Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

Thus, a person could avoid protest and rebellion and accept all the circumstances and still preserve his dignity by the thought that he had overcome private difficulties, when in fact it was the monstrous way of life that had to be overcome. Rejecting it would have shown real willpower.

I believe it was academician Lysenko’s theory that cells are born out of unstructured “living matter.” He rejected the role of genes and DNA; his invented “living matter” was a tabula rasa in which external influences did not meet an invariant component, the conditional “selfness.”

Father’s “willpower” was like Lysenko’s “living matter,” presuming a person’s continual ability to mentally mutate and forget oneself.

With that, Father imagined “willpower” in purely inherited images of resoluteness picked up from industry, from metal work and turning lathes. The way to develop it was “working on oneself”: self-trimming, self-sawing with screeching metal and showers of sparks.

Only in Mother did I encounter the flexibility I so needed, the smooth transitions from approval to disapproval, a wealth of semitones in relations. She seemed to be made of a different material than everyone else—and I sensed that this was the source of her suffering, what made her vulnerable.

Mother often suffered from headaches. Today headaches are not perceived in the same way; advertisements offering healing fizzy tablets have done their hypnotic work. Back in the eighties, with scant medications available, a headache did not seem like an easy opponent. People talked about them constantly, shared home remedies, compresses, massages; it seemed that everyone—the schoolteacher, the old man in the bus, the woman in line, the barber, the doctor—all had a headache, and the pain sometimes subsided, allowing a few days of normal life.

It was the era of the headache, the pain was the sediment, the reflux of all feelings and thoughts.

But Mother had a particularly fierce pain that would last several days; the attack came unexpectedly, unpredictably. This suddenness and inability to determine the cause (the doctors could not give a reliable diagnosis) gave aesthetic meaning to Mother’s suffering; this was not an illness, it was pain—pure suffering situated in the head.

Neither coffee nor pills helped; she held her head with her hands, as if it had grown heavy; she moved through the room as if some power were twisting her muscles; she whispered in a changed voice, as if someone had possessed her.

I thought that someone else’s old pain, wandering the world, seeking a head in which to ache, was entering her. At one point I decided to track the pain and understand how it got into the apartment: Did it seep in through a door or window left ajar, did it sneak into her purse at work or the store?

I set traps for the pain, imagining it to be like a draft, and I hid behind the shoe rack when my parents came home in the evening, watching for a dense stream of air slipping over the threshold, moving the dust on the floor or the nap of an overcoat. While the grown-ups changed into house clothes, I looked through the grocery bag—would there be a strange object, would I notice something odd about a package of grain?

When the attack reached its peak, Mother, who was usually very controlled and unremarkable, suddenly was emancipated in her movements and revealed herself deeply and powerfully; she tolerated the pain without tears, moans, or complaint, but the pain removed the bonds of habit and seemed to reassemble her beauty, dispersed by every-dayness, and her nonmaternal femininity. One time I saw her holding her head with both hands, as elegant as a narrow pitcher, a sealed pitcher—the pain was not penetrating from outside, the pain was always inside Mother, in the vessel of her head.

During the attacks Father’s voice was subdued. And things felt freer, I guess; and I sensed and remembered that difference—it was supposed to just be quieter, but it became freer. I’m ashamed to say it, but sometimes I wanted Mother to have a headache because it gave a rest to feelings that were imperceptibly suppressed; the house grew calmer, gentler, there was a mysterious fragrance of carnation from the pungent Vietnamese salve that Mother rubbed into her temples, and her light wool blanket radiated warm, electrified waves that hushed street noises; the universe of the house changed orbit and revolved around Mother’s head. Hoping to reduce the pain, I would ask for it to be passed to me, but it would not, as if it could not go beyond Mother in a generational sense and stopped with her.

Grandmother Mara never had headaches, and I don’t think she ever pitied her daughter in her pain; there was only one time when I saw Grandmother with her during one of those attacks: she reluctantly embraced her and started reciting words, an ancient, flowing abracadabra about stones-oaks-winds-seas-tears-clouds.

The old woman was a whisperer and she was “whispering” the young woman; thanks to the ancient rhythms of the spell, I saw the female body as an entity made by nature for suffering. Grandmother Mara leaned toward my mother, embraced her, whispered conspiratorial words, ran her palms soothingly over her head, and you could no longer tell which hand was Mother’s and which Grandmother’s, they had melted into each other; Mother moaned weakly, and Grandmother Mara repeated the moan, wove it into the incantation. The outlines of the two bodies formed a lump of flesh, breathing clay.

Grandmother Mara broke off the whispering, pulled away, broke the clay body into two figures and, with regret and slight disappointment, regarded her daughter. Mother felt better, her face brightened, and her body seemed lighter, as if suffering was no longer weighing her down and had finally found a comfortable place inside her, free of everything that had resisted it. And now Grandmother Mara looked at her daughter with approval.

Order and pain—those were the family principles; I protected myself as I could from my father’s will, for he wanted to organize my life and make me like him, and I felt compassion for my mother. Naturally, my parents were the most important and closest people in the world for me, but with one exception—in the everyday moment, in measuring time. As soon as I began thinking of my grandfathers and feeling I was their descendant, the grandson in me started arguing with the son.

On those rare occasions when the grandson won wholly and fully, when I heard the tense silence of the wall of photographs in Grandmother Tanya’s room, when we picked through the grains and I thought every grain in Grandmother’s fingers was telling her something, my parents—as if an invisible power were transforming them—became strangers; the ones on the side of silence; my foes.

They had shut the door to the past and limited themselves to this day. There is probably a reason why the clearest memories I have are the winter weekend evenings devoted to laundry, the washed sheets hanging in the kitchen, dimming the already weak light; it was stuffy, and the stuffiness was made thicker by the darkness outside. The kitchen window was covered in steam, and I could spend hours wiping an opening in the condensation. It would cover over instantly, and I would clear it again. It seemed as if nothing existed in the world besides the kitchen, the smell of soup, laundry, and burned matches. Everyone, I thought, lives this way—scraping a small hole to see a little bit. It never occurred to me to take a rag and clean the window.

My parents’ life appeared to have an abundance of desires; much later, as an adult, I understood that what I had taken to be the grown-ups’ desires was not that at all.

The substitute for desire was necessity; the necessity of finding food, buying clothing, getting me into Pioneer summer camp; necessity and not desire was the spur to action. When, for example, there is an inescapable task—you must buy oil whether you want to or not—and there is a total deficit of everything that could be of any value, desires fade and are replaced by needs.