When I saw what was inside, I asked my friends and the policeman to wait outside.
My scarf hung in the coatrack; it had disappeared from our coatroom at work, worn and inexpensive, and I wondered who could have wanted it. The table and windowsills held pages with my handwritten notes, drafts of scholarly works. Everything that could be borrowed or taken unobserved she had gathered in her apartment; my pens, lighter, a pack of cigarettes; CDs, key chain, driver’s manual, pocket calendar, the five hundred ruble note with a torn corner which she’d borrowed for a taxi.
She created a phantom of my presence out of those trifles. She lived her real life here with me, and in her ordinary life she was just a shadow. I suddenly realized how great was the constant tension with which she created—out of insignificant things!—this life of a double.
Her inner existence was revealed to me: desire, passion, jealousy twisted into a tight whip. Inside, there was another life in which I was a slave of this woman, the more obedient the farther apart we were in fact. That was the locus of the forces that were unleashed by her death; they had vision that did not see other people or were totally blind, blinded at the birth of her irrational choice rejecting other men. The eyeless hunting dogs followed the scent, hurried to fulfill their destiny, to pass unto me the passion that had created them—and at the same time to attach themselves to something in this world, the world of the living.
She had killed herself while alive, destroyed herself in order to live through me alone, and therefore her love was the love of a corpse; an almost otherworldly equivalent of emotions, which however were capable of participating in the entwining of fate.
Grandfather II’s attitude toward me was of this nature. Back then, as a child, I felt only this nameless, unknown force; I couldn’t have imagined that there was another life in which I was the star unwinding in Grandfather II’s mind, and that he no longer correlated it with reality, like that woman who loved me many years later. In his head—blindness in this case played into his hands—I was already the person he wanted me to be; and the way he behaved in real life—which I took as the only behavior—was merely an edited, partial reflection of his plan.
Grandfather II carefully brought me closer; he asked that I accompany him when possible on his walks and errands, and my parents consented. I became more than his guide, I perforce walked his paths, moved in his orbits. Some would have thought that I was leading him, a blind man, but in fact he led me; we could go mushroom hunting, I looked for porcini or orange caps, Grandfather II carried the basket, and the mushroomers we met were touched, praising me for my kindness and care; but I knew that I was the blind one and Grandfather II saw what he was doing, saw his own intentions, invisible to me. In the woods on a hot day a spiderweb stuck to my face, and I thought that the web was the materialization of Grandfather II’s plans, and I removed it, washing with black musty water from ground puddles, just to keep from feeling those threads; in the early twilight—we could go out for long periods—the forest turned into a layering of shadows, inky springs of darkness appeared between tree trunks, and I would relax—I didn’t have to watch out for a trick anymore, I no longer felt that the sunny day was just a cover-up, that the two of us were moving in a different space that only seemed light. I wandered after the figure showing white in the twilight and I knew that this is how everything really looked—dark, formless, with the invisible touch of grass and branches.
My age gave Grandfather II power; whatever happened, he would be believed, not I. And Grandfather II, moving beyond making me his guide, began playing a game with me. It began by the well; we had gone for water, Grandfather II turned the handle and I filled the buckets. “Do you want to get in the bucket and I’ll send you down?” Grandfather II said. “You can see the stars from the well even in daytime.”
I looked into the well. It was hot, flies were swarming—the cows had been herded nearby recently; everything was burning, sparkling, heating up; the world itched like a scratched bite, blistering, stinging with nettles, dusting, shimmering, but under the well roof, pulling back the lid, you were suddenly, without transition, on the underside of that overheated world.
I was always a bit afraid of well water—I thought you shouldn’t drink it until it had been in the light for a while, had gotten used to air and space. The buckets were covered, and I secretly removed the lid so that the water would not keep what it had absorbed underground; my parents told me once about groundwater, how it collects, dripping along layers of rock, forming underground rivers and lakes; a second landscape was revealed to me, a second world which contained the mysteries of the circle of matter, everything that was washed away, carried, dissolved, everything that the water had seen with its transparent tight eyeball-drops; it contained decomposed fallen leaves, spring-melted snow, the rain from two days ago; there, beneath the present was the past, flowing its own way, and the well water in a bucket seemed different than water from the tap—thicker, like a trembling ingot, as if the attraction of molecules was stronger in it. And now Grandfather II offered to lower me down there, into the round hold of the well, into the cold of yesterday’s water.
I was afraid of being near the water that had not yet been brought to the surface, still underground and dark. Grandfather II said: if you don’t want to go down there, just have some water—it’s hot. I wasn’t allowed to drink water from the well for fear of catching cold, and Grandfather II’s suggestion seemed such an understanding gesture: go ahead and drink, I know you do when no one’s watching, go on; but I knew that I had never in fact had a drink of water like that.
A tin cup was attached to the well by a chain, Grandfather II scooped it full and handed it to me.
There were many cups on chains later—by wells, by the hot water urns in rickety trains, by cisterns in Kazakhstan mines; the water in them either had a musty smell, or had been boiled a dozen times, or had a rusty aftertaste; a prison camp, shackled kind of mug, dented, scratched, wrapped in dirty adhesive tape, with an uneven bottom and edge shiny from many lips; but this was the first, most memorable mug.
I didn’t dare refuse and took a tiny sip; the icy water burned my lips the way metal does in winter, and Grandfather II started telling me how in the North water can be so cold even in summer that it can stop a man’s heart; it wasn’t water anymore but the embodiment of cold. I drank from the cup and Grandfather II waited; then he scooped up more and drank himself.
After his mention of the icy water of the North, our relationship was firmly established, strange, full of unspoken words, pauses, and tensions. Grandfather II had selected me to be a junior comrade, a confidant, knowing that I would understand very little of what would be revealed to me in hints, circumlocutions, and riddles; it was my inability to understand that must have tempted him to begin a conversation extended over time.
Sometimes he gave me “a sip from the mug”—as if he was giving me communion, permitting me a sip of the past, which I could neither picture accurately nor fit into a bigger picture. Grandfather II told me about polar nights, when people went mad and could be saved only by showing them a picture of a new, different face cut from a magazine; about mountains that were always hidden by thick clouds, where German planes had crashed during the war; about gnats and midges that could get past any mosquito net, crawling over your face and neck, seeking dead meat. It was all carefully selected to suit my age—distant parts, extraordinary events—but the more Grandfather II told me, the more I felt that all these stories were just the edge of the envelope; Grandfather II set out the hunting flags consistently and irreversibly, turning my perception in the right direction; he sketched the contours of an unknown continent, Atlantis, which would float up on his command, gradually preparing me to step on its soil.