The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  I imagined yet another, conclusive way to liberation from my fears: to follow Lenin and perform some exploit that would allow me to take on a new surname, a pseudonym; to be reborn and get a name given by history itself.

  My question, would I be able to have my own surname when I grew up, ended in an expected scene. My parents brought up the business with my passport, they wanted to take me to a psychiatrist, but then changed their minds—apparently out of shame and embarrassment; they would have had to explain that the child did not want to carry the family name, and what would the doctor think of the parents, would he suspect them of something? Probably all I wanted was to certify the right to own myself, which I was denied—the right to my own self, my own life, my own destiny.

  The word “owner,” however, was a harsh rebuke, an accusation of a terrible sin.

  I can’t say that I wasn’t allowed to own things. But as soon as the adults began to think that it was more than some object that tied itself to me, rather that I was starting to organize a close circle of objects, determining what was mine and what belonged to others and demanding that this division be recognized, thereby tracing an outline of myself—measures were taken.

  “Oh, look at this owner growing here,” they said with a grimace of scornful disapproval, as if they were talking about a pushy invasive weed, outpacing the docile useful plants.

  “You must live for others,” the grannies said. “You must live in their place,” they said, meaning the victims of war. I imagined that someone was living for me and in my place; this formed a vicious circle of lives turned over to others; a chain of substitute existences that completely erased the individuality of man.

  For me the scorn for the concept of “owner” also meant the invisible power of ancestors. Later, in the nineties, the word “ancestors” was used ironically for parents, stressing the newly discovered generation gap and the fundamental difference in approach to the new times. But back in the eighties the word “ancestors” still reeked of gunpowder, blood, and dirt, creating the sense that they were here with you, seeing right through you and able to pass on what they saw to Grandmother Tanya or Grandmother Mara as easily as handing over an X-ray.

  Each grandmother tried to make me her grandson. Between them they had lost eleven brothers and sisters, two husbands, and an almost uncountable number of more distant relatives. As the only grandchild, the only one amid the dead, missing in action, and arrested, I was not just a child: I was a fantastic win in the lottery, a win in the game with the century; a justification for their suffering, deprivation, and losses; justification and meaning.

  They both had grieved more than they had happily loved; they did not have a woman’s life from youth to old age—they were more sisters of dead brothers and widows of dead husbands, and their love in terms of time was spent more in loving the dead than loving the living. So there was a fear that their love and hope would tilt the scales of fate, a suspicion that love was not always protective, that on the contrary it could send one on a dangerous path, to face a bullet, to die.

  They both greatly pitied the men of their cohort, which made passion an insignificant particle in the face of history, sympathy for male weaknesses, and disbelief that a man can be fully trusted, since tomorrow a notice might come calling him away. Their lives were solitary and austere, as if they were widows of an entire generation, as if beside their own husbands, they had to mourn the men who died without families, the ones renounced by their families, and the ones who were never remembered on the day of the great victory.

  They treated their children with hidden wariness, afraid to tempt fate with happiness; the children were accorded strictness, harshness, and even cruelty. But when a grandchild was born, born in another, less dangerous time, all the restrained feminine and maternal instincts awakened. I would even say that their love for me was a little like the love of a woman for a man—a passionate seriousness and a demanding delight. They both saw the first person in their life who was not under the heavy thumb of history, who could not be taken by the universal draft or a form warrant for arrest, and they decided to give him everything of which they had been deprived: joy, happiness, peace, confidence. But deprivation is not renewable, and they could only pass on longing, desire, thirst …

  They were jealous of each other, and they did not compete in generosity, love, or attention but in the solidity of their presence in my life. They often peered at me, looking for evidence of their husbands, brothers and sisters. The dead were resurrected in me—in pieces, individual features—and the grannies, each in her own way, reassembled me, reinterpreted me, yielding no ground to the other. If Grandmother Tanya said that my hair color was like her younger brother Alexei, who died without news in the Kharkov siege, it meant that Alexei was saved; while Grandmother Mara’s older brother Pavel, also fair-haired, his blood had been shed in vain onto Finnish snow in the winter of 1939, melting in the spring, into the black peat flows of Karelian lakes, and he had vanished without a trace.

  In the end, the grannies agreed: I had something of both Alexei and Pavel; better they had not agreed, for now I had to be responsible for two; eye color, shape of temples and mouth, form of nose—there was a line of men seeking salvation in me, and the grannies weighed and measured small bits of inheritance. I was supposed to take the best personal traits of each, for each one I had to live an unlived life, embody the unembodied.

  The grannies saw and discussed some other me, an object of posthumous pride; and I was lost, wondering if I myself existed at all, or if I was just the sum of other people’s features, an eternal debtor.

  This burden throughout my childhood was latent; besides the power of my parents, my teachers and coaches, the requirements of kindergarten and school, there was also the power, the word and opinion of the dead, who in the afterlife seemed to be holding a continual family council, discussing and evaluating me, arguing over my fate.

  LEGACY OF THE LIVING

  Several times a year the living and dead met; that’s how it felt to me, in any case. The main meeting point in time and space was my birthday.

  The table, freed from daily trifles and opened to its full length, was covered with an ancient tablecloth, spectral as a shroud from a thousand washings.

  Embroidered in red on the white cloth, proverbs unfolded in a spiral from the center. Like tree rings, they swirled in a single endless sentence, admonitions in thread. Measure seven times, cut once; When the cat’s away, the mice will play; You can’t catch fish without work. I saw the sententious simplicity of the proverbs and their similarity to contemporary slogans: Peace for the world; He who does not work does not eat; We are not slaves.

  Usually, proverbs were spoken with a dash of irony, stressing their age and naive edification, but here I sensed that they were not harmless. The tablecloth turned into a short outline of the future; all the life coming to me was already predestined and planned in those simple phrases.

  At last, the table was set. A festive landscape appeared, with culinary accents and hills and dales, and the tablecloth moved into the background; only the red letters refracted in the vodka glasses reminded us of its presence.

  Grown-ups, mostly relatives, gathered and made toasts in my honor. This ritual was grandiloquent, serious, heavy. The toasts addressed to the future were like the instruments of a sculptor or orthopedist; they cut away the excess and added what was missing; it was all the worse that there was no sense of encroachment on their part, only love, goodwill, and wishes for a better life.

  They drank vodka, and some had wine, not dry but sweet, fragrant, dark, intoxicated with itself. They brought gifts, wonderful presents, thoughtfully selected, useful; but the abundance of gifts, their significance, became too much by the end of the evening. The presents were put in my room, and I sensed the incursion of other people’s wills, arguing not over my gratitude but my future.

  Maybe I would have preferred something less dangerous and coercing than the books, periscope, globe, chunk of diamond
-bearing kimberlite, bear tooth, case of drawing instruments—the presents which lay like a weight on my shoulders. Once again I was being reassembled, reinvented by people who thought they were fulfilling my dreams.

  I would leave the room, come back to the festive table, and see the grown-ups holding old shot glasses, which just two months ago had been used for somebody’s wake; now they were in the service of my birthday. A transparent terrible liquid glimmered dully in them; every glass drunk in my honor laid a debt on me, a promise made in my name, for the rest of my life.

  Living water, dead water—when I was very sick, with my temperature at almost 104 ° F, and I lay there, disassociated from my body while my mind wandered in other worlds, my father would come in late at night, as if he knew the hour for these ministrations. I could smell the tickling, transparent scent of inert freshness—that was the vodka which he dipped gauze into and rubbed my body with, so that the fever would leave with the evaporating alcohol. The stinging icy touch on my skin was not like my father’s hand but an otherworldly breath; that was how he returned me from the depths of illness, dragged me back to this world.

  When the vodka was poured at the table, I thought the men were drinking it in order to open up a capacity for inner vision, like sorcerers and shamans who traveled between worlds. Words spoken with a shot glass in hand—unless it was a merry toast—had a special weight, a special ability to affect others, a special ability to come true; they were words spoken by the dead through the mouths of the living.

  At the height of festivities a cold draft swept through the dishes, bottles, and glasses, the fringes of the tablecloth swayed, and the merriment leaned over an abyss, looking into it. Poses changed, speech grew more hushed, fingers moved thoughtfully, and someone would be the first to say: let’s have a song.

  The couches, cupboards, and chairs disappeared, the light of the chandelier became diffused; jackets, ties, and dress collars grew tight, as if people wanted to liberate themselves from images imposed upon them, as if inside each person there lived a tramp, a nomadic, homeless parasite, not a person but a persecuted spirit, the ghost of an exiled landowner—Decembrist—People’s Will radical—politician—priest—prisoner; a figure shimmering and always moving north or east.

  They’re taking our comrades away in chains

  They’re taking them far away

  Our comrades groan in pain

  The chains rattle night and day.

  I hid under the table, wanting to disappear before everyone was reborn. Above me, they were singing a different song; the song, like bad weather, came in bursts, intensifying, then simmering down, again and again. The voices of the singers resembled the sound of wind gusts, rolling over the field and bending the grass. Convulsions caused by the whipping wind keep nature from dissipating, from calming; the voices were like that, and along with my fear I was glad that I was below, under the table, seeing only feet, shoes that were not keeping time, since there was no rhythm in those songs, and not seeing the faces.

  When I climbed out after the inundation of song, someone was weeping, allowing tears to roll down his cheeks, as if it were part of the ritual; the vodka gleamed dully in the glasses. The songs must have shaken up the molecules and the vodka had been transformed into tears.

  They cried for me, about me, as if they could see a terrible, confused, and jagged prophetic dream. Then, awakened, they picked up knives and forks and returned to the mayonnaise salads, herring, sausages, and the overloaded table.

  There was always an abundance of food, the vinegret, the Russian potato salad with vegetables and diced meat, mixed in a tub, and the table turned into a feasting vessel with barely enough space for knives and forks; but a special place was reserved for a plate of eggs stuffed with red caviar among the crowds of dishes, bottles, and fruit vases.

  Grandmother Mara got caviar in gift boxes on holidays. Caviar on the table was evidence that everything was fine, a barometer of prosperity, more a signifier than actual food. You could not eat all you wanted, you could have one or two portions, but not three—that would earn you a frown of displeasure from Grandmother Mara who watched the whole table, noting who ate how much and making equalizing operations, moving bowls, platters, and decanters so that everyone could get some of everything. Grandmother’s restriction told me that caviar had to be eaten with the eyes, which I could not yet understand, lacking the skill of feeding on pictures.

  Besides which, the caviar on the table reminded me of sunny spring ponds, the weightless glowing bubbles of eggs with black dots in each. When we came to the dacha, I headed for the pond to see the roe grow murky, filling up with dirty juices, and the dots had turned into worms, and I sensed something just as murky, unsettled, and ripening in me.

  As I thought about this, I noted people’s teeth squashing the eggs, the shining steel crowns, the awfulness of a nicotine-stained tooth with a metal filling. I thought grown-ups ate caviar like predators who sensed the time of spawning, of fledging, and came to savor the delicacy, the childlike state of being alive, energetically charged for life, still close to the mystery of creation and birth, when the promise of the future already exists in a small particle. They devoured these fetuses of the future, munching on them with vodka, as if when the caviar came into contact with alcohol, its deathly taste was mitigated.

  The wives watched their husbands, setting aside the shot glasses or covering them with a hand when another round was being poured. The men were not free; their wives’ gazes kept them attached by a thread, anxious, worried, angry.

  The party would start to fade, poisoned on itself, dissipating, people were tired and flabby, as if lightly touched by sleep. That was the only time when you could clearly see that both grandmothers—they were usually seated at opposite ends of the table—seemed to grow in significance, and looked at their adult children from the height of age, turning into statues, supports that held the vault of the table, the vault of life itself.

  My father liked chess and we played often. At the end of the game, almost all the figures were dead, their lacquered bodies heaped up on both sides of the board, the black and white board a battlefield, with pawns fighting in the midst of wild cavalry assaults.

  But my queen usually survived, and Father had to plan several moves ahead in order to corner her.

  The dull rooks and bishops that could travel only straight or on the diagonal—Father usually traded the knights—surrounded my queen, pushing toward an attack. I was astonished by the survival of the queen, the most powerful figure on the board, who could not be taken one-on-one, who could slip out of traps that would kill rook, bishop, or king.

  The two grannies at the table were like those queens. They underlined the tragic weakness and vulnerability of man, subject to typhus, drafts, blood poisoning, gingivitis, caught in a trap, cut off from family, forgotten; wounded, bearing the metal of war in the body, unable to reenter peaceful life, turning to drink; needing clothes mended and washed, to be fed, someone to deal with the thousands of details as persistent as lice and as constant as a child’s sniffles. The providential nature of women was revealed in the grandmothers—woman as mourner, woman as widow from youth to old age. You could see woman’s terrible inflexibility, the ability to survive, to build the universe so that it supports the man, for in it he is a transitory, flickering silhouette and the woman is like a caryatid, and their relationship is that of the eternal with the transitory.

  For them, the people around the table at that moment weren’t children or even grandchildren—they were distant descendants, and my parents were no different from the rest; the grandmothers were like right and left, alpha and omega, life and death.

  I was between them, I belonged to them, as if my parents had performed the requisite physiological act, but the true right of parenthood belonged to Grandmother Tanya and Grandmother Mara.

  FIELD OF SILENCE

  The skill of dealing with time and darkness was given to me by my grandmother Tanya. Setting aside my homework, I s
at with her at the kitchen table, picking through buckwheat, rice, and wheat; chaff to the left, grain to the right, separating the clean from the unclean. Sometimes she said, as if to herself, that with every year the grains were getting dirtier, and her fingers flew, accustomed to small work—darning, knitting, copyediting, and setting type.

  Covered with blankets and cardboard, the radiators breathed hot wool, and the angled lamp shone brightly, as in an operating room. My attention, focused since morning on the rigor of notebook squares and lines, began to blur, and the concentration of school gave way to languor, the tiredness from running around after class, and the translucent filtered sadness in the remains of a frosty day.

  Picking through grains seemed like fortune-telling to me. Cooked, the grains became mush, food, fit for humans; uncooked, it was the food of birds and animals, a memorial dish set on a grave. The hard, faceted, rustling grains belonged to the field, to the earth, they were connected to the underground, the posthumous kingdom, and picking through them was the same as dipping your fingers into that kingdom.

  Grandmother receded from me, as if she were present in both worlds simultaneously; her graying hair and the brown spots on her skin were like signs from that other kingdom.

  The grain was a kind of rosary; but she did not recite prayers, she called to the deceased. The ghost of the Leningrad blockade, which took her sisters, the ghost of battles where her brothers were lost without news, floated over the table; grain—the most important value of a hungry age, the measure of life and death—had turned into grains of memory. Grandmother did not throw away the damaged ones, she swept them up and put them in the bird feeder outside the window, as if she were watched by the shades of people who died of starvation, for whom even damaged grain was a treasure. Blue tits congregated at the feeder, but sometimes I wondered—were they really blue tits? Were they even birds at all? They looked into the apartment, hesitating, as if recalling something, and then it seemed to me that they found strange their own little bodies, feathers, beaks, pinpoint eyes, their twitters and bustling movements.