Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

It’s most likely that Stalin wasn’t in it, otherwise the cars would have continued on. But no one was thinking about that then. A great and total silence ensued, so quiet you could hear the ticking of the black cars’ cooling engines. No one rushed to help or to call an ambulance, everyone froze in place waiting for Stalin to open the door to see who dared play this outrageous and delightful game. Maybe only a boot would appear, the boot would touch the ground but the Leader would stay inside. The boot would be even more threatening and majestic than Stalin whole—no one would have any doubts about whose boot it was—the boot would be Stalin.

No one remembered how long the silence lasted. Mother said the trains at Kiev Station seemed to have stopped too. The two boys, tied by the clothesline, their skin scraped to the flesh by the asphalt, with twisted joints and broken bones, also lay there in silence, trying to move but not moaning, for a moan could change the balance in the scale of punishment and clemency.

Guards came out of the black car, picked up the children and loaded them into the vehicle. They headed in the direction of the closest hospital, while the motorcade went to the Kremlin, and the crowd broke up, people trying to forget what they saw, erasing the boys from their memory until their fate was resolved.

The boy my mother had liked returned a month later from the hospital: against all expectations, there was no punishment. The absence of penalty and its anticipation destroyed the boy. The broken bones knitted properly, the wounds healed, but he never got over it; he hanged himself in the woodshed, with a clothesline.

I took the story in a different way than Mother intended. She was protecting and warning me, surely aware that bad things were brewing in me.

But I heard something else: a child can perform a deed that adults fear, he can throw himself in the path of a black car and stare into its headlights. I understood the spirit, the mood, of the boys; I realized that my mother was afraid of that—that one day either accidentally or intentionally, now or twenty years from now, as an adult, I would do something similar; run out, leap, rush headlong where I should not go.

I did not yet know what I would do, what I would achieve, but I absolutely knew how —like those two boys who dared to run across the road in front of a black motorcade that never stops.

As a reward for his trip to Chernobyl, Father was given a union-paid holiday—a few days aboard an excursion cruise on the Volga. It was May, navigation season was just beginning, it was practically the first voyage, which usually went half-full, but the ship was completely booked.

No one knew where the fallout would spread, where the radioactive rains had fallen; there were rumors that Western countries had registered higher radiation and people were guessing how bad it was in Russia.

A lot of people tried to send their wives and children wherever they could as long as it was far from the reactor. These were primarily scientists and military men who understood what danger radiation posed; in Moscow the first pre-evacuation whispers circulated.

The cruise ship left in the evening, and we would go through the locks of the Moscow-Volga Canal at night. We arrived at the Northern River Station, that relic of the 1930s, where plaster volleyball players eternally fly up over an imaginary net and plaster female swimmers dry themselves with towels. Parts of the sculpted images had fallen off, the athletes stood on rusty rebar stubs like prostheses, as if they were crumbling, dematerializing, vanishing into thin air with each new navigation, which for them meant time passing.

In a landlocked capital, the river station gathered five seas under a five-pointed star on a spire, which had once twinkled on a Kremlin tower; I sensed that this was not the feckless dock for quick ferry rides but a more important place.

In ring-encircled Moscow, here was the secret exit, a river road. Yet Russian history flowed along rivers, the rivers grew cities on themselves, dictated the geography of principalities—and the echo of that was palpable there: the station for ships bound for Yaroslavl, Uglich, Kostroma, the forests beyond the Volga, and the very word Volga, which was spoken more frequently than others at the station, with its deep and rolling o , ready to spill out of the word like a gemstone from a setting.

It so happened that my parents had traveled in all directions out of Moscow but never north. In childhood, that kind of randomness is perceived as a deeply-reasoned principle. Therefore, in my personal topography, the North was the land of fairy tales and historical legends. The mysterious city of Kitezh, vanished principalities, extinct nomadic tribes, the Polish regiment that seventeenth-century martyr Ivan Susanin lured into the swamp, Tsarevich Dmitri, exiled to Uglich, where he died—these stories were all jumbled into a narrative about extreme lands where people perish, vanish, get lost, a narrative about enchanted, unstable places that can open up and swallow, as if history had not yet “set” there, but was still a thin and spotty film of rust on the surface of swamps.

Mother and I settled into the cabin while the boat left the dock and moved into the night. She promised to show me the locks; I had drifted off to sleep and she woke me when the ship had passed the watershed and started going down the lock ladder to the Volga. Bright violet-white lights hit our portholes, and we went out on deck with the crowd of passengers.

Above us rose the locks, looking like churches, with colonnades and porticos, yellow and white, illuminated in the night. Between them, down in the channel, were the heavy black gates, slippery with water and seaweed. Other gates shut behind the stern, and the boat slowly sank into the lock pit. A rotten river stench emanated from the walls covered with grasses and shells; the grasses moved like worms, black moisture streaming down; I thought we were being lowered into a bottomless well.

The big river’s water, agitated by the pumps, revealed its secrets; its smell—the smell of silt, crayfish, and leeches, the spirit of pike and burbot—precipitated like water on the skin. I thought that if we rose up again—there beyond the black gates—we would surface in a world like that of the fairy tale river king, where the lower edge of a fishnet sometimes floats in the foggy sky.

The boat stopped descending; the gates began to open silently. The boat started forward, and we sailed past the water-corroded walls; their fishy smell, the weeds, cartilaginous lumps and declivities—they were like walls of an enormous stomach.

In the morning I resisted leaving our cabin for breakfast, for I did not want to discover that my foreboding had come to pass—that we had sailed into an underwater kingdom; but Mother did manage to talk me into going upstairs for lunch.

The places along the walls were taken, but in the middle of the restaurant, beneath a glass cupola that collected the sun’s rays like a lens, stood several tables placed together and formally set; the head of a sturgeon looked at me from a silver tray with its boiled eye. The head, as big as a teapot, with splayed gills revealing its jellied innards; a jaw half-open as if it would speak; the eye, dead but still seeing, the size of a coat button, perfectly round, with a black pupil in the center.

The sturgeon’s body—from the first fins to the tail—was cut into even slices and laid out around the head. The funereal tray gleamed; the head, blanched in boiling water, was dull silver; its shape, like a pointy helmet, made it look like the head of a slain fish knight—or a knight who was transformed into a fish, slain and chopped into thirty-three pieces. The sturgeon looked out with an empty and terrible gaze—not food, not a dish, not a treat but a natural corpse, served up to the table of those who vanquished and killed it.