Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

There was a second fear paradoxically associated with the first. I remember the creepy feeling of my own inauthenticity, which could not be overcome with a pinprick in my thumb or a look in the mirror; did I exist, was I someone if there were no papers about me? Was I protected, so to speak, from accidental disembodiment, of not being known as me, if my name was not attached to my being, and my inner being, by documents? My parents had passports, ID, passes—what about me?

I told my parents about this fear, and Mother, trying to reassure me, showed me my birth certificate, but the green booklet did not convince me. It certified the fact of birth but not the fact of my subsequent existence. I thought my parents were hiding something, there had to be a paper just about me, and they’d probably lost it or never got it in the first place, or there was something horrible about me written on it, some stamp of selection and rejection, a sign of unreliability.

My parents got sick of providing me with reassurance and explanations that there was no other document and ended up raising their voices. The next day, Grandmother Tanya gave me a passport, handmade from a notebook, with a photograph and a state symbol, copied in red pencil from a coin. Even though I understood that she made it for me the night before after overhearing the argument, the passport calmed me down instantly. I never even touched it again, did not take it out of the desk drawer—it was enough to know that it existed.

I could not have known about the anxieties of earlier years, of not having a passport, not being documented in life; having a passport back then meant the conferment of civilian person-hood, when it was so important to have documents without any notations that restricted your rights; but my fear was real and so was being freed from it.

I imagined yet another, conclusive way to liberation from my fears: to follow Lenin and perform some exploit that would allow me to take on a new surname, a pseudonym; to be reborn and get a name given by history itself.

My question, would I be able to have my own surname when I grew up, ended in an expected scene. My parents brought up the business with my passport, they wanted to take me to a psychiatrist, but then changed their minds—apparently out of shame and embarrassment; they would have had to explain that the child did not want to carry the family name, and what would the doctor think of the parents, would he suspect them of something? Probably all I wanted was to certify the right to own myself, which I was denied—the right to my own self, my own life, my own destiny.

The word “owner,” however, was a harsh rebuke, an accusation of a terrible sin.

I can’t say that I wasn’t allowed to own things. But as soon as the adults began to think that it was more than some object that tied itself to me, rather that I was starting to organize a close circle of objects, determining what was mine and what belonged to others and demanding that this division be recognized, thereby tracing an outline of myself—measures were taken.

“Oh, look at this owner growing here,” they said with a grimace of scornful disapproval, as if they were talking about a pushy invasive weed, outpacing the docile useful plants.

“You must live for others,” the grannies said. “You must live in their place,” they said, meaning the victims of war. I imagined that someone was living for me and in my place; this formed a vicious circle of lives turned over to others; a chain of substitute existences that completely erased the individuality of man.

For me the scorn for the concept of “owner” also meant the invisible power of ancestors. Later, in the nineties, the word “ancestors” was used ironically for parents, stressing the newly discovered generation gap and the fundamental difference in approach to the new times. But back in the eighties the word “ancestors” still reeked of gunpowder, blood, and dirt, creating the sense that they were here with you, seeing right through you and able to pass on what they saw to Grandmother Tanya or Grandmother Mara as easily as handing over an X-ray.

Each grandmother tried to make me her grandson. Between them they had lost eleven brothers and sisters, two husbands, and an almost uncountable number of more distant relatives. As the only grandchild, the only one amid the dead, missing in action, and arrested, I was not just a child: I was a fantastic win in the lottery, a win in the game with the century; a justification for their suffering, deprivation, and losses; justification and meaning.

They both had grieved more than they had happily loved; they did not have a woman’s life from youth to old age—they were more sisters of dead brothers and widows of dead husbands, and their love in terms of time was spent more in loving the dead than loving the living. So there was a fear that their love and hope would tilt the scales of fate, a suspicion that love was not always protective, that on the contrary it could send one on a dangerous path, to face a bullet, to die.

They both greatly pitied the men of their cohort, which made passion an insignificant particle in the face of history, sympathy for male weaknesses, and disbelief that a man can be fully trusted, since tomorrow a notice might come calling him away. Their lives were solitary and austere, as if they were widows of an entire generation, as if beside their own husbands, they had to mourn the men who died without families, the ones renounced by their families, and the ones who were never remembered on the day of the great victory.

They treated their children with hidden wariness, afraid to tempt fate with happiness; the children were accorded strictness, harshness, and even cruelty. But when a grandchild was born, born in another, less dangerous time, all the restrained feminine and maternal instincts awakened. I would even say that their love for me was a little like the love of a woman for a man—a passionate seriousness and a demanding delight. They both saw the first person in their life who was not under the heavy thumb of history, who could not be taken by the universal draft or a form warrant for arrest, and they decided to give him everything of which they had been deprived: joy, happiness, peace, confidence. But deprivation is not renewable, and they could only pass on longing, desire, thirst…

They were jealous of each other, and they did not compete in generosity, love, or attention but in the solidity of their presence in my life. They often peered at me, looking for evidence of their husbands, brothers and sisters. The dead were resurrected in me—in pieces, individual features—and the grannies, each in her own way, reassembled me, reinterpreted me, yielding no ground to the other. If Grandmother Tanya said that my hair color was like her younger brother Alexei, who died without news in the Kharkov siege, it meant that Alexei was saved; while Grandmother Mara’s older brother Pavel, also fair-haired, his blood had been shed in vain onto Finnish snow in the winter of 1939, melting in the spring, into the black peat flows of Karelian lakes, and he had vanished without a trace.

In the end, the grannies agreed: I had something of both Alexei and Pavel; better they had not agreed, for now I had to be responsible for two; eye color, shape of temples and mouth, form of nose—there was a line of men seeking salvation in me, and the grannies weighed and measured small bits of inheritance. I was supposed to take the best personal traits of each, for each one I had to live an unlived life, embody the unembodied.

The grannies saw and discussed some other me, an object of posthumous pride; and I was lost, wondering if I myself existed at all, or if I was just the sum of other people’s features, an eternal debtor.

This burden throughout my childhood was latent; besides the power of my parents, my teachers and coaches, the requirements of kindergarten and school, there was also the power, the word and opinion of the dead, who in the afterlife seemed to be holding a continual family council, discussing and evaluating me, arguing over my fate.