Suddenly the presence of spirit, previously unknown, appeared, as if in that moment my entire future was being decided, and the person I was and would be in every moment of my life stepped into the compressed moment of the present, in the room that was a trap—and the trap cracked and fell apart. It did not require courage or boldness—just the presence of spirit; I saw that I was more extended than any particular moment of the present; and this extended “ego” in three tenses banished fear and opened up the conspiracy of things.
Hair—growth—time; razor and strap; a minute ago I had considered slashing my throat with the razor, hanging myself with the strap; but now I simply left the room. The adults told me to sit at the table, but I promised to be back in five minutes; they stayed in the house, and I unlatched the gate and went into the woods.
This wasn’t running away; I had run away many times, hiding, but this time I simply needed to walk through the woods to the field. Something had happened inside me that needed space so it could complete itself and start living and breathing, and so I walked to the field; rye grew there every year, it was the end of summer, but it had not yet been harvested, and I soon crossed the twisted, cracked earthen lips of the fire ditch.
The grains slept in the dry grass spikes; the road cut into the field like a long tongue, disappearing beyond the edge; beyond the woods the commuter train moved, picking up speed; and I felt that I was alone; this was probably the first time I felt the sentiment—Where are the adults?—without fear, without an instinctive wary look.
They looked for me; they told me later that Grandfather II blamed himself, said it was all his fault; he was so frightened it seemed that some time in the past he had previously suggested shaving some other boy’s head and smearing it with kerosene and then some accident befell the boy, not related to the shave, but the two events were so close together that they were somehow combined; Grandfather II roused everyone, sent them out searching, but he wasn’t concerned by the insult I suffered; my hurt did not worry him—he just needed to know I was alive.
After my flight, Grandfather II stopped noticing me for a while; I think he realized that I had figured out his ulterior motive, and now we were united by that knowledge; my family fussed about my oversensitivity, my unacceptable childishness, but Grandfather II kept quiet; he probably understood that I would be thinking about him, that I would risk trying to find an explanation; he was sure I would not talk about it with the other adults—it was one thing to be scared of a haircut, another to even hint that you suspect Grandfather II of something.
He started behaving so that we were alone more often. I remember the dacha room that had pieces of carpet runner, probably bought from a hotel that had remainders—wine red with a dark green border; all the rooms of our house had them, we were used to them and did not notice that along with them unheard steps had crept in, and long corridors with nowhere to sit. The runners—which Grandfather II had obtained through his connections—were reminiscent not of a hotel but of Party headquarters, ministries, even the agency that people preferred not to mention; you could say that Grandfather II let them in along those paths—what a gift, what a service!—but I thought he had them laid because they were more familiar to the soles of his feet than painted floorboards.
I remember the room where I was alone—I had to work on my English, which I was taught in summer, and Grandfather II came in and stopped at the window. He did not pretend to have been passing, did not hide behind some errand—he simply stood there and allowed me to regard him; I was supposed to see something in him, be enticed in the neutral examination, gradually shortening the distance between us, coming closer and closer—in my gaze; like a big fish with its jaws wide open stopping in the water so that the small fry can swim in on its own.
And so it went: Grandfather II no longer tried to influence me directly; he appeared on the periphery of my vision in the house, in the garden, as if trying to soap up my eyes—or, despite his own unobtrusiveness, enter my retina piece by piece. I soon discovered that he appeared in many separate moments of my day, like photographs. He did not try to make his presence known—he seemed to be counting on peripheral vision, knowing that it was a crack through which he could sneak into my awareness, just by visual repetition.
Grandfather II had figured it out correctly, but he underestimated my fright over shaving my head; of course, the fear receded over time, but the caution remained, and now trying to behave differently, but still with some sleight of hand, he merely heightened my wariness and essentially set in motion my formation in feeling and thought.
When we speak of a child’s liveliness of perception, we think that liveliness is practically a synonym for friskiness; that it is alive in the sense of being changeable, distractible, unstable. But perhaps a child’s perception is really alive, that is, endowed not with the gift of subtle differentiation but the gift of sensing—the game of “hot or cold” is not accidental here—what is alive and what is not in the ordinary sense; to see through the substitute image, to feel not nuances but the very nature of human relations.
This ability to understand the nature of relations, recognizing the live and the not-live is what bound me to Grandfather II with ties that could not be broken then.
I sensed that he was dead inside, unconnected to the world of the living; not a ghost, not a specter—but a solid, physical, long-lived (what could happen to him?) corpse; yet he had a strange concern for me and in his own way a liking. He—perhaps unconsciously—tried to bring me up in order to untie some knot in the past, to solve a drama that made him what he was. But in the present there were no explanations for his actions, from insisting on my birth to the haircut and kerosene for lice. My family got used to accepting current events as a given without seeking reasons, but if you looked at things from a different angle, the whole story between Grandfather II and me seemed superfluous, like a goiter or an appendix; he could have lived perfectly well without me and no circumstances forced him to have a relationship with me.
I felt that there was no life, nothing living in Grandfather II’s attitude toward me; there was something else, unnamed; and I understood it only twenty years later.
A woman loved me; she confessed her feelings to me and not finding reciprocity tried to receive it with extreme persistence for a while; she called at night, wrote letters allegedly from my girlfriend, and then stopped, and I thought that her passion was spent or she had found someone else.
A few years later she died in an accident but was not immediately identified, and we, her coworkers, began searching for her while she was still missing; we got the police to open the door to her apartment, in case something had happened to her at home.