Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

During the war, Vera worked as a switchman at the Leningrad Station in Moscow. In February or March 1941 a train arrived from Leningrad with evacuees, and rats poured out of the cars.

A train with flour stood on nearby tracks, and the rats streamed across the rails; the train was guarded, but some of the men with guns panicked. Vera grabbed a crowbar to chase the rats away from the grain, but then realized that these rats had eaten corpses on the streets of Leningrad—evacuees had told her about it—had survived by eating human flesh and had escaped the city in the trains with surviving humans.

Her enthusiasm vanished and she ran—from the rats and from the people with them in the train, in the same cars; one didn’t know who had the real power there: the weakened people or the strong rats. One of the guards had the sense to run to the engine. Still coupled, the driver moved the train with flour, the rats jumped and fell under the wheels trying to get at the flour, and then scattered, making for the platforms and the warehouses. Vera shuddered for years afterward at the sight of a rat in Moscow or in her village—Was it an ordinary one or a Leningrad man-eating rat?

I think the old women were expecting the progeny of those rats, or rather, they were willing them to come, predicting, luring them, as if they feared the looming disasters would not be bad enough. The old women put on their mended flowered dresses and shawls, met at the well or the mailboxes on the village street, and talked about exploding gas canisters, drowned fishermen, overturned buses. Their talk made the dacha area fascinatingly hostile, mysterious, open to the drafts of history, the winds from the past, its restless shadows. There will be famine, the old women said, you can’t even buy ordinary grain any more—and I recalled the submarine captain’s white locust flowers; we had one growing by our fence.

And finally, the old women got what they wanted: horrible news rolled through the dachas and surrounding villages; children were forbidden to play far from home or go alone into the woods, and soldiers patrolled the roads. They claimed to be catching deserters, but everyone knew that a maniac child killer had appeared in the region.

The maniac had a nickname—Mister; no one knew why it was the English word, but everyone said he called himself that. The bodies were found in places where you think the killer could not be unnoticed, and that increased the fear; it seemed that Mister was absolutely unrecognizable and therefore elusive; no one would suspect him of being a maniac, inhuman, the devil’s spawn.

My friends and I felt no fear at first; in a few days of playing and running around the idea came up, just for empty chatter and boasting: Why don’t we catch Mister?

Naturally, no one believed in it; but it was so exciting to imagine ourselves as brave and clever hunters, capable of doing what the police and soldiers could not. We talked ceaselessly about capturing Mister. We knew the area better than the adults, all the secret places, the dangerous corners; gradually, without a plan, we began acting like detectives, scrutinizing people, armed at all times with a penknife, nails, or metal electrodes sharpened on a brick.

None of this turned into a real search, and nobody actually wanted that; everyone wanted to amaze his friends with a story about how he found a mysterious boot print on the path by the fence and sat in ambush, we invented suspicious drifters allegedly seen in the field or by the pond; we all knew that these were just made-up stories, but we enjoyed competing in heroic lies with the knowledge that by unspoken consensus no one would be exposed.

But these fantasies did promote the idea that we could really try to catch Mister; each succeeding lie made the idea a bit more real.

The idea fermented like yeast, fed by the boredom of the longest, hottest summer days, the old women’s stories, the whispers of the adults, the rules, the faded raincoats of the patrols, young soldiers fatigued by the pointless length of their tours who sneaked off to bathe in the pond, closer to the still-white bodies of girls lounging on towels. Something was going to happen, we were all expecting it, and inside me the feeling grew slowly, slowly that I was distancing myself from my gang and that part of me was already taking the idea of finding Mister seriously.

I did not realize it yet, but the maniac murderer, elusive in the dacha area, had become a fact and phenomenon in my inner life. The rumors, the boys’ braggadocio, the details related by the villagers, were one layer—everything that is scary but does not affect you elicits interest; but there was another layer.

The dacha area changed with the appearance of Mister. I was drawn to the contrast between light and dark at the edge of a thick fir forest, the dry crackle of wires, the fragrance of peas in the field where you can open a pod and find tiny green pearls, sense their infancy, their softness that will turn to hardness. But I knew, whatever you did, whatever engrossed you, you were always either getting closer to Mister or moving away from him, and you never knew what was there, at the end of the forest path.

The world became a terrifying fairy tale realm, where nothing is random, where every object means something, says something, increases the danger that threatens the hero or mitigates it. My age kept me from feeling compassion for the ones who died in torment, and I accepted the appearance of Mister as what had been missing from my life.

Lazily discussing the latest “news” about Mister—who found which clues or traces—we played “knifesies” at the fire pit at the dacha dumping ground; what a strangely attractive game it is, you can play it a thousand times day after day and never tire of it. On the hard, ash-covered ground, you draw a circle with the knife blade and then divide it in half; two get into it and throw a knife onto the territory of the opponent; if it sticks, another line is drawn, and now you own three-fourths of the circle, and he has one-fourth; if it sticks again, your territory grows and his diminishes, but he still has room to stand. If your knife doesn’t stick, then the opponent throws, scuffing away the recent borders with his foot, scratching in new ones, and now it’s you and not him who balances on one foot.

Sometimes we’d play knifesies all day—there comes a time when frictions and unspoken injuries accumulate in a group of children; they were removed, channeled on the days we played many times against various opponents. The number of wins, the pressure and excitement of the game reset the relationships of seniority, first place going to the luckiest player.

I don’t know how other children played in other places, but for me knifesies was inseparable from the bonfire ground. The soil smelled of ashes and was cleansed by fire—as if something had been burned, destroyed completely; we smoothed the surface so that it could be cut by a knife like bread, still warm, transformed in the fire, having lost its memory of all previous borders, divisions, markings. Soil and metal, soil and knife were like paper and pen; “pen” was criminal slang for knife, and we played with a homemade knife that had a broad and thick blade, which stuck into the ground less reliably than a penknife. Konstantin Alexandrovich, my mother’s cousin, gave it to me secretly, telling me that a famous criminal had owned it and used it in self-defense when he was arrested; but I guessed that the knife had once belonged to the general, who grew up in workers’ barracks, and in giving it to me, he was remembering the boy from the lawless, thieving outskirts who’d had a greater chance of becoming a bandit than a policeman.

In my mind, knifesies belonged with books and films about the Civil War; with the Red Cavalry, machine gun carts, “in the distance by the river, bayonets flashed,” the psychological attacks by White officers, stars carved into backs, death in locomotive boilers. Not the invasion of the Germans, foreigners attacking from outside the circle, but the struggle of two implacable foes inside the disintegrating and simultaneously existing, “flickering” whole; knifesies was a Russian national game, somehow internalized and intimate.