From then on, as soon as Grandmother Tanya said, “I’m going to Pravda Street,” something hearkening back to olden times overwhelmed me with primal fear.
Grandmother Tanya was probably the only person with whom I used to feel spiritually safe. The feeling that she had suddenly acquired all my secrets—for I understood the real meaning of the adult threat “I can see right through you!”— undermined the very possibility of my existence.
So I decided to go to Pravda Street, to see it, to be assured of its supernatural powers; it was a desperate move.
I had no idea what was there, whether I would be able to even access the street (when Grandmother went there she took a red leather ID with gold letters), or how to find the building where she worked. But I set out without asking for permission, alone so far from home for the first time. When I turned onto Pravda Street from the big boulevard and saw the signs, I thought I had the wrong street: there were ordinary houses, trees, courtyards, stores—nothing supernatural.
I thought perhaps the real Pravda Street could not even be found in ordinary topography, perhaps it was something hidden, with only one unobtrusive entrance. Could ordinary people even get in, the ones who don’t know the secrets of Nonpareil and Cicero, who don’t know the secret password? Was Politizdat in another world whose existence was proven by Grandmother’s ruler without the usual centimeters?
I decided to walk to the end of the street. After a few blocks I was ready to turn back when far on the right I saw the corner of a building that seemed to come from another planet; aha, corner of Nonpareil, corner of Cicero, I recognize you, Politizdat!
The building was like a blueprint of itself: naked form stripped of ornamentation. It was a Constructivist crystal, the ideal of cutting up the universal into indivisible simple elements, the ideal of thinking with these elements, ready to be checked for correctness against an ideal. The building stood alone against chaos, against the bustle of the streets, against the city and its residents. It extended beyond its limits, as if the axes drawn on paper by the architect continued into the air along invisible lines of force; the building tried to even out the neighboring block, to straighten the line of the other buildings, and to organize the rhythm of pedestrians.
Across the street was a yolk-yellow culture club, framed by a colonnade, ornamented with plaster, bas-reliefs depicting the joy of Soviet people—marching off in columns, some waving banners, others sheaves of wheat, still others model airplanes.
The House of Culture with its plasterwork and columns, built much later than Politizdat, seemed like an artifact from the deep past, from Soviet antiquity. In the Soviet eighties the Constructivist architecture of the thirties looked like science fiction; the Futurism that projected the future still worked a half-century later. Constructivist design, which incorporated the complete cycle of truth production—from the editor’s office to the printing press—bore the sense of a severe wholeness that subsequently fell apart, decayed, was replaced by an abundance of attributes and décor. I could not tie Constructivism to a certain era—there was very little of it left in Moscow—and so it seemed that the house was built outside of time, alien to everything and with power over everything.
I circled the building a few times. Politizdat was exactly what I had expected. But there was something that confused me. I looked through the spacious windows: huge paper cylinders turned and the printing presses tossed out reams of newspapers.
The day before, our school had announced another collection of wastepaper for recycling; the school was in the regional competition, and all pupils were instructed to show up with at least three kilograms, and if you brought in five, they would raise your grade in deportment.
The last collection was in the previous quarter, but the neighbors’ apartments had filled up again with unneeded copies of Izvestia, Pravda, Komsomolets, and Vecherka. In the morning all the pupils showed up with piles of newspapers; the older ones hauled two or three piles, some helped by their parents, some using old people’s satchels on wheels. Piles and piles, some still white, others yellowed—I don’t think the school officials had expected so much, and now they were trying to reduce the paper overload, seeing something indecent and seditious in the haste to be rid of newspapers. Paper to be pulped kept increasing, no longer fitting in the cloakroom, and everyone who walked in froze at the sight of so many old words surrounding him.
The school porch was strewn with bits of paper; the remains of transcripts of Party congresses, editorials on international aid for Afghanistan, feuilletons on the American war machine, articles on record harvests and heroic tractor drivers.
The paper shreds and ashes made me recoil instinctively. On the school porch I recalled Grandmother’s ruler, the names Nonpareil, Cicero, Sanspareil, Mignon, Parangon—scary but majestic and endless, and I thought proudly that through my grandmother I was in touch with the mystery of deathless words.
And now to see that Politizdat had something to do with newspapers! I took a very deep breath. Two men walked past, printer’s ink spotting their clothes, and one held a sheaf of freshly printed pages and was declaring heatedly to the other: “I told them we needed Nonpareil here!”
Nonpareil, the incantation had been spoken on the street, anyone could hear, anyone could learn. It stopped being an incantation. The magic was gone.
Watching the ream of paper spinning in the pressroom, I experienced the deepest disillusionment and the deepest relief simultaneously. I was sorry about the self-deception that had made life profound and significant, but the joy of liberation was greater: I knew that I could feel completely safe with Grandmother Tanya.
Once again the days stretched out, the months of my existence near her; I went back to waiting, observing, spying, seeking the false bottom of life. I noticed that Grandmother Tanya treated old things with a hidden pity, she repaired and darned clothing, sent old books to be rebound, as if they had suffered from the cruelty of the age. But she never grew attached to anything, she did not accumulate souvenirs, the trifles to which people entrust part of their memory.
She had only one thing of that sort, a small porcelain figurine—three green-glazed frogs: one covered its eyes, the second its ears, and the third its mouth.
“See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.” Grandmother Tanya explained the meaning of the figures, which she kept on constant view.
Other people’s possessions were separate and at a remove, by virtue of not belonging to you, but Grandmother Tanya seemed to have purposely placed the three frogs right on that very boundary separating me from “other people’s possessions,” as if to train me to notice them and understand their meaning.
At first I thought my grandmother was teaching me how not to live: the three frogs were a satire, a caricature like the ones that appeared on the back page of newspapers. But gradually I began to look deeper at the frogs and tried to grasp what set them apart from their surroundings in Grandmother’s room.
The room had a large table with papers, a wooden darning mushroom over which a torn sock or stocking was stretched, a velvet pincushion, a basket with pieces of fabric, an old portable sewing machine, books, and table games always ready for me. It was all so well-studied, so reliable, always in the same place, determined long before my birth, and it seemed that life went on year after year, attaching objects and people ever more firmly to their place, gently and not quite really aging them.
Only the three frogs, as tiny as Japanese netsuke, meant something different. Sometimes, when no one was home, I sat and looked at them, trying to understand them whole, as a triple statuette, three syllables of a single word. I sensed an old suffering in them that was causing the glaze to gradually crack and chip.