When you first start to read, it's not the text that steers your thoughts, but your thoughts that steer the text. The tear always runs through the most interesting part, and if you find out from a piece of newspaper how the audience greeted comrade this and comrade that with applause, you start thinking what real big shots these two must be if even their comrades give them a special greeting with some kind of applause. And you close your eyes and start to imagine these comrades and the applause, and you manage to live a whole little life that is completely hidden from those sitting on the neighboring cans. And all this thanks to a piece of newspaper the size of one side of a tea box and imprinted with the sole of a boot. And if an actual book falls into your hands, that's an experience unlike any other. And it doesn't matter what kind it is—there aren't many of them here, five or six, and you read each one several times—and the reason it doesn't matter is that each time you read the book differently. At first it's the words themselves that are important, and they're all immediately followed by a flash of the thing they denote ("boot," "can," "quilted jacket") or a meaningless, gaping blackness ("ontology," "intellectual"), and you have to go to one of the grownups, which is something you'd always rather avoid, so as a result ontology turns into a flashlight and intellectual turns into a long monkey wrench with a changeable head. The next time you start to wonder about entire situations: how a certain person tramps heavily into the stinking closeness of a kitchen and with strong worker's fists clobbers the simpering, odious face of the waiter Proskha. There isn't an adult who, after reading this, wouldn't for an instant turn into that righteous guy, the worker Artyom, every time the usual foul-breathed circle gathered around the latest victim, one after another taking a little step forward and putting all their hatred toward the simpering, waiterly thing flailing about in the center into their blows. Probably there has never been a single beating where righteousness did not triumph. And later—the third time—you find a description of how on the top plank bed some girl is breathing hot and heavy, and now that's the only thing you notice. You have to grow up quite a bit before you understand just how dull and squalid all that you managed to read so many times really is.
You're happy in childhood because that's what you think when you remember it. In general, happiness is recollection. When you were little, you were let out for the entire day and you could go down all the corridors, looking wherever you wanted and wandering into the sorts of places where you might be the first person since the construction workers. Now this is a closely guarded memory, but back then—it was just: you walk along the corridor and feel sad because winter is starting again and it would almost always be dark outside the window, you turn a corner, and just in case you wait while two foul-mouthed sheepskins lumber along an adjacent corridor, and again you turn into the door that is always closed, but today is suddenly wide open. There's some sort of light at the end of the corridor. It turns out that along the wall here there are two stout pipes covered in plaster and even painted. And at the end, there, you can see light and a metal trapdoor is open, below something is humming, and when you carefully bend over the trapdoor you see some huge blue machinery that is shaking and droning ever so slightly, and beyond it there are two more of the same, and nobody in sight: you could even climb down the ladder right now and find yourself in that magical space that's quaking from all the power concentrated here. The only reason you don't do this is that when you have your back turned they could close the door at any moment, so you head back, dreaming of one day making your way here again. Later, when you start to come here every day, when taking care of these unsleeping metal turtles becomes the nominal purpose of your life, you often have the urge to remember how you saw them for the first time. But memories wear off if you use them too often, so you keep this thing—about happiness—in reserve.
Another memory that you hardly use at all is also associated with the conquest of space. This is probably something that happened earlier: one of the side corridors, a winter day (the window is already bluish: it's starting to get dark), silence throughout the entire, huge building—everyone is at work. It seems that truly nobody is there. This is obvious from the way everything looks. Grownups change whatever is around them, but now the dusky corridor is uncommonly mysterious, nothing but shadows—it's even a little scary. They haven't turned on the lights yet, but it's almost time, and you are able to indulge in a rare pleasure—running. You start running from where the fire emergency instructions are posted in the corridor's dark dead end (the instructions are very strange—a picture of an axe, a fire hook, and a bucket, done in oil paints), and for a while you zigzag along the corridor, savoring the freedom and ease with which you can force the wall to incline, advance, or retreat—and all because of the tiny little commands you're giving your body. But the most astounding thing, of course, is the turn to the right into the short branch of the corridor that ends in a window covered with wire mesh. A whole twenty meters before you get to the corner, you heave to the left wall, and when you catch a glimpse of the laminated door marked Valve 15-S across the hall, you peel away from the wall and, tracing an elongated arc, lean sharply to the right—and these few seconds when your right side is almost suspended over the floor tiles give you freedom unlike anything else. Then you easily fly through the remainder of the corridor and, sticking your fingers into the wire squares, you look out the window: it's already dark, and over the fence, whose posts are topped by tall hats of snow, a few cold blue street lights are glowing.
Noises coming from outside the window are of a completely different nature than those that are generated somewhere inside the corridor or on the other side of a partition. The difference is not so much in the properties of the sound itself—loud or quiet, sharp or muffled—but in what brings it to life. Almost all noises are produced by people, but noises that originate inside a huge building are perceived as if they were the intestinal rumblings or the cracking joints of a huge body—in other words, since they are so familiar and explainable, they're of no interest. But what comes from beyond the window is almost the only evidence that a whole other world exists, and every sound from there is extraordinarily important. The auditory picture of the world has also managed to change a great deal since childhood, even though its main components remain the same. Take an ordinary sound from outside the window: the distant, resonant pounding of metal on metal, about two or three times slower than a pulse. It has a very interesting echo: it seems as if the sound is coming not from any single point, but from the entire arc of the horizon all at once. The very first thing this pounding was—back when you could still sleep past the general wakeup—was the time scale or even the external point of reference that gave the grownups' evening tussle and the morning face-smashings their necessary duration and sequence. Later, that measured clang turned into the beating of the world's heart and remained so until such time as someone said that it was the sound of piles being driven into the ground at construction sites. Also among the sounds you can make out the drone of far off machinery, the wail of the switch engine in the sorting yard, voices and laughter (very often of children), the hum of airplanes in the sky (there is something prehistoric in that hum), a sound generated by the wind, and, finally, the barking of dogs. They say that there used to be a way to communicate with the person in the next cell (there was just one person per cell—it's hard to believe such a thing is possible): the person in the first cell began to tap on the wall in a particular way, encoding his message in the sequence of taps, and he got a response from the person in the next cell using the same code. This must be a legend—why would you make up a special language when you can talk things over just fine at the work sites? What's important is th idea—conveying what you want to say by tapping some combinations that seem utterly meaningless through the wall. Sometimes you think—if our Creator wanted to tap back and forth with us, what would we hear? Probably something like the distant sound of the pilings being beaten into the frozen soil—definitely at regular intervals, because using t
he Morse code or something like that just wouldn't seem right.
The more grownup you are, the less intricate the world becomes, but there is still a lot that's incomprehensible. Even the two squares of sky in the wall (sky if you sit on the lower planks, but from the upper ones you can see the tops of distant smokestacks). At night you can see stars through them, and during the day you see clouds, which raise quite a few questions. The clouds have been with you since childhood, and so many of them have been born in the windows that you're always surprised when you encounter something new. Now, for instance, in the right-hand window an expanded pink fan is hanging (it's almost sunset), consisting of a multitude of feathery stripes—as if made by all the world's aviation (incidentally, I wonder what the earth looks like to those who do their time in the heavens), and in the left-hand one the sky is outlined as if with a crooked ruler. It turns out that today the infinitely distant point from which the wind blows is straight opposite the right-hand window. That probably means something and you just don't know the code—there you have it, tapping back and forth with God. There's no mistaking it. You also can't mistake the meaning of what's going on when a fuzzy spot appears on an opaque November cloud, a pale irregular triangle (you've seen it before, one summer morning on the bricks near your face), and from its center the sun is shining through fast-moving bands of fog. Or in the summer—a red hill that takes up half the sky over the horizon (only from the upper planks). There used to exist many things and occurrences that were ready to reveal their true nature at your first glance—actually, almost all of them. When a photograph of the prison taken from outside (presumably from the watchtower over the candy factory zone) was passed around, it was hard to understand what the older cons were so stunned about—was this really the most amazing thing they'd seen in their lives? The eternal piece of bad cake, the familiar stench from the cans, and naïve pride in the abilities of human reason. But you can tap back and forth with God. After all, answering him just means feeling and understanding all this. That's what you think in childhood when the world is still being constructed out of simple analogies. Only later do you understand that you can't talk with God, because you yourself are his voice, gradually becoming more muted and quieter. The same thing is happening to you, if you think about it, as happens with someone's shout that reaches you from the courtyard where they're playing soccer.
Something was happening with the world where you grew up, every day it was changing a little bit, every day everything around was taking on a new shade of meaning. It all started with the sunniest and happiest place on earth, home to people slightly ridiculous in their attachment to kirza boots and black quilted jackets—ridiculous, and all the nearer and dearer for being so, it started with the joyous green corridors, with the cheerful play of the sun on the peeling wire mesh screen, with the desperate twittering of the swallows building their nest under the eaves of the tin workshop, with the festive roar of the tanks crawling on parade (even though you can't see them through the fence, you can tell by the sound when it's a tank going by and when it's a self-propelled gun), with grownups' chorus of laughter in response to some of your questions, with the smile of a guard who runs into you in the corridor, with the wagging tail of a huge German shepherd running up to you. Then the very best things begin to gradually fade: you begin to notice cracks in the walls, the awful stench from the food unit, particularly disgusting because it's there every day; you begin to guess that beyond the fence you've known since childhood with its freshly puttied pockmarks there exists some sort of life—in other words, with each new day there are fewer and fewer questions about your true fate that remain unanswered. And the less that remains hidden from you, the less grownups are inclined to forgive you your purity and naivete, and it turns out that even seeing this world is enough to sully you and implicate you in all its abominations—and in the evenings frightening things turn up in the blind alleys of corridors and the dark corners of cells. And out of the rippling fog of the childhood that is receding from memory, an understanding emerges—as if the focus had been adjusted—of the fact that you were born and grew up in prison, in the filthiest and most putrid corner of the world. And once you have thoroughly understood this, you come under the full force of your prison's laws. But so what? The point is that it is not people who thought up the world—however they might try, it is not within their power to make life for the lowliest prisoner any different from that of the superintendent. And what difference does it make what occasions it if the happiness manufactured by souls is all the same? There is a happiness quota allotted to a person in life, and whatever might happen, you can't take that happiness away. You can talk about what's good and what's bad only if you at least know by whom and for what a person has been engineered.
Objects don't change, but something disappears while you're growing up. Actually, it's you who loses "something," every day you irreversibly pass by the most important thing, plunging downward—and you can't stop, you can't halt your slow freefall to nowhere—all you can do is pick out the words that describe what is happening with you. The opportunity to look out the window is not the most important thing in life, but you still get upset when they no longer let you into the corridor—you're almost an adult, and by the holiday you'll get kirza boots and a quilted jacket. Of the multitude of panoramas once available, you now only have constant use of one (you can see the same thing out of both windows at slightly different angles), and you can only admire it if you tilt a short bench against the wall and stand on the edge of it: the courtyard enclosed by a short cinder-block fence, two rusted busses—probably just the remains, resembling dead wasps—yellow membranes empty on the inside, the long building of the neighboring prison with its semi-circular brown roof, and beyond that, the really far-off prisons and the sky, which occupies the entire remaining portion of the quadrangular opening. The things you have seen every day for many years are gradually transformed into monuments to yourself—to what you were once upon a time—because they bear the stamp of feelings that belonged to a person who has almost entirely vanished, a person who appears inside you for a few moments when you see the same thing that he once saw. To see—what this really means is superimposing your soul on a standard imprint on the retina of a standard human eye. They used to play soccer in this yard, they fell, they got up, they kicked the ball, and now all that's left are rusted busses. In truth, since you started to go out to work with the others you've been too tired for anything inside you to come alive that's even capable of playing soccer on your retina. But whatever universal change of underwear might lie ahead, nobody can deprive anyone of the past they saw (the former you, if that means anything at all), standing on the teetering bench and looking through the window: a few people are passing a ball around, they're laughing—their voices and the sound of feet hitting leather reach you with a short delay, one unexpectedly breaks out ahead of the others—he's wearing a green t-shirt—and moves the ball toward a goal made out of two old tires, shoots, falls, and disappears from view, and the cries of the players reach you. Amazing. In this very same cell a little prisoner once lived who saw all this, and now he is no more. Apparently escapes are sometimes successful, but they are always shrouded in complete secrecy, and where the escapee is hiding, nobody knows, not even the escapee.
Translation by Nora Seligman Favorov
Notes for Ontology of Childhood
1. A multilayer, cotton-based fabric treated to resemble pigskin that is used to make military boots.
Joe Juan
Ludmila Petrushevskaya
The things Joe told about himself got no reaction from his listeners—none whatsoever. Everyone sat there dumbly, eating and drinking, unable to take in his information.
He's an old friend. What's more, the host of the gathering, the head of a family, is his employee. And what does Joe do? He comes in and laughingly relates that the twelve-year-old daughter of his other friends (name not divulged) is sleeping with him. How do you react to that? You can't just say, "You
're a child molester," or "Joe, you're a criminal!"
It's awkward. What should you do? Run to the police? Inform the girl's parents? That would be even more horrible. On the one hand, this is a terrible tragedy for the family. But on the other, if you put Joe in jail, you bring all the shame of a trial on that little girl.
Plenty of girls sleep around at a young age. The same things go on everywhere—in town and country, at children's camps.... As long as the parents don't know, everything's fine. Much knowledge is indeed much grief.
The girl will grow up and get married or get by somehow, and even then she'll need to avoid her parents' scrutiny, their insane shadowing of her, their accusations and tears.
And after all, Joe is a friend, and a proven one. You can ask him to fix your washer or sewing machine. He won't refuse. He'll take a friend's ailing wife in for X-rays. Joe hired the very host at whose home this information was made public, lifted him out of night duty at the regional hospital to the position of research fellow in his laboratory.
Life Stories Page 19