Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

But Grandmother Tanya accepted the news easily, with a light sadness; unexpectedly, she was firm about not letting my parents interfere. I couldn’t bear the thought of Grandmother Mara’s betrayal of Grandfather Trofim, which distanced me even more from him, until I learned who the prospective bridegroom was.

Even in her late years she had several admirers, very different old men, and as a rule, significant people. The former head of a trust, a former weapons designer, the former chief engineer of an energy plant, the former director of a model kolkhoz—all were widowers and they swarmed around Grandmother Mara, sensing that they would live longer and better with her. She accepted their friendship, understood their intentions, and kept them close without putting anyone in an awkward or painful situation; this lasted for years, and they were all her husbands slightly. She took only one man seriously, the one who proposed to her.

He was the only one I thought had the right to be in a relationship with my grandmother, the widow of Grandfather Trofim—they were both soldiers, “brothers in arms,” as they wrote in books, and there was no betrayal here. Besides which, the man embodied one of my dreams from the past.

Pilots and submariners, two Soviet castes of free-spirited heroes; not part of the group, not in a unit, but one-on-one with the enemy, with the sky, with the water.

Pokryshkin and Kozhedub, two fighter pilot aces whose planes were covered with stars for shot-down enemies and whose uniforms bore starred medals, were solitary men in the land of collectivism, aluminum angels of the Soviet skies; at first my heart belonged to them.

But later, in the middle of the 1980s, living and dead submariners began floating up from the weight of the archives, the commanders of Shchuka-class and Malyutka-class ships. They had lain on the bottom for a long time, engines off; now the pressures of the depths were tossing them to the surface, the fetid air conserved in the submarines escaped from the portholes with a whistle.

Suddenly their exploits and service were revealed; my heart switched from pilots, the geniuses of speed and maneuver, to the hidden men of the sea, geniuses of patience and obscurity.

In the Kuzminki neighborhood of Moscow, on the lane that led to the park and ponds, there was a game arcade I liked to play at, and I saved fifteen kopeks all week before the walk to the park. And then—Oh joy!—I put my eyes to the periscope, my fingers held the triggers for the torpedo launchers, and the dark silhouettes of enemy cruisers and destroyers moved along the sea drawn on glass.

Shoot—the torpedo makes the water foam and an orange light shines on the horizon. If you miss, the black German cruiser sails off into open sea to attack a Soviet convoy. I forgot I was in the middle of wintry Moscow, that I had never seen the sea; my fingers pulled the triggers, the torpedoes left their trail, and with ferocious glee I was blown up along with the enemy ships.

Grandmother Mara’s fiancé was a submariner, a retired commander. He sometimes visited the dacha wearing a black uniform jacket with planks of decorations and a cap; I knew where his house was, in the village near the market: an old wooden house, an izba , with age-darkened gingerbread window carvings, with random-seeming additions, patched many times, and sinking into the ground.

It had a huge cellar: there was a hatch with a heavy ring beneath one of the rugs in the house, and when it opened, the earth breathed damply into your face. The innumerable supplies had an earthy smell—beets, carrots, onions (the cellar was rented to the market traders). How could I connect this house, permeated with heavy human smells, smoke, the sour stink of pickling, this house where grandfathers and great-grandfathers had lived and died, this house raised on a foundation of grub, on cool darkness where potato eyes grew blindly, how could I connect it to the sea?

I saw that Grandmother, clearly caring about the commander, still resisted a final connection with him; she had buried her husband, and the next one—husband or companion—had to be a man with a clear and simple fate, unburdened by old wounds and memory of the war; wounds and memory were identical here. I, on the other hand, kept waiting for him to talk about the war when he visited the dacha; to explain how he, a peasant son, became a man of the sea.

That winter I came upon the commander at Grandmother Mara’s house. My parents had taken me to the dolphinarium near her apartment, and as I watched the pool with the bluish-gray glossy sea creatures, I thought of him, the commander, his habitual silence, his incredible sensitivity to sound—I think he could hear mice scrambling in the next room—the trained wariness of navigating a submarine that operated in the shallow Baltic Sea, where submarines were frequently discovered by destroyers or planes; the only story he told was about the ship getting wrapped in antisubmarine netting and how they escaped with just a half hour of air left; his ability to move silently, placing his cup on the saucer without a sound, eating without once clinking the plate with a fork, as if he was still waging his war; the dolphins, perceptive and agile, speedy, flying through a ring above the water, reminded me of him—and that very day he was visiting Grandmother Mara.

My parents had gone, they hadn’t expected Grandmother to have company, but they left me, at her request. I had always known that people were divided into summer folk, the ones we saw at the dacha, and winter city friends, and it was strange to see this shift in calendar, seeing the old submariner in the seriousness of his feelings for Grandmother Mara; and seeing her, heavy, suddenly aged by another’s love; she must have thought that acoustically the submariner sensed her better than she did herself, heard all the creaks and groans of her weary body.

The commander, his hair pure white, chatted politely and easily with me about insignificant things—cross-country skiing, school, what books I was reading. I almost told him about the narrow gauge lines, almost asked him what they were, but stopped in time—I thought he would politely laugh it off and then joke forever, no matter what I wanted to learn from him.

I sensed that Grandmother was slightly unhappy with her decision to keep me overnight, so I asked to go to bed, earning an appreciative look from the commander. She made up a bed for me, I turned a few times for show, and then was still, feigning sleep. A half hour later, Grandmother opened the door, came over, listened to my breathing, and quietly returned to the commander. I waited a minute and then moved to the door just as quietly.

Glasses clinked a few times, I could hear quiet conversation—the old man did most of the talking, recalling how he had seen Grandmother Mara at the dacha station with two pails of strawberries. She seemed uncomfortable and she began softly singing, hitting false notes, the song “The Fragrant Clusters of White Locust,” which she loved.

I sensed the commander putting his hand on hers, asking her to stop. I suspected that Grandmother, knowing him well, sang a song he didn’t like to get something out of him. The shot glasses clinked again, and she asked him why he didn’t like the love song, he had promised to tell her a long time ago and still had not.

The commander replied: at first I did not understand what he was talking about, what events he was describing, they were impossible to imagine—but then I felt like a submariner whose damaged ship was sinking helplessly into the pressing depths.

In the spring of 1932 the black locust tree bloomed in the Ukrainian village where he lived as a youth; by then the starving villagers had eaten the first grass, and stray refugees lay dying in the streets devoid of birds, dogs, and cats.