Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

But my desire and hurt were too great; instead of apologizing, I turned and left. It’s for me, for me, whispered the petty demon awakened inside me, why won’t she show it to me?

The next day I waited for Grandmother to go to the kitchen and I crept into her room. The book in the brown cover lay on the desk, with a bookmark—very close, too close to the beginning. I noticed this, realized that she was only starting, but my hands opened the book by themselves.

“For my dear grandson,” I read the inscription. “For my dear grandson, when I am gone.” Shame burned my heart; I turned, Grandmother was in the doorway.

Without a word she took the book from me, put it in a drawer with her papers and locked it with a key that she wore around her neck like a cross. She picked up the pen, tightened the cap, and put it in the glass with pencils. The pen jangled against the glass bottom, and it was irreversibly clear: there would be no book. I had ruined everything, cut it off at the very beginning. There would be no book. Grandmother sat down, picked up the newspaper crossword—which she never did—and picked up the same pen, then changed her mind, and took a pencil and moved the three frogs to the edge of the table.

See nothing.

Hear nothing.

Say nothing.

I should have fallen to my knees and begged for forgiveness. But the pain of shattered hopes was too deep, and so my thoughts ran in the opposite direction. I didn’t need any stupid book! I didn’t need to wait! I renounced Grandmother Tanya and became the grandson of Grandmother Mara, who would have been horrified by the news that I—the grandson of Grandfather Trofim, the brave tank soldier, and of Grandfather Mikhail, the imaginary spy—had a tsarist general ancestor.

It will be summer in a month, I kept telling myself, I’ll be sent to the dacha, away from Grandmother Tanya, and there I’ll… I didn’t know what I would do, but my despair told me I had to undertake a risk, like in the story about the son of the regiment who drew artillery fire to save the men.

That day the book in the brown cover vanished and no longer appeared on Grandmother’s desk. She continued to study and play with me, but treated me as a child whose interests were the playground and school; there were no more picture memories in the album, no more poetry; and she never again invited me to sort grains with her.

If parents only knew what ideas they accidentally give their children!

Sometimes my mother took me to the medical clinic near the Kiev Station. She had lived there with Grandmother Mara and Grandfather Trofim before and after the war, so revisiting her childhood places, she grew younger, cheerful and free, liberated from Father and Grandmother Tanya, and happily told me stories: how they made a special hook to steal bread from the downstairs bakery’s truck; how in winter bandits used to throw dead bodies into the warm water seeping from the local steam baths; how German prisoners of war built houses and how they frightened her, she worried about who would live in them, who would be punished by being forced to move there. And at the same she wondered how Germans, who only killed and destroyed, knew how to build so neatly and deftly—maybe they weren’t Germans at all?

I liked being in that neighborhood; the huge glass canopy over the platforms was like a magnet—you could be pulled in under the canopy, to the ticket office, and then onto a commuter or long-distance train, even though you weren’t planning on a trip. Buses and trolleys pulled up and drove off, river ferries were docked at the landing, and Mother was energized by the hustle and bustle, she bought me ice cream and let me eat as we walked; we entered into a wordless conspiracy and didn’t tell anyone at home how good it was, just the two of us.

Soon after my falling out with Grandmother Tanya, Mother took me to the clinic. We were crossing the bridge over the Moskva River while a motorcade, surrounded by motorcycles, passed us on the embankment in the direction of Leninsky Prospect and Vnukovo Airport: three shiny black Chaika limousines with opaque windows. Traffic had been stopped and the Chaikas raced along the empty street, led by a highway patrol Volga, siren blaring, showering puddles and store windows with flashes of blue light.

I stopped, thinking that Mother would go on while I watched the motorcade and then caught up with her. The cars reached Sparrow Hills and I discovered that Mother, who was not interested in cars or privileged persons, was also staring helplessly at the now-invisible motorcade.

I wanted to go on, but she stood still, in the grip of some emotion. Down under the bridge at the corner by a traffic light a boy my age stood with his mother, impatiently stamping his feet, while his mother held his hand, pulling him away from the curb.

My mother was looking back and forth at the asphalt, the double white lines dividing traffic, and at the boy who was obviously chafing at the delay and would have run across against the light had he been alone. He would probably have pulled a prank trying to scare an inexperienced driver by pretending to run in front of the car. Coming closer I saw that Mother was crying, but only her left eye was tearing up, as if, being a righty, she had more control over that side. Slow tears accumulated in the eye’s corner, and she wiped them away, pretending to be dabbing some speck with her hankie.

I could not remember my mother ever crying out of the blue like that. My mother was lighthearted; she could be sentimental, but in a fierce way, not weepy; at a moment of separation, a moment of fear, she always smiled encouragingly. But now she was crying with pity for herself, and I sensed that the cause of her tears was somewhere in the past of the girl who had yet to meet my father and become my mother. I realized that she had spent most of her life without me and a significant part without my father. Stunned by the unexpected separateness of a person I had always considered an immutable part of my world, I stepped away to give her privacy.

Later, as we sat in the clinic corridor, Mother talked—into space, to the side—about a boy she liked when she was at school not far from the train station, and how when she was twelve, she decided to marry him when they grew up, but then disaster struck.

Daily, at a certain hour, Stalin’s motorcade of several identical black cars flew down Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya thoroughfare to the Kremlin. The local boys came up with a game: they tied their hands together with a clothesline and ran across the street right in front of the cars. Why did they do that? Mother did not say.

The police and secret service did not try to stop the children, even though they ran across the street more than once. The guards seemed to be spellbound by this strange behavior, they, too, wanted to see if the boys would succeed and to experience those moments of delight, horror, and delicious fear that someone dared to play this game with the Leader, teasing the tiger in dangerous proximity to his whiskers. Probably no orders came from Stalin’s bodyguards, the ones in the cars, as if they knew that their boss liked it; they had developed an animal sense for approval and disapproval, they must have perceived the impulses of his will directed at the backs of their shaved heads.

The cars hurtled past the children without reducing speed. One day two of the boys, one of whom was my mother’s crush, decided to run extremely close, so close that Stalin would be able to see their faces. They ran, but a policeman blew his whistle—they said he was new, his first day on the job, and didn’t know this game. The whistle violated the general pact of noninterference, the secret service agents ran onto the sidewalk, but it was too late to catch the boys. The black cars were racing down Dorogomilovskaya, hubcaps gleaming, parting space, sending everyone—pedestrians, police, guards—reeling back toward the walls. Only the two boys raced across the street; the policeman blew the whistle again, and one boy lost his stride, tripped on the line, and knocked over his friend. They tried to get up, the rope stretched out and the nickel-plated fangs of the front car’s bumper caught it, dragging the children. About one hundred meters later, right by the bridge, it stopped, and against all regulations, so did the whole motorcade.