Oblivion

by Sergei Lebedev

  That sight—a house built on barbed wire—gave me the feeling that the building was about to shudder, all poked through, riddled, and no surface would hold, no matter the brand of cement. The wire seemed to be breaking the house apart from inside, the way tree roots break through asphalt, and all the molding, the bas reliefs, the vases in niches were not enough to make me believe that this building was meant for living, for people. Animals have a good sense about this, and it was the case here: there wasn’t a cat or dog to be seen, a bird feeder dangled empty in the wind, and only rats rustled in the garbage cans.

  There was something strange in this neighborhood, one detail—I couldn’t figure out exactly what—was disturbing me; something was missing from the sounds of the city, a note in the background noise was gone. I stopped, but the more closely I listened, the more I realized that hearing would not help; the answer was literally before my eyes. Here—the only place in town—the windows were not covered by light cotton curtains but thick, heavy brown or straw-colored drapes, probably weighted by dust, full of heavy folds like the skin beneath an old man’s eyes; the drapes covered the closed windows; no sound reached the street from the apartments.

  The residents had shut themselves off from the air of the street, locked the wide entry doors; in their apartments, where the sunlight rarely fell, they tried to preserve the air of their dwindling days; in the diffused honey light at sunset, perhaps they dusted the lacquered furniture, enjoying the cognac-colored lacquer, the cut-glass crystal glasses in the sideboard, and the existence of well-crafted things took away the fear of their own impotence.

  I remembered the other time I had heard this silence, only once, but I remembered it for its singularity; as a child, one morning in the paleontological museum in the dinosaur skeleton hall.

  The museum was empty that morning; I beat my parents to the biggest hall with the tyrannosaurus and other carnivorous monsters, and I was amazed: usually I was afraid of this room, afraid of the fangs and claws the size of my head, afraid of the skeletons that looked like enlarged drawings—they revealed the natural-rational meaning of creation, and I did not know what to think of life, of nature, which creates with equal thoroughness both the tender jay and the predatory pterodactyl.

  It was quiet, completely quiet; and what I saw in the gaping monstrous jaws was not the anger and wrath that had frightened me before but instead the distortion from suffering and death; I saw that the room with the skeletons, the entire museum, the entire sunny autumn day—everything, we were all inside invisible jaws that had not yet closed, but in some final sense it had already happened.

  And here on the street of the northern town I recognized that silence—the silence of a museum where the vanished creatures of a different era, fierce and horrible, were diminished by the fleshless face of death and became just as harmless as a squashed frog drying in the heat.

  In the lobby I was met by the same ocher, rhomboid tile as in the Moscow building where Grandfather II lived; tile, walls, railing, elevator—it was all the same. I was amazed: how many other cities were there where I could walk into a building whose interior would inevitably elicit memories that I considered profoundly personal; even the wires leading to the doorbell bent the same way as in the former building, and I thought that there was really only one building, like the statue of Lenin, and that the differences in the biographies of its residents in various cities was averaged out by this uniformity; that the memorial plaques you sometimes see on its walls are just a mockery because for each apartment many more were led out of it than those who live there now. I imagined what would happen if all those decomposed residents were to return—the house could not fit them all, they would stand on the staircases, in the courtyard, strangers to one another, but each would recognize the sand-colored rhomboid tiles, the doorbells, the little plaques with the apartment numbers … The ones who survived would stay inside their rooms, afraid to come out, afraid to open the door a crack, because through that crack would squeeze flimsy shadows with black spots, ink splotches for faces, blotted out by the censors’ ink.

  I started up the stairs; for a second I thought there was no one left in the building, that stale funereal air came through the keyholes, that behind the doors all the mirrors were covered. I recognized the beginning of my third dream that started me on this path; not that it had taken place here, though it could have.

  The air on the landings still held—as it holds the smells from your neighbors’ kitchens—the febrile, sweat-soaked, throat-rattling dreams of old men; they slept, turning under their eiderdowns, gritting their teeth so as not to speak in their sleep, not choke, like a drunk on vomit, on the unexpected words of a sleepwalker, and their bodies trembled and sweated, and the sweat reeked of death.

  Fourth floor, apartment sixteen; the bell jangled, it seemed, behind every door at once, the sound flew down long corridors, striking the glass panes of wardrobes and scattering as bouncing beads on the parquet. There was quiet behind the door; I rang again and waited a few minutes. The lock clicked inside the apartment.

  In the dark of the chain-length crack, I saw a face. A woman stood behind the door, a meter and half from me, but I could not say whether it was a person or an image; then I realized that her face was partially paralyzed, only the eyebrows moved, expressing surprise; I couldn’t see her features, it turns out a face lives in motion, in the barely perceptible movements of the facial muscles, and when it is motionless, there is nothing to be said about it; my gaze was attracted by the nostrils—two black dots, two entrances into the inner darkness of the body.

  I imagined that a lizard or snake could crawl out of those black apertures, like holes in a stone wall or a cliff; that they did not belong to the face, they were openings, dangerous, evil; if I could, I would have shut the old woman’s nostrils, filled them with flesh.

  To get out of that darkened moment, half inhaled into those nostrils, I spoke; I greeted her and asked for Semyon Vikentyevich. The old woman went back down the corridor, she left so noiselessly, as if she spent a lifetime trying not disturb someone’s sleep, sensitive, troubled, imbued with neuralgic pains; she returned just as noiselessly and unlocked the door. She had three dozen keys—probably to all the rooms, cupboards, closets, desk—and they did not make a sound, as if each key had been wrapped in cloth. There was something bizarre in that key ring, in that passion for keys, for their grooves and teeth, in the desire to keep all the keys together; there was a hint here, a key to the woman herself; she made an inviting gesture—come in—and immediately shut the door behind me. I had not noticed but I immediately felt it: the door was locked.

  Keys and doors, doors and keys; I understood who she was: a former warder, the wife of some big shot who got her a job in his department; now an aide for the man I was visiting.

  The old woman gave me a gentle shove: go. I went down the dark long corridor; two skinny cats were cleaning themselves near their bowls, the walls were bare, the side doors were shut, and only at the end of the corridor weak daylight from the room illuminated moth-eaten bear and deer heads, cotton stuffing poking out, and moths twirled in the sunbeams like animated dust; I remembered the letters—bear fat, seal blubber—the head belonged to one of the bears whose flesh supported life in the body of Grandfather II.

  The first thing I saw in the room was a stick, just like the one with which Grandfather II killed the black dog in my childhood, made of polar larch, honey-rose from the resin, twisted like sinews, lacquered, and caught in shiny brass bands; the stick leaned against an armchair, and the vertical line of bright light through a crack in the drapes gave it a long shadow, like a sundial.

  “An eternal stick,” said the man sitting in shadow. “A larch like this grows two hundred years, you can’t chop it down with an ax. A good thing. We’ll rot but it won’t.”

  I was looking at the stick; now I saw that it was not just similar to, it was the one, the stick that had broken the black dog’s back. The stick was repeated, the way, when you go
down winding tower stairs, the view is repeated through the windows set one above the other; it was repeated, fixing a spiral of time.

  But there was something else besides the larch stick that sent me back to the past. From the almost pre-memory state of memory, from the first five or six years of my life, from the regions which show you to what degree a person consists of blanks and gaps—from there, as if through gauze, something was beating, as if memories could have a heart.

  The voice—I knew that voice—but I had never heard it before.

  The old man started to speak again; I barely heard what he said because this time his words resembled the sounds vibrating in my memory; I thought I was losing consciousness, falling forward, but in fact it was the liberated memory laying its hand on my forehead.

  That’s what had happened—a heavy hand on my forehead, hard, bony fingers, a half-awake state, and two people by my bed: Grandfather II and this old man seated in the armchair. They were speaking in a half whisper thinking I was asleep; two aging men by a five-year-old’s bed. I didn’t know whose hand was on my forehead, whose fingers were so cold—their hearts could barely pump blood to them; their figures rose above me, blurred by twilight, and my body under the blanket got goose bumps: an alarm clock always ticked in my dacha room, but it was silent then—probably it had run down and no one rewound it—and those lost seconds came out as goose bumps.

  I had a clear sense of my young age, the childhood of my body—not consciousness, my body—how weak and pitiful it was; the old men stood above me like priests above a prepared sacrifice, and I felt threatened just by our relative positions, increased by the rough hand that caressed me, practically scratching me.

  I recalled a taut apple, unripe, that I had cracked open that day, and I saw myself as a soft seed, not yet turning brown; the old men stood over an open bed, showing white in the dark, and the moment was broken like the apple, to its very core.

  I recalled Grandfather II grafting apple trees, we had many of them in the garden with knobby grafting scars ringing the bottoms of their trunks; of all the knives of my childhood there was only one I didn’t dream of owning—Grandfather II’s crooked garden knife, hooked, scary, scarier than a scalpel, ugly, like the beak of a bird of prey. You couldn’t peel with it, or cut up a potato, or play knives—you could only slice layers, cut apart tree fibers, leaving a shiny smooth cut. All those things—the white apple, the grafts cut at an angle, the apple trees with twisted trunks if the graft grew together badly, Grandfather II’s knife—they combined into a panicked sensation that the two old men were there to do something to me.

  That they were just standing and talking was even more eerie, their speech sounded like a spell spoken over a sleeper whose mind was softened and defenseless; the hand kept stroking my forehead, and I felt an invisible mark, a seal, being left by that touch; the old men spoke of their childlessness, Grandfather II said two names and I understood that he had had a wife and a son who died in early childhood; I also understood that now, blind, he was imagining that he was at the bedside of his child and showing him to the other old man.

  In that replacement, that substitution, the sign his hand was putting on my forehead was created; it is wrong to put a living person in place of a dead one, even in thought—it puts in place unnatural ties and casts a shadow into the future of the imagined predestination, which will never come to pass, but will tie knots the person will have to untie with his own life.

  I must have blocked this memory; I honestly did not remember the second old man; he must have been passing through Moscow and come to visit Grandfather II at the dacha. In the morning when I got up, he was gone, the night was gone, Grandfather II’s words about his dead son—the event moved into the distance, as if it had occurred years ago, and soon after vanished completely; dream or reality, the vision was too much for me to handle then, which is why it was hidden by my consciousness and returned in childhood as a vague, tormenting echo in my dreams, where I sensed that my place in life was taken by someone else, a cuckoo in the nest, a monstrous infant who grew along with me but remained an infant. I shuddered when I heard “Who’s been eating my porridge? Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” I knew who; a blurred white face, as if in a beaker with formaldehyde, looked at me from my dreams, the key to which I had lost, and no one else in our family had ever heard of Grandfather II’s wife and son.

  And now standing in the room to which I was led by postcards in Grandfather II’s papers, I sensed that one of the most significant events of my life had taken place: that which tells us about ourselves exists in fragments, scattered in time and space, and most often we do not know the most important thing about ourselves, though it already exists; I remembered the second guiding dream with the train engineer and his arrested brother, missing each other forever by the prison train, brought together so as not to meet; I sensed that my life was being refracted in the present moment like a beam in a magnifying glass, refracted and reset by this lens of understanding; I learned what I had come for, and that knowledge, it turns out, had always been with me, in my memory.

  Essentially, it was the end of the journey, I could leave the room and go home; but I remembered that the door was locked, too firmly locked. Naturally, I could have asked to open it, moreover, that’s what I wanted to do; I was eager to get out, eager to think about what had happened; but the door wasn’t being opened yet. Gradually I realized there was something else I was to learn and understand, and my being resisted this imminent discovery. But leaving meant leaving, acting arbitrarily.

  The right thing was not to leave before the hosts opened the door for me; the right thing was to take from this meeting not only what I wanted to learn but what my mind rejected in foreboding, which promised not a return home but another, new journey.

  The old man rose from the armchair toward me; I jumped back. Before me stood an aged child, physically; the concept of thinness no longer applied—he was not just thin, he was desiccated, as if he had been drained and pinned like an insect and kept for years under glass on a velvet cloth. His muscles had melted leaving only sinew, the skin was as transparent as fine parchment, and the inner life of the body was revealed; blue blood vessels, with a pigeon-wing iridescence, were woven into a map of the blood flow and here and there dark areas like squashed blueberries showed subcutaneous bruising. The old man was half dressed, his body no longer could sweat and exude the death that was crawling beneath his skin; he no longer had a face in the human sense, the flesh had melted like butter from a growing fever, and the twitching pupils looked out straight from the skull. The cartilage on his ears had wilted like smoked mollusks, his eyelashes and eyebrows had fallen out, and only a weak childlike fluff, as if it had been scorched, covered his brows; the swollen capillaries on his cheeks had blended together into fine hieroglyphics written in crimson ink; the old man was dying of radiation disease, he had been exposed to a low level dose which was acting on his body only now; the body was no longer capable of hematosis, the blood in his veins was not renewed, and he was slowly being poisoned by the life he was living—and had lived—poisoned by the past, its slag and toxins accumulating in tissue. He was being killed by time; standing before him, I was the embodiment of that new time; he hated me, that was clear from his clenched teeth, he had forgotten that his withered lips did not cover them anymore; his dentures were smooth and white, and I remembered Grandfather II’s false teeth.

  I handed him his own letter; he read it, nodded to show he understood who I was, and began to speak. He said he knew how Grandfather II had died, he knew that I had received a blood transfusion from him—Grandfather II had told his housekeeper whom to inform if something happened to him and ordered her not to tell my family about it.

  The old man waited to find out why I was there, and I asked if he had any papers, maybe photographs; I didn’t want to ask him about Grandfather II, the head of the prison camp, didn’t want to ask about their relationship, it was all clear anyway.

  The old man to
ld me to take the album from the closet and remove the greeting card from the first page; there was a photograph behind it.

  Age had removed most of the black and white from the photo, it was faded; it felt as if the photographer had been taking a picture of a memory.

  There were people in the photo, they were gathered for an opening ceremony for something, among them I recognized Grandfather II; there was only one spot that stood out—a spot of blackness in the place where the shovel in Grandfather II’s hands had dug out a clump of dirt. The hole was dark, it attracted the eye like a beauty mark on a cheek. I understood that the quarry I had seen the day before had come out of that hole.

  The photograph tried to convey the joy of the actions, spectral banners blended with the clouds, officers of the camp guards and engineers squeezed together to get into the shot; a poorly dressed band played horns and there was a sense that not the clothes but the musicians were made out of quilted cotton fabric charred by bonfires in winter, and then patched up, not people but puppets; the band played, the flags fluttered, but it was all done—the quarry was begun and the future was predestined; the future of the town, of all these people, and my future.

  I stood there, knowing there was nothing more to ask, it was all there in the photo. Get out, get out as fast as I could; I just wanted to find out where the wife and son were buried so I could visit their graves and thereby complete my descent into the past. The old man told me where to look in the local cemetery; but when I started making my hasty farewells, he stopped me.