The blind seem lost in time, they are not entirely present in every moment; being lost blurred his features, as if he had moved while being photographed.
That is why Grandfather II did not persist in the viewer’s retina, he seeped through it, remaining a vague silhouette; you remember his profile better than his face, he somehow was always turned sideways, behind something, as if in a crowd, among others, even when he was alone; you remembered his clothing, perhaps the set of his shoulders, something of his walk, but that did not create a whole portrait.
Now trying to picture his face, I see some moment of recollection in which everything should be there, I see it with photographic precision, but there is no face; it could be overexposed. I can list external features—medium height, thin, gray-haired, but the key to description is not there; rather it lies in the layer of perception where the impression is no longer directly tied to what we see.
Grandfather II—that was the only way; when you spoke his real name, you felt that you were throwing a letter across the fallow no-man’s land by a border, and the letter never made it, falling halfway; you call the man by his name, but the sound of that name does not create a link between you, no closeness; the anonymous numeral—Grandfather II—corresponded to your actual feeling.
Grandfather II was not a relative; he was a neighbor at the dacha, an old blind gardener. Apparently having spent his past life encased by the harsh contours of an army or some other uniform, he now wore only soft linen that followed the lines of the body; he had lost his vision long ago, decades before my birth; he had gone beyond his blindness, beyond the habits that trap the blind in their blindness, and he was free in his inability to see; he reduced his life to a few routes, the main one being the route from his apartment in the city to the dacha and back. He relied on a cleaning woman for the housekeeping—and over the years by ear and touch created an image in his mind of the limited space he allowed himself for habitation.
In essence, he lived on a few islands with the solid ground of familiar sounds, smells, and touch; you might say he lived in the midst of this ground, perceiving it with his entire body, leaning on it, and in that sense his situation was more stable than that of the sighted. The only danger for him was something new. A new bridge across the ravine, a new front door, a changed bus stop destroyed the dummy Grandfather II had created out of sounds and physical impressions; for the sighted this destruction is not visible as destruction, they see only a change, while the blind are closer to the true understanding of things; new means death, innovation is murder; and therefore, although not only because of this, Grandfather II treated the past more seriously than others.
What Grandfather II had been earlier, no one knew; there were almost no old-timers left at the dacha settlement to ask. Dacha life predisposes people to friendliness, to collecting biographies and the names of local celebrities—and this is where so-and-so lives!—but Grandfather II was always beyond such inquiries.
He was alluringly uninteresting; next to him everyone seemed a bit more significant than they actually were; Grandfather II blended into the background, the epitome of obscurity—not modesty, not discretion, but obscurity; modesty and discretion are distinctive traits, and he had none of those. Grandfather II sought to pass through life by never drawing attention to himself and achieved this with almost monastic perfection.
As the senior bookkeeper of a concern, remnants of the managerial habit appeared in him, but very weakly, when he sat down in a specially important way, weighing the pen in his fingers before signing a receipt; it seemed that the eyes behind his smoky eyeglasses had been eaten by the ciphers. Yet some of the old villagers—the dachas were built on the site of a mushroom woodland beyond the village—said that Grandfather II was no bookkeeper at all. The village gives you a different vantage point on people, a different sensitivity to destiny, than the city, its inhabitants have a different sense of a person’s belonging to the state, whether he had been only a mailman or a forest ranger—and the old men thought that there was a stench about Grandfather II; he had “the stench of official boots.” Of course, the villagers did not go far in their thinking—a police accountant or administrator; official boots, in their opinion, did not have a powerful odor.
The dacha residents did not judge by city standards, but by those of dacha life. Owning a dacha in those days and among those people was considered a kind of amnesty, an absolution of the past, whatever it had been; not of imagined or actual sins, but of the past per se.
One’s past life became a treat that could be served up as something light and tasty with tea, for an evening chat; people moved to the dacha in order to reexamine their memory, reorganize it through a retrospective gaze, to be assured thoroughly and meticulously of its fine quality. The dacha residents sensed a vague similarity of fates, an affinity in attitude toward life; finding themselves in proximity, they discovered that they were a community; and dacha life in that sense was perceived as a different life—following upon the one already lived and separate from it.
It is unlikely that morally inexcusable acts were among the things they wanted to remember. Rather, the very position in the middle rungs of authority, which presumed a slightly greater moral conformity than what a person could exhibit without having to inwardly justify himself, forced them to assume a dignified air. They were the abstract “elderly” who were supposed to be given seats on the train and bus, according to the proper rules.
Naturally, the question of what Grandfather II used to be simply could not be uttered in this circle—the sound would be lost in the air; everyone there was a decent person, and this combination of words—decent person, not “worthy,” not “good,” but decent—was the highest praise at the dachas. In essence, this is what united all the residents: they managed to come out of difficult times as decent men—that is, people about whom for a variety of reasons you couldn’t say anything bad.
At first glance, the dachas were an oasis, an island of conciliation, tranquility, amiability. But the children—the children sensed that it was all a sham, a show: we were brought up too strictly and fervently, shown no forgiveness or mercy in moral issues. The adults had a clearly marked area of eclipse in their heads, and if that eclipse came on—if you stole, lied, didn’t keep your promise—the punishment was so incommensurate—not in cruelty, but in readiness to deny your son or daughter, to become strangers instantly—that it seemed you weren’t a child but an enemy who had sneaked into the family, a changeling from the maternity hospital.
The family played out an entire scene: Is this our son? Is this our daughter? I remember how my friend, eight years old, unable to stand these questions—they were investigating the theft of plums—suddenly came up to his parents and repeated loudly: I’m your son! I’m your son! I’m your son!—and they stepped back, they didn’t know what to do with the little boy who was shaking, missing an unbuckled sandal, and shouting without anger, without stubbornness but with the sudden firmness of the weak: I’m your son! I’m your son! I’m your son! They, the adults, were at the moment afraid of an eight-year-old child, they stood there, mother, father, and the person whose garden the plums had come from, until the boy quieted down, climbed into a ditch, and started to cry.
Children were seemingly being prepared for a life in which any misdeed was not in and of itself bad but bad because it cast a shadow on the family, made people take a closer look at them—Who brought up a child like this?—and the family did not want to be looked at closely; the result was forced morality, and reciprocal hypocrisy permeated everything: the order not to lie, accompanied by fear, only multiplies the lie and forces to you operate within it.