Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

The steam engine seemed to be complicit, its wheels, connecting rods, pistons, furnace, and boiler made history; but now the steam engine looked aged, knowing it had been rendered useless and scorned by the electric commuter trains.

To my right, thousands of dacha dwellers were emptying out of trains onto the station platforms. Into the humid and dirty city smells rolled in from the Garden Ring Road and from the Moskva River covered in mucky seaweed, the aromas of thousands of baskets with the first apples, with fragrant grushovka tomatoes, and endless bouquets of dacha flowers and jasmine came like fresh streams of scents and perfumes.

Jasmine had bloomed during the week; everyone coming home from the weekend cut some of the flowers and saw that everyone else on the train was carrying sweet, cloying jasmine as well and the suburban platforms were covered with the tiny cups of its flowers, which resembled the tea sets of fairies.

A storm was gathering over Moscow, the wind was rising, the dry wind that comes before a shower, not yet very strong but capable of wrinkling the heavy fabric of men’s jackets and trousers and lifting and fluttering women’s light dresses, skirts, blouses, and scarves. In the wind, the men seemed to be moving calmly and unemotionally, while the women—buds of fabric—slightly intoxicated by the jasmine, pupils dilated by heart palpitations and difficult breathing in the crowded train, were vibrating, expecting the approaching rain, listening to the car horns that had become too jarring.

Another dozen such evenings and something was bound to happen in the city, compounded out of the electric atmosphere, dilated pupils, and excitement taken for nervousness. A woman tripped on the metal-trimmed steps, and dozens of teaspoons fell from her purse and spilled out across the stairs, ringing merrily, dazzling with their polished dimples, but everyone turned around as if there had been a shot.

Drawn by a morbid interest, I went where Lenin had been wounded; on a Sunday evening the streets around the station were empty except near the hospital that gave rabies shots around the clock where several men with bandages were waiting—obviously attacked by a dog—and smoking silently, listening to their bodies: Was the sickness, the madness, the frothing at the mouth, coming, were the shots too late?

The square where Kaplan had taken the shot was empty except for a bronze Lenin. Only once in a while, cars drove by on neighboring streets, the dusty and unwashed windows of the former factory looked down, recognizing nothing, and the silence seemed padded, as if the entire area had been covered with poplar fluff. The place that was once open and tragic was now surrounded by the wild growth of new houses and courtyards.

I spent the evening wandering the streets, coming out by the Donskoi Cemetery and then the Shukhov Tower; force lines—the shining trolley tracks—led me, not letting my movement become a relaxed and unimportant stroll, pushing me forward; through them the city communicated its magnetized, edgy state before the storm.

When the rain began, I went home, almost falling asleep on my train, where it traveled aboveground and the raw air, filled with creosote from the ties, poured into the windows.

In the metro I had a vision, half-asleep, of an empty compartment, the long corridors of the cars, the curtained windows, the tedious jangle of a spoon stirring sugar in a glass with a metal holder, so prolonged that you couldn’t imagine that tea could absorb that much sugar; voices in the distance, muffled by the vestibules at the end of cars, flashes of light—the crossing lights—and once again the rattling spoon.

The quickest way home from the metro was along the railroad; the signal lights shone over the empty crossing and a large pack of homeless dogs ran along the embankment.

I was exhausted when I got home; my parents and grandmother were sleeping, and I went to bed without even washing up—a heavy sleepiness that portended a bad dream was knocking me off my feet; I fell asleep just after hearing the piercing blare of the freight train’s horn, forcing late-night idlers to recoil from the platform edge.

I dreamed I was walking in the cool morning through a field along a railroad track; in the distance, by the switchman’s hut, enveloped in fog, a train had stopped.

It was the train that had carried Lenin’s body. The engine huffed steam, a sentry stood by the stairs to the cabin, wearing an old Red Army uniform. Coming closer, I recognized him—his photograph was probably the smallest one on Grandmother’s wall of photographs, hung on the periphery, like a distant planet or Sputnik; he was Grandmother Tanya’s great-uncle, the first in the family to sign up for the Red Army and the first to die at the age of nineteen in an armored train hit by artillery and captured by General Shkuro’s “Wolf Division.”

He stood on watch, swaying clumsily, for he consisted of two parts, separated by a saber slash from right collarbone to left leg. But he did not fall apart, some force held the dead body together, dressed in an undershirt marked by two hoof prints.

Seeing me, the sentry nodded toward the cabin—go in—and blinked, probably to indicate that he had recognized me, too.

There was no one in the cabin; the tender was empty, it didn’t smell of coal near the furnace, but fire roared inside it, and the steam engine was slowly restoring the connection among pistons, wheels, and axles, becoming a machine again.

A shout came from the boiler, but the dead sentry was unfazed. A shout, then another shout, and someone struggled in the boiler, being burned alive, trying to break the door, get through the iron walls. The train started, the screams blended into the powerful roar of the machine, as if the burning man had turned into thrust, flames, and the energy of the furnace.

I walked through the cars; in the first was the coffin with Lenin’s body, heaped with winter fir wreaths. The fir fragrance was strong, and frost covered the windows; the black mourning crepe, stretched into tight folds, resembled the wings of bats, and the coffin seemed to be embraced by a gigantic bat.

The stink of stale river silt filled the hallway, and a shiny black centipede crawled out from a compartment door and climbed up the wall; near the ceiling, several others waited for it. Someone was vomiting in the compartment, murky water poured into the hallway with small fry and seaweed floating in it.

Chapayev was inside, vomiting sand and filthy water, centipedes climbing out of his ears, and his eyes were white, like a boiled fish.

In the restaurant car, twenty-six men were celebrating, black-haired, so tanned that even death’s pallor could not touch them; they drank wine from clay jugs and the wine poured out through the bullet holes in their chests.

Also in the restaurant car, sailors in striped shirts and round caps were gathered around a basin of macaroni, and watched entranced as the noodles turned into white maggots that gobbled up the meat.

There were other cars, other people, men, women, missing legs, arms, and eyes, marked by torture, in uniforms of various eras or half-naked with red stars carved into their backs.

Alongside the train, a hundred cavalrymen raced over meadows and ravines, passing through trees and strata of earth, creating fox fire in the decaying swamp wood. The horsemen passed the train, then fell behind, swooping out on the right, then the left, galloped in the air over the roofs of the cars, nimbly, like swallows or swifts. Semitranslucent, with silvery moon faces, the riders pointed the way with their sabers, and their horses—clots of forest shadows, flowing and slipping—picked up speed effortlessly, leaping over rivers that could not catch their reflection.