Even stranger was the other side of her “cooking persona,” which many people considered eccentric.
In the spring, on the eve of blossoming, Grandmother Mara would become agitated, worried by a premonition. And then one day she would say, “The sap is running!” and send me for grandfather’s ax, as if she could feel what was happening inside the birch trees without going into the woods.
I entered the grove cautiously, the ground made sucking noises from the recent melt, branches knocked down by winter winds were strewn everywhere, young tree trunks bearing the teeth marks of hares and elk, and the usual paths were lost under last year’s fallen leaves. The forest, which had restored its wildness over the winter, was alien to me, still in my city mode. I would have preferred to wait for the paths to be trampled once again, for foliage to hide the traces of winter, and the fallen trees and branches taken away for firewood. But Grandmother Mara brought me to help her chop through the thick birch bark, and watched with inexplicable excitement as the first drop dripped into the three-liter jar. The desire to animate herself after a long winter with sap coming from the earth turned Grandmother Mara into part-spirit, part-animal, and I avoided drinking that liquid seething from the tree. I believed it would make wood goblin fur grow between my toes.
Also in the spring, when the earth was still a mass of dried blades of grass and last year’s leaves—it all lay as it had fallen in December, squashed by the wet and heavy snow—but the mean sharp teeth of nettles were breaking through the old grass on sunny hillocks, Grandmother Mara went with a sack to collect the nettles. When she had picked all the young nettle leaves in the closest hillocks, she came back to make soup, meatless nettle soup, which was merely “whitened” with flour.
I watched her pick the nettles, and she seemed like a persistent herbivore who would outlive any predator, because predators cannot live without meat, while herbivores can get by on twigs, leaves, and buds. She was performing a ritual, feeding us food from the kingdom of the dead, where translucent shadows of those who died of hunger flitter around meadows and gather edible herbs, the first spring greenery, still as weak and thin as themselves. Once a year Grandmother Mara reminded us who we were and where we came from, which vegetative root was ours, for she, our ancestor, ate soup in the thirties that did not even have sorrel but only coltsfoot and birch bark.
Spring passed, and I forgot these thoughts; but in summer the wallpaper had to be changed in the dacha rooms. Grandmother Mara mixed flour in warm water to get a white, bubbling, slurping glue. She said there was a time when she would never have thought of using flour to make glue; she and grandfather would have sat by the kettle of glue mix, taking turns with spoons, and they wouldn’t have needed anything else, not even bread, just a pinch of salt.
Once, when she was busy, I took a spoonful of the mix and tried to swallow it; I threw up behind the shed. Maybe in other circumstances, I would have felt pity, thinking about her hungry past—but all I felt was her conviction that people should consume with joy the inedible, getting calories from glue, shoe leather, and bark, and I was inadequate, a pathetically weak descendant of real people.
I tried eating the soft inner bark of birches; I stole a leather belt and hid in the woods, trying to boil it in a tin can, waiting for it to soften, but I was unable to chew a tiny bit. I was hounded by the fear that in case of real starvation, there would be no gradation; I would immediately fall to the very bottom, would be forced to boil insoles of shoes, to catch rats.
My grandfathers could have taught me to retain my dignity, not fear hunger or war, live openly and boldly; but they were gone so long and so definitively, that I could only guess, catch fleeting accidental glimpses of what I had lost.
My grandfathers were taken by the war: one died from his wounds ten years after the victory, the other was lost, missing in action. They were both absent from my time, each in his own way: one had been dead a long time ago although he had been alive, the other seemed to have never existed at all.
I am sure that my grandmothers and parents remembered the grandfathers and spoke with them in their heads. But they never told me their biographies, never talked about them with me at all. If they had talked about one, who died, they would have had to talk about the other, who was lost, and for some reason they didn’t want to do that. So they preferred to keep both cloaked in silence. I reassembled my grandfathers in pieces, fragments of random recollections, the few remaining objects, without finding anything abnormal about it, thinking that everyone lived this way.
Our dacha was in a place where battles were fought in the winter of ’41. The Germans took the neighboring village, but not ours. The former line of the front split the dacha region in half. The trenches and foxholes of the frontline were filled in, but in the field and woods where the Germans had stood the grass and trees grew a little differently, a shadow fell on nature even on the sunniest days. I understood how dangerously close it was to Moscow: an hour on the commuter train.
There were still dozens of old blinds in the woods, big trenches for tanks. Kids weren’t allowed to play around them, for there were rumors that decades ago someone was blown up by a mine. But the trenches and foxholes didn’t elicit any desire to crawl through them, they were blurred holes filled with black rotting water that digested fallen leaves year after year.
Every little village in the area had an obelisk with a list of names and an inscription like “They Passed Into Immortality.” An artillery captain was buried near a local pond—either his unit had been stationed there or he had died on the spot. The grave was tended by the dacha residents and the villagers, but it was as if they were fixing something in their yard, so the repairs made it resemble more a rural sanctuary than a military memorial. A quiet neo-paganism arose in the region, a weakly pulsating cult of departed ancestors—“They Passed Into Immortality.” Essentially, the cult was very distantly tied to official events, fireworks, parades, gigantic monuments, and eternal flames; as if the universal sacrifice was so great that any memorial was rendered insignificant. Gradually all the ground that held the dead turned into a memorial and took on features of sanctity, blessed by sacrifice and blood.
In this cult my warrior grandfathers had become nature: a birch, bird, brook, grass in a meadow. The phantom shadow of the German presence, the trace of the extreme edge the Germans reached in their attack on Moscow, was stronger than the imaginary presence of the grandfathers. I tried many times to imagine that maybe one grandfather had hidden in this pit from gunfire and the other’s tank stood here, but I felt nothing. Without the support of real memory, it was just a failed attempt at self-deception.
But everything German attracted me. I had a morbid interest as one sometimes does in relation to something extremely repulsive: sores on a beggar’s leg or a dog hit by a car and smeared into a red spot on the asphalt.
Besides which, the symbols of the Third Reich, which were unceasingly preserved and refreshed for propaganda purposes in the Soviet Union, did not go through the stages of aging and decay that the Soviet military symbols, images, and heroes had experienced.
Soviet art had played itself out, the content was gone, leaving only the form. In some sense, what their soldier husbands had been like had already been told on behalf of my grandmothers; in any case, a solidly established canon had been imposed on us.
Grandfathers—all the dead—had been appropriated by the state and returned in the form of ideologically laden images; their death turned out to be the main justification for the regime.