Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

Exposing me with plastic saber to the camera, showing the photos to friends—the shots were a guaranteed success and people always said that I would grow up a “real Budyonnovite”—my parents always hit me in my sorest spot, my secret desire to be someone’s heir, to take on a great fate, exploits, and glory; they stressed that this was a childish and insignificant game.

The plastic horse was popular at the photographer’s studio, because all the parents wanted to capture their sons on it, with the saber; while I was being photographed, someone was waiting his turn, hat-flattened hair being combed. But I was the only one of the kids to have seen a real saber!

One of my parents’ friends had a saber in a scabbard hanging on the wall; it belonged to his uncle, a Red Army commander who had started fighting back in World War I.

The scabbard was beaten up and scratched, as unattractive as the legs of our old dacha table that had been scuffed by boots for a century. At first I even pitied it, as if it had outlived its usefulness and had wandered around, falling on hard times, and it was kept out of kindness on the wall instead of in a trunk.

But once—Father was sick and stayed home while Mother and I went to visit—they took the saber down and let me hold it. I almost dropped it, it was so heavy. They took it out of the scabbard and it scraped the trim around the throat—and showed itself all at once, more than a meter long, with a lengthy groove in the blade, from the guard to the tip, tempered, with a violet-blue sheen and a patina of hardening.

The handle was at my eye level, and I imagined what that sharpened steel does to a body, how a single blow at a third of one’s power would cut me in half, vertically or diagonally. I understood the mechanics of a cavalryman, borne forward by the raised weight of the saber, the horse’s legs in unison with the chopping blows. I pictured clearly—as if someone else’s blood had come to play in my veins—that I could have been a soldier in the Civil War, a Red horseman.

“Born in the saddle,” “one with the horse,” they traveled through books and films. The best fighters of the Red Army, the spirit of the Civil War, warriors without front, rear, or flank, creatures covering forest and steppe in their maneuvers, appearing where least expected, turning upside down all the planned dispositions of troops; strange immortal creatures who cared nothing for time and space!

They forced me to sit on a factory-made plastic horsy on wheels, while I wholeheartedly wished for real things that could pass something along to me, without realizing that I sought them in a very contradictory way.

I was capable of simultaneously desiring my grandmother’s secret book and penetrating the space of silence, and also wanting to become a hero in a Soviet epic—a horseman from Budyonny’s army, a partisan of the Great Patriotic War, son of the regiment, the boy who handled the shells, the messenger for the underground who never named names when arrested.

The pendulum swayed continually, and I swung one way and then the other, living in two registers of perception, two planes of existence.

In one, the reality around me was a cardboard shell hiding the entrance to the real past; the cardboard did not protect from the terrible icy winds.

In the second, the secret of the past was not horrible, but entertaining; reality was a landscape of boredom and longing for great events, for exploits, as if our ancestors had performed them all, leaving nothing for their descendants to do. These two layers occasionally intersected, interacting in a strange way, but they still followed different paths.

The USSR, continually editing and reshaping its mythological past, was essentially a matryoshka doll of images and myths that sprouted from one into another; some formed cause-and-effect connections, others were pushed aside; inside each construction you could endlessly search for the truth, accepting the legends of the previous era which became the “real past” by virtue of seniority.

You could climb into a pit, descending deeper and deeper, without realizing that the entire construction was artificial; that was why you didn’t know where to put the spaces of silence, areas that were forced outside the limits of the Soviet universe.

The temptation was always there to admit that those spaces were nonexistent, that they were the fruit of my imagination; to seek myself only within the Soviet historical myths, to consider them as having a real existence.

In choosing myth, you acquired the richest milieu for self-definition, self-construction, for fantasy; in admitting the veracity of the spaces of silence, you found yourself alone, in a bare, viewless place. That choice was a constant motif throughout your life: constantly balancing on the edge, leaning one way then the other, flickering, living in incompleteness, rechecking your feelings: Who are you, a lonely, impotent spy or a rightful heir to the past, a Soviet Theseus who will find his sandals and sword under a rock?

The former demanded patience and the ability to live without hope, the latter, bravery and desperate belief; and so I took both paths, thinking I was taking one, unable to distinguish the obstacles along different roads.

By now there was a hint of the collapse, a brink-of-war disorder in daily life; things were definitely vanishing from hardware stores. The first to go were items that fasten—nails, screws, wire, cement, glue, without which boards and bricks are useless and pointless.

Father had a small shed at the dacha for his tools; there were also jars and tins with nuts and bolts. They were picked up on the side of the road or taken from things in the dump; every nut found on a dacha path, perhaps fallen off a bicycle, was examined for its thread, cleaned, soaked in kerosene, and then put in the appropriate jar. Bent lengths of wire, aluminum, copper, steel, of varying diameters and sizes, hung from long nails in the shed; wire was not bought, either, but found somehow. Going through an old structure, Father pulled out all the nails with a claw bar, straightened them with a hammer, and diligently saved them.

Of course, we collected old boards, planks from vegetable and fruit crates, pieces of baseboard—they could come in handy for the never-ending dacha repairs. But a quiet abnormality appeared only in the collection of things that could be called connective material; there was a huge shortage, as if the material world reflected the changes in the nation, in the political object called the USSR.

Grandmother Tanya also participated in the gathering of fasteners: she kept various buttons in round candy tins. Hundreds of buttons, matched and unmatched, cut from our own clothing or of unknown provenance; buttons from a military uniform, buttons with British lions, pretty mother-of-pearl buttons from a blouse, wooden toggles and huge plastic buttons from a fashionable ladies’ coat. You could probably use them to re-create the history of clothing for several decades or write dozens of novels—for example, a meeting between a man in a jacket with British lions on the buttons and a lady in a jacket with bronze clasps. I used to go through the buttons and try to imagine the fate of the people who had worn them, as if they were all gone and only their buttons survived them, hard, resilient, and huddling together.

Zippers, of various lengths, colors, and teeth, had their own place; together, there were enough buttons and zippers for a hundred articles of clothing. Grandmother Tanya, who had spent a lifetime working with paper and did not tolerate a casual attitude toward it, who knew the value of paperweights that protected sheets of paper from drafts and clumsy people and affirmed the fact that any movement of paper as document could be fateful—Grandmother Tanya kept stores of paper clips and paste.