The Year of the Comet

PART ONE

I was born in the afternoon of March 14, when a fault opened deep below Bucharest.

The inky tips of seismographic recording needles trembled as the tectonic blow rolled through the Carpathians toward Kiev and Moscow, gradually receding. The face of the world was distorted, as if in a fun-house mirror: avalanches fell from mountains, asphalt roads buckled, railroad tracks turned into snakes. Flags shook on flagpoles, automatic guns rang out in arsenals, barbed wire across state borders broke under the strain; chandeliers in apartments and frozen carcasses in meat processing plants swung like metronomes; furniture on upper floors swayed and scraped. The thousand-kilometer convulsion of the earth’s uterus gave a gentle push to the concrete capsules of missile silos, shook coal onto the heads of miners, and lifted trawlers and destroyers on a wave’s swell.

My mother was in the maternity ward, but her contractions had not started. The tectonic wave reached Moscow, shook the limestone bedrock of the capital, ran along the floating aquifers of rivers, gently grasped the foundations and pilings; an enormous invisible hand shook the skyscrapers, the Ostankino and Shukhov towers, water splashed against the gates of river locks; dishes rattled in hutches, window glass trembled. People called the police—“our house is shaking”—some ran outside, others headed straight for the bomb shelters. Of course, there was no general panic, but this was the first time since the German bombing that Moscow reeled; it was only at quarter strength, but it was enough to awaken the deepest historical fears. They surged for a second, these fears: of nuclear war, the collapse of the country, the destruction of the capital; few people admitted that they had experienced these fears, everybody talked instead about a slight confused fright, but they were lying.

Mother worked at the Ministry of Geology and was part of a special commission that studied the causes and consequences of natural disasters. She had seen the ruins of Tashkent, the ruins on the Kuril Islands and in Dagestan, thousands of people without shelter, destroyed homes, buckled rail tracks, cracks seemingly leading straight to hell. When the maternity ward was shaken by a gentle wave from the center of the earth, my mother was the only person to understand what was happening, and the unexpectedness of it, the fear that the earth’s tremor had pursued her and found her in the safety of Moscow and induced her into labor.

The earthquake was my first impression of being: the world was revealed to me as instability, shakiness, the wobbliness of foundations. My father was a scholar, a specialist in catastrophe theory, and his child was born at the moment of the manifestation of forces that he studied, as he lived, without knowing it, in unison with the cycles of earth, water, wind, comets, eclipses, and solar flares, and I, his flesh and blood, appeared as the child of these cycles.

My parents were wary of this coincidence from the start, they thought it a bad sign. Therefore they entrusted me to my grandmothers, hiding me in a sewing box with thread and yarn, among the accouterments of geriatric life. My grandmothers, who had suffered so much, lost brothers, sisters, and husbands, but had survived all the events of the age, were to give me refuge in the peaceful flow of their lives, bring me up on the margins, far from real time, as if deep in the woods or on a lost farmstead. But—and I will tell you about this later—the nearness of my grandmothers merely intensified the sensation it was supposed to heal.

Why did my parents, who were not superstitious or given to reading meanings into things, still worry about the portent of the earthquake? My mother could not get pregnant for a long time. The doctors were stumped because all her signs were normal; at last, an old doctor, a professor, changed tack. Instead of asking about family illnesses and rechecking all her blood and other samples, he had a long and detailed conversation with my mother about the family’s history. She did not understand the purpose but she told him everything she knew—she clutched at every straw.

The professor said that she was not the only patient he had like her; in many women he saw an unconscious fear of motherhood connected to the great number of violent deaths the previous generation had suffered. He suggested they go somewhere extremely peaceful, where nothing would remind her of time, history, or the past. Mother was ready to take the suggestion, but my father resisted at first; he thought that the problem was between them as man and woman, not in history or psychology. But they went.

In those years, the Soviet Union was building hydroelectric stations, and reservoirs were supposed to flood enormous areas along the Siberian riverbeds. My parents took probably the only unscheduled vacation of their lives and headed out to the zone of future flooding. They spent a month there; my father had a friend in the construction administration, and they were housed comfortably in an abandoned house of a buoy keeper at the foot of the cliff, a tall granite remnant that had to be demolished so that it did not interfere with shipping on the future sea.

It was a place of great emptiness and silence. Hunters’ huts dotted trails and roads. Letters no longer reached this region, since the mail codes and addresses had been deleted in advance of the flooding, just like the telephone numbers of the former kolkhoz offices; the villages didn’t appear on the new maps ready for printing. The animals left the river valley, the people were gone, and even the fish, as if sensing that soon water would flood the banks, either lay low in the bottom holes or swam upriver.

In a Robinson Crusoe world consisting of house, rowboat, fishing nets, firewood, stove, food supplies, and rifle, my parents lived in a time that they had never experienced before or since; I don’t think they even took photographs, although they brought a camera.

There, in the ideal nowhere, a place that is now forever underwater, I was conceived. And I was born in the tremor of an earthquake, as if my parents’ plan had been discovered and the big world sent a menacing message to the one they had hoped to hide from fate.

My feelings, my ability to feel, were fashioned by that underground blow. I had trouble understanding anything to do with stability, immutability, and firmness, even though I wanted those states I could not achieve; disharmony was closer and more understandable than harmony.

When I took walks in the city, I was attracted by old houses, sinking and decrepit. Cracks in walls and windows, cracks on the sidewalk which children sometimes try to avoid, cracks in the marble siding of the metro joined into a complex network for me, as if the entire world was tormented by secret tensions.

Kaleidoscopes and puzzles where you had to make a figure out of parts did not elicit curiosity, but a morbid, stubborn interest—not so much to put the pieces together as to observe how the whole can be reassembled and disassembled.

Objects that had lost their companions—a single mitten, a shoe left alone while the other was being repaired, a domino dropped in the playground—called me to understand how they lived in their insufficiency.

Even though I knew I would be punished, I would sometimes drop a cup to experience the moment of the vessel’s irremediable loss and the irreversibility of time. Grown-ups tried to teach me to be careful—for them spoilage, breakage, even accidental, was tantamount to a crime. They lived as if there were a finite number of things, and a broken shot glass could not be replaced by another; a lack of care for things would lead to having none at all, a regression into the Stone Age, animal skins, digging sticks, and flint axes.

The grown-ups seemed to be constantly mending the world, aged, worn, carelessly used; they thought that loss was the result of age. But when Father cemented the dacha’s foundation that had cracked from the earth’s spring turbulence, I thought it was not the foundation’s age that was at fault—rather, the future was hidden inside the cracks and it was growing out, like leaves or bushes on old facades, crumbling the exterior.

They sometimes made me listen to classical music, but I was tormented by its harmonies, sensing that the world wasn’t made that way, it didn’t have form and discipline, and I sought other sounds that would correspond to my picture of sensations. I found them at the German cemetery, where we went a few times a year to tend the family plot.

Stars, insignias, rifles, propellers; captains, majors, colonels—every third or fourth tombstone had a photo, their faces still youthful. The cemetery was dispassionate proof of what the country had done for a century and where its men had gone; the saturation of war was so strong that I sometimes expected medals and orders to grow on trees instead of leaves.

Among the old graves there were Germans of previous centuries: someone called Hans Jacob Straub, physician and apothecary. The Russian names alternated with German names, as if it were a total list of losses after a fierce battle. I thought the corpses had to be uncomfortable there, underground, lying in graves as if in the trenches, and that some deceased general had taken command in order to free our soil from the German-Fascist invaders.

The quieter and more reconciled the cemetery seemed on a clear fall day, the more horrible, deep and persistent seemed the underground struggle that supplanted eternity for those who did not believe in it. The cemetery land, dug up and crumbly, often sank, buckled, tossed up stones, swallowed fences, tilted tomb-stones, and squeezed out tree roots—I imagined these were traces of underground attacks: recognizing only the enemy, the corpses dug underground passages with their fingernails, stormed burial vaults, and broke into other people’s rotting coffins.

Suddenly, with terrifying noise, the wind tunnels of the nearby aviation plant roared over the cemetery. During the war, jet fighters were tested there with compressed air. A prehistoric animal, the mastodon of all mastodons, roared, its voice bigger than the cemetery, bigger than the city, it even put a stop to the silent underground war and suspended my heart, which lost its beat, in the emptiness; the power of the sound was so great it turned into the sound of power.

Yet my parents went on cleaning the area as if nothing happened, scraping off the persistent moss and sweeping leaves. But I was certain: yes, the world was built on discord, yes, my sensations were truthful, in the way that the sensation of the nearness of bad weather, of high pressure, of electrically charged air before a storm was truthful. The roar of the wind tunnels over the family graves became the sound of the past, the sound of history, the sound of its ruthless elemental power, and I listened to it almost gratefully. It explained in a manifest physical manner what forces were tearing apart and oppressing our family and what echoes of events lived in it; it tore off the covers to reveal the very core, the very essence.

With the birth of a child, a family’s fate awakens, its postponed powers going into action; the diagram of relationships changes, for now there is a new center of gravity.

Everything that connects people, amity, arguments, insoluble contradictions that have become a form of existence lose their static nature and move into the active phase. The clashes over the crib involve not just will and character, but the joint legacy that will exist in the child, unchanged, or that will not take, or become part of the new creature’s life.

Every family in the USSR was “overloaded” by history; the family space did not protect you from anything, it had lost its autonomy. Too many people had died before their time, and the family remained exposed to the crossfire of history, constantly reconfiguring itself to the intensity of the losses, finding a replacement for once significant figures.

Probably every family at any time lives like that. But there seems to be a threshold for loss, after which there is a quantitative change. The family stops being a communal entity unfolded in time, built on values and meanings, and it becomes simplified, moving into a reactive existence within opaque zones where you can hide from time and the state.

You are born inside certain relations that become “family” to you simply by the inertia of language: father, mother, grandmothers, son, grandson. These people have warmth, closeness, sincere feelings. But essentially they are a multilayered, complexly organized conflict, and an insoluble one because the conflict does not arise from personalities. A child’s life in such a family is not at all necessarily horrible, the child can be loved and spoiled, but he still feels that below the cover of daily existence and the concord of communal life, there are tectonically active layers saturated with blood that is hardly symbolic.

A child grows in a field of conflict greater than his horizon of comprehension, inheriting historical anxiety as a background and milieu of life.

Name and surname is the first and tightest tie to the family; but often I did not want to have either. I was afraid when I saw my name written somewhere, for example on a medical document, inaccessible to me but “signaling” my existence.

I seemed to know how dossiers are gathered and stored, how questionnaires and personnel files lie for years in cardboard boxes, how the bureaucratic machine strives to “tie” things up, combining a person and his name, so that neither can escape the other and the person is always identified precisely.

The fear of lists of names, the fear that your name would become a thread tying you to arrested relatives, that they could take you away just for your name if it revealed a persecuted nationality—all these fears that I had not experienced personally seemed to prompt my fear of having a name. Sometimes my greatest pleasure was in writing it in pencil and then erasing individual letters, watching how my name became unrecognizable.

I decided to give myself a name that no one would realize was a name. I would call myself Plexiglas or KPRB-ZT, Quiet Evening or Tomorrow’s Weather Forecast. People would think those were random words, but I would call myself that and gradually I would separate myself from my outside name and one day slip out of it like an old skin.

At work, Mother had a Moscow phone book. When she took me with her, I could open the book at random and plunge into the columns of Kuznetsovs, Matochkins, or Shimovs, forcing myself into the crowd; it was a pleasure to know how many surnames there were in the world and if one day everyone decided to change their names, no force could ever restore the original ones.

So, when they took me to the Alexander Garden to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I felt that the highest award was permission to be unknown, and I understood that such an award was given to one person and there could be no others.

There was a second fear paradoxically associated with the first. I remember the creepy feeling of my own inauthenticity, which could not be overcome with a pinprick in my thumb or a look in the mirror; did I exist, was I someone if there were no papers about me? Was I protected, so to speak, from accidental disembodiment, of not being known as me, if my name was not attached to my being, and my inner being, by documents? My parents had passports, ID, passes—what about me?

I told my parents about this fear, and Mother, trying to reassure me, showed me my birth certificate, but the green booklet did not convince me. It certified the fact of birth but not the fact of my subsequent existence. I thought my parents were hiding something, there had to be a paper just about me, and they’d probably lost it or never got it in the first place, or there was something horrible about me written on it, some stamp of selection and rejection, a sign of unreliability.

My parents got sick of providing me with reassurance and explanations that there was no other document and ended up raising their voices. The next day, Grandmother Tanya gave me a passport, handmade from a notebook, with a photograph and a state symbol, copied in red pencil from a coin. Even though I understood that she made it for me the night before after overhearing the argument, the passport calmed me down instantly. I never even touched it again, did not take it out of the desk drawer—it was enough to know that it existed.

I could not have known about the anxieties of earlier years, of not having a passport, not being documented in life; having a passport back then meant the conferment of civilian person-hood, when it was so important to have documents without any notations that restricted your rights; but my fear was real and so was being freed from it.

I imagined yet another, conclusive way to liberation from my fears: to follow Lenin and perform some exploit that would allow me to take on a new surname, a pseudonym; to be reborn and get a name given by history itself.

My question, would I be able to have my own surname when I grew up, ended in an expected scene. My parents brought up the business with my passport, they wanted to take me to a psychiatrist, but then changed their minds—apparently out of shame and embarrassment; they would have had to explain that the child did not want to carry the family name, and what would the doctor think of the parents, would he suspect them of something? Probably all I wanted was to certify the right to own myself, which I was denied—the right to my own self, my own life, my own destiny.

The word “owner,” however, was a harsh rebuke, an accusation of a terrible sin.

I can’t say that I wasn’t allowed to own things. But as soon as the adults began to think that it was more than some object that tied itself to me, rather that I was starting to organize a close circle of objects, determining what was mine and what belonged to others and demanding that this division be recognized, thereby tracing an outline of myself—measures were taken.

“Oh, look at this owner growing here,” they said with a grimace of scornful disapproval, as if they were talking about a pushy invasive weed, outpacing the docile useful plants.

“You must live for others,” the grannies said. “You must live in their place,” they said, meaning the victims of war. I imagined that someone was living for me and in my place; this formed a vicious circle of lives turned over to others; a chain of substitute existences that completely erased the individuality of man.

For me the scorn for the concept of “owner” also meant the invisible power of ancestors. Later, in the nineties, the word “ancestors” was used ironically for parents, stressing the newly discovered generation gap and the fundamental difference in approach to the new times. But back in the eighties the word “ancestors” still reeked of gunpowder, blood, and dirt, creating the sense that they were here with you, seeing right through you and able to pass on what they saw to Grandmother Tanya or Grandmother Mara as easily as handing over an X-ray.

Each grandmother tried to make me her grandson. Between them they had lost eleven brothers and sisters, two husbands, and an almost uncountable number of more distant relatives. As the only grandchild, the only one amid the dead, missing in action, and arrested, I was not just a child: I was a fantastic win in the lottery, a win in the game with the century; a justification for their suffering, deprivation, and losses; justification and meaning.

They both had grieved more than they had happily loved; they did not have a woman’s life from youth to old age—they were more sisters of dead brothers and widows of dead husbands, and their love in terms of time was spent more in loving the dead than loving the living. So there was a fear that their love and hope would tilt the scales of fate, a suspicion that love was not always protective, that on the contrary it could send one on a dangerous path, to face a bullet, to die.

They both greatly pitied the men of their cohort, which made passion an insignificant particle in the face of history, sympathy for male weaknesses, and disbelief that a man can be fully trusted, since tomorrow a notice might come calling him away. Their lives were solitary and austere, as if they were widows of an entire generation, as if beside their own husbands, they had to mourn the men who died without families, the ones renounced by their families, and the ones who were never remembered on the day of the great victory.

They treated their children with hidden wariness, afraid to tempt fate with happiness; the children were accorded strictness, harshness, and even cruelty. But when a grandchild was born, born in another, less dangerous time, all the restrained feminine and maternal instincts awakened. I would even say that their love for me was a little like the love of a woman for a man—a passionate seriousness and a demanding delight. They both saw the first person in their life who was not under the heavy thumb of history, who could not be taken by the universal draft or a form warrant for arrest, and they decided to give him everything of which they had been deprived: joy, happiness, peace, confidence. But deprivation is not renewable, and they could only pass on longing, desire, thirst…

They were jealous of each other, and they did not compete in generosity, love, or attention but in the solidity of their presence in my life. They often peered at me, looking for evidence of their husbands, brothers and sisters. The dead were resurrected in me—in pieces, individual features—and the grannies, each in her own way, reassembled me, reinterpreted me, yielding no ground to the other. If Grandmother Tanya said that my hair color was like her younger brother Alexei, who died without news in the Kharkov siege, it meant that Alexei was saved; while Grandmother Mara’s older brother Pavel, also fair-haired, his blood had been shed in vain onto Finnish snow in the winter of 1939, melting in the spring, into the black peat flows of Karelian lakes, and he had vanished without a trace.

In the end, the grannies agreed: I had something of both Alexei and Pavel; better they had not agreed, for now I had to be responsible for two; eye color, shape of temples and mouth, form of nose—there was a line of men seeking salvation in me, and the grannies weighed and measured small bits of inheritance. I was supposed to take the best personal traits of each, for each one I had to live an unlived life, embody the unembodied.

The grannies saw and discussed some other me, an object of posthumous pride; and I was lost, wondering if I myself existed at all, or if I was just the sum of other people’s features, an eternal debtor.

This burden throughout my childhood was latent; besides the power of my parents, my teachers and coaches, the requirements of kindergarten and school, there was also the power, the word and opinion of the dead, who in the afterlife seemed to be holding a continual family council, discussing and evaluating me, arguing over my fate.

Several times a year the living and dead met; that’s how it felt to me, in any case. The main meeting point in time and space was my birthday.

The table, freed from daily trifles and opened to its full length, was covered with an ancient tablecloth, spectral as a shroud from a thousand washings.

Embroidered in red on the white cloth, proverbs unfolded in a spiral from the center. Like tree rings, they swirled in a single endless sentence, admonitions in thread. Measure seven times, cut once; When the cat’s away, the mice will play; You can’t catch fish without work. I saw the sententious simplicity of the proverbs and their similarity to contemporary slogans: Peace for the world; He who does not work does not eat; We are not slaves.

Usually, proverbs were spoken with a dash of irony, stressing their age and naive edification, but here I sensed that they were not harmless. The tablecloth turned into a short outline of the future; all the life coming to me was already predestined and planned in those simple phrases.

At last, the table was set. A festive landscape appeared, with culinary accents and hills and dales, and the tablecloth moved into the background; only the red letters refracted in the vodka glasses reminded us of its presence.

Grown-ups, mostly relatives, gathered and made toasts in my honor. This ritual was grandiloquent, serious, heavy. The toasts addressed to the future were like the instruments of a sculptor or orthopedist; they cut away the excess and added what was missing; it was all the worse that there was no sense of encroachment on their part, only love, goodwill, and wishes for a better life.

They drank vodka, and some had wine, not dry but sweet, fragrant, dark, intoxicated with itself. They brought gifts, wonderful presents, thoughtfully selected, useful; but the abundance of gifts, their significance, became too much by the end of the evening. The presents were put in my room, and I sensed the incursion of other people’s wills, arguing not over my gratitude but my future.

Maybe I would have preferred something less dangerous and coercing than the books, periscope, globe, chunk of diamond-bearing kimberlite, bear tooth, case of drawing instruments—the presents which lay like a weight on my shoulders. Once again I was being reassembled, reinvented by people who thought they were fulfilling my dreams.

I would leave the room, come back to the festive table, and see the grown-ups holding old shot glasses, which just two months ago had been used for somebody’s wake; now they were in the service of my birthday. A transparent terrible liquid glimmered dully in them; every glass drunk in my honor laid a debt on me, a promise made in my name, for the rest of my life.

Living water, dead water—when I was very sick, with my temperature at almost 104 ° F, and I lay there, disassociated from my body while my mind wandered in other worlds, my father would come in late at night, as if he knew the hour for these ministrations. I could smell the tickling, transparent scent of inert freshness—that was the vodka which he dipped gauze into and rubbed my body with, so that the fever would leave with the evaporating alcohol. The stinging icy touch on my skin was not like my father’s hand but an otherworldly breath; that was how he returned me from the depths of illness, dragged me back to this world.

When the vodka was poured at the table, I thought the men were drinking it in order to open up a capacity for inner vision, like sorcerers and shamans who traveled between worlds. Words spoken with a shot glass in hand—unless it was a merry toast—had a special weight, a special ability to affect others, a special ability to come true; they were words spoken by the dead through the mouths of the living.

At the height of festivities a cold draft swept through the dishes, bottles, and glasses, the fringes of the tablecloth swayed, and the merriment leaned over an abyss, looking into it. Poses changed, speech grew more hushed, fingers moved thoughtfully, and someone would be the first to say: let’s have a song.

The couches, cupboards, and chairs disappeared, the light of the chandelier became diffused; jackets, ties, and dress collars grew tight, as if people wanted to liberate themselves from images imposed upon them, as if inside each person there lived a tramp, a nomadic, homeless parasite, not a person but a persecuted spirit, the ghost of an exiled landowner—Decembrist—People’s Will radical—politician—priest—prisoner; a figure shimmering and always moving north or east.

I hid under the table, wanting to disappear before everyone was reborn. Above me, they were singing a different song; the song, like bad weather, came in bursts, intensifying, then simmering down, again and again. The voices of the singers resembled the sound of wind gusts, rolling over the field and bending the grass. Convulsions caused by the whipping wind keep nature from dissipating, from calming; the voices were like that, and along with my fear I was glad that I was below, under the table, seeing only feet, shoes that were not keeping time, since there was no rhythm in those songs, and not seeing the faces.

When I climbed out after the inundation of song, someone was weeping, allowing tears to roll down his cheeks, as if it were part of the ritual; the vodka gleamed dully in the glasses. The songs must have shaken up the molecules and the vodka had been transformed into tears.

They cried for me, about me, as if they could see a terrible, confused, and jagged prophetic dream. Then, awakened, they picked up knives and forks and returned to the mayonnaise salads, herring, sausages, and the overloaded table.

There was always an abundance of food, the vinegret, the Russian potato salad with vegetables and diced meat, mixed in a tub, and the table turned into a feasting vessel with barely enough space for knives and forks; but a special place was reserved for a plate of eggs stuffed with red caviar among the crowds of dishes, bottles, and fruit vases.

Grandmother Mara got caviar in gift boxes on holidays. Caviar on the table was evidence that everything was fine, a barometer of prosperity, more a signifier than actual food. You could not eat all you wanted, you could have one or two portions, but not three—that would earn you a frown of displeasure from Grandmother Mara who watched the whole table, noting who ate how much and making equalizing operations, moving bowls, platters, and decanters so that everyone could get some of everything. Grandmother’s restriction told me that caviar had to be eaten with the eyes, which I could not yet understand, lacking the skill of feeding on pictures.

Besides which, the caviar on the table reminded me of sunny spring ponds, the weightless glowing bubbles of eggs with black dots in each. When we came to the dacha, I headed for the pond to see the roe grow murky, filling up with dirty juices, and the dots had turned into worms, and I sensed something just as murky, unsettled, and ripening in me.

As I thought about this, I noted people’s teeth squashing the eggs, the shining steel crowns, the awfulness of a nicotine-stained tooth with a metal filling. I thought grown-ups ate caviar like predators who sensed the time of spawning, of fledging, and came to savor the delicacy, the childlike state of being alive, energetically charged for life, still close to the mystery of creation and birth, when the promise of the future already exists in a small particle. They devoured these fetuses of the future, munching on them with vodka, as if when the caviar came into contact with alcohol, its deathly taste was mitigated.

The wives watched their husbands, setting aside the shot glasses or covering them with a hand when another round was being poured. The men were not free; their wives’ gazes kept them attached by a thread, anxious, worried, angry.

The party would start to fade, poisoned on itself, dissipating, people were tired and flabby, as if lightly touched by sleep. That was the only time when you could clearly see that both grandmothers—they were usually seated at opposite ends of the table—seemed to grow in significance, and looked at their adult children from the height of age, turning into statues, supports that held the vault of the table, the vault of life itself.

My father liked chess and we played often. At the end of the game, almost all the figures were dead, their lacquered bodies heaped up on both sides of the board, the black and white board a battlefield, with pawns fighting in the midst of wild cavalry assaults.

But my queen usually survived, and Father had to plan several moves ahead in order to corner her.

The dull rooks and bishops that could travel only straight or on the diagonal—Father usually traded the knights—surrounded my queen, pushing toward an attack. I was astonished by the survival of the queen, the most powerful figure on the board, who could not be taken one-on-one, who could slip out of traps that would kill rook, bishop, or king.

The two grannies at the table were like those queens. They underlined the tragic weakness and vulnerability of man, subject to typhus, drafts, blood poisoning, gingivitis, caught in a trap, cut off from family, forgotten; wounded, bearing the metal of war in the body, unable to reenter peaceful life, turning to drink; needing clothes mended and washed, to be fed, someone to deal with the thousands of details as persistent as lice and as constant as a child’s sniffles. The providential nature of women was revealed in the grandmothers—woman as mourner, woman as widow from youth to old age. You could see woman’s terrible inflexibility, the ability to survive, to build the universe so that it supports the man, for in it he is a transitory, flickering silhouette and the woman is like a caryatid, and their relationship is that of the eternal with the transitory.

For them, the people around the table at that moment weren’t children or even grandchildren—they were distant descendants, and my parents were no different from the rest; the grandmothers were like right and left, alpha and omega, life and death.

I was between them, I belonged to them, as if my parents had performed the requisite physiological act, but the true right of parenthood belonged to Grandmother Tanya and Grandmother Mara.

The skill of dealing with time and darkness was given to me by my grandmother Tanya. Setting aside my homework, I sat with her at the kitchen table, picking through buckwheat, rice, and wheat; chaff to the left, grain to the right, separating the clean from the unclean. Sometimes she said, as if to herself, that with every year the grains were getting dirtier, and her fingers flew, accustomed to small work—darning, knitting, copyediting, and setting type.

Covered with blankets and cardboard, the radiators breathed hot wool, and the angled lamp shone brightly, as in an operating room. My attention, focused since morning on the rigor of notebook squares and lines, began to blur, and the concentration of school gave way to languor, the tiredness from running around after class, and the translucent filtered sadness in the remains of a frosty day.

Picking through grains seemed like fortune-telling to me. Cooked, the grains became mush, food, fit for humans; uncooked, it was the food of birds and animals, a memorial dish set on a grave. The hard, faceted, rustling grains belonged to the field, to the earth, they were connected to the underground, the posthumous kingdom, and picking through them was the same as dipping your fingers into that kingdom.

Grandmother receded from me, as if she were present in both worlds simultaneously; her graying hair and the brown spots on her skin were like signs from that other kingdom.

The grain was a kind of rosary; but she did not recite prayers, she called to the deceased. The ghost of the Leningrad blockade, which took her sisters, the ghost of battles where her brothers were lost without news, floated over the table; grain—the most important value of a hungry age, the measure of life and death—had turned into grains of memory. Grandmother did not throw away the damaged ones, she swept them up and put them in the bird feeder outside the window, as if she were watched by the shades of people who died of starvation, for whom even damaged grain was a treasure. Blue tits congregated at the feeder, but sometimes I wondered—were they really blue tits? Were they even birds at all? They looked into the apartment, hesitating, as if recalling something, and then it seemed to me that they found strange their own little bodies, feathers, beaks, pinpoint eyes, their twitters and bustling movements.

I both liked and feared helping grandmother: engrossed in the monotonous sorting, I lost a clear consciousness of myself, but I could feel some alertness, someone’s invisible presence in the dark beyond the turn in the corridor.

There on the wall of grandmother’s room was something akin to an iconostasis of photographs. Pictures in six rows, in old carved frames, in simpler new frames, big and small—the photos that survived; several dozen people, men and women, in groups and alone, in civilian clothing and military uniforms; a wall of black and white faces.

Grandmother neatly avoided explaining who was in the pictures. I did not press her, out of my hidden horror: all the faces belonged to people who had never known old age—otherwise I would have met at least some of them. These were all interrupted lives, how else to explain that they were gone?

In the evening, in the circle of the lamplight, I could sense that the unknown and hidden were awakening in the dark and moving toward the edge of the light, drawn by the rustle of the grains.

In my daytime life I gave little thought to who they were, taking their secrecy as a given, as a rule of life, even though I guessed that they were my relatives, my closest ancestors.

Their absence was so absolute that it stopped being a negative concept. The world was constructed as a system of deficits that through their constancy became a quality of presence.

Picking through the grains with numbing fingers, pondering the significance of Grandmother’s silence, I would suddenly feel the weakness and baselessness of my own life, as if it were a random oversight of fate, and I wondered “Who am I? Who am I?”—testing the solidity of the silence.

“There once was a man in the land of Uz,” Grandmother Tanya would say, forgetting that she was talking to herself aloud, as if she were telling a fairy tale.

“There once was a man in the land of Uz” was her secret phrase, which she whispered when she was fighting an illness or her heart felt heavy. I looked for the land of Uz in encyclopedias, dictionaries, and atlases, I didn’t find it and decided that Grandmother had invented it, a land of losses, a shard of a land, with only one syllable left of its name. Nothing was left whole in that land, and in it lived a fractional man, like two-fifths of an earthmover, which happens if you do your math problem incorrectly in school. And this fractional man knows only the current name of the country, Uz, he doesn’t remember that it once had been longer, and he is not afraid of the fractional things in it, nor is he afraid of himself, shattered into pieces.

Grandmother would scoop my unsorted pile over to herself, and sensing that I need cheering up, declaim from Pushkin’s “Ruslan and Ludmila” with an ironic glance at the table with its mounds of buckwheat or wheat:

Her voice would change and she’d always read the last lines gravely:

“Why are you mute, field?” Grandmother would repeat, and I thought that she had in mind a specific field, but one that didn’t exist anywhere upon the land.

The field of Pushkin’s fairy tale with its severed heads, evil sorcerers in caves, dark rivers, traces of old battles, a field where everyone is alone—when Grandmother finished reciting, I imagined that I lived in that kind of field, the emotions were familiar, even though I couldn’t say why I experienced it that way.

I was overwhelmed by a numbing sense of being an orphan. I had two grandmothers, I had a father and a mother—and yet I was an orphan. Yet how, and why, could that be? The answer was hidden in a field of silence.

We finished up the grains, I sat down to my homework, and everything that had occurred at the table became unreal and vanished. But a week later Grandmother would bring another few kilos of buckwheat—my parents chided her for her excessive purchases—and it would all repeat: the lamplight, the photographs awakened in the dark, the horror of losses, “There once was a man in the land of Uz,” “Why are you mute, field,” and once again I tried to control the feeling that I had approached a most important truth.

I imagined that every old thing had an empty space, like that within a porcelain statuette, filled with silence; every person had a space like that. Not swallowed words, not a secret, but silence; it was a silence that did not require the nominative case—who or what?—but the prepositional—about whom or what?

I started looking for evidence that my intuitions, which I felt deeply but could not express clearly, were not delusional. I became a detective of the unknown: there were some words or some object that would confirm that my feelings were not lying to me, that what everyone was being silent about actually existed. I did not expect instant and full revelation, I needed just a hint, a sign.

Where could I seek it? I lived in a one-bedroom apartment, went to school, spent the summer at the dacha, occasionally visited my parents’ friends… I leafed through the books on our shelves: I might find a forgotten notation in the margins, an old note or receipt, a page from a calendar used as a bookmark; I pulled photos out of their frames, looking for a hidden second picture; since I was good at hiding places—I had several in the apartment—I looked for those that belonged to others, but found nothing more than presents bought ahead of time and money secreted away from burglars.

Actually, I didn’t believe the find would be in a hidden place; I rather expected that in deference to my persistence, a second face, a second bottom would be revealed to me. And the more ordinary and unobtrusive the object would be, the more unexpectedly and obviously would its ability as shape-shifter appear.

Naturally, these searches were not all I lived for; they occurred like bouts of fever, and between them my existence was the ordinary existence of a schoolboy. But I can’t remember anything about those long intervals, although I remember my desire to get evidence of the reality of the conspiracy of silence and the intensity of every moment of the search.

When I had searched the apartment and other accessible places many times without result, I almost lost faith in my suppositions. The world was so solidly constructed, so authentic in the poverty of its unambiguity that I grew depressed, sensing that my entire life was being decided, that if I gave up now and believed that there was no false bottom, then my guesses would retreat from me, choose another paladin, another detective.

Give up, all the circumstances, all my failed attempts, said: give up. And only the weakest, barely audible voice whispered: give up and you will be no more, because “you” are that inner ear and inner eye; you did not notice that each failure was a step; you are close, so very close to success, try again!

Try! And so one day when I was alone in the apartment I set the alarm clock in a visible place, marking time until Grandmother Tanya’s return, and started a new search. Despair, despair, I had fingered the lining of clothes in the wardrobe, removed books from the shelves, opened the forbidden drawers in the desk, discovered general and private secrets, learning who was hiding what from whom, opened jars of shoe polish, peeked behind mirrors, reached into the ventilator openings, studied the innards of the washing machine—despair, despair, despair, everything was empty and silent!

The minute hand was hurrying, catching up with the hour hand, I had fifteen minutes before Grandmother’s return, I had to put everything back the way it was, lock all the cabinet doors the correct number of turns, line up the shoes in the entry, wipe away my fingerprints in the dust—I would have to lie and say I thought I would do a bit of housecleaning—move the hangers in the closet to the exact intervals at which they hung before my incursion. Neither my grandmother nor mother would notice anything unless I left obvious traces, but my father with his passion for order would be affected by the smallest, most insignificant change that occurred in his absence; he would feel the difference, so I had to use my fingertips to learn where a thing had properly lain and return it to that position.

Thirteen minutes, twelve, ten, nine, six—and suddenly in my rush to find clues I knew that grandmother would be late; she wasn’t aware of my plans and likely wouldn’t have approved but with blessed generosity she was giving me another half hour by walking from the metro.

And in that unaccounted-for half hour, when all signs of a search were removed, when the clock was ticking unhurriedly, I saw the apartment with new eyes, I saw that there were a few places, a few objects to which I had never paid attention, even though that seemed impossible.

For an instant it was like being inside a rebus or brain twister: a ray of light from the corridor pointed out the pier glass, which reflected the brass bell that Grandmother used to indicate the start or end of our games; I picked it up and rang it and the brass ding-ding began the countdown to a special time, when toys come alive.

They were right there, gathered in the corner of Grandmother’s couch: a rag clown with hook-nosed plastic boots; Timka, a stuffed dog with button eyes; Mymrik, a rubber man with a hedgehog-sharp nose who carried a first-aid pouch sewn by Grandmother over his shoulder; Bunny, a white winter hare, synthetic and bedraggled; and a few others, secondary, unnamed. They formed a partisan unit, the underground anti-Nazi fighters. Grandmother and I usually played war, and it never occurred to me to ask why these completely unwarlike creatures became partisans.

Evening after evening they crept through ravines in the folds of the blanket toward the back of the couch, where the railroad tracks were, laid mines under an important German train carrying tanks or weapons, retreated, binding the wounded with bandages from Mymrik’s pouch; the clown stayed behind to provide cover, led the Germans on a wild-goose chase, and died in the snow of the sheet billowing from beneath the blanket, only to be resurrected for the next day’s foray.

That day my entire toy army, my comrades, whose imaginary wounds were as my own, real ones, sat leaning against the back of the couch as if it were a log, and looked at a single point; the trajectory of their gaze indicated the edge of the bookshelf. There was a book, a big book bound in dark brown leather that blended with the shelf; there was no title on its spine. That must be why I glanced right past it so many times, as if it were insignificant.

I immediately remembered that I had seen Grandmother sitting at the table with the book in front of her. She masked those moments so deftly, making them accidental, meaningless, transitional between two pastimes, say, reading and darning, that I was completely fooled.

I took the book down from the shelf; there was no name on the cover, either. Heavy, resembling a barnyard ledger, the book opened, revealing the glazed whiteness of empty pages.

Could I have known that this was the printing house mock-up of an important edition? No. Instead, I made another assumption based on all the stories about revolutionaries who wrote their missives from prison with milk or invisible ink. There was a text, it just had to be developed! Grandmother had saved this wordless tome for some reason, set it on her shelf so that it was unnoticeable to others but not to her, perhaps as a reminder of something, always in view.

I was impressed by the gracefulness with which the book was hidden in plain sight; as I turned the empty pages, my excitement and anticipation made me see faded letters. They combined into words, words into lines, the lines filled the pages; the book flickered spectrally, and dissimilar handwriting, various fonts, pictures, photographs, footnotes appeared—all unintelligible, vanishing, slipping away. This was the book of books, an ark of texts that never were, written in accordance with the grammar rules and orthography of various ages; the texts crowded one another, merging, disappearing.

I turned—behind me was the wall of photographs, of silent faces, and I thought I saw a very thin connection between the faces and the handwriting, the phantom bits of text. I did not know whether my desire had given rise to this or whether I was just delirious. I knew it depended on me whether the lines appeared on the white pages; it depended on how I lived, what I sought, what I believed. It would be an original source, a material truth, the answer to my questions; a reward for my loyalty to myself.

Thus my life, without losing its habitual flow, took on a dimension of expectation, an anticipatory spirit of the promised encounter. I hid my knowledge of the mysterious book without letters deep inside me, understanding that faith in its special qualities should not be tested often, was fragile; but I did not give up my efforts.

Amid the household objects, I looked for ones that would take me beyond the quotidian, would open the limits of current history, geography, and destiny. A bronze mortar, an antique microscope, a compass, a Solingen straight razor in a leather sheath, a boot tree, a silver teaspoon, a worn leather cigar case, a prerevolutionary pocket watch with crossed cannons on the lid, a rusty cabbage chopper, heavy green glass apothecary bottles with incomprehensible labels, a forged four-sided nail—they were a vanishing breed, they lived as hangers-on, souvenirs, meaningless trifles; but I, on the contrary, recognized their seniority and wisdom: in the easiest form for a child they taught me about time, about what was authentic and real and how to recognize it.

You could even say that I now had two lives. In one, I was son, grandson, schoolboy, October Scout, pal of my peers, a boy of my age. In the other, when I was alone, I was no one, I enjoyed a blessed anonymity, as if everyone in the world was recognized, defined, attributed, while I was superfluous, auxiliary, unexpected, no one’s son and no one’s grandson; I was frightened by the ease with which I moved into that state, by the strength of the sense of my separateness.

Left alone, I turned into a greedy, indiscriminate seeker of knowledge. My hunger for interests and desires, my search for the heights of impressions, for feeling the meaning of existence spurred by the dreariness of life around me gave my search a savagery.

I raced around the apartment, opening adult books at random, marauding through dictionaries, mastering mysterious-sounding terms and concepts, stealing art books, committing paintings to memory—without any idea of subject or meaning, like a nomad filling saddlebags with booty that seems valuable—things that might change him in the future. I was given a very small interval to create myself out of the only materials available to me; if I didn’t manage it then, I never would.

Grandmother Tanya was hard of hearing. She could hear only very loud sounds: breaking glass, sirens, locomotive whistles. You couldn’t call her on the telephone, get her attention from the next room, make a comment across the table, or reply with your back to her. To have a conversation you had to put your arm around her and speak into her ear. Later, as an adult, I realized that my special attachment to her, aside from other reasons, was the result of those embraces as we talked.

Grandmother Tanya’s deafness annoyed those around her, and she was often asked to use a hearing aid or an ear trumpet. There was a kind of envy in those requests, a secret wish for equality: the suspicion was that Grandmother Tanya, by not using a hearing aid, was making her life easier by excluding one of the most obnoxious components of Soviet reality—sound. Speeches on the radio and music from loudspeakers did not exist for her, and speeches on television and street conversation were nothing more than bare gesticulation.

The home radio was kept on, the old wartime habit, but muted. The television was for daily, ordinary news, but the radio muttered along just in case there was suddenly something incredibly important and fateful. I think the adults subconsciously trusted the radio more, it was older, and they thought that if war broke out, the television would present a soothing picture while the radio would “awaken” and start speaking in the old announcer Levitan’s remembered voice. The radio, the one that had been wired into every apartment, was perceived as the voice of the communal unconscious, like the shared neuron network of all the apartments, which on its own, without a central control, would sense danger and warn us.

I thought that the radio not only broadcast programs but that it eavesdropped on us; it was part of the general conspiracy of vigilance. Grandmother Tanya had a friend who spent the war in the air defense corps charged with early plane detection. When she showed war photos, huge ear trumpets to detect the sound of plane engines, I saw an image of that universal listening, greater than necessary for everyday life, attention to words and sounds that saturated daily life like glue; the power of language, where every word contained a backward glance at itself. I sometimes wished that all the grown-ups would be like Grandmother Tanya; no, I did not wish them harm, I thought it would be better for them, too.

Grandmother Tanya could not hear me, and until my parents got home I had freedom that I didn’t even think about; I took it as a given. Her deafness gave me an early independence, a window of a few hours a day when I was on my own. My inner biography grew out of those hours of solitude.

Not only deaf, Grandmother Tanya also could not see well without her glasses: her vision had been damaged by the strain of editorial work. She was a pensioner, but continued to work at Politizdat; I didn’t know what the contraction stood for—Publishing House for Political Literature of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR—but I sensed the thrilling monumentality of the name.

I considered Soviet abbreviations and acronyms, offensive in their unnatural combinations of sounds and truncated syllables, as the names of beings that were part of the mysterious hierarchy of power, and Politizdat was, using Christian terms, an archangel, especially since it was located on no less than the Street of Truth, that is, Pravda Street.

One day, grandmother left her purse open; a shiny corner of some metal object was sticking out. Out of simple curiosity I pulled on it—and brought out a ruler without millimeters and centimeters, only unusual, nonexistent measures of length with carved names: Nonpareil, Cicero, Sanspareil, Mignon, Parangon.

Nonpareil; Cicero; Sanspareil; Mignon; Parangon—fright made me drop the ruler, for I had accidentally touched a thing from Politizdat, a magical artifact! What did those measures mean, those names, so like incantations? What sorcery took place there on Pravda Street?

Pravda Street, the name began to glow with awesome light; all my trifling transgressions, my searches of the apartment, my secret thoughts, everything I thought reliably hidden now lay before the six gigantic letters PRAVDA as if under a magnifying glass.

From then on, as soon as Grandmother Tanya said, “I’m going to Pravda Street,” something hearkening back to olden times overwhelmed me with primal fear.

Grandmother Tanya was probably the only person with whom I used to feel spiritually safe. The feeling that she had suddenly acquired all my secrets—for I understood the real meaning of the adult threat “I can see right through you!”— undermined the very possibility of my existence.

So I decided to go to Pravda Street, to see it, to be assured of its supernatural powers; it was a desperate move.

I had no idea what was there, whether I would be able to even access the street (when Grandmother went there she took a red leather ID with gold letters), or how to find the building where she worked. But I set out without asking for permission, alone so far from home for the first time. When I turned onto Pravda Street from the big boulevard and saw the signs, I thought I had the wrong street: there were ordinary houses, trees, courtyards, stores—nothing supernatural.

I thought perhaps the real Pravda Street could not even be found in ordinary topography, perhaps it was something hidden, with only one unobtrusive entrance. Could ordinary people even get in, the ones who don’t know the secrets of Nonpareil and Cicero, who don’t know the secret password? Was Politizdat in another world whose existence was proven by Grandmother’s ruler without the usual centimeters?

I decided to walk to the end of the street. After a few blocks I was ready to turn back when far on the right I saw the corner of a building that seemed to come from another planet; aha, corner of Nonpareil, corner of Cicero, I recognize you, Politizdat!

The building was like a blueprint of itself: naked form stripped of ornamentation. It was a Constructivist crystal, the ideal of cutting up the universal into indivisible simple elements, the ideal of thinking with these elements, ready to be checked for correctness against an ideal. The building stood alone against chaos, against the bustle of the streets, against the city and its residents. It extended beyond its limits, as if the axes drawn on paper by the architect continued into the air along invisible lines of force; the building tried to even out the neighboring block, to straighten the line of the other buildings, and to organize the rhythm of pedestrians.

Across the street was a yolk-yellow culture club, framed by a colonnade, ornamented with plaster, bas-reliefs depicting the joy of Soviet people—marching off in columns, some waving banners, others sheaves of wheat, still others model airplanes.

The House of Culture with its plasterwork and columns, built much later than Politizdat, seemed like an artifact from the deep past, from Soviet antiquity. In the Soviet eighties the Constructivist architecture of the thirties looked like science fiction; the Futurism that projected the future still worked a half-century later. Constructivist design, which incorporated the complete cycle of truth production—from the editor’s office to the printing press—bore the sense of a severe wholeness that subsequently fell apart, decayed, was replaced by an abundance of attributes and décor. I could not tie Constructivism to a certain era—there was very little of it left in Moscow—and so it seemed that the house was built outside of time, alien to everything and with power over everything.

I circled the building a few times. Politizdat was exactly what I had expected. But there was something that confused me. I looked through the spacious windows: huge paper cylinders turned and the printing presses tossed out reams of newspapers.

The day before, our school had announced another collection of wastepaper for recycling; the school was in the regional competition, and all pupils were instructed to show up with at least three kilograms, and if you brought in five, they would raise your grade in deportment.

The last collection was in the previous quarter, but the neighbors’ apartments had filled up again with unneeded copies of Izvestia, Pravda, Komsomolets, and Vecherka. In the morning all the pupils showed up with piles of newspapers; the older ones hauled two or three piles, some helped by their parents, some using old people’s satchels on wheels. Piles and piles, some still white, others yellowed—I don’t think the school officials had expected so much, and now they were trying to reduce the paper overload, seeing something indecent and seditious in the haste to be rid of newspapers. Paper to be pulped kept increasing, no longer fitting in the cloakroom, and everyone who walked in froze at the sight of so many old words surrounding him.

The school porch was strewn with bits of paper; the remains of transcripts of Party congresses, editorials on international aid for Afghanistan, feuilletons on the American war machine, articles on record harvests and heroic tractor drivers.

The paper shreds and ashes made me recoil instinctively. On the school porch I recalled Grandmother’s ruler, the names Nonpareil, Cicero, Sanspareil, Mignon, Parangon—scary but majestic and endless, and I thought proudly that through my grandmother I was in touch with the mystery of deathless words.

And now to see that Politizdat had something to do with newspapers! I took a very deep breath. Two men walked past, printer’s ink spotting their clothes, and one held a sheaf of freshly printed pages and was declaring heatedly to the other: “I told them we needed Nonpareil here!”

Nonpareil, the incantation had been spoken on the street, anyone could hear, anyone could learn. It stopped being an incantation. The magic was gone.

Watching the ream of paper spinning in the pressroom, I experienced the deepest disillusionment and the deepest relief simultaneously. I was sorry about the self-deception that had made life profound and significant, but the joy of liberation was greater: I knew that I could feel completely safe with Grandmother Tanya.

Once again the days stretched out, the months of my existence near her; I went back to waiting, observing, spying, seeking the false bottom of life. I noticed that Grandmother Tanya treated old things with a hidden pity, she repaired and darned clothing, sent old books to be rebound, as if they had suffered from the cruelty of the age. But she never grew attached to anything, she did not accumulate souvenirs, the trifles to which people entrust part of their memory.

She had only one thing of that sort, a small porcelain figurine—three green-glazed frogs: one covered its eyes, the second its ears, and the third its mouth.

“See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.” Grandmother Tanya explained the meaning of the figures, which she kept on constant view.

Other people’s possessions were separate and at a remove, by virtue of not belonging to you, but Grandmother Tanya seemed to have purposely placed the three frogs right on that very boundary separating me from “other people’s possessions,” as if to train me to notice them and understand their meaning.

At first I thought my grandmother was teaching me how not to live: the three frogs were a satire, a caricature like the ones that appeared on the back page of newspapers. But gradually I began to look deeper at the frogs and tried to grasp what set them apart from their surroundings in Grandmother’s room.

The room had a large table with papers, a wooden darning mushroom over which a torn sock or stocking was stretched, a velvet pincushion, a basket with pieces of fabric, an old portable sewing machine, books, and table games always ready for me. It was all so well-studied, so reliable, always in the same place, determined long before my birth, and it seemed that life went on year after year, attaching objects and people ever more firmly to their place, gently and not quite really aging them.

Only the three frogs, as tiny as Japanese netsuke, meant something different. Sometimes, when no one was home, I sat and looked at them, trying to understand them whole, as a triple statuette, three syllables of a single word. I sensed an old suffering in them that was causing the glaze to gradually crack and chip.

Once during winter vacation, I was dying of boredom as I recuperated from a bad flu and high temperature. Still sensing the remains of the fever, I wandered the rooms agitatedly, looking for something, picking up and putting down objects, seeking a release from illness to freedom. I found nothing; tired, irritated, I turned on the television—at twilight during vacation they ran adventure movies for schoolchildren.

I don’t remember the film, one of the many Soviet movies about our intelligence agents in the West, shot on pretty much the same streets of Tallinn or Vilnius. Fired up by the shooting and fighting, still reliving the chase and shoot-out at the end, I wandered around the apartment again, found myself in Grandmother’s room, and my eyes were fixed on the three frogs at the edge of the table.

In spy movies a small detail—a beige handkerchief in a jacket pocket, a bottle of wine on a café table, the rear window lowered in the car—shows the invisible spectator that the surveillance has failed, the operation is off, connections have been figured out, and danger is all around, dissolved in the carefree day, for any passerby could be counterintelligence. But the sign has to be extremely natural, unobtrusive, so no one watching could guess it was a special signal.

Suddenly, with the same certainty as the movie’s hero, I understood that the three frogs were such a signal. Grandmother Tanya decided to give it to me, to show how people really live—see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. My intuitive guess about the vast expanses of silence had its second proof, after the book in the brown binding, the book without words.

I took the statuette and moved it under the lamp, to show (in the tradition of spy movies) that I had noticed it and got the message.

Grandmother Tanya came home. Awhile later she dropped into the room where I was reading and gave me a quick look. Then I walked down the hall past her room. The three frogs were still under the lamp, where I had moved them. The brown book lay before her on the table, opened to the first glossy white page. Grandmother was scribbling with a ballpoint pen on a scrap of paper in preparation for starting a line. There was no determination in her pose, she brought the pen to the top of the page and then put it away, picked up another pen that might not be as messy; it was as if she knew that the first word would inexorably oblige her to continue.

I understood that Grandmother had sat this way many times before, fighting with herself, remembering all the previous failed attempts, and that today the pen would not touch the page, either. But at the moment I sensed that my future had been born. I was prepared to wait.

My attachment to Grandmother Tanya weakened over the summer vacation, when Grandmother Mara took over—my summertime dacha grandmother; in the city she lived separately, but I spent the three summer months with her. Heavy, solid, and physically strong, she was a true dacha sovereign. Our small plot was filled with apple trees, plums, cherries, currants, gooseberries, sea buckthorn; we grew potatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, turnips, beets, squash, pumpkins, and herbs. Grandmother Mara would walk around the garden looking for a bit of space to plant something else. It seemed she lived from spring to fall, barely tolerating winter, waiting for the first warm sunlight to put seedlings in cans and milk cartons onto the windowsill next to the frosty glass.

She’d gone through many professions. She’d been a maid, a warehouse keeper, a seamstress, she worked the elevator in a clinical laboratory. When they showed me pictures of her in her twenties and thirties, I thought I was being fooled, for I had seen that woman in the mosaics at the Kiev metro station and in the sculptures on Revolution Square. I could not consider that young woman a relative any more than you can consider a figurative or architectural style a relative. At one with her generation, she was the embodiment of the era’s heroine, “a simple Soviet girl,” a peasant from a leading kolkhoz, a swimmer, veterinarian, or student.

They were women who had not acquired femininity, often not pretty, but even the pretty ones retained the soft dullness of peasant rag dolls; in astonishment at getting used to blouses, jackets, shoes, simple necklaces; joyous and inspired, dynamic in metro frescoes and static, caught by a camera; as accustomed as nudes in an artist’s studio to seeing themselves depicted on gables and ceilings, to identifying with the great construction, with socialism, which had chosen them as heroines, or to use today’s language, as top models, for just as today runways and magazines are used to display fashions, it was through their features and clothing that they portrayed the new times.

Her father gave his daughters peasant names as dowries: Mara was a family nickname for Marfa, and her sisters were called Fevronya, Pavlina, Agrippina, Felka, and Lukerya, old-fashioned village names. It was probably the only thing he could give them, sending them out into the world, before dying in the Civil War. She grew up in post-revolutionary orphanages, and for all her determination to have a family, she retained a sort of unease about her femininity, which apparently was taken as emancipation by the men who courted her.

In the photographs from the war years, of the sort that have vanished, a clearly feminine image appeared, as if the four-year wait for her husband and fear for her children had given her a face. Gradually, the individuality wore away; in the war years she approached the peak of self-awareness and then gave herself back to the era so it could fill her head with the appropriate thoughts, concepts, and ideas. Grandmother Mara enthusiastically gave herself up to this important work until there was an upheaval in her later years. She thought the world was broken, Communism was broken; bitterly she locked herself in her memories of the past. But then I was born, and she turned to me as passionately as she had welcomed the new future in the thirties.

She liked lipstick and kisses, she liked sweets. She always had candies in a bowl, chocolates and caramels with jam filling. My family considered sweets excessive, an indulgence that ruined not only teeth but character and attitude, the start of spiritual decay; they brought me up with ridiculous seriousness, unable to distinguish between the essential and the trifling, taking extreme positions on everything, as if it were party politics and not candy.

Only Grandmother Mara lived as if we had earned all this—chocolate, cake, candy, halvah, caramel, marmalade, meringue—just by surviving, by being born despite the war, destruction, and hunger, and therefore, we should celebrate and sweeten every day.

When she entered a room it felt as if several people had come in. Having grown up in horribly crowded peasant huts and workers’ barracks, in the human rivers of trains and stations, she never could separate herself completely from the masses. She walked around the room, she gestured, as if trying to fill the space with people; every movement presumed the presence of someone else, a line, a parade, a meeting of party members, a crowd storming a store counter. Internally, I staggered, feeling the wave of her presence, intensified by the odor of her perfume that rolled over me.

She lightly sprayed her throat and neck, but in combination with her personality the already overwhelming fragrance of Red Moscow seemed incredibly cloying, sticking to everything, narcotic, as if she remembered a completely different smell—rot, smoke, decay—and was trying to kill it with this perfume, unconsciously adding more than necessary.

She had two lipsticks—crimson and purplish brown; her face powder was in a red compact; the bottle of Red Moscow perfume with its ruby top looked like the Kremlin towers and their stars; she managed to desacralize red, making it her own. From the color of blood shed for the revolution that saturated the banners, red turned into the color of a vivacious blush that came from health, joy, and sensual appetite. In fact, all of Grandmother Mara’s cosmetics created a range of blushes, as if she wanted to demonstrate her satisfaction with life under socialism.

Grandmother Mara’s looks were clear evidence that she appreciated the material side of life. An inattentive observer might conclude that she was a loud, impulsive, bossy but essentially harmless pensioner.

Yet the first time I heard the word “ruthless,” I intuitively understood its meaning through Grandmother Mara. No, she wasn’t cruel, she knew how to be tender, and she loved sincerely and fully; ruthlessness is something else—it is the absence of intermediate states. Grandmother Mara did not know how to internalize an experience, she always overcame it—or solved it—in a single movement; therefore she could be ruthless even in kindness.

If a tree was not fruitful, she had it cut and dug out in order to plant a new one. I learned to use ax and shovel, to dig out and to chop clinging roots. I approached the task reluctantly, hoping that Grandmother Mara would change her mind and spare the tree, but the first chopped root unloosened the ties of pity, and I fiercely dug into the ground to find the main root that kept the apple tree firmly in the ground. I struggled like a fairy tale hero with the power of the tree, deep, dispersed, and intractable.

I think at times like that Grandmother Mara felt special pangs of love for me, certain that I was her grandson more than I was Grandmother Tanya’s, or the son of my parents. My father would remove the cherry or apple tree three times faster, but he would do it without passion, just another job. Grandmother Mara kept the garden not out of love for gardening; the garden was her domain, her little empire, and she was using her Communist upbringing on the irrational plants, believing that a fruitless plum tree was setting a bad example for the others and therefore had to be destroyed before the others were tempted by the joy of fruitless growth.

She let me use Grandfather’s ax—a terrible executioner’s tool, which had somehow survived all the moves and the wartime evacuation, as if such objects do not vanish, as if they were more than things, with a fate and a soul; resembling a Scandinavian battle ax, it was an instrument and a weapon; life began with it in a bare spot, with no people; it gave birth to a house, utensils, fence; peasants fought with it against swords and rifles; a weapon of labor and a weapon of rebellion.

I felt it, I felt the power of that ax, which was still too big for me. I picked it up and the ax made me grow to match its size, taught me how to use its weight effortlessly to chop branches and wood. When a tree indicated by Grandmother Mara was turned into a pile of branches and a stump—an octopus-like shape, resembling a terrible animal—I looked in amazement at the emptiness cleared of trunk and branches. The space was a result of that ax, and the labor became profoundly justified, as if I were repeating the actions of many generations of peasant ancestors.

I dragged the green branches beyond the fence; a short breather. Grandmother Mara fed me like an adult worker, like a man, and then she handed me a matchbox to start the main part.

Grandmother Mara believed that the best ashes for fertilizing came from freshly sawn trees, burned while the leaves were still firm, while the foamy sap still dripped from the cuts. I made a big bonfire, putting old dry logs on the bottom, for a hot and long-lasting fire, and threw the fresh branches on top. They caught reluctantly, slowly drying on the fire of the bottom logs, so the burning lasted until twilight. I stood in the smoke and trembling air, amid the sparks and searching breaths of the flames, stunned by the heat, thinking of taking a rest but knowing that somewhere in the yard that had grown viscous in the heated air, Grandmother Mara was watching me work.

The next morning, tired, with aching muscles, I still rose early, for I had to see the culmination of my actions; Grandmother Mara, who never slept past seven and often rose with the sun, living in the ancient peasant rhythm imbued in her from childhood, came out to sift the ashes.

At the hour of thickening dew and the first sun rays, not so much warm as luminous, I could see her approaching frailty; her dress refused to fall smoothly and freely, keeping its angles, seams, and darts, as if her bulky body had weakened inside and the fabric hugged her like a sheet does a very ill patient, gathering the smell of unaired linen in the folds; in the hour of morning dew she came out like a witch, a sorceress, with a trough and an old sieve, as if she was going to cast a spell.

She used a trowel to gather the still hot ashes, putting portions into the sieve and sifting it over the trough; a mound of delicately gray ash, with darker flecks, grew in the trough; the finest dust that could not be held by the sieve flew in the air, settled on the grass, while the coals that did not burn fully rattled around, black bone trees, the broken joints of burned branches.

I was amazed that the apple or cherry trees that were alive and full of juice just yesterday, cracking under the blade of the ax, had been burned, and that the old woman was sifting their ashes; but it could be no other way because of all the grownups only Grandmother Mara was capable of deciding without a second thought what would live and what would die; she stood on the border of life and death, ordering one to be chopped and burned in order to fertilize another, more worthy tree.

Here I understood why some of the old men in the dacha compound called her (behind her back, of course) Soviet Power; “Has Soviet Power gone by yet?” “Have you seen Soviet Power?” Without mockery, half-jokingly, half-seriously. Grandmother Mara had never held any official posts, had no titles or awards, not even the most trifling, merely nominal ones; but when she showed me which tree to destroy and I followed her orders, it seemed that we were serving something greater than concern over the harvest; Soviet Power was revealed to me as a life force and the mystery of annihilation simultaneously. Grandmother Mara, despite her lowly public position, was an apostle or at the very least a Soviet zealot in the true, invisible hierarchy.

There was only one circumstance which made me feel that Grandmother Mara knew much and had seen much that did not quite fit into the Soviet canon, but either hid it or forced herself not to remember it.

When we visited her in the winter at her Moscow apartment, she put a tablecloth on a big round table—we did not eat like that at home because of our cramped quarters and harried life—and set plates from a porcelain service that was kept in the sideboard.

Grandfather Trofim brought the service back from Germany after the war, along with the sewing machine and silk bedspreads in the Japanese style, embroidered with birds and dragons.

The bedspreads and sewing machine were almost never used; Grandmother Mara used a Soviet machine for sewing, the spreads were kept in the closet, but an exception was made for the porcelain service for certain family meals. These three things were metaphysical trophies, as if Grandfather Trofim had returned from a distant kingdom with three special objects.

The marvelous objects were equivalent—with adjustment for time and place—to family treasures, for which every generation had its own attitude. Paid for in blood, Grandfather Trofim’s early death, they created the family, the community of people allowed to eat soup from German porcelain, admire the bedspreads, and appreciate the mechanical beauty and harmonious structure of the Singer sewing machine.

The bedspreads had a citrusy fragrance—Grandmother Mara saved the skin of oranges and tangerines and used the dry bits against moths; a repairman came once a year with tiny tools, like dental instruments, and a narrow-necked oil can, to tune up the Singer; we weren’t allowed to scrape our spoons on the bottom of the plates so as not to scratch the enamel.

The service enchanted me with the sophistication of its creator’s mind; five kinds of plates, three kinds of cups and saucers, tureen, salad bowls, cream pitcher and many others—with wide and narrow necks, with thin noses like a beak; pots, jugs, vases—nobody knew what they were really called or for which foods they were intended; no one could imagine a life where there was so much food that all these forms and shapes were needed.

“This must be for jam,” Grandmother Mara said, and everyone carefully put jam in the thin dish, but no one was sure that it was intended for jam, and it seemed that the dishes that remained on the sideboard looked down on us with aristocratic displeasure.

The service was for twenty, and I kept wondering: Why so many? Were there families with so many close relatives? For a while I consoled myself with the guess that it had been made with extras, in case something was broken. But then one day I saw Grandmother Mara’s gaze while she set the table, as she looked from the mountain of unneeded plates to the photograph of Grandfather Trofim. And I understood, I realized that Grandfather Trofim brought this service back from Germany in the hope that he would one day gather together the large prewar family, all the relatives. Maybe he even imagined them sitting at the table; having been separated by war, they would meet again, passing bread, serving one another, pouring vodka, and these gestures, arms crossing and fingers touching, would renew their family ties; the German service would stop being specifically German when the victors broke bread and raised glasses over it.

Grandmother Mara’s eyes saw what I did not—the emptiness, the absence. For me, four people at the table was the norm, the maximum, while for Grandmother Mara it was the remains, a small part of something larger. She set out the service to remember, to count all the dishes and cups that did not appear, all the unneeded bowls of soup.

I pictured the wall of photographs in Grandmother Tanya’s room; for a second I pitied both grandmothers, who were irreconcilable and so similar in their loneliness.

It is both simple and difficult to compare my grandmothers; they were so different that each defined herself through negation—I am not her—which over time bound the two so tightly that one could not live without the other.

One could say that our family was the result of a historical misalliance; both grandmothers were born before the revolution, one a noblewoman of an ancient line, the other a peasant from recent serfs, and it is unlikely they would have had a grandson in common if not for 1917, the Civil War, and the establishment of Soviet rule.

For peasant Grandmother Mara everything beginning with 1917 was her history, her time. While Grandmother Tanya lived, perhaps without fully realizing it, in an alien time; it merely moved her inherent era farther and farther away. The two women could not have come together: time flowed differently for them. Their conflict could only grow.

Naturally, as a child I did not know that Grandmother Tanya belonged to the nobility, did not know that the family was divided by a temporal marker into “present people” and “former people”; that our family was in its essence not something finished but a continuing attempt to find a common tongue, to coexist, realized in the children and in the grandchild, that is, in me; that I was in effect something experimental, a child of two times.

Grandmother Mara, a Communist who did not belong to the Party, should have been impressed by non-Party Grandmother Tanya, an editor at Politizdat, a person with entrée to the ideological inner sanctum. But it seems that Grandmother Mara did not trust Grandmother Tanya, knowing her dubious social heritage, nor Politizdat itself or the very genre of ideological speech.

Lenin and Stalin were immutable for her; they had said it all, their speeches were no longer words, they were signs on tablets, and there was no need to say or write anything more; therefore the official language elicited an unrecognized protest in her that grew into a quiet war, an overthrow of grammar and orthography.

I think she found inexplicable bliss in talking about “communisum” and “socialisum,” stretching out the terms, stomping tight shoes to fit the big clumsy feet of a peasant girl.

Saying “perscription” and “supposably” was not simply a vulgarization of awkward “intellectual” words to suit the speech of village, not a parody of buzzwords used in inaccessible spheres of culture.

No, she killed complex words just because, she was certain that words were not important, there was no ontological faith in them, they were to be mocked like the vanquished. She saw the future of communism as wordless somehow: the kingdom of the final truth would have no words.

Even in insignificant situations she spoke aggressively, pushing, harsh, trying to tear the words apart, use them all up so that the final silence could come.

For me, Grandmother Mara’s aggressive speech merely epitomized what I sensed in the speech of all adults. Grandmother Mara immediately invaded your side of the field with words, as if she used their meaning not for communicating but as bellicose weapons.

Grandmother Tanya spoke softly, both in intonation and in choice of words, her sentences always left space for a response. She used neutral language, and I always felt free with her, like a soldier during a truce, when you don’t have to keep expecting shots and looking for the closest cover.

In every conversation, Grandmother Mara (no matter what was being discussed) tried to exact some special proof of the speaker’s sincerity and existential attitude. She seemed to believe no one, and condemned herself for that lack of trust, but still attacked, insisted, as if she needed the person to tear his shirt, claw his chest to the flesh and blood, exposing the gaping flesh of feeling, even though they might be discussing ways of pickling cucumbers.

Her fixation turned Grandmother Mara into an investigator, a torturer: Is there truth in the person? The connection she had felt with you—was it still true? She perceived lying as absolute evil and would never admit it was a psychological mechanism that could perform, say, a defense function as well.

Grandmother Tanya allowed me to maintain some moral mystery inside me, a hidden moral life. Her principle was “just don’t lie to yourself.” But Grandmother Mara thought the more important principle was “don’t lie to others.” She demanded that I tell everything, as if cleansing from guilt could come only in confession, preferably before several people, not just one. The most ordinary formulas of apology in her presence took on the weight of repentance.

I have to mention here what I later called the metaphysics of remarking. The concept—remarking—was key in education; “I was given a remark,” “You will get a remark,” “I’m writing a remark in your notebook.”

A remark is not just some words with moral content; the words are secondary, first comes the act of remarking, the act of a specifically organized seeing. This seeing is not neutral, it nearly unconsciously fixes on almost anything wrong, latches on to it, calculates, classifies, and only then do the clichéd words come.

Wherever you were, you were watched by the collective hundred-eyed Argus, the visual field of existence was not safe and free; it was bad enough that you practically had no private, personal space; intense moralizing held sway in the public domain; everyone watched everyone else, zealously hurrying to be the first to make a remark, to execute a microact of power.

This feeling—that every person is both policeman and judge, that you are surrounded by people without eyelids, who never blink—this very feeling is probably what I experienced, and Grandmother Mara was its most vivid personfication. Once, in a good mood because it was May Day and there was a parade of thousands, she explained to me, “Soviet power is you and me and we are all together, that’s what this power is like, it is ours, it belongs to everyone.” I understood what power Grandmother Mara had in mind—the power of remarks.

The difference in language and morality was the first distinction I made between the grandmothers; gradually, a few dropped words and details created other distinctions, deeper ones.

Grandmother Tanya sometimes spoke of her childhood, the most insignificant episodes that had no historical context, walks in a meadow or a trip to the sausage store. These episodes were an expression of her person; her recollections were detailed, extended, filled with moments of understanding, moments of revelation of her own individuality.

Grandmother Mara’s recollections could not strictly be called recollections. Turning to the distant past, she wandered in twilight where vague visions appeared that did not seem to relate to her life; she could not clearly define where the existence of her brothers and sisters ended and her own began, she did not have a personal view of the world and therefore no personal memory.

But it all changed come the revolution; that and the establishment of Soviet power pulled her out of her former dissolution in everyone else, tore her out of the darkness of communal living where the concept of “individual” was rather vague.

So Grandmother Mara’s creator was Stalin. Naturally, the social and psychological upheaval was done by the revolution, but that thought was too complex for Grandmother; she needed an “author,” a demiurge, a “father” for her new personality, because attributing her second birth to historical events meant that she was both an orphan and vulnerable. A peasant daughter, her greatest and unacknowledged fear was being alone in history, without instruction and edification, without a leader’s guidance.

Lenin merely “lit the way,” he was a prophet, while “Stalin brought us up to be true to the people,” as the 1943 anthem said, and for Grandmother Mara her birth as an individual was “registered” in Stalin’s name. The name Stalin was not just a symbol of victory and faith and Communism. When she said “Stalin,” she was giving a name to a complex and contradictory alloy of traits of her own personality and the qualities of an era.

Cruelty and the readiness to quash disagreement, to sacrifice herself and others, was what she called “Stalin,” thereby justifying them and making them the necessary part of the whole. They were connected to honesty, concern, and sincerity—the bad and good in such a monstrous mix that “Stalin” was an incantation joining the incompatible and forbidding all attempts to understand oneself, which would have ended—given her meager intellectual means—in an inner tragedy.

For Grandmother Tanya the comparable character-forming concept was the blockade of Leningrad, or simply The Blockade.

Grandmother Tanya never spoke of her sisters who starved to death in Leningrad, and I heard her say the word “blockade” only two or three times; that evinced how deeply The Blockade had taken root inside her and become a way of being. Talk of the inhuman horrors of blockade life were not welcome; what was welcome were descriptions of heroic exploit, and Grandmother was left behind in the prison of silence that surrounded the death of her sisters, and she found in this the only correct and honest way of relating to life, history, and destiny.

Grandmother Mara never mentioned the siege of Leningrad as part of the war; this may be explained by the fact that she had no relatives there, that Grandfather Trofim had fought in the south, and her worry for family was tied to other points on the map.

The shadow of the blockade fell on Grandmother Tanya’s everyday life; an old illness made her keep a strict diet: porridge, boiled vegetables, boiled fish, unsweetened tea, a bit of fruit. She probably did not need to be this inflexible, she could have spoiled herself a bit without worrying about her health; but people of her generation had difficulty giving into laxity, following their mood; they did not know how to handle it, they had been trained by an era that did not recognize intermediate states, vacillations, mutability. It was easier for Grandmother Tanya to deny herself all small culinary pleasures than to permit herself to enjoy them from time to time.

Grandmother Mara loved to eat and derived pleasure from feeding others: her cooking creations overwhelmed you not so much with their taste as their number, opulence, satisfaction, and Rabelaisian forms.

On the one hand, Grandmother Mara had great admiration for steadfastness. But on the other, she sensed something in Grandmother Tanya’s behavior that in the thirties would have been called something like “counterrevolutionary lifestyle.”

She probably saw it like this: she considered the culinary abundance that she created out of literally nothing, finding products in almost-empty stores, as an achievement of the Soviet regime. All those pies, soups, and blini were the substance of Sovietness for her; she did not simply cook, she participated in the shared celebration of food, bringing joy to the stomach; she created examples of the happiness and plenty promised under socialism.

Grandmother Tanya’s refusal to try any of these dishes elicited suspicion. I think Grandmother Mara sometimes suspected that Grandmother Tanya was actually healthy and used a medical excuse to reject not the food but the regime, enacting a dietetic insurgency against the Soviets. I sometimes imagined that Grandmother Mara wanted to force-feed Grandmother Tanya to prove that normal, healthy, festive food would not harm her, and expose her deceit to the world.

At the table Grandmother Mara kept a close eye on us to make sure everything was eaten, and no excuse or trick could spare you. You had to overeat to the point where you couldn’t swallow the tiniest bite, and only then did she smile in satisfaction.

Her treats were sometimes a torture, I could not eat the most wonderful, freshest, finger-licking, meat pies; my revulsion went far beyond children’s sudden food antipathies.

I wasn’t frightened by the overflowing affection—essentially all the manifestations of care were excessive in both grandmothers, as if they should have been shared among five grandchildren; I feared not the care but what was inside it, like a blade in a sheath.

“Then why did I cook all this?” she would exclaim rhetorically and with great pathos if you refused another helping or asked her to pack less for home (this was a mandatory part of the ritual, the food made its own kind of intervention into other kitchens and tables).

“Then why did I cook all this?” Grandmother Mara would exclaim. And there was a whole philosophy in it: create such a profusion—of food, feelings, instructions, intentions—that the addressee had to accept, with no chance of refusing without hurting the giver’s feelings or questioning the kindness of the gesture.

In just the same way, she imposed her opinions, her understanding of the world, and established her power in relationships. Your wishes—actually the wishes ascribed to you—were always already fulfilled, and you had no space for maneuver, for acting on your own.

I think it was Grandmother Tanya’s tact, verging on dissembling, that bothered Grandmother Mara the most. Almost unconsciously, Grandmother Mara embodied the hungry dreams in hundreds of wartime diaries, which listed the foods that would appear on the table in peacetime and described how mindfully and plentifully people would eat. She sensed that she had the right of the victors on her side, that true generosity obviated tact, but she still knew that Grandmother Tanya was more strict; and that drove her mad.

But Grandmother Mara could not control herself, and over and over stacks of blini would appear, too many to fit in a bucket; sometimes I thought that everything she touched turned to food, as if a genie had played a joke on her.

Even stranger was the other side of her “cooking persona,” which many people considered eccentric.

In the spring, on the eve of blossoming, Grandmother Mara would become agitated, worried by a premonition. And then one day she would say, “The sap is running!” and send me for grandfather’s ax, as if she could feel what was happening inside the birch trees without going into the woods.

I entered the grove cautiously, the ground made sucking noises from the recent melt, branches knocked down by winter winds were strewn everywhere, young tree trunks bearing the teeth marks of hares and elk, and the usual paths were lost under last year’s fallen leaves. The forest, which had restored its wildness over the winter, was alien to me, still in my city mode. I would have preferred to wait for the paths to be trampled once again, for foliage to hide the traces of winter, and the fallen trees and branches taken away for firewood. But Grandmother Mara brought me to help her chop through the thick birch bark, and watched with inexplicable excitement as the first drop dripped into the three-liter jar. The desire to animate herself after a long winter with sap coming from the earth turned Grandmother Mara into part-spirit, part-animal, and I avoided drinking that liquid seething from the tree. I believed it would make wood goblin fur grow between my toes.

Also in the spring, when the earth was still a mass of dried blades of grass and last year’s leaves—it all lay as it had fallen in December, squashed by the wet and heavy snow—but the mean sharp teeth of nettles were breaking through the old grass on sunny hillocks, Grandmother Mara went with a sack to collect the nettles. When she had picked all the young nettle leaves in the closest hillocks, she came back to make soup, meatless nettle soup, which was merely “whitened” with flour.

I watched her pick the nettles, and she seemed like a persistent herbivore who would outlive any predator, because predators cannot live without meat, while herbivores can get by on twigs, leaves, and buds. She was performing a ritual, feeding us food from the kingdom of the dead, where translucent shadows of those who died of hunger flitter around meadows and gather edible herbs, the first spring greenery, still as weak and thin as themselves. Once a year Grandmother Mara reminded us who we were and where we came from, which vegetative root was ours, for she, our ancestor, ate soup in the thirties that did not even have sorrel but only coltsfoot and birch bark.

Spring passed, and I forgot these thoughts; but in summer the wallpaper had to be changed in the dacha rooms. Grandmother Mara mixed flour in warm water to get a white, bubbling, slurping glue. She said there was a time when she would never have thought of using flour to make glue; she and grandfather would have sat by the kettle of glue mix, taking turns with spoons, and they wouldn’t have needed anything else, not even bread, just a pinch of salt.

Once, when she was busy, I took a spoonful of the mix and tried to swallow it; I threw up behind the shed. Maybe in other circumstances, I would have felt pity, thinking about her hungry past—but all I felt was her conviction that people should consume with joy the inedible, getting calories from glue, shoe leather, and bark, and I was inadequate, a pathetically weak descendant of real people.

I tried eating the soft inner bark of birches; I stole a leather belt and hid in the woods, trying to boil it in a tin can, waiting for it to soften, but I was unable to chew a tiny bit. I was hounded by the fear that in case of real starvation, there would be no gradation; I would immediately fall to the very bottom, would be forced to boil insoles of shoes, to catch rats.

My grandfathers could have taught me to retain my dignity, not fear hunger or war, live openly and boldly; but they were gone so long and so definitively, that I could only guess, catch fleeting accidental glimpses of what I had lost.

My grandfathers were taken by the war: one died from his wounds ten years after the victory, the other was lost, missing in action. They were both absent from my time, each in his own way: one had been dead a long time ago although he had been alive, the other seemed to have never existed at all.

I am sure that my grandmothers and parents remembered the grandfathers and spoke with them in their heads. But they never told me their biographies, never talked about them with me at all. If they had talked about one, who died, they would have had to talk about the other, who was lost, and for some reason they didn’t want to do that. So they preferred to keep both cloaked in silence. I reassembled my grandfathers in pieces, fragments of random recollections, the few remaining objects, without finding anything abnormal about it, thinking that everyone lived this way.

Our dacha was in a place where battles were fought in the winter of ’41. The Germans took the neighboring village, but not ours. The former line of the front split the dacha region in half. The trenches and foxholes of the frontline were filled in, but in the field and woods where the Germans had stood the grass and trees grew a little differently, a shadow fell on nature even on the sunniest days. I understood how dangerously close it was to Moscow: an hour on the commuter train.

There were still dozens of old blinds in the woods, big trenches for tanks. Kids weren’t allowed to play around them, for there were rumors that decades ago someone was blown up by a mine. But the trenches and foxholes didn’t elicit any desire to crawl through them, they were blurred holes filled with black rotting water that digested fallen leaves year after year.

Every little village in the area had an obelisk with a list of names and an inscription like “They Passed Into Immortality.” An artillery captain was buried near a local pond—either his unit had been stationed there or he had died on the spot. The grave was tended by the dacha residents and the villagers, but it was as if they were fixing something in their yard, so the repairs made it resemble more a rural sanctuary than a military memorial. A quiet neo-paganism arose in the region, a weakly pulsating cult of departed ancestors—“They Passed Into Immortality.” Essentially, the cult was very distantly tied to official events, fireworks, parades, gigantic monuments, and eternal flames; as if the universal sacrifice was so great that any memorial was rendered insignificant. Gradually all the ground that held the dead turned into a memorial and took on features of sanctity, blessed by sacrifice and blood.

In this cult my warrior grandfathers had become nature: a birch, bird, brook, grass in a meadow. The phantom shadow of the German presence, the trace of the extreme edge the Germans reached in their attack on Moscow, was stronger than the imaginary presence of the grandfathers. I tried many times to imagine that maybe one grandfather had hidden in this pit from gunfire and the other’s tank stood here, but I felt nothing. Without the support of real memory, it was just a failed attempt at self-deception.

But everything German attracted me. I had a morbid interest as one sometimes does in relation to something extremely repulsive: sores on a beggar’s leg or a dog hit by a car and smeared into a red spot on the asphalt.

Besides which, the symbols of the Third Reich, which were unceasingly preserved and refreshed for propaganda purposes in the Soviet Union, did not go through the stages of aging and decay that the Soviet military symbols, images, and heroes had experienced.

Soviet art had played itself out, the content was gone, leaving only the form. In some sense, what their soldier husbands had been like had already been told on behalf of my grandmothers; in any case, a solidly established canon had been imposed on us.

Grandfathers—all the dead—had been appropriated by the state and returned in the form of ideologically laden images; their death turned out to be the main justification for the regime.

Grandmothers might have risked going against the canon. But they could not go against themselves.

The men’s lot was to act, the women’s, to wait; men got arrests, battles, and death, women got suffering and the passive portion of existence. Naturally, this is an arbitrary distinction, but it makes something a little more clear.

The female line continued, through the grandmothers, while the male line was cut off with the death of the grandfathers. The grandmothers passed on only their views and understanding to their grandchild. They were afraid of history: involvement in history killed their husbands and brothers; you have to hide from history, snuggle deeper into the family circle.

Only the grandfathers could have given an example of historical courage, historical action, historical duty—but the grandmothers, I think, were afraid that such an example could be fateful, could push me toward a dangerous path, and unconsciously they tried to protect me from the grandfathers, to hide them and keep them away from the house, the family circle, which they might destroy accidentally. The grandfathers were turned into restless ghosts who came home to the wives but were not allowed through the door and given a corner in the barn, where the women slipped out to see them, keeping their presence a secret from the family.

I tried to imagine what my grandfathers would be like now, in my time. I went to the “Generals’ Building” on Sokol, whose terra-cotta bricks seemed to have been fired in a special flame so fierce that a fire truck had to be kept handy as part of the guardhouse. The walls displayed memorial plaques, with military leaders armored by rows of medals, and bas-reliefs of banners, weapons, laurel leaves, bayonets, funereal ribbons sprinkled with five-pointed stars; old men in uniform often strolled in its rectangular courtyard defended from the street by bastion walls, as if protecting the building from the winds of new times.

One time I saw two old men come out the heavy doors with cream-colored curtains, one in navy black and the other in blue summer uniform, four or five rows of medals and ribbons on their chests. They must have been an admiral and a general, both around seventy, they had started in the war as lieutenants, and now maybe they were friends, married to sisters, or maybe one had saved the other on the Black Sea or the Barents Sea, during the defense of Sebastopol or in military convoys; their highly polished shoes gleamed and the old men were smiling.

A Chaika limousine was waiting at the steps, it belonged to the admiral, I thought, and a boy a little younger than I in the backseat looked at them with longing and adoration. The admiral greeted his grandson with a smile, a squint, and a salute, while the pilot general spread his arms, long thin fingers stretching out of the sleeves—he was missing two fingers on his right hand—and pretended to be flying right from the steps to the car.

How I wanted to be in that boy’s place! I thought my desire was so strong that like a cuckoo I could push the boy out of his body and the old aviator would come down the steps pretending to be a plane for me. But with that feeling I realized that I would be betraying my grandfathers, denying them for the sake of inner well-being, and I turned away, bitterly leaving the boy in the Chaika his old men.

Grandfather Trofim was my mother’s father; I had seen pictures of him, heard a few stories, rather sketchy; I knew he was an officer, served in tanks, fought the whole war, and died in the mid-1950s from his old wounds.

In fact we were separated by only three decades. But a prehistoric man looked out at me from the photographs; his features and his uniform said that he had lived in some distant time of which there were very few remnants, things made solidly and out of indestructible material—cast-iron doorstops and irons, sewing machines on cast-iron pedestals, heavy nickel silver spoons.

Grandmother Mara kept his decorations in a candy box hidden under the linens in the closet. They were rarely taken out or shown to me, I think I saw them only two or three times, so I have no visual memory of them; I remember the weight of the box, which I was allowed to hold, and the feeling that Grandfather Trofim would not have permitted keeping his medals in a box with the word “Assortment” in gold letters.

There was an Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Red Banner, other orders, and a dozen medals. No one really knew how he earned them or where he had fought.

I imagined the orders and medals in rows on his chest, enveloping him with their golden glow; but each order meant a lot, “weighed” too much, and this excess of meaning that intensified the complex hierarchy of awards erected a solid wall between me and my late Grandfather Trofim.

Once I decided to steal the medals and hide them in a place known only to me, to bury them, because they outweighed the cemetery urn with light ashes, outweighed the fleeting memory of family, as if the medals acted in their own self-interest. On the death of their bearer, they became his executors, so to speak, acquired the right to speak on his behalf, and the other material evidence of his life—papers, clothing, personal trifles—lost out to the heraldic symbols. The medals wanted to be remembered, they stole Grandfather Trofim from me, they did not steal my memory but were the key to remembering him.

On our dacha plot, which Grandfather Trofim received from the government a few years before his death, he had time just to build the summerhouse and leave some symbolic objects, seemingly from a fairy tale.

Grandfather Trofim transplanted this oak from the woods, they told me, pointing to a big tree whose roots had spread to a third of the plot and suffocated the roots of other trees. The apple trees were being killed by the oak, but no one would consider sawing down this memory of Grandfather.

Grandfather Trofim dragged this stone from the woods, they told me, pointing to the enormous glacial boulder that looked as if it wouldn’t budge without a crowbar.

The oak and stone—Grandfather must have been bored in civilian life, performing these inexplicable exploits, measuring his strength against stones and trees, capturing them, moving them onto his land. He finally died of ennui, oppressed by this great weight, the weight of former feats; he wanted to be cremated. What he sought perhaps, in his weariness, was a definitive death.

I studied the statutes engraved on the decorations, which order was given for what; I fought the orders and medals in my imagination, forcing them to speak, trying to imagine the enamel Red Banner fluttering, how the soldier etched on the Order of the Red Star grabs my rifle and turns to me to tell me at last how my grandfather had fought. But the orders did not come to life and I just wasted paper by drawing battles. The grown-ups were touched by my dedication to Grandfather, while I suffered attacks of despair that increased on days commemorating military achievements: the same orders were depicted on posters, glowed in lightbulbs on lampposts, and gazed at me from postcards; silent and oppressive, they were given to me as coins in place of a monetary note, instead of memories of my grandfather, as if there had been an exchange of a person for awards at some unknown rate.

Grandfather Mikhail; no one ever mentioned his surname, I never saw any photographs or heard any talk of him; his name existed only in my father’s patronymic. It was as if he had never lived, had never met Grandmother Tanya, had no face, character, or habits, and existed only in documents, a ghost of the civil state. “Grandfather vanished without a trace” my parents replied curtly. It seemed that Grandfather Mikhail did not vanish in some specific albeit unknown part of the country, of the planet, but simply fell into another dimension.

Gradually I pictured a vicious circle of losses: the sergeant who buried the lieutenant on the battlefield died, along with the secret of his grave; in the hospital a private who remembered the village where the sergeant was buried also died, and so entire chains of human names died off; one, two, dozens, hundreds, and Grandfather Mikhail was there among them, on the dark side of memory.

The only object I knew for sure belonged to him was the medal “For Bravery” on a worn, shiny ribbon, alone, as if lost. It contrasted strangely with the box of orders and medals belonging to Grandfather Trofim, as if he had possessed numerous qualities that turned into awards, while Grandfather Mikhail had only one, irrational and infinite bravery, which led him too far, to the place from which no one returns, where people die without a trace; beyond the limits of the universe, where death is not an event that can reach the living.

As a child, I probably rarely noticed that I had absolutely no grandfathers. It had always been that way, and it did not seem strange; Father was born during the war, and in some sense he was its son, as if in the war a woman could become pregnant, as in myths and fairy tales, from a military wind, the stamp of a boot, the gleam of bayonets, from the stormy, tense atmosphere.

My father was born when all the men had gone off to war, and this collective departure of men and the subsequent return of the few somehow obviated the question of paternity, made it pointless. The boy was born into a circle of women, righting the deathly absence of men, equalizing the balance, as if life could not stand it and boys started being born on their own. What had been before the war was gone like burned archives, like the state of paradise, and there was no way back there even mentally.

I sometimes thought that my father’s patronymic was not real, it was simply that people had to have one. My father could have been Petrovich, Sidorovich, Ivanovich, Alexeevich, as if some office had supplied the patronymics to restore the proportional relations of names in the generation lost in war. He was registered in the name of the Mikhails who had died, in a redistribution of newborns among the dead soldiers, like posthumous rations, perhaps taking children away from living fathers for the benefit of dead ones, because the dead need descendants more than the living, they have no other way of perpetuating themselves. The silence of my grandmother and my parents was a sign to me that they knew about this government operation that changed the familial ties of the whole country.

Sometimes I thought that Mikhailovich was code, a cipher, a pseudonym; that Grandfather had existed, but lived the life of a secret agent, a spy, about whom one could not say that he existed; someone who worked for decades under a cover in a foreign land, who was anonymous even for those who worked with him.

Grandfather Mikhail was in army communications; that was all I knew about him, but I couldn’t tell if that was true or part of his cover story. There was a huge, nonworking radio receiver on legs at home; it had broken long ago, and the tuner moved the indicator to different marks for wavelengths and names of cities without effect. Father had wanted to bring the receiver to the dacha, set it up in the attic as a retro ornament, but Grandmother Tanya always stopped him gently. I thought this was a special receiver, that it had never gotten ordinary radio stations with music and news; it served another purpose—Grandmother Tanya was waiting for a signal from Grandfather Mikhail which had been delayed for decades, lost in atmospheric distortions.

I did not notice the exact moment when I started inventing Grandfather Mikhail the spy. The USSR was a joint creation of millions of nameless “authors” who spent a lifetime making this imaginary space, starting with children’s games of war versus the Germans or the Reds against the Whites; I made up Grandfather Mikhail because it was my obligation as a person entering the world of a certain culture. The culture had a ready-made plot of espionage as the search for the secret causes of the world, the revelation of the true face of reality; there already was the figure of the spy, the man who went abroad, beyond the known, into the transcendental.

In trying to find the truth, to understand the past of my grandfathers, I merely immersed myself deeper into the mythological sphere that had taken them from me; I was creating it myself.

I also did not realize that both grandfathers, while called that, were not grandfathers in age or spirit. How could they be grandfathers when they were only approaching middle age when they died, when they were young fathers? There was a generational gap, as if a scythe had swept away a certain age range.

This optical defect of generations must have been obvious to the sculptors who filled the country with huge figures of soldiers and goddesses of victory; having died young, these grandfathers were unsuitable for grandfathers; the further back in time their death retreated, the less power they had over our memories of them. And the greater the ease with which the place they should have held in history and the consciousness of their descendants was filled with phantoms, created by indifference to individual destinies, by the dark, earthy pathos of fraternal graves.

When I was still in kindergarten, one spring evening the teacher told some of us that we would be picked up by our fathers, and later than usual.

We were brought out after dinner to the playground. There was a truck and our fathers were unloading huge logs, bigger than they could embrace. It was almost dark but the sky still had the bloodred, troubling sunset, like a sign whose power was longer than a single day; it extended into the future. It was no longer the sky of a bedroom suburb of Moscow, it was the sky of a fairy tale, with endless fields with the severed heads of heroes and viburnum bridges, where the sources of living and dead water flowed, where the swift falcon flew beneath the clouds and the gray wolf leaped over ravines; the sky over the field in the stories that Grandmother Tanya read to me as she picked over the grains on winter evenings.

I quoted them, surprised that I had memorized them without even trying:

I quoted them and suddenly saw that the logs being unloaded and set down on the ground were fairy tale warrior bogatyr figures carved in wood. They were set up in lots of playgrounds, used as supports for swings, huts, and wooden slides. But with the approach of nightfall and the silent labor of men—the fathers were digging deep holes and mounds of dirt piled up, as if they were digging graves—the wooden fairy tale heroes looked like ancestor idols.

We children stared in confusion; that day we had been rehearsing for the Victory Day celebrations. We were given costumes—national costumes of all the republics of the USSR; each was symbolized by a single child, but the Russian Republic had several; the most fair-haired boys and girls were dressed in embroidered red shirts and long pseudonational skirts and headdresses.

We were supposed to sing the anthem lyrics, “Arise, enormous country,” and a few military songs. To help us learn them, they played records over and over, and by the end of the day I was full of the refrain “Let noble anger boil up like a wave, it is a people’s war, a holy war.”

This was not a song. The chorus voices grew stronger and crossed the limit beyond which the choir and the audience disappeared, leaving only the all-penetrating, earthshaking sound: “Arise, enormous country,” said the internal voice of the rampant universe.

When the wooden idol-knights were dug in, I realized that they could have sung “Arise, enormous country”: they grew on the field of oblivion, and no power on earth could save them from their spell, turn them back into living people.

I touched the closest statue and felt the firm dry wood; suddenly I understood that my father had never known his father and grandfather. For an instant under the crimson, dangerously open spring sky his drama, his double orphanhood was revealed to me.

Father was hypersensitive about order. Every item on his desk at home looked as if it had been placed there by someone obsessed by geometry, a paranoiac of right angles, who could detect even one degree of misalignment. It was the ultimate arrangement, as if each time he left he might not come back and therefore assembled his things so that he might remember them forever.

I never saw Father arrange anything on purpose or expend any effort to maintain that order; but I couldn’t say that it happened on its own. Without effort and without spontaneity, he created order by his very existence. When I was at home, alone at his desk, I lay in wait for the moment a book would be crookedly poised, hanging over the edge of the desk, as if I hoped to get through to my father via that gap of a few degrees.

Father probably became a brilliant specialist in catastrophe theory because of this sensitivity. I think that he “got” the world only in static forms; the fear of shifts, spasms, and drift made him a marvelous “earphone,” a human radar. I sometimes saw huge graphs on millimeter-squared paper on his desk, the teeth and dips of extremes, I saw Father bent over them, and I could sense that those teeth were digging into him, wounding him, and that he was suffering; as if an ancient chthonic creature, the god of chaos, had dug its claws or fangs into him.

He sought order, and not in the police sense of enforced regulation. Rather, he wanted the world to be fixed, once and for all. He spent a lot of time with maps, the principles of cartography, the compilation of map legends, the signs for depicting objects for seismically unstable regions. I think that unconsciously he thought of the world as a map on a scale of one-to-one. A map is a special kind of cultural object, in which reality is given in an ideal state, which can be imagined but never occurs in reality. Every map is a utopia and an anachronism, a moment of fixed time, it becomes obsolete the moment it is created, and in using maps we deal with a past that is specially organized so that it names and reveals itself.

He had the personality of a collector, a seeker of causal relationships that can be laid out on a baize-covered surface; minerals, shells, plants, stamps—he collected a bit of everything. The collecting could not become a passion because I don’t think he had any passion in him; a collection was the model of an arrested, compartmentalized universe—there’s a reason those drawers with sections resemble prison cells. The world as it is did not suit him, the world had to be repacked, made transparent, reduced to museum methodology.

Order was not merely observed at home; it was simply an expression of his figure, his character, his will. The collections—from badges to stamp albums—were external bastions, defensive walls protecting him from the unpredictable world around him.

As a development of his desire for order, he had an almost painful preference for symmetry. He kept trying to restore a disturbed inner balance, placing spoon and fork equidistant from his plate, setting the toothbrush mugs in the corners of the bathroom shelf, putting books in piles, performing numerous tiny operations with objects according to unknown principles—color? form? weight? application?—setting them up in pairs, one balancing the other to achieve a harmonic state known only to him.

He sought stability, steadfastness in daily life, sought it with such force that you guessed an unconscious fear behind it. Born in the war and four years old when it ended with Japan’s capitulation, Father must have developed a fear of history’s catastrophic nature, preferring times with no extreme characteristics, either positive or negative. After all, the period that was called “stagnation” in the history of the USSR was actually the realization of very definite hopes of the grown generation of children of the forties. And the generation of their parents.

I think that Grandmother Tanya, who lost almost all her brothers and sisters in the war, a widow, unconsciously brought up her son to be unobtrusive, even unnoticeable. I don’t mean she wanted him to hide from everything or become a gray creature no one was interested in. Grandmother wanted him to have a glorious fate and success; but a fate and a success that were providentially safe, the kind that were not entirely real.

I think that when he was born, she begged—this is a story for a Greek myth or a sermon—that her son never be noticed by the gods, neither with evil intentions nor with good ones. Her wish came true—the man instinctively avoided extreme situations that would bring him to the fore; a man of the firm middle ground.

She must have been horrified by her wish come true; but the gods could not intervene a second time, even if she asked—it would contradict the first, strict condition of their agreement.

I would think she was not the only woman to request that her child be saved from fate, that her child not be seen as a target for the forces of historical destiny hovering over continents and oceans; and she was not the only one who was heard after the great and terrible war.

In some sense (higher than the juxtaposition of faith and atheism) they were prayer-saved children. But who knows what such children miss, if this apparent protection they allegedly received meant being left alone, left behind, separated from life.

Not a Party member, not an activist, not a former adept of Communism, Father nevertheless accepted the USSR as an adequate form for his existence. The cumbersome state, historical, and cultural construct, incapable of development despite its progressive rhetoric, suited his profound need for stopped time, and the rest—the absurd ideology, the inconveniences of daily life, the absence of freedom—was a heavy but not impossible price to pay for that deep and crucial correlation.

Of course, there were times when the price was unbearable and to accommodate it, to survive, he created—and imposed—crazy ideas.

He had a central concept from which came his perceptions of people and his attitude toward life. I may be exaggerating by picking out only one aspect of a complex, but I remember the paralyzing effect that the word “willpower” had on me.

When I did not want to do something, did not understand why it was necessary, did not want to accept something imposed upon me as my own idea, could not allow someone else’s opinion of me to become mine, did not want to give up my sensation, feeling, mood, or thought, Father would say that I lacked willpower, and said it as if my very existence was a violation of a universal agreement and I was an indecent and shameful figure.

Willpower was an instrument of self-coercion that helped you survive in a place where your wishes and intentions were meaningless. Obstacles, barriers, and violence caused by injustice, stupidity, lies, and the absurdity of circumstances were seen out of any context that required a definite moral reaction: just a dynamic phenomenon, a useful piece of exercise equipment for that willpower.

Thus, a person could avoid protest and rebellion and accept all the circumstances and still preserve his dignity by the thought that he had overcome private difficulties, when in fact it was the monstrous way of life that had to be overcome. Rejecting it would have shown real willpower.

I believe it was academician Lysenko’s theory that cells are born out of unstructured “living matter.” He rejected the role of genes and DNA; his invented “living matter” was a tabula rasa in which external influences did not meet an invariant component, the conditional “selfness.”

Father’s “willpower” was like Lysenko’s “living matter,” presuming a person’s continual ability to mentally mutate and forget oneself.

With that, Father imagined “willpower” in purely inherited images of resoluteness picked up from industry, from metal work and turning lathes. The way to develop it was “working on oneself”: self-trimming, self-sawing with screeching metal and showers of sparks.

Only in Mother did I encounter the flexibility I so needed, the smooth transitions from approval to disapproval, a wealth of semitones in relations. She seemed to be made of a different material than everyone else—and I sensed that this was the source of her suffering, what made her vulnerable.

Mother often suffered from headaches. Today headaches are not perceived in the same way; advertisements offering healing fizzy tablets have done their hypnotic work. Back in the eighties, with scant medications available, a headache did not seem like an easy opponent. People talked about them constantly, shared home remedies, compresses, massages; it seemed that everyone—the schoolteacher, the old man in the bus, the woman in line, the barber, the doctor—all had a headache, and the pain sometimes subsided, allowing a few days of normal life.

It was the era of the headache, the pain was the sediment, the reflux of all feelings and thoughts.

But Mother had a particularly fierce pain that would last several days; the attack came unexpectedly, unpredictably. This suddenness and inability to determine the cause (the doctors could not give a reliable diagnosis) gave aesthetic meaning to Mother’s suffering; this was not an illness, it was pain—pure suffering situated in the head.

Neither coffee nor pills helped; she held her head with her hands, as if it had grown heavy; she moved through the room as if some power were twisting her muscles; she whispered in a changed voice, as if someone had possessed her.

I thought that someone else’s old pain, wandering the world, seeking a head in which to ache, was entering her. At one point I decided to track the pain and understand how it got into the apartment: Did it seep in through a door or window left ajar, did it sneak into her purse at work or the store?

I set traps for the pain, imagining it to be like a draft, and I hid behind the shoe rack when my parents came home in the evening, watching for a dense stream of air slipping over the threshold, moving the dust on the floor or the nap of an overcoat. While the grown-ups changed into house clothes, I looked through the grocery bag—would there be a strange object, would I notice something odd about a package of grain?

When the attack reached its peak, Mother, who was usually very controlled and unremarkable, suddenly was emancipated in her movements and revealed herself deeply and powerfully; she tolerated the pain without tears, moans, or complaint, but the pain removed the bonds of habit and seemed to reassemble her beauty, dispersed by every-dayness, and her nonmaternal femininity. One time I saw her holding her head with both hands, as elegant as a narrow pitcher, a sealed pitcher—the pain was not penetrating from outside, the pain was always inside Mother, in the vessel of her head.

During the attacks Father’s voice was subdued. And things felt freer, I guess; and I sensed and remembered that difference—it was supposed to just be quieter, but it became freer. I’m ashamed to say it, but sometimes I wanted Mother to have a headache because it gave a rest to feelings that were imperceptibly suppressed; the house grew calmer, gentler, there was a mysterious fragrance of carnation from the pungent Vietnamese salve that Mother rubbed into her temples, and her light wool blanket radiated warm, electrified waves that hushed street noises; the universe of the house changed orbit and revolved around Mother’s head. Hoping to reduce the pain, I would ask for it to be passed to me, but it would not, as if it could not go beyond Mother in a generational sense and stopped with her.

Grandmother Mara never had headaches, and I don’t think she ever pitied her daughter in her pain; there was only one time when I saw Grandmother with her during one of those attacks: she reluctantly embraced her and started reciting words, an ancient, flowing abracadabra about stones-oaks-winds-seas-tears-clouds.

The old woman was a whisperer and she was “whispering” the young woman; thanks to the ancient rhythms of the spell, I saw the female body as an entity made by nature for suffering. Grandmother Mara leaned toward my mother, embraced her, whispered conspiratorial words, ran her palms soothingly over her head, and you could no longer tell which hand was Mother’s and which Grandmother’s, they had melted into each other; Mother moaned weakly, and Grandmother Mara repeated the moan, wove it into the incantation. The outlines of the two bodies formed a lump of flesh, breathing clay.

Grandmother Mara broke off the whispering, pulled away, broke the clay body into two figures and, with regret and slight disappointment, regarded her daughter. Mother felt better, her face brightened, and her body seemed lighter, as if suffering was no longer weighing her down and had finally found a comfortable place inside her, free of everything that had resisted it. And now Grandmother Mara looked at her daughter with approval.

Order and pain—those were the family principles; I protected myself as I could from my father’s will, for he wanted to organize my life and make me like him, and I felt compassion for my mother. Naturally, my parents were the most important and closest people in the world for me, but with one exception—in the everyday moment, in measuring time. As soon as I began thinking of my grandfathers and feeling I was their descendant, the grandson in me started arguing with the son.

On those rare occasions when the grandson won wholly and fully, when I heard the tense silence of the wall of photographs in Grandmother Tanya’s room, when we picked through the grains and I thought every grain in Grandmother’s fingers was telling her something, my parents—as if an invisible power were transforming them—became strangers; the ones on the side of silence; my foes.

They had shut the door to the past and limited themselves to this day. There is probably a reason why the clearest memories I have are the winter weekend evenings devoted to laundry, the washed sheets hanging in the kitchen, dimming the already weak light; it was stuffy, and the stuffiness was made thicker by the darkness outside. The kitchen window was covered in steam, and I could spend hours wiping an opening in the condensation. It would cover over instantly, and I would clear it again. It seemed as if nothing existed in the world besides the kitchen, the smell of soup, laundry, and burned matches. Everyone, I thought, lives this way—scraping a small hole to see a little bit. It never occurred to me to take a rag and clean the window.

My parents’ life appeared to have an abundance of desires; much later, as an adult, I understood that what I had taken to be the grown-ups’ desires was not that at all.

The substitute for desire was necessity; the necessity of finding food, buying clothing, getting me into Pioneer summer camp; necessity and not desire was the spur to action. When, for example, there is an inescapable task—you must buy oil whether you want to or not—and there is a total deficit of everything that could be of any value, desires fade and are replaced by needs.

Another factor that was exhausting and stripped life of any profundity was the petty and absurd tyranny of necessities; there are shoes but you can’t find spare shoelaces anywhere, there are five pots of different sizes on the shop counter—what luck!—but not a single frying pan…

Whatever difficulties my grandmothers and grandfathers suffered in the thirties and forties, whatever deprivations befell them, the nature of those difficulties and deprivations were different. They could come in an endless succession, they could destroy you or break you, but they were serious, threatening, large-scale, directly linked to the historical fate of the country and the world, they bore personal and general meaning.

The quiet absurdity of life, on the contrary, destroyed destiny and grandeur, mocked steadfastness and courage, and demanded that you make yourself commensurate to it, reduce your dreams and become one with hard-to-get items. The world of needs and deficits spun a tiny web of the power of circumstances, in which people got trapped.

Deficit does not only mean a constant sensation of the absence of something. It creates a complex system of the ersatz, mandatory substitutions, a system of switching and redistributing functions and meanings. It makes every life situation chronically difficult, like a disease without a disease, which consists of intertwining and multiplying complications, because, in the final analysis, every thing and every phenomenon is not in its own place, its own niche, but is displaced to replace something missing.

This is the world in which my parents lived; I existed in this world as their son. And as a son I felt things I did not feel as a grandson.

Probably every Soviet family put their name on a list “to increase living space,” and they waited for decades, without a clear idea of what was happening at the head of the line. We were registered in a line like that. I sensed that we were links in a chain; someone was waiting for us to move so they could occupy our apartment, someone else had to move so we could obtain a new home. Our place in the world was defined by the line that lived its own life, simultaneously inexplicable and powerful.

At some point we began a countdown marked by the phrase “So when we move,” a countdown of postponed intentions, delayed plans, and we began living in the nonexistent new apartment we’d moved into, like furniture and objects, the best features of the present; but the line did not budge, and our hopes and dreams remained on the dubious shore of the future.

As a son I was also part of the line, sensing the pressure of its slow movement; our apartment belonged to the line, we were temporary tenants. I thought that my grandfathers would have found a different way to live, although I saw the neighboring old men who were certainly also in line. From my parents I could take only a lesson in tolerating this kind of life.

Some evenings—because meat patties, kotlety, were always cooked for dinner—Father took out the heavy meat grinder and attached it firmly to the table edge. Mother pushed the meat, thoroughly cleaned, through the neck. But it got stuck anyway, tendons wrapping around the blades, stalling the mechanism. Father took it apart and rinsed it, and then they started again; the ground meat was passed through a second time, and sometimes even a third.

There was something unbearably dreary in this struggle with the meat, which seemed to be taking posthumous revenge. Second-grade, and not very fresh, the beef set an example: the thick strong sinews were able to stop the blades—so one must grow sinews instead of muscles. That was more reliable than counting on spirit and heroism. You need the sinewy strength of a dying man, whom torturers will tire of beating, they will scrape their knuckles on him and give up. You have to grow up like that, not so much brave or strong as tough and unsuitable for dividing up, sinewy and cartilaginous so that your meat blocks the knives; so that life struggles with you and finally leaves you alone.

I imagined that my grandfathers had a different strength that allowed them to maintain dignity, and the grandmothers retained some reflections of it. Father and Mother had no strength of their own, but the powers of a great order, which I could only intuit, moved through them. That was another reason they were my foes; if my thoughts and strivings were revealed, my parents would make every effort to make me only a son and not a grandson; if they learned what I felt picking through the grains with Grandmother Tanya, how I waited for her to write the first line in the wordless book dressed in a brown cover, our evenings at the kitchen table would be banned and the book would vanish as if it never had existed.

I often sensed my parents distancing themselves from me, I saw that they were not with me in some situations; they handed me over to people or circumstances, transmitting someone else’s will, like puppets.

Kindergarten, school, hospital, Pioneer camp—they literally handed me over, silently acknowledging the right to take me. I’m not talking about a child’s experience of the alien and unfamiliar; this was a guess about the all-encompassing power of the state with its national anthem on school notebooks, October badges, Pioneer pledges of allegiance, friendship of the peoples, and concern for the health of Soviet children; a guess about the forms this took, forms that did not recognize the private yet could be softened through personal relations, but still powerful.

My parents sent me to school not only because they wanted me to study; it was as if another will was added to theirs, one that did not coerce them as much as paralyze their ability to even consider any other possibility, say, homeschooling me; that they, like me, were part of some universal obedience class.

In addition, the grown-ups talked about resolute action, self-reliance, and independence. But I knew, my sixth sense told me, that one day something would happen and my parents, who kept telling me that you have to stand firm and achieve your goals, would submit to someone else’s will, as if they had never lectured me at all.

There was another power to which my parents gave me up as well, perhaps without understanding it, a power as palpable as it was faceless, without a single specific source. It was like being left in a labyrinth and exposed to radioactivity without a mask, or special clothes, or a Geiger counter, or even a warning. It was a mythical labyrinth, a forest of signs, and you were forced to comprehend them on your own, for no one ever talked to you—either at home or at school—about the nature of the symbolic.

My parents worked for two years in Egypt on the Aswan Dam; they were taken on excursions to temples and burial sites closed to the public, to the pyramids and necropolises of animals. They had a crate of slides they brought back from there.

Sometimes on weekends they hung a sheet on the wall and turned on the projector, which smelled of ozone and the dust burning on the hot lens; and on the sheet appeared vanished yellow sands, the ancient god Horus carved of granite, the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen, the Temple of Karnak, the sphinx alley, Luxor, Amenhotep’s columned hall, walls covered in ash from the bonfires of Napoleon’s soldiers; and most important, the hieroglyphs, everywhere, as if all the surfaces were covered with a single, endless text.

The hieroglyphs and statues of Egyptian rulers, impossibly far from me in time and space, did not elicit intellectual curiosity but a profound interest and equally profound anxiety; I somehow knew their oppressive presence, their dead mysteriousness; I felt closeness rather than alienation.

But all my attempts to understand where that sense of recognition came from were in vain; sometimes I almost reached understanding by a physical effort—but each time I fell short by a step, a millimeter, a second.

Yet understanding did come.

The Pioneer camp where I was sent had a big storage area, a windowless cellar, where they kept bugles, flags, drums, banners, posters, and costumes. It was a big camp, with probably a thousand children; these props had been kept since the camp’s founding, it seemed—the administrators were probably afraid to throw them out or burn them, since someone could write an anonymous letter revealing that Soviet symbols were being destroyed at Camp X. The job of camp director must have been a highly desirable one; it was a good location, high on a bank of the Oka River, with a view of the flood-meadows, and so the administration preferred to save this arsenal of propaganda assets for an eventual inspection.

I was sent to help the cleaning woman sweep the storeroom; she gave me a broom and dustpan and went off somewhere. I was left alone in the dark space with burned-out lightbulbs; it was filled with cupboards, shelves, and boxes, the ones that might come in handy placed closer to the door, and farther back the old and dusty ones that were never touched.

The particularly disorderly disorder that comes about when various people use things only from time to time was rampant in there; small poles without banners, piles of gold fringe, spools of gold braid, rolls of faded red bunting, rolled-up banners, tarnished bugles, broken drums, hundreds of small flags with stars, tattered songbooks, white belts with star buckles, scattered cockades, plastic emblems of the USSR, and costumes—moth-eaten fur hats with red ribbons, a cloak à la Chapayev. The mess formed a shipwrecked mass. Drawings from camp contests were stuffed into various cracks, and they protruded like giant cabbage leaves, always with the same elements—red stars, Pioneers, flags, tanks, foxholes, hammers and sickles.

A spacious and innocent sunny day awaited outside, while here, in the musty cramped dark there reigned the senile promiscuity of things, the trash heap orgy of obsolete symbols. If there had been just one ordinary object, say a soup pot or an oar, the room would have resembled a storeroom, a collection of junk like the ones I’ve seen in dachas. But no—here there were only the tools of symbolism, abandoned, touched by the beginnings of corruption, when an object begins to fall apart but still maintains its form.

I suddenly realized that for each child in the camp there were three caps, one-and-a-half bugles, two drums, two banners, five flags, and fifteen posters; they manufactured them faster than they were used up, and they didn’t wear out, just got old and accumulated. You could explode trying to blow the bugle, hold a banner, wave a flag, carry a big sign, and play the drum at the same time.

“It would be fun to play grave robbers here,” an inner voice prompted; of course, my parents had told me about thieves in the Valley of the Kings who went down into the stone labyrinths, avoiding traps, and I often imagined myself as one—for I looked for secret places in my parents’ apartment, finding other people’s secrets, intruding on forbidden territory.

I had just decided to play at being a robber of subterranean Egypt when I bumped into something, and the whole edifice of things reaching to the ceiling made a cracking sound and began to list. It was enough to touch one thing for the rest to fall, held by nothing. A bank of shelves fell on me, and with it a mountain of emblems, banners, and drums along with folders of rules for Pioneer games and packets of pennants. They tipped me over softly and stiflingly, pressing me onto the floor, squashing me. I tried to climb out, then laughed: how ridiculous to be buried under this! But after three minutes my arms started going numb under the shelves, I was dizzy from the heat and dust, and most important, I didn’t feel like calling for help, not out of shame or embarrassment but from a worrying, unhealthy lassitude.

In a desperate need to free myself from the pile of dead things, I fought my way out, covered in dust and flakes of gilt paint, and ran to the river to let the flowing water wash away the decay of paper and fabric. Now I did feel like a thief who had made his way into an Egyptian tomb and was caught by dead watchmen; a thief who had not believed the stories of ghostly guardians and who then felt their spectral and yet fully real power.

Another event at the camp advanced my understanding even more.

In a playground surrounded by tall, dark firs stood an enormous portrait of Lenin.

I had seen many different depictions of Lenin, some I liked, some elicited no response. But the camp portrait was special. Triple the height of a man, it stood behind us during morning roll call; you sensed his gaze on the back of your head, pushing you down into the ground. I felt that the Lenin in the portrait knew I thought something about him that the others did not and he wouldn’t stop until he squashed me some day.

Lenin’s face—lips, cheeks, eyes—had melted downward and the forehead, huge, convex, filled with petrified thoughts, took up more than half of the head. The exposed gigantic forehead was horrifying, as if a great and terrible idea was pushing out the skull from within. When we were lined up under that portrait, I thought that Lenin’s head would burst any minute, and something bloody that had been living inside him, like a tapeworm, would crawl out; Lenin would die, but that thing would live.

Around that time, my parents gave me Nikolai Kun’s Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece, probably for the pictures rather than the text; once again, as with the Egyptian slides, I sensed that this was something familiar and once again could not understand why I had these feelings.

Lenin on the poster reminded me of someone or something; I imagined that once I figured it out, I would be safe; the very fact of comparison, recognition, would save me.

Enlightenment came unexpectedly; there must have been some preliminary hint, but I don’t remember it, I remember only how I understood, and gloried in the risky accuracy of the comparison, that Lenin was giving birth to the revolution the way Zeus gave birth to Athena!

I sensed instantly that I had performed an action for which my upbringing, education, and general life conditions had not prepared me; like a cosmonaut, I went out into space, a place where few venture.

The ancient Greek myth and the portrait at the Pioneer camp were one and the same. This was a powerful breakthrough; I was no longer defenseless before Zeus-Lenin, I knew what he was made of, I grasped the matter of his image, I had power over him; of course, not absolute power, but enough to protect me from his pursuing gaze from the poster.

The case with Lenin was more of an exception; more often my feeling about Soviet symbols was what I had experienced in the camp storeroom—lifelessness. I regretted that I had not lived in the times when the heroic legends were created, before there were children’s red flags and pins.

Every year my parents took me to the photographer’s studio near our house, where they had a small pink plastic horse, a toy Red Army stallion. It came with a yellow plastic saber in a blue sheath—the random motley colors proved that the toy was fake even as a toy—and a knit wool cap with an October star and a pointy top, a fake Budyonny broadcloth helmet.

Sitting in the plastic saddle you were supposed to raise the plastic saber over your head, as if riding to the attack; the photographer commanded “Flash!” with an important air and my parents squinted and smiled in satisfaction. For them, this was fun and the props seemed appropriate for my age. Maybe they wanted to even give me some historical images, a sense of connection to the past, in safe form. But for me, this was painful and insulting nonsense, as if they were intentionally mocking me.

Exposing me with plastic saber to the camera, showing the photos to friends—the shots were a guaranteed success and people always said that I would grow up a “real Budyonnovite”—my parents always hit me in my sorest spot, my secret desire to be someone’s heir, to take on a great fate, exploits, and glory; they stressed that this was a childish and insignificant game.

The plastic horse was popular at the photographer’s studio, because all the parents wanted to capture their sons on it, with the saber; while I was being photographed, someone was waiting his turn, hat-flattened hair being combed. But I was the only one of the kids to have seen a real saber!

One of my parents’ friends had a saber in a scabbard hanging on the wall; it belonged to his uncle, a Red Army commander who had started fighting back in World War I.

The scabbard was beaten up and scratched, as unattractive as the legs of our old dacha table that had been scuffed by boots for a century. At first I even pitied it, as if it had outlived its usefulness and had wandered around, falling on hard times, and it was kept out of kindness on the wall instead of in a trunk.

But once—Father was sick and stayed home while Mother and I went to visit—they took the saber down and let me hold it. I almost dropped it, it was so heavy. They took it out of the scabbard and it scraped the trim around the throat—and showed itself all at once, more than a meter long, with a lengthy groove in the blade, from the guard to the tip, tempered, with a violet-blue sheen and a patina of hardening.

The handle was at my eye level, and I imagined what that sharpened steel does to a body, how a single blow at a third of one’s power would cut me in half, vertically or diagonally. I understood the mechanics of a cavalryman, borne forward by the raised weight of the saber, the horse’s legs in unison with the chopping blows. I pictured clearly—as if someone else’s blood had come to play in my veins—that I could have been a soldier in the Civil War, a Red horseman.

“Born in the saddle,” “one with the horse,” they traveled through books and films. The best fighters of the Red Army, the spirit of the Civil War, warriors without front, rear, or flank, creatures covering forest and steppe in their maneuvers, appearing where least expected, turning upside down all the planned dispositions of troops; strange immortal creatures who cared nothing for time and space!

They forced me to sit on a factory-made plastic horsy on wheels, while I wholeheartedly wished for real things that could pass something along to me, without realizing that I sought them in a very contradictory way.

I was capable of simultaneously desiring my grandmother’s secret book and penetrating the space of silence, and also wanting to become a hero in a Soviet epic—a horseman from Budyonny’s army, a partisan of the Great Patriotic War, son of the regiment, the boy who handled the shells, the messenger for the underground who never named names when arrested.

The pendulum swayed continually, and I swung one way and then the other, living in two registers of perception, two planes of existence.

In one, the reality around me was a cardboard shell hiding the entrance to the real past; the cardboard did not protect from the terrible icy winds.

In the second, the secret of the past was not horrible, but entertaining; reality was a landscape of boredom and longing for great events, for exploits, as if our ancestors had performed them all, leaving nothing for their descendants to do. These two layers occasionally intersected, interacting in a strange way, but they still followed different paths.

The USSR, continually editing and reshaping its mythological past, was essentially a matryoshka doll of images and myths that sprouted from one into another; some formed cause-and-effect connections, others were pushed aside; inside each construction you could endlessly search for the truth, accepting the legends of the previous era which became the “real past” by virtue of seniority.

You could climb into a pit, descending deeper and deeper, without realizing that the entire construction was artificial; that was why you didn’t know where to put the spaces of silence, areas that were forced outside the limits of the Soviet universe.

The temptation was always there to admit that those spaces were nonexistent, that they were the fruit of my imagination; to seek myself only within the Soviet historical myths, to consider them as having a real existence.

In choosing myth, you acquired the richest milieu for self-definition, self-construction, for fantasy; in admitting the veracity of the spaces of silence, you found yourself alone, in a bare, viewless place. That choice was a constant motif throughout your life: constantly balancing on the edge, leaning one way then the other, flickering, living in incompleteness, rechecking your feelings: Who are you, a lonely, impotent spy or a rightful heir to the past, a Soviet Theseus who will find his sandals and sword under a rock?

The former demanded patience and the ability to live without hope, the latter, bravery and desperate belief; and so I took both paths, thinking I was taking one, unable to distinguish the obstacles along different roads.

By now there was a hint of the collapse, a brink-of-war disorder in daily life; things were definitely vanishing from hardware stores. The first to go were items that fasten—nails, screws, wire, cement, glue, without which boards and bricks are useless and pointless.

Father had a small shed at the dacha for his tools; there were also jars and tins with nuts and bolts. They were picked up on the side of the road or taken from things in the dump; every nut found on a dacha path, perhaps fallen off a bicycle, was examined for its thread, cleaned, soaked in kerosene, and then put in the appropriate jar. Bent lengths of wire, aluminum, copper, steel, of varying diameters and sizes, hung from long nails in the shed; wire was not bought, either, but found somehow. Going through an old structure, Father pulled out all the nails with a claw bar, straightened them with a hammer, and diligently saved them.

Of course, we collected old boards, planks from vegetable and fruit crates, pieces of baseboard—they could come in handy for the never-ending dacha repairs. But a quiet abnormality appeared only in the collection of things that could be called connective material; there was a huge shortage, as if the material world reflected the changes in the nation, in the political object called the USSR.

Grandmother Tanya also participated in the gathering of fasteners: she kept various buttons in round candy tins. Hundreds of buttons, matched and unmatched, cut from our own clothing or of unknown provenance; buttons from a military uniform, buttons with British lions, pretty mother-of-pearl buttons from a blouse, wooden toggles and huge plastic buttons from a fashionable ladies’ coat. You could probably use them to re-create the history of clothing for several decades or write dozens of novels—for example, a meeting between a man in a jacket with British lions on the buttons and a lady in a jacket with bronze clasps. I used to go through the buttons and try to imagine the fate of the people who had worn them, as if they were all gone and only their buttons survived them, hard, resilient, and huddling together.

Zippers, of various lengths, colors, and teeth, had their own place; together, there were enough buttons and zippers for a hundred articles of clothing. Grandmother Tanya, who had spent a lifetime working with paper and did not tolerate a casual attitude toward it, who knew the value of paperweights that protected sheets of paper from drafts and clumsy people and affirmed the fact that any movement of paper as document could be fateful—Grandmother Tanya kept stores of paper clips and paste.

All the grown-ups at home saved connective material as if it were part of a secret universal undertaking. But I, led by a different feeling, suffered in several ways over the diffusion and decay, the loss of wholeness.

At school, we also collected scrap metal; every quarter all the classes, including the lowest ones, went out to scour the neighborhood for lost metal—and always found some, even though just a few months prior, at the last hunt, we’d thought we’d cleared out every corner. But no, metal appeared out of somewhere, as if a huge mechanism had just fallen apart midoperation, with nuts and bolts and springs bursting from of its belly, ruining some of the mechanical connections, but the machine kept working without knowing that some essential parts were lost and no longer functioning. We went through yards, back lots of garages, collecting the remains of the machine’s self-destruction, so they could be melted down and made into new parts that would not repair the machine but could cobble it together enough to keep it going.

There was a political map of the USSR on the wall—I guess my parents wanted me to learn geography as well while I played with my grandmother. She was starting a quilt and had settled into an armchair beneath the map with all the pieces of fabric, scissors, needles and thread.

I had always seen the USSR as a whole. The rest of the world was fragmented, but our one-sixth of the world could not be separated; it was like an ingot.

Of course, the union republics were shown in different colors on the map. I had never paid any attention to their differences, it had never occurred to me to look at the map from that point of view; the Union as a whole absolutely predominated over the particulars, whatever colors and names they had.

But now—horrors!—I fell into a different dimension in which the USSR looked like the quilt Grandmother Tanya was sewing.

I was being cruelly mocked, given for an instant a jester’s vision that turned concepts into their exact opposites. The USSR could not, did not have the right, to look like a quilt!

The Union, “the indissoluble Union” of the anthem, was a guarantor of the dependability of the world in its everyday minutia: light in bulbs, beets in the store, ink in my pen, bus at the stop, tea in the pot, the postman’s ring at the door, a new coat for school—all that was the Union. Its existence affirmed that water would run, snow would melt, and sugar dissolve, as if without it, without its indefinable power, even simple physical processes would cease.

Yes, I did sense that an unknown force had cut short the life of my ancestors, had stolen the memory of them, that the three frogs “see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing” on Grandmother’s table showed how we really lived. But that was weakly related to my concept of the USSR; if the Union could be imagined as a person, I would have said that the USSR-man did not know what strange things were happening inside him.

I would have been happy to forget the image of the quilt Union, but I could not; it was deeply ensconced and periodically returned in waves of fear. The more I chased it away, the more clearly I saw that my usual picture of the world had developed a crack and that this was only the beginning.

The only domestic space I had not studied thoroughly was Grandmother Mara’s apartment. I visited only with my parents and I was always supervised, so even if I had a few minutes of solitude, what could I do in that time, especially when the adults were in the next room and could come in at any moment?

But Mother got a bad flu and I was sent to spend my fall holiday with Grandmother Mara. She was rarely home, it turned out, taking walks, visiting friends, and she did not insist that I accompany her.

At first, I was uncomfortable in her house—there was no place for books, neither shelves nor cupboard; only the book she was reading at a given time lay on her nightstand. I was surrounded by a world of fabrics—drapes, runners, tablecloths, napkins, antimacassars; the mass of her dresses, entangled and resembling a bud, pushed against the closet door.

Naturally, I searched her two rooms very quickly, but it was a disappointment. Besides the war trophy porcelain set, silk bedspreads, and sewing machine, the rest of the things were like idiot servants: stupid cups, stupid combs, stupid mirrors, stupid marking pencils, some of them old but still like newborns, without memories, unable to tell me anything.

I started watching Grandmother Mara; at home both my parents and Grandmother Tanya were beginning to suspect that I was getting into the wrong places, but they explained it as searching for sweets. Grandmother Mara didn’t know this, so if I watched her closely, she could lead me to the hiding place or the object that I did not suspect. To tell the truth, I wasn’t certain of success—Grandmother Mara’s straightforward nature did not give me much hope that she had a “false bottom.”

There was a storeroom near the toilet that served as a kind of Siberian exile. Things that survived from the past were kept there: a bag of bluing, a kerosene lantern, a suitcase of household soap, cast-iron irons, washtubs, dried up washboards, cabbage cutter, cleaver, spinning wheel, laundry baskets, lengths of unbleached linen. She forbade me to go in there—without explanation, just “no.”

Of course, one more ban when I had violated so many meant nothing. But when I approached the door in her absence, I remembered Blue Beard’s secret room. My hand froze as I reached for the doorknob.

I had peeked into the storeroom beneath her arm and it did not seem scary. But now alone in the apartment, where water coughed in the old pipes, I grew uneasy.

Back in the living room, I found the candy box with Grandfather Trofim’s medals, and I attached the Red Star to my shirt. I would not have done that before, but I needed support and security, and I was not usurping his award but using it as a sign of his protection.

With the star tugging at the fabric of my shirt and a flashlight in my hand, I entered the storeroom. There was a weak scent of dried-out soap and aging wood and metal. Empty jars filled the shelves, ready for summer canning, and they reflected the flashlight in dozens of flickers.

What was there to fear here, what should I be looking for? I was ready to leave, ashamed of my fear, ashamed that I needed to put on the star, when I noticed that the washtub seemed to be covering something.

Beneath was a large square object wrapped in worn oilcloth and tied with string. Grandmother Mara knew how to make clever, complicated knots, she said Grandfather Trofim taught her when they had to move and pack up; Grandfather Trofim was a soldier and he probably knew how to tie up a prisoner and join two steel ropes to pull a truck out of a ditch; a genius of the small skills that evince human reliability.

It was a difficult knot that showed she used what she learned from Grandfather Trofim. I knew I would not be able to duplicate it, my fingers would get lost in the loops, forget which end of the string went where. The knot would give me away—if I tied it my way, Grandmother would know that someone had been in the secret place under the washtub. But I also knew: if what I was seeking, what I needed, was there, then I would be able to re-create the knot. I didn’t know the way now, but afterward I would. I pulled on it.

Under the oilcloth was a row of dark burgundy volumes with gold inscription, obviously old, overly large, as if books had degenerated since then.

With the tenacity of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Hittite cuneiform writing, the gibberish abracadabra, the deepest secret transcribed into ordinary letters struck my eyes: A to ACONEUS, ACONITE to ANT, ANTARCTICA to BACON, BARBARIAN to BEDLAM, BOREDOM to CANADA, DELHI to DYNASTY, and so on to HINDI to IMPERIALISM. Here the row of leather-bound books, ornamented in gold letters, stars, sheaves, and machine gears, broke off.

My soul heard the echo of the words Nonpareil and Cicero, the ghost of my previous self-deception.

I could not resist those consonances, I could not get enough, and my recent disillusionment had not been a lesson.

This was the GSE, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in the 1920s-1930s edition. I perceived the GSE as a great book of spells fallen into the hands of an underage ignoramus; there were missing volumes, as if someone tried to destroy them. Who? People? Time?

I was not bothered that among the unfamiliar and clearly magical, unreal, secret words, there were familiar ones like Germany and Iron. I understood—discovered—the real setup of the world, where Germany or Iron, the names of countries, things, and actions, were merely a small part of the truly real, where iron is connected to imperialism (a connection it was possible to imagine), deficit with Donetsk, and Germany with the mysterious Gerhardt.

The encyclopedia contained names of vanished things and like the International, its language was the language of ancient magic, but power had deserted these words. Not knowing how many more of these books remained, I assumed that perhaps I was seeing the only extant copy in the world, a gift from the gods of the past to me.

Comprehending nothing, incapable of figuring anything out, I spent the remaining days at Grandmother Mara’s reading the GSE the minute she stepped out the door, intoxicated by the smell of old yellow paper. I had stepped on the Atlantis of books, the continent of the past that had floated up from the ocean depths. Gradually there appeared a world about which I knew nothing. Those names, phenomena, and events did not exist in my time, or if they did, I intuitively sensed that they were presented in a completely different way.

At home with my parents, I often read the SSE, the Small Soviet Encyclopedia published in the 1960s, primarily out of a superficial curiosity, the empty passion of an erudite. And that helped me so much; numerous people the GSE wrote about with a view to eternity did not figure at all in the SSE. Geographic and scientific concepts were the only things the encyclopedias had in common.

I thought that if one were to read the entire GSE, aloud, like a prayer, even without understanding the meaning, the reading would give birth to, create the USSR, the forgotten Soviet Union of the twenties and thirties, gone into the past.

In one of the volumes I found a dry maple leaf, and lazily wondered what happened to the tree from which it fell; I doubt it survived. I shivered with foreboding; what if the past that gave rise to the encyclopedia does not exist at all? What if it wasn’t preserved at all except in this one book?

It didn’t give me pause that Grandmother Mara, who didn’t like to read and would have trouble with encyclopedia articles, had the GSE. An encyclopedia that survived by accident should be kept by a person who would never be considered a Guardian. Maybe Grandmother Mara didn’t even know what was in the package, maybe she’d never looked, following Grandfather Trofim’s orders.

The flyleaf of each volume was the color of dark straw, like the soldiers’ uniforms in the 1940s. Against that background, bright crimson thorny vines twisted into a single pattern, looking both like branches of a prickly shrub and barbed wire; not an abstract design or an ornamental element, it was a naturalistic depiction, a martyr’s epigraph to the book, doubling, tripling its weight and significance, as if the knowledge it contained had been paid for in blood.

In the list of editors, I knew only two names: Kuibyshev, also the name of a city, and Schmidt, who gave his name to an iceberg—a polar explorer, organizer of all the northern expeditions, conqueror of the Arctic, and creator of the drifting North Pole Station. I remembered that when the volume I held in my hands was published, Schmidt was in the Arctic, exploring the Northern Sea Route, and could not have worked on the encyclopedia, where he was listed as editor in chief. I knew that for certain, because I had read a lot of books on polar explorers—the Arctic, the great white “nowhere,” was a blank page perfect for manufacturing ideal exploits and heroic figures, and those figures, without an ideological sell-by date, were still featured in books and films in my day.

That meant the GSE had been made by the rest, the unknown people whose names were preceded by the red thorns on the fly-leaf. I reread the list twice, and I found two names—Bukharin and Piatakov; I couldn’t remember how I knew them, but they must have slipped through the conversations of adults, flickered like ghosts, outside time or context; ghosts surrounded by an aura of greatness, or significance, or tragic death, or betrayal and villainy, or maybe all of the above.

Juxtaposing the celebrated fate of Schmidt and Kuibyshev with the silence and obscurity surrounding the others, I began to understand that the USSR I knew and inhabited was just a copy, a piece of the other, earlier one. I set my flashlight on the floor and on the very first try I replicated Grandmother’s tricky knot on the package. I was right, it was intended for me.

When I returned home after my school holidays at Grandmother Mara’s, I went to the Small Soviet Encyclopedia and I did not find Bukharin or Piatakov; instead, there were articles on Bukhara and Piatigorsk where their names should have been.

The inviolably singular USSR was shaken; I had never heard the Soviet Union used in the plural, it was impossible, contradicted the dependence of the world upon the singularity of the USSR; but I risked it—slowly, with difficulty, as if pushing those gigantic stone letters, I said to myself: USSRs. Two USSRs. That USSR. Today’s USSR.

USSRs.

Now I kept asking to visit Grandmother Mara. My parents were happy, they thought I had gotten over my dislike of her. What I cared about was being near the secret books hidden in the storeroom and watching Grandmother Mara: Had she guessed I had been in there? Did she know what she was concealing? Grandmother continued her everyday life, so ordinary that I wondered if I had dreamed up the hidden ancient encyclopedia.

I was counting on spending the winter holidays at Grandmother Mara’s so I could get back to the GSE. To keep my parents from denying my as-yet unvoiced request, I worked on my studies and ended the quarter with excellent grades. But the night I brought home my report card and was about to ask at dinner to stay at Grandmother Mara’s, my parents beat me to the punch, exchanged a cheerful look and announced that because I had done so well at school they booked us a stay at a boardinghouse and the school had awarded me an invitation to the New Year’s celebration at the Kremlin.

I don’t think they understood my disappointment, which I was unable to hide, and I explained it as the result of being overworked at school, but they were hurt I didn’t appreciate the gift. I was in their power, and I reflected sadly that this must be how it is—a secret book is opened only once, and whatever you did not have time to learn from its pages is gone forever. How angry I was at them, unwitting accomplices of a life arranged to hide secrets! I meekly agreed to go on vacation and to the Kremlin party; I was even forced to pretend to want to go so my parents wouldn’t start wondering why I was so eager to spend the holidays at Grandmother Mara’s, which I’d never wanted to do before.

In the final days of December, Mother and I moved into the vacation boardinghouse, planning to return to Moscow for one day, for the party. Snowy woods, early dark, cartoons in the hall, and other children to play with—Grandmother’s storeroom was shunted aside, disappeared, the great GSE volumes vanished, leaving only the role of child enjoying the holidays, which I grew into.

I did not want to go to the Kremlin but was afraid to say so, for the party at the Palace of Congresses was a kind of unmatched peak in a Soviet childhood, the highest recognition of achievements and reliability.

I had never understood the festive crowds on Red Square gathered for the fireworks; the space was dangerously exposed to the winds of ancient times. O, how empty and terrible it was in early morning bad weather, the navel of the earth from the ascent to the Museum of the Revolution down to the Vasilyevsky Slope, a place where the curvature of the globe is clearly visible! The body of the square looked to me like the squashed chest of a bogatyr, the scales of his armor the cobblestones, and in the corner lay his chopped off head, the round Execution Place. Saint Basil’s Cathedral blazed like a funeral pyre, the spiral designs on its domes combining war helmets and the multiple heads of a dragon; a place of ancient battles, a place of executions, its cobbles buckled by the wild forces of the earth beneath it; a place of victims and funeral feasts. Across the square, by the wall, stood the Mausoleum ziggurat; the tense diagonal between Execution Place and the Mausoleum burst open the square, turning it into a parallelogram, making an already distorted space even more lopsided. How could anyone stroll around Red Square without anxiety?

From the warmth and light of the boardinghouse Mother and I stepped into the frosty early twilight, the icy dark hole of December, and took the long walk to the train. Snow-filled forests and fields surrounded us, we saw only occasional lights, and it was hard to believe that a big city was only a dozen stations away. Time did not exist for these woods and fields, they were the same as they had been centuries ago. Daylight made them charming, they were suburban, filled with vacationers, but in the evenings, when the last skiers hurried to the train, they became wild again, lost in snowy expanses, stolen by the dark.

The day before we had gone on an excursion to an old nearby estate, the mansion yellow and white, with columns at the main entrance and sculptures in the parkland, but now I thought that the estate was gone, the trees visible in the daytime were gone, and we were walking on a road from nowhere to no place. We might run into horse-drawn sleighs from the last century, and so we had to firmly believe that a railroad station awaited us at the end of the road and that we had left the boardinghouse behind us. Otherwise we might not reach our goal or find our way back.

We reached the station, Mother led me by the hand confidently. The commuter train, covered in frost and battling dirty winds, rattled along, its irrational mechanical heart beating in the engine car, while the darkness beyond the frosty windows gathered, turning into corners of buildings, platforms, and people in the light of streetlamps.

The noise, crowds, and marble of the metro closed in on us and then threw us out near the Kutafya Tower by the Troitsky Gates of the Kremlin.

We passed through the Kremlin walls. I had been transported from the rarefied air and timeless darkness of the forests outside Moscow and now I was immured in stone—the towers, walls, crenellations, chimes, the brick ensemble of the Kremlin oppressed me. The sight of the Ivan the Great bell tower, the towers and cathedrals floodlit by klieg lights against the sky was so powerful I thought my ears would ring and my nose would bleed. It was impossible to breathe there, impossible to feel, because my feelings were in spasm.

One sensation did get past the spasms—the Kremlin could see me, even though it was incredibly large and I was insignificantly tiny; it was indifferent to the other people walking next to me, but I had a flaw which the citadel could sense.

At the time, I was sure that the Kremlin had been built in the Soviet era; this belief coexisted without contradiction with the knowledge that the chief architectural symbol of the Soviet Union was much older. The red brick walls and ruby stars made the Kremlin an incarnation of the Union, the chimes on Spassky Tower counted out the hour in the enormous country; it wasn’t the symbol of Soviet power, it was simply power.

I realized what the Kremlin knew about me; it knew about my vision of the patchwork quilt Union, it knew I had opened the secret, banned book of the GSE and had spoken the impossible word “USSRs”; it exposed me—How could I have not foreseen it, how self-reliantly and forgetfully had I risked venturing inside its walls!

For an instant I thought guards would ask us to show our tickets again and they would find a problem; we would be separated and led away. I thought back to the guesthouse where our clothes were drying on the radiator and suddenly saw other people in our room, other clothes drying after a ski outing.

The hallucination passed but the Kremlin’s gaze remained.

In the lobby of the Palace of Congresses teenagers were helping the arrivals; they were dressed in Pioneer uniforms even though they were too old to be Pioneers.

One of them, tall, handsome, wearing the Pioneer outfit as if it were a military uniform—I even thought he might have had it made in some expensive shop, otherwise the baggy trousers and too-short jacket would never have fit that way—pointed out our section of the coat check and turned away, as if we were bothering him with trifles and had called him away from his important post. The white wavy curtains on the huge windows, the immaculately clean collar of his white shirt, the dashing drape of the red tie, the crease in his trousers and his pointy shoes—the Palace would have made him the gatekeeper, and he liked being in the Palace, he liked telling people where to go. This was his party, his evening, and for a second I wanted to be him, to feel as comfortable and confident in the Kremlin.

We were seated close to the stage. The performance began. Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, was kidnapped by a villain, the usual plot, and all the children screamed: “Come out, Grandfather Frost!” clutching our cardboard gift boxes with the sticky smell of chocolate. I had an acute sense of the meaninglessness of the party, the play, Grandfather Frost, the costumed actors, fake beards, confetti and paper spirals, the shiny tree ornaments; I had aged in minutes and was weary with monstrous adult ennui.

My childhood was over—I had dreamed of it so often, but now I sat, deafened, confused, feeling the unwavering gaze of the Kremlin, practically hoping they would take me away and lock me up with others like me.

My childhood was over; still, I did not regret opening the forbidden book—if they did not take me from the concert hall, did not lead me by the elbow as we were leaving, there would be events arising from my contact with the book, and those events were near! The new year was coming, and for the first time it would truly be new, not like the previous ones that followed the same pattern.

Discoveries and unknown sacrifices awaited me, perhaps the sacrifice of my life—the gaze of the Kremlin supported that possibility—but I was naively prepared to make sacrifices, even wanted them, delighted that this desire found approval from the Kremlin.

Two days later, when the television showed the chimes of the Kremlin marking the last minute of last year, I no longer felt its gaze. A blizzard raged around us, I slipped away from my mother to run outside, to touch, to hold the first snow of the new year. Cold penetrated my hand, I heard the thrum of guesthouse residents behind me, and I stood looking out onto the illuminated emptiness of the tree-lined lanes.

My time had come.