Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

Ivan erased the line just as unhurriedly and carelessly, increasing his space to three-quarters and reducing mine to one-fourth; he threw again, and each time I thought the knife wouldn’t stick. But no—it entered the earth smoothly and firmly. I experienced a strange excitement; I had never lost this easily and indisputably, but it wasn’t just the loss; as Ivan’s share swallowed up mine, my desire to run away or attack Ivan vanished. I wanted the game never to end, for the division of my piece of ground to continue to infinity, so that I would diminish before Ivan and that there would be another chance to grow smaller, give up yet another part.

The burning ground inside the circle was my life now, and Ivan was reshaping it, taking everything for himself; he was whole and I was becoming part of that whole. I seemed to know that Ivan, in humiliating me and herding me into a reduced sector of the circle, would later make up for it.

Ivan threw the knife the last time; there was no place for me to stand, and I left the circle, acknowledging his victory.

“Come over some time,” Ivan said. “Gate’s not locked. Or I’ll come over and pick you up. Well, so long.”

He turned and left as if he hadn’t just been playing; before me was the circle, still full of him, belonging to him; the knife stuck in the ground, casting a long evening shadow, like the marker on a sundial.

Ivan won me—from my own self. My pals could tell that I had not simply lost the game, I was happy to have lost, I wanted to be friends with Ivan.

They dubbed me Ivan’s girlfriend; I couldn’t go past our fence, they were waiting for me, hiding in the bushes, armed with rock-hard sour apples. I would creep up to the bushes and hear their conversations, which I’d but recently been a part of, and I bitterly missed the idiotic friskiness of speech, the hurrying, the gasping, the rush to talk, the constant exaggeration, the lies, the stupid boasting. The group was talking about Mister again, telling the same old stories, overgrown with outright falsehoods, while in my solitude I sensed that so many things had been rolled together into one clump: Ivan, Mister, my desire to show Ivan I wasn’t like my pathetic comrades, to show my comrades I was braver than them, that they could only make up stories and pick on someone ten against one; the desire to do something exceptional, to block a black car’s path, to prove to myself that I’d been right to turn away from Grandmother Tanya and the brown book; yes, yes, I thought, I’m like the son of the regiment, I will draw fire away from others; one dream hurried and pushed the next, and with the relief of a soldier weary of waiting for an attack, I sensed that soon I would take a step.

It was June, close to the solstice; the summer was dry, hot, and scorchingly sunny; it made the heavy fir forest beyond the dacha fence seem even blacker. Late evening and nighttime, when children are usually afraid, did not seem scary that summer; scary and horrible were the afternoons, when the streets were empty, hot haze shimmering above the asphalt, distorting and hiding perspective and the horizon; in the boiling jelly of that haze, the figures of passersby could suddenly appear very close, shimmering, inaccurate, flowing, and worrying; blessed was the cool of the evening, clearing the air and chasing away the ghosts of the day.

Those were the days when Konstantin Alexandrovich always visited the dacha. No use in hiding it—I was proud when his black Volga stopped at our gate, the numbers and letters on the license plate not random gibberish but a brief readable code, a sign of power and strength.

The general arrived at the moment the first cucumbers were ripening on the vine; Grandmother Mara brought them out on a plate, freshly washed, fragrant with the energizing, cooling scent of early morning and dew, which seemed to bring out the bumps on them. Konstantin Alexandrovich ate these first vegetables of the summer when they were still babies, thin-skinned, covered with a transparent and tender silvery fuzz. I honestly couldn’t understand what made the general so happy, why this ritual was repeated year after year.

Then the table was set in the garden, the gramophone was brought out, a square box with a windup handle and an orchid-like trumpet. Manufactured in 1900, the gramophone was older than everyone around it; you could study its history in its scratches, lumps of lacquer, and dents in the trumpet. They used records, heavy ones, one song on each, and the gramophone rasped out “La Cucaracha,” “La Cumparcita,” and melodies from Alexandrov’s comedies. No one remembered how the gramophone came into the family; I even thought that the family appeared because the gramophone was first; it was one of those long-lived objects that are unthinkable without a certain lifestyle, and if a gramophone shows up in someone’s life, it will unite a man and a woman, marry them, give them children and grandchildren, a dining table, and curtains.

The record spinning, the slowing of the viscous sound when the springs wound down—the gramophone was a machine for producing familial happiness, and I was happy to turn the handle that dozens of hands had touched before me.

This time the general arrived toward evening, when everyone had thought there was no point in expecting him that day—that often happened, when urgent business held up Konstantin Alexandrovich or canceled his visit.

Watching Konstantin Alexandrovich’s pleasure in washing up with well water, wiping his face with a linen towel that Grandmother Mara handed him, how he hung up his uniform jacket in the closet and came out in ordinary clothing, handily setting up the chairs, adjusting the tablecloth, carrying out the narrow faceted shot glasses between his fingers, and constantly looking around at the apple trees, the vegetable plots, the old house with flaking paint—I understood that the dacha was the closest thing to the lost world in which he was born. He was relaxed here, stopped being a general, returned to his postwar childhood, to the villages where soldiers settled; one lieutenant or captain joined the police as a patrolman, another became a bandit, and the boy grew up seeing both.

Later, just as the party was warming up, I was sent to bed. Usually, because of my attachment to Konstantin Alexandrovich, I was allowed to stay up to the end, but here, I noticed, the general glanced over at me to show it was time for me to go to sleep.

Mister!—the general knew something that he wanted to tell my parents.

I had the idea that if I could tell my friends what Konstantin Alexandrovich said, casually dropping his name, lying that he had told me personally, I would be able to get back in their favor, end their campaign against me, and become top dog: the reflection of Mister’s horrible fame would make everyone listen and obey.

I said good night. I was to sleep in the attic, because Konstantin Alexandrovich was here, and after waiting a few minutes, I opened the dormer window, the hinges of which I had oiled because I liked climbing out on the roof at night. I crawled on my belly to the drainpipe and sat above the garden party. While I crawled, I decided that I wouldn’t tell my pals about the general—let them sit in the bushes with apple cores—I would go to Ivan. Now I would have something to intrigue him and keep him. For some reason, I had no doubt that Ivan was interested in Mister.

“They’re not talking about this now,” the major general spoke softly. “Trying not to talk. We have just one witness, a boy, a friend of the first victim. The artist’s renderings are made from his description. They were together at Pioneer camp and sneaked out during quiet hour. Some people think the witness is a phony. He did see something, but much less than what he’s telling us. He gave a description of the man who led his friend into the woods, very detailed, without any discrepancies, he said the killer scared him, warned him not to tell the police anything or he’d come back for him. We’re hunting for the man described by the boy—height, hair color, a navy tattoo on his hand, something complex, and so on. And that nickname, Mister, allegedly he called himself that.