Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

The bicycle looked like a ferocious torture machine—the spokes were spinning and they could tear off your finger if you stuck it in the wheel, the sharp teeth of the gears worked the chain that could break bones.

The scariest part for some reason were the nickel-plated handlebars, with a shiny bell with a metal “ear” attached to them like a well-fed snail. I thought that if the rider were to ring the bell at me, it would be the last loud sound I would hear in my life. The bicycle, its quiet tires making an unobtrusive trail… no one would consider tying the murder to a bicycle track, there were many trails on the road, plus it sounded silly—the killer got away on a bike. We were alone in the field, visible to all and to no one, because no one was watching, this was a convenient moment for villainy, the evil hour. The cyclist drove past, nodding at me, and only then did I realize it was the familiar mailman.

There were others. Early in the morning a man was carrying a large unframed mirror along the side of the highway. He was passing a dangerous curve where there were frequent accidents. Alders, impregnated with the roadside dust, grew in the ditch, and faded, worn wreaths hung on them; a monster that devoured people and cars must live in the messy den of the forest.

The mirror was too big to carry under his arm, and the man held it in front of him, with a newspaper folded in four to cushion his hands. This made the sharp edge of the broken mirror come sharply—literally—into focus. I was walking toward him, and toward myself, reflected in the mirror. On my side were the rotting alders, the ditch, never cleared of the debris of car accidents, and it was filled with broken headlights, crumbled windows, pieces of upholstery, rubber snakes of belts, clots of oil, spark plugs, leaking batteries. I walked and waited for my face to be changed through the opaque amalgam into one with warts, tight red nodules, like on aspen leaves, the face of a satyr, a forest spirit, as if from inside the reflection. I would become frozen, understanding everything, and turn off into the woods, while only the mirror would remain on the road, leaning against a clumsy alder and reflecting the dark undergrowth on the other side of the highway.

There was a mushroom hunter, an old man who wore a black raincoat in all weather, with a big, frayed basket and long kitchen knife, thinned by sharpening, turned into a thin steel probe, that could deftly slip through fear-stiffened muscles, squeezing under the ribs; its thin point, as narrow as a bird’s tongue, would find the most sacred and alive part in the darkness of your body and end life with a single touch. The old man wandered in the distant aspen forests, rummaging through the leaves with a stick, even though it was too early for the mushrooms that grow under aspens, and it seemed that he was seeking a meeting, a knot in the confused clump of small forest paths.

There was the store night watchman, who picked raspberries during the day and sold them at the train station before his work began. In the hot stifling air of the prickly berry patches, where you can only hear and see the mosquitoes and horseflies thickening the heat, the watchman moved noiselessly, pulling and shaking the raspberries from their branches into the can tied to his waist. Dressed in dark heavy clothing, so as not to feel the bites and thorns, he would appear unexpectedly from the breaks in the berry patch in his white hat, and the hat that hid his eyes, unnaturally, a sterile white, contrasted sharply with his big, spade-shaped hands covered in ichor berry stains.

The juice of the berries, which ripened in just two or three days in the humid heat, had eaten deep into his skin. Soiled hands dangling, the watchman stood resting in the empty intersection of forest passages by the red orienting pillar. The matte underside of leaves glowed on the smashed raspberry plants, and it seemed that just a minute earlier there had been a fight, an attempt to escape, breaking the bushes. The watchman stood, smoking and wiping his brow, but I could see that he wasn’t picking berries, that there was a body hidden under the branches farther back.

One day I went really deep into the woods, where my parents and I went only rarely, when the mushrooms appeared in fall on stumps and fallen trees; firs grew there, tall, heavy, far apart. They shaded the ground, not letting underbrush grow, moss spread beneath them, and in the space between the ground and their lower dry branches an invisible daytime twilight collected, fed by the endless decay of fallen needles.

The air was filled with the sour dampness of decay, with wood sorrel ranging among the fir roots. Yellow mushrooms, as wrinkled as brains, poked out of a rotten log; pale toadstools, a light greenish tinge around the cap, formed witches’ circles all around. I walked and I thought that my presence was awakening the witches’ circles, and they were expanding, like drops on water, and the old fir forest was expanding, opening a corridor for me, a path to the deepest part of the grove.

I saw something through the trees: a tramp’s hovel of boards and bitumen set up in an old tank bunker. I sensed that someone or something was inside; not necessarily a human or an animal, but perhaps an ax, knife, nail, or hammer pretending to be stolen, when in fact it had been used to smash someone’s skull.

But a thought came to me, like redemption, that the tramp’s hovel was made in a bunker where maybe a T-34 had stood, and that meant the place, even if defiled, could not be fully evil . Picturing the tank, camouflaged by branches after it had squashed the supple forest mud with its treads, I stepped inside.

From inside, the hovel was like the belly of a gigantic animal; thin tree roots, like blood vessels or feelers, hung from the ceiling; the walls reeked of rot and the dampness of the earth’s womb. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw plank beds by the wall, human nests of filthy rags, and the floor, ankle-deep in food scraps, bottles, tin cans, cigarette butts, and rotten cabbage leaves—the people who lived here must have stolen them from the store near the station. A tall thick block of wood held dozens of candle stubs with dead, tormented looking wicks, and burned matchsticks were scattered everywhere.

Was this where Mister was hiding? I suddenly got so scared that I ran home, imagining dying there, wounded, amid the putrefaction and mud; that disgusting death seemed so real that I dropped my intention of catching Mister. I thought that even Ivan, who had listened raptly to my stories of the headless mailman and the watchman with bloody hands and told me I was getting closer to my goal, that I had a good eye—he was now getting weary of the hunt, as if he thought he’d been mistaken in me, I was not the one to recognize Mister. It took a great effort to keep from going to Ivan and giving up the hunt; one more day, I told myself, just one more day, one more attempt, and then it’s over.

And so the next day, I walked along the highway; it was that hot afternoon hour when yards and roads are empty, and sleep, as viscous as the drool from an idiot’s mouth, a sleep without dreams or feelings, submerges the area into a warm, starchy pudding. People, dogs, birds, cats—everyone hid, moved into the shade, and only flies wandered like somnambulists along the plains of lunch tables, clambering up the porcelain or cut-glass temple of the sugar bowl, the porous boulders of bread crumbs, and avoiding the lakes of tubs with soaking dishes to be washed later, when the heat let up.

The smell of chewed chicken bones, soap, and burned butter fills kitchens and verandas, seeps into the rooms, and the flies, while people nap, slowly move their tiny feet over the bodies of the sleepers, approaching the eyelids, as if trying to peek behind their cover.