Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

I did not want to go to the Kremlin but was afraid to say so, for the party at the Palace of Congresses was a kind of unmatched peak in a Soviet childhood, the highest recognition of achievements and reliability.

I had never understood the festive crowds on Red Square gathered for the fireworks; the space was dangerously exposed to the winds of ancient times. O, how empty and terrible it was in early morning bad weather, the navel of the earth from the ascent to the Museum of the Revolution down to the Vasilyevsky Slope, a place where the curvature of the globe is clearly visible! The body of the square looked to me like the squashed chest of a bogatyr, the scales of his armor the cobblestones, and in the corner lay his chopped off head, the round Execution Place. Saint Basil’s Cathedral blazed like a funeral pyre, the spiral designs on its domes combining war helmets and the multiple heads of a dragon; a place of ancient battles, a place of executions, its cobbles buckled by the wild forces of the earth beneath it; a place of victims and funeral feasts. Across the square, by the wall, stood the Mausoleum ziggurat; the tense diagonal between Execution Place and the Mausoleum burst open the square, turning it into a parallelogram, making an already distorted space even more lopsided. How could anyone stroll around Red Square without anxiety?

From the warmth and light of the boardinghouse Mother and I stepped into the frosty early twilight, the icy dark hole of December, and took the long walk to the train. Snow-filled forests and fields surrounded us, we saw only occasional lights, and it was hard to believe that a big city was only a dozen stations away. Time did not exist for these woods and fields, they were the same as they had been centuries ago. Daylight made them charming, they were suburban, filled with vacationers, but in the evenings, when the last skiers hurried to the train, they became wild again, lost in snowy expanses, stolen by the dark.

The day before we had gone on an excursion to an old nearby estate, the mansion yellow and white, with columns at the main entrance and sculptures in the parkland, but now I thought that the estate was gone, the trees visible in the daytime were gone, and we were walking on a road from nowhere to no place. We might run into horse-drawn sleighs from the last century, and so we had to firmly believe that a railroad station awaited us at the end of the road and that we had left the boardinghouse behind us. Otherwise we might not reach our goal or find our way back.

We reached the station, Mother led me by the hand confidently. The commuter train, covered in frost and battling dirty winds, rattled along, its irrational mechanical heart beating in the engine car, while the darkness beyond the frosty windows gathered, turning into corners of buildings, platforms, and people in the light of streetlamps.

The noise, crowds, and marble of the metro closed in on us and then threw us out near the Kutafya Tower by the Troitsky Gates of the Kremlin.

We passed through the Kremlin walls. I had been transported from the rarefied air and timeless darkness of the forests outside Moscow and now I was immured in stone—the towers, walls, crenellations, chimes, the brick ensemble of the Kremlin oppressed me. The sight of the Ivan the Great bell tower, the towers and cathedrals floodlit by klieg lights against the sky was so powerful I thought my ears would ring and my nose would bleed. It was impossible to breathe there, impossible to feel, because my feelings were in spasm.

One sensation did get past the spasms—the Kremlin could see me, even though it was incredibly large and I was insignificantly tiny; it was indifferent to the other people walking next to me, but I had a flaw which the citadel could sense.

At the time, I was sure that the Kremlin had been built in the Soviet era; this belief coexisted without contradiction with the knowledge that the chief architectural symbol of the Soviet Union was much older. The red brick walls and ruby stars made the Kremlin an incarnation of the Union, the chimes on Spassky Tower counted out the hour in the enormous country; it wasn’t the symbol of Soviet power, it was simply power .

I realized what the Kremlin knew about me; it knew about my vision of the patchwork quilt Union, it knew I had opened the secret, banned book of the GSE and had spoken the impossible word “USSRs”; it exposed me—How could I have not foreseen it, how self-reliantly and forgetfully had I risked venturing inside its walls!

For an instant I thought guards would ask us to show our tickets again and they would find a problem; we would be separated and led away. I thought back to the guesthouse where our clothes were drying on the radiator and suddenly saw other people in our room, other clothes drying after a ski outing.

The hallucination passed but the Kremlin’s gaze remained.

In the lobby of the Palace of Congresses teenagers were helping the arrivals; they were dressed in Pioneer uniforms even though they were too old to be Pioneers.

One of them, tall, handsome, wearing the Pioneer outfit as if it were a military uniform—I even thought he might have had it made in some expensive shop, otherwise the baggy trousers and too-short jacket would never have fit that way—pointed out our section of the coat check and turned away, as if we were bothering him with trifles and had called him away from his important post. The white wavy curtains on the huge windows, the immaculately clean collar of his white shirt, the dashing drape of the red tie, the crease in his trousers and his pointy shoes—the Palace would have made him the gatekeeper, and he liked being in the Palace, he liked telling people where to go. This was his party, his evening, and for a second I wanted to be him, to feel as comfortable and confident in the Kremlin.

We were seated close to the stage. The performance began. Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, was kidnapped by a villain, the usual plot, and all the children screamed: “Come out, Grandfather Frost!” clutching our cardboard gift boxes with the sticky smell of chocolate. I had an acute sense of the meaninglessness of the party, the play, Grandfather Frost, the costumed actors, fake beards, confetti and paper spirals, the shiny tree ornaments; I had aged in minutes and was weary with monstrous adult ennui.

My childhood was over—I had dreamed of it so often, but now I sat, deafened, confused, feeling the unwavering gaze of the Kremlin, practically hoping they would take me away and lock me up with others like me.

My childhood was over; still, I did not regret opening the forbidden book—if they did not take me from the concert hall, did not lead me by the elbow as we were leaving, there would be events arising from my contact with the book, and those events were near! The new year was coming, and for the first time it would truly be new, not like the previous ones that followed the same pattern.

Discoveries and unknown sacrifices awaited me, perhaps the sacrifice of my life—the gaze of the Kremlin supported that possibility—but I was naively prepared to make sacrifices, even wanted them, delighted that this desire found approval from the Kremlin.

Two days later, when the television showed the chimes of the Kremlin marking the last minute of last year, I no longer felt its gaze. A blizzard raged around us, I slipped away from my mother to run outside, to touch, to hold the first snow of the new year. Cold penetrated my hand, I heard the thrum of guesthouse residents behind me, and I stood looking out onto the illuminated emptiness of the tree-lined lanes.

My time had come.

Great events sometimes send messengers, a sign: be alert, be open and sensitive, don’t miss it, don’t interfere by deed or feeling, or it will not happen!