Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

What amazed me about him were his movements; he resembled a rat, mole, or shrew who knows how to find the narrowest crack, gnaw itself into it, and squeeze through where any other creature would be stuck.

One summer a skunk began visiting a neighbor’s henhouse. The first time, the dog scared it off, but the skunk started coming every night, looking for a way in. The chickens squawked, the neighbor lost sleep, so he put sheet metal all over the henhouse and got a second dog. He depended on his laying hens, he sold their eggs every morning at the train station. But the skunk would not retreat; the neighbor sat up all night with a rifle, shot at a moving shadow in the dark and killed two cats; one was a pet, beloved by its family, and he and the owners got into a feud; then he wrapped electrified barbed wire around the henhouse. It drove him crazy that he, a former sapper sergeant, builder, and decent hunter couldn’t handle a lousy little creature. The skunk seemed to sense the sergeant’s fury and would vanish for a while, then return again, until one night the neighbor got drunk and forgot to lock the henhouse.

In the morning, hungover, sobbing, he brought out hen after hen and spread the white bloodstained chickens on the grass; they lay there, just piles of feathers, and he moved them around and called them by name. The dark forest beyond the fence was filled with the malicious glee of the skunk that had killed all the hens and had waited three months—ages for a small creature—for the owner to make a mistake.

Nimble, quick, and as sensitive as an animal, the teenager turned around, feeling my gaze. I recognized him: it was the teenager pretending to be the ideal Pioneer who met Mother and me at the Palace of Congresses, enjoying his role as usher and his part in the party at the Kremlin. It was his face; but my imagination could not put the Pioneer uniform on him, as if he had outgrown it, like a snake shedding its skin. It had happened a little over a year ago, and I sensed that I was falling behind, unable to let go of last summer, while everything around me was changing rapidly and irrevocably.

I watched the new neighbors for several days as they surveyed and circled their property, chopping it up with their eyes, and I understood that my worry over the gazebo was pointless: they would tear down the gazebo and the house, redo the entire lot and would not stop within its borders.

The dacha association had 150 members who could vote at meetings, they’d been there a long time, and they discussed the poor manners of the new neighbors who had not come to introduce themselves, did not make a polite visit to the association chairman, and who had already filled up the communal dump—an annual fee of a ruble per household—with stuff that belonged to the previous owners. People were angry, and the angriest were ready to go over and explain how things were done and that the old ways had to be respected.

I saw workers carting things away. I watched the first trip out of boredom, the next with growing interest, and then I couldn’t tear myself away.

I wasn’t attracted by the private life that now belonged to no one and was being discarded, but by its absence. In the first cart I had noticed an old radio, just like the one we used to have, a lampshade that I’d seen at the dacha of Father’s friends, and a few other things that were familiar in color and shape. So I decided to wait for the next cart—I was curious.

There were familiar things in the second, third, and fourth cartloads. When they formed the interior of someone else’s house, standing together, shoulder to shoulder, they were hard to recognize as “doubles.” But separated, loaded like corpses on the cart, deprived of mutual support and protection, they lost the domestic charm that gave them individuality and color. All day long, without haste, taking smoke breaks and drinking a pint of vodka over lunch, the workers brought things out—and I knew that if you were to open and gut any of the other dachas, the workers would bring out the same light fixtures, cabinets, refrigerators, and armchairs; that similarity held a vulnerability that the old dacha residents did not recognize.

The time had come for all those things to be worthless, old-fashioned, ridiculous, unneeded, laughable. That would happen tomorrow, or the day after, or in six months, all of a sudden, like a stock market collapse, and the people who bought lot No. 104 were harbingers of that change.

“These are new people here,” the association chairman said to the women gathered at the well with their buckets. “New people, understand? They’ll get used to it, they’ll become like everyone else.”

“New people,” I said, testing the words. “New people…”

When Father arrived for the weekend, Grandmother Mara demanded he immediately rebuild the fence that faced the street. She wanted solid planks so that when she was on her own property—the dacha was hers—she would never see the new neighbors.

Grandmother Mara was in mourning—the submarine captain had recently died, having been her husband for just a little over a year; but through her grief you could sense her gratitude to him that he had died well, in his sleep, as if he had lived through something very important with her, something he had previously lacked, and then left. Grandmother dressed in mourning, but she was cheerful and worked in the garden, as if she had paid a debt and that gave her strength.

Father was stunned by her harsh demand and launched into explanations, but Grandmother Mara stood her ground: if he didn’t build a tall, solid fence she threatened to sell the dacha the very next day—she shoved a packet of documents under his nose—and she would sell it to people like the new neighbors, show-offs and scoundrels, who had no regard for elderly and respectable people.

Grandmother’s fury had a simple explanation; the day before she’d been out planting strawberries and she had a few runners left of some precious and prolific variety. She went over to offer them to the newcomers, and at the same time learn what kind of people they were. They explained indifferently that they didn’t need the runners, they could buy strawberries at the market, and they had no intention of “mucking around in the soil.” Just before that, Grandmother Mara had shown the new neighbors an example of hard work, digging up long potato rows by the fence in the hot afternoon.

She visited all her friends that evening to tell them the shocking news—the new dacha people weren’t going to plant anything at all! Forgetting that the Latin names the old doctor used had upset her, forgetting their move to Israel, which she used to mock—the hyenas ran off—she now hit all the chords in her changed tune about the wonderful old owners; she promised to write and tell them who had moved into their old place, even though, of course, she didn’t know their address.

She had a very hard time dealing with the strangers’ lack of connection with the soil. That night as I was falling asleep, she was still upset, heavily pacing the room, using a cane, which she never had before. Like a sleepwalker, she kept repeating the same words in a low, mindless voice—What if there’s a war? A war! No, it’s too soon to give up on the potatoes! Only potatoes will keep us fed! Potatoes! They’ve never seen how people plant just the eyes, no they haven’t! Time will tell, if Stalin were still alive, he’d grab them by the ear and toss them over the wall for that kind of behavior!

It seemed that Stalin was just like her, an embittered old gardener or a lame spirit thrown out along with the furniture of the previous owners, circulating under the foundation, creaking the floorboards to make the newcomers feel uneasy. Grimly, as if he himself had grown out of an ugly potato plant, he demanded that they plant potatoes. “Don’t fool with the soil,” as Grandmother Mara repeated.