Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

All the grown-ups at home saved connective material as if it were part of a secret universal undertaking. But I, led by a different feeling, suffered in several ways over the diffusion and decay, the loss of wholeness.

At school, we also collected scrap metal; every quarter all the classes, including the lowest ones, went out to scour the neighborhood for lost metal—and always found some, even though just a few months prior, at the last hunt, we’d thought we’d cleared out every corner. But no, metal appeared out of somewhere, as if a huge mechanism had just fallen apart midoperation, with nuts and bolts and springs bursting from of its belly, ruining some of the mechanical connections, but the machine kept working without knowing that some essential parts were lost and no longer functioning. We went through yards, back lots of garages, collecting the remains of the machine’s self-destruction, so they could be melted down and made into new parts that would not repair the machine but could cobble it together enough to keep it going.

There was a political map of the USSR on the wall—I guess my parents wanted me to learn geography as well while I played with my grandmother. She was starting a quilt and had settled into an armchair beneath the map with all the pieces of fabric, scissors, needles and thread.

I had always seen the USSR as a whole. The rest of the world was fragmented, but our one-sixth of the world could not be separated; it was like an ingot.

Of course, the union republics were shown in different colors on the map. I had never paid any attention to their differences, it had never occurred to me to look at the map from that point of view; the Union as a whole absolutely predominated over the particulars, whatever colors and names they had.

But now—horrors!—I fell into a different dimension in which the USSR looked like the quilt Grandmother Tanya was sewing.

I was being cruelly mocked, given for an instant a jester’s vision that turned concepts into their exact opposites. The USSR could not, did not have the right, to look like a quilt!

The Union, “the indissoluble Union” of the anthem, was a guarantor of the dependability of the world in its everyday minutia: light in bulbs, beets in the store, ink in my pen, bus at the stop, tea in the pot, the postman’s ring at the door, a new coat for school—all that was the Union. Its existence affirmed that water would run, snow would melt, and sugar dissolve, as if without it, without its indefinable power, even simple physical processes would cease.

Yes, I did sense that an unknown force had cut short the life of my ancestors, had stolen the memory of them, that the three frogs “see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing” on Grandmother’s table showed how we really lived. But that was weakly related to my concept of the USSR; if the Union could be imagined as a person, I would have said that the USSR-man did not know what strange things were happening inside him.

I would have been happy to forget the image of the quilt Union, but I could not; it was deeply ensconced and periodically returned in waves of fear. The more I chased it away, the more clearly I saw that my usual picture of the world had developed a crack and that this was only the beginning.

The only domestic space I had not studied thoroughly was Grandmother Mara’s apartment. I visited only with my parents and I was always supervised, so even if I had a few minutes of solitude, what could I do in that time, especially when the adults were in the next room and could come in at any moment?

But Mother got a bad flu and I was sent to spend my fall holiday with Grandmother Mara. She was rarely home, it turned out, taking walks, visiting friends, and she did not insist that I accompany her.

At first, I was uncomfortable in her house—there was no place for books, neither shelves nor cupboard; only the book she was reading at a given time lay on her nightstand. I was surrounded by a world of fabrics—drapes, runners, tablecloths, napkins, antimacassars; the mass of her dresses, entangled and resembling a bud, pushed against the closet door.

Naturally, I searched her two rooms very quickly, but it was a disappointment. Besides the war trophy porcelain set, silk bedspreads, and sewing machine, the rest of the things were like idiot servants: stupid cups, stupid combs, stupid mirrors, stupid marking pencils, some of them old but still like newborns, without memories, unable to tell me anything.

I started watching Grandmother Mara; at home both my parents and Grandmother Tanya were beginning to suspect that I was getting into the wrong places, but they explained it as searching for sweets. Grandmother Mara didn’t know this, so if I watched her closely, she could lead me to the hiding place or the object that I did not suspect. To tell the truth, I wasn’t certain of success—Grandmother Mara’s straightforward nature did not give me much hope that she had a “false bottom.”

There was a storeroom near the toilet that served as a kind of Siberian exile. Things that survived from the past were kept there: a bag of bluing, a kerosene lantern, a suitcase of household soap, cast-iron irons, washtubs, dried up washboards, cabbage cutter, cleaver, spinning wheel, laundry baskets, lengths of unbleached linen. She forbade me to go in there—without explanation, just “no.”

Of course, one more ban when I had violated so many meant nothing. But when I approached the door in her absence, I remembered Blue Beard’s secret room. My hand froze as I reached for the doorknob.

I had peeked into the storeroom beneath her arm and it did not seem scary. But now alone in the apartment, where water coughed in the old pipes, I grew uneasy.

Back in the living room, I found the candy box with Grandfather Trofim’s medals, and I attached the Red Star to my shirt. I would not have done that before, but I needed support and security, and I was not usurping his award but using it as a sign of his protection.

With the star tugging at the fabric of my shirt and a flashlight in my hand, I entered the storeroom. There was a weak scent of dried-out soap and aging wood and metal. Empty jars filled the shelves, ready for summer canning, and they reflected the flashlight in dozens of flickers.

What was there to fear here, what should I be looking for? I was ready to leave, ashamed of my fear, ashamed that I needed to put on the star, when I noticed that the washtub seemed to be covering something.

Beneath was a large square object wrapped in worn oilcloth and tied with string. Grandmother Mara knew how to make clever, complicated knots, she said Grandfather Trofim taught her when they had to move and pack up; Grandfather Trofim was a soldier and he probably knew how to tie up a prisoner and join two steel ropes to pull a truck out of a ditch; a genius of the small skills that evince human reliability.

It was a difficult knot that showed she used what she learned from Grandfather Trofim. I knew I would not be able to duplicate it, my fingers would get lost in the loops, forget which end of the string went where. The knot would give me away—if I tied it my way, Grandmother would know that someone had been in the secret place under the washtub. But I also knew: if what I was seeking, what I needed, was there, then I would be able to re-create the knot. I didn’t know the way now, but afterward I would. I pulled on it.

Under the oilcloth was a row of dark burgundy volumes with gold inscription, obviously old, overly large, as if books had degenerated since then.

With the tenacity of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Hittite cuneiform writing, the gibberish abracadabra, the deepest secret transcribed into ordinary letters struck my eyes: A to ACONEUS, ACONITE to ANT, ANTARCTICA to BACON, BARBARIAN to BEDLAM, BOREDOM to CANADA, DELHI to DYNASTY, and so on to HINDI to IMPERIALISM. Here the row of leather-bound books, ornamented in gold letters, stars, sheaves, and machine gears, broke off.