Did he feel blood on his fingers, did he sense something wet, or did he understand, with his mind, that it was blood? I don’t know: maybe the feeling of wetness on his hands fit some picture from his visual memory in his mind.
Deprived of light, most of his visions from the past must have fallen apart into dust; he was healthy for the present moment, but in the measure of the past he was sick, his visual memory, if I can put it this way, was going crazy: a live amputation, a stump, left alone with itself. The gap in time remained—and grew!—in his mind: his past, wrapped up in darkness, could not meet the present. And when it tried, the blind memory took what reached it through smell, touch, and hearing, and fit it into and rhymed it with a few remaining pictures where it fit; but the meeting of times could not take place this way: only the blind past via hidden fear directed the blind present.
Now I think that the blood of the worm he set on the hook seemed like human blood to him; externally he remained the same, unflappable, inspiring caution more than respect, as if he would open his eyes and say “I saw everything!” and that “everything” would be X-ray knowledge of what you hide in deep inner shame, which should never be revealed, because that which you experience so painfully may in fact be the reason you have a conscience, and revealing it would be moral murder; externally Grandfather II remained the same but I think inside, condemned to darkness, he was sentenced to being torn apart by the manifestations of his memory.
Now I understand why some of his memories seemed more stable through time than all the rest. These were memories leading beyond the border of life; killing and destruction contradict the work of memory—to preserve whole, which is why the memory of a death in which you are involved is a tragic oxymoron; if you clear away the component of external action from this memory, its foundation will not be the bas relief of presence, the existence of something, but a gutter of absence, unfillable but never-ending like the water in the Danaides’ vessels. Such a memory is not quite a memory; it is fed by an unrealizable desire, used to punish sinners; it does not strengthen, it weakens existence in a person.
But Grandfather II—it seems to me—did not regret anything; you couldn’t approach him from the moral side. However, the categories of being and nonbeing are more primary than moral ones, and vengeance got him through a fear of death; the worm’s blood did not remind him of the blood of his victims or of their suffering—the less he could feel the horror of his deeds, the more palpably did death, as a naked, dispassionate fact arise before him, elicited by that blood; what had previously served as a defense—perceiving it that way—turned against him and became the only weapon that could hurt him.
This explains the death of Grandfather II and our posthumous blood tie.
It all took place at the dacha, in early August, the day before my birthday. It was so hot that the chocolate candies in the hutch were melting, sticking to their wrappers; the bread kvass in the crawl space fermented, popping their corks, and the sour intoxication spread through the floorboards into the house, dozens of flies were dying on the sticky paper, so many that the paper ribbons moved as if in a breeze; but the air was heavy, unmoving, stale, like the water in a glass for dentures; grass flopped heavily, breaking at the geniculum, the pond grew shallow and fish rotted in the dark green, dried slime, bubbling on the surface; crows gathered at the pond, perching on the low trees on the shore, digging in the slime, untangling fish innards with their beaks; sated, the crows flew to the high-voltage lines and it seemed that the lines were drooping under the weight of the heavy bird mass and not the heat; the crows sat in silence, burping occasionally; Grandfather II walked along the bank of the stinking pond, feeling the presence of the birds above, and he threatened them with his cane, copper-clad, knotty, darkened by the tar the wood had absorbed, resembling a mummy’s sinew-wrapped bone.
In the dachas, where behind the white swoon of lace curtains old people breathed heavily, the thermometer’s red thread trembled and crawled upward; all the thermometers looked like glass tubes for collecting blood, and all the thermometers measured life and death. Blood pushed at calcified arteries, flushing faces, pumping into weak, flabby hearts; blood seemed to be dispersed in the air, and the dogs, hiding in jasmine bushes, in pipes and ditches, swollen tongues lolling, clawed at the dry earth. The heat cracked the tender skin of cherries, unpicked for several weeks—and dark ichor dropped from the cherries, making spots on the eggshells tossed beneath the trees; the sweltering heat accumulated in the sky, and feeble, age-spotted hands touched the body, which had become alien and distant—farther than the tubular metal pillbox, farther than the voice which could no longer call for help.
Dust storms swirled on the adjoining fields, convulsions of space; something was brewing, gathering amid the whispering oats; there was always a line at the dacha guard booth for the only phone, people turned the dial that clicked when it sprang back into place, and through the fading foliage we could see the red and white of the ambulance, and only Grandfather II was sprightly and brisk, as if on good terms with death, like a doctor, and the heat merely dried his body to make it lighter, allowing him to stride faster.
That day I went out to the alley of garden plots; our children’s gatherings had ceased a long time ago, as if the element that brings children together had evaporated, gone with the play of breezes, rustles, whispers, and trembling branches that form the melody and milieu of children’s games; the air was sickeningly thick, sticky like the skin that forms when making jam, and had an acrid taste.
Why I went out I can’t remember now; there are actions you perform without knowing what prompted them and in that sense are unintentional, but not done out of momentum or habit. Probably I just needed to get outside the fence, to free myself of the sense of being surrounded on all four sides by pickets; the fence in a dacha lot very clearly defines the place where a child is both protected and hemmed in at the same time, while right outside the fence the street begins, where things impossible inside the fence can happen.
A fence is the border that separates life built on repetition, like a school lesson—have breakfast, weed the garden, read a few pages of a book—from life where you are on your own; the gate, which could be locked if you are being punished and not allowed out, the lock and shackle are guards protecting you from imaginary and real harms: the year before a boy had jumped from the shore and cracked his head, at the beginning of summer another boy went into the woods and got lost, a third boy tried crossing the tracks beneath a standing train, but the train started and caught his shirt, a fourth boy went for a walk in the sand quarry and fell into a hole … These supposed corpses were “registered” in the dacha topography, like pagan spirits of lakes and forests, they even included a pilot shot down in the winter of 1941 and buried near the pond under a small pyramid with a red tin star; they deprived the area of safety but also announced its realness: the forest wasn’t a forest but the forest-where, the pond was the pond-where; thanks to them, this locality took on an additional dimension, stopped being a dacha suburb and turned into a village district that incorporated life and death in such proximity, like the village and its cemetery.
Under the dark forest canopy, in the impenetrable, intoxicating denseness of the raspberries at noon, in the cattails and sedges on the pond shore that blended into a thick green haze over the black water, in the moist moss of the swamp, in the hidden source of the forest stream, buried under tree roots, everywhere there was something that called to you, touched you questioningly and invitingly, as if testing to see how conscious you were, whether you could be enticed, lured, abducted. The boys from the stories told by grown-ups, to whom something “bad” happened—you understood that was a lie, but a lie caused by not knowing, a guess, which therefore unexpectedly revealed the area of truth.