personal fronts and impersonal fronts
My grandmother is watching her Argentinian soap opera, dubbed into Russian. These first made it to Russia in the 1980s, I think, and they hit like crack cocaine. My mother remembers her great-aunt complaining about them in the mid-nineties, going into great detail to explain “the nonsense they’re playing here now” before looking at the time and hurrying off. But I thought you said it was such nonsense, my mother said. “Of course it’s nonsense, and you can’t miss a single episode! It’s terrible,” and she turned on the television. My grandfather reads the paper next to her. My mother is waiting for the water for the shower to heat up, reading Elaine Pagels on sex and morality in the Christian tradition. Outside my window someone is playing Hebrew rock and roll; last night it was Russian rap, the kind where you can hear that the back-up girls are naked.
So, today, another walk with my grandfather, this time with his hearing aid. The ear he hears with is on the same side as the arm he holds the cane with, so when you walk with him you’re next to the deaf ear, and when you want to say something you have to kind of talk around his head to the ear that hears, hence all the stopping and looking and not walking, I think. The ear he doesn’t hear with was on the other side of his head from the wound he got—I think it was the second wound. He was lying in the hospital where they were patching up his head, and he told the nurse he couldn’t hear anything with the other ear. The doctor looked at the ear and couldn’t see anything wrong, so he figured he’d get over it. Much later he found out that it was nerve damage from the wound on the other side of his head—so of course the doctor wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with the inside of the ear itself. The next time he was wounded he was in another hospital, and still couldn’t hear anything in that ear, but he didn’t say anything, even though he really should have: “at least they would have written it down, I would have gotten a free hearing aid.”
That next time was in a better hospital, which he got to by hook and by crook. He’d got some shrapnel in his bone from a wound to his leg, but since the field hospital couldn’t do an X-ray, they couldn’t take it out. They sent him on to another hospital closer inland, and when they got there two of his buddies who also had families in Moscow told him to get his papers, with the history of his wound, from the head doctor. He went in to the head doctor, who didn’t want to give them up. “Well, I started to talk him into it. ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’ I said. That’s Dante, Anechka.” Finally the doctor gave him his papers, with a warning to say he’d stolen them himself if someone asked. He found the buddies, and together they boarded a frieght train headed toward a town in the Moscowly direction. There they got off and found a passenger train full of military men. They understood right away what was going on—two guys in uniform with arms in slings, another walking with a cane—and got them onto the train. “Right away people got up to make room for us. They spread out their coats,” here my grandfather chokes up a bit, as he’s prone to do when something moves him, which I think is a hereditary trait, actually, “because they could see that I was injured, and they lay me down on a seat. And that’s how we rode all the way to Moscow.”
When they got off the train in Moscow they were promptly arrested by the NKVD (the proto-KGB). But they explained to the guy what they were doing, and “he understood our position. We had families in Moscow.” And so they got into the NKVD hospital, a very good hospital, and the volunteer on duty got the address from my grandfather and went right away to inform his family. His father and my grandmother got there as he was being carried out on a stretcher to remove the shrapnel from his leg. They waited until he was brought back and it was there, recovering from the operation, that he first saw his son, my uncle, who I guess at that point was about a year old or so—I’m having a little trouble getting a straight chronology on this. The next time he’d see him after this spell in the hospital would be after the end of the war.
He started recovering quickly after the shrapnel was removed, and when he could walk, my grandmother brought him a pair of black pants and a shirt. He’d sneak into the neighboring yard and change in the outhouse, and in the evenings they’d stroll together. One day as he was returning, the outhouse door went, according to my grandfather, bang. Someone burst in on him. Apparently someone had witnessed this strange man sneaking in and out of the outhouse night after night and had reported it to the authorities. What are you doing here? the man asked. “Changing,” my grandfather replied, with the exact same look of innocent amusement, I suspect, as he had this morning, sixty some years later, telling me about it.
The man dragged him out of the outhouse and, refusing to look at the papers that my grandfather tried to hand him, started walking him to the hospital, to get to the bottom of this, my grandfather all the way trying to talk him out of it, explaining that if they found out they wouldn’t let him stroll with his wife anymore, that he was going back to the front soon anyway, to just be a buddy why don’t you. When they got to the hospital and were swarmed by a group of war invalids who all said the exact same thing, they guy finally relented and let him go, and thus he was able to keep strolling with his wife all the way up until he was sent back to the front for the next three years. His delight at this great good luck, a hospital respite in Moscow that let him stroll about with his wife, shows clearly. My grandfather’s face, like mine, is an open field: bolts of emotion strike with perfect clarity, transforming the whole area in their image. And after the lightning of delight, a slower cloud of memory. “She was very lucky to have escaped, Anechka.” She’d been evacuated (as his wife, not as a refugee from Poland) from the town in western Ukraine where they’d met, shortly before it was occupied. After the war, my grandfather went back there once; all the Jews were gone. There’d been a wooden synagogue—of course as soon as he says “wooden,” you know where the story is going. The story walks us home.
So, today, another walk with my grandfather, this time with his hearing aid. The ear he hears with is on the same side as the arm he holds the cane with, so when you walk with him you’re next to the deaf ear, and when you want to say something you have to kind of talk around his head to the ear that hears, hence all the stopping and looking and not walking, I think. The ear he doesn’t hear with was on the other side of his head from the wound he got—I think it was the second wound. He was lying in the hospital where they were patching up his head, and he told the nurse he couldn’t hear anything with the other ear. The doctor looked at the ear and couldn’t see anything wrong, so he figured he’d get over it. Much later he found out that it was nerve damage from the wound on the other side of his head—so of course the doctor wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with the inside of the ear itself. The next time he was wounded he was in another hospital, and still couldn’t hear anything in that ear, but he didn’t say anything, even though he really should have: “at least they would have written it down, I would have gotten a free hearing aid.”
That next time was in a better hospital, which he got to by hook and by crook. He’d got some shrapnel in his bone from a wound to his leg, but since the field hospital couldn’t do an X-ray, they couldn’t take it out. They sent him on to another hospital closer inland, and when they got there two of his buddies who also had families in Moscow told him to get his papers, with the history of his wound, from the head doctor. He went in to the head doctor, who didn’t want to give them up. “Well, I started to talk him into it. ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’ I said. That’s Dante, Anechka.” Finally the doctor gave him his papers, with a warning to say he’d stolen them himself if someone asked. He found the buddies, and together they boarded a frieght train headed toward a town in the Moscowly direction. There they got off and found a passenger train full of military men. They understood right away what was going on—two guys in uniform with arms in slings, another walking with a cane—and got them onto the train. “Right away people got up to make room for us. They spread out their coats,” here my grandfather chokes up a bit, as he’s prone to do when something moves him, which I think is a hereditary trait, actually, “because they could see that I was injured, and they lay me down on a seat. And that’s how we rode all the way to Moscow.”
When they got off the train in Moscow they were promptly arrested by the NKVD (the proto-KGB). But they explained to the guy what they were doing, and “he understood our position. We had families in Moscow.” And so they got into the NKVD hospital, a very good hospital, and the volunteer on duty got the address from my grandfather and went right away to inform his family. His father and my grandmother got there as he was being carried out on a stretcher to remove the shrapnel from his leg. They waited until he was brought back and it was there, recovering from the operation, that he first saw his son, my uncle, who I guess at that point was about a year old or so—I’m having a little trouble getting a straight chronology on this. The next time he’d see him after this spell in the hospital would be after the end of the war.
He started recovering quickly after the shrapnel was removed, and when he could walk, my grandmother brought him a pair of black pants and a shirt. He’d sneak into the neighboring yard and change in the outhouse, and in the evenings they’d stroll together. One day as he was returning, the outhouse door went, according to my grandfather, bang. Someone burst in on him. Apparently someone had witnessed this strange man sneaking in and out of the outhouse night after night and had reported it to the authorities. What are you doing here? the man asked. “Changing,” my grandfather replied, with the exact same look of innocent amusement, I suspect, as he had this morning, sixty some years later, telling me about it.
The man dragged him out of the outhouse and, refusing to look at the papers that my grandfather tried to hand him, started walking him to the hospital, to get to the bottom of this, my grandfather all the way trying to talk him out of it, explaining that if they found out they wouldn’t let him stroll with his wife anymore, that he was going back to the front soon anyway, to just be a buddy why don’t you. When they got to the hospital and were swarmed by a group of war invalids who all said the exact same thing, they guy finally relented and let him go, and thus he was able to keep strolling with his wife all the way up until he was sent back to the front for the next three years. His delight at this great good luck, a hospital respite in Moscow that let him stroll about with his wife, shows clearly. My grandfather’s face, like mine, is an open field: bolts of emotion strike with perfect clarity, transforming the whole area in their image. And after the lightning of delight, a slower cloud of memory. “She was very lucky to have escaped, Anechka.” She’d been evacuated (as his wife, not as a refugee from Poland) from the town in western Ukraine where they’d met, shortly before it was occupied. After the war, my grandfather went back there once; all the Jews were gone. There’d been a wooden synagogue—of course as soon as he says “wooden,” you know where the story is going. The story walks us home.
posted by blahgstein at 11:51 AM
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