Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

Now, I assume that it was the birthday of an important boss on the fleet; the ordinary passengers did not approach the center table, edging away from the party for high-ranking bosses, and that is why the sturgeon head stuck out in the white starched emptiness.

Then I saw what I had guessed correctly—here he was, the dead king of fish, and we were in his otherworldly realm. I twisted out of Mother’s grasp and ran up onto the deck to see what I had been hiding from and to throw myself into the water, since we were already in it, anyway.

The Volga attacked me; I saw a mighty flow of water that could no longer be called a river. The centripetal force of the gigantic plain had collected innumerable streams, brooks, and rivers, with names in dozens of languages, mossy, woodsy languages in which forest spirits laugh and sprites giggle; the Volga was a continent of moving water, raised above the low lost land, above the distant lines of shores.

My entire life seemed a glacial, frozen existence. In delight, I sensed that it was not only the Volga moving, but my fate, too; the source and force of that movement were in me.

I ran to the stern, when the roiling water splashed out from the propellers, and threw the word “Fate!” into the watery furrow like a seed, I threw it endlessly, and I thought that the waves grew more powerful and violent upon hearing it. Fate! Fate! Fate! I shouted until I was hoarse and no longer knew why I was shouting, why I was facing down the water spraying from the propellers.

Catching my breath and stepping away from the rail, I sensed that something had changed. Wherever I had gone, wherever I was, I always knew where my parents and grandmothers were, no matter how near or far; they were orientation points, a lighthouse.

The lighthouse went dark, and that feeling was gone.

I was alone.

Mother caught a chill looking all over the boat for me, and she did not go ashore at Uglich, the last stop, but sent me along with a friend of hers.

The friend was one of those women who bring discomfort wherever they go—as if they worked as funeral mourners and everyone knew. Bustling, sharp-angled, she led me by the hand, but since she was childless she didn’t lead me in a maternal way but as if she were planning to turn me over to an orphanage. Her gait and behavior, the wharf and gangplanks, and the expanse of the Volga behind me brought to mind Grandmother Mara’s long-ago talks about being evacuated near Engels on the Volga, images taken from someone else’s memory—satchels, sacks, a desert of water, wailing infants, inhospitable houses.

I didn’t want to go anywhere, pleaded to be left on the boat, but my escort was implacable in executing my mother’s request.

There were not many men on the boat, and they headed off to find a liquor store; the excursion consisted entirely of women. The noisy crowding on the wharf, the hurried descent on the gangplank, and the wind that prompted them to put on scarves, somehow turned them into peasant women, homeless, evacuated; there was a readiness for transfers, negotiations and struggles for seats, rather than a quiet trip; the women were nervous and agreed to split up—one would go for groceries, the other would fill her in on the sights.

The tour guide was a young woman of thirty or so, redhaired, narrow-hipped, ungainly; it seemed that she had lost the equilibrium of her life and stressed the instability, the readiness to fall, by wearing high-heeled shoes.

She wore a necklace of large amber beads, big earrings of landscape agate framed in silver, heavy rings on her narrow fingers, handmade by a jeweler but still ready to slide off. I don’t think she wore them for beauty and charm, the ornaments were for someone who could no longer see them, a dead husband or fiancé, perhaps a young officer who died in Afghanistan—hence the slight air of mourning about her, the shadow of an imaginary veil over her face.

Every day she met cruise tourists, led them down the same routes, and she would have been better off in jeans and sneakers rather than shoes and a dress beneath a raincoat that was long and a bit old-fashioned, setting her apart from the provincial crowd. A personal tragedy had hardened her heart, left her here, tied her to this city. The expectation of revenge, something that did not happen, kept her here. The force of the hidden emotion made her the medium of the place, the voice of its silent land.

The city, museum-like and overvisited, abundantly gifted with churches and monasteries, waited with bated breath. There were too many churches and monasteries, they had been placed intentionally: they held down, contained, and soothed the unstable land.

The convulsions of the Time of Troubles, which had come from here, from Uglich, from the moist soil washed by the Volga, had been too terrible and powerful. Generation after generation built up this place in a special way. That’s why the city felt heavy, overloaded, not a city at all but an outpost with a border within its very self, a city padlock enclosing the abyss that had once opened here; a city of silence, of muteness, for a word spoken here could reawaken the Time of Troubles.

My presence here was a hindrance, an insignificant one. I had the same feeling at the Eternal Flame at the Kremlin: separated by an invisible line, the soldiers stood on guard, and the people on this side of the line, dressed up, falling silent before the memorial, were trifling compared to the perfection and severity of the guards’ silent vigilance, by the flame that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, from magma. The soldiers guarded not the memory of war so much as this dangerously open place; and so Uglich stood still on watch, forced to allow everyday life into the city, the chatter of lines for food and excursions from tourist boats.

The guide told us about the life of Tsarevich Dmitri, and the cold spring wind from the Volga, blowing dusty swirls on the streets, fluttered red hair around her face. The strands of hair rose up like snakes, surrounded her face like a glowing halo.

She did not talk, she almost sang the words; the dead Tsarevich Dmitri, the dead husband, perhaps the unborn child—the female and maternal in her merged into a single passion, a single desire.

Before her eyes stood the boy tsarevich, the imagined fruit of her womb and the adolescent tsar, already estranged, born again in the womb of the land in order to rule. She spoke of the exile of the Nagikh family to Uglich, and each word had a sensual form like that of an auricle, of lips; the fire of obsession was in every word. Thank God no one was listening, they were busy with their own thoughts about the stores and what they saw in the windows—I thought.

The guide brought us to the place where Tsarevich Dmitri died, in the red and white church with lapis lazuli domes—clots of heavenly blue ornamented with stars; the Church of St. Dmitri on the Blood above the Volga, on a promontory cliff. I’ve been there since and saw that the promontory is small, just a slight headland of the shore on a low cliff. But as a child I felt the nakedness of the promontory, sharpened like a compass needle; invisible arrows of events still looked down from the air onto the spot where Dmitri, who wounded himself, had fallen.

The church was rather childlike, not grown-up; the domes seemed like toys—blue glowing bulbs dusted with gold stars, toys for a dead tsarevich; if you touched them they would tinkle, like fresh new ice; church as cradle, church as crib.

The guide recounted the story of how he died, playing with friends and falling onto a knife. Now her words were crowded, jumbled, radiating a female heat ready to escalate into hysterics.

The words pushed and shoved like fleshy large-bodied peasant women, hot from the kitchen and laundry, sweating, smelling of fried potatoes, onion skin and fish scales, ashes and dirty sour water. The guide did not lose herself in the speech, remaining lofty in gestures and pose, but the words were older and stronger than her. In her spoken intonations the drama played out: the people running from their houses, the alarm bells, the tsarevich’s body crumpled in an epileptic fit, the bloodied throat—and the primordial power of the female element, which comes not from heart or head but belly, womb; the element that combines lust and birth pangs, in which a panting woman is half mad with passion or hatred, in hot armpits, below the belly, in the very roots of her hair.