Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

The wives watched their husbands, setting aside the shot glasses or covering them with a hand when another round was being poured. The men were not free; their wives’ gazes kept them attached by a thread, anxious, worried, angry.

The party would start to fade, poisoned on itself, dissipating, people were tired and flabby, as if lightly touched by sleep. That was the only time when you could clearly see that both grandmothers—they were usually seated at opposite ends of the table—seemed to grow in significance, and looked at their adult children from the height of age, turning into statues, supports that held the vault of the table, the vault of life itself.

My father liked chess and we played often. At the end of the game, almost all the figures were dead, their lacquered bodies heaped up on both sides of the board, the black and white board a battlefield, with pawns fighting in the midst of wild cavalry assaults.

But my queen usually survived, and Father had to plan several moves ahead in order to corner her.

The dull rooks and bishops that could travel only straight or on the diagonal—Father usually traded the knights—surrounded my queen, pushing toward an attack. I was astonished by the survival of the queen, the most powerful figure on the board, who could not be taken one-on-one, who could slip out of traps that would kill rook, bishop, or king.

The two grannies at the table were like those queens. They underlined the tragic weakness and vulnerability of man, subject to typhus, drafts, blood poisoning, gingivitis, caught in a trap, cut off from family, forgotten; wounded, bearing the metal of war in the body, unable to reenter peaceful life, turning to drink; needing clothes mended and washed, to be fed, someone to deal with the thousands of details as persistent as lice and as constant as a child’s sniffles. The providential nature of women was revealed in the grandmothers—woman as mourner, woman as widow from youth to old age. You could see woman’s terrible inflexibility, the ability to survive, to build the universe so that it supports the man, for in it he is a transitory, flickering silhouette and the woman is like a caryatid, and their relationship is that of the eternal with the transitory.

For them, the people around the table at that moment weren’t children or even grandchildren—they were distant descendants, and my parents were no different from the rest; the grandmothers were like right and left, alpha and omega, life and death.

I was between them, I belonged to them, as if my parents had performed the requisite physiological act, but the true right of parenthood belonged to Grandmother Tanya and Grandmother Mara.

The skill of dealing with time and darkness was given to me by my grandmother Tanya. Setting aside my homework, I sat with her at the kitchen table, picking through buckwheat, rice, and wheat; chaff to the left, grain to the right, separating the clean from the unclean. Sometimes she said, as if to herself, that with every year the grains were getting dirtier, and her fingers flew, accustomed to small work—darning, knitting, copyediting, and setting type.

Covered with blankets and cardboard, the radiators breathed hot wool, and the angled lamp shone brightly, as in an operating room. My attention, focused since morning on the rigor of notebook squares and lines, began to blur, and the concentration of school gave way to languor, the tiredness from running around after class, and the translucent filtered sadness in the remains of a frosty day.

Picking through grains seemed like fortune-telling to me. Cooked, the grains became mush, food, fit for humans; uncooked, it was the food of birds and animals, a memorial dish set on a grave. The hard, faceted, rustling grains belonged to the field, to the earth, they were connected to the underground, the posthumous kingdom, and picking through them was the same as dipping your fingers into that kingdom.

Grandmother receded from me, as if she were present in both worlds simultaneously; her graying hair and the brown spots on her skin were like signs from that other kingdom.

The grain was a kind of rosary; but she did not recite prayers, she called to the deceased. The ghost of the Leningrad blockade, which took her sisters, the ghost of battles where her brothers were lost without news, floated over the table; grain—the most important value of a hungry age, the measure of life and death—had turned into grains of memory. Grandmother did not throw away the damaged ones, she swept them up and put them in the bird feeder outside the window, as if she were watched by the shades of people who died of starvation, for whom even damaged grain was a treasure. Blue tits congregated at the feeder, but sometimes I wondered—were they really blue tits? Were they even birds at all? They looked into the apartment, hesitating, as if recalling something, and then it seemed to me that they found strange their own little bodies, feathers, beaks, pinpoint eyes, their twitters and bustling movements.

I both liked and feared helping grandmother: engrossed in the monotonous sorting, I lost a clear consciousness of myself, but I could feel some alertness, someone’s invisible presence in the dark beyond the turn in the corridor.

There on the wall of grandmother’s room was something akin to an iconostasis of photographs. Pictures in six rows, in old carved frames, in simpler new frames, big and small—the photos that survived; several dozen people, men and women, in groups and alone, in civilian clothing and military uniforms; a wall of black and white faces.

Grandmother neatly avoided explaining who was in the pictures. I did not press her, out of my hidden horror: all the faces belonged to people who had never known old age—otherwise I would have met at least some of them. These were all interrupted lives, how else to explain that they were gone?

In the evening, in the circle of the lamplight, I could sense that the unknown and hidden were awakening in the dark and moving toward the edge of the light, drawn by the rustle of the grains.

In my daytime life I gave little thought to who they were, taking their secrecy as a given, as a rule of life, even though I guessed that they were my relatives, my closest ancestors.

Their absence was so absolute that it stopped being a negative concept. The world was constructed as a system of deficits that through their constancy became a quality of presence.

Picking through the grains with numbing fingers, pondering the significance of Grandmother’s silence, I would suddenly feel the weakness and baselessness of my own life, as if it were a random oversight of fate, and I wondered “Who am I? Who am I?”—testing the solidity of the silence.

“There once was a man in the land of Uz,” Grandmother Tanya would say, forgetting that she was talking to herself aloud, as if she were telling a fairy tale.

“There once was a man in the land of Uz” was her secret phrase, which she whispered when she was fighting an illness or her heart felt heavy. I looked for the land of Uz in encyclopedias, dictionaries, and atlases, I didn’t find it and decided that Grandmother had invented it, a land of losses, a shard of a land, with only one syllable left of its name. Nothing was left whole in that land, and in it lived a fractional man, like two-fifths of an earthmover, which happens if you do your math problem incorrectly in school. And this fractional man knows only the current name of the country, Uz, he doesn’t remember that it once had been longer, and he is not afraid of the fractional things in it, nor is he afraid of himself, shattered into pieces.

Grandmother would scoop my unsorted pile over to herself, and sensing that I need cheering up, declaim from Pushkin’s “Ruslan and Ludmila” with an ironic glance at the table with its mounds of buckwheat or wheat: