Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

No one drove along the highway. There was a pause; for kilometers in both directions, from the station and from the village, there were no cars on the road, no sand trucks from the military quarry, no sedans or buses. The few who had intended to go somewhere, maybe to meet the first commuter train after the break, delayed, or chose another road, or decided to kill some time, stopping to chat with someone near the store closed for break time, and have a smoke.

That created a window of absence, ten or fifteen minutes lost from shared existence. The well-used highway was guaranteed to be unoccupied, as if it were the deepest corner of the forest.

I froze: so this was the time when Mister was active, he knew, he could sense these intervals like a ballet dancer, he “landed” only in them. He was like a locater that calculated the holes outside the field of vision of people busy with their own affairs, inaccessible to their hearing, and he dove from hole to hole, appearing between people, in the quiet intervals from one passerby to another. Only a random boy could come across him, a pathetic little fool who’d wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time, which is why his victims were found in places that seemed impossible to leave without being noticed. But no one ever saw Mister.

Then, as if through the veil of a landscape, the windshield of a parked car flashed from the bushes near the road.

A child’s eye is always focused on hiding places. An adult sees an unremarkable landscape, while a child will find a loop in the path, where the bushes could hide a standing person, a dark space between two low pines where you could lie down; that ability is the basis of hide-and-seek, the competition of who’s best at vanishing. I understood that the car owner had not picked this place accidentally, this descent from the highway was a hideaway that pedestrians and drivers would miss. I should have walked past, looking the other way, pretending not to have noticed the car. But I turned, I turned off the road, telling myself it was only curiosity about the Lada, which I could touch, look to see what was inside, imagine myself in the driver’s seat.

The banged-up gray Lada 9 with rusty fenders was dusty from the rural roads; a crumpled oilcloth jacket was tossed on the backseat. There was nothing else that gave a clue about the owner; but there was nothing scary, it was just a car.

Crooked lines were etched in the mud of the doors—it often drove into the woods and had been scratched by branches; it had rained last night, but there were no drips in the dust—it had been in a garage overnight; almost bald tires, sagging suspension—it was used frequently; the license plates were illegible, covered in front and in back with clay and grass, as if the car had been stuck and had to go back and forth, to work its way out, hitting dirt with both bumpers. An ordinary rural car, there were dozens of them by the station, changing owners frequently, worked on in garages or the kolkhoz tractor station.

But there was something else that I couldn’t catch, and I circled the car, peeking inside, under the car, sniffing. I realized what it was—the crushed grass where the car had driven was still trying to spring back into place, which meant it had driven here recently and the owner was nearby—hiding?

He came out of the woods, slipping sideways through the thick growth of rowan bushes at the edge. He was around twenty-five or thirty, dark-haired, thin, small-boned, not a man, despite his age; his face was narrow and elongated, rather anemic, as if it did not know strong passions. He probably wanted to look cool, fashionable, but he had a bad barber, the jeans, denim jacket, and sneakers were bought at the village outdoor market, where they sold fakes. These details—unfortunate haircut, clumsy clothing, an early stoop, a slight drag of one leg—formed a recognizable type. If I had met him at the station, I wouldn’t have given him a second look: this driver was simply, tastelessly unattractive, and I would have lost interest in him before remembering his features.

Walking to the car, he smiled uncertainly and waved at me, I pretended to be embarrassed but continued observing him attentively through half-closed eyes. As I looked closer, he reminded me of someone.

His softness and not complete adultness made me think he was a coach or gym teacher, people who are always around children. They like to touch, caress, hug, tickle with a blade of grass, they like to fake wrestle, they like sports, camping trips, making up competitions and games to keep up the constant running and scrambling of bare arms and legs. They are not attracted to children but to the strength that accompanies growth, which makes scratches heal by morning and quickly forgives yesterday’s hurt.

The guy who came out of the rowan grove could never be Mister. I knew a spy could wear any guise, and I would have believed any but this one. I had a counselor like this in Pioneer camp, who adored boys’ elbows and knees, skinny, sharp, and always scraped. He softened and applied plantain leaves to scratches, smeared them with green iodine, and before taking you to the doctor he examined swollen lymph nodes or glands himself—he was tempted by these illnesses of growth, their ugly manifestations, as if he sought the ugly duckling in each child, who was rejected, needing protection and patronage. The counselor had the same pathetic haircut, avoided the loud fat cook and her jokes about him, and often walked alone in the woods.

Mister a mailman, Mister a shepherd, Mister a forest ranger, Mister a rail watcher, Mister an electrician, Mister a tractor driver, Mister a hunter, Mister a mower, a hundred variants, a hundred faces, only not this harmless fellow who probably worked at the village school or the big Pioneer camp on the other side of the woods.

But why was I so anxious?

“What’s the matter, boy?” he asked, coming right up to me. “Are you all right?”

He probably did think that I had sunstroke or was sick from the heat.

I looked around in confusion; it was about a kilometer to the edge of the dacha settlement, no one would hear me scream even though it was quiet. We were surrounded by piles of garbage overgrown with nettles, this unattractive turnoff from the highway had become a garbage dump, and mushroom hunters and people out for a walk avoided this place; the only ones who came here were tramps and feral dogs, I saw a mutt with a low hanging belly gnawing at a plastic bag of scraps.

“You must be really scared and think I’m Mister.” The guy smiled, gave a short, good, kindly laugh, his eyes narrowed slightly, his cheeks lifted and filled with merriment, and light wrinkles ran to the corners of his eyes. “I’m not Mister, I breed horses, you know the farm across the lake? One of our horses, Diana, is sick. She loves berries, she can eat a bucket of raspberries.” He pushed his lips forward and stuck out his tongue, showing how a horse eats berries. “I don’t know the berry places around here. Maybe you do? I’ve been wandering around for an hour, the nettles are killing me. Do you know a berry place? Just point the way, if you’re afraid. If you’re not afraid, help me out, and then I’ll show you the horses on the farm, take you for a ride.”

He’s not Mister, not Mister, not an evil otherworldly saboteur. But why was he lying about looking for a berry patch for the last hour, when just a few minutes ago I’d seen the recently bent grass straightening under the car?

He shook cobwebs from his plaid shirt, pulled out a pack of Opals, and offered me a cigarette.

“Smoke? I started at your age, too. Go on, don’t be shy, I know you don’t have your own yet.” He held out the cigarette. “You all smoke, I know.”

He was taking me for someone else. I had never smoked and didn’t want to, and who was “you all?”