Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

Grandmother exposed herself to that light; I was told it was a treatment, but I suspected that was just a pretense, not very convincing.

After sitting motionless for the requisite time, Grandmother would turn off the lamp, remove the cloth from her eyes, and get ready for bed.

But the day we drew the comet, she did not go to sleep—she opened the wordless book in brown leather binding and began to write.

I guessed—nothing was stronger than this certainty—that the blue lamp was a medium, an apparatus without which Grandmother could not write what she was writing; the blue colors of the drawing, the blue light of the lamp, it all came together.

I understood that the manuscript was her memoirs; special reminiscences that could be hailed, recalled, translated into heavy violet ink only after special preparation, the ritual of self-blinding.

The blindness was in the burgeoning buds of cloth over her eyes, the blue light enveloped her face, absorbed by the pores of her skin, sensed by nostrils, ears, and hair, making her face visible to the dead with whom Grandmother could speak—her lips often moved, speaking words I could not hear—but whom she was not allowed to see, that was forbidden.

I contrived to be by her door every night, to catch a quick glimpse of the blue glow, but I did not yet consider asking her what she was writing or to open the book without permission. If I asked, Grandmother would not answer, or tell me I had to grow a little older. But if I read it myself, deceiving her, then I would end up reading some other, fake, superficial text, since I had no access or key.

Perhaps if Grandmother had typed her text, the standard font would have deprived the book of its power; but even though she knew how to type and enjoyed doing so, she wrote by hand in the abrupt penmanship of an editor used to correcting other people’s writing instead of creating her own. In fact the text was an editing of myself, a rewriting of a random draft filled with inaccuracies and omissions.

A text about the past that has power over the future; I could feel almost physically that postponed power, the changes happening here and now.

As far as I know, Grandmother Tanya did not show her book to Father or Mother; they silently acquiesced to her right to solitude, or perhaps they were in no hurry to learn something new about the past, wisely delaying that moment. It’s possible that they might have asked about the manuscript, if not for the events which pushed all texts into the background.

The telephone rang just before morning, Father walked across the room using his flashlight, and through the partly open door strange, unfamiliar words came from the hallway—reactor, isotopes, radiation sickness. Half-asleep, still sensing the light from Father’s flashlight through my lids, lulled by the slow sway of the birches outside my window, I dreamed about radiation sickness, imagining that it emanated from the body, so unbearable that it blinded other people, while the person whose body was radiating light did not suffer at all, but turned into a gas, a part of the sun, retaining mind and language. Father was still on the phone and seemed to be speaking even more softly, then hung up and went to the kitchen, where he sat immobile in the dark, but for how long, I did not know, for I fell back to sleep.

In the morning I was told not to go to school—an extremely rare event—and not to leave the house. My parents left, Grandmother Tanya knew nothing, and I sat in the apartment listening to the radio—I knew that if Father got a call in the night, in the next day or two there might be news on radio and television about an earthquake or railroad accident, but you had to be vigilant to notice it, because it would flash by, reported calmly, lost in the midst of humorous stories, hockey match results, and lottery numbers. But there was nothing on the radio, the television, or the newspapers.

Nothing the next day, either. My parents did not sleep at home, I did not go to school, and it was only on the third day that the word Chernobyl appeared.

On the third day, my mother came home, and soon after so did my father, to pack; he was headed to Chernobyl.

Accustomed to Father’s trips, the anxieties of Mother and Grandmother Tanya, the names of unfamiliar places which because they were the location of train collisions, earthquakes, chemical spills, suddenly became the names of disasters, I usually tried to visualize the catastrophe: buildings in ruins, burned metal, corroded soil—my imagination could manage that.

But try as I might, I could not imagine Chernobyl, the danger was invisible, death flowed along with water, flew with the wind, fell in the rain, grew in the grass and leaves, penetrated objects; Father went off to an otherworldly realm, the kingdom of the dead.

I was sent back to school; there were lots of conflicting stories told in the school yard—it wasn’t a power plant that blew up, but a rocket; war had broken out, there was a nuclear strike, but the public was not being told; no, others said, it was a power plant and now we have to wait for the next accidents, all the reactors have a built-in flaw; not so, others countered, a secret military plant in Zheltye Vody blew up, and they’re covering it up by talking of Chernobyl; a bomber crashed, the plane had nuclear weapons, and no one wants to admit it.

Nuclear explosion, atom bomb, “peaceful atom”—all the concepts were muddled, leading to an explosion of false information, the radiation of rumors, a vague and therefore even more frightening sign of the end.

“The energy released by a single hydrogen bomb is greater than the energy of all the explosives used in World War II,” I read in my Book for a Young Commander . “If the capitalists provoke us into a third world war, our goal will be noble and beautiful—to make that war the last in the history of humanity.”

The last in history—the echo of those words resounded in me as if I were an old man who had lived his life wasting it on nonsense or difficult and useless efforts, leaving an aftertaste of spiritual exhaustion that reduces both joy and sorrow. I could give myself up to the idea of the bomb that would put an end to everything, obviate the complex questions of daily life, spare me from the emptiness of prospects, giving the future a single, dramatic, and fateful meaning.

I had seen photographs of Kurchatov, the director of the Soviet atomic bomb project, with his long black beard; I think my father told me that he had vowed not to shave until the war was over, and then, until the bomb was made. His beard, long black tufts with gray, scared me; the smoothly shaven rocket engineers Korolev and Keldysh looked like scientists to me, and Kurchatov like a black wizard; his face, slightly Eastern, confirmed my guess. I thought they had brought in Korolev and Keldysh as a screen, to make people believe that the atom bomb was being developed by scientists, when in fact it was created by Kurchatov alone, a sorcerer who knew the dark secrets of things, who knew the real human fears.

At the Red Square parade, trucks transported intercontinental missiles, dark green cylinders with pointy red noses, which did not look like weapons. Rifles, cannons, and tanks presupposed a concrete enemy and their construction had a definite aim. Ballistic missiles were abstract in form and target; they negated the geography of war in its concreteness, in its small-scale thinking, and the figure of the enemy as such. They required an enemy as abstract as they were—alien, unknown, without characteristics—an enemy in which there is almost no trace of enemy.

War, the war has begun, I thought. I had dreamed so often of becoming a soldier, running away to fight, and I suddenly realized that my dreams were no longer valid.