Childhood in those dachas—they are long gone, they have become the suburbs, the houses have changed, been renovated, there are solid fences—childhood was a school of hypocrisy; I cannot say that in full measure about my own family or the families of some of my friends—but the general field of relations was like that. Every one of us dacha kids led a double life to some degree; I’m not talking about secret mischief, rule breaking, omissions, or enforced furtiveness. We—each in his own way—were betrayed by our families, who saw all too clearly other children we were supposed to become.
However, I am thankful for my childhood; if not for the enforced study of split personality almost to the point of schizophrenia, I would not have become who I am; and certainly I would not have been able to see and figure out Grandfather II’s real nature.
One day—I am getting ahead of myself—I understood, naively, childishly, that seeing is a mirror; we see not people but how people are reflected in us; I thought I had discovered a secret and all I needed was to figure out how to get beyond my own gaze to see what you’re not supposed to be able to see.
I began playing with my shadow: I tried to stand so that you could not tell who my shadow belonged to; I stood next to the stump of an apple tree, a barrel, a scarecrow, held my head down, hid my hands, and tried to make my shadow look like theirs; I played for several days, choosing the evening when the shadows were clear, thick, and long, I played madly, forgetting the time. And suddenly, weary and just fooling around, I turned and froze; my shadow was not mine. I had missed the moment of the switch and stood there, afraid to move: what if moving didn’t help, what if that alien shadow followed, but remained alien? But I had frozen in a very uncomfortable position, I moved my feet as soon as I shut my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw that it was my shadow.
The game now had a dangerous meaning: I consciously sought the state of excited oblivion when I was playing so hard, so inside the movements and the last rays of the sun, that I lost consciousness for a second and became a stranger to myself; I acquired another’s shadow.
Of course, I never experienced that state again; then I started studying the grown-ups’ shadows—this wasn’t an amusement, not a game, but a path to knowledge. I thought that their shadows differed in more than outline: my father’s shadow was much bigger than he was, and when he put the light out in my room after wishing me good night, I imagined that it remained, dissolved in the dark, growing and threatening, watching if I was really asleep. Mother’s shadow was fluid, musical in outline, I thought if you touched it, it would respond in a singing tone like a cello; grandmother’s was flickering, like a spindle, like knitting needles—a kind shadow.
I couldn’t get a feel for Grandfather II’s shadow; it did not respond to my imagination, no matter how hard I tried to find something in it; I couldn’t say that it was ordinary, average, without a hook for my fantasy; it seemed that Grandfather II knew what his shadow was like, that he directed it and watched that it did not tell anything more about him, that he was constantly pulling it closer, like the skirts of a long raincoat.
However, this is a subject for later; I merely needed to clarify the circumstances of my childhood and the starting point of the story—the story of Grandfather II’s gradual entry into our family, my birth, and my separate and special relationship with him.
Our dacha plot was next to Grandfather II’s; there was no fence between them, the water pipe served us both, and somehow it turned out that the sellers of our dacha also passed along the voluntary obligation to take care of Grandfather II. All the separation of the dacha lots, the delineations between neighbors depended on visual clues—fences and pipes, in our case. What can you expect from someone who can’t see? So the border did not work, and relations with Grandfather II crossed the line of neighborliness.
As far as I can judge Grandfather II had no obvious interest in being close to us; he was not looking for listeners and he didn’t need comrades; it happened on its own, Grandfather II even subtly pretended that he was acceding to neighborly socializing under pressure. Now I think that this nearness was a test: he had lived privately for decades, outliving the past, and now he was trying to be close with strangers so that he could use their eyes and their feelings to check just how well hidden were the things that needed to be hidden.
However, that’s too simple an explanation; there were other reasons. Grandfather II’s health was excellent; nature, having taken his vision, seemed to have exhausted the bodily harm due him, and the woes of aging passed him by; only his bones ached when bad weather was coming—he must have suffered freezing temperatures long ago and now his body warned him of cold. Grandfather II sought—and found in my family—people among whom he could die; what he sought most was not reliability, not help “if something happens,” but fastidiousness toward other people’s secrets.
He was building a relationship—not for life, but for his postponed death; this vantage point, this turn of events was hard to see from inside the relationship, and I can judge it only in memory. Grandfather II didn’t join the family, he didn’t try to become a dependent—on the contrary, he tried not to be a burden, not to beg for intimacy, and did it all without stress or artificiality, without engendering pity. Yet there was something of a well-rehearsed dramatic role about it, when the actor never makes the slightest deviation from his chosen method.
Of course, this could be the behavior of a man of impeccably noble objectives; however, such a man would have been natural in his nobility, while Grandfather II’s actions always seemed slightly off, dissociated from himself.
However, this remark is from subsequent times—back then no one thought this way; on the contrary, as far as I can tell, the family considered Grandfather II a sincere man, albeit rather reticent.
Grandfather II knew how to be useful—with considered advice or needed information; his presence elicited the sense of the steadfastness of life arising when you know that next to you is a man who has been through a lot and learned to live amid adversity. Both my real grandfathers had died in the war, and Grandfather II gradually took the place of the oldest man in the family, even though he did not openly count himself a family member; he did not seek to replace them, did not try to block the memory of the real grandfathers, on the contrary he treated them respectfully. Slowly, over years, he worked his way in: gave up some land for a garden, taught us how to graft trees, selecting the most viable cutting, grafting it to the trunk, covering it with tar, and tending it the first few years—and he gradually grafted himself to us, joining us, as if he knew the long power of time, which does not tolerate haste but allows only the small daily effort—the way texts are written, the way impossibilities and contradictions in relations are solved—a small effort creating and increasing the field; the field that first grows quantitatively and at some point takes on its own qualities, creating new connections, new events, incidents, thoughts, and actions, previously impossible.
At the end of summer, we made jam at the dacha—Grandfather II helped, washing the copper tubs; foods were canned—he brought over jars sterilized by boiling. Gooseberries, currants, apples—the fruity summer moisture, the summery juice was boiled, thickened, the summery fruitful time was canned for winter, cold and dark; the summery aromatic herbs were put into jars with cucumbers, tomatoes, and squash, they were used to separate layers of mushrooms in pails, which emitted burbling, drooling juices.