Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

“It all seems true, but I’ve talked to that boy… I think he got scared and ran off before the killer even noticed there were two of them. Our witness saw nothing but a shadow, a silhouette. But he invented this Mister, told the camp counselors about him. He wanted the attention. Then the police and the prosecutors kept at him, and now the boy can’t admit that he lied. He knows he’ll be punished. He’s heard about giving false testimony. However, a lot of the investigators believe the boy. It’s easier to hunt for this Mister. Lots of distinguishing marks.”

“This doesn’t sound right,” Father interrupted. “Doesn’t he understand that he is putting other people in danger?”

The general did not respond. I had conflicting feelings. On one hand, I was embarrassed by my father’s question; didn’t he understand what power there was in that lie? And on the other hand, I was scared, because I could easily picture myself in the boy’s place and I knew I could have done the same thing, invented Mister.

“He must have a car,” said Konstantin Alexandrovich. “And a place where he does it all before tossing the remains in the woods. A garage or a cellar. Probably a cellar. And here’s one more thing,” he added. “He is attracted to boys of a very certain type. Aged ten or eleven, not shy, not spic-and-span with no physical flaws. Not mama’s boys, but boys who like to wander around on their own. The faces of all six boys are similar.” The general stopped. “Bold, clear. Even at that age, no one would say, ‘What a nice boy,’ rather ‘What a great guy.’ Something was going through my mind,” the general said and struck a match, tobacco smoke rose to my rooftop, “they reminded me of something. I finally remembered. It seems strange, but I keep thinking it. When I was a kid and we played war, you’d go into the woods, find an old hazel with thick, far-flung branches. You’d climb into the center and that’s where the thin new canes are, completely straight, as if they came from a different root than the clumsy branches. You cut down a switch like that, you can make a bow or an arrow, anything at all—it’s flexible, sturdy, springy, as if it has absorbed all the power from the ground. I look at photographs of those boys, and I think of the hazel tree. Maybe I’m just making it up, but I think he senses that quality in them. He sees it from afar. And he chooses them.”

I froze. Konstantin Alexandrovich was saying something he could not know. It was my secret: I cut hazel switches like that and hid them in the nettles outside the fence, they were my weapon against the confusing deep forest, filled with spider webs. With a cane like that, turned into a sword, I could enter deep into a grove with borrowed courage, knowing that it did not have power over me.

Konstantin Alexandrovich told them about increased checkpoints at all the suburban stations along our line; about military helicopters flying over the region; about soldiers combing the woods; about checking old files and solving dozens of crimes along the way; about undercover police pretending to be mushroom hunters, bathers, fishermen; about a group of immediate responders, ready to come instantly; about the fact that both the MCID—Moscow Criminal Investigations Department—brought in to help the local police, and the Minister of Internal Security himself were in charge of the case; and that the killer would be caught any minute, the ring was narrowing, he would definitely make a mistake and reveal himself.

My parents didn’t consider taking me back to the city to wait until the maniac was caught. No one even brought it up. Instead, they sat there, depressed, helpless, Mother wrung her hands, bringing them up into the air as if pleading to a cruel power for mercy.

I remembered where I had seen that movement before, those maternal pleas; I remembered the album of pictures from the Dresden gallery that my father brought back from the GDR and I leafed through secretly; a painting by Breughel the Elder, with snow, redbrick houses, dark sky, hounds, trees—and men in red on horseback, scattering throughout a village, dragging women by the hands, killing infants.

The mother and father in the painting also clasped their hands, fell on their knees by the stirrups, stared lifelessly in the direction of yellow patches of thawed snow, wept by the walls of houses. No one interfered, picked up pitchforks or scythes, the villagers showed not just docility but a primal readiness to accept the deepest suffering.

I might have wanted to leave the dacha, but my parents couldn’t break the usual rhythm of life, to act differently than they ever had, sharply and roughly—you couldn’t even consider that. The adults were worried by the threat to their child, but they looked at the neighbors, who also lived in dachas with children, and told themselves not to panic—as if submitting to the habit of bearing things and obeying the power of circumstances, awaiting their fate like the men and women in Breughel’s painting. The power was Mister, Mister-Coming-From-the-Woods, Mister-Taking-Away-Your-Children. Not a single resident of the dacha complex left, took away their children, they all lived as if hypnotized by a boa constrictor.

The more confidently Konstantin Alexandrovich talked about posts, helicopters, and special groups, the clearer it was that he was simply calming my parents. Despite the ban, I went into the woods, wandered around the area, not knowing why, just absorbing impressions that would later prompt me to act.

For example, when I picked strawberries on the sunny side of the railroad tracks, where freight cars were parked far from the station awaiting formation into new trains, I could sometimes sense the evil sticky smell of oil on the gravel, and how strangely predatory the berries looked, red and spattered with tiny hairs, how dark the water was in the pond, and how the forest reflected in it was also reflected in my gaze, not allowing me to see inside, as if all of nature was on the side of Mister.

Garage… Car… Cellar… Human remains… You couldn’t say that I didn’t believe the major general, but it seemed to me that there was something he was leaving out or didn’t understand. Mister had become an otherworldly creature for me, Konstantin Alexandrovich’s logical, clear statements about a flesh-and-blood man contradicted my ideas; I thought I could see farther and deeper than the old detective.

“The soldier patrols must have come across him,” Konstantin Alexandrovich said. “More than once. But he’s a simple good Soviet man. Can’t recognize him.”

“You mean he looks normal?” Father asked, stressing the word “normal.”

“Soviet, he looks Soviet,” the major general replied. “I have a theory. He must have something that makes people like him. And that shows he’s a responsible person, not in authority, but nearly so. An armband of the national volunteer force, a badge of the Green Patrol, an ID as a fisheries inspector, something like that. A socially involved person.”

A Soviet man, I thought. I didn’t even listen to the rest. A Soviet man. Mister. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t believe in a killer finding pleasure in torture. Of course, it didn’t fit my picture of the world, but there was something else, some backstory.

A Soviet man. Mister. Mister Soviet man.

Enlightenment came.

There were so many of them in children’s books—various “misters,” unremarkable fishermen, hunters, campers, soil scientists, nature photographers, herb collectors! Even the experienced eye of the border guard did not recognize them as violators of the border, spies, saboteurs, devils incarnate who crossed the no-man’s land in shoes that leave hoof prints, in order to kill, poison wells, set explosives, to sow evil that was as cruel as it was ultimately pointless, evil for evil’s sake, or to learn military secrets.