He had the kind of pride that is unknown to ordinary people who cannot imagine that a person can be the sculptural shell of his pride; a pride so strong that its bearer would be humiliated to reveal it; pride and scorn.
Later I managed to see all this only because Grandfather II’s habits, his scrupulous self-control, which was tripled or quadrupled by the need to keep in mind the accidental gaze that he could not notice, were all calculated for adults; they do not play hide-and-seek, do not sit silently, breathing through the nose, under the table when someone enters the room.
Grandfather II seemed to have forgotten there was another pair of eyes in the house. He had never seen me from my very birth, and probably at the beginning I was something like a speaking breeze of air for him. He could follow my growth only in his mind, and not knowing how I looked, not being able to picture me made me—in his perception—a plant capable of reason or a domestic pet. Grandfather II concentrated too much on always appearing the way he wanted to adults, keeping a mental picture in his head built on sounds—who came and went, where they were going, where they were now, who might be looking at him—that I “fell out” of the picture, or rather, did not appear in it for some time. Grandfather II did not expect astuteness from me, did not target me as a possible danger; he could judge me only by the conversations adults had with me, and those conversations—for this is the common attitude in conversations with children, if you listen objectively—could create only the image of a dawdler and bumbler.
Had Grandfather II been internally closer to his own childhood, had his memory not been so crammed with events that blocked one another, he might have understood that one should beware of a child most of all; that the absentmindedness for which I was always scolded was in fact a sign of a different sort of attention: not narrowed but expanded, embracing and absorbing the margins, the things that did not fit into a focused crystal. But Grandfather II—I guessed this only later—had lived the kind of life that separates a man from himself; he was unlikely to remember anything about his own perceptions in childhood.
When I turned seven, Grandfather II at last laid claim to me. In the final dacha days—the family was already seeking suitable gladioli for a bouquet to bring to school—they found I had lice. There were only a few days left before class started, it would be impossible to get rid of them in that short time; the adults met to hold a council and I waited in the next room; I thought they would decide to cut my hair short, and I was already suffering: not only was my hair perhaps my only freedom, but I did not regard the whole haircutting business as something ordinary and safe.
My inner anxiety was always disproportionately high before a haircut. The mended sheet that my mother used to cover me seemed like an ancient shroud, its whiteness no longer the familiar white of bed linens and it took on—probably because it was an old, much-washed sheet—the shade of invisible twilight that you catch on white death shrouds: they themselves are not touched by decay, but the shadow of decay lies upon them, as if sunlight from the cloth is absorbed into the air, leaving behind particles of the purplish blue that appears on the sharpened cheekbones of the dead.
The loneliness—looking in the mirror—of the human head separated by the sheet, the nearness of scissor blades, hair falling on the floor which had just been part of you, and was already being swept up; a haircut seemed like a little death to me. I invented a hierarchy, and a haircut was on the same level as the death of a cat or dog; the animal dies, while a person is not killed by a death like that, a human needs a larger death—but I wasn’t very big, and so I froze on the chair, and to this day I have to walk anxiously past the barbershop several times before stepping inside. The scent of soap, powder, foam whipped up by the hot currents of the blowdryer, sweetness and stickiness all refer me to something else, two biblical stories merge into one: Delilah cutting Samson’s hair and Salomé carrying John the Baptist’s head upon a plate; cut off hair and the separation of head from body—something about life and death is understood in those images which is revealed in anxiety even to a child; I learned later how such feelings are euphemistically transformed in the Book.
And then, when something had to be done with my head, Grandfather II proposed: shave it and smear it with kerosene.
Shave. Completely.
I was not worried that I would be teased for being bald; rather, a complete shave was equal and equivalent to death, not the little death, as in a haircut, but the full-sized real death. They were going to “nullify” me, turn me into an infant, that is, to deprive me of the little I had lived and which was expressed visually in the length of my hair.
I got even more scared when I realized that the adults would not argue with Grandfather II; they were happy that he proposed what they were thinking but, out of pity, had not said. It was fitting for Grandfather II to propose it; lice, kerosene, shaving the head—it all smelled of ancient times, homeless children, severe measures; if anyone else had suggested it, the adults might have argued, but here we had the charm of severity; stop whining, shave the head, imagine you’re in the army, no one’s asking you, you’ve got to put up with things, learn to man up. This was all said as if he had right of age and experience, with the intonation of superficial and therefore cheerful people who like the phrase “don’t turn this into a tragedy.” People like that become sergeants, trainers, gym teachers, they don’t like sloppy and careless bums; they think that even feelings should be energetic and brief—three minutes for a farewell; nothing bothers them, nothing gets through to them, everything heals quickly. Grandfather II spoke that way, and the adults probably thought he was playacting, that this was the right tone to take to cheer me up, but I had the growing awareness that this wasn’t just about the haircut; Grandfather II had decided—and no one understood!—to take me in his power.
There was a backstory to this feeling; I had noticed long ago that Grandfather II resented and even hated long hair.
Blind, he could still guess whether the unknown woman who came into the room had her hair loose and not up in a knot. A woman, for instance, our new neighbor, would visit for the first time, and Grandfather II could sense the invisible agitation coming from the unbound, curly, long hair—and run his hand over his gray crew cut; that meant that Grandfather II was angry. In the liberated locks, in the lightness of tresses sweeping her shoulders, he probably sensed vague danger: a symbol and source of sensual freedom—that is why he really loved, forgetting his relatively masculine nature, all kinds of hairpins and slides, all the metal ammunition used to tame and restrain women’s hair. The housekeeper spent her life wearing kerchiefs, he bought them for her with almost every pension deposit; she used them to cover the television, laid them on shelves like little tablecloths, she secretly gave them away, for Grandfather II could not count them; much later I learned that Grandfather II burned her hair, allegedly by accident, with a curling iron. When Grandfather II hugged me and patted my head, his fingers grabbed my hair at the root and moved as if the middle and index fingers were scissors. In our dacha house, the scissors hung on a nail near the cupboard, and Grandfather II sometimes went over to check if they were in place. The fact that they hung on a nail and were not put into a drawer created a special sensation; they were old, made in an ironmonger’s workshop in the twenties—you could make out the mark—blackened, as if over the decades the metal had absorbed candle soot, stove smoke, and coal dust; the scissors hung on the wall like a sign and reminder, a sign of power. The only object equal in power was the pencil—once a year, on the eve of my birthday, Grandfather II stood me in the doorway, put a book on my head, then I stepped aside, and he made a pencil mark along the book—to mark how I had grown, and then he notched the line. How I feared that pencil, ribbed and sharpened: I thought that one day I would not meet the measure Grandfather II had already intended for me, and my failure—I could not grow, the bread of our house was wasted on me—would be so great that no one would even say a word to me: they would turn away, and that would be all.