Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

I stepped back, my back up against the car.

“You were trying to get into the car, yeah? Wanted to steal something?” He spoke sympathetically, persuasively, not threateningly, not raising his voice, as if he would be happy to be proven wrong.

“Thank God it’s not Mister, not a killer, just a weirdo,” I thought, looking at his hand, pale, with small red ridges—from tight rubber gloves? Small black hairs, like animal fur, grew on the back of his hand and fingers, but his face was clear, he barely needed to shave.

“Wanted to go for a ride, yeah?” He leaned his arm on the car roof, as if he wanted to embrace me. “Wanted to go for a ride, but you can’t drive. Want me to teach you?”

Learn to drive, even just sit in the driver’s seat, that was my dream. Besides the drive with Ivan, which didn’t even seem real to me, I’d only ridden from the dacha four times with neighbors who agreed to drop off our heavy baskets of apples in their old Zhiguli, and twice with my parents in a taxi coming home late from a party.

The smell of the car, the blinking arrows, wheel, pedals, gear shift, mysteriously connected, that brief moment of delightful supremacy over pedestrians!

Once again, as I had felt at the wharf in Uglich, I realized that neither at school nor at home was there attention paid to my insignificant wishes; we all lived that way—some look to borrow a smoke, others dream secretly of a rare stamp or toy car, still others wander around in search of drink. And it’s not the cigarette, car, or bottle of beer that matters, but a small friendly sign from fate, the satisfaction of your expectation of kindness.

A random stranger says, “Would you like me to…” without even knowing how much you want it, to be shown how to drive, to be talked to as an equal for a few minutes, and then you can live, trusting the near future. He was a messenger with good news, this stranger from another life, where there are no limitations of childhood, sent to build confidence in growing children.

I was about to admit that I dreamed of driving, but the man interpreted my prolonged silence in his own way.

“Fine, if you don’t want to,” he said regretfully. Then he brought his face close to mine and looked into my eyes. “I left a tape recorder in the car, an expensive one, what have you done with it? I wanted to be nice about it, give you chance to confess. But you’re being stubborn. That’s not good. We’ll have to go to the police.” He took my arm. “They’ll figure it out. Get in the car.” He opened the back door. “Get in right now!”

I resisted, not letting him push me into the car, while my thoughts raced: Maybe it would be better to go to the precinct? They knew me, the local cop often came by when Konstantin Alexandrovich was visiting, it would be safe there.

“He must have a car,” I remembered the general’s words. “And a place where he does it all. A garage or cellar. Probably a cellar.”

He pushed me into the car, my face ground into his crumpled jacket on the seat, and I saw the badge pinned on the lapel: “Public Environmental Inspector,” dark green, shaped like a shield, with a golden hammer and sickle on the bottom.

“An armband of the national volunteer force, a badge of the Green Patrol, something like that. A socially involved person.” Once again I heard the general’s voice.

I finally understood. The evil was real, my fantasies about a saboteur were not.

The guy was leaning on me, pushing me against the seat, and I was kept from struggling and screaming by a profound regret: how could I have deceived myself, how could I have believed Ivan, who probably listened to my stories about searching for Mister with the relish of a person who had played an incredible, dangerous hoax!

It suddenly started to rain—a brief summer shower that forms in a few seconds, falling out of nothing, from weak clouds, as if an invisible cup had overflowed in the sky. Its gigantic drops spread in flight into a rainbow of vertical strokes, unfolding a radiant curtain, so thick that at twenty paces you can make out only silhouettes, and then the rain increases for two or three minutes, making noise, hiding all other sounds, and even the silhouettes will vanish beyond the veil of water. It weakens quickly, falls into silvery threads, and then vanishes completely, leaving the steaming ground—but the silhouettes will vanish with the rain, as if they had been created by the rain, as if no one had stood on the forest path.

“We won’t go to the police,” the “horse breeder” said. “I’ll punish you here myself, your little thief. Get out. You deserve to be whipped with a belt, don’t you?”

I got out without a word.

There was nothing but the flying drops, the rain that swallowed up space. I realized that behind that rain, inside that rain, he would kill me; sensitive to nature, he had been waiting for something like this—and he found the minutes of cover.

The world fell apart, I felt its tiniest particles, the raindrops, but I did not feel the whole; the rain glowed, the rain blazed, deepening the victim’s dreadfully triumphant joy, which would in seconds be replaced by horror, but for a second filled me entirely as if it were the most important thing in my life—I was brought to the altar of just retribution.

“Turn around,” came his voice from behind me, not angry but agitated, hoarse with his breathing that sounded like a dog’s. “I’ll tie you up. Behave. I have to get something from the trunk.”

He opened the trunk and reached below, to the well where the spare tire is kept. I might have tried to run, but I couldn’t even move a finger. I sensed that the pause in time the killer was using was coming to an end; far away a car appeared on a rise and in ten minutes it would drive past on the highway, its wipers removing the decreasing raindrops. The commuter train from Moscow was three stops away from ours, crammed with passengers, the store would be opening soon after the lunch break, everything would come back to life, move, fill with people. Perhaps the killer had never taken such a risk, but the quieting rain brought us together intimately, like lovers under a raincoat.

He came up from behind, put his hand on my shoulder and tickled my ribs with a knife; he turned me to face him, and put the tip of the thin, nickel-plated scalpel on my nose; my eyes focused on the shiny blade, it was blinding me.

“Fucking lousy weather!” Behind the “horse breeder,” so very close, unheard because of the rain, several men were cursing without anger, clambering over the garbage.

Mister cursed, too, as if he had never done so in public, pretending to be the well brought up examplar, and maybe he couldn’t even curse alone, because it came out feeble and pathetic.

He weakened instantly, becoming a child, the loud, brazen voices reminded him of something, and he lowered his hands. Four tramps came out of the garbage mound, young, hard-drinking, I think they were deserters from the army. He sobbed and exclaimed strangely, as if his liver or kidneys were moaning with pain.

The spell was broken, I shouldered him aside and ran through the nettles to the tramps, slipped, slashed my hand on a tin can, but jumped up and ran. The car door slammed, the engine started, and the car drove off through the brush…

I woke up on the plank beds of the hideout I had entered, thinking this was where Mister lived.

“Who are you, young fellow?” one of them asked. “Where do you live? What was that all about?”

“That was Mister,” I replied, barely able to get the words out.

“We just went out to find some tarp, we were getting soaked in here,” someone else muttered in the dark.

“You have to call the cops, boy,” the first said. “Let’s go, we’ll walk with you. But not a word about us, all right? Tell them you escaped on your own.”