into fall shoes, which later crept up the leg, exquisite ladies’ boots, the stylish ones made of pleated patent leather, the workers’ coarse rubber boots that took out the trashcans, the villagers’ galoshes, arriving for the market on Thursday, the blue or red kids’ boots, the only colorful splotches amid the overwhelming brown and black. And again the gradual spring easing, the undressing of shoes down to the bare summer soles, ankles and toes, shod only in sandals and flip-flops. The flip-flops were something like swimsuits for feet.
During autumn, the window became piled with yellowish-brown fallen leaves from the sidewalk, making the light in the room soft and yellow. Then the late autumn wind would scatter them. The rains would come—and the eternal puddle out front. I could sit and watch the drops falling into it for hours, forming fleeting bubbles, whole armadas of ships, which the drops would then smash. How many historic sea battles unfolded in that puddle! Then the snow would bury the little window and the room would become a den. I would curl up into a ball like a rabbit under the snow. It is so light, yet you are hidden, invisible to the others, whose footsteps crunch in the snow only inches away from you. What could be lovelier than that?
THE GOD OF THE ANTS
He was six when they started leaving him home alone. In the morning his mother and father would light the gas heater, constantly telling him to keep an eye on the flow of gas inside the little tube. Two gas heaters on their street had exploded. They left him food in the refrigerator and went out. A typical 1970s childhood. Left on his own all day, with that early unnamed feeling of abandonment. The half-dark room frightened him. He would spend the warm autumn days outside. He would sit on a rock by the gate, on the sidewalk, like a little old man, counting the people passing by, the cars, the makes of the cars. He’d try to guess them from the humming before they appeared from around the curve. Moskvitch, Moskvitch, Zhiguli, Trabant, Polski Fiat, Zhiguli, Moskvitch, Moskvitch . . . When he got tired of that, he would rest his head on his knees and stare at the stone slabs of the sidewalk. Each slab was crisscrossed uniformly by vertical and horizontal lines, and in the furrows they created ants would run, meet and pass one another. This was a whole other, quasi-visible world. It looked like the labyrinth from that book with the illustrations. He would sit like that for hours, thinking up stories for every ant. He observed them with the skill of a naturalist, without knowing the word, of course. He would study them, devoting to them hours of the time he was so generously allotted. Each ant was different from the others.
Sometimes he would imagine that he was the God of the Ants.
Most often he was a kind God, helping them, dropping crumbs or a dead fly down to them, nudging it with a stick toward their home so they wouldn’t have to struggle to carry it.
But sometimes he grew wrathful without reason, like the real God, or he simply felt like playing and so would pour a pitcher of water into the corridors of the labyrinth. He made a flood for them.
Other times he would pour salt at the ends of the flagstone, he had discovered by chance that they detested salt, and they would stagger through the corridors of that temporary prison, frightened senseless. When they met, they would quickly press their feelers together, as if passing on some very important secret.
His other discovery, divine and scientific, was that ants hate the scent of humans. If you trace a circle around an ant with your finger, it will run up against that invisible border as if you had built a wall.
He had already noticed this ability of his, he considered it a terrible defect to be able to experience that which happened to others. To embed himself—the word would come later—into their bodies. To be them.
One night he dreamed that he, his mother, and his father were walking down the street and suddenly a giant finger, whose nail alone was as big as a cliff, thumped down and began circling around them. And as if it wasn’t terrifying enough that this finger could crush them at any second, just like that, out of carelessness, it also reeked toxically to boot. A stench you could ram into and crack your skull on.
But in the winter things change, you can’t stay outside all day. The room grows ever dimmer, the stove smells like gas, while scary things peek out from under the bed or creak inside the worm-eaten wardrobe. The only salvation then is the window. He would climb up to it in the morning and get down only to eat his slice of bread at lunchtime and to pee.
A PLACE TO STOP
I’m thinking about the first person, which easily recedes into the third, before returning again to the first. But who can say for certain that that boy there forty years ago was me, that that body is the same as the one here? Even the ants from 1975 are not the same. I don’t find any similarities between the body of a six-year-old, with that thin, pale-pink skin and invisible blond fuzz on his legs. No preserved sign of identification, no trace, except the vaccination scar with which our whole generation is marked. That nearly invisible scar on the shoulder, which over the years has treacherously grown and begun to creep downward.
A detour within a detour. A friend of mine told me a story about how after an amorous night, when she was lying exhausted on the floor with her younger lover, he suddenly asked her (with certain sympathy) what that scar on her arm was from (it had already left her shoulder). She then realized with horror that he didn’t have that vaccination brand anywhere on his shoulders. Those who came after us are no longer marked in that way, she said, he seemed like an alien to me, like a clone. She got up, got dressed, and they never saw each other again.
ANT-GOD
Most likely all dreams, when being retold, should begin with the opening statement, revealing and startling in its simplicity, which I heard from Aya, who was then four: I dreamed that I was awake.
And so, I dreamed that I was awake. I was standing in front of huge curtains with nameless colors that flowed into one another—like I said, huge, but light and ephemeral. It was made clear to me in the dream that concealed behind them was “the beautiful face of God,” in those exact words. I draw aside the first curtain. (It seems that between curiosity and fear, curiosity always takes the upper hand, or at least that’s how it is in dreams.)
Behind it there was a second one. I draw it aside.
A third.
A fourth.
I notice that every subsequent curtain becomes ever smaller and smaller. Hence whatever it was hiding is ever smaller as well. I keep drawing them aside until finally only one is left, the size of a child’s handkerchief. I stop myself. Should I really draw this curtain? Could God possibly be so small? Perhaps the Antichrist is tempting me in my dreams?
I draw it aside. Behind it stands a big black ant. And I somehow know that this is God. But he has no face. The discovery is terrifying. How can you pray to and trust in someone who has no face? Someone who is that small? The revelation that the Ant-God gave me in the moment of awakening, without opening its jaws, went more or less like this: God is an insect who watches us. Only small things can be everywhere.
CRUMBLING LANGUAGE
I learned the alphabet from the cemetery in that town languishing in the sun. I could put it this way, too—death was my first primer. The dead taught me to read. This statement should be taken absolutely literally. We went there every Thursday and Saturday. I stood reverentially before the hot stone crosses. I was as tall as they were. With a certain dread, I dragged my finger along the grooves, reading more through my skin, I memorized the half-moon of C, the door of H, and the hut of A. Language seemed warm and hard. It had a crumbling body. Only a bit of dust and fine sand remained on my fingers from the stone. The first words I learned were:
rest
