The quiet absurdity of life, on the contrary, destroyed destiny and grandeur, mocked steadfastness and courage, and demanded that you make yourself commensurate to it, reduce your dreams and become one with hard-to-get items. The world of needs and deficits spun a tiny web of the power of circumstances, in which people got trapped.
Deficit does not only mean a constant sensation of the absence of something. It creates a complex system of the ersatz, mandatory substitutions, a system of switching and redistributing functions and meanings. It makes every life situation chronically difficult, like a disease without a disease, which consists of intertwining and multiplying complications, because, in the final analysis, every thing and every phenomenon is not in its own place, its own niche, but is displaced to replace something missing.
This is the world in which my parents lived; I existed in this world as their son. And as a son I felt things I did not feel as a grandson.
Probably every Soviet family put their name on a list “to increase living space,” and they waited for decades, without a clear idea of what was happening at the head of the line. We were registered in a line like that. I sensed that we were links in a chain; someone was waiting for us to move so they could occupy our apartment, someone else had to move so we could obtain a new home. Our place in the world was defined by the line that lived its own life, simultaneously inexplicable and powerful.
At some point we began a countdown marked by the phrase “So when we move,” a countdown of postponed intentions, delayed plans, and we began living in the nonexistent new apartment we’d moved into, like furniture and objects, the best features of the present; but the line did not budge, and our hopes and dreams remained on the dubious shore of the future.
As a son I was also part of the line, sensing the pressure of its slow movement; our apartment belonged to the line, we were temporary tenants. I thought that my grandfathers would have found a different way to live, although I saw the neighboring old men who were certainly also in line. From my parents I could take only a lesson in tolerating this kind of life.
Some evenings—because meat patties, kotlety, were always cooked for dinner—Father took out the heavy meat grinder and attached it firmly to the table edge. Mother pushed the meat, thoroughly cleaned, through the neck. But it got stuck anyway, tendons wrapping around the blades, stalling the mechanism. Father took it apart and rinsed it, and then they started again; the ground meat was passed through a second time, and sometimes even a third.
There was something unbearably dreary in this struggle with the meat, which seemed to be taking posthumous revenge. Second-grade, and not very fresh, the beef set an example: the thick strong sinews were able to stop the blades—so one must grow sinews instead of muscles. That was more reliable than counting on spirit and heroism. You need the sinewy strength of a dying man, whom torturers will tire of beating, they will scrape their knuckles on him and give up. You have to grow up like that, not so much brave or strong as tough and unsuitable for dividing up, sinewy and cartilaginous so that your meat blocks the knives; so that life struggles with you and finally leaves you alone.
I imagined that my grandfathers had a different strength that allowed them to maintain dignity, and the grandmothers retained some reflections of it. Father and Mother had no strength of their own, but the powers of a great order, which I could only intuit, moved through them. That was another reason they were my foes; if my thoughts and strivings were revealed, my parents would make every effort to make me only a son and not a grandson; if they learned what I felt picking through the grains with Grandmother Tanya, how I waited for her to write the first line in the wordless book dressed in a brown cover, our evenings at the kitchen table would be banned and the book would vanish as if it never had existed.
I often sensed my parents distancing themselves from me, I saw that they were not with me in some situations; they handed me over to people or circumstances, transmitting someone else’s will, like puppets.
Kindergarten, school, hospital, Pioneer camp—they literally handed me over, silently acknowledging the right to take me. I’m not talking about a child’s experience of the alien and unfamiliar; this was a guess about the all-encompassing power of the state with its national anthem on school notebooks, October badges, Pioneer pledges of allegiance, friendship of the peoples, and concern for the health of Soviet children; a guess about the forms this took, forms that did not recognize the private yet could be softened through personal relations, but still powerful.
My parents sent me to school not only because they wanted me to study; it was as if another will was added to theirs, one that did not coerce them as much as paralyze their ability to even consider any other possibility, say, homeschooling me; that they, like me, were part of some universal obedience class.
In addition, the grown-ups talked about resolute action, self-reliance, and independence. But I knew, my sixth sense told me, that one day something would happen and my parents, who kept telling me that you have to stand firm and achieve your goals, would submit to someone else’s will, as if they had never lectured me at all.
There was another power to which my parents gave me up as well, perhaps without understanding it, a power as palpable as it was faceless, without a single specific source. It was like being left in a labyrinth and exposed to radioactivity without a mask, or special clothes, or a Geiger counter, or even a warning. It was a mythical labyrinth, a forest of signs, and you were forced to comprehend them on your own, for no one ever talked to you—either at home or at school—about the nature of the symbolic.
My parents worked for two years in Egypt on the Aswan Dam; they were taken on excursions to temples and burial sites closed to the public, to the pyramids and necropolises of animals. They had a crate of slides they brought back from there.
Sometimes on weekends they hung a sheet on the wall and turned on the projector, which smelled of ozone and the dust burning on the hot lens; and on the sheet appeared vanished yellow sands, the ancient god Horus carved of granite, the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen, the Temple of Karnak, the sphinx alley, Luxor, Amenhotep’s columned hall, walls covered in ash from the bonfires of Napoleon’s soldiers; and most important, the hieroglyphs, everywhere, as if all the surfaces were covered with a single, endless text.
The hieroglyphs and statues of Egyptian rulers, impossibly far from me in time and space, did not elicit intellectual curiosity but a profound interest and equally profound anxiety; I somehow knew their oppressive presence, their dead mysteriousness; I felt closeness rather than alienation.
But all my attempts to understand where that sense of recognition came from were in vain; sometimes I almost reached understanding by a physical effort—but each time I fell short by a step, a millimeter, a second.
Yet understanding did come.
The Pioneer camp where I was sent had a big storage area, a windowless cellar, where they kept bugles, flags, drums, banners, posters, and costumes. It was a big camp, with probably a thousand children; these props had been kept since the camp’s founding, it seemed—the administrators were probably afraid to throw them out or burn them, since someone could write an anonymous letter revealing that Soviet symbols were being destroyed at Camp X. The job of camp director must have been a highly desirable one; it was a good location, high on a bank of the Oka River, with a view of the flood-meadows, and so the administration preferred to save this arsenal of propaganda assets for an eventual inspection.
I was sent to help the cleaning woman sweep the storeroom; she gave me a broom and dustpan and went off somewhere. I was left alone in the dark space with burned-out lightbulbs; it was filled with cupboards, shelves, and boxes, the ones that might come in handy placed closer to the door, and farther back the old and dusty ones that were never touched.