Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

I knew that I would never have dared to fight the whirlpool and regarded him as a hero who took on the water spirit in his den; who was Ivan, where did he come from, what did his spot mean, what was he doing among ordinary people?

Then we sat on the shore, and when he was rested, Ivan told me that he sometimes came here to fight the whirlpool and that he always survived. They must have released water from the dam upstream and the river had not calmed yet, supposed Ivan, and that’s why the whirlpool was more dangerous than usual; I examined him quietly, saw how his muscles were strained, the veins swollen, and I was in awe, as if I had created this body, pulled it out of nonexistence in a single motion.

I never did understand what happened that day. Was Ivan acting from beginning to end, pretending that the whirlpool was sucking him in and he could not swim out? Had he started off pretending only to have the water unexpectedly get the better of him? Or was he not pretending at all and had he actually underestimated the vortex?

“You know what the old generals call this rock?” Ivan asked unexpectedly. “Generalissimo. Some call it Iosif Vissarionovich. But mostly, Generalissimo. They’ve been coming here for decades, they know all each other’s war wounds here. The head of the sanatorium is also an old frontline soldier, this is their favorite place, their own little private club. No one remembers now who first called the stone Generalissimo. They bring the new ones over to meet it. Here’s the fresh spring, here’s the dock, here’s the pine allée, and here’s the Generalissimo. I saw them bring one over, an aviation major general, gray-haired, scarred…”

Ivan paused, finding the right words, and I thought back to the building on Sokol, the generals coming down the steps, the gray-haired pilot who pretended to be a plane for his grandson—could he be the one?

“A very serious old man, the locals are mostly flabby now, but this one seemed to be hewn from metal,” Ivan continued. “I thought he would laugh and say the geezers had gone gaga, too much rich food at the sanatorium has gone to their heads, the mineral water bubbles affected the brain and soon they would be naming the trees. But the pilot, and you could tell he had been shot down, his face cut by pieces of the windshield, stood there and then saluted. The old men nodded and swayed: he’s one of us, he is, and they led him to the main building and looked at one another as if their impotent little crowd might have drowned him, if he had not acknowledged the stone as the Generalissimo.”

Ivan stared at the rock that almost took his life, while I processed the meaning of his words, remembering the two boys who ran across the street in front of Stalin’s black car. Who was he, who was Ivan, if he could throw out this challenge to the Generalissimo and fight him? I had no doubt that the ancient boulder, deified by the old generals who gave it the name of the Supreme Commander, was in some sense today’s Stalin.

If I had been more attentive, I would have realized that Ivan had made up something in this story; after all, I did the same thing.

At school, where my teacher knew that my parents had traveled extensively around the country, I began making up journeys for myself: saying I had seen Mount Communism in the Pamir Range and had even gone up into its foothills, had been in the Ural River in the place where Chapayev had drowned, had visited Shushenskoe and gone inside the house where Lenin and Krupskaya had lived in exile.

I made up the first story because I was bored, and I based it on a few facts—they really had considered taking me to Pamir. But I realized that our strict teacher, who never allowed us to stray, was treating me as if I had made a pilgrimage to holy lands; I, a child, had become more significant and authoritative than the adult. I couldn’t resist continuing the fantasies that protected me from disciplinary zealousness and moved further and further from reality.

But I couldn’t ever imagine that Ivan was fibbing or lying. Why lie to me? Knowing my tendency to mislead, I felt it had been forced upon me: I didn’t completely believe my grandmothers and parents, I could feel that they were leaving a lot of things out, hiding things, and I had become wearily accustomed to my own lies of omission. But Ivan? Ivan had come to me as a messenger of truth, an outsider who certainly had no need for me not to know something or to believe in some allegedly redeeming deception.

Could I have guessed that Ivan used falsehood as a tool? The one who lies has power over whoever believes him; Ivan was not interested in deceit per se, as are fantasizers and fabulists like me. Deceit was a form of power, it created the power; out of false assumptions he cultivated real feelings, real attachments, and I think that was what thrilled him.

But this kind of reasoning was beyond my abilities.

“Last night I thought about what you told me,” Ivan suddenly said. “You’re right. Mister is really a spy or saboteur or they would have caught him a long time ago.”

After the battle with the Generalissimo, I was prepared for Ivan to give me clear marching orders on how to catch Mister; he continued slowly, still exhausted, “It’s your mission. Only yours. I can’t help you. I’ll only scare him off. Or he’ll kill me.” Ivan shut his eyes for a second, as if examining his exhausted body, and I lost my breath from the sincerity of his words, his confession of weakness.

“I would risk it anyway,” said Ivan, “but you’ll be better at it. And I’ll help however I can.”

Maybe I would have come to my senses, pretending that nothing had happened—even at the cost of breaking apart from Ivan—if not for a single detail, a circumstance that decided everything.

While talking to me, Ivan grew agitated, blood infused his usually pale face, and a thick crimson bead of blood slowly dripped from his left nostril. Ivan sensed my look before he tasted the salty viscous warmth over his lip, took out a handkerchief from the shirt lying on the dock, patted the blood, leaving a pink print on his skin, and as if forced to apologize for something improper, said, “Weak vessel.”

That phrase—weak vessel—decided it. While the blood dripped—a second, two seconds, an eternity—along his pale skin, I experienced physical lust for Ivan’s blood, saturated, overfilled with red. I was in love with a man whose body literally bled when he was agitated, I understood the flawed superiority of my body and my mission—to protect Ivan so that nothing would upset this higher being who elicited dizzying delight and anxious pity.

“Weak vessel.” Ivan’s body was a weak vessel, and I—as life had decided—became guardian of the vessel, that was the reason I was born into this world. I would catch Mister so that Ivan would be unharmed, so that he would not go on a hopeless hunt that would result in his death.

Day after day I stubbornly wandered around the empty areas near the dacha, trying not to be seen by anyone I knew and to be noticed by the terrible unknown Mister. The occasional people I came across showed me that everyone, almost everyone, had a secret life that can be discovered in the keyhole of a random moment, if you know how and want to see.

It started with a bicyclist, the village mailman, I recognized him eventually, but at first I just saw a man on a bike. He was riding through the wheat field, going uphill, he was bent over the handlebars and for a second I thought the pedals were being pushed by a headless body in dark trousers and a patched jacket. The headless corpse flickered, and once again there was a man riding toward me, but I felt a jolt of fear. The bicyclist came closer, and I grew even more frightened, not of him, but of his bicycle.