Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

“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,” she repeated. “And for signs.”

I had never heard words of such high seriousness; I understood right away their gravity, that they were but a small part of something whole, and that whole, existing higher than me, than Grandmother, higher than everything in the world, had suddenly touched me.

Were these the words that were supposed to appear in Grandmother’s wordless book, dressed in a brown leather cover? No, I thought, no, this is yet another book I do not know, perhaps even the book of books. They surround me, secret or even nonexistent, and how many more of them will I encounter?

I naturally knew the origins of the planet, the appearance of life, fish climbing onto land, man developing from apes, the beginning of history which led to the birth of the USSR. That picture had no place for God, the firmament of heaven, or lights for signs. But with the same certainty I now knew that the world was arranged differently: another key to it had appeared on my chain.

It did not occur to me to ask about the provenance of the text; it could not have come from a book, it did not have details like a title or an author. I did not reveal my presence, did not ask Grandmother to continue, to say another few lines—those phrases were enough, they contained everything, and I still had to master them.

Unable to maintain this elevated sensation, as if I had climbed too high, I fell back into the winter evening after school, finding myself again in familiar circumstances. I retained only the word “sign,” linked to the newspaper on the table, with its blurry black-and-white photo of the comet, flying like a bright, extended shuttlecock in the obscurity of the cosmos. I understood that the comet would find something, reveal something related to me, my parents, grandmothers, the past, the present, and I could not miss it, I had to read the sign—I used it in relation to myself for the first time.

Days passed, the date named by astronomers was approaching when the comet would be closest to the earth, but nothing happened. I despaired in anticipation. Every day I checked that Father’s telescope was in place, every night when they were all asleep I hid behind the curtains and looked at the sky, waiting, not so much for the comet as for changes in the skies, for example, in the movement of clouds, the glow of stars, but I found nothing.

I made a decision and asked Grandmother Tanya to tell me what she knew about the comet. She seemed to have been waiting for the question and said I should come to her room that evening, and she opened her album of drawings. A few hours later I was looking at them.

A large mansion on a hill, almost hidden by twilight, windows reflecting light. A waist-high picket fence, with two dozen people gathered by it looking up at the sky—white, old-fashioned dresses, white summer jackets and trousers. Above, in the blue-black sky, dimming the stars, spread the yellow comet, curved like a scorpion’s tail, spitting orange from its inflated head.

Who were all those people standing like friends or relatives, why were they frozen in the light of the comet? What sign were they reading in the sky, what were they learning of their destiny?

This time Grandmother had employed all her skill, and I recognized her, a little girl pressed close to a man in an old-fashioned military cap, as well as other faces from the wall of photographs in her room. I turned to the photographs, and Grandmother, noticing my gaze, gave me a look that told me I had understood the picture.

Twilight, field, fence, house, distant forest—they were all painted in dark blue tones. I realized that here blue was a synonym for the remoteness of the past, that with this drawing Grandmother was looking so deeply into her own memory, beyond any temporal magnitude I had ever known.

“What year was this?” I asked, as if inquiring about the depth of a crevasse.

“It’s now 1986,” Grandmother Tanya said, happy for the opportunity to give me a math problem. “Subtract 76 years and you will know when the comet came the last time.”

I subtracted.

“I must be wrong,” I told her. “I get 1910.”

“You’re right!” she said with a smile. “You figured it correctly. World War I started four years later. Back then everyone thought that the comet was an omen of great misfortune, and so it was. Of course, then came the revolution,” Grandmother went on, correcting herself. “And the revolution made people joyful.”

I froze. I had never known exactly how old Grandmother was, I knew she had lived a long time and that she remembered the Great Patriotic War as an adult. But 1910?

“Grandmother, you mean you were born before the revolution?” I asked, hoping that there was an explanation, a miscalculation in subtraction.

“Yes,” she replied, without a smile this time and uncertainly, catching the tone of my question.

My world was crushed by her reply. I had been certain that everyone alive was a child of the USSR. All the elderly, no matter how old, were the old people of a new time begun by the revolution and aged by that time.

Of course I knew that people born before the revolution did not die in 1917, but what happened to them later? The question never came up—they dissolved, scattered, vanished. It was not hard to calculate that they were alive in the seventies and eighties, but it never occurred to me to do the math.

Grandmother was born before the revolution; she could have said before the Ice Age or before the Cretaceous period. I studied history, I knew about the Battle of Kulikovo, about Ivan the Terrible, and the abdication of Nicholas II, but that had nothing to do with me. It was prehistoric history; real history, my history and the history of my family, began in 1917.

Grandmother Tanya suddenly became a prehistoric creature, as if she were a Neanderthal. Like the submarine commander, I was submerged too deep; I didn’t have enough breath for 1910.

Yet the picture attracted me, the comet in the drawing and the comet somewhere in the sky above the city moved closer to each other, and I was caught as if in a vise. I put my head in my hands, seeking to answer the question: Who were my ancestors, who were those twenty people in the drawing? The mansion and clothing prompted me; but my conscientious naiveté, brought up on stories of workers and peasants, resisted the reply.

Those twenty people had also had fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers; that obvious thought stunned me. I ran from Grandmother’s room, threw on coat and hat and hurried outside; I ran without thinking until I reached the empty lot near school. I was ready to learn that the Soviet Union had a hidden past, that was part of the pain of being a detective. But I could not connect myself with someone before the Union; that was a forbidden activity like dividing by zero, the mind refused to do it.

But the historical shell had cracked and there I sat, pathetic chick, enviously watching the older boys as they played soccer on the icy snow, caught up in the simple joys of the game.

I wept, and tears blurred my vision. But then they ran off, the world began to clear up, I could judge distance again—and I experienced a sense of historical scale, historical distance, for the first time, as if I had been living in a floating indefinite moment. My year of birth, my age, the years of my parents’ birth, 1917, 1910, when the comet had come, the year Grandmother Tanya was born—they all fell into place, a network of coordinates. I had acquired a field of vision.

Walking home slowly, I imagined what I would find. Grandmother Tanya had been feeling ill for the last week. I could see through a crack in the door how she sat in an armchair, put on an eye mask, and turned on a lamp with a long black handle, and how the darkened room would fill with a chemical blue otherworldly light—the night light of hospitals and barracks, the light of bomb shelters, the posthumous light of blockaded Leningrad.