Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

Several times a year the living and dead met; that’s how it felt to me, in any case. The main meeting point in time and space was my birthday.

The table, freed from daily trifles and opened to its full length, was covered with an ancient tablecloth, spectral as a shroud from a thousand washings.

Embroidered in red on the white cloth, proverbs unfolded in a spiral from the center. Like tree rings, they swirled in a single endless sentence, admonitions in thread. Measure seven times, cut once; When the cat’s away, the mice will play; You can’t catch fish without work. I saw the sententious simplicity of the proverbs and their similarity to contemporary slogans: Peace for the world; He who does not work does not eat; We are not slaves.

Usually, proverbs were spoken with a dash of irony, stressing their age and naive edification, but here I sensed that they were not harmless. The tablecloth turned into a short outline of the future; all the life coming to me was already predestined and planned in those simple phrases.

At last, the table was set. A festive landscape appeared, with culinary accents and hills and dales, and the tablecloth moved into the background; only the red letters refracted in the vodka glasses reminded us of its presence.

Grown-ups, mostly relatives, gathered and made toasts in my honor. This ritual was grandiloquent, serious, heavy. The toasts addressed to the future were like the instruments of a sculptor or orthopedist; they cut away the excess and added what was missing; it was all the worse that there was no sense of encroachment on their part, only love, goodwill, and wishes for a better life.

They drank vodka, and some had wine, not dry but sweet, fragrant, dark, intoxicated with itself. They brought gifts, wonderful presents, thoughtfully selected, useful; but the abundance of gifts, their significance, became too much by the end of the evening. The presents were put in my room, and I sensed the incursion of other people’s wills, arguing not over my gratitude but my future.

Maybe I would have preferred something less dangerous and coercing than the books, periscope, globe, chunk of diamond-bearing kimberlite, bear tooth, case of drawing instruments—the presents which lay like a weight on my shoulders. Once again I was being reassembled, reinvented by people who thought they were fulfilling my dreams.

I would leave the room, come back to the festive table, and see the grown-ups holding old shot glasses, which just two months ago had been used for somebody’s wake; now they were in the service of my birthday. A transparent terrible liquid glimmered dully in them; every glass drunk in my honor laid a debt on me, a promise made in my name, for the rest of my life.

Living water, dead water—when I was very sick, with my temperature at almost 104 ° F, and I lay there, disassociated from my body while my mind wandered in other worlds, my father would come in late at night, as if he knew the hour for these ministrations. I could smell the tickling, transparent scent of inert freshness—that was the vodka which he dipped gauze into and rubbed my body with, so that the fever would leave with the evaporating alcohol. The stinging icy touch on my skin was not like my father’s hand but an otherworldly breath; that was how he returned me from the depths of illness, dragged me back to this world.

When the vodka was poured at the table, I thought the men were drinking it in order to open up a capacity for inner vision, like sorcerers and shamans who traveled between worlds. Words spoken with a shot glass in hand—unless it was a merry toast—had a special weight, a special ability to affect others, a special ability to come true; they were words spoken by the dead through the mouths of the living.

At the height of festivities a cold draft swept through the dishes, bottles, and glasses, the fringes of the tablecloth swayed, and the merriment leaned over an abyss, looking into it. Poses changed, speech grew more hushed, fingers moved thoughtfully, and someone would be the first to say: let’s have a song.

The couches, cupboards, and chairs disappeared, the light of the chandelier became diffused; jackets, ties, and dress collars grew tight, as if people wanted to liberate themselves from images imposed upon them, as if inside each person there lived a tramp, a nomadic, homeless parasite, not a person but a persecuted spirit, the ghost of an exiled landowner—Decembrist—People’s Will radical—politician—priest—prisoner; a figure shimmering and always moving north or east.

I hid under the table, wanting to disappear before everyone was reborn. Above me, they were singing a different song; the song, like bad weather, came in bursts, intensifying, then simmering down, again and again. The voices of the singers resembled the sound of wind gusts, rolling over the field and bending the grass. Convulsions caused by the whipping wind keep nature from dissipating, from calming; the voices were like that, and along with my fear I was glad that I was below, under the table, seeing only feet, shoes that were not keeping time, since there was no rhythm in those songs, and not seeing the faces.

When I climbed out after the inundation of song, someone was weeping, allowing tears to roll down his cheeks, as if it were part of the ritual; the vodka gleamed dully in the glasses. The songs must have shaken up the molecules and the vodka had been transformed into tears.

They cried for me, about me, as if they could see a terrible, confused, and jagged prophetic dream. Then, awakened, they picked up knives and forks and returned to the mayonnaise salads, herring, sausages, and the overloaded table.

There was always an abundance of food, the vinegret , the Russian potato salad with vegetables and diced meat, mixed in a tub, and the table turned into a feasting vessel with barely enough space for knives and forks; but a special place was reserved for a plate of eggs stuffed with red caviar among the crowds of dishes, bottles, and fruit vases.

Grandmother Mara got caviar in gift boxes on holidays. Caviar on the table was evidence that everything was fine, a barometer of prosperity, more a signifier than actual food. You could not eat all you wanted, you could have one or two portions, but not three—that would earn you a frown of displeasure from Grandmother Mara who watched the whole table, noting who ate how much and making equalizing operations, moving bowls, platters, and decanters so that everyone could get some of everything. Grandmother’s restriction told me that caviar had to be eaten with the eyes, which I could not yet understand, lacking the skill of feeding on pictures.

Besides which, the caviar on the table reminded me of sunny spring ponds, the weightless glowing bubbles of eggs with black dots in each. When we came to the dacha, I headed for the pond to see the roe grow murky, filling up with dirty juices, and the dots had turned into worms, and I sensed something just as murky, unsettled, and ripening in me.

As I thought about this, I noted people’s teeth squashing the eggs, the shining steel crowns, the awfulness of a nicotine-stained tooth with a metal filling. I thought grown-ups ate caviar like predators who sensed the time of spawning, of fledging, and came to savor the delicacy, the childlike state of being alive, energetically charged for life, still close to the mystery of creation and birth, when the promise of the future already exists in a small particle. They devoured these fetuses of the future, munching on them with vodka, as if when the caviar came into contact with alcohol, its deathly taste was mitigated.