It must have been that other sense that told Grandfather II that something important or dangerous was happening to me; once when my parents assumed I was riding bikes with my friends, we were actually planning to climb the power line tower to retrieve someone’s kite stuck in the lines; the kite fluttered, I was trying on the rubber boots and gloves I had taken from the shed, and my friends were egging me on—and Grandfather II appeared on the road. He was probably going off on some business of his own, but the anticipation of my triumph was blown away; his appearance seemed to say: What do you think you’re doing! Don’t you dare!
So it’s unlikely to have been a coincidence: Grandfather II was behind the bramble rose and heard my screams … He was guarding me, nursing me; not me, but my future. Then the ambulance came flying through the fields, siren wailing, driving consciousness deeper, down into my heels, it smelled of tobacco and gasoline, and the belfry swayed and swayed over the hospital courtyard, I had seen the belfry many times when I fished on the dammed lake; the belfry was like a needle on some apparatus, leaning first left then right, it bent toward me like a question mark, shot upward, blocking the sky, shrank, waving in the far corner of my vision and then blocked the view again. In the room, plaster was peeling off the walls, there was a black spider in a web in the corner; I watched it with strangely changed vision, which omitted the objects nearby; the spider moved right in front of my face, while my torn leg—this was probably the drugs—seemed to be back in the courtyard, my body was being dragged through the hallway, and only my head had been brought into the room.
The spider was going to weave its web over my face, get in my mouth, hang up its sticky threads and wait for the flies that were buzzing in the hospital room; I wanted to wave my arms, shout for them to take away the spider.
But as soon as I tried to speak the dog appeared, its eyes rheumy, bulging, as if the touch of the dry lids caused them pain, and I realized that it was not the hound looking at me. I had crossed an invisible line, marked perhaps only by faded buttercups or scattered gravel; the way you can catch swamp fever, I caught death, seeing a mole pecked to death, a dead hedgehog covered with black horned beetles; I wandered out on Concrete in the evening hour when nature trembles at someone’s presence, when you feel it, too, and every shrub watches, it seems that they’re looking at you, but they’re really looking at the one standing behind you. At that hour you can’t play hide-and-seek far from home, beyond its allure, where voices and smells don’t reach—you will get lost, climbing into a dark space that turns out to be the crack between day and night; it is the hour of interstitial, indeterminate time, the hour the birds try to wait out in the air. I let in the pestilence somehow, brought it home without noticing the way you don’t notice illness, thinking the slight temperature is due to running around, and that your throat is dry from thirst; I let it in and it grew in me, settled in like a worm in the intestine, and that is why the black dog ran straight for me—I was careless and learned too soon what is hidden from a child by the indissolubility of body and mind, the indivisibility of the individual and the universe.
It was all decided there at the hospital; I had lost so much blood I needed a transfusion, they didn’t have the right type, and then Grandfather II, who had forced his way into the ambulance—my parents were in the city, leaving me in his care—offered his blood. He wasn’t supposed to do that because of his age, but he insisted—I don’t remember it, but I can imagine how he spoke to the doctors in a voice that crushed his interlocutor the way his stick broke the dog’s back—they took his blood, they took a lot, and I lived and he died, as if the part of his blood that was transfused in me contained his life and the part that remained in his veins was empty, used up blood, the blood of a dead man.
Now I think that he did not plan to die, counting on his good health; if he had lived, having saved my life, I would have belonged to him totally, by right of the blood in my veins; he took a risk and he would have won, but something happened that he could not have imagined, he was sure he would be transferred to Moscow, where they would nurse him back, replenish his blood loss: the break in our lives, the dangerous threadbare patch, coincided with a tectonic shift in history; an epoch—the epoch of Grandfather II, in which he could function, his milieu—was over; he did not survive the first moments of general confusion, the moments that did away with the old but did not yet usher in the new.
A few hours after the operation, tanks and armored cars from the neighboring base moved along the concrete road outside the hospital; I watched them through the third floor windows, and I don’t remember anything except the turning tank rollers and wheels of the vehicles. A whole hour while the column moved, stopping, compressing and stretching, driving into the invisible funnel of the highway leading into town and the tank treads and wheels spinning before my eyes.
I had seen tanks before on parade, but there you had the triumph of form, coordinated movement, no room for details, the parade was perceived as a whole, as if a text was marching, carrying the structure of letters. But here, on the concrete road outside the hospital, the tanks moved one behind the other, stalling, jerking in place, the caterpillar tracks grinding and coming loose—probably not all the vehicles were ready when the alarm was sounded—and therefore, my perception, affected by pain and the medication, involved two mutually exclusive images.
It seemed that the column of tanks, constantly braking and falling into two or three tank groups, the soldiers waving their flags furiously, the cursing officers speaking on the helmet phones, the very metal of the tanks that suddenly lost the connection that brought them into motion, the evaporated fuel that lacked the power to push the tons of steel—all this was the disintegrating speech of that time, the speech of a paralytic whose lips had forgotten the shape of sound. Some words tried to be spoken, but too late: the lips were already rimmed by the deadening frost, like anesthesia. I later learned that Grandfather II started dying just as the first tanks moved past the hospital; the nurse thought the noise and rumbling were killing him, and she shut and curtained the windows tightly, but Grandfather II still thrashed in the bed as if the tanks were driving over his legs, accidentally in the way.
There was a second image my mind would let in, pushing out the image of disintegrating speech, and then let go; the rollers that propelled the caterpillars and the wheels turned into the gears of a clock that needed winding, that couldn’t start turning; the clock had been stopped for many years, the mechanism had disconnected, and now all the gears from biggest to smallest turned on their own, the cogs catching and then not, and the hands on the clock jumped forward and then stopped again. The tanks got bogged down, angrily backfiring, their engines roared, but the tension of men and motors seemed incommensurate to the slow, disjointed movement, as if there was something ahead on the highway blocking the column, as if it—the vehicles and people—basically did not know whether there was any point or necessity in the expedition; as if time were trying to start and could not.
August days last a long time; in the distant fields beyond the hospital windows, they were harvesting the rye, and two different types of vehicles, as different as predators and herbivores, tanks and combines, seemed to look at each other in amazement, discovering that there were others types of mechanical creatures. Young soldiers waiting for the tank in front to restart its ignition amused themselves by turning their turrets toward the field, aiming at combines and trucks, which kept moving away, until work stopped completely. The combines ended up wedged at the very edge of the fields, the necks of their chutes raised; cars were parked along the sides of the road, one had a sofa on the roof and it looked as if the stuffed, plush creature had climbed up to save itself from the tank treads. An agricultural plane circled in the air senselessly, like a bumblebee on a string.