Oblivion

PART 2

Summer days, long, expansive, like an enfilade of bright rooms; days when nothing is missing in nature and wakening comes with the dawn—summer days, the summer of life!

Autumn memory absorbs nature’s decline, the transition from volumes of foliage to the emptiness of bare forests, and this disembodiment continues, as if its strength were undermined by disease.

The darkness of winter days multiplies the lacunae of memory, confined to the circle of light from the desk lamp; you travel from one memory to the next as if from village to village in the snow, sinking, losing the road, barely hearing the guiding thread—the hum of the power lines.

The memory of spring is timid, unsure, resembling the dreams of a recovering patient, as fragile as the ice of morning frosts, unsupported by the body’s strength.

Only the memory of summer says: remember, all this has happened to you and will not be repeated, but there will be room for everything in your reminiscences; remember—here’s a blue spike of delphinium, bowing under the density of color, here are the smoky blue juniper berries smelling of tar, clean arboreal sweat, here is a butterfly flying without will, like a bit of white cloth carried by the wind; remember and it will be you: delphinium, juniper, and butterfly, they will become the rigging of your feelings and thoughts, they will help you when feeling will seek words and thought—images.

August is the month of your appearance in the world; you were born in the summer, and the world appeared summery to you. It was hot, the thermometer kept climbing; body temperature coincided with air temperature, and you must have felt the world accepting you.

August—in August you fell, climbing up on the handle of the stroller, and crashed with it onto stone; blood spurted from your smashed lips, your mouth turned into a wound, your milk teeth crumbled; you sensed pain that years later returned with the metal wires of braces retaining the metallic taste of blood; pain that deformed and paralyzed speech, as if every word was pushed through the bars of its cage.

The unspoken words when you wanted to say them accumulated in you; other children collected cars and the older ones, stamps, but you started collecting words. Just as the rectangle of a stamp held out for some the promise of another life, other countries, where fame and glory were so great and triumphant that the hero’s face radiating his portrait into space was captured on stamps, the smallest part of the world’s mosaic—so for you every word reflected the bigger life that had produced it.

Hidden beneath my childish appearance was a real and profound age of silence and life among words and conversation with words that allowed all the insights that shaped my early development.

A man whom I will call Grandfather II insisted on my birth—I called him that to myself as a child; naturally, he had a name, patronymic, and surname, but they are inessential; my receptivity accurately sensed this man’s extreme alienation, hidden by politeness. It wasn’t that he kept himself aloof, taciturn, it wasn’t about his behavior or character; he was alienated from life almost in the legal sense of the word and only as a consequence of that was he alienated from people as well. Everything that happened in the present did not involve him directly but only brushed against him—not because he was unreceptive but because he seemed to have already lived his life, his existence outlasting his destiny, and no event could touch him now; he was omitted from the blueprints of daily life as if he was being punished—left out—denied.

Grandfather II was blind. It is difficult to give a physical description of a blind man; sightless eyes not only deprive a person of one of the usual features, they create the sensation that the defect is greater than an external one, in the organs of sensation, that the blind man is lacking something more than the inability to orient himself in space.

The eyes are something unusual for the human body, smooth, solid, as impenetrable as a wall; they seem to be clots of energy of a different sort than the energies found in blood and muscle. There you find blood corpuscles and formulas for breakdown and conversion; the eyes contain something of an order more mysterious for all their obvious openness. Time is light, the physicists say, light enters a person through the eye; perhaps they are the organ of time.

The blind seem lost in time, they are not entirely present in every moment; being lost blurred his features, as if he had moved while being photographed.

That is why Grandfather II did not persist in the viewer’s retina, he seeped through it, remaining a vague silhouette; you remember his profile better than his face, he somehow was always turned sideways, behind something, as if in a crowd, among others, even when he was alone; you remembered his clothing, perhaps the set of his shoulders, something of his walk, but that did not create a whole portrait.

Now trying to picture his face, I see some moment of recollection in which everything should be there, I see it with photographic precision, but there is no face; it could be overexposed. I can list external features—medium height, thin, gray-haired, but the key to description is not there; rather it lies in the layer of perception where the impression is no longer directly tied to what we see.

Grandfather II—that was the only way; when you spoke his real name, you felt that you were throwing a letter across the fallow no-man’s land by a border, and the letter never made it, falling halfway; you call the man by his name, but the sound of that name does not create a link between you, no closeness; the anonymous numeral—Grandfather II—corresponded to your actual feeling.

Grandfather II was not a relative; he was a neighbor at the dacha, an old blind gardener. Apparently having spent his past life encased by the harsh contours of an army or some other uniform, he now wore only soft linen that followed the lines of the body; he had lost his vision long ago, decades before my birth; he had gone beyond his blindness, beyond the habits that trap the blind in their blindness, and he was free in his inability to see; he reduced his life to a few routes, the main one being the route from his apartment in the city to the dacha and back. He relied on a cleaning woman for the housekeeping—and over the years by ear and touch created an image in his mind of the limited space he allowed himself for habitation.

In essence, he lived on a few islands with the solid ground of familiar sounds, smells, and touch; you might say he lived in the midst of this ground, perceiving it with his entire body, leaning on it, and in that sense his situation was more stable than that of the sighted. The only danger for him was something new. A new bridge across the ravine, a new front door, a changed bus stop destroyed the dummy Grandfather II had created out of sounds and physical impressions; for the sighted this destruction is not visible as destruction, they see only a change, while the blind are closer to the true understanding of things; new means death, innovation is murder; and therefore, although not only because of this, Grandfather II treated the past more seriously than others.

What Grandfather II had been earlier, no one knew; there were almost no old-timers left at the dacha settlement to ask. Dacha life predisposes people to friendliness, to collecting biographies and the names of local celebrities—and this is where so-and-so lives!—but Grandfather II was always beyond such inquiries.

He was alluringly uninteresting; next to him everyone seemed a bit more significant than they actually were; Grandfather II blended into the background, the epitome of obscurity—not modesty, not discretion, but obscurity; modesty and discretion are distinctive traits, and he had none of those. Grandfather II sought to pass through life by never drawing attention to himself and achieved this with almost monastic perfection.

As the senior bookkeeper of a concern, remnants of the managerial habit appeared in him, but very weakly, when he sat down in a specially important way, weighing the pen in his fingers before signing a receipt; it seemed that the eyes behind his smoky eyeglasses had been eaten by the ciphers. Yet some of the old villagers—the dachas were built on the site of a mushroom woodland beyond the village—said that Grandfather II was no bookkeeper at all. The village gives you a different vantage point on people, a different sensitivity to destiny, than the city, its inhabitants have a different sense of a person’s belonging to the state, whether he had been only a mailman or a forest ranger—and the old men thought that there was a stench about Grandfather II; he had “the stench of official boots.” Of course, the villagers did not go far in their thinking—a police accountant or administrator; official boots, in their opinion, did not have a powerful odor.

The dacha residents did not judge by city standards, but by those of dacha life. Owning a dacha in those days and among those people was considered a kind of amnesty, an absolution of the past, whatever it had been; not of imagined or actual sins, but of the past per se.

One’s past life became a treat that could be served up as something light and tasty with tea, for an evening chat; people moved to the dacha in order to reexamine their memory, reorganize it through a retrospective gaze, to be assured thoroughly and meticulously of its fine quality. The dacha residents sensed a vague similarity of fates, an affinity in attitude toward life; finding themselves in proximity, they discovered that they were a community; and dacha life in that sense was perceived as a different life—following upon the one already lived and separate from it.

It is unlikely that morally inexcusable acts were among the things they wanted to remember. Rather, the very position in the middle rungs of authority, which presumed a slightly greater moral conformity than what a person could exhibit without having to inwardly justify himself, forced them to assume a dignified air. They were the abstract “elderly” who were supposed to be given seats on the train and bus, according to the proper rules.

Naturally, the question of what Grandfather II used to be simply could not be uttered in this circle—the sound would be lost in the air; everyone there was a decent person, and this combination of words—decent person, not “worthy,” not “good,” but decent—was the highest praise at the dachas. In essence, this is what united all the residents: they managed to come out of difficult times as decent men—that is, people about whom for a variety of reasons you couldn’t say anything bad.

At first glance, the dachas were an oasis, an island of conciliation, tranquility, amiability. But the children—the children sensed that it was all a sham, a show: we were brought up too strictly and fervently, shown no forgiveness or mercy in moral issues. The adults had a clearly marked area of eclipse in their heads, and if that eclipse came on—if you stole, lied, didn’t keep your promise—the punishment was so incommensurate—not in cruelty, but in readiness to deny your son or daughter, to become strangers instantly—that it seemed you weren’t a child but an enemy who had sneaked into the family, a changeling from the maternity hospital.

The family played out an entire scene: Is this our son? Is this our daughter? I remember how my friend, eight years old, unable to stand these questions—they were investigating the theft of plums—suddenly came up to his parents and repeated loudly: I’m your son! I’m your son! I’m your son!—and they stepped back, they didn’t know what to do with the little boy who was shaking, missing an unbuckled sandal, and shouting without anger, without stubbornness but with the sudden firmness of the weak: I’m your son! I’m your son! I’m your son! They, the adults, were at the moment afraid of an eight-year-old child, they stood there, mother, father, and the person whose garden the plums had come from, until the boy quieted down, climbed into a ditch, and started to cry.

Children were seemingly being prepared for a life in which any misdeed was not in and of itself bad but bad because it cast a shadow on the family, made people take a closer look at them—Who brought up a child like this?—and the family did not want to be looked at closely; the result was forced morality, and reciprocal hypocrisy permeated everything: the order not to lie, accompanied by fear, only multiplies the lie and forces to you operate within it.

Childhood in those dachas—they are long gone, they have become the suburbs, the houses have changed, been renovated, there are solid fences—childhood was a school of hypocrisy; I cannot say that in full measure about my own family or the families of some of my friends—but the general field of relations was like that. Every one of us dacha kids led a double life to some degree; I’m not talking about secret mischief, rule breaking, omissions, or enforced furtiveness. We—each in his own way—were betrayed by our families, who saw all too clearly other children we were supposed to become.

However, I am thankful for my childhood; if not for the enforced study of split personality almost to the point of schizophrenia, I would not have become who I am; and certainly I would not have been able to see and figure out Grandfather II’s real nature.

One day—I am getting ahead of myself—I understood, naively, childishly, that seeing is a mirror; we see not people but how people are reflected in us; I thought I had discovered a secret and all I needed was to figure out how to get beyond my own gaze to see what you’re not supposed to be able to see.

I began playing with my shadow: I tried to stand so that you could not tell who my shadow belonged to; I stood next to the stump of an apple tree, a barrel, a scarecrow, held my head down, hid my hands, and tried to make my shadow look like theirs; I played for several days, choosing the evening when the shadows were clear, thick, and long, I played madly, forgetting the time. And suddenly, weary and just fooling around, I turned and froze; my shadow was not mine. I had missed the moment of the switch and stood there, afraid to move: what if moving didn’t help, what if that alien shadow followed, but remained alien? But I had frozen in a very uncomfortable position, I moved my feet as soon as I shut my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw that it was my shadow.

The game now had a dangerous meaning: I consciously sought the state of excited oblivion when I was playing so hard, so inside the movements and the last rays of the sun, that I lost consciousness for a second and became a stranger to myself; I acquired another’s shadow.

Of course, I never experienced that state again; then I started studying the grown-ups’ shadows—this wasn’t an amusement, not a game, but a path to knowledge. I thought that their shadows differed in more than outline: my father’s shadow was much bigger than he was, and when he put the light out in my room after wishing me good night, I imagined that it remained, dissolved in the dark, growing and threatening, watching if I was really asleep. Mother’s shadow was fluid, musical in outline, I thought if you touched it, it would respond in a singing tone like a cello; grandmother’s was flickering, like a spindle, like knitting needles—a kind shadow.

I couldn’t get a feel for Grandfather II’s shadow; it did not respond to my imagination, no matter how hard I tried to find something in it; I couldn’t say that it was ordinary, average, without a hook for my fantasy; it seemed that Grandfather II knew what his shadow was like, that he directed it and watched that it did not tell anything more about him, that he was constantly pulling it closer, like the skirts of a long raincoat.

However, this is a subject for later; I merely needed to clarify the circumstances of my childhood and the starting point of the story—the story of Grandfather II’s gradual entry into our family, my birth, and my separate and special relationship with him.

Our dacha plot was next to Grandfather II’s; there was no fence between them, the water pipe served us both, and somehow it turned out that the sellers of our dacha also passed along the voluntary obligation to take care of Grandfather II. All the separation of the dacha lots, the delineations between neighbors depended on visual clues—fences and pipes, in our case. What can you expect from someone who can’t see? So the border did not work, and relations with Grandfather II crossed the line of neighborliness.

As far as I can judge Grandfather II had no obvious interest in being close to us; he was not looking for listeners and he didn’t need comrades; it happened on its own, Grandfather II even subtly pretended that he was acceding to neighborly socializing under pressure. Now I think that this nearness was a test: he had lived privately for decades, outliving the past, and now he was trying to be close with strangers so that he could use their eyes and their feelings to check just how well hidden were the things that needed to be hidden.

However, that’s too simple an explanation; there were other reasons. Grandfather II’s health was excellent; nature, having taken his vision, seemed to have exhausted the bodily harm due him, and the woes of aging passed him by; only his bones ached when bad weather was coming—he must have suffered freezing temperatures long ago and now his body warned him of cold. Grandfather II sought—and found in my family—people among whom he could die; what he sought most was not reliability, not help “if something happens,” but fastidiousness toward other people’s secrets.

He was building a relationship—not for life, but for his postponed death; this vantage point, this turn of events was hard to see from inside the relationship, and I can judge it only in memory. Grandfather II didn’t join the family, he didn’t try to become a dependent—on the contrary, he tried not to be a burden, not to beg for intimacy, and did it all without stress or artificiality, without engendering pity. Yet there was something of a well-rehearsed dramatic role about it, when the actor never makes the slightest deviation from his chosen method.

Of course, this could be the behavior of a man of impeccably noble objectives; however, such a man would have been natural in his nobility, while Grandfather II’s actions always seemed slightly off, dissociated from himself.

However, this remark is from subsequent times—back then no one thought this way; on the contrary, as far as I can tell, the family considered Grandfather II a sincere man, albeit rather reticent.

Grandfather II knew how to be useful—with considered advice or needed information; his presence elicited the sense of the steadfastness of life arising when you know that next to you is a man who has been through a lot and learned to live amid adversity. Both my real grandfathers had died in the war, and Grandfather II gradually took the place of the oldest man in the family, even though he did not openly count himself a family member; he did not seek to replace them, did not try to block the memory of the real grandfathers, on the contrary he treated them respectfully. Slowly, over years, he worked his way in: gave up some land for a garden, taught us how to graft trees, selecting the most viable cutting, grafting it to the trunk, covering it with tar, and tending it the first few years—and he gradually grafted himself to us, joining us, as if he knew the long power of time, which does not tolerate haste but allows only the small daily effort—the way texts are written, the way impossibilities and contradictions in relations are solved—a small effort creating and increasing the field; the field that first grows quantitatively and at some point takes on its own qualities, creating new connections, new events, incidents, thoughts, and actions, previously impossible.

At the end of summer, we made jam at the dacha—Grandfather II helped, washing the copper tubs; foods were canned—he brought over jars sterilized by boiling. Gooseberries, currants, apples—the fruity summer moisture, the summery juice was boiled, thickened, the summery fruitful time was canned for winter, cold and dark; the summery aromatic herbs were put into jars with cucumbers, tomatoes, and squash, they were used to separate layers of mushrooms in pails, which emitted burbling, drooling juices.

A family is made up of various people with a shared attitude toward time, and Grandfather II was gradually accepted into that circle, first as not a stranger and then as one of us. Novels, magazines, and newspapers were read aloud to him—his housekeeper read woodenly, without intonation, the book did not let her inside—and he talked about the past, very abruptly, as if constantly bumping into the borders of an area he had promised himself not to discuss, and my family formed the opinion that somewhere in his past there was a drama, an injustice, perhaps an arrest, an exile, a prison term. Grandfather II liked table games, lotto, cards, but someone had to sit with him and with a touch tell him what move to make, and the dacha evening under the cloth lamp shade became quite proper thanks to him—the way evenings at the dacha should be when people of different generations got together, when no gaps existed in the generations, and everyone was kindheartedly connected because there was a person whose need was appropriate, not burdensome and who could be easily helped; the tubby lotto barrels tumbled along the table, the cards were placed on the tablecloth, it grew late, and it was probably even too agreeable to sense that evening was closer for some and farther for others; the evening of life.

Thus, bit by bit, Grandfather II entered our family. Of course, he never interfered in affairs that were profoundly personal; if something important was discussed in his presence, he settled himself in the chair in a way that showed that he considered himself properly present but without a say; with each year in these situations he sat ever more confidently in the chair, millimeter by millimeter approaching the stance of a family member and not just a friend; he became something like a notary, and he was invited when there was a serious conversation to be had.

And then once, when my mother was pregnant with me, the doctors said that giving birth was very risky and recommended an abortion; naturally, this was not discussed at the table, but the whole family knew and worried. Unborn, I was already present, grandmother was already searching the trunks for old diapers and wool to knit a cap and socks; but everything vacillated, grew, and the family—belatedly—tried to be more careful in their speech and controlled their gazes; a life was being decided and no one wanted to place the wrong calibration on the scales.

Everyone expected the decision to ripen and occur on its own; life in the household changed, swollen like a pregnant belly, filled with the murky waters of expectation. Mother was determined to give birth, but too many unspoken concerns, unfinished questions had accumulated in the house. The closer the day approached when an abortion would no longer be possible, the more some members of the family, who felt she should not carry the baby, watched with frightened and squeamish astonishment—as if looking at jars in a medical museum—as the new life, still totally belonging to physiology and therefore comparable to a disease, a tumor, prepared to appear at the cost of the possible death of the person bearing it.

All the old grievances between the two branches of the family, mother’s and father’s, manifested themselves; two bloods, two heritages met, and the fact that I—still nothing, still only a fetus in the womb—was preparing to be born this way, through mortal danger, exposed old contradictions; pitting blood against blood, family against family.

Father bore the receding, weakening blood of an ancient noble dynasty; my three great uncles on my father’s side died missing in action during the war—having set down roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the line was dying out, finding itself in an alien time and conditions.

Mother had the blood of a southern family in which every generation bore at least ten children, and each child was much more someone’s brother or sister than himself or herself; where, if the whole family gathered, they set tables in the garden; where they were strong bodied, and when they died, they were not lost or unknown, as if the family ties—direct, second cousin, third cousin—left no one unsupervised, did not permit them to vanish without a trace; as if the blood of this family in some sense ignored the individual person, and new shoots came up, as it did after grass was mown—three times as thick.

Two bloods, two family fates were mixed in me; two past tenses sought the future verbs in me. Two forces, related to me but not to each other, my mother’s family and my father’s, came together implacably in me: Which was I to be, whom would I take after? Each side was prepared to fight to the death to keep the other from winning. People were merely weapons of those forces, blood donors.

I know that this incompatibility, just as objective as the incompatibility of proteins, this irreconcilability of two sources, not opposite but different in some other way and therefore unable to become one whole, forms the contradictions of my life today. Two loves, two hatreds, two fears—from my mother, from my father. The feeling of disunity in myself, desire bifurcated—two different desires for the same thing, arguing and competing; and fear multiplied by two. Twice as much strength to quell, stifle, sate; half as much confidence, validity, firmness; two bloods—tenacity and vulnerability, lust for life and openness to mortality—two bloods, two mutually exclusive legacies. Even when my mother was pregnant with me, they grappled with each other, tying the knot of the delayed event—the threat of death in childbirth.

It was then that Grandfather II came to our house. Unable to see the tension of the hidden conflict manifested in every look, gesture, and pose, he nevertheless learned of the argument or disagreement. In the timbres of voices, in the changed sounds at home—What do we know of what a blind person learns from the sharp and fractured sound of a fork on porcelain, the strained creak of door hinges, water pouring more voluminously and loudly than usual from the kitchen tap?—Grandfather II sensed the score of discord in the changed sounds (the way animals sense an earthquake, hear the noise of the future, for every catastrophe is also a catastrophe of time, violating its smooth flow). Silence and quiet for a blind man are material phenomena, objects grow still for him, and the edge of a chair or table is the acute angle of silence; Grandfather II recognized changes in the silence of the furniture, the drapes, chandeliers, doors, and parquet; he recognized it and like an engineer, a composer in steel and concrete who sensed that the construction did not sound right, he tried to find the region of altered sound, the region of the cavern, the split, the crack. He sought it in questions—he must have heard not only the words but also how they bumped into one another, head-on or obliquely, in passing, swallowed by the atmosphere or on the contrary, forcing it to resonate; words for him were those invisible particles whose existence physicists can determine only by the sum of the effects they produce, and these effects, of intonation, of meaning, Grandfather II literally absorbed; he straightened up, as if listening with his whole body, turning it into a resonator or radar, and he received hidden currents of events with the surface of his body.

Quite quickly—they had been at table about an hour—Grandfather II must have comprehended the situation; one remark about mothers not eating spicy food, and the tone in which it was said, was enough for him to see that pregnancy was dangerous for her. And here—everyone knew that Grandfather II was childless—he unexpectedly, after a long pause for thought, delivered a speech, revealing everything that was hidden, bringing himself into the family with full and permanent rights.

Grandfather II spoke hesitatingly, jumping from one subject to another, which in itself was amazing. His judgments, for all their reason and experience, were always somehow memorized, rote; he never supposed, never considered possibilities and probabilities, as if his blindness had taught him to trust only hard—in every sense of the word—facts. He valued the hardness as a quality even more perhaps than the content of the fact, which gave the impression that he was an encyclopedia reader, a lover of dates, metrical information, and legal definitions; but here he stepped onto the unfamiliar ground of conversation about life per se, and this gave his speech an additional sense of sincerity.

He spoke the way one might conjure away a toothache—repeating intentionally, leading away from the present with its constant reminders of the pain; lulling, calming the unborn child, as if giving the mother a relaxing massage. He began for some reason with the thirties in the village where he had lived; the former landowner there had a huge apple orchard. In the olden days, he let in the villagers, giving them a third of the harvest, and even though he always offered people allotments, no one took them—it was more familiar and easier to gather apples in someone else’s orchard in the fall. After the revolution the orchard belonged to the public, and every village family decided to have an apple tree in their yard; the old orchard trees were dug out and brought by cart to the village. It was fall, harvest time for trees, and the yellow-leaved crowns of the apple trees floated across the fields as if the orchard had decided to leave the area; not a single tree took—they were the wrong age, even though the villagers had dug big holes and lined them with hay and manure; the apple trees froze the first winter.

Grandfather II spoke with a sense of having been injured by the apple trees, by the laws of nature, according to which an old tree cannot take root in a new place; then he spoke of the North, of the fish spawn coming from the ocean, where the whole world becomes a fishing net, and it tries to break through the nets, seines, swim upstream through rapids, overcome the force of the flow, and its movements are so powerful that it breaks through—but it breaks through into death, it dies creating its descendants, as if there are obstacles that cannot be overcome without accepting first that you will die if you do.

But note that from Grandfather II’s speech it was impossible to tell whether he sympathized with the apple trees and the fish that died in the nets; they were echoes of his thoughts about himself. He had something planned and was now trying to prepare my family to accept his idea without naming it. He could barely keep up with his own speech, he had spent too much time, perhaps decades, deciding something and now the energy of those unspoken deliberations, liberated, unleashed, poured out of him, and he could only manage to place dams along the way, to separate it into flows, cover them with masks and euphemisms, so that whatever he had said to himself clearly and directly should not be heard in that directness.

Of course, it was listened to and heard differently; the people gathered around the family table sensed that Grandfather II was searching for an approach to what could resolve the general tension of many days, and they interpreted his speech as he was speaking not about himself but exclusively about the situation in which he found himself. The no longer fruitful apple trees, the dying fish spawning—there was something vague in this and it was not clear onto which side of the scales his words were to go. But suddenly, coming to his senses, he sharply changed course: to everyone’s surprise, he began to speak as if he had discovered all the unspoken trepidations—and tossed them aside. He said that she should definitely have the baby, medicine was advanced now, and the doctors were being overly cautious—he listed births in trolley cars, the lamp room of a mine shaft, a cornfield, on a Central Asian steppe near the space center, in a bakery, a dentist’s chair, a bomb shelter. A more attentive listener would have realized that Grandfather II was inventing these incidents, choosing the locations from the life he knew or from newspapers, but he filled and overpopulated the room with these unexpectedly born infants, the endless contractions of birth, until the listeners’ focus dissolved. Grandfather II was already promising to get Mother into the best hospital, an exclusive clinic for the elite, promising that everything would go well, as if he were a midwife himself; he spoke of himself, his childlessness—I end with myself and there is no continuation of me—and asked and begged her so persistently to have the baby, pleaded with her to fear nothing, that no one ever thought he was asking for himself.

This conversation settled it: she should have the baby; and this is how Grandfather II appeared among the people who stood at the source of my life. The contractions lasted a long time, I exhausted my mother; with every hour she grew weaker, we needed to be separated, she needed to be freed of me, but they couldn’t; she hemorrhaged, the bleeding would not stop, and the doctors later said that at one point they didn’t know whom to save, mother or child. I was born in part on the word of another, I was born a hair’s length away from death, mine and my mother’s; it was luck, but in hindsight it strengthened faith in Grandfather II’s successful presentiments.

And so Grandfather II entered our family; it was unspoken, but I was established as his grandson; through me came the connection, through me this relationship was created and subsequently retained. With his words, his vital force, embodied as certainty, Grandfather II redeemed me from nonexistence, made me real, opened doors for me; the connection of savior and saved, creator and created. In some sense I was relinquished to Grandfather II; many disagreements among those bringing up a child are over who has the final right of ownership of the child, and Grandfather II held this right of mental property, creating a slavery more subtle than treating a human being like a thing.

However, he did not rush to use it in my early years; as far as I understand, he removed himself, as if taking a break after the main deed was done. Additionally, he did not care for infants, he avoided being in the same room with them, as if they were disgusting to him, babbling, suckling, crying, screaming, unable to speak; unintelligible creatures to the ear.

He must have been waiting for the infant to grow up quickly, acquiring reason and speech—then he could talk to him, treat him like a small adult—that is, behave as Grandfather II behaved with everyone else. Infancy requires a different attitude: you don’t have to adore, flirt, make kissy noises, you can be aloof but have an inner conviction about the scale of the event; this person had not existed and now here he is, called upon to live. In fact, infants are a gauge of the ability to have serious and altruistic feelings between people: he is yet no one and at the same time already someone completely autonomous, a concentrated “ego” that will only be dissolved by the years. And if an adult can truly comprehend the revelation of a new life that belongs only to itself, if he has the inner hearing and vision, he would never encroach on a relationship with another; the other for him is a goal, not a means. So when an adult absolutely must do something with a small child and he has no idea how—then you can presume that this person is a seeker of use and profit in relationships; none of his usual methods of secretly manipulating others works with infants, and he is lost, in an uncomfortable situation fraught with exposure.

Thus, the fact that Grandfather II disappeared after my birth, which he had so wanted, could have been food for thought; could have, but was not.

I’ve already said that Grandfather II lived like a man without a past; one external flaw—blindness—hid another: that absence of a past. A displacement occurred—it was impolite, uncomfortable asking a blind man what he had seen, how he had lived, what he used to do. The idea was that such questions would remind him of his handicap, his infirmity, and Grandfather II hid behind blindness so naturally that no one noticed the maneuver. He did not pretend to be powerless, he did not parade his lack of vision, demanding special attention—he merely did not see, did not see with all humility and realization of his inability; he did not grumble or complain and I was probably the only one who understood that Grandfather II had made himself an appendage to his own unseeing eyes; it is unlikely he could have restored his vision, the diagnosis was final, but his acceptance was feigned.

He had the kind of pride that is unknown to ordinary people who cannot imagine that a person can be the sculptural shell of his pride; a pride so strong that its bearer would be humiliated to reveal it; pride and scorn.

Later I managed to see all this only because Grandfather II’s habits, his scrupulous self-control, which was tripled or quadrupled by the need to keep in mind the accidental gaze that he could not notice, were all calculated for adults; they do not play hide-and-seek, do not sit silently, breathing through the nose, under the table when someone enters the room.

Grandfather II seemed to have forgotten there was another pair of eyes in the house. He had never seen me from my very birth, and probably at the beginning I was something like a speaking breeze of air for him. He could follow my growth only in his mind, and not knowing how I looked, not being able to picture me made me—in his perception—a plant capable of reason or a domestic pet. Grandfather II concentrated too much on always appearing the way he wanted to adults, keeping a mental picture in his head built on sounds—who came and went, where they were going, where they were now, who might be looking at him—that I “fell out” of the picture, or rather, did not appear in it for some time. Grandfather II did not expect astuteness from me, did not target me as a possible danger; he could judge me only by the conversations adults had with me, and those conversations—for this is the common attitude in conversations with children, if you listen objectively—could create only the image of a dawdler and bumbler.

Had Grandfather II been internally closer to his own childhood, had his memory not been so crammed with events that blocked one another, he might have understood that one should beware of a child most of all; that the absentmindedness for which I was always scolded was in fact a sign of a different sort of attention: not narrowed but expanded, embracing and absorbing the margins, the things that did not fit into a focused crystal. But Grandfather II—I guessed this only later—had lived the kind of life that separates a man from himself; he was unlikely to remember anything about his own perceptions in childhood.

When I turned seven, Grandfather II at last laid claim to me. In the final dacha days—the family was already seeking suitable gladioli for a bouquet to bring to school—they found I had lice. There were only a few days left before class started, it would be impossible to get rid of them in that short time; the adults met to hold a council and I waited in the next room; I thought they would decide to cut my hair short, and I was already suffering: not only was my hair perhaps my only freedom, but I did not regard the whole haircutting business as something ordinary and safe.

My inner anxiety was always disproportionately high before a haircut. The mended sheet that my mother used to cover me seemed like an ancient shroud, its whiteness no longer the familiar white of bed linens and it took on—probably because it was an old, much-washed sheet—the shade of invisible twilight that you catch on white death shrouds: they themselves are not touched by decay, but the shadow of decay lies upon them, as if sunlight from the cloth is absorbed into the air, leaving behind particles of the purplish blue that appears on the sharpened cheekbones of the dead.

The loneliness—looking in the mirror—of the human head separated by the sheet, the nearness of scissor blades, hair falling on the floor which had just been part of you, and was already being swept up; a haircut seemed like a little death to me. I invented a hierarchy, and a haircut was on the same level as the death of a cat or dog; the animal dies, while a person is not killed by a death like that, a human needs a larger death—but I wasn’t very big, and so I froze on the chair, and to this day I have to walk anxiously past the barbershop several times before stepping inside. The scent of soap, powder, foam whipped up by the hot currents of the blowdryer, sweetness and stickiness all refer me to something else, two biblical stories merge into one: Delilah cutting Samson’s hair and Salomé carrying John the Baptist’s head upon a plate; cut off hair and the separation of head from body—something about life and death is understood in those images which is revealed in anxiety even to a child; I learned later how such feelings are euphemistically transformed in the Book.

And then, when something had to be done with my head, Grandfather II proposed: shave it and smear it with kerosene.

Shave. Completely.

I was not worried that I would be teased for being bald; rather, a complete shave was equal and equivalent to death, not the little death, as in a haircut, but the full-sized real death. They were going to “nullify” me, turn me into an infant, that is, to deprive me of the little I had lived and which was expressed visually in the length of my hair.

I got even more scared when I realized that the adults would not argue with Grandfather II; they were happy that he proposed what they were thinking but, out of pity, had not said. It was fitting for Grandfather II to propose it; lice, kerosene, shaving the head—it all smelled of ancient times, homeless children, severe measures; if anyone else had suggested it, the adults might have argued, but here we had the charm of severity; stop whining, shave the head, imagine you’re in the army, no one’s asking you, you’ve got to put up with things, learn to man up. This was all said as if he had right of age and experience, with the intonation of superficial and therefore cheerful people who like the phrase “don’t turn this into a tragedy.” People like that become sergeants, trainers, gym teachers, they don’t like sloppy and careless bums; they think that even feelings should be energetic and brief—three minutes for a farewell; nothing bothers them, nothing gets through to them, everything heals quickly. Grandfather II spoke that way, and the adults probably thought he was playacting, that this was the right tone to take to cheer me up, but I had the growing awareness that this wasn’t just about the haircut; Grandfather II had decided—and no one understood!—to take me in his power.

There was a backstory to this feeling; I had noticed long ago that Grandfather II resented and even hated long hair.

Blind, he could still guess whether the unknown woman who came into the room had her hair loose and not up in a knot. A woman, for instance, our new neighbor, would visit for the first time, and Grandfather II could sense the invisible agitation coming from the unbound, curly, long hair—and run his hand over his gray crew cut; that meant that Grandfather II was angry. In the liberated locks, in the lightness of tresses sweeping her shoulders, he probably sensed vague danger: a symbol and source of sensual freedom—that is why he really loved, forgetting his relatively masculine nature, all kinds of hairpins and slides, all the metal ammunition used to tame and restrain women’s hair. The housekeeper spent her life wearing kerchiefs, he bought them for her with almost every pension deposit; she used them to cover the television, laid them on shelves like little tablecloths, she secretly gave them away, for Grandfather II could not count them; much later I learned that Grandfather II burned her hair, allegedly by accident, with a curling iron. When Grandfather II hugged me and patted my head, his fingers grabbed my hair at the root and moved as if the middle and index fingers were scissors. In our dacha house, the scissors hung on a nail near the cupboard, and Grandfather II sometimes went over to check if they were in place. The fact that they hung on a nail and were not put into a drawer created a special sensation; they were old, made in an ironmonger’s workshop in the twenties—you could make out the mark—blackened, as if over the decades the metal had absorbed candle soot, stove smoke, and coal dust; the scissors hung on the wall like a sign and reminder, a sign of power. The only object equal in power was the pencil—once a year, on the eve of my birthday, Grandfather II stood me in the doorway, put a book on my head, then I stepped aside, and he made a pencil mark along the book—to mark how I had grown, and then he notched the line. How I feared that pencil, ribbed and sharpened: I thought that one day I would not meet the measure Grandfather II had already intended for me, and my failure—I could not grow, the bread of our house was wasted on me—would be so great that no one would even say a word to me: they would turn away, and that would be all.

Scissors and pencil: if a coat of arms depicting Grandfather II’s power over me were needed, I would pick those two objects. Scissors and pencil, and maybe also a protractor: when I first saw the drafting tools in his room, when I saw the ascetic precision of the tools, the gaunt extension of the legs, I didn’t even understand at first that these items were meant for drawing on paper; I assumed that they were intended for drawing on a person, anthropometry, and decided that Grandfather II had called me in to compare me with those instruments to some diagram: Was I suitable to be a person, was there some discrepancy?

So, I sensed that the haircut would have a second, additional meaning; in getting rid of the lice, Grandfather II actually wanted to get me in his power, and I saw my shaved head as the hairless head of an infant. I might not have felt this so acutely and morbidly were it not for yet another recollection.

Besides hair, the second mysterious and special part of the body were nails; they were cut with small curved scissors, and for me it was a ritual of leave-taking, a ritual of growth and loss; sometimes there were white spots, like stars or clouds, on my nails, and I tried to tell my fortune by them, thinking they held signs of the future. I knew that nails continued to grow after death, and therefore thought they belonged in both worlds simultaneously, and that we without knowing were always standing before the veil of death and penetrating it with our fingertips. Those white dots and stars come from over there, from death, from the unity of time.

I brought my hand very close to my eyes and looked at the nail as if it were a screen, the sky in the planetarium where messages were projected from the other, dead side, shadows of approaching events; that is why you can’t simply cut nails, you have to catch the mood and moment, do everything not to scare off the shadows; my nails seemed to be the most sensitive—if we mean premonitions and other sensations that combine feeling and time into one—and the almost forbidden part of my body that did not belong to me.

So on a spring day when frogs were laying eggs and their gassy clouds, full of black dots that would turn into tadpoles, glowed in puddles, I ran into Grandfather II’s house; the house was illuminated, white woven curtains in the doorways rustled in the draft, and Grandfather II did not hear me. He was in the middle of the room on an oak stool, cutting his toenails; nails as yellow as last year’s fatback salo, ingrown, like bird claws. Grandfather II was soaking his feet in a tub of warm water and clicking his clippers; with the same indifference to yourself you could chip at a sugarloaf or slice a sausage. I was astonished: not only did he not see the signs I saw, he could not even imagine that these signs occur; he was snipping off particles of himself dispassionately, meaninglessly; he was a thing to himself.

As I sat awaiting the haircut—the adults were consulting on where to get kerosene, there wasn’t enough left in the lantern—I recalled those moments; I was sure that Grandfather II wanted to make me just like him; a thing, a thing, a thing ran through my brain; I suddenly saw the room as a conspiracy of things; my steps had made a narrow bright path in their dark life, and I realized I was trapped; Grandfather II knew whom to leave me with, to whom to entrust me.

He was the only adult who truly mastered things; the relationship between him and things was mastery, not possession or ownership.

The difference is that possession and ownership deaden the object, root it in the ossified nature of matter; a person repeatedly enslaves things that are already there to serve him—out of fear that he will lose them, that they will refuse to serve him, that someone else will take them; he enslaves them without actually having real power over them.

I watched Grandfather II pick up an axe, rusty, with a splintered handle, and it was suddenly clear that it was his axe, the way it was his arm which lifted the axe; the category of belonging did not apply here—Grandfather II and the axe became a single organism of flesh, wood, and metal, and the tool quickly regained the forgotten meaning of its form; I realized that Grandfather II could chop until the axe handle broke, but even then the axe—if things could speak—would bless the hands of Grandfather II, who had provisionally restored meaning to its existence.

This happened with things other than tools: Grandfather II could pick up someone’s pen, a spoon in someone’s house—and I would have the feeling that he left those items happy, left them recruited by an idea, the conviction of agents, and the sugar bowl from which he took a cube of sugar was ready to drag its glass belly on its stubby nickel-plated feet to the telephone, to inform Grandfather II what people at the table said about him after he left. It seemed that things sought his patronage: they fell at his feet, rolled across the floor to him; he was blind but he constantly found things and never lost anything; and every rare loss turned out to be someone else’s oversight or error.

I was alone in the room; I was not alone; things—Grandfather II’s eavesdroppers and servants surrounded me. I was caught; I was too scared to even think about running. I imagined that the couch upholstery and the old curtains were like the carnivorous sundew plant, electrified, sending out tiny threadlike whiskers that listened to my inner vacillations; a trap—I was trapped—I knew that Grandfather II had set it, and I even wondered if he had not given me head lice. He had told me how homeless children used to stop people on the street with a box of lice and threaten: We’ll shake them on you if you don’t give us money. I started looking for a hole I could escape through and got stuck even deeper in the feeling of being caught, identifying myself with mice, the house was riddled with their holes, mice, whose inconspicuousness I envied.

Grandfather II killed the mice; some adults considered this hunt a manifestation of his preference for order: the mice in this case were something irregular, petty, and nasty; others—who thought they saw more deeply and accurately—assumed that the mice were too much a reminder of the days that Grandfather II never talked about; that in the image of mice creeping up on grains of sugar and wheat, Grandfather II saw the deprivations of his past.

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 persistence 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.

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 cough—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.

Dust storms swirled on the adjoining fields, convulsions of space; something was brewing, gathering amid the whispering oats; there was always a line at the dacha guard booth for the only phone, people turned the dial that clicked when it sprang back into place, and through the fading foliage we could see the red and white of the ambulance, and only Grandfather II was sprightly and brisk, as if on good terms with death, like a doctor, and the heat merely dried his body to make it lighter, allowing him to stride faster.

That day I went out to the alley of garden plots; our children’s gatherings had ceased a long time ago, as if the element that brings children together had evaporated, gone with the play of breezes, rustles, whispers, and trembling branches that form the melody and milieu of children’s games; the air was sickeningly thick, sticky like the skin that forms when making jam, and had an acrid taste.

Why I went out I can’t remember now; there are actions you perform without knowing what prompted them and in that sense are unintentional, but not done out of momentum or habit. Probably I just needed to get outside the fence, to free myself of the sense of being surrounded on all four sides by pickets; the fence in a dacha lot very clearly defines the place where a child is both protected and hemmed in at the same time, while right outside the fence the street begins, where things impossible inside the fence can happen.

A fence is the border that separates life built on repetition, like a school lesson—have breakfast, weed the garden, read a few pages of a book—from life where you are on your own; the gate, which could be locked if you are being punished and not allowed out, the lock and shackle are guards protecting you from imaginary and real harms: the year before a boy had jumped from the shore and cracked his head, at the beginning of summer another boy went into the woods and got lost, a third boy tried crossing the tracks beneath a standing train, but the train started and caught his shirt, a fourth boy went for a walk in the sand quarry and fell into a hole … These supposed corpses were “registered” in the dacha topography, like pagan spirits of lakes and forests, they even included a pilot shot down in the winter of 1941 and buried near the pond under a small pyramid with a red tin star; they deprived the area of safety but also announced its realness: the forest wasn’t a forest but the forest-where, the pond was the pond-where; thanks to them, this locality took on an additional dimension, stopped being a dacha suburb and turned into a village district that incorporated life and death in such proximity, like the village and its cemetery.

Under the dark forest canopy, in the impenetrable, intoxicating denseness of the raspberries at noon, in the cattails and sedges on the pond shore that blended into a thick green haze over the black water, in the moist moss of the swamp, in the hidden source of the forest stream, buried under tree roots, everywhere there was something that called to you, touched you questioningly and invitingly, as if testing to see how conscious you were, whether you could be enticed, lured, abducted. The boys from the stories told by grown-ups, to whom something “bad” happened—you understood that was a lie, but a lie caused by not knowing, a guess, which therefore unexpectedly revealed the area of truth.

Therefore the fence was not simply a guardrail: all the scrapes, wounds, and hurts, everything that made you bleed and left scars happened outside it. If you cut yourself at home, it was from a carelessness that was instantly nursed with iodine and a bandage. But out there, beyond the fence, the concept of careful and careless did not exist: sunny fields and dark woods worked together so uniformly, blood flowed so easily and almost merrily from a cut that you did not see it or any wound as an attempt by death on life; you didn’t see it and in that sense you were protected.

Coming out to the alley, I stepped on the sand that marked the border between it and the garden plots—and saw a chunk of concrete the size of a fist; it was studded with smooth pebbles the color of frozen meat and sharp shards of flint speckled with conch shells. The piece of concrete must have fallen from a truck carrying construction materials from some lot; it had fallen recently and was not yet pushed into the sand, catching my eye.

Before I understood or remembered anything, my mouth filled with the taste of blood—without any blood; pain shot through my lower jaw like surgical thread in an unhealed wound. The world around me turned blurry, like the corrugated glass in hospitals, like the walls of a vortex; I looked at the piece of concrete but it seemed to be at the bottom of the vortex; the only clear thing in a blurry world, but extremely far away, discovered at the bottom of memory. I was slowly drowning in myself. Numbness entered my muscles, and I understood that in parts of my body an incessant telegraphic conversation had been under way, and now the components were falling apart, it went silent and was becoming empty, like the line where I stood, empty, like a book without letters, and my breathing stopped.

I saved myself—the way a diver finds a pocket of air underwater and takes a breath. My memory found a previous moment with a rock just like this one, and at that point, the opening which connects time like a nerve canal was revealed, and a fragmentary and flickering recollection came to the surface.

That other concrete block was just like this one, bristling with flint and pebbles. I had leaned too hard on the handle of my stroller and tipped it over, falling face-first onto the concrete. I was about a year old; my memory of that time was like amniotic fluid, better at conveying sound than image, and I sensed only my own long-ago scream. I did not understand then that I could die, the scream was older than my age, as if it was not a year-old child screaming but someone who was conscious of the horror of death and cried to stave it off. The sound was so piercing that it thickened and slowed time and the moment of the fall, and pain lengthened in it, lengthened in memory.

As soon as I recognized the rock the vortex vanished and the world stopped spinning like a top; however the sensation of alienness coming from the rock did not go away. I knew that my father had put the block in a wheelbarrow, smashed it with a sledgehammer, and thrown it away in the distant forest; when he told me that—those were his words, “in the distant forest,”—it frightened me that somewhere a chunk of concrete splattered with my blood and that had almost killed me, was still lying around, smashed but not destroyed. I wanted to find it so I could bury it, or better, take it out in a rowboat to the middle of the pond and submerge it beneath the water and the silt. Father just laughed and said he had forgotten where he threw it; as if to say it was all nonsense and if not for Grandfather II he would have used the concrete as planned—for the foundation of the shed; he and my mother were to blame for not keeping a closer eye on me, but the concrete was just concrete. Father admitted that Grandfather II had insisted that he take the concrete to the woods; “nothing good will come from such a foundation,” Grandfather II said and Father obeyed.

Now a chunk of concrete just like it lay before me. Or was it part of the block I fell on? There are moments when you sense that you must live carefully: it’s as if the protective layers have been removed, habitual as clothing, you are left naked, exposed, vulnerable, and the event that has been stalking you, following you outside your field of vision, is close, but you don’t know where it’s coming from.

Reliving death exhausted me—I did not feel weak but I sensed that I was defenseless, and defenseless in a different way than even an animal in a hunter’s sight; the deer and wolf have the ground beneath their feet, they are certain at least of that, confident in their ability to rapidly flee.

Sand. Sand was under my feet. A drop of sweat fell from my face and was absorbed, leaving a fat, convex blotch. In the sand I could see shiny grains of quartz, flakes of mica like particles of dragonfly wings, and pieces of feldspar as pale gray as ground grain; my body seemed too soft, pliant, sadly doomed; this is the way you look at places you are leaving, you become relaxed and compliant because in your mind they are already abandoned. I felt as if I had discovered a crack in myself and the fear that the break would increase fought with my desire to look inside, to follow that break, as if it had opened a path into depths previously inaccessible, or perhaps not even existing before.

At the very end of the desolate alley, by the far gate that opened to the place we called Concrete—there used to be a railway to the airfield there, abandoned, with crookedly diverging rails, where once they pushed concrete blocks like stelae from the loading docks onto smashed tanks, the lids of pillboxes, the wild wind of the outskirts whistled over broken glass and cardboard shelters for tramps—at the far gate a black dot appeared, growing like an abscess, a wormhole in the jellylike, greasy flesh of the day.

It was a dog, a black dog that could have come only from the Concrete side: it was running toward me, unsteadily, trotting from ditch to ditch, jaws open, scattering thick cottony saliva in the dust. There was no one around: just me and the dog, we were connected by the straight line of the alley, the geometry of fate; the dog was rushing disjointedly and kept itself together by running—if it were to stop, it would fall apart—and I stood, nailed to the ground by its attack, and the flesh in my calf could already feel the touch of its fangs.

The black dog—there were no black dogs in our neighborhood—black, frenzied by the heat, came close and prepared to jump, but its muscles could not lift its body into the air, and it just attacked, knocked me over and bit into my left leg as if my blood could cure it. Then the dog got on top of me, held me down with its paws, and started crawling toward my throat—and suddenly it howled, moaned pathetically, bent as if death were taking its measure which it could not fit while still alive. Grandfather II stood above us with his cane; he broke the dog’s back, striking the protruding vertebrae with the copper; the dog was dying, and Grandfather II moved his boiled egg-white eyes, not seeing but sensing how the fur fell out, the legs straightened, and the dog’s life ran out; blood gurgled out of my torn leg, and Grandfather II listened attentively to that sound.

How had he appeared there? I remember that Grandfather II was not nearby when I went out into the alley. Apparently he must have been hiding behind the brambles at the gate—he liked to play with them, bring his fingers close to the prickly branches, following their curves with the palm of his hand, bringing his hand so close that the thorns seemed to trace the lines of his fingerprints like a needle on a record; he seemed to be testing, calibrating, adjusting some sense that replaced vision, and he hated being caught at this; then he would intentionally—and I was the only one who guessed it was intentional—prick himself and pretend that he had wanted to pick a flower or a berry.

It must have been that other sense that told Grandfather II that something important or dangerous was happening to me; once when my parents assumed I was riding bikes with my friends, we were actually planning to climb the power line tower to retrieve someone’s kite stuck in the lines; the kite fluttered, I was trying on the rubber boots and gloves I had taken from the shed, and my friends were egging me on—and Grandfather II appeared on the road. He was probably going off on some business of his own, but the anticipation of my triumph was blown away; his appearance seemed to say: What do you think you’re doing! Don’t you dare!

So it’s unlikely to have been a coincidence: Grandfather II was behind the bramble rose and heard my screams … He was guarding me, nursing me; not me, but my future. Then the ambulance came flying through the fields, siren wailing, driving consciousness deeper, down into my heels, it smelled of tobacco and gasoline, and the belfry swayed and swayed over the hospital courtyard, I had seen the belfry many times when I fished on the dammed lake; the belfry was like a needle on some apparatus, leaning first left then right, it bent toward me like a question mark, shot upward, blocking the sky, shrank, waving in the far corner of my vision and then blocked the view again. In the room, plaster was peeling off the walls, there was a black spider in a web in the corner; I watched it with strangely changed vision, which omitted the objects nearby; the spider moved right in front of my face, while my torn leg—this was probably the drugs—seemed to be back in the courtyard, my body was being dragged through the hallway, and only my head had been brought into the room.

The spider was going to weave its web over my face, get in my mouth, hang up its sticky threads and wait for the flies that were buzzing in the hospital room; I wanted to wave my arms, shout for them to take away the spider.

But as soon as I tried to speak the dog appeared, its eyes rheumy, bulging, as if the touch of the dry lids caused them pain, and I realized that it was not the hound looking at me. I had crossed an invisible line, marked perhaps only by faded buttercups or scattered gravel; the way you can catch swamp fever, I caught death, seeing a mole pecked to death, a dead hedgehog covered with black horned beetles; I wandered out on Concrete in the evening hour when nature trembles at someone’s presence, when you feel it, too, and every shrub watches, it seems that they’re looking at you, but they’re really looking at the one standing behind you. At that hour you can’t play hide-and-seek far from home, beyond its allure, where voices and smells don’t reach—you will get lost, climbing into a dark space that turns out to be the crack between day and night; it is the hour of interstitial, indeterminate time, the hour the birds try to wait out in the air. I let in the pestilence somehow, brought it home without noticing the way you don’t notice illness, thinking the slight temperature is due to running around, and that your throat is dry from thirst; I let it in and it grew in me, settled in like a worm in the intestine, and that is why the black dog ran straight for me—I was careless and learned too soon what is hidden from a child by the indissolubility of body and mind, the indivisibility of the individual and the universe.

It was all decided there at the hospital; I had lost so much blood I needed a transfusion, they didn’t have the right type, and then Grandfather II, who had forced his way into the ambulance—my parents were in the city, leaving me in his care—offered his blood. He wasn’t supposed to do that because of his age, but he insisted—I don’t remember it, but I can imagine how he spoke to the doctors in a voice that crushed his interlocutor the way his stick broke the dog’s back—they took his blood, they took a lot, and I lived and he died, as if the part of his blood that was transfused in me contained his life and the part that remained in his veins was empty, used up blood, the blood of a dead man.

Now I think that he did not plan to die, counting on his good health; if he had lived, having saved my life, I would have belonged to him totally, by right of the blood in my veins; he took a risk and he would have won, but something happened that he could not have imagined, he was sure he would be transferred to Moscow, where they would nurse him back, replenish his blood loss: the break in our lives, the dangerous threadbare patch, coincided with a tectonic shift in history; an epoch—the epoch of Grandfather II, in which he could function, his milieu—was over; he did not survive the first moments of general confusion, the moments that did away with the old but did not yet usher in the new.

A few hours after the operation, tanks and armored cars from the neighboring base moved along the concrete road outside the hospital; I watched them through the third floor windows, and I don’t remember anything except the turning tank rollers and wheels of the vehicles. A whole hour while the column moved, stopping, compressing and stretching, driving into the invisible funnel of the highway leading into town and the tank treads and wheels spinning before my eyes.

I had seen tanks before on parade, but there you had the triumph of form, coordinated movement, no room for details, the parade was perceived as a whole, as if a text was marching, carrying the structure of letters. But here, on the concrete road outside the hospital, the tanks moved one behind the other, stalling, jerking in place, the caterpillar tracks grinding and coming loose—probably not all the vehicles were ready when the alarm was sounded—and therefore, my perception, affected by pain and the medication, involved two mutually exclusive images.

It seemed that the column of tanks, constantly braking and falling into two or three tank groups, the soldiers waving their flags furiously, the cursing officers speaking on the helmet phones, the very metal of the tanks that suddenly lost the connection that brought them into motion, the evaporated fuel that lacked the power to push the tons of steel—all this was the disintegrating speech of that time, the speech of a paralytic whose lips had forgotten the shape of sound. Some words tried to be spoken, but too late: the lips were already rimmed by the deadening frost, like anesthesia. I later learned that Grandfather II started dying just as the first tanks moved past the hospital; the nurse thought the noise and rumbling were killing him, and she shut and curtained the windows tightly, but Grandfather II still thrashed in the bed as if the tanks were driving over his legs, accidentally in the way.

There was a second image my mind would let in, pushing out the image of disintegrating speech, and then let go; the rollers that propelled the caterpillars and the wheels turned into the gears of a clock that needed winding, that couldn’t start turning; the clock had been stopped for many years, the mechanism had disconnected, and now all the gears from biggest to smallest turned on their own, the cogs catching and then not, and the hands on the clock jumped forward and then stopped again. The tanks got bogged down, angrily backfiring, their engines roared, but the tension of men and motors seemed incommensurate to the slow, disjointed movement, as if there was something ahead on the highway blocking the column, as if it—the vehicles and people—basically did not know whether there was any point or necessity in the expedition; as if time were trying to start and could not.

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 plastic 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.

I walked down the path, not looking around, bearing this new mood in me; there was only a slight sorrow that everything happened too easily and imperceptibly. The cemetery fences, crosses, trees—everything was freed of the heavy feeling created by memories and appeared with a new ease; I walked slowly, I wanted to stay longer, to remember it all anew. The cemetery had changed even in its color scheme, there were light green and straw tones I had never noticed before.

Suddenly I saw an old crumbling stump and on it a floury and plicated tree mushroom, looking like a fat ear.

An ear—the underground world was listening, it was here, I just hadn’t noticed it in the sunny omens of the day. It all came back: fear, loathing, chills; the mushroom looked like the flesh of a corpse and it lived a vegetative existence; Grandfather II had not let go of me.