Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

The commander tenderly described the creamy white blossoms that he and his friend ate, bending the branches to the ground with their remaining strength. There were bugs in some of the flowers, and they ate the bugs, sour and crunchy; the two friends knew the flowers would make them sick, but their fragrance was so appetizing they couldn’t resist; once they fell into a dream state and started retching they would stop.

The commander weakened first, the sweet toxic petals sickened him; “the fragrant clusters” had a fragrance that was too thick, luring him into dizziness, sleepiness, a deadly, starving sleep; “The night drove us mad”—the locust flowers literally did, and he got up to eat a few more petals.

Other people came, breaking the branches and carrying them off to eat without sharing. The weakest, little children, who died first, crawled underfoot, licking the dusty clusters on the ground. A fight broke out—an impossible fight among weakened men who could not even make a fist or hold down a rival.

A bee stung the commander, the sting as painful as a bayonet wound; his face swelled up, turning watery and soft, and he crawled home without noticing where his friend was, crawling for several hours, slinking along the fences. His friend vanished—someone saw him being taken away by two women, to the hospital they said, where there was quarantine for people with dystrophy. If we had not eaten the locust, he said, Kolya would be alive today, he was still agile, he would have gotten away, not given up.

I had once tried the poisonous water hemlock whose umbrella heads wave in the ditches along the road, and I remembered my consciousness dissolving, I could feel what the commander had been through. My consciousness was gone now, too, I did not hear his last words, except for one phrase that sounded like a bell tolling: “Human meat in aspic does not jell.”

They sat at the table, drinking a bitter liqueur, uncleared dishes before them; the commander was talking about the unimaginable, and Grandmother Mara did not respond to his story with surprise or indignation.

I sensed that he was not lying, but in my system of coordinates, what he was saying could not be true—it was delirium, phantasmagoria.

Commander, commander, why did you answer Grandmother’s question, why didn’t you tell instead of torpedoing a transport ship and hiding from powerboats, naval hunters? “If this did happen, it was only in a single place,” I told myself, “only in that tiny town; human meat in aspic does not jell.”

But why was Grandmother quiet? Suddenly I realized why she was marrying him, what it was that united them in the past; what he and she remembered.

There was only one salvation: to believe that both of them had been victims of monstrous circumstances, that they were exceptions. That’s what I decided.

In the morning I no longer remembered the commander’s story accurately, it had been distorted by my febrile dreams. But I had the feeling that somewhere inside me, in the rooms of my mind there was now a hole, a well that could not be closed, into which one might fall, and from its depths came the sweet fragrance of locust blossoms.

I returned home happily, trying not to recall what had happened at Grandmother Mara’s; I clung to Grandmother Tanya, so that when I talked or played with her, I could banish the vision of the deadly white petals at least for a time.

That winter Grandmother Tanya, as if sensing the changes within me, started teaching me to draw. I copied postcards or drew our dacha, but neither gouache, nor watercolor, nor pencils obeyed me, and my work was poor, but this did not worry Grandmother; in exchange for my picture, she gave me one of hers. That was the point of her new game: she was surreptitiously introducing me into the circle of her memories.

The first night battle over Moscow—the orange lines of tracers in the dark blue sky, the ghostly columns of searchlights, German planes falling like swatted midges; Stalin’s funeral—a whirlpool of bodies, people trapped in the swirling masses on the street; the German dirigible Zeppelin flying to the Arctic in 1930, a gigantic silvery cigar above the Kremlin; the autumn parade in 1941 on Red Square—gray figures with vertical strokes of rifles appearing out of the snow and marching back into it.

I saw her pencil and pastel sketches done when she was young—pitchers, plaster heads, abstract compositions; I couldn’t say that the hand of a strong artist was visible, but the precision and solidity of the lines revealed an artist for whom the world was clear, transparent, and safe.

But now many decades later, her style had changed completely; her drawings resembled lubok , the pictures on the walls of peasant huts. Her style became more childlike in execution, with extended captions; the drawings were turning into a homemade filmstrip.

Later, as an adult, I saw the drawings made by prisoners in death camps, the drawings of people sent to distant penal colonies beyond the Arctic Circle, I recognized the style—childlike, as if the mind was protecting itself from the experience, translating it to the safest forms of comprehension, separating it in time, moving it back to fairy tale days, and at the same time, taming it, bringing it into the composition of memory.

Back in that year, there was a lot of talk about Haley’s Comet approaching earth. The newspapers and television said that it would be studied with telescopes, that a space probe would be sent out to meet it; the comet was a free gift to popularizers of astronomy, a new holiday on the boring calendar. I didn’t know that Haley was the astronomer’s name, I thought it was the name of the comet.

I noticed that both grandmothers, who rarely took an interest in that sort of news—a new nebula discovered, another spaceship launched—knew about the comet, as if there were some special reason for them to remember when it was due, the way they remembered birthdays and anniversaries.

They were preparing for the comet’s arrival, and while the preparations were not manifest in action, they were palpable. Grandmother Mara softened, and contrary to her personality she let go of her old feuds and worried that she would not be able to forgive everything in time. Grandmother Tanya, an incredible tranquil person, became calmer still, more tactful, as if apologizing even to the dust she wiped away or the salt she tossed into the soup.

It seemed that they wanted to talk about something, to tell us something, but were afraid of being misunderstood, that their statements would be taken with a condescending smile, and they kept silent, as if they knew that the mockery might later make trouble for the one who dismissed their warning so lightly.

I sensed the aura of mystery that surrounded the comet and tried to stick closer to the grannies, in case their anxiety would make them careless and they’d inadvertently say something that explained their strange anticipation.

Comet, comet, comet—I went to school, did my homework, made snow forts, but it was inside me, invading my dreams as the source of tormenting fears, like sounds that humans cannot hear but which resound in the body as confusion and horror. The comet was already there, it was constantly hanging over my head, and the nearness of the comet to the earth hinted at some future event, an exceedingly rare moment in time, when the veils are lifted and the invisible becomes visible.

One afternoon I came home early—they had canceled the final class.

Grandmother Tanya was sitting at the table, with a newspaper spread before her, open to an article about Haley’s Comet with a bold and clumsy headline referring to the “celestial guest.”

Grandmother had removed her glasses—even though she read with them on—and seemed to be holding an invisible book before her eyes, for which glasses were unnecessary. Softly, with a cautious step, feeling the way through the path of memory, overgrown and nearly gone, she whispered words, repeating them more confidently, with fewer hesitations, each time: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.