Grandpa's Trunk

March 5, 2020

Grandpa's name was Grigory Yefimovich, but nobody in town ever called him that. He was simply Grandpa Grisha, even to people older than he was, and even — Kesha had heard it himself — to the local policeman, who once came to the shop on some business and said as he left, "Well, take care, Grandpa Grisha." As though it were not a nickname but an official position. It happens like that in a small town: there's Grandpa Grisha, there's Granny Tosya, there's Uncle Misha the watchman, and nobody remembers their surnames any more, and if anyone does remember, it gives them a fright to hear them, as though someone they had known all their life had suddenly been called by a stranger's name.

He was tall, stooped, with big hands and a big head on which, right up to his death, there grew thick, completely white hair. He walked slowly, spoke slowly, and everything he did he did as though he had a whole eternity ahead of him and no reason at all to hurry. He smoked a pipe — not for show but in earnest, strong cheap tobacco, the smell of which still lingered in the corners of the shop twelve years on. He spoke Russian cleanly, but sometimes, when he was angry or very pleased, he would suddenly slip into another dialect, sing-song and rustic, with little words Kesha did not understand.

"Where are you from, Grandpa?" little Kesha once asked him.

"From here-abouts," said Grandpa.

"No, before. Before you weren't from here."

Grandpa gave him a long look from under his white eyebrows.

"Before, little grandson, nobody was from here," he said. "Before, there wasn't even you. Off you go and wash your hands."

And Kesha went and washed his hands. He was an obedient child altogether.

---

Grandpa raised Kesha himself. Kesha's father died the very night Kesha was born — the thirty-first of December, 1992, on New Year's Eve. An accident, Grandpa said, and said nothing more, and Kesha did not ask: what is there to ask about a man you have never seen? His mother left when Kesha was not yet a month old — left and never came back. Why, Grandpa did not say either. "She couldn't," he said once, when Kesha was ten and asked after all. "Couldn't what?" "Couldn't anything. It happens to people, little grandson. Don't judge." And Kesha did not judge. He had a poor idea of his mother and father anyway: they were like people from a book he had not read.

But Grandpa was there.

Grandpa woke him in the mornings, fed him porridge — always the same, buckwheat with milk — walked him to school, and after school collected him and took him to the shop on Krivaya, and Kesha did his homework behind the curtain, at a little table by the wall, while Grandpa received clients.

In those days Grandpa still received them himself. He went out to people himself, talked to them himself, took their hands in his own and looked. There were no photographs then — that is, there were, of course, some people had phones with cameras, but Grandpa did not believe in such things. "A palm has to be held," he would say. "Alive. Warm. With the blood beating in it. What will you see in a picture? You'll see nothing in a picture." He would take a person by the hand, turn it to the light — from the side too, always from the side — and look, and say nothing, and the people before him sat quiet as quiet, as in church.

Kesha peeped through a gap in the curtain. He was curious.

And when he turned eight, one evening Grandpa closed the shop, sat him down opposite, took his hand and said:

"Come on then, little grandson. Look at mine."

And he held out his palm.

Kesha looked. Grandpa's palm was enormous, dry, yellow, covered in tiny little wrinkles like an old map. The lines on it were deep as ravines.

"What do you see?" asked Grandpa.

"A palm," said Kesha.

"And what else?"

Kesha looked. He looked for a long time, until his eyes stung. And suddenly — he could never explain afterwards how it happened — suddenly he saw. Not with his eyes. As if Grandpa's palm were a window, and beyond the window was a room, and in the room someone was walking about.

"Tomorrow," Kesha said uncertainly, "your tooth's going to hurt. This one." He pointed to his own cheek.

Grandpa was silent for a long time. Then he took his hand away.

"Well, that's good," he said. "That's good, little grandson."

The next day Grandpa's tooth began to ache.

From then on Grandpa taught him every evening. He taught him for a long time, seven years, and taught him strangely: not the way they teach in the books on palmistry, which Kesha later, as an adult, read out of curiosity and laughed at. Grandpa did not name the lines for him, did not talk about the mounts of Venus and Jupiter, did not draw any diagrams. Grandpa simply gave him hands — his own, clients', anyone's — and asked: what do you see? And then said: right. Or: wrong, look again. And Kesha looked again.

And the rules. Grandpa did not have many rules, but he repeated them so often that Kesha could have recited them in his sleep.

See a month ahead. Don't look further. "Further isn't ours."

Write only what you see. Don't guess, don't invent. "Write at random — and it'll come true at random."

No more than five a day. "Your eyes aren't government property."

Never look at your own palm. Never. Not in a mirror, not in a photograph, not by accident. "Your own isn't yours. Don't touch your own."

And one more, which Grandpa said only once, but which Kesha for some reason remembered better than all the others:

"Whoever lives in your house — don't read their palm. Not your wife, not your child, not a lodger. Whoever sleeps under one roof with you — don't read them."

"And you?" Kesha asked then. "You're under one roof."

"Me — all the more so," said Grandpa, and smiled. "That time with the tooth — I allowed you that. Once. No more."

---

Grandpa died when Kesha was fifteen.

He died in the back room of the shop, on the very bed Kesha slept on now. He was not ill for long — a week, perhaps less. Kesha remembered that week badly, in pieces: he remembered the smell of medicine and tobacco, remembered Grandpa coughing at night, remembered sitting on the stool by the bed himself and not knowing what to do. He remembered a doctor coming. He remembered Grandpa sending the doctor away, saying, "No need, doctor, I know." He remembered — dimly, as through water — the last evening: dark, only the lamp on the table, and Grandpa calling him — "little grandson" — and Kesha going over…

And after that — nothing. After that Kesha did not remember. As if someone had torn out a page at that place. The next thing he remembered was morning, grey, and Grandpa lying on the bed with his hands folded on his chest, and it was no longer Grandpa.

Grandpa left the trunk to him. He said so a week before his death, while he could still speak: "The trunk's yours. Only don't rush to open it. When it's time — you'll open it."

"And when will it be time?"

"You'll know," said Grandpa.

And Kesha did not open it. For twelve years. The trunk stood in the back room, in the corner by the head of the bed — big, wooden, bound with iron, once painted blue and now peeled down to grey wood. On it lay Kesha's books, a glass of water, his clothes. It was part of the room, like a wall or the floor. Kesha would go weeks at a time without remembering that it was a trunk and that there was something in it.

But that night he remembered.

---

He took the books, the clothes and the glass off the lid. The lid was heavy. There was no lock on the trunk — only an iron hasp with a loop that had nothing through it. Kesha took hold of the edge and pulled.

The lid rose with a long, plaintive creak, and a breath of tobacco came out of the trunk. Grandpa's tobacco, strong and cheap — so thick, so alive, as if Grandpa had been sitting there smoking his pipe only a minute ago. Kesha recoiled. His throat tightened.

Then he looked inside.

On top lay clothes. Grandpa's jacket, grey, with leather patches on the elbows. Trousers. Shirts, folded neatly, as in a shop. Kesha took them out one at a time and laid them on the bed, and each smelled of tobacco and of something else — something of the village, hay perhaps, or dry grass.

Under the clothes, a pipe. Not the one Grandpa smoked — another, old, with a cracked stem bound with coarse thread. A tobacco pouch. A box of matches so old that the label had faded white.

A framed photograph, face down. Kesha turned it over. Black and white, browned with age: a young man and a young woman sitting side by side on a bench outside some cottage. The man tall, broad-shouldered, in an embroidered shirt, with a forelock. Kesha looked at him for a long time before he recognised him: Grandpa. Grandpa, young, twenty-five or so, no older — and already with that same slow, heavy way of sitting, that same look from under the brows. And the woman…

The woman was beautiful. That was the first thing that came to mind — not "young," not "smiling," but precisely "beautiful," as girls in old photographs are beautiful, where everyone looks serious and she alone is smiling — and her smile is such that you want to smile back. Fair hair in a plait. Hands folded in her lap.

On the back, in faded ink: "Hryts and Mariyka. 1968."

Grandmother. Kesha knew her name had been Maria — Grandpa had said. He knew she had died when Kesha was less than a year old. And he knew nothing more. Grandpa never talked about her. There were no photographs of her in the house — Kesha had thought none were left. And here they were.

Kesha stood the photograph on the bed, by the clothes, leaning it against the pillow. Young Grandpa and young Grandmother looked at him out of 1968.

Under the photograph lay papers tied with string — bills, receipts, old documents for the shop. A child's drawing — Kesha recognised his own hand, aged six or so: a house, a sun, a big person and a little person holding hands. Underneath, in block capitals: "GRANDPA AND ME." Kesha did not remember drawing it. Did not remember that Grandpa had kept it.

And at the very bottom, under the papers, under the drawing, lay a notebook.

---

It was not quite a notebook. More a book, thick, bound in dark leather, worn and cracked at the folds. The size of a large palm. No lettering — neither on the cover nor on the spine.

Kesha took it out. It was heavy, like that coin — heavier than a book that size had any right to be.

In the middle of the cover a copper plate was set. Kesha held the notebook up to the lamp and made it out: the plate was in the shape of a palm. An open palm, the fingers slightly apart — life-size, an adult's, a man's. And on this copper palm the lines were engraved: life, heart, head, fate — all of them, with all their twigs, islands and crossings, deep and clear, as on Grandpa's hand.

And along the edge of the cover, where an ordinary book's binding simply ends, ran a copper strip, and this strip came over the pages and held them — Kesha tried to open the notebook and could not. It was locked. There was no keyhole, no clasp, no hook. Nothing but the copper palm on the cover.

Kesha sat for a while with the notebook on his knees.

Then slowly, not quite understanding why he was doing it — or perhaps understanding all too well — he laid his palm on the copper one.

The copper was cold. Kesha pressed his hand down, finger to finger, and felt under his skin the relief of the engraved lines — as if he were pressing his palm against someone else's palm, a dead man's palm.

Nothing happened.

He took his hand away and looked. His palm was smaller than the copper one — noticeably smaller: his fingers fell a good half-centimetre short of the copper fingertips, and his wrist was narrower. And the lines — he did not look at them, Grandpa had forbidden it, but out of the corner of his eye he could see — the lines were not the same. Not the same at all.

It was not his palm. It was Grandpa's palm. And the lock opened to Grandpa's hand.

Kesha sat on the bed on which Grandpa had died, holding Grandpa's notebook on his knees, and beside him lay Grandpa's shirts smelling of tobacco, and from the photograph Grandpa and Grandmother looked on, young, in 1968 — and it suddenly occurred to him that Grandpa might really have wanted Kesha to open it. "When it's time — you'll open it." But then — how? Grandpa's hand was gone. Grandpa's hand had lain in the ground for twelve years, in the town cemetery, in section three, under a granite slab.

Then why lock it?

Or — Kesha thought, and the thought made him cold, colder than the copper palm — or Grandpa had not locked it against him. Or Grandpa had locked it so that no one could open it but Grandpa himself.

And so he knew that some day he would come and open it.

Behind the wall, in the neighbouring cellar, water was dripping. Kesha sat listening to it, holding the heavy book with the copper palm on his knees, and could not bring himself to put it back in the trunk.