The only object I knew for sure belonged to him was the medal “For Bravery” on a worn, shiny ribbon, alone, as if lost. It contrasted strangely with the box of orders and medals belonging to Grandfather Trofim, as if he had possessed numerous qualities that turned into awards, while Grandfather Mikhail had only one, irrational and infinite bravery, which led him too far, to the place from which no one returns, where people die without a trace; beyond the limits of the universe, where death is not an event that can reach the living.
As a child, I probably rarely noticed that I had absolutely no grandfathers. It had always been that way, and it did not seem strange; Father was born during the war, and in some sense he was its son, as if in the war a woman could become pregnant, as in myths and fairy tales, from a military wind, the stamp of a boot, the gleam of bayonets, from the stormy, tense atmosphere.
My father was born when all the men had gone off to war, and this collective departure of men and the subsequent return of the few somehow obviated the question of paternity, made it pointless. The boy was born into a circle of women, righting the deathly absence of men, equalizing the balance, as if life could not stand it and boys started being born on their own. What had been before the war was gone like burned archives, like the state of paradise, and there was no way back there even mentally.
I sometimes thought that my father’s patronymic was not real, it was simply that people had to have one. My father could have been Petrovich, Sidorovich, Ivanovich, Alexeevich, as if some office had supplied the patronymics to restore the proportional relations of names in the generation lost in war. He was registered in the name of the Mikhails who had died, in a redistribution of newborns among the dead soldiers, like posthumous rations, perhaps taking children away from living fathers for the benefit of dead ones, because the dead need descendants more than the living, they have no other way of perpetuating themselves. The silence of my grandmother and my parents was a sign to me that they knew about this government operation that changed the familial ties of the whole country.
Sometimes I thought that Mikhailovich was code, a cipher, a pseudonym; that Grandfather had existed, but lived the life of a secret agent, a spy, about whom one could not say that he existed; someone who worked for decades under a cover in a foreign land, who was anonymous even for those who worked with him.
Grandfather Mikhail was in army communications; that was all I knew about him, but I couldn’t tell if that was true or part of his cover story. There was a huge, nonworking radio receiver on legs at home; it had broken long ago, and the tuner moved the indicator to different marks for wavelengths and names of cities without effect. Father had wanted to bring the receiver to the dacha, set it up in the attic as a retro ornament, but Grandmother Tanya always stopped him gently. I thought this was a special receiver, that it had never gotten ordinary radio stations with music and news; it served another purpose—Grandmother Tanya was waiting for a signal from Grandfather Mikhail which had been delayed for decades, lost in atmospheric distortions.
I did not notice the exact moment when I started inventing Grandfather Mikhail the spy. The USSR was a joint creation of millions of nameless “authors” who spent a lifetime making this imaginary space, starting with children’s games of war versus the Germans or the Reds against the Whites; I made up Grandfather Mikhail because it was my obligation as a person entering the world of a certain culture. The culture had a ready-made plot of espionage as the search for the secret causes of the world, the revelation of the true face of reality; there already was the figure of the spy, the man who went abroad, beyond the known, into the transcendental.
In trying to find the truth, to understand the past of my grandfathers, I merely immersed myself deeper into the mythological sphere that had taken them from me; I was creating it myself.
I also did not realize that both grandfathers, while called that, were not grandfathers in age or spirit. How could they be grandfathers when they were only approaching middle age when they died, when they were young fathers? There was a generational gap, as if a scythe had swept away a certain age range.
This optical defect of generations must have been obvious to the sculptors who filled the country with huge figures of soldiers and goddesses of victory; having died young, these grandfathers were unsuitable for grandfathers; the further back in time their death retreated, the less power they had over our memories of them. And the greater the ease with which the place they should have held in history and the consciousness of their descendants was filled with phantoms, created by indifference to individual destinies, by the dark, earthy pathos of fraternal graves.
When I was still in kindergarten, one spring evening the teacher told some of us that we would be picked up by our fathers, and later than usual.
We were brought out after dinner to the playground. There was a truck and our fathers were unloading huge logs, bigger than they could embrace. It was almost dark but the sky still had the bloodred, troubling sunset, like a sign whose power was longer than a single day; it extended into the future. It was no longer the sky of a bedroom suburb of Moscow, it was the sky of a fairy tale, with endless fields with the severed heads of heroes and viburnum bridges, where the sources of living and dead water flowed, where the swift falcon flew beneath the clouds and the gray wolf leaped over ravines; the sky over the field in the stories that Grandmother Tanya read to me as she picked over the grains on winter evenings.
I quoted them, surprised that I had memorized them without even trying:
I quoted them and suddenly saw that the logs being unloaded and set down on the ground were fairy tale warrior bogatyr figures carved in wood. They were set up in lots of playgrounds, used as supports for swings, huts, and wooden slides. But with the approach of nightfall and the silent labor of men—the fathers were digging deep holes and mounds of dirt piled up, as if they were digging graves—the wooden fairy tale heroes looked like ancestor idols.
We children stared in confusion; that day we had been rehearsing for the Victory Day celebrations. We were given costumes—national costumes of all the republics of the USSR; each was symbolized by a single child, but the Russian Republic had several; the most fair-haired boys and girls were dressed in embroidered red shirts and long pseudonational skirts and headdresses.
We were supposed to sing the anthem lyrics, “Arise, enormous country,” and a few military songs. To help us learn them, they played records over and over, and by the end of the day I was full of the refrain “Let noble anger boil up like a wave, it is a people’s war, a holy war.”
This was not a song. The chorus voices grew stronger and crossed the limit beyond which the choir and the audience disappeared, leaving only the all-penetrating, earthshaking sound: “Arise, enormous country,” said the internal voice of the rampant universe.
When the wooden idol-knights were dug in, I realized that they could have sung “Arise, enormous country”: they grew on the field of oblivion, and no power on earth could save them from their spell, turn them back into living people.