Therefore the fence was not simply a guardraiclass="underline" all the scrapes, wounds, and hurts, everything that made you bleed and left scars happened outside it. If you cut yourself at home, it was from a carelessness that was instantly nursed with iodine and a bandage. But out there, beyond the fence, the concept of careful and careless did not exist: sunny fields and dark woods worked together so uniformly, blood flowed so easily and almost merrily from a cut that you did not see it or any wound as an attempt by death on life; you didn’t see it and in that sense you were protected.
Coming out to the alley, I stepped on the sand that marked the border between it and the garden plots—and saw a chunk of concrete the size of a fist; it was studded with smooth pebbles the color of frozen meat and sharp shards of flint speckled with conch shells. The piece of concrete must have fallen from a truck carrying construction materials from some lot; it had fallen recently and was not yet pushed into the sand, catching my eye.
Before I understood or remembered anything, my mouth filled with the taste of blood—without any blood; pain shot through my lower jaw like surgical thread in an unhealed wound. The world around me turned blurry, like the corrugated glass in hospitals, like the walls of a vortex; I looked at the piece of concrete but it seemed to be at the bottom of the vortex; the only clear thing in a blurry world, but extremely far away, discovered at the bottom of memory. I was slowly drowning in myself. Numbness entered my muscles, and I understood that in parts of my body an incessant telegraphic conversation had been under way, and now the components were falling apart, it went silent and was becoming empty, like the line where I stood, empty, like a book without letters, and my breathing stopped.
I saved myself—the way a diver finds a pocket of air underwater and takes a breath. My memory found a previous moment with a rock just like this one, and at that point, the opening which connects time like a nerve canal was revealed, and a fragmentary and flickering recollection came to the surface.
That other concrete block was just like this one, bristling with flint and pebbles. I had leaned too hard on the handle of my stroller and tipped it over, falling face-first onto the concrete. I was about a year old; my memory of that time was like amniotic fluid, better at conveying sound than image, and I sensed only my own long-ago scream. I did not understand then that I could die, the scream was older than my age, as if it was not a year-old child screaming but someone who was conscious of the horror of death and cried to stave it off. The sound was so piercing that it thickened and slowed time and the moment of the fall, and pain lengthened in it, lengthened in memory.
As soon as I recognized the rock the vortex vanished and the world stopped spinning like a top; however the sensation of alienness coming from the rock did not go away. I knew that my father had put the block in a wheelbarrow, smashed it with a sledgehammer, and thrown it away in the distant forest; when he told me that—those were his words, “in the distant forest,”—it frightened me that somewhere a chunk of concrete splattered with my blood and that had almost killed me, was still lying around, smashed but not destroyed. I wanted to find it so I could bury it, or better, take it out in a rowboat to the middle of the pond and submerge it beneath the water and the silt. Father just laughed and said he had forgotten where he threw it; as if to say it was all nonsense and if not for Grandfather II he would have used the concrete as planned—for the foundation of the shed; he and my mother were to blame for not keeping a closer eye on me, but the concrete was just concrete. Father admitted that Grandfather II had insisted that he take the concrete to the woods; “nothing good will come from such a foundation,” Grandfather II said and Father obeyed.
Now a chunk of concrete just like it lay before me. Or was it part of the block I fell on? There are moments when you sense that you must live carefully: it’s as if the protective layers have been removed, habitual as clothing, you are left naked, exposed, vulnerable, and the event that has been stalking you, following you outside your field of vision, is close, but you don’t know where it’s coming from.
Reliving death exhausted me—I did not feel weak but I sensed that I was defenseless, and defenseless in a different way than even an animal in a hunter’s sight; the deer and wolf have the ground beneath their feet, they are certain at least of that, confident in their ability to rapidly flee.
Sand. Sand was under my feet. A drop of sweat fell from my face and was absorbed, leaving a fat, convex blotch. In the sand I could see shiny grains of quartz, flakes of mica like particles of dragonfly wings, and pieces of feldspar as pale gray as ground grain; my body seemed too soft, pliant, sadly doomed; this is the way you look at places you are leaving, you become relaxed and compliant because in your mind they are already abandoned. I felt as if I had discovered a crack in myself and the fear that the break would increase fought with my desire to look inside, to follow that break, as if it had opened a path into depths previously inaccessible, or perhaps not even existing before.
At the very end of the desolate alley, by the far gate that opened to the place we called Concrete—there used to be a railway to the airfield there, abandoned, with crookedly diverging rails, where once they pushed concrete blocks like stelae from the loading docks onto smashed tanks, the lids of pillboxes, the wild wind of the outskirts whistled over broken glass and cardboard shelters for tramps—at the far gate a black dot appeared, growing like an abscess, a wormhole in the jellylike, greasy flesh of the day.
It was a dog, a black dog that could have come only from the Concrete side: it was running toward me, unsteadily, trotting from ditch to ditch, jaws open, scattering thick cottony saliva in the dust. There was no one around: just me and the dog, we were connected by the straight line of the alley, the geometry of fate; the dog was rushing disjointedly and kept itself together by running—if it were to stop, it would fall apart—and I stood, nailed to the ground by its attack, and the flesh in my calf could already feel the touch of its fangs.
The black dog—there were no black dogs in our neighborhood—black, frenzied by the heat, came close and prepared to jump, but its muscles could not lift its body into the air, and it just attacked, knocked me over and bit into my left leg as if my blood could cure it. Then the dog got on top of me, held me down with its paws, and started crawling toward my throat—and suddenly it howled, moaned pathetically, bent as if death were taking its measure which it could not fit while still alive. Grandfather II stood above us with his cane; he broke the dog’s back, striking the protruding vertebrae with the copper; the dog was dying, and Grandfather II moved his boiled egg-white eyes, not seeing but sensing how the fur fell out, the legs straightened, and the dog’s life ran out; blood gurgled out of my torn leg, and Grandfather II listened attentively to that sound.
How had he appeared there? I remember that Grandfather II was not nearby when I went out into the alley. Apparently he must have been hiding behind the brambles at the gate—he liked to play with them, bring his fingers close to the prickly branches, following their curves with the palm of his hand, bringing his hand so close that the thorns seemed to trace the lines of his fingerprints like a needle on a record; he seemed to be testing, calibrating, adjusting some sense that replaced vision, and he hated being caught at this; then he would intentionally—and I was the only one who guessed it was intentional—prick himself and pretend that he had wanted to pick a flower or a berry.