Scissors and penciclass="underline" if a coat of arms depicting Grandfather II’s power over me were needed, I would pick those two objects. Scissors and pencil, and maybe also a protractor: when I first saw the drafting tools in his room, when I saw the ascetic precision of the tools, the gaunt extension of the legs, I didn’t even understand at first that these items were meant for drawing on paper; I assumed that they were intended for drawing on a person, anthropometry, and decided that Grandfather II had called me in to compare me with those instruments to some diagram: Was I suitable to be a person, was there some discrepancy?
So, I sensed that the haircut would have a second, additional meaning; in getting rid of the lice, Grandfather II actually wanted to get me in his power, and I saw my shaved head as the hairless head of an infant. I might not have felt this so acutely and morbidly were it not for yet another recollection.
Besides hair, the second mysterious and special part of the body were nails; they were cut with small curved scissors, and for me it was a ritual of leave-taking, a ritual of growth and loss; sometimes there were white spots, like stars or clouds, on my nails, and I tried to tell my fortune by them, thinking they held signs of the future. I knew that nails continued to grow after death, and therefore thought they belonged in both worlds simultaneously, and that we without knowing were always standing before the veil of death and penetrating it with our fingertips. Those white dots and stars come from over there, from death, from the unity of time.
I brought my hand very close to my eyes and looked at the nail as if it were a screen, the sky in the planetarium where messages were projected from the other, dead side, shadows of approaching events; that is why you can’t simply cut nails, you have to catch the mood and moment, do everything not to scare off the shadows; my nails seemed to be the most sensitive—if we mean premonitions and other sensations that combine feeling and time into one—and the almost forbidden part of my body that did not belong to me.
So on a spring day when frogs were laying eggs and their gassy clouds, full of black dots that would turn into tadpoles, glowed in puddles, I ran into Grandfather II’s house; the house was illuminated, white woven curtains in the doorways rustled in the draft, and Grandfather II did not hear me. He was in the middle of the room on an oak stool, cutting his toenails; nails as yellow as last year’s fatback salo, ingrown, like bird claws. Grandfather II was soaking his feet in a tub of warm water and clicking his clippers; with the same indifference to yourself you could chip at a sugarloaf or slice a sausage. I was astonished: not only did he not see the signs I saw, he could not even imagine that these signs occur; he was snipping off particles of himself dispassionately, meaninglessly; he was a thing to himself.
As I sat awaiting the haircut—the adults were consulting on where to get kerosene, there wasn’t enough left in the lantern—I recalled those moments; I was sure that Grandfather II wanted to make me just like him; a thing, a thing, a thing ran through my brain; I suddenly saw the room as a conspiracy of things; my steps had made a narrow bright path in their dark life, and I realized I was trapped; Grandfather II knew whom to leave me with, to whom to entrust me.
He was the only adult who truly mastered things; the relationship between him and things was mastery, not possession or ownership.
The difference is that possession and ownership deaden the object, root it in the ossified nature of matter; a person repeatedly enslaves things that are already there to serve him—out of fear that he will lose them, that they will refuse to serve him, that someone else will take them; he enslaves them without actually having real power over them.
I watched Grandfather II pick up an axe, rusty, with a splintered handle, and it was suddenly clear that it was his axe, the way it was his arm which lifted the axe; the category of belonging did not apply here—Grandfather II and the axe became a single organism of flesh, wood, and metal, and the tool quickly regained the forgotten meaning of its form; I realized that Grandfather II could chop until the axe handle broke, but even then the axe—if things could speak—would bless the hands of Grandfather II, who had provisionally restored meaning to its existence.
This happened with things other than tools: Grandfather II could pick up someone’s pen, a spoon in someone’s house—and I would have the feeling that he left those items happy, left them recruited by an idea, the conviction of agents, and the sugar bowl from which he took a cube of sugar was ready to drag its glass belly on its stubby nickel-plated feet to the telephone, to inform Grandfather II what people at the table said about him after he left. It seemed that things sought his patronage: they fell at his feet, rolled across the floor to him; he was blind but he constantly found things and never lost anything; and every rare loss turned out to be someone else’s oversight or error.
I was alone in the room; I was not alone; things—Grandfather II’s eavesdroppers and servants surrounded me. I was caught; I was too scared to even think about running. I imagined that the couch upholstery and the old curtains were like the carnivorous sundew plant, electrified, sending out tiny threadlike whiskers that listened to my inner vacillations; a trap—I was trapped—I knew that Grandfather II had set it, and I even wondered if he had not given me head lice. He had told me how homeless children used to stop people on the street with a box of lice and threaten: We’ll shake them on you if you don’t give us money. I started looking for a hole I could escape through and got stuck even deeper in the feeling of being caught, identifying myself with mice, the house was riddled with their holes, mice, whose inconspicuousness I envied.
Grandfather II killed the mice; some adults considered this hunt a manifestation of his preference for order: the mice in this case were something irregular, petty, and nasty; others—who thought they saw more deeply and accurately—assumed that the mice were too much a reminder of the days that Grandfather II never talked about; that in the image of mice creeping up on grains of sugar and wheat, Grandfather II saw the deprivations of his past.
But I saw that he found a special eerie pleasure in how the mice died in the traps he, a blind man, set out; he did not need to see their holes, or seek the right place to put the mousetrap, or select the right bait—it was enough to set down the mousetrap and the mouse would find it, as if it was not the bait but the trap that attracted it by its very existence. Grandfather II was not killing mice, he probably did not care about them at all—he was seeking over and over confirmation of the law he discovered by intuition: the trap is important, not the quarry, it is important to insert the spring, raise the toothed arch, and the victim will appear—only because the trap was there.
Now in the room—there was silence behind the door, they had made a decision about the kerosene and they would call me in at any moment—I sensed that I was right; Grandfather II had a trap for every person. I realized that if I allowed them to cut my hair, if I sat in the chair, snuggled into the sheet, the scissors snipping metallically by my ear, my hair falling to the floor like rubbish, the blue blade, which made a ringing sound if you snapped it with a fingernail and which was honed on the suede reverse of a belt strap—if the dangerous razor touched my scalp, I would lose the future. The future tense—in premonition—was taken away, petrified, lost its visual perspective; it was taken away in language, too, verbs became a third lighter in weight. I sensed that if the scissors divided time into “before” and “after,” the “after” would be alien to me, but I would not know that it was not mine, I would not remember how I had been afraid and wanted to run and thought about the trap. Acting on my own, not giving in did not mean exercising my own will; it was not will—it was life versus not-life, in which I could be taken like a thing, shaved and acquired.