Grandmothers might have risked going against the canon. But they could not go against themselves.
The men’s lot was to act, the women’s, to wait; men got arrests, battles, and death, women got suffering and the passive portion of existence. Naturally, this is an arbitrary distinction, but it makes something a little more clear.
The female line continued, through the grandmothers, while the male line was cut off with the death of the grandfathers. The grandmothers passed on only their views and understanding to their grandchild. They were afraid of history: involvement in history killed their husbands and brothers; you have to hide from history, snuggle deeper into the family circle.
Only the grandfathers could have given an example of historical courage, historical action, historical duty—but the grandmothers, I think, were afraid that such an example could be fateful, could push me toward a dangerous path, and unconsciously they tried to protect me from the grandfathers, to hide them and keep them away from the house, the family circle, which they might destroy accidentally. The grandfathers were turned into restless ghosts who came home to the wives but were not allowed through the door and given a corner in the barn, where the women slipped out to see them, keeping their presence a secret from the family.
I tried to imagine what my grandfathers would be like now, in my time. I went to the “Generals’ Building” on Sokol, whose terra-cotta bricks seemed to have been fired in a special flame so fierce that a fire truck had to be kept handy as part of the guardhouse. The walls displayed memorial plaques, with military leaders armored by rows of medals, and bas-reliefs of banners, weapons, laurel leaves, bayonets, funereal ribbons sprinkled with five-pointed stars; old men in uniform often strolled in its rectangular courtyard defended from the street by bastion walls, as if protecting the building from the winds of new times.
One time I saw two old men come out the heavy doors with cream-colored curtains, one in navy black and the other in blue summer uniform, four or five rows of medals and ribbons on their chests. They must have been an admiral and a general, both around seventy, they had started in the war as lieutenants, and now maybe they were friends, married to sisters, or maybe one had saved the other on the Black Sea or the Barents Sea, during the defense of Sebastopol or in military convoys; their highly polished shoes gleamed and the old men were smiling.
A Chaika limousine was waiting at the steps, it belonged to the admiral, I thought, and a boy a little younger than I in the backseat looked at them with longing and adoration. The admiral greeted his grandson with a smile, a squint, and a salute, while the pilot general spread his arms, long thin fingers stretching out of the sleeves—he was missing two fingers on his right hand—and pretended to be flying right from the steps to the car.
How I wanted to be in that boy’s place! I thought my desire was so strong that like a cuckoo I could push the boy out of his body and the old aviator would come down the steps pretending to be a plane for me. But with that feeling I realized that I would be betraying my grandfathers, denying them for the sake of inner well-being, and I turned away, bitterly leaving the boy in the Chaika his old men.
Grandfather Trofim was my mother’s father; I had seen pictures of him, heard a few stories, rather sketchy; I knew he was an officer, served in tanks, fought the whole war, and died in the mid-1950s from his old wounds.
In fact we were separated by only three decades. But a prehistoric man looked out at me from the photographs; his features and his uniform said that he had lived in some distant time of which there were very few remnants, things made solidly and out of indestructible material—cast-iron doorstops and irons, sewing machines on cast-iron pedestals, heavy nickel silver spoons.
Grandmother Mara kept his decorations in a candy box hidden under the linens in the closet. They were rarely taken out or shown to me, I think I saw them only two or three times, so I have no visual memory of them; I remember the weight of the box, which I was allowed to hold, and the feeling that Grandfather Trofim would not have permitted keeping his medals in a box with the word “Assortment” in gold letters.
There was an Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Red Banner, other orders, and a dozen medals. No one really knew how he earned them or where he had fought.
I imagined the orders and medals in rows on his chest, enveloping him with their golden glow; but each order meant a lot, “weighed” too much, and this excess of meaning that intensified the complex hierarchy of awards erected a solid wall between me and my late Grandfather Trofim.
Once I decided to steal the medals and hide them in a place known only to me, to bury them, because they outweighed the cemetery urn with light ashes, outweighed the fleeting memory of family, as if the medals acted in their own self-interest. On the death of their bearer, they became his executors, so to speak, acquired the right to speak on his behalf, and the other material evidence of his life—papers, clothing, personal trifles—lost out to the heraldic symbols. The medals wanted to be remembered, they stole Grandfather Trofim from me, they did not steal my memory but were the key to remembering him.
On our dacha plot, which Grandfather Trofim received from the government a few years before his death, he had time just to build the summerhouse and leave some symbolic objects, seemingly from a fairy tale.
Grandfather Trofim transplanted this oak from the woods, they told me, pointing to a big tree whose roots had spread to a third of the plot and suffocated the roots of other trees. The apple trees were being killed by the oak, but no one would consider sawing down this memory of Grandfather.
Grandfather Trofim dragged this stone from the woods, they told me, pointing to the enormous glacial boulder that looked as if it wouldn’t budge without a crowbar.
The oak and stone—Grandfather must have been bored in civilian life, performing these inexplicable exploits, measuring his strength against stones and trees, capturing them, moving them onto his land. He finally died of ennui, oppressed by this great weight, the weight of former feats; he wanted to be cremated. What he sought perhaps, in his weariness, was a definitive death.
I studied the statutes engraved on the decorations, which order was given for what; I fought the orders and medals in my imagination, forcing them to speak, trying to imagine the enamel Red Banner fluttering, how the soldier etched on the Order of the Red Star grabs my rifle and turns to me to tell me at last how my grandfather had fought. But the orders did not come to life and I just wasted paper by drawing battles. The grown-ups were touched by my dedication to Grandfather, while I suffered attacks of despair that increased on days commemorating military achievements: the same orders were depicted on posters, glowed in lightbulbs on lampposts, and gazed at me from postcards; silent and oppressive, they were given to me as coins in place of a monetary note, instead of memories of my grandfather, as if there had been an exchange of a person for awards at some unknown rate.
Grandfather Mikhail; no one ever mentioned his surname, I never saw any photographs or heard any talk of him; his name existed only in my father’s patronymic. It was as if he had never lived, had never met Grandmother Tanya, had no face, character, or habits, and existed only in documents, a ghost of the civil state. “Grandfather vanished without a trace” my parents replied curtly. It seemed that Grandfather Mikhail did not vanish in some specific albeit unknown part of the country, of the planet, but simply fell into another dimension.
Gradually I pictured a vicious circle of losses: the sergeant who buried the lieutenant on the battlefield died, along with the secret of his grave; in the hospital a private who remembered the village where the sergeant was buried also died, and so entire chains of human names died off; one, two, dozens, hundreds, and Grandfather Mikhail was there among them, on the dark side of memory.