Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

I was born in the afternoon of March 14, when a fault opened deep below Bucharest.

The inky tips of seismographic recording needles trembled as the tectonic blow rolled through the Carpathians toward Kiev and Moscow, gradually receding. The face of the world was distorted, as if in a fun-house mirror: avalanches fell from mountains, asphalt roads buckled, railroad tracks turned into snakes. Flags shook on flagpoles, automatic guns rang out in arsenals, barbed wire across state borders broke under the strain; chandeliers in apartments and frozen carcasses in meat processing plants swung like metronomes; furniture on upper floors swayed and scraped. The thousand-kilometer convulsion of the earth’s uterus gave a gentle push to the concrete capsules of missile silos, shook coal onto the heads of miners, and lifted trawlers and destroyers on a wave’s swell.

My mother was in the maternity ward, but her contractions had not started. The tectonic wave reached Moscow, shook the limestone bedrock of the capital, ran along the floating aquifers of rivers, gently grasped the foundations and pilings; an enormous invisible hand shook the skyscrapers, the Ostankino and Shukhov towers, water splashed against the gates of river locks; dishes rattled in hutches, window glass trembled. People called the police—“our house is shaking”—some ran outside, others headed straight for the bomb shelters. Of course, there was no general panic, but this was the first time since the German bombing that Moscow reeled ; it was only at quarter strength, but it was enough to awaken the deepest historical fears. They surged for a second, these fears: of nuclear war, the collapse of the country, the destruction of the capital; few people admitted that they had experienced these fears, everybody talked instead about a slight confused fright, but they were lying.

Mother worked at the Ministry of Geology and was part of a special commission that studied the causes and consequences of natural disasters. She had seen the ruins of Tashkent, the ruins on the Kuril Islands and in Dagestan, thousands of people without shelter, destroyed homes, buckled rail tracks, cracks seemingly leading straight to hell. When the maternity ward was shaken by a gentle wave from the center of the earth, my mother was the only person to understand what was happening, and the unexpectedness of it, the fear that the earth’s tremor had pursued her and found her in the safety of Moscow and induced her into labor.

The earthquake was my first impression of being: the world was revealed to me as instability, shakiness, the wobbliness of foundations. My father was a scholar, a specialist in catastrophe theory, and his child was born at the moment of the manifestation of forces that he studied, as he lived, without knowing it, in unison with the cycles of earth, water, wind, comets, eclipses, and solar flares, and I, his flesh and blood, appeared as the child of these cycles.

My parents were wary of this coincidence from the start, they thought it a bad sign. Therefore they entrusted me to my grandmothers, hiding me in a sewing box with thread and yarn, among the accouterments of geriatric life. My grandmothers, who had suffered so much, lost brothers, sisters, and husbands, but had survived all the events of the age, were to give me refuge in the peaceful flow of their lives, bring me up on the margins, far from real time, as if deep in the woods or on a lost farmstead. But—and I will tell you about this later—the nearness of my grandmothers merely intensified the sensation it was supposed to heal.

Why did my parents, who were not superstitious or given to reading meanings into things, still worry about the portent of the earthquake? My mother could not get pregnant for a long time. The doctors were stumped because all her signs were normal; at last, an old doctor, a professor, changed tack. Instead of asking about family illnesses and rechecking all her blood and other samples, he had a long and detailed conversation with my mother about the family’s history. She did not understand the purpose but she told him everything she knew—she clutched at every straw.

The professor said that she was not the only patient he had like her; in many women he saw an unconscious fear of motherhood connected to the great number of violent deaths the previous generation had suffered. He suggested they go somewhere extremely peaceful, where nothing would remind her of time, history, or the past. Mother was ready to take the suggestion, but my father resisted at first; he thought that the problem was between them as man and woman, not in history or psychology. But they went.

In those years, the Soviet Union was building hydroelectric stations, and reservoirs were supposed to flood enormous areas along the Siberian riverbeds. My parents took probably the only unscheduled vacation of their lives and headed out to the zone of future flooding. They spent a month there; my father had a friend in the construction administration, and they were housed comfortably in an abandoned house of a buoy keeper at the foot of the cliff, a tall granite remnant that had to be demolished so that it did not interfere with shipping on the future sea.

It was a place of great emptiness and silence. Hunters’ huts dotted trails and roads. Letters no longer reached this region, since the mail codes and addresses had been deleted in advance of the flooding, just like the telephone numbers of the former kolkhoz offices; the villages didn’t appear on the new maps ready for printing. The animals left the river valley, the people were gone, and even the fish, as if sensing that soon water would flood the banks, either lay low in the bottom holes or swam upriver.

In a Robinson Crusoe world consisting of house, rowboat, fishing nets, firewood, stove, food supplies, and rifle, my parents lived in a time that they had never experienced before or since; I don’t think they even took photographs, although they brought a camera.

There, in the ideal nowhere, a place that is now forever underwater, I was conceived. And I was born in the tremor of an earthquake, as if my parents’ plan had been discovered and the big world sent a menacing message to the one they had hoped to hide from fate.

My feelings, my ability to feel, were fashioned by that underground blow. I had trouble understanding anything to do with stability, immutability, and firmness, even though I wanted those states I could not achieve; disharmony was closer and more understandable than harmony.

When I took walks in the city, I was attracted by old houses, sinking and decrepit. Cracks in walls and windows, cracks on the sidewalk which children sometimes try to avoid, cracks in the marble siding of the metro joined into a complex network for me, as if the entire world was tormented by secret tensions.

Kaleidoscopes and puzzles where you had to make a figure out of parts did not elicit curiosity, but a morbid, stubborn interest—not so much to put the pieces together as to observe how the whole can be reassembled and disassembled.