Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

My soul heard the echo of the words Nonpareil and Cicero, the ghost of my previous self-deception.

I could not resist those consonances, I could not get enough, and my recent disillusionment had not been a lesson.

This was the GSE, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia , in the 1920s-1930s edition. I perceived the GSE as a great book of spells fallen into the hands of an underage ignoramus; there were missing volumes, as if someone tried to destroy them. Who? People? Time?

I was not bothered that among the unfamiliar and clearly magical, unreal, secret words, there were familiar ones like Germany and Iron. I understood—discovered—the real setup of the world, where Germany or Iron, the names of countries, things, and actions, were merely a small part of the truly real, where iron is connected to imperialism (a connection it was possible to imagine), deficit with Donetsk, and Germany with the mysterious Gerhardt.

The encyclopedia contained names of vanished things and like the International, its language was the language of ancient magic, but power had deserted these words. Not knowing how many more of these books remained, I assumed that perhaps I was seeing the only extant copy in the world, a gift from the gods of the past to me.

Comprehending nothing, incapable of figuring anything out, I spent the remaining days at Grandmother Mara’s reading the GSE the minute she stepped out the door, intoxicated by the smell of old yellow paper. I had stepped on the Atlantis of books, the continent of the past that had floated up from the ocean depths. Gradually there appeared a world about which I knew nothing. Those names, phenomena, and events did not exist in my time, or if they did, I intuitively sensed that they were presented in a completely different way.

At home with my parents, I often read the SSE, the Small Soviet Encyclopedia published in the 1960s, primarily out of a superficial curiosity, the empty passion of an erudite. And that helped me so much; numerous people the GSE wrote about with a view to eternity did not figure at all in the SSE. Geographic and scientific concepts were the only things the encyclopedias had in common.

I thought that if one were to read the entire GSE, aloud, like a prayer, even without understanding the meaning, the reading would give birth to, create the USSR, the forgotten Soviet Union of the twenties and thirties, gone into the past.

In one of the volumes I found a dry maple leaf, and lazily wondered what happened to the tree from which it fell; I doubt it survived. I shivered with foreboding; what if the past that gave rise to the encyclopedia does not exist at all? What if it wasn’t preserved at all except in this one book?

It didn’t give me pause that Grandmother Mara, who didn’t like to read and would have trouble with encyclopedia articles, had the GSE. An encyclopedia that survived by accident should be kept by a person who would never be considered a Guardian. Maybe Grandmother Mara didn’t even know what was in the package, maybe she’d never looked, following Grandfather Trofim’s orders.

The flyleaf of each volume was the color of dark straw, like the soldiers’ uniforms in the 1940s. Against that background, bright crimson thorny vines twisted into a single pattern, looking both like branches of a prickly shrub and barbed wire; not an abstract design or an ornamental element, it was a naturalistic depiction, a martyr’s epigraph to the book, doubling, tripling its weight and significance, as if the knowledge it contained had been paid for in blood.

In the list of editors, I knew only two names: Kuibyshev, also the name of a city, and Schmidt, who gave his name to an iceberg—a polar explorer, organizer of all the northern expeditions, conqueror of the Arctic, and creator of the drifting North Pole Station. I remembered that when the volume I held in my hands was published, Schmidt was in the Arctic, exploring the Northern Sea Route, and could not have worked on the encyclopedia, where he was listed as editor in chief. I knew that for certain, because I had read a lot of books on polar explorers—the Arctic, the great white “nowhere,” was a blank page perfect for manufacturing ideal exploits and heroic figures, and those figures, without an ideological sell-by date, were still featured in books and films in my day.

That meant the GSE had been made by the rest, the unknown people whose names were preceded by the red thorns on the fly-leaf. I reread the list twice, and I found two names—Bukharin and Piatakov; I couldn’t remember how I knew them, but they must have slipped through the conversations of adults, flickered like ghosts, outside time or context; ghosts surrounded by an aura of greatness, or significance, or tragic death, or betrayal and villainy, or maybe all of the above.

Juxtaposing the celebrated fate of Schmidt and Kuibyshev with the silence and obscurity surrounding the others, I began to understand that the USSR I knew and inhabited was just a copy, a piece of the other, earlier one. I set my flashlight on the floor and on the very first try I replicated Grandmother’s tricky knot on the package. I was right, it was intended for me.

When I returned home after my school holidays at Grandmother Mara’s, I went to the Small Soviet Encyclopedia and I did not find Bukharin or Piatakov; instead, there were articles on Bukhara and Piatigorsk where their names should have been.

The inviolably singular USSR was shaken; I had never heard the Soviet Union used in the plural, it was impossible, contradicted the dependence of the world upon the singularity of the USSR; but I risked it—slowly, with difficulty, as if pushing those gigantic stone letters, I said to myself: USSRs. Two USSRs. That USSR. Today’s USSR.

USSRs.

Now I kept asking to visit Grandmother Mara. My parents were happy, they thought I had gotten over my dislike of her. What I cared about was being near the secret books hidden in the storeroom and watching Grandmother Mara: Had she guessed I had been in there? Did she know what she was concealing? Grandmother continued her everyday life, so ordinary that I wondered if I had dreamed up the hidden ancient encyclopedia.

I was counting on spending the winter holidays at Grandmother Mara’s so I could get back to the GSE. To keep my parents from denying my as-yet unvoiced request, I worked on my studies and ended the quarter with excellent grades. But the night I brought home my report card and was about to ask at dinner to stay at Grandmother Mara’s, my parents beat me to the punch, exchanged a cheerful look and announced that because I had done so well at school they booked us a stay at a boardinghouse and the school had awarded me an invitation to the New Year’s celebration at the Kremlin.

I don’t think they understood my disappointment, which I was unable to hide, and I explained it as the result of being overworked at school, but they were hurt I didn’t appreciate the gift. I was in their power, and I reflected sadly that this must be how it is—a secret book is opened only once, and whatever you did not have time to learn from its pages is gone forever. How angry I was at them, unwitting accomplices of a life arranged to hide secrets! I meekly agreed to go on vacation and to the Kremlin party; I was even forced to pretend to want to go so my parents wouldn’t start wondering why I was so eager to spend the holidays at Grandmother Mara’s, which I’d never wanted to do before.

In the final days of December, Mother and I moved into the vacation boardinghouse, planning to return to Moscow for one day, for the party. Snowy woods, early dark, cartoons in the hall, and other children to play with—Grandmother’s storeroom was shunted aside, disappeared, the great GSE volumes vanished, leaving only the role of child enjoying the holidays, which I grew into.