Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

“To be opened in 1992,” Father repeated. I think he felt like a woodsman who cut down a beloved tree and discovered its rotting core.

“There it is, the future,” Father said. “Cigarette butts.”

Father went back to the earthquake zone. Despite the horror, he seemed happier there; indisputable and obvious, the ruins cut off any thoughts of the future. He had ceased being rational, he thought that the massacre in Sumgait, the Spitak earthquake, and other small and big disasters were related somehow, that nature and humans had become one. “It will start soon,” he would say, and I could see why he did not perceive everything that had happened thus far to be the beginning; the more threatening the shots and underground tremors and the longer the lines at stores, the clearer it became that these were the events that could set off an avalanche, but were not the avalanche itself; Father knew this field, he dealt with snow issues, and he used a dynamic mathematical model of avalanche for his theoretical model of catastrophe.

And just a few months later—Father was still on the trip—I came home in the evening; Grandmother Tanya was watching television with a very strange picture on the screen—an enormous line of tanks, kilometers long. And the line was moving fast.

They moved across a huge bridge with angular trusses, they moved in an endless flow across the Amu-Darya River back from Afghanistan, the tanks and armored carriers wreathed in blue-gray smoke with their gun barrels raised, headlights burning, and red flags waving; soldiers with their hands at their temples stood knee-deep or chest-deep in the tank hatches. It was like the movement of ice, like ice cracking in the upper reaches of a river; a chain of events had begun, events that, like people, stood in line to happen . There was such power, such impatience in that movement home that it seemed the tanks would never be able to stop anywhere, they would drive and drive, like windup cars that never run down.

And it was true—that fall I saw the parade on the anniversary of the October Revolution. Our family and my parents’ friends had a tradition: we would meet near the U.S. Embassy on the Garden Ring Road, to see the columns of war vehicles headed toward the Kremlin through the eyes of American diplomats. The children grew up, others were born, but the tradition was unchanged. We all climbed up on a parapet, while the tanks and missiles rolled by, followed by the trucks, and marines threw their collars, navy blue trimmed with a triple line of white, with handwritten signs—DMB-84, 85, 86, 87. That moment—the flying collars with fluttering ribbons, the hands reaching for them—was repeated annually, making the parade a city holiday, not a military one, turning the military machines into something theatrical, not quite real, the setting for a film shoot.

But that autumn the collars didn’t fly into the crowd—maybe there had been an order not to waste state property—and the tanks were grim and menacing, as if they were the same ones that could not stop, the ones that crossed the bridge over the Amu-Darya.

Soldiers in the cab of a tented truck—I think they were border guards—waved meekly to the crowd, and then one who must have seen family in the crowd along the sidewalk shouted at the top of his lungs:

“We’ll be back, wait!”

The tanks, armored vehicles, trucks with marines, missile haulers, and self-propelled artillery turned onto the New Arbat, toward the Kremlin, moving out of sight, going, going, going; the huge canvases of military banners carried in open cars seemed vulnerable.

“We’ll be back!” the solider yelled again, and now it sounded like a threat; the troops stayed in formation, but it seemed that they could also move helter-skelter, for the flags of the military controllers no longer had the same power and there might be a shell hidden in the equipment; the moving vehicles made windowpanes rattle in a high mosquito-like whine.

I don’t remember any more parades; they may have still taken place, or maybe the marshals also sensed the new mood of the tanks ; we stopped going to the Garden Ring Road, my parents’ group of friends fell apart. My father quit his job and became eccentric, inventing crazy alarm systems, rescue methods for a fire, and was a regular at the patent bureau, which was a gathering place for scientists like him and stubborn autodidacts, as well.

I grew closer to him and my mother, the grandmothers’ health kept deteriorating, and we had trouble remembering our previous life, when everyone was healthy. Illness lived in our apartment, not us, we were merely its servants and messengers, illness consumed time, took away the right to make plans, and made tomorrow both predetermined and yet uncertain; we almost never watched television and rarely opened the papers and magazines that were bloated with news and had huge print runs. To make money, they found work for me as a laborer on archeological and geographic expeditions, and in the winter I studied and indifferently passed from one grade to another.

Two years passed this way.

The grandmothers were brought back to life by the March referendum on preserving the USSR. It’s not that they were cured, more as if they had asked the illness to give them a reprieve from infirmity, a last surge of strength. When 77 percent of the people voted “yes,” Grandmother Mara remembered the planting, the dacha where she had not been for a few years, and began reproaching us—probably we had not whitewashed the apple tree trunks for the winter or dug up the beds in the autumn for spring planting; and Grandmother Tanya asked us to buy her new glasses and resubscribe to newspapers.

They both demanded to be with me, once again they competed in signs of attention, giving me trifles from their pensions, and they were happy that we could go to the nearest park, that I had grown, and they could brag about me to the neighbors; having lived through feebleness and knowing it would be back, and for good, they hastened to give me everything, they opened accounts in my name at the bank without consulting each other; and my parents, seeing how the former family was being reborn, asked me not to go away for the summer, not to apply for jobs, but to stay with the grandmothers.

I was uncomfortable and embarrassed, I noticed signs of their frailty that should not be noticed, I was clumsy, self-conscious, pathetic, and unable to respond to their love. Grandmother Mara kept talking about my future, my wonderful wife, and my good apartment—she meant hers, and this kindly rejection of her own future grated on me. Grandmother Tanya was much quieter, but she started holding my hand much more frequently, as if trying to slip something into it or seeking support.

That summer I was attracted to bridges, ancient houses, factory chimneys, and monuments. I avoided rallies, loudspeaker voices, screaming posters, and took side alleys; old stones and bricks and cast-iron bridge trusses had a better sense of the future than any orator; monuments knew more than those agitating around them. I wandered around the city, looking for advice—who should I be, how to live; I went through the places, names and events imprinted on the city’s memory.

One Sunday I found myself at the Paveletsky Station, where the steam engine that brought Lenin’s body from Gorki in 1924 was placed on a pedestal.

In school, we were taken to see the steam engine and a nearby monument marking the spot where Fanya Kaplan shot at Lenin during a rally at the Mikhelson factory. Back then I was unpleasantly surprised by the nearness of those two points: the shot with a poisoned bullet, as we were told, seemed to pin Lenin to the place of the assassination attempt, and six years later they brought his body back here.