Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

The room had a large table with papers, a wooden darning mushroom over which a torn sock or stocking was stretched, a velvet pincushion, a basket with pieces of fabric, an old portable sewing machine, books, and table games always ready for me. It was all so well-studied, so reliable, always in the same place, determined long before my birth, and it seemed that life went on year after year, attaching objects and people ever more firmly to their place, gently and not quite really aging them.

Only the three frogs, as tiny as Japanese netsuke, meant something different. Sometimes, when no one was home, I sat and looked at them, trying to understand them whole, as a triple statuette, three syllables of a single word. I sensed an old suffering in them that was causing the glaze to gradually crack and chip.

Once during winter vacation, I was dying of boredom as I recuperated from a bad flu and high temperature. Still sensing the remains of the fever, I wandered the rooms agitatedly, looking for something, picking up and putting down objects, seeking a release from illness to freedom. I found nothing; tired, irritated, I turned on the television—at twilight during vacation they ran adventure movies for schoolchildren.

I don’t remember the film, one of the many Soviet movies about our intelligence agents in the West, shot on pretty much the same streets of Tallinn or Vilnius. Fired up by the shooting and fighting, still reliving the chase and shoot-out at the end, I wandered around the apartment again, found myself in Grandmother’s room, and my eyes were fixed on the three frogs at the edge of the table.

In spy movies a small detail—a beige handkerchief in a jacket pocket, a bottle of wine on a café table, the rear window lowered in the car—shows the invisible spectator that the surveillance has failed, the operation is off, connections have been figured out, and danger is all around, dissolved in the carefree day, for any passerby could be counterintelligence. But the sign has to be extremely natural, unobtrusive, so no one watching could guess it was a special signal.

Suddenly, with the same certainty as the movie’s hero, I understood that the three frogs were such a signal. Grandmother Tanya decided to give it to me, to show how people really live—see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. My intuitive guess about the vast expanses of silence had its second proof, after the book in the brown binding, the book without words.

I took the statuette and moved it under the lamp, to show (in the tradition of spy movies) that I had noticed it and got the message.

Grandmother Tanya came home. Awhile later she dropped into the room where I was reading and gave me a quick look. Then I walked down the hall past her room. The three frogs were still under the lamp, where I had moved them. The brown book lay before her on the table, opened to the first glossy white page. Grandmother was scribbling with a ballpoint pen on a scrap of paper in preparation for starting a line. There was no determination in her pose, she brought the pen to the top of the page and then put it away, picked up another pen that might not be as messy; it was as if she knew that the first word would inexorably oblige her to continue.

I understood that Grandmother had sat this way many times before, fighting with herself, remembering all the previous failed attempts, and that today the pen would not touch the page, either. But at the moment I sensed that my future had been born. I was prepared to wait.

My attachment to Grandmother Tanya weakened over the summer vacation, when Grandmother Mara took over—my summertime dacha grandmother; in the city she lived separately, but I spent the three summer months with her. Heavy, solid, and physically strong, she was a true dacha sovereign. Our small plot was filled with apple trees, plums, cherries, currants, gooseberries, sea buckthorn; we grew potatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, turnips, beets, squash, pumpkins, and herbs. Grandmother Mara would walk around the garden looking for a bit of space to plant something else. It seemed she lived from spring to fall, barely tolerating winter, waiting for the first warm sunlight to put seedlings in cans and milk cartons onto the windowsill next to the frosty glass.

She’d gone through many professions. She’d been a maid, a warehouse keeper, a seamstress, she worked the elevator in a clinical laboratory. When they showed me pictures of her in her twenties and thirties, I thought I was being fooled, for I had seen that woman in the mosaics at the Kiev metro station and in the sculptures on Revolution Square. I could not consider that young woman a relative any more than you can consider a figurative or architectural style a relative. At one with her generation, she was the embodiment of the era’s heroine, “a simple Soviet girl,” a peasant from a leading kolkhoz, a swimmer, veterinarian, or student.

They were women who had not acquired femininity, often not pretty, but even the pretty ones retained the soft dullness of peasant rag dolls; in astonishment at getting used to blouses, jackets, shoes, simple necklaces; joyous and inspired, dynamic in metro frescoes and static, caught by a camera; as accustomed as nudes in an artist’s studio to seeing themselves depicted on gables and ceilings, to identifying with the great construction, with socialism, which had chosen them as heroines, or to use today’s language, as top models, for just as today runways and magazines are used to display fashions, it was through their features and clothing that they portrayed the new times.

Her father gave his daughters peasant names as dowries: Mara was a family nickname for Marfa, and her sisters were called Fevronya, Pavlina, Agrippina, Felka, and Lukerya, old-fashioned village names. It was probably the only thing he could give them, sending them out into the world, before dying in the Civil War. She grew up in post-revolutionary orphanages, and for all her determination to have a family, she retained a sort of unease about her femininity, which apparently was taken as emancipation by the men who courted her.

In the photographs from the war years, of the sort that have vanished, a clearly feminine image appeared, as if the four-year wait for her husband and fear for her children had given her a face. Gradually, the individuality wore away; in the war years she approached the peak of self-awareness and then gave herself back to the era so it could fill her head with the appropriate thoughts, concepts, and ideas. Grandmother Mara enthusiastically gave herself up to this important work until there was an upheaval in her later years. She thought the world was broken, Communism was broken; bitterly she locked herself in her memories of the past. But then I was born, and she turned to me as passionately as she had welcomed the new future in the thirties.

She liked lipstick and kisses, she liked sweets. She always had candies in a bowl, chocolates and caramels with jam filling. My family considered sweets excessive, an indulgence that ruined not only teeth but character and attitude, the start of spiritual decay; they brought me up with ridiculous seriousness, unable to distinguish between the essential and the trifling, taking extreme positions on everything, as if it were party politics and not candy.

Only Grandmother Mara lived as if we had earned all this—chocolate, cake, candy, halvah, caramel, marmalade, meringue—just by surviving, by being born despite the war, destruction, and hunger, and therefore, we should celebrate and sweeten every day.

When she entered a room it felt as if several people had come in. Having grown up in horribly crowded peasant huts and workers’ barracks, in the human rivers of trains and stations, she never could separate herself completely from the masses. She walked around the room, she gestured, as if trying to fill the space with people; every movement presumed the presence of someone else, a line, a parade, a meeting of party members, a crowd storming a store counter. Internally, I staggered, feeling the wave of her presence, intensified by the odor of her perfume that rolled over me.