Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

The marvelous objects were equivalent—with adjustment for time and place—to family treasures, for which every generation had its own attitude. Paid for in blood, Grandfather Trofim’s early death, they created the family, the community of people allowed to eat soup from German porcelain, admire the bedspreads, and appreciate the mechanical beauty and harmonious structure of the Singer sewing machine.

The bedspreads had a citrusy fragrance—Grandmother Mara saved the skin of oranges and tangerines and used the dry bits against moths; a repairman came once a year with tiny tools, like dental instruments, and a narrow-necked oil can, to tune up the Singer; we weren’t allowed to scrape our spoons on the bottom of the plates so as not to scratch the enamel.

The service enchanted me with the sophistication of its creator’s mind; five kinds of plates, three kinds of cups and saucers, tureen, salad bowls, cream pitcher and many others—with wide and narrow necks, with thin noses like a beak; pots, jugs, vases—nobody knew what they were really called or for which foods they were intended; no one could imagine a life where there was so much food that all these forms and shapes were needed.

“This must be for jam,” Grandmother Mara said, and everyone carefully put jam in the thin dish, but no one was sure that it was intended for jam, and it seemed that the dishes that remained on the sideboard looked down on us with aristocratic displeasure.

The service was for twenty, and I kept wondering: Why so many? Were there families with so many close relatives? For a while I consoled myself with the guess that it had been made with extras, in case something was broken. But then one day I saw Grandmother Mara’s gaze while she set the table, as she looked from the mountain of unneeded plates to the photograph of Grandfather Trofim. And I understood, I realized that Grandfather Trofim brought this service back from Germany in the hope that he would one day gather together the large prewar family, all the relatives. Maybe he even imagined them sitting at the table; having been separated by war, they would meet again, passing bread, serving one another, pouring vodka, and these gestures, arms crossing and fingers touching, would renew their family ties; the German service would stop being specifically German when the victors broke bread and raised glasses over it.

Grandmother Mara’s eyes saw what I did not—the emptiness, the absence. For me, four people at the table was the norm, the maximum, while for Grandmother Mara it was the remains, a small part of something larger. She set out the service to remember, to count all the dishes and cups that did not appear, all the unneeded bowls of soup.

I pictured the wall of photographs in Grandmother Tanya’s room; for a second I pitied both grandmothers, who were irreconcilable and so similar in their loneliness.

It is both simple and difficult to compare my grandmothers; they were so different that each defined herself through negation—I am not her—which over time bound the two so tightly that one could not live without the other.

One could say that our family was the result of a historical misalliance; both grandmothers were born before the revolution, one a noblewoman of an ancient line, the other a peasant from recent serfs, and it is unlikely they would have had a grandson in common if not for 1917, the Civil War, and the establishment of Soviet rule.

For peasant Grandmother Mara everything beginning with 1917 was her history, her time. While Grandmother Tanya lived, perhaps without fully realizing it, in an alien time; it merely moved her inherent era farther and farther away. The two women could not have come together: time flowed differently for them. Their conflict could only grow.

Naturally, as a child I did not know that Grandmother Tanya belonged to the nobility, did not know that the family was divided by a temporal marker into “present people” and “former people”; that our family was in its essence not something finished but a continuing attempt to find a common tongue, to coexist, realized in the children and in the grandchild, that is, in me; that I was in effect something experimental, a child of two times.

Grandmother Mara, a Communist who did not belong to the Party, should have been impressed by non-Party Grandmother Tanya, an editor at Politizdat, a person with entrée to the ideological inner sanctum. But it seems that Grandmother Mara did not trust Grandmother Tanya, knowing her dubious social heritage, nor Politizdat itself or the very genre of ideological speech.

Lenin and Stalin were immutable for her; they had said it all , their speeches were no longer words, they were signs on tablets, and there was no need to say or write anything more; therefore the official language elicited an unrecognized protest in her that grew into a quiet war, an overthrow of grammar and orthography.

I think she found inexplicable bliss in talking about “communisum” and “socialisum,” stretching out the terms, stomping tight shoes to fit the big clumsy feet of a peasant girl.

Saying “perscription” and “supposably” was not simply a vulgarization of awkward “intellectual” words to suit the speech of village, not a parody of buzzwords used in inaccessible spheres of culture.

No, she killed complex words just because, she was certain that words were not important, there was no ontological faith in them, they were to be mocked like the vanquished. She saw the future of communism as wordless somehow: the kingdom of the final truth would have no words.

Even in insignificant situations she spoke aggressively, pushing, harsh, trying to tear the words apart, use them all up so that the final silence could come.

For me, Grandmother Mara’s aggressive speech merely epitomized what I sensed in the speech of all adults. Grandmother Mara immediately invaded your side of the field with words, as if she used their meaning not for communicating but as bellicose weapons.

Grandmother Tanya spoke softly, both in intonation and in choice of words, her sentences always left space for a response. She used neutral language, and I always felt free with her, like a soldier during a truce, when you don’t have to keep expecting shots and looking for the closest cover.

In every conversation, Grandmother Mara (no matter what was being discussed) tried to exact some special proof of the speaker’s sincerity and existential attitude. She seemed to believe no one, and condemned herself for that lack of trust, but still attacked, insisted, as if she needed the person to tear his shirt, claw his chest to the flesh and blood, exposing the gaping flesh of feeling, even though they might be discussing ways of pickling cucumbers.

Her fixation turned Grandmother Mara into an investigator, a torturer: Is there truth in the person? The connection she had felt with you—was it still true? She perceived lying as absolute evil and would never admit it was a psychological mechanism that could perform, say, a defense function as well.

Grandmother Tanya allowed me to maintain some moral mystery inside me, a hidden moral life. Her principle was “just don’t lie to yourself.” But Grandmother Mara thought the more important principle was “don’t lie to others.” She demanded that I tell everything, as if cleansing from guilt could come only in confession, preferably before several people, not just one. The most ordinary formulas of apology in her presence took on the weight of repentance.

I have to mention here what I later called the metaphysics of remarking. The concept—remarking—was key in education; “I was given a remark,” “You will get a remark,” “I’m writing a remark in your notebook.”

A remark is not just some words with moral content; the words are secondary, first comes the act of remarking, the act of a specifically organized seeing. This seeing is not neutral, it nearly unconsciously fixes on almost anything wrong, latches on to it, calculates, classifies, and only then do the clichéd words come.