Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

Her voice would change and she’d always read the last lines gravely:

“Why are you mute, field?” Grandmother would repeat, and I thought that she had in mind a specific field, but one that didn’t exist anywhere upon the land.

The field of Pushkin’s fairy tale with its severed heads, evil sorcerers in caves, dark rivers, traces of old battles, a field where everyone is alone—when Grandmother finished reciting, I imagined that I lived in that kind of field, the emotions were familiar, even though I couldn’t say why I experienced it that way.

I was overwhelmed by a numbing sense of being an orphan. I had two grandmothers, I had a father and a mother—and yet I was an orphan. Yet how, and why, could that be? The answer was hidden in a field of silence.

We finished up the grains, I sat down to my homework, and everything that had occurred at the table became unreal and vanished. But a week later Grandmother would bring another few kilos of buckwheat—my parents chided her for her excessive purchases—and it would all repeat: the lamplight, the photographs awakened in the dark, the horror of losses, “There once was a man in the land of Uz,” “Why are you mute, field,” and once again I tried to control the feeling that I had approached a most important truth.

I imagined that every old thing had an empty space, like that within a porcelain statuette, filled with silence; every person had a space like that. Not swallowed words, not a secret, but silence; it was a silence that did not require the nominative case—who or what?—but the prepositional—about whom or what?

I started looking for evidence that my intuitions, which I felt deeply but could not express clearly, were not delusional. I became a detective of the unknown: there were some words or some object that would confirm that my feelings were not lying to me, that what everyone was being silent about actually existed. I did not expect instant and full revelation, I needed just a hint, a sign.

Where could I seek it? I lived in a one-bedroom apartment, went to school, spent the summer at the dacha, occasionally visited my parents’ friends… I leafed through the books on our shelves: I might find a forgotten notation in the margins, an old note or receipt, a page from a calendar used as a bookmark; I pulled photos out of their frames, looking for a hidden second picture; since I was good at hiding places—I had several in the apartment—I looked for those that belonged to others, but found nothing more than presents bought ahead of time and money secreted away from burglars.

Actually, I didn’t believe the find would be in a hidden place; I rather expected that in deference to my persistence, a second face, a second bottom would be revealed to me. And the more ordinary and unobtrusive the object would be, the more unexpectedly and obviously would its ability as shape-shifter appear.

Naturally, these searches were not all I lived for; they occurred like bouts of fever, and between them my existence was the ordinary existence of a schoolboy. But I can’t remember anything about those long intervals, although I remember my desire to get evidence of the reality of the conspiracy of silence and the intensity of every moment of the search.

When I had searched the apartment and other accessible places many times without result, I almost lost faith in my suppositions. The world was so solidly constructed, so authentic in the poverty of its unambiguity that I grew depressed, sensing that my entire life was being decided, that if I gave up now and believed that there was no false bottom, then my guesses would retreat from me, choose another paladin, another detective.

Give up, all the circumstances, all my failed attempts, said: give up. And only the weakest, barely audible voice whispered: give up and you will be no more, because “you” are that inner ear and inner eye; you did not notice that each failure was a step; you are close, so very close to success, try again!

Try! And so one day when I was alone in the apartment I set the alarm clock in a visible place, marking time until Grandmother Tanya’s return, and started a new search. Despair, despair, I had fingered the lining of clothes in the wardrobe, removed books from the shelves, opened the forbidden drawers in the desk, discovered general and private secrets, learning who was hiding what from whom, opened jars of shoe polish, peeked behind mirrors, reached into the ventilator openings, studied the innards of the washing machine—despair, despair, despair, everything was empty and silent!

The minute hand was hurrying, catching up with the hour hand, I had fifteen minutes before Grandmother’s return, I had to put everything back the way it was, lock all the cabinet doors the correct number of turns, line up the shoes in the entry, wipe away my fingerprints in the dust—I would have to lie and say I thought I would do a bit of housecleaning—move the hangers in the closet to the exact intervals at which they hung before my incursion. Neither my grandmother nor mother would notice anything unless I left obvious traces, but my father with his passion for order would be affected by the smallest, most insignificant change that occurred in his absence; he would feel the difference, so I had to use my fingertips to learn where a thing had properly lain and return it to that position.

Thirteen minutes, twelve, ten, nine, six—and suddenly in my rush to find clues I knew that grandmother would be late; she wasn’t aware of my plans and likely wouldn’t have approved but with blessed generosity she was giving me another half hour by walking from the metro.

And in that unaccounted-for half hour, when all signs of a search were removed, when the clock was ticking unhurriedly, I saw the apartment with new eyes, I saw that there were a few places, a few objects to which I had never paid attention, even though that seemed impossible.

For an instant it was like being inside a rebus or brain twister: a ray of light from the corridor pointed out the pier glass, which reflected the brass bell that Grandmother used to indicate the start or end of our games; I picked it up and rang it and the brass ding-ding began the countdown to a special time, when toys come alive.

They were right there, gathered in the corner of Grandmother’s couch: a rag clown with hook-nosed plastic boots; Timka, a stuffed dog with button eyes; Mymrik, a rubber man with a hedgehog-sharp nose who carried a first-aid pouch sewn by Grandmother over his shoulder; Bunny, a white winter hare, synthetic and bedraggled; and a few others, secondary, unnamed. They formed a partisan unit, the underground anti-Nazi fighters. Grandmother and I usually played war, and it never occurred to me to ask why these completely unwarlike creatures became partisans.

Evening after evening they crept through ravines in the folds of the blanket toward the back of the couch, where the railroad tracks were, laid mines under an important German train carrying tanks or weapons, retreated, binding the wounded with bandages from Mymrik’s pouch; the clown stayed behind to provide cover, led the Germans on a wild-goose chase, and died in the snow of the sheet billowing from beneath the blanket, only to be resurrected for the next day’s foray.

That day my entire toy army, my comrades, whose imaginary wounds were as my own, real ones, sat leaning against the back of the couch as if it were a log, and looked at a single point; the trajectory of their gaze indicated the edge of the bookshelf. There was a book, a big book bound in dark brown leather that blended with the shelf; there was no title on its spine. That must be why I glanced right past it so many times, as if it were insignificant.