Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

They walked me to the fence of the dacha area, wrapped my hand in a dirty rag; the rain was long gone, the sun was shining, and the water from the bushes had washed their hands and faces; the deserters were even younger than they had seemed in the dugout, around eighteen, their first year in the army.

“Listen, bring us something to eat, huh?” the smallest one asked. “There’s nothing in the gardens yet. Please?”

I crept into the cellar behind the house, pulled out a half-full sack of potatoes, and dragged it back to the forest. The four of them grabbed the sack, said, “Be sure to call,” and ran off, sensing that the police would be combing through the woods soon.

Grandmother Mara was still napping in her room.

I went up to the attic, sat at the window, and gathered my wits to wake her up and confess everything.

Ivan. I thought about him. My thoughts were short and clear.

Only the deserters and I knew who the killer was. But the forest tramps would not go to the police. They would hide as far away as possible or maybe leave the area.

The “horse breeder” would also lie low, he had to understand that every policeman would know his description within an hour. He would run away, hide, stop killing. He would never imagine that I wouldn’t tell. The elusive Mister would continue to exist for everyone.

If Mister killed Ivan, caught him on a forest path, no one would be surprised.

I finished this thought and sensed a black liquid, a poison, slurping in my chest. Black, sticky, smelly, it came from my old offense against Grandmother Tanya, it had been inside me a long time. It all came spewing out, until the last spasm made me pass out.

I dreamed that Grandmother came and pulled me by the tongue, which unrolled endlessly like a telegraph’s perforated tape. She held me by the tip of my tongue, while I ran off, jumping over fences and railroad tracks, swimming across lakes, leaping over cities, trying to cut it off by putting it in the path of a slamming door or a hurtling express train, but the tongue wouldn’t tear, and Grandmother tugged, and I was thrown in the opposite direction through high grasses and forest branches, until I was back in the room and it all started again.

“Did you see the deserters?” Grandmother Mara asked.

“Yes,” I replied and only then realized that this was no dream but a sunny morning with Grandmother at the head of my bed.

“I knew it,” she said, shaking her head. “They stole our potatoes. And scared you to death, you were unconscious all day. Well, stay in bed, here’s some hot milk for you. We won’t tell your parents, or they’ll fuss at us.”

From the doorway, she said, “Your Ivan came by. If he comes again, shall I let him in?”

“Yes,” I replied.

I hadn’t readjusted to the world yet, the only thing I felt was my lightness, as if I had no body. The drapes, floor, ceiling, furniture, everything was scuffed, scraped, and dusty, but it all seemed new and amazingly clean. Had yesterday happened?

Hurried steps sounded outside the door. It was my pals, who burst in together, chattering and paying no attention to Grandmother Mara.

“They caught Mister!”

“The highway cop waved his baton at him, but he didn’t stop!”

“The cops chased him, stopped him, asked him why he kept going.”

“He said, I didn’t notice you wanted me to stop!”

“They started writing a ticket—”

“And the MCID cop with them said—”

“Search the car—”

“They found a scalpel under the seat—”

“And all kinds of things in his garage—”

“Mister was arrested!”

They couldn’t understand why I only lay back weakly in the pillows. The approaching hum of a car came through the window, and I raised myself up on my elbow—Ivan’s Volga was driving toward Moscow, he was at the wheel; as he passed our house, he didn’t even turn his head, and a sixth sense told me that he was leaving forever .

I had but a remnant of summer left, even though there were still six weeks before school. Ivan had vanished, Mister’s dangerous shadow was gone from the area, nothing flickered threateningly at the dark end of forest paths. I wandered aimlessly, retreading the routes I had taken in my search for Mister, but I felt nothing, just clocked up the kilometers, breathing dust and heat, watching indifferently as wheat, apples, and corn burgeoned.

Only one place suited my mood. Far from the dachas lay large swampy ponds surrounded by reeds. Huge catfish lived there, and to catch them, people used special hooks made by blacksmiths and smelly dead crows as bait. They shot the crows right there, on the edge of the field where a garbage heap had formed, as it often does, from a large hole where someone had dumped a truckload of construction rubbish. Over a few years the trash spread outward from the pit filled with eviscerated sofas and broken barrels.

I wanted to be at those ponds, walking along their swampy shores, risking falling into duckweed-covered ooze, trying to feel the edge, the edge of something in my life and destiny. The water hid big fish, blunt-headed killers I had seen swallow up ducks from the surface of the water.

July passed and two-thirds of August, the falling stars had finished their cascades, and the long rains and packing for the return to the city began; Grandmother Mara was picking which gladioli still in bud would go in my back-to-school bouquet for the teacher.

It was a particularly glum day, the rain pouring drearily, the puddles bubbling, and beyond the fog the express trains to Brest blared their horns. I went out on the porch and the first gust of wind from the north, scattering the clouds and clearing the sky, cooled my face. It was an autumn wind, the air was clearing, the fog heading into the distant woods, the puddles covered with tiny wavelets. I could see the heights of the heavens, marked by cirrus clouds frozen on the border of the stratosphere, and something cleared up inside me, too, and as if I had just noticed that my key was gone and there was a hole in my pocket, I recalled that the light had not been on in the second-floor window of the house opposite.

Before Ivan there was one person I had wanted to call my friend. He was a slightly younger boy who lived across the street. I could have, but did not call him a friend; we both sensed that we should not be friends; individually, each of us was accepted in the dacha groups, but if we had shown a mutual connection, we would have been ostracized.

Other children grew energetically and boldly, with no fear of the future, like greedy and agile shoots of a strong plant. We existed with uncertainty, feeling our way as if in constant pain and unable to heal, unable to feel the mind-numbing and unsubtle energy of a perfectly healthy person.

We knew, even though we never discussed it, that were we to go off and do what we wanted, drop soccer and tag and instead read books and share impressions, look for belemnite fossils among the railroad gravel, wander in silence around the dacha streets without looking for a branch of ripe plums hanging over a fence, or plant an oak or rowan tree in the far corner of the garden in honor of friendship and watch it grow—if we were to reveal our real wishes, we would be punished, our lives would be turned into a living hell over that silly tree, even if the horde of rude pals knew nothing about it, only sensed that we were sharing a secret, delicate and lofty.

So we spent many summer seasons side by side without becoming closer, and it was only in the twilight, when the streets were empty, I could see the light come on in my friend’s window—home after playing outside and a late dinner, he went up to his room. I watched sometimes, waiting to see if his curtains would move—that would mean that he was looking at my house, my window, illuminated by the night light, and pining over the impossibility of friendship.