Time passed, and I understood that as an adult I would not find anything in the apartment; everything that was visible I had examined, and not a single object replied to my silent question. Going through the closets, methodically opening drawers and boxes, searching—the very thought made me want to wash my hands, scald them with hot water until they turned red, until they burned. I had to return my childhood perception—I had spent a lot of time in Grandfather II’s rooms—go through the paths of that perception, which drew its own map of the apartment in sensual relief, to notice which objects remained themselves and which ones were slightly blurry, shimmering iridescently, showing that something was hidden inside; remember which corners, dark spaces behind furniture, and secret places behind the drapes called to me; the answer was there somewhere, in the past, in the view I once had from my height as a child.
I lay down on the couch, this position equalizes adult and child; a spring poked my side through the cushion; I lay there a long time, twilight came, the velvet curtains softening the light, and soon the room was dusky, so dark that I could not tell the color of the dark blue vase; the color was gone as if the vase was the usual glass dipped in water. I was getting sleepy but the couch spring, no matter how I turned, bothered me, poking my body, not letting me relax, not letting me sleep. I felt that something was missing and I wound the clock—an old alarm clock with an arc between two nickel-plated bells, resembling a snail that had a clock face instead of a shell. The clock started up, it had a special sound, a tinny dry click, which made me think as a child that it was counting its own separate time, the time of coming events that no one except Grandfather II was supposed to know about. Now it all came together, the clock, the blue twilight, the spring in my side, and I remembered how once I caught a cold visiting my parents, and they left me to spend the night at Grandfather II’s; I lay on this very couch, covered with two blankets, and I couldn’t fall asleep, the clock and spring kept me in the brittle space of half-awake and half-asleep, the room had already undergone the nighttime transformation, it was inhabited with shadows swaying like underwater grasses, and the objects had huddled in the corners, vaguely rising from the darkness; shadows and corners—the room turned into the combination of dozens of blurred templates, alternating stripes of curved and straight lines; its volume decreased, it contracted from a cube into a sphere, movable, breathing, like the lungs seen from inside.
I recalled how Grandfather II walked through the room that night; he suffered from insomnia—it was only in his dreams that he could see things that went beyond the framework of memory, but he slept badly, went to the kitchen for a glass of water, then a second and third, trying to fill some hole in himself, and only then slept, full of water, bloated like a bedbug; blind, he moved like a sleepwalker, reading the apartment by touch, and I thought that he might forget himself during these nocturnal walks, remembering that he was not always alone when he was awake, and do something that he would not do in the daytime; open a door, get something he did not want seen. And this time I was right: on the way back—the faucet was still dripping in the kitchen—Grandfather II came over, tucked in my blanket, and checked with his hand whether I was asleep; the corners of the eyes are relaxed when a person is sleeping, while they are tense in an awake person who shuts his eyes, and he knew the places to touch lightly to see if someone was asleep; I truly was dozing, I was almost asleep, almost no longer felt my body which had grown alien and heavy, like winter clothing. Having ascertained that I was asleep, Grandfather II went to his room.
He started bustling in there; if I had risked getting up and stepping on the floor, Grandfather II would have heard me immediately; but he had not shut the door and I could see what was going on in the big mirror of the chiffonier opposite the door; Grandfather II opened the top drawer of his desk and rummaged in it.
I knew that drawer; a child remembers every area where he is not allowed and tries to figure out ways of getting in; that drawer was always locked, it had a special lock, unlike the others in the desk, and I never saw a key on Grandfather II’s key chain that might fit it. I had tried pushing in a heavy fishing line to move the things inside and guess what was there from the sound; I shined my flashlight through the keyhole, I studied whether I could remove the screws and take out a side of the drawer; all in vain.
Grandfather II closed the drawer; the key was in his hand but he made a fist and I didn’t get a look at it; Grandfather II got in bed—where had he put the key!—and that was the end of the incident in the night; in the morning I found a moment to look around his room, but I couldn’t see where he could hide the key.
Now two decades later, my old interest in the drawer was the hottest clue I had recalled; I went to the desk and tugged lightly at the drawer. I expected it to be locked, but it submitted to the tug with a creak; the apartment must have been examined for valuables more than once over twenty years.
In the drawer was a bundle of well-worn letters tied with a colorful ribbon, probably tied by a woman, a box of pen nibs, and a few razor blades for removing ink splotches and errors; a calendar with an announcement of elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and a round candy tin filled with paper fasteners; there was a smaller tin, for caviar, which held teeth, with crowns and without, canines, incisors, wisdom teeth—the dental history of Grandfather II’s life; he must have collected them out of some strange whim, a madman’s eccentricity—something like a belief that you have to show up at the Final Judgment with all your bones, turn yourself in with all thirty-two teeth accounted for; but even the gold and steel of the crowns could not connect these teeth in the box with a human image—they seemed to belong to some animal like a wolf or dog; strong-boned, powerful, big, that had passed many other animals, fat and skinny, it didn’t matter, through its jaws; a magnitude—a mathematical magnitude—of the consumed flickered before me when I looked at those teeth; a long line of living creatures eaten so that the jaws could swallow another one.
Grandfather II had saved his canines and incisors as if preparing for a new life where they would come in handy. In the same box, wrapped in wax paper, were my milk teeth, tiny, pathetic, like those of a puppy or fox kit; I wanted to throw them away instantly, there was something nasty in the existence of a part of myself that was separate from me; I was engulfed by the old, forgotten sensation that he was following an instinct and collecting everything that could bring me closer to him, everything through which he could own me, literally and figuratively; the answer to why, or rather the start of the path to the answer, was somewhere here in this drawer; I sensed it as I went through Grandfather II’s pagan amulets.
His dental bridges were there, too—pink plastic with smooth ceramic teeth and a special powder to clean them. There were four pieces—Grandfather II started losing his teeth early, either because of some long-ago starvation and his exhausted organism, or because his body was matching his desire to appear to be a little old man, a lisping, gray granddad with teeth-in-a-glass. Grandfather II, he was a grandfather, a mighty word charged with a radical power, traded his body for the signs of aging, even though he was in good health, and it helped him, let him hide behind age, although not completely.
The false teeth, the elderly lifestyle, the insistent use of baby words—puddy cat, yumyum porridge, jammies; walking stick, medication schedule, milk toast instead of soup—all a mask to fool people and cunning to fool death, self-deprecation, marked impotence; here I am, I’m blind, harmless, and weak, I am like a bug in Your hand, do not squash me, Lord. But he wasn’t a bug, he was a scorpion sleeping under a cold damp rock on a hot day; the drawer, which gave off a sharp smell of turpentine and furniture shellac as chilling as the touch of a centipede’s legs, seemed to be a den of toxic creatures, they had hidden and run off, but the sense that they had been there remained; I knew that feeling from Central Asia, where the deceptively pleasant air always carried the presence of the sun’s stinger, the cheery crippling poison dissolved in it, the bite always near.
; There was yet another box in the drawer, creamy yellow, for vanilla fudge. This fudge had been my favorite sweet. Grandfather II knew it and whenever I visited he treated me; I even thought that if I opened the box I would find hardened honeyed grains of the candied fruits that now contained only the memory of their taste. Grandfather II would give me one, sometimes two, but never more, not out of stinginess but as if he knew the final number of candies not given to someone else, and he was in no hurry to hand them all to me at once, so they would last longer; I would not have accepted the candies, even though I liked sweets, for the candies from his fingers seemed oversweet, but I was afraid; I had the feeling that if I refused he would force it on me, shove it in my mouth.
The fudge box was a signal, a sign; only Grandfather II and I knew about the custom of treats; inside the box were strange handmade toys: a rifle two matchsticks long, with a sharp bayonet made from an awl; a horse covered in real horsehide I think—the hide was moth-eaten and straw stuffing fell out of the belly; a German shepherd made of glove leather, with sharp claws glued on; several human figures, as anonymous as tailor’s dummies—wood, screws, smooth rounded heads; their arms and legs moved, and there were clever notches in their hands, where the rifle fit perfectly. The toys were very old and too real for toys; it was clear that they were just a small part of some set and I could feel that you didn’t play with them the way you do with plastic soldiers—wood, iron, leather were not of a toy nature; the objects in the box were too heavy, too carefully detailed—they lacked the abstraction of toys that left room for the imagination; on the contrary, they seemed as if someone had the idea to depict a specific horse, dog, and people in this crazy way—except the people had no clothes and only one of them had Lilliputian leather boots the size of thimbles.
I had never encountered anything like this; I did remember that Grandfather II had said several times—in a roundabout way, vaguely, and perhaps even making it up—that when I grew up he would give me some very special—and he didn’t say toys, he said playthings, games. There they were—rifle, horse, dog, and then people; they could not belong to a child, they were handmade souvenirs for an adult—and at the same time they gave off the aura of madness, a neurosis, a wild concentration on details that came from the inability to capture the whole, the morbid detail of a mad concept, the same kind of paganism as in keeping the teeth. The little figures could have belonged to an aged military officer replaying old battles, but ones in which the wooden soldiers led by the will of the blood-maddened marshal die for real, die the death of things—which is why they had to be made of simple, elementary materials, wood, iron, leather.
I was stunned; the sun’s sting, the poison, it was like a blow, a snakebite; I wanted to find a document, evidence, and instead I found Pandora’s box.
If he had been alive, Grandfather II would have given me the figures and explained something, told me their provenance; a story or a fairy tale, an anecdote—and they would have been turned into amusing marionettes or cute things from the past: here’s what little ones had before there was the Detsky Mir children’s store in Moscow. I would have taken them, depending on my age, as toys or as souvenirs; I would have kept them without feeling everything I was feeling now that I was alone with them.
The figures were scary—I didn’t want to hold them. It seemed that touching them had its dangers; that they were a connection with the dead people they depicted; yes, the figures were anonymous, devoid of concrete features—but in each of them I sensed a person, just as devoid of traits, ruthlessly dehumanized, rolled smooth by time.
The spirit of the times was fully realized in them: not the general and superficial one that is in the air and forms an era’s ambience—fashion, slogans, speeches, technological innovations—but what is deeper and closer to the heart: the concepts of good and evil, the concepts of human and inhuman, the dominant note of relations, what one man can do to another—and the times will accept those deeds as a matter of course.
The spirit of the times—what is a person in those times, how free, or unfree, is the human in people; the figures belonged to a time when a person wasn’t even a toy, for that image allows for fate, which is varied and enjoys fickle games, but a unit deprived of fate.
The figures in the box—horse, dog, and three featureless “people”; they had that clumsy solidity that distinguishes a peasant harness or homemade scythes, pitchforks, and shovels; they were obviously not made by Grandfather II, he wouldn’t know how, his fingers did not have such tactile precision; some parts showed that the maker lacked needle files and chisels, everything was done with just two or three tools: knife, hone, and boot needle; old leather, old copper wire, waxed thread—the figures were meant to last a long time, or perhaps, the maker didn’t know how to work any differently.
There was nothing more in the box; I untied the pack of letters. I didn’t remember Grandfather II writing letters often or receiving many; not New Year’s or Soviet Army Day cards or telegrams or parcels—Grandfather II lived almost without any connections, friendships, family; his telephone rang only once when I was there, and he spoke shutting the door to his room, and I listened to him apologize and ask the caller to call back tomorrow—I’m not feeling well—as if he didn’t want to reveal the real reason, that a boy was visiting him. The letters must have survived because the housekeeper didn’t find the key to this drawer when she was burning his papers; the drawer had remained locked for years, and then, when the key was found, it seemed silly to burn a few remaining documents.
The letters, which the sender must have assumed would be read aloud to Grandfather II by the housekeeper, had wishes for good health; every letter mentioned seal blubber and bear fat sent to Grandfather II; asked if it had helped; seal blubber and bear fat—it was all about the fat, the writer explained how they caught the seal, how they shot the bear; the correspondent was a clumsy writer, words did not obey him, and he piled them on, one holding up the next so the sentence did not fall apart. But as soon as it came to hunting, the cold will of the shooter organized the rhythm of halting style. Seals and bears, bears and seals, the resident of a northern town exterminated them, made the long trek to the sea, went out hunting in the winter, and I don’t think it had to do with Grandfather II’s needs; the writer did not hunt in order to send parcels to the capital. He talked about hunting as if he did not do the shooting but simply observed the carbine fire the bullets; this removal of the weapon from a subordinate role and ascribing its own significance to it showed a certain restrained reverence. The man had found a support, had found an object that was different from other objects, that had power over life, which other objects lack, and he’d clung fast to it ever since.
He leaned on the rifle, carbine, gun, the way people of superficial faith lean, figuratively, on the church; the weapon became his religion but without all the emotion that usually surrounds it; the smell of the oil, the smoke, the machismo of a man with a double-barreled shotgun, ammunition belts, gunfire, hunting stories—none of this seemed to matter to the writer. He believed strictly and almost chastely, believed in the higher wisdom of the mechanism, in the trigger, firing pin, percussion cap, shell, and barrel; he believed in the laws of physics that made the shot possible. The seals and bears he killed died because the shotgun has to shoot; because the sight seeks a target; because the bullet wants to fly; he was a barely literate arbitrary poet of shooting who saw the world as being flat—a target does not have a third dimension—and that made reading his letters even more frightening; any murderer fixated on destruction was more human than this connoisseur of bluing gun barrels, direct and reverse threading, different gunpowders and types of sights, in love with his gun because it was soulless, which made it seem lofty, impartial, and just.
You could say that the letter writer had discovered a new unity beyond nationality and beyond culture—the unity of people with guns, the unity of pure force, and he enjoyed embodying pure force with no ideological coloration. He must have been pleased imagining a
rsenals growing and weapons rooms filling up; pleased reading about a new missile or new cannon in the newspaper—they were all merely forms of force, a force without content, force per se, and he had decided as a youth to be part of force—the most imperceptible part, the most impersonal part, without ambition and in that sense safe for the integrity of the force.
Obliquely it was clear that the writer was once very close to Grandfather II; this was obvious from the missing details and information that sometimes made the letters unclear and which Grandfather II apparently knew. Judging by the postmarks, the letters were around thirty to forty years old; the penultimate one came a few months before his death and the last one after Grandfather II had died; that one mentioned a meeting with Grandfather II and it mentioned me, too, as if the writer had seen me. Try as I could, I couldn’t remember anything; all I had was the return address—a street in a small northern city that had a huge mining complex, which I had heard about when I worked as a geologist.
I reread the letters in case I had missed something; seal blubber, bear fat—I imagined Grandfather II taking spoonsful of smelly jellied fat, too natural, untamed by cooking; the fat smelled of musk, subcutaneous glands, meat, blood, fur, smelled of animal, and in order to eat it you would have to overcome disgust, one which was greater than ordinary disgust: it expressed human prohibitions and crossing them brought you closer to being a wild beast.
Oblivion Page 11
