Dust storms swirled on the adjoining fields, convulsions of space; something was brewing, gathering amid the whispering oats; there was always a line at the dacha guard booth for the only phone, people turned the dial that clicked when it sprang back into place, and through the fading foliage we could see the red and white of the ambulance, and only Grandfather II was sprightly and brisk, as if on good terms with death, like a doctor, and the heat merely dried his body to make it lighter, allowing him to stride faster.
That day I went out to the alley of garden plots; our children’s gatherings had ceased a long time ago, as if the element that brings children together had evaporated, gone with the play of breezes, rustles, whispers, and trembling branches that form the melody and milieu of children’s games; the air was sickeningly thick, sticky like the skin that forms when making jam, and had an acrid taste.
Why I went out I can’t remember now; there are actions you perform without knowing what prompted them and in that sense are unintentional, but not done out of momentum or habit. Probably I just needed to get outside the fence, to free myself of the sense of being surrounded on all four sides by pickets; the fence in a dacha lot very clearly defines the place where a child is both protected and hemmed in at the same time, while right outside the fence the street begins, where things impossible inside the fence can happen.
A fence is the border that separates life built on repetition, like a school lesson—have breakfast, weed the garden, read a few pages of a book—from life where you are on your own; the gate, which could be locked if you are being punished and not allowed out, the lock and shackle are guards protecting you from imaginary and real harms: the year before a boy had jumped from the shore and cracked his head, at the beginning of summer another boy went into the woods and got lost, a third boy tried crossing the tracks beneath a standing train, but the train started and caught his shirt, a fourth boy went for a walk in the sand quarry and fell into a hole . . . These supposed corpses were “registered” in the dacha topography, like pagan spirits of lakes and forests, they even included a pilot shot down in the winter of 1941 and buried near the pond under a small pyramid with a red tin star; they deprived the area of safety but also announced its realness: the forest wasn’t a forest but the forest-where, the pond was the pond-where; thanks to them, this locality took on an additional dimension, stopped being a dacha suburb and turned into a village district that incorporated life and death in such proximity, like the village and its cemetery.
Under the dark forest canopy, in the impenetrable, intoxicating denseness of the raspberries at noon, in the cattails and sedges on the pond shore that blended into a thick green haze over the black water, in the moist moss of the swamp, in the hidden source of the forest stream, buried under tree roots, everywhere there was something that called to you, touched you questioningly and invitingly, as if testing to see how conscious you were, whether you could be enticed, lured, abducted. The boys from the stories told by grown-ups, to whom something “bad” happened—you understood that was a lie, but a lie caused by not knowing, a guess, which therefore unexpectedly revealed the area of truth.
Therefore the fence was not simply a guardrail: all the scrapes, wounds, and hurts, everything that made you bleed and left scars happened outside it. If you cut yourself at home, it was from a carelessness that was instantly nursed with iodine and a bandage. But out there, beyond the fence, the concept of careful and careless did not exist: sunny fields and dark woods worked together so uniformly, blood flowed so easily and almost merrily from a cut that you did not see it or any wound as an attempt by death on life; you didn’t see it and in that sense you were protected.
Coming out to the alley, I stepped on the sand that marked the border between it and the garden plots—and saw a chunk of concrete the size of a fist; it was studded with smooth pebbles the color of frozen meat and sharp shards of flint speckled with conch shells. The piece of concrete must have fallen from a truck carrying construction materials from some lot; it had fallen recently and was not yet pushed into the sand, catching my eye.
Before I understood or remembered anything, my mouth filled with the taste of blood—without any blood; pain shot through my lower jaw like surgical thread in an unhealed wound. The world around me turned blurry, like the corrugated glass in hospitals, like the walls of a vortex; I looked at the piece of concrete but it seemed to be at the bottom of the vortex; the only clear thing in a blurry world, but extremely far away, discovered at the bottom of memory. I was slowly drowning in myself. Numbness entered my muscles, and I understood that in parts of my body an incessant telegraphic conversation had been under way, and now the components were falling apart, it went silent and was becoming empty, like the line where I stood, empty, like a book without letters, and my breathing stopped.
I saved myself—the way a diver finds a pocket of air underwater and takes a breath. My memory found a previous moment with a rock just like this one, and at that point, the opening which connects time like a nerve canal was revealed, and a fragmentary and flickering recollection came to the surface.
That other concrete block was just like this one, bristling with flint and pebbles. I had leaned too hard on the handle of my stroller and tipped it over, falling face-first onto the concrete. I was about a year old; my memory of that time was like amniotic fluid, better at conveying sound than image, and I sensed only my own long-ago scream. I did not understand then that I could die, the scream was older than my age, as if it was not a year-old child screaming but someone who was conscious of the horror of death and cried to stave it off. The sound was so piercing that it thickened and slowed time and the moment of the fall, and pain lengthened in it, lengthened in memory.
As soon as I recognized the rock the vortex vanished and the world stopped spinning like a top; however the sensation of alienness coming from the rock did not go away. I knew that my father had put the block in a wheelbarrow, smashed it with a sledgehammer, and thrown it away in the distant forest; when he told me that—those were his words, “in the distant forest,”—it frightened me that somewhere a chunk of concrete splattered with my blood and that had almost killed me, was still lying around, smashed but not destroyed. I wanted to find it so I could bury it, or better, take it out in a rowboat to the middle of the pond and submerge it beneath the water and the silt. Father just laughed and said he had forgotten where he threw it; as if to say it was all nonsense and if not for Grandfather II he would have used the concrete as planned—for the foundation of the shed; he and my mother were to blame for not keeping a closer eye on me, but the concrete was just concrete. Father admitted that Grandfather II had insisted that he take the concrete to the woods; “nothing good will come from such a foundation,” Grandfather II said and Father obeyed.
Now a chunk of concrete just like it lay before me. Or was it part of the block I fell on? There are moments when you sense that you must live carefully: it’s as if the protective layers have been removed, habitual as clothing, you are left naked, exposed, vulnerable, and the event that has been stalking you, following you outside your field of vision, is close, but you don’t know where it’s coming from.
Reliving death exhausted me—I did not feel weak but I sensed that I was defenseless, and defenseless in a different way than even an animal in a hunter’s sight; the deer and wolf have the ground beneath their feet, they are certain at least of that, confident in their ability to rapidly flee.
Sand. Sand was under my feet. A drop of sweat fell from my face and was absorbed, leaving a fat, convex blotch. In the sand I could see shiny grains of quartz, flakes of mica like particles of dragonfly wings, and pieces of feldspar as pale gray as ground grain; my body seemed too soft, pliant, sadly doomed; this is the way you look at places you are leaving, you become relaxed and compliant because in your mind they are already abandoned. I felt as if I had discovered a crack in myself and the fear that the break would increase fought with my desire to look inside, to follow that break, as if it had
opened a path into depths previously inaccessible, or perhaps not even existing before.
At the very end of the desolate alley, by the far gate that opened to the place we called Concrete—there used to be a railway to the airfield there, abandoned, with crookedly diverging rails, where once they pushed concrete blocks like stelae from the loading docks onto smashed tanks, the lids of pillboxes, the wild wind of the outskirts whistled over broken glass and cardboard shelters for tramps—at the far gate a black dot appeared, growing like an abscess, a wormhole in the jellylike, greasy flesh of the day.
It was a dog, a black dog that could have come only from the Concrete side: it was running toward me, unsteadily, trotting from ditch to ditch, jaws open, scattering thick cottony saliva in the dust. There was no one around: just me and the dog, we were connected by the straight line of the alley, the geometry of fate; the dog was rushing disjointedly and kept itself together by running—if it were to stop, it would fall apart—and I stood, nailed to the ground by its attack, and the flesh in my calf could already feel the touch of its fangs.
The black dog—there were no black dogs in our neighborhood—black, frenzied by the heat, came close and prepared to jump, but its muscles could not lift its body into the air, and it just attacked, knocked me over and bit into my left leg as if my blood could cure it. Then the dog got on top of me, held me down with its paws, and started crawling toward my throat—and suddenly it howled, moaned pathetically, bent as if death were taking its measure which it could not fit while still alive. Grandfather II stood above us with his cane; he broke the dog’s back, striking the protruding vertebrae with the copper; the dog was dying, and Grandfather II moved his boiled egg-white eyes, not seeing but sensing how the fur fell out, the legs straightened, and the dog’s life ran out; blood gurgled out of my torn leg, and Grandfather II listened attentively to that sound.
How had he appeared there? I remember that Grandfather II was not nearby when I went out into the alley. Apparently he must have been hiding behind the brambles at the gate—he liked to play with them, bring his fingers close to the prickly branches, following their curves with the palm of his hand, bringing his hand so close that the thorns seemed to trace the lines of his fingerprints like a needle on a record; he seemed to be testing, calibrating, adjusting some sense that replaced vision, and he hated being caught at this; then he would intentionally—and I was the only one who guessed it was intentional—prick himself and pretend that he had wanted to pick a flower or a berry.
It must have been that other sense that told Grandfather II that something important or dangerous was happening to me; once when my parents assumed I was riding bikes with my friends, we were actually planning to climb the power line tower to retrieve someone’s kite stuck in the lines; the kite fluttered, I was trying on the rubber boots and gloves I had taken from the shed, and my friends were egging me on—and Grandfather II appeared on the road. He was probably going off on some business of his own, but the anticipation of my triumph was blown away; his appearance seemed to say: What do you think you’re doing! Don’t you dare!
So it’s unlikely to have been a coincidence: Grandfather II was behind the bramble rose and heard my screams … He was guarding me, nursing me; not me, but my future. Then the ambulance came flying through the fields, siren wailing, driving consciousness deeper, down into my heels, it smelled of tobacco and gasoline, and the belfry swayed and swayed over the hospital courtyard, I had seen the belfry many times when I fished on the dammed lake; the belfry was like a needle on some apparatus, leaning first left then right, it bent toward me like a question mark, shot upward, blocking the sky, shrank, waving in the far corner of my vision and then blocked the view again. In the room, plaster was peeling off the walls, there was a black spider in a web in the corner; I watched it with strangely changed vision, which omitted the objects nearby; the spider moved right in front of my face, while my torn leg—this was probably the drugs—seemed to be back in the courtyard, my body was being dragged through the hallway, and only my head had been brought into the room.
The spider was going to weave its web over my face, get in my mouth, hang up its sticky threads and wait for the flies that were buzzing in the hospital room; I wanted to wave my arms, shout for them to take away the spider.
But as soon as I tried to speak the dog appeared, its eyes rheumy, bulging, as if the touch of the dry lids caused them pain, and I realized that it was not the hound looking at me. I had crossed an invisible line, marked perhaps only by faded buttercups or scattered gravel; the way you can catch swamp fever, I caught death, seeing a mole pecked to death, a dead hedgehog covered with black horned beetles; I wandered out on Concrete in the evening hour when nature trembles at someone’s presence, when you feel it, too, and every shrub watches, it seems that they’re looking at you, but they’re really looking at the one standing behind you. At that hour you can’t play hide-and-seek far from home, beyond its allure, where voices and smells don’t reach—you will get lost, climbing into a dark space that turns out to be the crack between day and night; it is the hour of interstitial, indeterminate time, the hour the birds try to wait out in the air. I let in the pestilence somehow, brought it home without noticing the way you don’t notice illness, thinking the slight temperature is due to running around, and that your throat is dry from thirst; I let it in and it grew in me, settled in like a worm in the intestine, and that is why the black dog ran straight for me—I was careless and learned too soon what is hidden from a child by the indissolubility of body and mind, the indivisibility of the individual and the universe.
It was all decided there at the hospital; I had lost so much blood I needed a transfusion, they didn’t have the right type, and then Grandfather II, who had forced his way into the ambulance—my parents were in the city, leaving me in his care—offered his blood. He wasn’t supposed to do that because of his age, but he insisted—I don’t remember it, but I can imagine how he spoke to the doctors in a voice that crushed his interlocutor the way his stick broke the dog’s back—they took his blood, they took a lot, and I lived and he died, as if the part of his blood that was transfused in me contained his life and the part that remained in his veins was empty, used up blood, the blood of a dead man.
Now I think that he did not plan to die, counting on his good health; if he had lived, having saved my life, I would have belonged to him totally, by right of the blood in my veins; he took a risk and he would have won, but something happened that he could not have imagined, he was sure he would be transferred to Moscow, where they would nurse him back, replenish his blood loss: the break in our lives, the dangerous threadbare patch, coincided with a tectonic shift in history; an epoch—the epoch of Grandfather II, in which he could function, his milieu—was over; he did not survive the first moments of general confusion, the moments that did away with the old but did not yet usher in the new.
A few hours after the operation, tanks and armored cars from the neighboring base moved along the concrete road outside the hospital; I watched them through the third floor windows, and I don’t remember anything except the turning tank rollers and wheels of the vehicles. A whole hour while the column moved, stopping, compressing and stretching, driving into the invisible funnel of the highway leading into town and the tank treads and wheels spinning before my eyes.
I had seen tanks before on parade, but there you had the triumph of form, coordinated movement, no room for details, the parade was perceived as a whole, as if a text was marching, carrying the structure of letters. But here, on the concrete road outside the hospital, the tanks moved one behind the other, stalling, jerking in place, the caterpillar tracks grinding and coming loose—probably not all the vehicles were ready when the alarm was sounded—and therefore, my perception, affected by pain and the medication, involved two mutually exclusive images.
It seemed that the column of tanks, constantly braking and falling into two or three tank groups, the soldiers waving their flags furiously, the cursing off
icers speaking on the helmet phones, the very metal of the tanks that suddenly lost the connection that brought them into motion, the evaporated fuel that lacked the power to push the tons of steel—all this was the disintegrating speech of that time, the speech of a paralytic whose lips had forgotten the shape of sound. Some words tried to be spoken, but too late: the lips were already rimmed by the deadening frost, like anesthesia. I later learned that Grandfather II started dying just as the first tanks moved past the hospital; the nurse thought the noise and rumbling were killing him, and she shut and curtained the windows tightly, but Grandfather II still thrashed in the bed as if the tanks were driving over his legs, accidentally in the way.
There was a second image my mind would let in, pushing out the image of disintegrating speech, and then let go; the rollers that propelled the caterpillars and the wheels turned into the gears of a clock that needed winding, that couldn’t start turning; the clock had been stopped for many years, the mechanism had disconnected, and now all the gears from biggest to smallest turned on their own, the cogs catching and then not, and the hands on the clock jumped forward and then stopped again. The tanks got bogged down, angrily backfiring, their engines roared, but the tension of men and motors seemed incommensurate to the slow, disjointed movement, as if there was something ahead on the highway blocking the column, as if it—the vehicles and people—basically did not know whether there was any point or necessity in the expedition; as if time were trying to start and could not.
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