Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

They had a gazebo, covered in vines and tiny flowers, the only one in a neighborhood where people borrowed the village habit of setting tables out in the garden or on the open veranda, of which there were not many, either. They drank tea from thin porcelain cups in the gazebo, and after lunch, his grandfather sat there with a book; he was a doctor who always came when children were sick, gently refusing payment as soon as he came in, and gave the disease its Latin name, as if that would scare off the illness; Grandmother Mara disliked him because he used Latin, torn between the need to cure me and her hatred of foreign speech in her house, which underlined her illiteracy.

How promising the gazebo would have been had we become friends! How delightful to have to sit there, hidden by the vines!

I was inside the gazebo three or four times when his grandfather invited us to play there; we were embarrassed and hastily refused. He listened to my excuses suspiciously while I tried to retain a snapshot of the old lettuce-green paint, bristling with splinters, the smell of the vines, so that I could re-create it later in my mind: the gazebo in the middle of the garden, no kids, no adults—just the two of us and our conversations that never happened.

Once I grew close to Ivan and began my search for Mister, I practically forgot my pal from the house opposite; sometimes I promised myself to think about him tomorrow or the next day, to miss him the way I used to—but Ivan reigned inside me.

We met a few times playing games, and he looked at me meekly, as if to ask, Could I be third, could you introduce me to Ivan? But I was submerged in the dark spaces Mister inhabited and regarded my abandoned friend with the harsh determination to bid farewell to the past. And then he stopped falling into my field of vision, as if our time had ended.

There was no light in the window! With belated regret I rushed to their gate. I remembered the interior, the German sewing machine turned into a workbench, the small photographs, like openings in a birdhouse, in wide wooden frames on the walls, with microscopic people reduced by time; how could I not have noticed them, how could I not have understood that he was my brother, my fellow traveler, my twin!

His grandfather opened the gate and politely told me that his grandson had left for the city two days ago. The old man said his good-byes for a very long time, telling me how much he liked me, thanked me for my friendship with his grandson—and all the time I was dying of shame, because I thought he had guessed my treachery and was trying to console me. The old doctor would not let me go, he would stop for a second, watch the north wind tear wet leaves from the apple trees, and then repeat his words of farewell, as if he were parting with his past and his life and not with me.

In the morning their house was empty and boarded up. We all did that, leaving the dacha for the autumn and winter, but that day the boards crisscrossing the windows seemed to be shutting me out of the big room of summer, where I had left Ivan, Mister, Konstantin Alexandrovich, the mailman, the watchman picking raspberries, the mushroom collector, the passerby with the mirror… The north wind brought the cold, and Grandmother Mara, no longer blaming the burzhuika stove for its huge appetite, fed it happily and started packing bags and baskets with jams and pickles, while I thought that inside the packages was my memory, divided up into pieces and taken away.

I did not want to lose this, I wanted to stay in that terrible summer that meant as much as all my previous life; in my boots and raincoat and with a bag of food I headed for the dugout, where I hoped the deserters who had saved me would return; the patrols on the roads were long gone and the wanted posters for Mister had been turned to papier-mâché by the rains. How are they going to winter over here, I wondered. I’ll spend the winter with them, I’ll bring them grain in glass jars to protect it from mice, I’ll steal my father’s jacket…

The weight of the water had torn through their roof of slab and polyethylene, and the dugout was filled with a puddle in which a soaked mass of stolen clothing floated.

The summer was over, having stolen years of my life ahead, making them empty and almost unnecessary.

Autumn and winter slipped by as if they never happened. I was awakened only by anniversaries of last year’s events: a year ago I had been at the Kremlin, a year ago the comet passed, a year ago Father went to Chernobyl, a year ago Grandmother Tanya showed me the “eternal bullet,” and then we had an argument. I lived with this refrain, existed on last year’s calendar, as if I still had to sail to Uglich, meet Ivan, fall into the hands of Mister.

It was only in the spring, when we arrived at the dacha and I saw the neighbors’ boarded-up house, that I began to wait for my friend to arrive with his grandfather and parents; I wanted to replay last year and set it on another path. They should have come out on a weekend, aired out the house, put the bedding, blankets, and pillows in the sun, chased away the stale mouse smell. But they didn’t come, the garden was not dug, the fir branches that covered the flower beds were still there.

Summer came, the grass grew and swallowed the paths, the occasional perennials drowning in the greedy weeds; we weeded regularly, but the weeds seemed to have run away from us to hide behind the neighbors’ fence. I secretly crept into the yard once, moving aside one of the pickets, a trick I learned from a friend. The floor of the gazebo was covered in autumn leaves and a couple of birch twigs brought in by the wind. A floorboard had rotted over the winter, tilting the table; a glass fruit cup forgotten on the table was covered with fine rings of dirt from the numerous times water collected and then evaporated in it.

None of the adults talked about where our neighbors were, where the whole family was. I finally asked and I was told, “They moved to Israel,” in a tone suggesting they’d left on a risky adventure, and while they didn’t condemn it, they didn’t approve of it, either.

I thought I was partly to blame for their move; I couldn’t believe it could be a good thing if they had left their house and gazebo, which would be quickly ruined by the weather—for things left unattended and uncared for develop special signs that are clear to rain and snow—pour here, fall here, drift here.

Like the adults, I suspected that the neighbors had left on the eve of something; coming events were in the shadows, creeping up quietly, but invading the horizon. The departure, like a wartime siren, shook off their invisibility.

Then I noticed there was someone there; I was sure the family had returned, that they’d never gone to Israel or had returned for the sake of the old house and the old gazebo. I decided to drop in right away and tell my friend I’d missed him.

But there was a pile of unfamiliar things on the porch, a teenager five or six years older than me was walking on the overgrown paths, a nail puller whined at the back of the house, and the nails came out of the boards with a screech.

The layout of the yard had been created by people who loved neatness and coziness, with a sentimental attitude toward flowers and birds, a touch boring and sweet in their love of trees that they grew not for the apples but for their look, shade, and rustle.

The teenager wandered around, irritated by the layout, picking out what to criticize, what to try to break off, “accidentally” spill, knock over, kick, or smash; he struck the weather vane with his shoulder and then stepped on the meaty leaves of the faded tulips in the grass.

“Just don’t let him go to the gazebo,” I thought. And he went inside the gazebo, started moving the glass jar around the table top, deciding whether or not to push it into the hole in the floor; he was bored, he didn’t like the dacha, he didn’t know why he was there, but just in case, he looked and sniffed around.