Сергей Лебедев - The Year of the Comet

The train exited the forest and hurtled down a long valley; in the distance, by the horizon, more banks of fog appeared. The riders sped through hay ricks without disturbing a single straw, occasionally startling a bird; I was thrown from the car, the train vanished in the fog, and the horsemen galloped in farewell, dissolving into swarms of lightning bugs and sparks from steppe campfires.

In the morning, I did not remember the dream right away but I awoke with a sense of loss—I did not yet understand what or whom I had lost.

Noon found me near the metro station at Revolution Square.

The famous sculptures—the army scout with a dog, the sailor signalman, the revolutionary laborer, the young woman who was a Voroshilov sharpshooter, the Stakhanovite worker with a raised hammer—had turned from ordinary monuments into monuments to a lost era, as if overnight the historical clocks had been reset.

In mid-August I dropped by to see my mother at the Ministry of Geology on Krasnaya Presnya Street. Her windows opened onto the zoo, and in the summer heat you could smell the animals, a scent unthinkable in a city, foreign to asphalt and glass.

The hippos, elephants, and crocodiles wallowed in the pools in their enclosures, ate, excreted, mated, and the zoo stank of putrid water, rotting cane, and tainted meat.

A vulture’s revolting call from behind bars was answered by a jackal or hyena. Once in a while, a random pedestrian, aroused by the scents of hay beds, nests, and dens, wet puppies and naked fledglings, the odors of predators and herbivores, mutually repellant, would discover the prehistoric creature within and with a quick look around send up a pithecanthropic hunting cry, responding to the animals with a ferocious animal sound.

The ministry hallways, carpeted in long runners, were filled with the clacking of electric typewriters; there were oases of quiet near the doors to the bosses’ offices, where people slowed down and lowered their voices as they passed.

The ministry countered the wild scents of the zoo with the smell of paper—it seemed that opening any door would reveal papers piled to the ceiling; even in the cafeteria on the first floor, the paper smell mixed into the flavor of soup, schnitzel, and fruit compote.

That day something had changed in the ministry corridors. The machines would start typing and then stop. There were fewer people. But most important, there was a new kind of air current, as if previously the draft had moved along the corridors in accordance with a general plan, decorously and strictly, and now the currents were all mixed up, new ones appeared that did not know how to behave in a ministry; they tore papers out of people’s hands and slammed doors and windows shut.

The ministry bureaucrats, extremely sensitive to such things, waited it out, staying put at their desks; the document flow stopped until it was clear what was going on, and the huge ministerial machine spun its wheels. There was still a long line at the security desk, maps, reports, and rolls of millimeter-marked paper were still carried from office to office, but the tension of power, the electricity that generated decisions, had slackened suddenly, and the four floors of the ministry building resembled a hive where the queen bee had died.

I went into my mother’s office; it was empty, she had gone to lunch with her colleagues. The insolent draft had pushed open the poorly fastened window and the office was filled with flying papers stamped “For Internal Use Only” and “Secret” that had been left on desks in violation of the rules. The zoo smells were no longer just swamp decay and rancid feed, but unrest, anxiety, as if the animals’ blood, warmed by the heat, was taking in a constant drip of hormones, and every gland was awakened, swollen and pulsating, responding to the stirrings in the air. The animals sensed this more deeply than the humans.

The animals were not lying down, they wandered, pushing against the cages, whipping themselves with their tails; suddenly an elephant trumpeted, lions, bears, and tigers roared, rhinoceroses and oxen screamed, as did every creature whose jaws were big enough for their voices to be heard. The noises clashed, tumbled, whirled until they blended into one sound that was no longer the cry of wild animals. It seemed it was not flesh and blood but a thing screaming, as if suddenly there was an onset of metal fatigue at some gigantic construction site, seams bursting, I-beams and channel bars collapsing, a wave of deformation traveling across all its elements, and the tower—I imagined it was a tower—began falling sideways, twisting into a corkscrew and emitting that scream of a disintegrating whole.

The next day was Saturday and my parents went to the dacha, leaving me in charge of the grandmothers. They were taking a long weekend, planning to return in a few days, but we did not meet until a week later.

Over the weekend it felt like there was a human flow across the city, the start of a vortex; the seemingly relaxed passersby were going about their business, but one had the impression they were carried along, led by an invisible force. I wandered the streets; I thought that everything had a secret meaning, and the policeman who didn’t pay attention to the Zhiguli that crossed a solid line knew something and was lost in thought, and the man with a suitcase hurrying to the train station had reason to rush; something had happened, people and things had changed, you could push your finger through a brick, fall into the metro through the thickness of the sidewalk, meet a talking dog, win five thousand rubles on a trolley ticket, and walk by unnoticed through the security at the Spassky Tower entrance to the Kremlin. It was only the general habit of belief that bricks were hard, the ground solid, and sentries vigilant, that kept the city in its former state.

Monday morning, the human flow in the city increased when the radio announcer, seemingly sedated, read: “In the aim of preventing chaos and anarchy… The collapse of society… Forming the State Committee on the State of Emergency in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”; the voice wanted to calm people and called them to order, but it was so recognizable, so laughable, that when it used the simple-folk pronunciation of Vice President Yanaev’s patronymic, calling him “Ivanych” instead of “Ivanovich,” more and more people left their radios with every word and went out into the street, albeit not yet knowing what to do or where to go.

That evening I found myself by the White House. The period had begun in which the concepts of “day” and “date” had lost meaning—it was a gap in eras when time itself becomes an event. Rumors moved among the thousands of people like rustling waves: “The Dzerzhinsky Division is headed this way,” “There’s a column of tanks on Komsomolsky,” “The ‘shoot to kill’ order has been given.” Barricades appeared and grew out of nothing.

Benches, newspaper kiosks, boards, pipes, cars, buses, streetlamps, grates—they remained in their places, they had a precise function. Suddenly, as if someone had looked at the city with a different view, the view of a revolutionary, a fighter, things began to move on their own, forming obstructions, lying down and dovetailing beneath memorial plaques commemorating the first revolution, the battles of 1905.

The White House, as the House of Soviets of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was known, hearkening back to the history of the Soviet regime, was built in a “dormant” historical zone, with the Barricades movie theater, the Barrikadnaya metro station. Like an enormous paperweight, it held down the crumbling ground of Krasnaya Presnya, which was already squashed by a high-rise, the house on Uprising Square.