But that’s not what I want to talk about. There’s something else. Since I was a little girl from time to time I’ve had moments when I seem to lose touch with the here and now. I think that many people have this experience, but because it’s so enormously complicated to describe these occurrences—for which our impoverished language has neither the words nor the concepts—no one even tries to share their experience with others. I have noticed many times how a child will suddenly stop in the middle of playing, eyes empty, fogged over, and then a second later is once again rolling a truck or dressing a doll. The child just drops out for a while. I’m sure that everyone knows the feeling of stopping dead in your tracks and losing all sense of the passage of time. How can I describe this, especially since I’m not a writer? Yet for some reason it seems important to try to get all this out. Perhaps it’s precisely for this reason that I’ve stopped trusting my own memory, which constantly fails me.
The most frightening experience I’ve ever had—and the most impossible to describe—is that of border crossings. I’m talking about the border between everyday life and various other conditions I’m acquainted with but that are as difficult to describe as death. What can a person who has never died say about dying? But it seems to me that each time you drop out of everyday life you die a little bit. I love my profession of drafting precisely because it has an exact set of rules that can be used to organize everything. There’s a key to the transition from one projection to another. What I’m talking about, though, is when there’s a transition, but from one time to the next you never know what laws govern it, which is what makes it so frightening.
Merciful Lord, all those journeys . . . All of them different . . . The most frightening thing that happened to me—for that matter the most frightening transition I ever underwent—happened just after my grandfather’s death. In order for you to understand this, I need to say a bit more about my family.
Everyone feared my grandfather—my mother and my grandmother included. That I was afraid of him is perfectly understandable. I was a frightened little girl in general. When he died, I was seven years old. In 1922. He was a building contractor, and at one time he had been very wealthy, but had lost it all before the revolution. I know very little about the history of my family, especially this part of it. All that survived in Grandmother’s version was that a train station pavilion he had built caved in, several people died, and he himself was hurt and his leg had to be amputated. There was a court trial, and that was his ruin. After the court case Grandfather never recovered. Usually he would sit in his deep armchair with its back to the bay window, and against the light background his face would seem dark, especially when it was sunny. Grandmother and Grandfather lived in Trekhprudny Lane, in the Volotsky buildings. My grandfather himself had built them, in 1911, I think. It was a garret apartment. The elevator never worked. Climbing up the tall staircase took a long time. Grandfather basically never left the house. He was always ill, breathed with a rasp, smoked smelly tobacco, and walked around the apartment with two canes. He never used a crutch. He just kept it near the couch.
In those years we—I mean the commune—kept cows and brought milk from Troparevo to City Hospital No. 1 on the Kaluga Highway. We had a cart and a communal horse. Mama sometimes took me with her, and after having delivered the milk, we would ride from the Kaluga Highway to the vegetarian cafeteria on Maroseyka Street. I remember carrot tea with saccharine, and soy cutlets . . . In the same building there was a publishing house and the Tolstoy Society’s offices. My father’s relationship with the society’s administration was not very good. It seems strange, but as far as I can judge now, the Tolstoyans were always fighting, arguing, and trying to prove something to each other. My father was an ardent debater. Between him and his father-in-law, my grandfather, there were deep hostilities, for political reasons. As for my grandmother, Evgenia Fedorovna, my father somewhat despised her for her Orthodox Christian beliefs, and though he never argued with her to the point of breaking off relations, he was always instructing her how to practice her faith correctly, the Tolstoyan way . . . Like Tolstoy, he did not recognize miracles or other mystical phenomena; for him the main thing was moral content. And Christ was the epitome of morality. I look back on this all now with a smile, because I constantly have before my eyes our Vasilisa, who has not the least conception of morality. She says, “that’s God’s way” or “that’s not God’s way,” and hasn’t a thought about good and evil, and judges only by her silly heart. While Papa had a theory for everything.
My mother visited her parents almost secretively. In any case, I somehow realized that I was not supposed to tell my father about our trips to Trekhprudny. It was kind of Mama’s and my secret. Like the several spoons of farmer’s cheese Mama withheld from sale as a present for her parents. Dairy products were not for our consumption. Only the sick and little children were given milk.
Grandmother always received us in the kitchen, which was right next to the entrance. Grandfather never came out of the room at the far end of the apartment, and I did not realize that Grandmother kept our visits secret from him. He extended his dislike for my father to my mother and would get frightfully angry if word got to him that Mama had been at Trekhprudny. A very, very cruel and intolerant person Grandfather was. He barely tolerated his grandchildren.
Mama told me that he had a long and painful death, and cursed terribly until his last minute, damning everyone and blaspheming. They did not take me to his funeraclass="underline" it was freezing cold. After some time had passed—I think not less than six weeks had passed—Mama brought me to Grandmother’s during Holy Week and left me with her because I had just broken out with chicken pox. While I was sick, I slept in the room where Grandfather had lived. They put me on his couch, which stood rather strangely in the center of the room. Probably in the last months of his life, when he could no longer get out of bed, they had turned the couch in order to be able to approach him from both sides. He was very heavy, and it was very difficult for Grandmother to change his linen by herself . . .
I was very ill for about three days, and then the healing sores just itched. Grandmother gave me some sort of tranquilizer, and I remember that it made me sleep and sleep, so that I confused day and night. Once in the middle of the night I heard a knock that seemed to come from the neighbors’. I was surprised in my sleep. What were they pounding nails at night for? Harder and harder. Each strike hit me right on the bridge of my nose. That’s because I’m sleeping, I explained to myself. I have to wake up. But I couldn’t. Then the blows seemed to coalesce, as if an invisible jackhammer were boring with great pressure into my forehead . . . The drill gnawed deeper, the vibration was unbearable, and it seemed as if all of me were being dragged into a velvet-black, spinning abyss. This was no dream; it was something else. And it lasted long enough for me to figure out two things: first, that what was happening to me was stronger than pain, and the suffering was not physical, but some other kind. Second, the spinning blackness began in the middle of my forehead, formed a funnel, and carried me off beyond time. I was terribly nauseated in a strange way, but if I had been able to vomit, I would have vomited up myself . . . Pain encircled me from all sides; it was bigger than me; it existed before me. I was simply a grain of sand in an unending stream, and what was happening, I guessed, was what is called eternity . . .
All these explanations come to me now. Then, as a little girl, I could never have found the words. But since then, whenever I recollect this event, a vibrating nausea arises just beneath my heart.