Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

Wherever you were, you were watched by the collective hundred-eyed Argus, the visual field of existence was not safe and free; it was bad enough that you practically had no private, personal space; intense moralizing held sway in the public domain; everyone watched everyone else, zealously hurrying to be the first to make a remark, to execute a microact of power.

This feeling—that every person is both policeman and judge, that you are surrounded by people without eyelids, who never blink—this very feeling is probably what I experienced, and Grandmother Mara was its most vivid personfication. Once, in a good mood because it was May Day and there was a parade of thousands, she explained to me, “Soviet power is you and me and we are all together, that’s what this power is like, it is ours, it belongs to everyone.” I understood what power Grandmother Mara had in mind—the power of remarks.

The difference in language and morality was the first distinction I made between the grandmothers; gradually, a few dropped words and details created other distinctions, deeper ones.

Grandmother Tanya sometimes spoke of her childhood, the most insignificant episodes that had no historical context, walks in a meadow or a trip to the sausage store. These episodes were an expression of her person; her recollections were detailed, extended, filled with moments of understanding, moments of revelation of her own individuality.

Grandmother Mara’s recollections could not strictly be called recollections. Turning to the distant past, she wandered in twilight where vague visions appeared that did not seem to relate to her life; she could not clearly define where the existence of her brothers and sisters ended and her own began, she did not have a personal view of the world and therefore no personal memory.

But it all changed come the revolution; that and the establishment of Soviet power pulled her out of her former dissolution in everyone else, tore her out of the darkness of communal living where the concept of “individual” was rather vague.

So Grandmother Mara’s creator was Stalin. Naturally, the social and psychological upheaval was done by the revolution, but that thought was too complex for Grandmother; she needed an “author,” a demiurge, a “father” for her new personality, because attributing her second birth to historical events meant that she was both an orphan and vulnerable. A peasant daughter, her greatest and unacknowledged fear was being alone in history, without instruction and edification, without a leader’s guidance.

Lenin merely “lit the way,” he was a prophet, while “Stalin brought us up to be true to the people,” as the 1943 anthem said, and for Grandmother Mara her birth as an individual was “registered” in Stalin’s name. The name Stalin was not just a symbol of victory and faith and Communism. When she said “Stalin,” she was giving a name to a complex and contradictory alloy of traits of her own personality and the qualities of an era.

Cruelty and the readiness to quash disagreement, to sacrifice herself and others, was what she called “Stalin,” thereby justifying them and making them the necessary part of the whole. They were connected to honesty, concern, and sincerity—the bad and good in such a monstrous mix that “Stalin” was an incantation joining the incompatible and forbidding all attempts to understand oneself, which would have ended—given her meager intellectual means—in an inner tragedy.

For Grandmother Tanya the comparable character-forming concept was the blockade of Leningrad, or simply The Blockade.

Grandmother Tanya never spoke of her sisters who starved to death in Leningrad, and I heard her say the word “blockade” only two or three times; that evinced how deeply The Blockade had taken root inside her and become a way of being. Talk of the inhuman horrors of blockade life were not welcome; what was welcome were descriptions of heroic exploit, and Grandmother was left behind in the prison of silence that surrounded the death of her sisters, and she found in this the only correct and honest way of relating to life, history, and destiny.

Grandmother Mara never mentioned the siege of Leningrad as part of the war; this may be explained by the fact that she had no relatives there, that Grandfather Trofim had fought in the south, and her worry for family was tied to other points on the map.

The shadow of the blockade fell on Grandmother Tanya’s everyday life; an old illness made her keep a strict diet: porridge, boiled vegetables, boiled fish, unsweetened tea, a bit of fruit. She probably did not need to be this inflexible, she could have spoiled herself a bit without worrying about her health; but people of her generation had difficulty giving into laxity, following their mood; they did not know how to handle it, they had been trained by an era that did not recognize intermediate states, vacillations, mutability. It was easier for Grandmother Tanya to deny herself all small culinary pleasures than to permit herself to enjoy them from time to time.

Grandmother Mara loved to eat and derived pleasure from feeding others: her cooking creations overwhelmed you not so much with their taste as their number, opulence, satisfaction, and Rabelaisian forms.

On the one hand, Grandmother Mara had great admiration for steadfastness. But on the other, she sensed something in Grandmother Tanya’s behavior that in the thirties would have been called something like “counterrevolutionary lifestyle.”

She probably saw it like this: she considered the culinary abundance that she created out of literally nothing, finding products in almost-empty stores, as an achievement of the Soviet regime. All those pies, soups, and blini were the substance of Sovietness for her; she did not simply cook, she participated in the shared celebration of food, bringing joy to the stomach; she created examples of the happiness and plenty promised under socialism.

Grandmother Tanya’s refusal to try any of these dishes elicited suspicion. I think Grandmother Mara sometimes suspected that Grandmother Tanya was actually healthy and used a medical excuse to reject not the food but the regime, enacting a dietetic insurgency against the Soviets. I sometimes imagined that Grandmother Mara wanted to force-feed Grandmother Tanya to prove that normal, healthy, festive food would not harm her, and expose her deceit to the world.

At the table Grandmother Mara kept a close eye on us to make sure everything was eaten, and no excuse or trick could spare you. You had to overeat to the point where you couldn’t swallow the tiniest bite, and only then did she smile in satisfaction.

Her treats were sometimes a torture, I could not eat the most wonderful, freshest, finger-licking, meat pies; my revulsion went far beyond children’s sudden food antipathies.

I wasn’t frightened by the overflowing affection—essentially all the manifestations of care were excessive in both grandmothers, as if they should have been shared among five grandchildren; I feared not the care but what was inside it, like a blade in a sheath.

“Then why did I cook all this?” she would exclaim rhetorically and with great pathos if you refused another helping or asked her to pack less for home (this was a mandatory part of the ritual, the food made its own kind of intervention into other kitchens and tables).

“Then why did I cook all this?” Grandmother Mara would exclaim. And there was a whole philosophy in it: create such a profusion—of food, feelings, instructions, intentions—that the addressee had to accept, with no chance of refusing without hurting the giver’s feelings or questioning the kindness of the gesture.

In just the same way, she imposed her opinions, her understanding of the world, and established her power in relationships. Your wishes—actually the wishes ascribed to you—were always already fulfilled, and you had no space for maneuver, for acting on your own.