I was struck by the realization that Uncle Vanya was sick, that his life was ruined by his ugliness, while Grandfather II was marked by a tidy, unnoticeable blindness; I suddenly saw—again by intuition—that Uncle Vanya’s face, a face in meaty drops, should belong to Grandfather II, and the clean, untouched face of Grandfather II should be Uncle Vanya’s.
I decided then and there to learn Grandfather II’s past. I thought that every adult in our house was privately glad that Grandfather II was secretive and that any potential knowledge of his past remained unexposed.
The adults tried if not to forget the time about which Grandfather II could have spoken, then to at least make it palatable for their own private memory. They broke it up into small impressions, personal stories—what an ice hill there was by the ravine, now covered up; what nuts, all with rotten, wrinkled kernels, they once bought at the market to make jam; what pale, water-diluted ink they used to pour into the inkwells at school, and then the teacher complained that she couldn’t read anything in their notebooks. That kind of past was like keys, wallet, and papers that you can stuff into your pockets when you go out; it was small, domesticated—everyone diligently reinforced the little sport of personal memory, and no one remembered for the collective.
Looking around mentally, I realized I could not combine the stories of the past into something general; people remembered their families, remembered their youth, but it was all narrow, cramped, like the rooms in the new neighborhoods built in the sixties and seventies in the outskirts on empty lots where it was so hard to get rid of dusty soil, burdock, and weeds; new houses came up, and in them, new life, separated by thin walls, and everyone learned to live quietly—how else when the neighbors could hear you cough—quietly and separately; live the way survivors do, stunned by having survived and forever maintaining the apartness of survivors.
I wanted to learn about Grandfather II’s past, but all I could manage I already knew; I was his guide, I walked the same roads, I put his few letters in the mailbox; there was only one area where he would not let me in: his passion for fishing. He went to the pond alone and returned alone; it was wholly his time. Once I crept after him, but halfway there he heard me and ordered me to return home. I had only wanted to see how a blind man could fish, but Grandfather II clearly sensed in my attempt the desire to spy out something else that he knew and I did not. I came up with a circular approach so that I would not be following his footsteps. Alders and sedges grew along the banks, and every fisherman had his spot, hidden from view and reached by squeezing through branches.
A blind fisherman, yet Grandfather II did not look silly—you couldn’t find a feature or detail that made him vulnerable to being a laughingstock. For all the potential ridiculousness of the image—canvas trousers, patched jacket, straw hat—he did not look ridiculous; even the bamboo rods, which always seem unserious and boyish in a grown man, were somehow separate from him, did not add another brushstroke to his look, even though he carried them in his hand.
He was not part of the brethren of fishermen, he had his place at the pond which no one else used, and the other fishermen did not come to him for bait or a cigarette or even to chat; he had set himself apart from the first day.
I started sneaking up to the pond and sitting at a distance from him. If you got too close, no matter how carefully you crept, Grandfather II would turn and fix his sightless eyes on you; at the moment you felt like a water rat that crawled out of its hole right in front of a hunting dog. I was amazed by the sensitivity in that self-contained and passionless man, whose movements were so measured you thought he was turning a windup handle, like on an old gramophone, inside himself that moved the various parts of his aged but still solid body. I even thought that he was expecting someone; someone who was supposed to come and ask him about something; waiting so as not to be caught unawares.
The more I sat at the pond watching Grandfather II catch fish, the more clearly—slowly, day by day—I understood that there was no mystery in Grandfather II’s character; there was only a strong ban, a securely locked door, the metal bolt, the heavy curve of the padlock’s shackle. There, behind the door, was something that had no place in the present; Grandfather II carried all his past with him, like a refugee at a short halt who does not unpack all the stuff from his city life.
Once I caught a glimpse of Grandfather II writing a letter; he must have written so much that blindness did not hinder him, the memory in his fingers connected the letters correctly. At the end of one sentence he placed a special question mark, drawn with additional meaning.
Grandfather II used a fountain pen, and the evaporating violet ink made the letter seem prematurely aged, and the sharp nib, divided like a snake’s tongue, gave the drawn letters a persistent intonation. The question mark, which I had written in school exercises so many times, appearing like the contour of a hot air balloon from the basket’s point of view or an ear with a drop earring—the sign suddenly appeared in a new meaning which I could not explain to myself then.
It was only later, at the pond, watching Grandfather II tie the hook to the float that I recognized the question mark from the letter—I recognized it in the snagged hook that sticks in the fish’s belly and does not let the creature escape.
Grandfather II had a strange way of fishing; I could see but I couldn’t tell from the movement of the float that the fish was biting, that its lips had touched the bait, I thought that the float was bobbing from wind puffs, but Grandfather II was already changing his grip on the pole the better to make the pull. He seemed to have a special sense of when the carp touched the bait; he could feel the live beating of the fish, he could feel it with the seeing fingers of a blind man, it reverberated moistly and sweetly in a hidden, clearly constructed corner of his soul.
A voluptuary of death, Grandfather II could feel—in general could feel—only through the mechanism of the fishing pole, in which the pain and fear of a living creature was transmitted by the tension of the line, the bend of the bamboo; he felt those surges, the thrashing weight of the fish as a caught life; without a fishing pole, touching live flesh, he apparently felt nothing.
I remember his fingers—I crept close and watched him put a worm on the hook. There is a peasant skill for killing chickens, breaking necks of geese, sticking pigs; the rough, domestic, accustomed dealing with death, without an admixture of martyrdom, of dependent animals and birds. This was something entirely different—Grandfather II’s fingers moved as if he was threading a needle, and not for work but out of curiosity—will the thread pass the eye or will he need a needle two numbers larger?
Worms have red blood, and the worm sullied his fingers. When you’re fishing your fingers are constantly covered with dirt or fish slime, and wiping them on grass or your clothes is automatic, repeated dozens of times. But Grandfather II took out his handkerchief and wiped his fingers thoroughly. There wasn’t an iota of squeamishness or excessive fastidiousness in this, it was an inappropriate and marked thoroughness, which he did not notice; thoroughness, which was only an edge, an unexpected protuberance—the way a sharp angle of a sculpture sticks out from a cloth tossed over it—of his real nature. Behind the thoroughness was his knowledge of himself, so habitual for him, albeit hidden, that being blind and not seeing himself from outside, he did not catch it motivating the gesture: to clean his fingers.