Occasionally he said nothing, stopped maintaining the image that he was presenting, and those were moments of stupefaction. His features did not change, but he stopped radiating familiarity and he appeared as a stranger.
That happens when you’re exhausted and look at someone you’ve known a long time, but you are completely drained and the comprehension of the gaze ceases; someone new and unknown appears before you. But in this case my vision did not lose its clarity and strength, did not fail me—it was Grandfather II’s inner tension, which twisted him like a cramp, letting him loose, and you could see another old man who sat inside Grandfather II.
This could happen anywhere, on the platform between train cars, in line at the doctor’s office, in the woods, at the pond. Grandfather II, knowing that I could see, would suddenly start touching his face, fingering the lapels of his jacket, bending over to fix his shoelace, run his hand along the row of buttons, as if checking that everything was buttoned and covered. If strangers saw him, they would think it the necessary habit of a blind man, but I knew that in just a minute Grandfather II would turn, stand so that I could not see him whole, he would be in a space between bodies, trees, or furniture, as if in a random photo, fleetingly, for a second, and I would not recognize him, neither his clothes nor the location would help. He would be a stranger from a different era, he would be years behind, and then, covered by a chance passerby, he would return to my field of vision as his former self, as if he had changed outer shells, time-traveled, behind the screen of someone’s body.
From the outside our connection looked like the friendship of an old man and a boy; everyone thought so, explaining Grandfather II’s good feeling for me by his reserved complaints about being childless. This explanation obligated me even more: it was assumed that Grandfather II—soon, not soon—was close to the grave, and therefore I was not supposed to “upset,” “anger,” “let him down,” or “make him worry.” I knew that Grandfather II was completely healthy, and my family knew it, too, but still they made him out to be a helpless old man who could be killed by any strong emotion—that was more convenient, it was a wonderful way of bringing my life into a subordinate state.
As a result, Grandfather II strengthened his power over me; every action, every word was evaluated by what effect it would have on Grandfather II. Interestingly, despite all this, no one particularly loved him; even I at some moments, when he seemed a completely harmless person, wondered why I couldn’t like him—it would save me from the constant feeling that he was trying to dominate me, and maybe I would be able to accept his power gladly. I even—quite childishly—tried to love him; I tried to clarify the map of my inner workings, find the area on it where the physiological background of love is located—warmth, a sense of openness, as if shutters were flung back; I tried, but failed—it was impossible to love Grandfather II.
I think no one actually had any feelings for Grandfather II, the attitude came from the mind rather than the heart; probably everyone was ashamed of this, thinking it was his own fault and not Grandfather II’s, and tried to express false emotions—you don’t want to hurt the old man, who didn’t deserve it. Maybe if members of my family had once talked to one another frankly and discovered that no one liked the old man, even though there was no reason, they would have stopped to think; but there was no conversation, and each one added his or her lines to the illusion of universal liking of the old man, never imagining that the rest were also pretending.
I thought a lot about why it was impossible to like Grandfather II; I realized that love could not arise in his vicinity. If you take cowardice to be the highest degree of egotism, Grandfather II was a coward; he could exhibit many different qualities, including self-sacrifice and concern, but they all served his cowardice: to preserve himself as he was. No one could love him: he loved himself so much, not in the sense of emotion but in the sense of self-preservation, that there didn’t seem to be any love that could be added, it was excessive as it was; and almost all his actions had a thin layer of fear for himself, the apprehension that events could interfere with his plans and destroy his plots.
I understood this when I was still a child; I had often asked Grandfather II if he had fought in the war and he replied that they didn’t take him in the army. But I knew from his cleaning woman that he kept his medals in an old candy box; I decided that Grandfather II had done something horrible in the war, never spoken, never reckoned with, which was behind all the films, paintings, and stories; I thought that those heroes killed the enemy with a first death—the one that happens on paper, canvas, on film; but there had to have been someone outside the pages of the book, the frame of the shot, who killed Germans with a real, fatal death, and I thought that Grandfather II could have been one of them, one of a few.
One day we kids were playing with Uncle Vanya the Iron Neck, who came from the village; right by his carotid artery he had a piece of shrapnel which doctors would not risk removing, and our favorite game was putting magnets on his neck, for they stuck right on living flesh. Uncle Vanya was an old man who had been burned in a tank; they tried to keep him away from children because his face and head were disfigured by drop-like growths that resembled the flesh of a rooster comb, missing a layer of skin and covered by blood vessels; it looked as if his face was melting and the flesh had frozen in those drops, trembling, hanging on thick threads, repulsive because they revealed—on his face!—the reverse, animal side of the body, like the rooster comb.
But children were not afraid or repulsed; Uncle Vanya the Iron Neck seemed to us to be the only person we knew who had something significant happen; we knew—and we could see—that he had been in the war. Of course, children avoid the pathetic and the sick, unconsciously protecting trust in life and in the future; but Uncle Vanya was so ugly that it was almost a caricature of ugliness; the destruction of his face was so horrible that it didn’t seem striking.
And then—he didn’t need pity or sympathy; Uncle Vanya carried a postponed death of 1944 in his body, a death that had killed four of his comrades; it had needed just a few more millimeters to get through his flesh, but the shrapnel was moving slowly through his body, like a drifting continent, heading toward the artery, and essentially, that explosion that hit the tank still existed for Uncle Vanya—he had carried away the trajectory of the shrapnel’s flight and lived in that trajectory.
Another person who survived death and was then disfigured by disease would probably have formulated a supporting philosophy, with the disease interpreted as the cost of his survival; commander of a tank that burned German dugouts, pillboxes, and trenches along with the soldiers, who crossed the battlefield in flames, flames that punished Germans, and who before the war had been fire chief of the district, Uncle Vanya didn’t even remove the mirror in his village house. Probably those flames destroyed all concepts of proportion, of beauty and ugliness; only one thing remained—man was not meat, even though he saw more burned men than live ones; the spirit of life breathed in him freely and easily.
We played with Uncle Vanya; he taught us to make stilts, nailing planks for our feet on long poles; we walked around him on our wooden legs, passed a ball, and he kept bending his neck so that the magnet stuck to the shard under his skin but did not fall. Grandfather II came over to us; he was looking for me, and Uncle Vanya said hello. By the way Grandfather II replied to the greeting and the way he asked when I would be back, I suddenly realized that Grandfather II was afraid; afraid that I would get too attached to Uncle Vanya, that I would not return, would slip away, taking advantage of his blindness. So blatant was that childish, offended fear in an adult next to the benevolent friendliness of Uncle Vanya, that I—from that single feeling—sensed that Grandfather II truly had not fought in the war, that he was of a different human breed than Uncle Vanya.