Finally, Grandfather II noticed that something was wrong with his son; he noticed too late and then acted with great persistence. The boy could not explain to his father—children do not have the language for expressing inner states—and even if he had, what would he have said? That he was enchanted by a toy made by a crazy prisoner? Grandfather II, thanks to the boy’s friends, learned about the whistle and took it away; he learned who had made it and summoned the crazy carver under guard; he no longer remembered the gift or the boy, and his fingers palpated the wood of the boss’s desk, as if trying to measure what could be done with such a thick oak plank if you cut it up and used it for various small items.
Grandfather II, given the limits of his perspective, decided that the carver was only pretending to be mad, that he was actually rational since he’d tried to gain the graces of a child who was the son of the camp warden; he became sophisticated in his cruelty: the miserable madman dared to think he could benefit this way, manipulating Grandfather II through his son.
He sent the carver to the distant timber area, where they prepared the beams for future mines. “Let him work with trees,” Grandfather II said, knowing that the madman would probably be squashed by a falling tree; he could have simply ordered him shot, but that would have been direct murder, and Grandfather II liked to act so that his sentences were executed by the apparent course of events, the forces of nature, postponed and removed: it was not his personal intention to send the man to his death, but the man fell into the whirlpool of fate, from which he could not escape.
Grandfather II’s son did not know what had happened to the carver; when they took away his whistle, he fell gravely ill. For a week the boy had a dry fever, his body tense and ossified; he cried out, struggling with something in his delirium. The doctor said that the child’s face changed so sharply and wildly, it seemed that two different people were arguing inside the boy, each appearing alternately in his face. One clearly showed the harsh pedigree of Grandfather II, who was born in a village by chalk cliffs over a river, where the soil was so imbued with lime that only cherries could grow there; the other face was tender as an infant, a vague face, as if he had just arrived in the world without a line of ancestors whose features could have shaped his. The one who had Grandfather II’s blood in his veins, thick and as viscous as the sap of cherry trees, was trying to push out this infant from the boy’s body, chase it away, toss it like a bird from the nest.
After a week, the boy awoke recovered, thinner and almost without memory; many memories did not survive the fever and had dematerialized, or maybe it was a part of his soul, the finest, purest, and childlike part that had dematerialized; he regained his health and forgot about the whistle, but he had become angular, wooden in his movements, as if the liveliness that gave fluidity to his body had been lost, and every scrape and bruise now lasted a long time on his skin.
He returned to his peers, but it was out of a sense of duty to be friends with boys his age; he played with them indifferently, without passion, and only hide-and-seek responded with his new sensibility: he searched badly, without focus, but he hid so well that it seemed he had not hidden himself at all, had no intention to hide—he simply vanished into a crack, like a coin into the floorboards, and when the seeker gave up, they all went looking for him, finding him only by accident. The boy had stopped wanting to be, his inner state was that of an old man; something extremely important had burned away in that illness, when Grandfather II sat at his bedside. He lost the gift awakened by the bird whistle, the gift of his own life, not subjected to anyone else, a life about which the boy had known nothing except the enchanting foretaste of it; the boy emptied out, grew as light as a wrapper, and that is why he did not hide playing hide-and-seek, rather he fell into empty spots, holes in the universe, like a random object that had no place of its own.
Grandfather II did not give up; he saw that the boy was still not himself, and he thought it was because he was taking a long time—an incommensurately long time—getting over the loss of the toy. He behaved as most adults would—he decided to replace the toy he took away with a present, to intercept the inner gaze focused on the loss with something new, significant, and valuable. This is the action of people for whom all life events are basically equivalent, one easily replaced by another; used to dealing this way with people, Grandfather II probably did not know that there were things that were irreversible—not physically, like death or injury—but because the most important aspect of a relationship happens in a single moment, beyond which everything has a future dimension based on trust, or else everything is forever too late.
Grandfather II started the quarry—and everything was too late, the town was doomed to the funnel; for him and his son the moment—everything is too late—had also come, but he thought and thought about what present would please the boy, how to show a father’s generosity, and at last came up with a gift with a significance that would define his son’s adolescence and maturity.
On Grandfather II’s orders, they searched the camp and found another carver, this one in his right mind. For several months he did not go out to the sites, slept only three hours a night, at work on his assignment; Grandfather II looked in occasionally to check up and give advice, leaving enough shag for a couple of cigarettes: he didn’t have to pay the carver too much, his life was in Grandfather II’s hands as it was, and the carver labored, extending his existence with each curl of wood, with each movement of his knife—Grandfather II could send him to the mines, and the elderly prisoner would die after a month of digging.
But despite his desire to live, despite his desire to please Grandfather II, the work did not go well; the commission was beyond the prisoner’s abilities: he was supposed to create the camp in miniature. Use a cobbler’s hammer to knock together barracks with wooden bunks, erect watchtowers, make the delousing room, the gun room, the steam bath, warehouse, and other buildings—all tiny, to fit a special base and be placed on a table; he had to carve and paint the convoy soldiers, sheepdogs, cooks, steam bath attendants, all the service people, and most important, the prisoners; make wheelbarrows with buttons for wheels, pickaxes out of furniture nails, shovels out of tin, boilers, furnaces; my new friend the engraver was assigned to help him in the fine work. The engraver used a magnifying glass to model the soldiers’ guns, fashioned bits of a broken cup into porcelain isolators for wooden poles using the finest wire which pricked your finger if you touched the end, and one of the free seamstresses sewed sheepskin jackets and peacoats for the guards and prisoners. Snow banks of cotton were placed around the camp; it was meant to be eternal winter, but the electrician made a dull, cheese-yellow sun from a 20-watt bulb that moved around the camp on a special arm the way the sun moves across the tundra in summer without going below the horizon.
The entire camp universe was being created by the efforts of the carver, engraver, and seamstress, but the further they worked, the more they felt they were doing something unseemly, almost forbidden; they were violating some unclear law; the carver and engraver confessed this to each other and even considered burning the toy camp by starting a fire in the workshop, but fear stopped them; they saw how excessively attached Grandfather II was to his idea, he came by more frequently, stayed longer, examining the toy, and it seemed that he had forgotten it was intended for his son. Grandfather II would chase them out of the workshop and remain there alone, they watched through a crack how the warden, illuminated by the flames of oil lamps and the fire of the opened furnace, with a dark face, too tall for the low ceiling, moved the figures of prisoners and soldiers, halting like God above the newly created earth, and deciding something in those moments when he silently smoked, exhaling on the toy barracks, as if their chimneys were smoking, and the draft blew smoke onto the cotton snow.