Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

We had been brought up with terms like bullet, fragment, and shell, on the idea that a soldier can play with fate, one will find a bullet and another won’t, and that maybe by behaving in a certain way, performing a heroic exploit, you can earn a reprieve from your bullet; the nuclear bomb did away with all of that.

There would never be soldiers like my grandfathers again and it was useless to think about being like them; the photographs on Grandmother Tanya’s wall were useless, so was her manuscript book, Grandmother Mara’s trophy dinner service, and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in the storeroom; one day they would all be gone in a nuclear blast.

When Father came back from Chernobyl and crossed the threshold into our apartment, he kept me, Mother, and Grandmother away from him, would not let us touch him. He knew he was clean in terms of radiation, but his caution was strong; for a few days we lived as if he had the plague. Grandmother Tanya, who usually did not show maternal sentiment, became more attentive toward him, looking at him sadly, regretting something undone, something she had wanted to tell him but for which she could not find the words or did not know how to begin.

On the third day, Konstantin Alexandrovich came to visit, he was Mother’s cousin, a detective, a police major general, the highest-ranking man I saw during my childhood. Apparently he wanted to hear firsthand what was going on in Chernobyl; even he, one of the main officials in the capital’s criminal investigation department, was not getting the whole truth.

We rarely saw him, he would come for an hour or an hour and half, then a telephone call would make him rush off; a black Volga with a radio antenna awaited in the courtyard.

Gray-haired, tall, broad-shouldered, he looked as if built for the expanses of gigantic construction projects, for enormous work that would cease without his efforts, he seemed to regard himself sometimes with hidden surprise, a general, a detective of the finest caliber: How did I find the time to become a man like this?

He looked at the world from two points of view, that of citizens and that of criminals. He incarnated a certain type of the era, a person who fights universal evil, not just anti-Soviet evil, and thus becomes a major figure.

Father told him they’d laid sheets of lead on the floor of the helicopter for protection from the radiation as they surveyed the exploded reactor. Konstantin Alexandrovich said something like “Yes, it’s a well-known method.” Father was interested, because he thought they’d come up with the idea at Chernobyl.

“When we flew to Checheno-Ingushetia, we also laid sheets of metal on the floor, not lead, though, steel,” the general explained reluctantly. “They didn’t have armored helicopters back then, and when they use machine guns from below, from a crevasse…”

I repeated the story to Grandmother Tanya close to her ear; two or three years earlier the police had undertaken raids in the mountains of the Caucasus, looking for caches of gold; it all began with large thefts of gold from the Kolyma mines, traced to Checheno-Ingushetia.

What the general described was war, even though neither he nor my father used the word; ambushes, shootouts, and so many bandits it was more accurate to call them partisans. I couldn’t understand: What about the peaceful Caucasus, the djigit in his turban on the Kazbek cigarette pack, the Narzan mineral water Father was drinking after Chernobyl? Grandmother Tanya looked as if the general’s story was not news to her. He seemed a bit irritated, rummaged in the right pocket of his uniform jacket and laid a piece of chewed-up metal on the table.

“Look, a bullet pierced the metal,” Konstantin Alexandrovich spoke into Grandmother Tanya’s ear. “It went through and then struck me beneath my heart, leaving only a bruise. I carry it with me now.”

Grandmother rose swiftly, went to her room, and started rummaging in the round woven sewing and knitting boxes. She came back and placed a small piece of cloth on the table, about the size of a quarter of a handkerchief, uniform fabric with a hole torn in the center.

Like a bit of a mosaic, a fragment from which one could reconstitute a larger image in various directions, rough, stained with mud, blood, and gunpowder. A whole world, a soldier’s world, fastened with the straps of a soldier’s pack, squashed by the heavy rim of a cannon wheel, unfurled from the remnant of an old uniform. The hole in the center wrapped it up, swallowed it; it seemed that the entire universe could be pulled into that hole like a fine shawl through a ring.

They lay next to each other, the piece of cloth and the bullet that struck Konstantin Alexandrovich in the chest; they suited each other, like a lock and key. I desperately wanted—oh, how I later understood Saint Thomas’s desire—I wanted to push the bullet through the hole in the old cloth.

“My great-grandfather’s uniform,” Grandmother said to the stunned general. “All that’s left. He died in the Caucasus. In the last century. He was also a general.” Grandmother gave a thin, apologetic smile. “Slain by a Chechen bullet, as they told us when I was a child. ‘Slain’; we were brought up poetically. His uniform was burned later, the epaulettes, the old officer class, that was not approved. My sister and I cut out this piece and kept it. She gave it to someone being evacuated from the siege of Leningrad. They found me in 1947. She didn’t pass along or save anything of her own, only this ill-fated piece of fabric.”

Father and the general looked at them with distrust and a childish horror; I think they wanted to do the same thing I wanted—to combine the bullet and the hole in the cloth.

“A tsarist general,” Konstantin Alexandrovich said. “Tsarist.”

He pushed the bullet through the hole in the uniform fabric as if in slow motion. Father was embarrassed, for he had not known about his ancestor who’d been a general, and like me, had never peeked beyond the border of 1917, even though he was born in 1941. I think he was planning to have a serious talk with Grandmother Tanya after Konstantin Alexandrovich left, to explain that you can’t come out with family secrets just like that, it’s embarrassing, uncomfortable… Grandmother did not notice Father’s reaction and gently smiled at her thought, happy that she had finally shared the family secret with him, as if he had become another person after Chernobyl, one with the right to know.

Amazed by the ease with which Grandmother revealed the secret, I took it to mean something else. I did not know how long it takes to write a book so I was certain that Grandmother had completed her memoirs—how else to explain the opening of the curtain of silence?

She had spent a month on them; I thought a month was plenty to tell everything completely, to climb into all the cubbyholes of memory, it would take a few days, no more than that. Excited and confused, I wanted to know everything about the general killed in the Caucasus, I could not wait, afraid that Grandmother would take out only pieces of the past from her hiding places, like a magician, without showing me the whole picture; she would torment me with sudden revelations, like inoculations or electric shocks.

Having convinced myself that Grandmother wanted to show me her manuscript but did not know how to give me a sign, I boldly went to her before bed and asked, May I read it? She pretended not to understand, adjusted her spectacles and gave me a disappointed look: Don’t you understand… Stubborn in my stupid certainty that the book was now completely written, I asked again: May I or not?

Grandmother shook her head: No. She was uncomfortable, sorry she had shown me the secret of the book, sorry that now everyone in the apartment seemed united against her, and she wanted to hide, vanish, but had nowhere to go and nowhere to take the book.