Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

I immediately remembered that I had seen Grandmother sitting at the table with the book in front of her. She masked those moments so deftly, making them accidental, meaningless, transitional between two pastimes, say, reading and darning, that I was completely fooled.

I took the book down from the shelf; there was no name on the cover, either. Heavy, resembling a barnyard ledger, the book opened, revealing the glazed whiteness of empty pages.

Could I have known that this was the printing house mock-up of an important edition? No. Instead, I made another assumption based on all the stories about revolutionaries who wrote their missives from prison with milk or invisible ink. There was a text, it just had to be developed! Grandmother had saved this wordless tome for some reason, set it on her shelf so that it was unnoticeable to others but not to her, perhaps as a reminder of something, always in view.

I was impressed by the gracefulness with which the book was hidden in plain sight; as I turned the empty pages, my excitement and anticipation made me see faded letters. They combined into words, words into lines, the lines filled the pages; the book flickered spectrally, and dissimilar handwriting, various fonts, pictures, photographs, footnotes appeared—all unintelligible, vanishing, slipping away. This was the book of books, an ark of texts that never were, written in accordance with the grammar rules and orthography of various ages; the texts crowded one another, merging, disappearing.

I turned—behind me was the wall of photographs, of silent faces, and I thought I saw a very thin connection between the faces and the handwriting, the phantom bits of text. I did not know whether my desire had given rise to this or whether I was just delirious. I knew it depended on me whether the lines appeared on the white pages; it depended on how I lived, what I sought, what I believed. It would be an original source, a material truth, the answer to my questions; a reward for my loyalty to myself.

Thus my life, without losing its habitual flow, took on a dimension of expectation, an anticipatory spirit of the promised encounter. I hid my knowledge of the mysterious book without letters deep inside me, understanding that faith in its special qualities should not be tested often, was fragile; but I did not give up my efforts.

Amid the household objects, I looked for ones that would take me beyond the quotidian, would open the limits of current history, geography, and destiny. A bronze mortar, an antique microscope, a compass, a Solingen straight razor in a leather sheath, a boot tree, a silver teaspoon, a worn leather cigar case, a prerevolutionary pocket watch with crossed cannons on the lid, a rusty cabbage chopper, heavy green glass apothecary bottles with incomprehensible labels, a forged four-sided nail—they were a vanishing breed, they lived as hangers-on, souvenirs, meaningless trifles; but I, on the contrary, recognized their seniority and wisdom: in the easiest form for a child they taught me about time, about what was authentic and real and how to recognize it.

You could even say that I now had two lives. In one, I was son, grandson, schoolboy, October Scout, pal of my peers, a boy of my age. In the other, when I was alone, I was no one, I enjoyed a blessed anonymity, as if everyone in the world was recognized, defined, attributed, while I was superfluous, auxiliary, unexpected, no one’s son and no one’s grandson; I was frightened by the ease with which I moved into that state, by the strength of the sense of my separateness.

Left alone, I turned into a greedy, indiscriminate seeker of knowledge. My hunger for interests and desires, my search for the heights of impressions, for feeling the meaning of existence spurred by the dreariness of life around me gave my search a savagery.

I raced around the apartment, opening adult books at random, marauding through dictionaries, mastering mysterious-sounding terms and concepts, stealing art books, committing paintings to memory—without any idea of subject or meaning, like a nomad filling saddlebags with booty that seems valuable—things that might change him in the future. I was given a very small interval to create myself out of the only materials available to me; if I didn’t manage it then, I never would.

Grandmother Tanya was hard of hearing. She could hear only very loud sounds: breaking glass, sirens, locomotive whistles. You couldn’t call her on the telephone, get her attention from the next room, make a comment across the table, or reply with your back to her. To have a conversation you had to put your arm around her and speak into her ear. Later, as an adult, I realized that my special attachment to her, aside from other reasons, was the result of those embraces as we talked.

Grandmother Tanya’s deafness annoyed those around her, and she was often asked to use a hearing aid or an ear trumpet. There was a kind of envy in those requests, a secret wish for equality: the suspicion was that Grandmother Tanya, by not using a hearing aid, was making her life easier by excluding one of the most obnoxious components of Soviet reality—sound. Speeches on the radio and music from loudspeakers did not exist for her, and speeches on television and street conversation were nothing more than bare gesticulation.

The home radio was kept on, the old wartime habit, but muted. The television was for daily, ordinary news, but the radio muttered along just in case there was suddenly something incredibly important and fateful. I think the adults subconsciously trusted the radio more, it was older, and they thought that if war broke out, the television would present a soothing picture while the radio would “awaken” and start speaking in the old announcer Levitan’s remembered voice. The radio, the one that had been wired into every apartment, was perceived as the voice of the communal unconscious, like the shared neuron network of all the apartments, which on its own, without a central control, would sense danger and warn us.

I thought that the radio not only broadcast programs but that it eavesdropped on us; it was part of the general conspiracy of vigilance. Grandmother Tanya had a friend who spent the war in the air defense corps charged with early plane detection. When she showed war photos, huge ear trumpets to detect the sound of plane engines, I saw an image of that universal listening, greater than necessary for everyday life, attention to words and sounds that saturated daily life like glue; the power of language, where every word contained a backward glance at itself. I sometimes wished that all the grown-ups would be like Grandmother Tanya; no, I did not wish them harm, I thought it would be better for them, too.

Grandmother Tanya could not hear me, and until my parents got home I had freedom that I didn’t even think about; I took it as a given. Her deafness gave me an early independence, a window of a few hours a day when I was on my own. My inner biography grew out of those hours of solitude.

Not only deaf, Grandmother Tanya also could not see well without her glasses: her vision had been damaged by the strain of editorial work. She was a pensioner, but continued to work at Politizdat ; I didn’t know what the contraction stood for—Publishing House for Political Literature of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR—but I sensed the thrilling monumentality of the name.

I considered Soviet abbreviations and acronyms, offensive in their unnatural combinations of sounds and truncated syllables, as the names of beings that were part of the mysterious hierarchy of power, and Politizdat was, using Christian terms, an archangel, especially since it was located on no less than the Street of Truth, that is, Pravda Street.

One day, grandmother left her purse open; a shiny corner of some metal object was sticking out. Out of simple curiosity I pulled on it—and brought out a ruler without millimeters and centimeters, only unusual, nonexistent measures of length with carved names: Nonpareil, Cicero, Sanspareil, Mignon, Parangon.