Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

Almost nothing remains in my memory of the long winters of childhood except sledding down an icy hill and skiing; I remember only the moments of movement. Flying on a big piece of fraying cardboard along icy ruts, rusty whorls of last year’s grass in the ice, always with spots of blood—because someone smashed his face or cut his hand—flying to the deep garbage ravine filled with old tires. Two skis before your eyes as they pass each other, intersecting and separating tracks. The creak of the snow, the scuffle of ski poles on the ice crust, sliding, sliding, coming home, hot tea with cranberries, a heavy meal, and a heavy, dreamless sleep.

Only one winter left a long memory; the winter in which my awakening to my own life began with the Kremlin New Year’s party.

The weather was good, vacation’s end still far away, Father came to visit us at the boardinghouse, and I demanded we go skiing every day—everything in me demanded action, apparently senseless movement and quests.

The embankment of the narrow gauge train line that joined the railroad from the opposite side of the station had pieces of colored glass, light blue, violet, lilac, blue, and green, looking like shards of ingots. I was not allowed to collect the glass, I was told it could contain dangerous chemicals; I would have believed them, but there was another condition—I was not allowed to cross over to the side with the narrow gauge line. I think the first ban was merely a consequence of the second.

Gradually I learned from phrases not intended for me that the glass was being carried from a place that had, or used to have, a testing ground. There were few words which could excite as much, except for “airport,” “military unit,” and “secret laboratory.”

One day, getting permission to play at the nearby ponds, I crossed the tracks and headed along the narrow gauge line. Pieces of colored glass glittered in the embankment gravel, and I could follow the trail endlessly. But a growing unease made me uncomfortable: the pieces of glass, iridescent, smoky, colored, were luring me, long warehouses and dumps stood on either side, but I could not see a testing ground, a big, wide space.

Two men came toward me, fishermen; dressed in cotton batting jackets with waterproof covers on their felt boots, with icebreakers and short winter fishing poles, they were headed to the ponds I had allegedly gone to see.

I cautiously asked them where the testing ground was. One man, round-faced, with silly, droopy ears, still shiny-faced from his wife’s blini or waffles, looked at me in confusion, preparing to say, “What testing ground?” The other, almost an old man, with a narrow face marked with swollen red capillaries, tall, the icebreaker slung over his shoulder like a rifle, blocked my way, pulled a huge fur mitten from his right hand and took me by the shoulder, his fingers on a vulnerable bone. I sensed that if he pushed, pain would shoot through my shoulder. I had noticed that inside the fur mitten, his wool glove, mended many times, had three fingers; I knew it was an army glove for winter shooting, leaving the index finger free to pull the trigger.

“How do you know about the testing ground?” the old man asked, not joking, as a man who had the right to pose such questions. “Who told you? Why are you here?”

I looked down at my feet, saw a bluish-white piece of glass, and realized that there was no point in a story about looking for colored glass. The second fisherman moved away, while the old man let go of my shoulder but put his hands on my cheeks and drew my face closer to his, his eyes pressing on me.

A train came round the sharp bend, the engineer blew the whistle, and the old man let me go with a rasping, “Go away, pup.” The locomotive and its chain of cars hauling gravel left us on opposite sides of the track.

I scrambled down the embankment and ran for it. I realized the adults knew something was wrong with this place, for we’d picked mushrooms on the testing ground for tanks near the dacha, but this was a different kind of testing ground, and the old man with the glove like the ones guards wear in winter may have even saved me. He obviously had worked there, and even in retirement he continued his vigilant watch.

Two or three days later we skied particularly far from the house. Crossing a long field, with the occasional tufts of grass, we could see a village of a dozen houses and a wooden church in the distance. We entered a bright birch grove with a glade. The glade was slightly raised above the road, as if dirt had been added to it; I was just thinking about that when my ski hit something metallic.

“Come on,” my father said, noticing that I had stopped. “Let’s go! We’ll be late for lunch!”

I nodded, but as soon as he turned, I cleared the snow away with my ski. I saw a rusted track of a narrow gauge railroad. While we skied along the path, I saw among the trees a few old poles, rotting and gray with age, pieces of barbed wire on the insulators.

That evening I asked Father what railroad we had crossed.

“It’s the old road to the Kommunarka sovkhoz ,” he replied instantly, as if he had been expecting the question. He replied in a way that stopped me from asking why a communal state farm needed a railroad and why they didn’t use it anymore.

On the next to last day of my vacation, I was allowed to ski on my own. It goes without saying that I followed the familiar route past the village and the black wooden church to the glade in the birch forest.

The scary old man with the carriage of a watchman, the narrow gauge railroad to the testing ground, the abandoned railroad in the forest, the strange, sidelined, unknown roads—I had found the remains of the lost country, the Atlantis I learned of thanks to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia .

Here I was at the spot where I’d found the railroad tracks under the snow. I brought a small shovel and dug around as much as I could until I found the stamp: 1931.

Which way, right or left? The gray cloudy day gave no hint, there was no wind. Left? I thought I could see something in the distance, either a house or a gate or a watchman’s hut. But once you go a hundred, two hundred meters, you realize that even though there is no one and nothing in the woods, you are distraught by the thin twigs, like bird feet, in the snow, by the crunch of the ice crust under your skis. Don’t go left or right, the gray cloudy day tells you, go back to the guesthouse, they’re putting the soup on the stove, forget these homely birches, last year’s crows’ nests falling apart in the wind, the rusty rails under the snow and the rotting poles with tin signs no longer legible.

I went back, not risking to go farther. But they stayed in my memory, a sleeping seed, those nameless railroads, abandoned trails of unknown things. One day I would find the explanation, I promised myself, not knowing that in five or six years I would read a newspaper article about the mass graves at the Butovo firing range, the firing trenches at the Kommunarka sovkhoz, illustrated by a photo of the narrow gauge railroad headed nowhere in the white winter space filled with the black spots of birch bark.

Standing there in the glade, for the first time I realized that life was a chain of events elicited by my actions, I saw how one inevitably prompts the next: GSE, New Year’s party, firing range. I even smiled at how I had resisted going to the guesthouse, now understanding that events would find me, and I should trust them rather than my own intentions. The important thing was not to give up my search.

Back in Moscow, I took up and dropped various things, unable to concentrate, behaving like a dog that lost a scent. My parents soon brought news: Grandmother Mara was getting married. They were embarrassed, they thought she had lost her mind, it wasn’t done to consider a second marriage at her age; they had gotten used to her loneliness, to the absence of older men in the family.