanisms that decided destiny, pronouncing a verdict calculated by tubes and micro schematics: what would be, what would not.
In was during this pause, this general stupefaction that Grandfather II’s life ended; it wasn’t that no one risked driving him to Moscow—for a brief period all human duty was suspended and people even tried not to pick up the phone, for who knew what the call might bring; the ambulance carrying medicine for him got stuck on the side of the road, letting the tanks go by, and he died—the new era might have accepted him, but it was the interval, the disconnect, that killed him.
Thus my existence coincided with his existence, and I was never just myself again—Grandfather II’s blood, which saved me, circulated in me; the blood of a scrawny, blind, old man flowed in the body of a little boy, and that separated me forever from my peers; I grew under the sign of the inestimable sacrifice made by Grandfather II; I grew like a graft on old wood.
I was in the hospital during his funeral, and later it was an effort to go to the cemetery: I thought that Grandfather II had not died completely, that he had passed into me, and that when I stood by his grave the two separated parts of Grandfather II’s soul encountered one another, one unsatisfied and the other I carried under my heart like a fetus; they met and experienced voluptuous pleasure because they had managed to deceive death, cling to life, while all around lay decomposed bodies, and the stage props of gravestones, photographs, and dates meant nothing.
I looked at other people wondering if there were those among them who like me carried a dead man inside them; maybe someone else is brought to the cemetery by a corpse, looks out from inside at the handyman sweeping the paths, piling up fallen leaves, and feels like a sneaky and nasty child who has hidden where no one will ever find him.
It was almost unbearable being in the apartment where Grandfather II used to live; I thought that his things, reverently preserved in their place, knew who I was and that the apartment had turned into a mausoleum, a crypt, where memory tactfully rested in peace, and it knew who I was. His ivory cigarette holder seemed a part of him; the housekeeper had filled the shelves with dozens of his pairs of glasses, of growing thickness as his eyesight dwindled; probably she wanted to create the impression in every corner that he had not died but just stepped out, leaving his glasses on the table, and would be right back, but for me the murky lenses meant Grandfather II’s gaze, he was inside me and at the same time looking at me from outside, from every spot in the room, wherever I might hide, under the bed, behind the drapes; the only place I could hide was the full-length mirror, but I had to be careful not to look in it—on the opposite wall there hung a photograph of Grandfather II and in a way that made him appear over my right shoulder when I looked in the mirror. His Sig Sauer, the double-barreled shotgun the Germans used during the war, which hung on the wall, also looked at me, but crookedly, with the dark holes of the barrels, two zeroes, assessing whether the previous owner would have the strength to pick it up with my hands, and deep in the attic there were boxes of shells, filled with still potent gunpowder.
Now remembering Grandfather II, I sometimes think that he summoned the death he wanted, even though he expected to survive giving me blood.
He was afraid to die the usual way; he thirsted to live through me, in me, and he was so fiercely afraid of death that he must have known whom he would meet in the other world; Grandfather II sought salvation for his soul, salvation as he understood it; his unconscious idea came out better than if he had lived; his death obligated me wholly and irretrievably, indebted me independent of any possible knowledge of him; whatever else may be, he saved me, sacrificing his own life—and tightened the knot by the fact that the sacrifice was accidental and the goodness a calculated risk.
I often wondered why Grandfather II had chosen such a housekeeper—a widow with a fifth-grade education, from an orphanage, who had never had a family, had gone through the Volga famine and retained the hunger forever—it lived in the depths of her large female body, and all her cooking was either too rich or too fatty; I remember the amber drops of fat in her cabbage soup and the pinkish gentle dew of fat on the salo striped with meat. Unaware of it, she fed not herself but the old hunger that was never sated; a sucking, irritating hunger like a foreboding that is actually the voice of remembrance pretending to be a premonition because we do not want to see it as a memory. Now I understand that Grandfather II picked her as if preparing a justification for himself—he helped a woman who did not expect anyone’s help, and she repaid him with loyalty.
The housekeeper executed the terms of Grandfather II’s will: she burned all his papers in the park, she threw away his clothes and shoes; they say that in those days—the August days—she was not the only one acting this way; while crowds stood outside government buildings, people of the former era, the most careful ones, hid their wealth or destroyed evidence, sometimes, along with themselves; if you added up the trophy guns that were used for the first and last time, it would reach the highest number in decades. My parents were taking care of me then, so no one could go to the funeral; the housekeeper later told us that he had left her a number to call in the case of his death, and when she called, people came, apparently military; they took care of everything, quickly, with military precision, and took away his medals with an inventory list, there turned out to be almost a dozen—she couldn’t remember what kind; they buried him as if they were afraid of the still-unclear new times, as if they didn’t know whether there should be honors or whether everything should be done quietly, and so they hurried; when we later visited the grave, there was nothing but a funeral wreath without a name.
Grandfather II passed away anonymously, as he had lived; as if there was a special service dedicated to his total obliteration; one of my relatives called the number the housekeeper had used, but he couldn’t even find out where he was calling: and when they learned that he was not a relative of Grandfather II, they refused to give him any information. Probably if he had died in a different time, we would have managed to learn a few things, to find friends, colleagues, to understand which agency had sent the funeral team; but the country was falling apart, all the agencies had stopped working, no one knew anything about previous positions, officers’ shoulder boards and insignia, forms and signs were meaningless; in this chaos, Grandfather II sank without a trace, as if he had planned this exit. Everyone preferred not to know, not to talk, not to inform, but to forget; and extensive research into who Grandfather II was led to nothing. Once he had hinted that he had headed a major construction project; now that lie was revealed, but there was nothing to replace it; therefore—probably for my sake—Grandfather II remained simply Grandfather II, the man who had saved my life.
His will left the apartment to his housekeeper and then to me upon her death; a large sum was left in my name, which I could receive when I came of age; Grandfather II left the dacha also to the housekeeper and then to me.
Thus I became an heir; the money soon became worthless, the thousands turned to nothing, and in fact the only thing I inherited was the secret of Grandfather II’s life; money, once a weighty thing, had turned into paper, which, as I later learned, was trucked away to be buried—you can’t burn money because the dyes are too toxic; later, in a northern region, I visited a mine into which they had dumped money in plas
tic bags in the early 1990s.
Somewhere among the violet 25-ruble notes with the profile of Lenin brought from branches of Sberbank was the money left to me by Grandfather II. I took a banknote as a memento—not of my lost wealth but as evidence of how quickly and irreversibly the materially embodied powers and possibilities of an era can vanish; evidence of the instant onset of historical illness; and I saw that along with time, the thing that had comprised Grandfather II’s posthumous power over me had also vanished; time, I realized, had loosened those bonds.
But this very pile of bills reminded me how I had gone to tidy up Grandfather II’s grave as a teenager; I thought I could go to the cemetery safely now, no longer fearing the revulsion of having the old man preserved inside me. I must have wanted to come to terms with Grandfather II, let go of those old memories and replace them with new ones, and I chose a time on the eve of my birthday: I thought that I would clean up the grave and step into the new year of my life on different terms with the past.
It was spacious and cool at the old cemetery; the mosaic on an ancient crypt depicted Charon bearing the dead across the River Styx, and in rhythm with the oarlocks came the creaks of the cemetery caretaker’s cart; dirt protruded onto the paths from beneath the gravestones, as if the dead needed more space.
I swept around the grave and watered the ferns and peonies; I smoked, looking at the neighboring plot, where a husband and wife were buried, Ivan Pavlovich and Sofia Vasilyevna Bessmertny; the black slab produced an iridescent play of blue shimmers, like the eyes on a butterfly wing; crows squabbled high in the branches.
It was empty and fresh, as if on the edge of a meadow; I thought that the past had finally gone and Grandfather II had left me in peace; I even thought that I could come to the cemetery more often—I had gotten over his hold on me, it was past its sell-by date determined by some unknown but active laws, and in the new times I would distance myself even more from those old feelings, cover them with another attitude toward Grandfather II; an attitude which essentially did not presume an attitude but only an elastic habit of memory, which actually makes you forget more deeply; you don’t remember what had been but only a memory of a memory, and the past moves away and diminishes, like an object reflected in opposing mirrors.
Oblivion Page 8
