Sick and healthy—everyone gathered at the garden plots, trestle beds were quickly covered in newspapers and the vodka appeared; someone had brought a battery-powered radio and a television and people clustered around them, no one tried to leave, or follow the tanks, or take part in anything—they all watched the TV or stared at the woods, beyond which the plane engines at the military air base warmed up, and there was the sense that the television and the radio were the latest secret mechanisms that decided destiny, pronouncing a verdict calculated by tubes and micro schematics: what would be, what would not.
In was during this pause, this general stupefaction that Grandfather II’s life ended; it wasn’t that no one risked driving him to Moscow—for a brief period all human duty was suspended and people even tried not to pick up the phone, for who knew what the call might bring; the ambulance carrying medicine for him got stuck on the side of the road, letting the tanks go by, and he died—the new era might have accepted him, but it was the interval, the disconnect, that killed him.
Thus my existence coincided with his existence, and I was never just myself again—Grandfather II’s blood, which saved me, circulated in me; the blood of a scrawny, blind, old man flowed in the body of a little boy, and that separated me forever from my peers; I grew under the sign of the inestimable sacrifice made by Grandfather II; I grew like a graft on old wood.
I was in the hospital during his funeral, and later it was an effort to go to the cemetery: I thought that Grandfather II had not died completely, that he had passed into me, and that when I stood by his grave the two separated parts of Grandfather II’s soul encountered one another, one unsatisfied and the other I carried under my heart like a fetus; they met and experienced voluptuous pleasure because they had managed to deceive death, cling to life, while all around lay decomposed bodies, and the stage props of gravestones, photographs, and dates meant nothing.
I looked at other people wondering if there were those among them who like me carried a dead man inside them; maybe someone else is brought to the cemetery by a corpse, looks out from inside at the handyman sweeping the paths, piling up fallen leaves, and feels like a sneaky and nasty child who has hidden where no one will ever find him.
It was almost unbearable being in the apartment where Grandfather II used to live; I thought that his things, reverently preserved in their place, knew who I was and that the apartment had turned into a mausoleum, a crypt, where memory tactfully rested in peace, and it knew who I was. His ivory cigarette holder seemed a part of him; the housekeeper had filled the shelves with dozens of his pairs of glasses, of growing thickness as his eyesight dwindled; probably she wanted to create the impression in every corner that he had not died but just stepped out, leaving his glasses on the table, and would be right back, but for me the murky lenses meant Grandfather II’s gaze, he was inside me and at the same time looking at me from outside, from every spot in the room, wherever I might hide, under the bed, behind the drapes; the only place I could hide was the full-length mirror, but I had to be careful not to look in it—on the opposite wall there hung a photograph of Grandfather II and in a way that made him appear over my right shoulder when I looked in the mirror. His Sig Sauer, the double-barreled shotgun the Germans used during the war, which hung on the wall, also looked at me, but crookedly, with the dark holes of the barrels, two zeroes, assessing whether the previous owner would have the strength to pick it up with my hands, and deep in the attic there were boxes of shells, filled with still potent gunpowder.
Now remembering Grandfather II, I sometimes think that he summoned the death he wanted, even though he expected to survive giving me blood.
He was afraid to die the usual way; he thirsted to live through me, in me, and he was so fiercely afraid of death that he must have known whom he would meet in the other world; Grandfather II sought salvation for his soul, salvation as he understood it; his unconscious idea came out better than if he had lived; his death obligated me wholly and irretrievably, indebted me independent of any possible knowledge of him; whatever else may be, he saved me, sacrificing his own life—and tightened the knot by the fact that the sacrifice was accidental and the goodness a calculated risk.
I often wondered why Grandfather II had chosen such a housekeeper—a widow with a fifth-grade education, from an orphanage, who had never had a family, had gone through the Volga famine and retained the hunger forever—it lived in the depths of her large female body, and all her cooking was either too rich or too fatty; I remember the amber drops of fat in her cabbage soup and the pinkish gentle dew of fat on the salo striped with meat. Unaware of it, she fed not herself but the old hunger that was never sated; a sucking, irritating hunger like a foreboding that is actually the voice of remembrance pretending to be a premonition because we do not want to see it as a memory. Now I understand that Grandfather II picked her as if preparing a justification for himself—he helped a woman who did not expect anyone’s help, and she repaid him with loyalty.
The housekeeper executed the terms of Grandfather II’s wilclass="underline" she burned all his papers in the park, she threw away his clothes and shoes; they say that in those days—the August days—she was not the only one acting this way; while crowds stood outside government buildings, people of the former era, the most careful ones, hid their wealth or destroyed evidence, sometimes, along with themselves; if you added up the trophy guns that were used for the first and last time, it would reach the highest number in decades. My parents were taking care of me then, so no one could go to the funeral; the housekeeper later told us that he had left her a number to call in the case of his death, and when she called, people came, apparently military; they took care of everything, quickly, with military precision, and took away his medals with an inventory list, there turned out to be almost a dozen—she couldn’t remember what kind; they buried him as if they were afraid of the still-unclear new times, as if they didn’t know whether there should be honors or whether everything should be done quietly, and so they hurried; when we later visited the grave, there was nothing but a funeral wreath without a name.
Grandfather II passed away anonymously, as he had lived; as if there was a special service dedicated to his total obliteration; one of my relatives called the number the housekeeper had used, but he couldn’t even find out where he was calling: and when they learned that he was not a relative of Grandfather II, they refused to give him any information. Probably if he had died in a different time, we would have managed to learn a few things, to find friends, colleagues, to understand which agency had sent the funeral team; but the country was falling apart, all the agencies had stopped working, no one knew anything about previous positions, officers’ shoulder boards and insignia, forms and signs were meaningless; in this chaos, Grandfather II sank without a trace, as if he had planned this exit. Everyone preferred not to know, not to talk, not to inform, but to forget; and extensive research into who Grandfather II was led to nothing. Once he had hinted that he had headed a major construction project; now that lie was revealed, but there was nothing to replace it; therefore—probably for my sake—Grandfather II remained simply Grandfather II, the man who had saved my life.