Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

Observing them, I noticed their colleagues, leaving by a side entrance and mixing with the crowd. On the sidewalk you could still tell they were KGB, but then they became faces, sleeves, hats, shoulders, and heads in the general crowd, vanishing without a trace, without adding a single person but raising the density of the living mass. Probably later you could find them in photographs, chanting about freedom, raising their arms, embracing neighbors, waving their fists at “Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky.”

Beneath the windows of the KGB, Lubyanka agents were enjoying the overthrow of the Lubyanka god; they had developed the art of mimicry to such a degree that it was stronger than their dutiful respect. I had thought that some general had given orders to the surveillance service, but orders no longer had their former power, and the surveillance agents had changed into civilian garb and left, beginning their private lives from that moment on.

The moment was joyful and partially comical—albeit with a note of danger; the spies were gone and the moment when they could have been identified and counted was gone, too.

The statue of Dzerzhinsky fell across the square, the soft and heavy thud of metal on asphalt blocking the roar of the crowd; and at that very moment Ivan came out of the museum.

I was still trying to figure out who was coming toward me so headlong, as if he wanted to arrest me, when he was just three steps away; he was practically running, like an actor performing in two plays on the same day, buttoning his jacket on the go; he did not recognize me as he went past to open the door of an empty car, parked right there; the car came alive, flashed its headlights, the driver, who had been hiding or sleeping, appeared; the rear lights drew red looping lines in the twilight and disappeared into a lane.

I went into the museum, up the empty stairs to the roof; there were no workers or guards, just a toy robot’s blinking lights on one floor; the door to the roof was wide open.

From above, the dark heads of the crowd looked like black caviar, a viscous mass that had filled the square, a strange dish for gourmets of this sort of spectacle. I stood on the roof in front of a barrel of caviar, an accidental guest at someone else’s banquet, and I expected cutlery to appear from the sky for the real diners prepared for the feast, for gluttony, to devour as much as possible without even tasting it.

Moscow had spent the previous years in lines; there were fewer individual pedestrians on the streets than people standing queuing up, looking at the back of another’s head. At any one moment, sometimes even at night, a family member was in line, sometimes people passed along their number to somebody else, writing it down on somebody’s hand, and my school pals and I tried not to wash them off—number 87, number 113—showing off what long lines we had been in.

The ability to form a chain was a skill, a form of existence; there were lines for lines: you had to stand in one for the right to sign up for another.

And this was just such a line spread out over Lubyanka Square, taking up its entire area and splashing out into the lanes, where human currents were pouring into the big sea of people standing in line for the future. If I had been in the street, I would have wholeheartedly rejoiced, kissing and hugging strangers; but from the roof I could see the waves of emotions and unstable feelings traveling over the square; I was happy to see them born and grieved over their quick death.

The year before I had worked as a laborer on an expedition in Kazakhstan. We traveled across a steppe where half-wild horses lived; the magnificent, free creatures galloped across an ideal plane, animals that had never seen a tree, house, fence, or corral, born for an unbounded plain. To me they weren’t animals, not flesh and blood, but spirits of motion.

A month later our expedition came back the same way—there were thousands of dead horses in the steppe; there had been a pestilence.

I was astonished by the speed with which a heavy mass of beauty became a mass of dead meat; the stench was unbearable, and it was impossible to believe it came from bodies that I had seen so recently not as bodies but as spiritual symbols.

I could not believe that beauty could die this way, it should have had a different death, pure and incorporeal. But the sun had turned the steppe into a rupturing abscess, and small predators scurried around the horse carcasses, foxes intoxicated by the abundance of meat were not afraid of cars and got run over, the horse plague had overwhelmed everything, and vultures circled in the sky, hypnotized by the sight, not knowing where to land, which carcass, for there were thousands of carcasses. This chewing, burping, grunting, and flying horde, consisting of teeth, beaks, and bellies, made a sound like the quiet buzz of a circular saw.

On the roof, where the emotional wave did not reach, spreading horizontally and sending throbbing sounds upward which resembled the tide, I realized that this communality was held together by short-lived emotions. Disintegration awaited it, the decay of feelings that, like the meat of victims of a cataclysm, will clutter the space, and in that environment ideas with the air of deterioration would form and carrion-eating creatures would be born. The physical sensation of feelings doomed to an early death moved me away from the edge of the roof.

It was time to go down.

I got home late; Grandmother Tanya went to sleep without waiting up for me; the high moon filled her room with a weak emulation of the blue glow of the lamp she used to radiate herself with long ago. I went to my room; the light was on—I thought she had gone in and forgotten to turn off the lamp.

On the table, in the lamplight, among last year’s textbooks I had forgotten to turn in, lay a large book, the size of a barnyard ledger, in a brown binding, with neat stiches of waxed thread. Next to it was Grandmother’s porcelain statuette, the three frogs “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing”; it seemed to me that they were no longer covering their mouth, eyes, and ears.

Frightened, I went to check on Grandmother Tanya: after writing that , even though I didn’t know what that was, she could die, maybe she had lingered on in order to complete this work.

Barricades and bonfires still filled the city’s squares; shells and bullets were still loaded in weapons; and the book—had Grandmother really been writing it for five years, hiding it from everyone?—seemed like a kind of a weapon, too.

Grandmother Tanya was breathing, breathing more evenly than usual, more calmly, as if her illness had left her. I envied her, she seemed so at peace, complete and finished; I wished that someday I would lie as calmly, and I lightly touched her gray hair, thinning with every year; the planet of another person’s mind, weightless in sleep, rested on the pillow.

Carefully, I turned the heavy cover and leafed through the pages, not reading the words, recognizing the colors of the ink—I had seen these pens on Grandmother Tanya’s desk—recognizing the various forms of her penmanship, the various stages of illness, when pain directed her fingers and the letters grew bigger, childishly disobedient, and then diminished in size when the pain weakened.

Here were the first lines, the first sentences. But what was it—had she decided to write a novel instead of a memoir, a novel stylized as a family chronicle, invented from the first letter to the last, kindly and edifying? Why fiction, why artistic invention, when I had thirsted for truth, even if it were meager, but still truth?

“The history of our family goes back to the XIV century,” Grandmother wrote. “Our family had military men, heads of the nobility, priests and metropolitans, generals and naval men, revolutionaries and philosophers, officers tried in the Decembrist plot and terrorists in the Socialist Revolutionary organization. Your great-grandfather, about whom you know nothing, was a nobleman and military doctor. And you, my grandson, are the seventeenth generation in our line.”