Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

So, we were throwing knives at the dumping ground beyond the dacha fence; I won, having pushed my opponent out of the circle, removed the line of his last holdings with the sole of my shoe, and was enjoying the ideal emptiness of the circle that belonged to me alone. At that moment, we heard a voice from the edge of the circle. “May I play?”

The day was coming to an end, swifts swooped low near the ground, scooping up mosquitoes; something was cooking in the sky’s kettle, towers of cumulous clouds rose higher and higher, deep blue on the bottom, colliding and devouring one another, the setting sun’s rays burst through the gaps in the clouds, the light was harsh, thick, and dangerous, as if a battle was looming on high. It was the time before evening when the shadow is so much longer than the object that it seems it will overbalance it; space consists of those shadows, everything is elongated, distorted, stretched on a rack; it was out of the intertwined shadows, the stifling pre-storm air, and the agitated darting of the swifts that Ivan appeared.

We had seen him before, from a distance, but we knew who he was and his name. He was about ten years older than we were and he visited the dacha area sometimes, for his grandfather had a house here, but he never made friends—he was always on his own.

I looked at Ivan and understood that we had a long, one-sided connection, originating from me. I had met him thirty or forty times, briefly, the meetings scattered, lost as insignificant among what seemed more meaningful and memorable encounters, impressions, discoveries. But they had accumulated in secret even from me, and suddenly, in a moment, they were all there, open; words spoken about Ivan by the grown-ups, our childish conversations—it all came together and filled the emptiness that appeared while I was on the boat cruise.

This must be the way a man who runs into a woman who lives nearby might automatically or with the whim of a voluptuary casually toss into a drawer of memory the rustle of her winter wool skirt clinging to her legs, the barely noticeable limp revealed by the wear on her right heel, the slight discomfort that arose when they met by the elevator with a mild hint of flirtation, and then he let her pass, thinking lazily, why bother? And then one day, opening that additional little drawer made for ornament rather than utility, he sees her, all of a sudden, revealed to him radiantly and tenderly, sees her and feels her as if he held her in his arms.

For three, no, four years I had noticed Ivan at the dachas, playing badminton or hide-and-seek as I went to the well; he went to the well, too, I had often seen the bench damp from the water that had slipped from his pails, and once I left the well bucket full, and Ivan, who came after me, carried that water home, and drank it, swallowed tea and soup made with it—water that I had collected, water that I raised from the icy depths by turning the handle, while the liquid reflected my phantasmagorically distorted face.

Our connection was forged long ago; and now all its component parts, all the links in the chain, all the moments isolated from the rest of time in which we were connected by the delayed and hidden work of my heart, were electrified, under tension; we recognized, we saw each other, and blazed with the triumphant and ruthless light of understanding—it’s him!

His figure was awkward; every adolescent goes through a time when his body behaves like a traitor, when everything you try to hide is callously revealed, the body’s stupidity, actually, its stupefaction; shyness, constraint, fear—everything is exposed, comes to light; the body is afraid to grow and change; the act of becoming a man is confounded.

The awkwardness of Ivan’s adolescent figure was different; there was something about him of a colt of magnificent breed, born to run, and the awkwardness was because his body grew faster than he could comfortably inhabit it, but would live in it tomorrow, and with great power.

He was tall, thin, blond; he stood out among our crew-cut boys with his long hair parted in the middle; he changed his hair later, but the first time I saw him I remembered him this way.

When I first saw this person, it seemed he hadn’t been there a second ago, had stepped through an invisible opening from another space, from a time of eternal summer; it was all in his hair, as if the locks of a beautiful woman at the peak of her youth had been transplanted onto a teenage boy. The wavy locks glowed like the sun, with golden sparks, threads, quick zigzag snakes; the youth’s gentle, slightly frightened beauty—Acteon looked like this when he saw his crazed borzoi hounds—was combined with an avalanche of hair, sensual, arousing the flesh.

We saw Ivan rarely, when he came to the dacha in his grandfather’s cream-colored Volga—his face behind the window, his profile against the backseat. Every boy’s dream was to ride in front, next to the driver, but Ivan rode in a car like an important person; a boss, a writer, in the back, by himself, alone with his thoughts, indolently looking out the window.

Ivan’s whole family lived differently from the neighbors, with aristocratic casualness they returned the intended function to things that had been warped by our lifestyle. No one had ever seen sacks of potatoes hauled in the cream-colored Volga, nor was the car ever crammed with passengers, as if Ivan’s family was not subject to the powers of life’s necessities, forcing people to clump together, huddle, fit into a prescribed space. Laundry never hung on a line in Ivan’s yard—inner secrets revealed—and the property was planted with twining plants that formed a living screen; only sometimes, walking past, could you see, through a gap in the foliage, Ivan reading a book in the garden.

You couldn’t say that the dacha kids liked or disliked Ivan. If he had been one of the gang, his behavior would have been considered a challenge, they would say he was being snotty and would take revenge—they would break the dacha windows or jump him and beat him up; but for the dacha youth Ivan did not exist, as if no one knew which language, which words to use to think about him.

Over the dacha summers, everyone observed him, everyone probably understood that Ivan was a kid like any other, then an adolescent, then a young man; not burdened by excessive physical strength, unlikely to stand up for himself in a fierce fight—we had learned about fighting from the local village lads who were not averse to brawling with bike chains and pieces of metal pipe. It seemed that a boy three or four years younger, who was used to scrapes, roughhousing, and clumsy cursing, could scare and beat up Ivan; but Ivan never landed in that kind of story.

Yes, there was something feminine about Ivan, but there is a necessary correction here: if boys sense something girly about a boy, they will inevitably make him miserable. But the femininity in Ivan was—and this was clearly felt—not a weakness or flaw, but just another side, inaccessible to others, of his strength, a plastic, flowing strength, the strength of a much greater emotional range than an ordinary person.

Ivan entered the circle; I bent down to draw a line dividing the circle in half with my knife and it looked as if I were bowing to him; he looked at me without surprise or mockery. But I felt an aching anger: I want to stab Ivan, kill him in this circle, on this slightly salty, ashy, velvety soil scorched by fire; this was no game at all. My friends watched with interest, they did not consider Ivan a serious competitor, and they were happy to watch someone their own age beat him.

We did rock-paper-scissors; I showed a fist and Ivan covered it with his hand; Ivan got to go first. I usually threw the knife to immediately cut the opponent’s side in half; then divide the remaining fourth; Ivan acted the same way. The knife we used had a secret—the handle was weighted, filled with lead; it had to fall absolutely vertically to stick into the ground, and that required practice. I hoped that Ivan would fail on his first throw; however, he threw it, very carelessly, without looking, as if he’d merely dropped it; the knife plunged into the dried soil and divided my part of the circle exactly in half.