Three months later the toy camp was ready; Grandfather II organized a viewing of the work. A windup locomotive ran down wire tracks with wagons loaded with real ore, billowing caustic soot: inside it was a boiler with burning tar; the electric sun made its slow orbit; the excavator could bend and unbend, the guards could aim their rifles, and the toy shepherd jaws opened revealing red mouths—the seamstress had used red calico freely; the toy camp was exactly like the real one, except for one missing figure—Grandfather II was not there, even though inside the camp office there was a thimble-sized bust of Lenin, carved from dog bone—that was the only bone there was—and on the wall a poster with Stalin’s profile, made from a postage stamp.
Grandfather II decided that the gift had to be a surprise; the anniversary was approaching of the day when the quarry gave its first ton of ore, and they were planning to celebrate. Grandfather II took these production anniversaries very seriously, they meant more to him than birthdays or other holidays like May Day. He usually celebrated in the laboratory where they tested the quality of the ore; however, he decided to betray his habit.
That evening Grandfather II brought the gift into the boy’s room; his son, he thought, was sleeping, and he set up the toy camp on the table and covered it with canvas, so the boy could open it himself.
But the morning brought something else: they found the boy shivering in the corner, wrapped in the canvas; the first snowy dawn was trying to break through the thick clouds, a watery, yellow blister of light appeared in the sky, and that light poured into the room through the rectangle of the window, illuminating the table and Grandfather II’s present.
The camp was smashed—everything down to the last connection, nail, thread knot, wire twist; the boy must have worked all night, destroying the toy, putting all of himself into the destruction, and now he trembled with sleeplessness, exhaustion, and fear. His fingers were bleeding, his nails were torn, the canvas was splotched with blood; he had managed to break it all noiselessly, silently, as if performing the greatest exploit of his life—not just the seven years he had lived, but for his whole life going forward; he was afraid, the room smelled of urine, and perhaps he was ready to give up his free will and wished it all to come back together, for the camp to rebuild itself, but the dawn entered the room, and the fluid objects of the night acquired their final, hard, daytime shapes, and not even the specter of desperation could re-create the broken camp.
Grandfather II staggered in the doorway. He would probably have been less shocked had the real camp been destroyed. On the evenings when he came to the workshop and threw out the carver and engraver to be alone with the toy, he enjoyed his own idea so much that he might have kept the toy camp in his office if that pleasure—as perceived by others—did not smack of eccentricity.
This miniaturized, facsimile camp truly did belong to Grandfather II. There was something not in the least metaphorical about the change in scale, in the optical magnification of his own figure, not from pure narcissism but as an expression of the correct proportions in his view: Grandfather II in his own estimation was not a god, not a master, he was himself, a man, and the fact that he was master of life and death over other men without considering himself something more simply proved to him that in fact he was truly greater. He gave his son a toy camp so that he would share his father’s destiny, accept his own from his father’s hands. Barracks outside the windows, whichever way you looked, barracks on the table—Grandfather II had sent his son to prison camp, excluding everything that was not-camp.
This can be called a crime against reality; a rather naive formulation, but one which accurately reflects the essence and can be interpreted more fully: much of what Grandfather II and those like him did was a crime against reality.
Reality always takes revenge on those who cut it down, who simplify it, who deny its multiplicity; it avenges as implacably as do the laws of nature; we are not always able to recognize events not as random but in accordance with the laws of nature.
With his commission of the miniature camp, Grandfather II had without realizing it overwound a tight spring; before he was a camp warden among others, not the best, and not the worst in those times, where the moving force was a depersonalized bureaucratic cruelty; he was also depersonalized, he did not stand out, his shoulder boards and uniform spoke for him, managed for him, while he was merely the wearer of the uniform, something secondary in relation to his rank and duty. But now—and there was a reason the craftsmen felt they were doing something inappropriate—now he had crossed the line of his work and tied his fate and his son’s fate with the camp, in life and death.
Had Grandfather II been simpler and more volatile, he might have beaten his son, expressed his anger, shouted; but his anger was not expressed directly, it was held inside, ripening; the anger went through the coils of his inner being, acquiring a toxic thickness and essentially ceasing to be anger. It was transmuted into the ability to take a person to the most painful limit, force him to confront himself; the ability to make the most extreme and truthful deed meaningless.
Anger openly expressed reinforces the event that caused it; that is why Grandfather II, who knew the fury he felt instantly, as if it was always on a boil under his skin, burning his tongue, blistering his fingers, remained outwardly calm. A person who acted against Grandfather II’s will had to undo it himself, as if sincere repentance was not enough: Grandfather II did not believe in words. He needed the action to be overturned by a counteraction, the antipode of the deed; Grandfather II swept away the traces, leaving no signs in memory that evinced his evildoing: the witness destroyed his witnessing, went backward over the path of his intention, undoing it.
Grandfather II said the boy had to repair the toy camp; he would not leave the room until he had done so, he would not go to school, and food would be brought to his room. Grandfather II locked the door with such force that the key got bent in the lock, the lock was broken, and the boy was truly locked in. Grandfather II did not believe that his son would escape through the window: he must have felt his will was a force like gravity which locked the boy up, squeezed him inside the room as if in his fist, and now he decided to wait, without loosening his grip, to wait and let time do its work.
Left alone with the inability to do what was demanded, the boy was supposed to feel time collapsing upon him, bringing no reprieve now or in the distant future; you sit there, knowing there is no way out, and the passing hours exacerbate your condition, exhausting and destructive.
Grandfather II saw his son as a traitor, he would have disowned him had there been examples of that, but in those days it was only sons who disowned their fathers. So Grandfather II did not punish the boy—he was forcing the boy to disown himself.
Seven was no age at all, thought Grandfather II, who was used to reckoning time in prison terms—ten years, fifteen, and you still have time after that to live—so a seven-year-old had to reject himself and curse himself daily, and then Grandfather II would take him, drained, limp inside, and mold himself another son.
His wife could no longer have children, and the barrenness of her womb depressed Grandfather II, who still felt the desire for fatherhood. Fatherhood he imagined was a plastic process, similar to sculpting, and he wanted to bring into the world not a new life—a living thing while it is alive cannot be molded, it has its own laws—but something meek, suitable for his creative efforts.