Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

I thought of Grandmother Mara’s fervent pleas—“Stalin, Stalin, Stalin!”—and understood that after her death she would join the army of these corpses, that the lifetime connection would become an inseverable umbilical cord.

The leader had stamped his name on them—and they responded to that branding, they were enslaved in the afterlife. They were people of his era; I saw that I had lazily united them all by the name Stalin, repeating their own loyalty to him when he was alive, the way serfs were called by their master’s name.

Ivan stood entranced by the rain, which was penetrating deep into the soil, to the roots of the cemetery trees, hammering on the sheet metal, tearing away weather vanes and down-spouts, seeping into the dried-out attics. He was a priest of a new, victorious faith, come into the temple of the old gods in order to sense his own power; he did not sense the awakening of the dead, he heard and saw something else: the spectral letters, the irony of oblivion that allowed the generalissimo to feel how completely he was forgotten—there was nothing but the inscription on the gable that appeared in storms with a westerly wind.

The rain was letting up; I was soaked, shivering, and my face was covered with cold drops.

Ivan was next to me, tired, drained; I understood that he had showed me the most personal and intimate thing he could show another person; he had come across that inscription and held on to it as if it were a jewel, showing it to no one, so as not to turn it into a local attraction.

I wanted to tell Ivan how Grandmother Mara cried out Stalin’s name, but I didn’t think he would understand, he would just laugh at an old woman’s stupidity. He had brought me along because he needed an audience and because he did not want to be remembered only as a deceiver; he could have not bothered about me at all—who cared what the little kid thought of him?—but he liked the opportunity to turn a difficult situation in his favor without having to admit guilt, easily resolving the unsolvable.

He was giving me a gift, allowing me to join in the glory of his power, in the feeling that the future was his, that his time had come, which meant that he’d been right about everything.

We were back at the dachas, soaked in the muddy streams carrying rubbish and leaves, and we stopped at my gate, opposite the Okunenko house.

“He’s a zero who dreams of standing next to a one, to make ten, and to be able to call that ten ‘us,’” he said, having guessed my secret and most burning question. He was generous, the way people are generous before a final farewell. “But I will need zeros like that. Many of them. He’s the first. You have to respect precedence.”

I thought Ivan was wrong; he haughtily thought Okunenko sought his society and was nothing on his own, he amused himself playing with what he considered an empty man. But I had seen Okunenko at the Palace of Congresses, and I was stunned by his ability to change, I sensed that Okunenko was not a zero. Grandmother Tanya, who liked to play solitaire, explained the meaning of the cards to me, and I thought that Okunenko was the joker, the card that can become any other; the fool who in certain circumstances can acquire the highest power and disrupt the balance in an instant.

“So,” Ivan said. “Go. Go dry off.”

He turned and strode off to his place. I wondered—should I run after him, tell him what I knew about Okunenko? And I stopped. I was interested in seeing what would happen with the two of them. The situation was reversed: now I had Ivan in my power because I knew what he did not. Without feelings of revenge or jealousy, I said: let things be.

I went home, knowing that Grandmother Mara would scold me for running off and for my wet clothes, but I had no fear of her now, as if I had suddenly become the older one.

Ivan never came back to the dacha, Okunenko didn’t visit much, either, and I was there less and less—my grandmothers were sick, they had trouble walking, and Mother and I took care of them. No sooner would one illness pass, than another would appear, and we spent years following a schedule of pill taking, both apartments turned into hospital wards; school, homework, friends—everything was left at the door, everything took a backseat to the endlessness of illness, its power that inexorably forced me to pay attention to other people’s pulses and breathing.

Father was traveling more frequently to places where ships sank, gas exploded, planes crashed, and buildings collapsed. He rushed from one catastrophe to another, no longer knowing what to do with them, how to explain it all; he drafted new tables, clicked his calculator keys, and brought home an aluminum cap, a part from a plane or rocket that he kept erasers in, but sometimes in the morning the cap stank of bad cognac and Mother tried to get me out the door for school faster.

The southern borderlands, the Caucasus mountains already echoed with future gunfire; with the coming of somber times, Moscow and other cities were plunged into darkness—some crazy force had declared war on lightbulbs, and the lines were getting longer and there were fewer things to buy; I grew taller, my physique changed, and Mother resewed and refaced old clothing for the third time.

My body demanded food, pleasure, and fun, but money, without a day’s rest in my parents’ wallet, turned into boxes of medicines with foreign names, into yellow and pink granules, green tablets, white pills, pale blue plastic capsules filled with liquid; syringes and oilcloth, bandages, ointments, and powders.

Father came and went, weary, bowed down, argued with Grandmother Tanya, who got up when we were out and tried to help with the housework; the two grandmothers could not be kept in the same apartment, so Mother lived between two houses; Father understood that he should be helping her, but she understood that he was waging war against the elements gone mad, facing defeat after defeat. Malignant lightning flared over the distant mountains, over the borderlands.

Father broke down in late December, in the black hole of winter, home from an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people. He was a stranger to Mother and me, exhausted, permeated with the smell of dead houses and generator fuel.

Late that night, refusing food, he told us what he had seen with a disconnected urgency; it was not a story but a mash of words, the ruins of narrative.

Darkness, lit only by bonfires and headlights, mounds of coffins at intersections, tanks and roadblocks, looters; the special hour when all work stops and they take acoustical soundings of the ruins in case someone is still alive under the concrete, stone, and brick.

“We couldn’t stop the machinery at the same time,” Father said. “They brought rescue workers from all over the country, and their watches were not synchronized, everything was plus-minus fifteen minutes.”

“One block survived,” Father said, with no connection to his previous sentence. “The usual five-story houses. The neighboring ones collapsed. We drew profiles of seismic waves in order to understand how that happened. An engineer found the documents. That particular block was built by workers from Czechoslovakia, on an exchange. They hadn’t stolen cement during its construction. The orders came to blow up that block.” Father drummed his fingers on the table. “Blow it up.”

Mother suggested gently that he go to bed, she seemed even more tired than he was from the story of the destroyed city.

“I can’t sleep, I haven’t slept in three days,” he replied softly, without expression. “There was a factory there, built by Komsomol workers. The factory was destroyed. Some Komsomol official came and said that there was a time capsule in the foundation, a message to future citizens. It was put there in 1972. He asked us to find it. We sent him packing, but he called somewhere, and the bulldozer was ordered to dig. He had brought a blueprint at least, he knew where to dig. He said a museum would take the capsule. We found it—a silver tube, dusty and dented. The engraving was beautiful: “With a Komsomol greeting to the builders of the future! To be opened in 1992.” The tube was dented, so it opened. And inside there was nothing but cigarette butts. And a note written on a pack of Prima cigarettes: “The Battalion Does Not Surrender.”