Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

She lightly sprayed her throat and neck, but in combination with her personality the already overwhelming fragrance of Red Moscow seemed incredibly cloying, sticking to everything, narcotic, as if she remembered a completely different smell—rot, smoke, decay—and was trying to kill it with this perfume, unconsciously adding more than necessary.

She had two lipsticks—crimson and purplish brown; her face powder was in a red compact; the bottle of Red Moscow perfume with its ruby top looked like the Kremlin towers and their stars; she managed to desacralize red, making it her own. From the color of blood shed for the revolution that saturated the banners, red turned into the color of a vivacious blush that came from health, joy, and sensual appetite. In fact, all of Grandmother Mara’s cosmetics created a range of blushes, as if she wanted to demonstrate her satisfaction with life under socialism.

Grandmother Mara’s looks were clear evidence that she appreciated the material side of life. An inattentive observer might conclude that she was a loud, impulsive, bossy but essentially harmless pensioner.

Yet the first time I heard the word “ruthless,” I intuitively understood its meaning through Grandmother Mara. No, she wasn’t cruel, she knew how to be tender, and she loved sincerely and fully; ruthlessness is something else—it is the absence of intermediate states. Grandmother Mara did not know how to internalize an experience, she always overcame it—or solved it—in a single movement; therefore she could be ruthless even in kindness.

If a tree was not fruitful, she had it cut and dug out in order to plant a new one. I learned to use ax and shovel, to dig out and to chop clinging roots. I approached the task reluctantly, hoping that Grandmother Mara would change her mind and spare the tree, but the first chopped root unloosened the ties of pity, and I fiercely dug into the ground to find the main root that kept the apple tree firmly in the ground. I struggled like a fairy tale hero with the power of the tree, deep, dispersed, and intractable.

I think at times like that Grandmother Mara felt special pangs of love for me, certain that I was her grandson more than I was Grandmother Tanya’s, or the son of my parents. My father would remove the cherry or apple tree three times faster, but he would do it without passion, just another job. Grandmother Mara kept the garden not out of love for gardening; the garden was her domain, her little empire, and she was using her Communist upbringing on the irrational plants, believing that a fruitless plum tree was setting a bad example for the others and therefore had to be destroyed before the others were tempted by the joy of fruitless growth.

She let me use Grandfather’s ax—a terrible executioner’s tool, which had somehow survived all the moves and the wartime evacuation, as if such objects do not vanish, as if they were more than things, with a fate and a soul; resembling a Scandinavian battle ax, it was an instrument and a weapon; life began with it in a bare spot, with no people; it gave birth to a house, utensils, fence; peasants fought with it against swords and rifles; a weapon of labor and a weapon of rebellion.

I felt it, I felt the power of that ax, which was still too big for me. I picked it up and the ax made me grow to match its size, taught me how to use its weight effortlessly to chop branches and wood. When a tree indicated by Grandmother Mara was turned into a pile of branches and a stump—an octopus-like shape, resembling a terrible animal—I looked in amazement at the emptiness cleared of trunk and branches. The space was a result of that ax, and the labor became profoundly justified, as if I were repeating the actions of many generations of peasant ancestors.

I dragged the green branches beyond the fence; a short breather. Grandmother Mara fed me like an adult worker, like a man, and then she handed me a matchbox to start the main part.

Grandmother Mara believed that the best ashes for fertilizing came from freshly sawn trees, burned while the leaves were still firm, while the foamy sap still dripped from the cuts. I made a big bonfire, putting old dry logs on the bottom, for a hot and long-lasting fire, and threw the fresh branches on top. They caught reluctantly, slowly drying on the fire of the bottom logs, so the burning lasted until twilight. I stood in the smoke and trembling air, amid the sparks and searching breaths of the flames, stunned by the heat, thinking of taking a rest but knowing that somewhere in the yard that had grown viscous in the heated air, Grandmother Mara was watching me work.

The next morning, tired, with aching muscles, I still rose early, for I had to see the culmination of my actions; Grandmother Mara, who never slept past seven and often rose with the sun, living in the ancient peasant rhythm imbued in her from childhood, came out to sift the ashes.

At the hour of thickening dew and the first sun rays, not so much warm as luminous, I could see her approaching frailty; her dress refused to fall smoothly and freely, keeping its angles, seams, and darts, as if her bulky body had weakened inside and the fabric hugged her like a sheet does a very ill patient, gathering the smell of unaired linen in the folds; in the hour of morning dew she came out like a witch, a sorceress, with a trough and an old sieve, as if she was going to cast a spell.

She used a trowel to gather the still hot ashes, putting portions into the sieve and sifting it over the trough; a mound of delicately gray ash, with darker flecks, grew in the trough; the finest dust that could not be held by the sieve flew in the air, settled on the grass, while the coals that did not burn fully rattled around, black bone trees, the broken joints of burned branches.

I was amazed that the apple or cherry trees that were alive and full of juice just yesterday, cracking under the blade of the ax, had been burned, and that the old woman was sifting their ashes; but it could be no other way because of all the grownups only Grandmother Mara was capable of deciding without a second thought what would live and what would die; she stood on the border of life and death, ordering one to be chopped and burned in order to fertilize another, more worthy tree.

Here I understood why some of the old men in the dacha compound called her (behind her back, of course) Soviet Power; “Has Soviet Power gone by yet?” “Have you seen Soviet Power?” Without mockery, half-jokingly, half-seriously. Grandmother Mara had never held any official posts, had no titles or awards, not even the most trifling, merely nominal ones; but when she showed me which tree to destroy and I followed her orders, it seemed that we were serving something greater than concern over the harvest; Soviet Power was revealed to me as a life force and the mystery of annihilation simultaneously. Grandmother Mara, despite her lowly public position, was an apostle or at the very least a Soviet zealot in the true, invisible hierarchy.

There was only one circumstance which made me feel that Grandmother Mara knew much and had seen much that did not quite fit into the Soviet canon, but either hid it or forced herself not to remember it.

When we visited her in the winter at her Moscow apartment, she put a tablecloth on a big round table—we did not eat like that at home because of our cramped quarters and harried life—and set plates from a porcelain service that was kept in the sideboard.

Grandfather Trofim brought the service back from Germany after the war, along with the sewing machine and silk bedspreads in the Japanese style, embroidered with birds and dragons.

The bedspreads and sewing machine were almost never used; Grandmother Mara used a Soviet machine for sewing, the spreads were kept in the closet, but an exception was made for the porcelain service for certain family meals. These three things were metaphysical trophies, as if Grandfather Trofim had returned from a distant kingdom with three special objects.