David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

Now the hammer boomed to a heavy cadence, louder than the storm outside. And so, for weeks — or was it months, who knows — Papa and Molochinko roamed the taiga. They lost their way, and the howling wolves that trailed them expectantly drove them half insane. Once they came across a skeleton with the cap of a political lying beside it. Molochinko crossed himself and peered at Papa anxiously. The sledgehammer reverberated, hard and dull, pausing each time like a cannon saluting the dead. There was nothing but pine forest and tundra as far as the eye could see. They slogged around in circles, up to their knees in the snow, stranded on the vast palm of Nature, terrified of disappearing without a trace in these infinite expanses. If not for Molochinko, said Papa, I would have sunk in the snow and waited for the Angel of Death.

Ai, Molochinko. Papa struck again, while Edna cringed in anticipation of what she read on his rippling back. Molochinko was a petty thief, a sardine from Odessa. He was arrested for stealing a consignment of streetlamps, so they sent him to the Hotel Komi for the rest of his life. Papa chuckled to himself, and Edna saw Molochinko on the wall, sketched with a few crude strokes as a shapeless but sprightly man full of merriment and chatter. Uh-huh, nodded Papa, that’s him all right.

Molochinko spouted witty anecdotes, hollow abstractions; he joked obscenely, flattered Papa, and exasperated him, working hard to maintaina kind of standard of human emotion in the heart of the ice. Together they learned to hunt birds with a slingshot and eat them raw, those brightly feathered birds, Miss Bloom, that sang so prettily, it was a shame to eat them, and once they had to fight a pack of dogs off a deer carcass. And there were herds of wild horses, small and lithe, galloping fleetly over the horizon. At night he and Molochinko would sleep in a tree, tying themselves to the trunk by a rope like criminals hanging from the gallows. One night Papa awoke with a feverish start, and saw that the taiga, glowing pale in the moonlight, was aswarm with crouching wolves that gazed patiently up at him like masked humans with cold, indifferent eyes, the faceless members of a thousand committees, who sent the likes of him to die in the taiga, and he began to beg them for mercy, he was a man like them, he wanted to live, to love a woman, but then he woke out of the trance, realizing he was delirious. Actually I was more afraid of Molochinko than I was of the wolves, because if he’d seen how weak I was, he would have butchered me on the spot, that’s right.

At last, after endless days of wandering, they reached the outskirts of a tiny village. Edna Bloom took her thumb out of her mouth and listened intently. Papa’s chest heaved like a bellows, and Aron cocked his eye: the low clouds overhanging the window seemed to have rallied to a secret cry; they puffed their cheeks and spat, as if trying to put out a forbidden flame. Papa and Molochinko lay low: the villagers were ignorant serfs who subsisted by growing beets and stealing the logs that floated down the river. Papa smashed the wall, tucking his head between his shoulders to hide from the resounding boom: the entire building groaned like a ship ramming into an iceberg, the naked plane tree screeched like a topmast; three days later, Papa and the robber of streetlamps discovered a woman locked up in the farthermost hut of the village. The captive’s husband worked outside the village and forbade his wife to leave their home. Twice a day some old crone would pass her a bowl of pottage through a hatch at the back. The two men ogled the slender arm reaching out to take the dish. Go to him now, murmured Edna all of a sudden. Go to him, wipe the sweat from his brow, bring him a glass of water. Without ulterior motives. Just to let him know there’s another human being in the room.

The following night Papa kneeled down on the frozen ground, and Molochinko climbed on his back and slipped in through the hatch. Papacould hear a muffled cry of surprise inside. Then a thud and a curse. Then silence, panting, and a startled groan. And silence again. And gentle weeping. Papa crouched in the darkness, in the shadow of the hut. Then, after a pause, he heard a harmonica tweedling inside, slowly and shyly at first, then mounting and bursting with life — Aron’s eyes were opened now: Come on, it’s time to go, I have homework to do, what’s taking so long? In the early dawn Molochinko shook his shoulder to wake him and they hurried back to the forest. In his hands he held a quarter of a sausage, a whole potato, and a chicken egg. A smile of pride spread over his lips. He held his fingers under Papa’s nose. Papa sniffed the fingers and shivered, then grabbed them and licked them and sucked them, unconscious that his feet were taking him back to the hut: Molochinko had to hit him over the head to bring him to his senses. And that’s the truth, Miss Bloom, I’m sorry to say.

Molochinko babbled frenziedly, explaining that the door was latched shut and the serf had the key. That the hatch was too small for Papa to climb through. But inside, he told him, there was fresh food and enough provisions to keep them going for days, and the woman, aiaiai, he drew two undulating curves in the air. Papa hung on to the robber’s every word and asked a thousand times if there might not be some way of getting him into the hut. Again the taiga seemed to him like a massive prison where his youth would wither in the bud.

Papa gulped hard, as though swallowing the bitter memory. Then he started hammering again. Edna listened, but the blows sounded hollow, reluctant somehow. Why did he have to break his story off? Pale and pouting, Edna stood up. She paced the room, nearly tripping over Aron, advancing toward Papa, then stumbling backward, till suddenly she was sitting at the piano; not bothering to wipe the dust away, her fingers flitted over the keyboard, searching for something, scanning her repertoire. Aron listened with his mouth open: what a strange, wispy melody. A slow, disorderly tinkling that burst wildly into song. He had heard it before. Papa too stood motionless, then nodded his heavy head as he followed the slippery tune with his lips, lighting after it, amazed at how it spurted out of the piano, and suddenly he could feel it hovering over his face, twisting and frolicking; he stuck out his tongue and snatched it up and licked it, beaming as it clung to his puffy lips, and he flourished his hammer and struck again with a silent whistle, the one that irritates Mama, and even kept time with his foot till Ednasmiled to herself and slowly shut the piano: We don’t need you anymore, we found what we were looking for …

The following night they returned to the hut. And they did it again: inside, Molochinko copulated with the woman, while outside, Papa kneeled, his ear to the wall, listening for their groans of pleasure, for the dregs of a passionate moan. Molochinko came out with a great supply of words for him. The way she smiled; the tender flesh of her inner thigh; her soft flowing hair … Papa listened, swallowing his spit. Molochinko allowed him to sniff his fingertips: Remember now, no biting.

And then one night … Papa hammered gently, with a trembling heart, and Aron jumped up and threw the blanket off: Why does she always have to cover me up, why do I come here day after day, it’s a miracle my head doesn’t explode from all the hammering, how long can you sit and watch someone tearing down a wall, and he tiptoed out, afraid they might stop him in his tracks with a resounding shout, or the boom of the sledge, and force him back to listen, and so, sidling up to the door, he stood there dizzily, with his hand on the knob: Maybe I got up too suddenly, it’ll pass, another second and I’ll be out of here and I’ll never come back, what a bore.

… One night Papa caught a glimpse of the crone in the next hut peering out the window. He decided not to wait for Molochinko and went back to their hideout in the forest. The robber of streetlamps returned around dawn, bragging and swaggering without cease. An unfamiliar urge for vengeance seeped into Papa’s heart. An ancient outrage. He said nothing to Molochinko about the old crone next door. The enraptured lover described the bright-colored cap the woman had started knitting him, and the holy icon over the bed which she piously turned to the wall each time, and the fullness of her lips as she blew on the harmonica — there was a look on Papa’s face that made Molochinko uneasy, and he slowed down but couldn’t stop entirely: her breasts, he said, raising a hand to caress them, so warm and soft beneath his cheeks, sending out their milky vapor; and Papa’s eyes never left Molochinko, stunned by the murderous hatred in his heart, the hatred of the meek for the braggart, the hatred of Cain for Abel.