Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

The women, it was the women who tore apart the tsarevich’s friends accused of murder; they did not allow the tsarevich to really die, to the end, they did not allow death to occur—with the power of the passion they resurrected the nine-year-old boy and turned him into an adolescent, handsome and innocent. From mud and blood, bits of human flesh and scraps of skin, squeezed-out eyes, torn entrails, mucus, urine, and feces, the true heir to the throne was born.

I listened and watched the women give in to the guide’s words; they adjusted their scarves, drew their children closer, started rummaging in their purses without knowing what exactly they were looking for, leaning forward, greedily looking at the church and the ground around them. A distant, weak echo of what had happened here enflamed them. It was a cloudy gray day—as it had been hundreds of years ago in May; a tugboat dragged a barge of timber along the Volga past the church, a radio played in the distance, but the guide’s voice was floating, we were all floating somewhere, as if the Volga were moving the shore with the church.

Now the women stood in a circle, listening closely, crowding one another, pulling back hands and elbows as if an electric current flowed between bodies. A slow clockwise movement began as they moved, the better to hear or see the guide, who could not stay in place and walked inside the circle; the crowd tightened ranks, and when the guide recounted how the tsarevich’s coffin was opened, the circle froze, a charged emptiness in its center.

Despite the coolness of the day, it was hot, it smelled as though something were being heated up, the smell of the crumbs that collect in the bottom of pockets, of poorly washed stains, of the dirt under fingernails, and the metallic bitterness of buttons. There, in the center of the circle, in the emptiness, someone had to appear, different, pure, untouched by our foul lives.

A cry rang out, a boy in the front row must have sensed a threat in the movement of the adults and tried to hide, but his mother held his hand so tightly that he bit her palm.

We shuddered and moved apart—there was no longer a compact crowd, just a group of adults shivering in the breeze and a boy being scolded by his mother, as she wrapped her bitten hand with a used hankie.

No one was looking at the guide, as she lightly adjusted her heavy bracelets, silver fetters, amber and malachite bridles; her hair was snaking in the wind again, and the passion cooled in her eyes.

The return trip on the boat was like a half-dream; I remember only the excursion in the shoe factory in Kimry. They were fulfilling an order for the military, and I saw thousands of wool boots; they were piled up, but in one place one of the workers jokingly set up a line of pairs of boots, as if they belonged to a unit of soldiers. There was something upsetting in the emptiness of the boots, as if somewhere there were people for whom the boots were intended but who were still living their individual lives, not knowing that their lives were predetermined.

The banks, not yet covered in green, were empty; the emptiness of water surrounded the boat. Mother was still sick, and I spent all day on deck.

I sensed significant images and faces leaving their usual places inside me, my inner arrangement changing, like a map of the heavens in the hands of an astronomer ready to add a newly discovered constellation.

I ended the school year poorly, my final May grades spoiling the quarter and the annual assessment; I could not do exercises or solve problems, and my parents decided to send me to the dacha as soon as possible, thinking I was exhausted by the end of the school year and that summer life would heal me faster than lectures and admonitions, than concern and care.

I was clearing space for future emotions, feelings, and events; they were prearranged, and I was the only draftee who knew that the factory was already making his boots.

The summer began with a household catastrophe—the old stove, built by Grandfather Trofim, collapsed; he had not been a professional bricklayer, but he learned to build, to create out of nothing, and his stove had served for three decades, until it buckled under its own weight.

It was cold and damp in the house, Grandmother Mara tried lighting the stove a few times, but the rooms immediately filled with smoke coming through the cracks in the plaster; the village stove builder refused to repair it, he said it had to be taken down and a new one built.

Grandmother Mara was not prepared to do that; I think she secretly felt that the collapse of the stove was retribution for infidelity to his memory, since she was marrying the retired captain; the old submariner was told not to come to the dacha for now, and he obeyed without complaint; Grandmother ordered Father to find a temporary stove.

Rather shady characters, of an inscrutable age and who knew their way around money, gathered at the village marketplace, ready to procure what was not available and would simply not be found in the stores. Father bought a burzhuika cast-iron stove from them, paying an arm and a leg and overcoming his disdain for swindlers and cheats. He brought the stove home in a wheelbarrow, seeking approval for obtaining the hard-to-find item and his willingness to overlook his principles for the good of the family.

But Grandmother Mara burst into tears: she wanted the stove carted off, Father to go away, everybody to leave her alone.

Outrage, confusion, Father’s explanations—we understood that Grandmother Mara had spent her whole life trying to escape from the freestanding stoves that gobbled firewood and fit into the smallest barracks room—and now, completing an enormous historical circle, the burzhuika was back.

Grandmother Mara was so enervated by the sight of the stove wrapped in wax paper that without raising her voice, in a monotone, she started telling me what she discovered when she returned from wartime evacuation in the winter of 1943: her former room in Moscow was occupied by new people registered to live there; of the things she had left with relatives to hold, only the Great Soviet Encyclopedia survived. They had traded the rest for food for the winters of 1941 and 1942, but kept the encyclopedia, maybe because it garnered a paltry exchange rate.

That cold winter in a tiny cell right by the barracks door, which opened and closed five hundred times a day, letting out the warmth and letting in the crisp frosty air, in that tiny room where she lived without official permission, Grandmother Mara waited for nighttime, so that no one would see, to feed the cracked and corroded stove with volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia , two volumes a night.

Things improved quickly, a package came from Grandfather Trofim, and she began receiving food parcels at work. But even decades later, she could not forgive her apostasy. She chose the volumes that did not have Lenin, Stalin, the Communist Party, the USSR, the RSFSR, Communism, or Bolsheviks—but even so, she said, she probably burned a volume that should not have been destroyed, on which everything depended. All our misfortunes come from that, Grandmother repeated, all our troubles! And there is worse to come!

Grandmother Mara told us how she and Grandfather Trofim traded alcohol for the GSE with some small town council, where the books had been sent for the local library, and where the set stood unopened. She and Grandfather didn’t need an encyclopedia but they were thinking about their future children, they wanted the GSE for them. And now the stove appeared before Grandmother as a testament to her ancient crime, an accusation of an unforgivable sin.

So that’s why there were missing volumes, I realized. My parents tried to console Grandmother Mara, saying, There are no troubles, no misfortunes, everything is fine—but I could tell they didn’t believe their own words and sensed changes on the horizon that were unlikely to be for the better.