Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

Objects that had lost their companions—a single mitten, a shoe left alone while the other was being repaired, a domino dropped in the playground—called me to understand how they lived in their insufficiency.

Even though I knew I would be punished, I would sometimes drop a cup to experience the moment of the vessel’s irremediable loss and the irreversibility of time. Grown-ups tried to teach me to be careful—for them spoilage, breakage, even accidental, was tantamount to a crime. They lived as if there were a finite number of things, and a broken shot glass could not be replaced by another; a lack of care for things would lead to having none at all, a regression into the Stone Age, animal skins, digging sticks, and flint axes.

The grown-ups seemed to be constantly mending the world, aged, worn, carelessly used; they thought that loss was the result of age. But when Father cemented the dacha’s foundation that had cracked from the earth’s spring turbulence, I thought it was not the foundation’s age that was at fault—rather, the future was hidden inside the cracks and it was growing out, like leaves or bushes on old facades, crumbling the exterior.

They sometimes made me listen to classical music, but I was tormented by its harmonies, sensing that the world wasn’t made that way, it didn’t have form and discipline, and I sought other sounds that would correspond to my picture of sensations. I found them at the German cemetery, where we went a few times a year to tend the family plot.

Stars, insignias, rifles, propellers; captains, majors, colonels—every third or fourth tombstone had a photo, their faces still youthful. The cemetery was dispassionate proof of what the country had done for a century and where its men had gone; the saturation of war was so strong that I sometimes expected medals and orders to grow on trees instead of leaves.

Among the old graves there were Germans of previous centuries: someone called Hans Jacob Straub, physician and apothecary. The Russian names alternated with German names, as if it were a total list of losses after a fierce battle. I thought the corpses had to be uncomfortable there, underground, lying in graves as if in the trenches, and that some deceased general had taken command in order to free our soil from the German-Fascist invaders.

The quieter and more reconciled the cemetery seemed on a clear fall day, the more horrible, deep and persistent seemed the underground struggle that supplanted eternity for those who did not believe in it. The cemetery land, dug up and crumbly, often sank, buckled, tossed up stones, swallowed fences, tilted tomb-stones, and squeezed out tree roots—I imagined these were traces of underground attacks: recognizing only the enemy, the corpses dug underground passages with their fingernails, stormed burial vaults, and broke into other people’s rotting coffins.

Suddenly, with terrifying noise, the wind tunnels of the nearby aviation plant roared over the cemetery. During the war, jet fighters were tested there with compressed air. A prehistoric animal, the mastodon of all mastodons, roared, its voice bigger than the cemetery, bigger than the city, it even put a stop to the silent underground war and suspended my heart, which lost its beat, in the emptiness; the power of the sound was so great it turned into the sound of power.

Yet my parents went on cleaning the area as if nothing happened, scraping off the persistent moss and sweeping leaves. But I was certain: yes, the world was built on discord, yes, my sensations were truthful, in the way that the sensation of the nearness of bad weather, of high pressure, of electrically charged air before a storm was truthful. The roar of the wind tunnels over the family graves became the sound of the past, the sound of history, the sound of its ruthless elemental power, and I listened to it almost gratefully. It explained in a manifest physical manner what forces were tearing apart and oppressing our family and what echoes of events lived in it; it tore off the covers to reveal the very core, the very essence.

With the birth of a child, a family’s fate awakens, its postponed powers going into action; the diagram of relationships changes, for now there is a new center of gravity.

Everything that connects people, amity, arguments, insoluble contradictions that have become a form of existence lose their static nature and move into the active phase. The clashes over the crib involve not just will and character, but the joint legacy that will exist in the child, unchanged, or that will not take, or become part of the new creature’s life.

Every family in the USSR was “overloaded” by history; the family space did not protect you from anything, it had lost its autonomy. Too many people had died before their time, and the family remained exposed to the crossfire of history, constantly reconfiguring itself to the intensity of the losses, finding a replacement for once significant figures.

Probably every family at any time lives like that. But there seems to be a threshold for loss, after which there is a quantitative change. The family stops being a communal entity unfolded in time, built on values and meanings, and it becomes simplified, moving into a reactive existence within opaque zones where you can hide from time and the state.

You are born inside certain relations that become “family” to you simply by the inertia of language: father, mother, grandmothers, son, grandson. These people have warmth, closeness, sincere feelings. But essentially they are a multilayered, complexly organized conflict, and an insoluble one because the conflict does not arise from personalities. A child’s life in such a family is not at all necessarily horrible, the child can be loved and spoiled, but he still feels that below the cover of daily existence and the concord of communal life, there are tectonically active layers saturated with blood that is hardly symbolic.

A child grows in a field of conflict greater than his horizon of comprehension, inheriting historical anxiety as a background and milieu of life.

Name and surname is the first and tightest tie to the family; but often I did not want to have either. I was afraid when I saw my name written somewhere, for example on a medical document, inaccessible to me but “signaling” my existence.

I seemed to know how dossiers are gathered and stored, how questionnaires and personnel files lie for years in cardboard boxes, how the bureaucratic machine strives to “tie” things up, combining a person and his name, so that neither can escape the other and the person is always identified precisely.

The fear of lists of names, the fear that your name would become a thread tying you to arrested relatives, that they could take you away just for your name if it revealed a persecuted nationality—all these fears that I had not experienced personally seemed to prompt my fear of having a name. Sometimes my greatest pleasure was in writing it in pencil and then erasing individual letters, watching how my name became unrecognizable.

I decided to give myself a name that no one would realize was a name. I would call myself Plexiglas or KPRB-ZT, Quiet Evening or Tomorrow’s Weather Forecast. People would think those were random words, but I would call myself that and gradually I would separate myself from my outside name and one day slip out of it like an old skin.

At work, Mother had a Moscow phone book. When she took me with her, I could open the book at random and plunge into the columns of Kuznetsovs, Matochkins, or Shimovs, forcing myself into the crowd; it was a pleasure to know how many surnames there were in the world and if one day everyone decided to change their names, no force could ever restore the original ones.

So, when they took me to the Alexander Garden to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I felt that the highest award was permission to be unknown, and I understood that such an award was given to one person and there could be no others.