We had lots of those, plastic and cotton ones, in the chest's upper drawer; years later, when I was in the seventh grade and a uniform was introduced into school, my mother would cut and sew them to the standing collar of my rat- gray tunic. For that uniform, too, was semi-military: tunic, belt with a buckle, matching trousers, a cap with a lacquered visor. The earlier one starts to think of himself as a soldier, the better it is for the system. That was fine with me, and yet I resented the color, which suggested the infantry or, worse still, the police. In no way could it match my father's pitch-black overcoat with two rows of yellow buttons that suggested an avenue at night. And when he'd unbutton it, underneath you'd see the dark-blue tunic with yet another file of the same buttons: a dimly lit street in evening. "A street within an avenue"—this is how I thought about my father, looking askance at him as we walked home from the museum.
16
There are two crows in my backyard here in South Hadley. They are quite big, almost raven-size, and they are the first thing I see every time I drive to or leave the house. They appeared here one by one: the first, two years ago, when my mother died; the second, last year, right after my father died. Or else that's the way I noticed their presence. Now they always show up or flap away together, and they are too silent for crows. I try not to look at them; at least, I try not to watch them. Yet I've noticed that they tend to stay in the pine grove that starts at the end of my back yard and slopes for a quarter of a mile to a meadow that edges a small ravine with a couple of big boulders at the edge. I never walk there anymore because I expect to find them, the crows, dormant atop those two boulders in the sunlight. Nor did I try to find their nest. They are black, but I have noticed that the inside of their wings is the color of wet ash. Tie only time that I don't see them is when it's raining.
17
In 1950, I think, my father was demobilized in accordance with some Politburo ruling that people of Jewish origin should not hold high military rank. The ruling was initiated, if I am not mistaken, by Andrei Zhdanov, who was then in charge of ideological control over the armed forces. By that time my father was already forty-seven, and he had to, as it were, begin his life anew. He decided to return to journalism, to his photoreportage. To do so, however, he had to be employed by a magazine or a newspaper. That t^ed out to be quite difcult: the fifties were bad years for the Jews. The campaign against the "rootless cosmopolites" was in full swing; then, in 1953, came the "Doctors' Case," which didn't end in the usual bloodbath only because its instigator, Comrade Stalin himself, all of a sudden, at the case's nadir, kicked the bucket. But long before, and for some time after, the air was full of rumors of the Politburo's planned reprisals against the Jews, of relocating all those "paragraph five" creatures to Eastern Siberia, to the area called Birobidzhan, near the Chinese border. There was even a letter in circulation, signed by the most prominent "paragraph five" individuals—chess champions, composers, and writers—containing a plea to the Central Committee of the Party, and to Comrade Stalin personally, to permit us, the Jews, to redeem with hard labor in remote parts the great harm we had inflicted upon the Russian people. The letter was to appear any day now in Pravda as the pretext for our deportation.
What appeared in Pravda, however, was the announcement of Stalin's death, although by that time we were preparing to travel and had already sold our upright piano, which nobody in our family could play anyhow ( notwithstanding the distant relative my mother invited to tutor me: I had no talent whatsoever, and even less in the way of patience). Still, in that atmosphere, the chances for a Jew and a non-Party member to be hired by a magazine or a paper were dismal; so my father hit the road.
For several years he freelanced all over the country under contract to the All-Union Agricultural Exhibit in Moscow. This way we occasionally would get some marvels on our table—four-pound tomatoes or apple-cum-pear hybrids; but the pay was less than meager, and the three of us existed solely on my mother's salary as a clerk in the borough's development council. Those were our very lean years, and it was then that my parents began to get ill. All the same, my father looked his gregarious self and he frequently would take me about town to see his Navy pals, now running a yacht club, minding old dockyards, training youngsters. There were quite a lot of those, and invariably they were pleased to see him (on the whole, I've never met anyone, man or woman, who held a grudge against him). One of them, the editor in chief of the newspaper for the regional branch of the Merchant Marine, a Jew who bore a Russian-sounding name, finally hired him, and until my father went into retirement he worked for that publication, in the Leningrad harbor.
It appears that most of his life was spent on foot ("Reporters, like wolves, live by their paws" was his frequent utterance), among ships, sailors, captains, cranes, cargo. In the background, there was always a rippled zinc sheet of water, masts, the black metal bulk of a stern with a few white first or last letters of the ship's home port. Except in winter, he always wore the black Navy cap with the lacquered visor. He liked to be near the water, he adored the sea. In that country, this is the closest one gets to freedom. Even looking at it is sometimes enough, and he looked at it, and photographed it, for most ofhis life.
18
To a varying degree, every child craves adulthood and yearns to get out of his house, out of his oppressive nest. Out! Into real life! Into the wide world. Into life on his own terms.
In time, he gets his wish. And for a while, he is absorbed with new vistas, absorbed with building his ovwn nest, with manufacturing his ownwn reality.
Then one day, when the new reality is mastered, when his own tenns are implemented, he suddenly learns that his old nest is gone, that those who gave him life are dead.
On that day he feels like an effect suddenly without its cause. The enormity of the loss makes it incomprehensible. His mind, made naked by this loss, shrinks, and increases the magnitude of this loss even further.
He realizes that his youthful quest for "real life," his departure from the nest, have rendered that nest defenseless. This is bad enough; still, he can put the blame on nature.
What he can't blame on nature is the discovery that his achievement, the reality of his ovwn manufacture, is less valid than the reality of his abandoned nest. That if there ever was anything real in his life, it was precisely that nest, oppressive and suffocating, from which he so badly wanted to flee. Because it was built by others, by those who gave him life, and not by him, who knows only too well the true worth of his own labor, who, as it were, just uses the given life.
He knows how willful, how intended and premeditated, everything that he has manufactured is. How, in the end, all of it is provisional. And even if it lasts, the best way he can put it to use is as evidence of his skill, which he may brag about.
Yet, for all his skill, he'll never be able to reconstruct that primitive, sturdy nest that heard his first cry of life. Nor will he be able to reconstruct those who put him there. An effect, he can't reconstruct his cause.