The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  During the attacks Father’s voice was subdued. And things felt freer, I guess; and I sensed and remembered that difference—it was supposed to just be quieter, but it became freer. I’m ashamed to say it, but sometimes I wanted Mother to have a headache because it gave a rest to feelings that were imperceptibly suppressed; the house grew calmer, gentler, there was a mysterious fragrance of carnation from the pungent Vietnamese salve that Mother rubbed into her temples, and her light wool blanket radiated warm, electrified waves that hushed street noises; the universe of the house changed orbit and revolved around Mother’s head. Hoping to reduce the pain, I would ask for it to be passed to me, but it would not, as if it could not go beyond Mother in a generational sense and stopped with her.

  Grandmother Mara never had headaches, and I don’t think she ever pitied her daughter in her pain; there was only one time when I saw Grandmother with her during one of those attacks: she reluctantly embraced her and started reciting words, an ancient, flowing abracadabra about stones-oaks-winds-seas-tears-clouds.

  The old woman was a whisperer and she was “whispering” the young woman; thanks to the ancient rhythms of the spell, I saw the female body as an entity made by nature for suffering. Grandmother Mara leaned toward my mother, embraced her, whispered conspiratorial words, ran her palms soothingly over her head, and you could no longer tell which hand was Mother’s and which Grandmother’s, they had melted into each other; Mother moaned weakly, and Grandmother Mara repeated the moan, wove it into the incantation. The outlines of the two bodies formed a lump of flesh, breathing clay.

  Grandmother Mara broke off the whispering, pulled away, broke the clay body into two figures and, with regret and slight disappointment, regarded her daughter. Mother felt better, her face brightened, and her body seemed lighter, as if suffering was no longer weighing her down and had finally found a comfortable place inside her, free of everything that had resisted it. And now Grandmother Mara looked at her daughter with approval.

  Order and pain—those were the family principles; I protected myself as I could from my father’s will, for he wanted to organize my life and make me like him, and I felt compassion for my mother. Naturally, my parents were the most important and closest people in the world for me, but with one exception—in the everyday moment, in measuring time. As soon as I began thinking of my grandfathers and feeling I was their descendant, the grandson in me started arguing with the son.

  On those rare occasions when the grandson won wholly and fully, when I heard the tense silence of the wall of photographs in Grandmother Tanya’s room, when we picked through the grains and I thought every grain in Grandmother’s fingers was telling her something, my parents—as if an invisible power were transforming them—became strangers; the ones on the side of silence; my foes.

  They had shut the door to the past and limited themselves to this day. There is probably a reason why the clearest memories I have are the winter weekend evenings devoted to laundry, the washed sheets hanging in the kitchen, dimming the already weak light; it was stuffy, and the stuffiness was made thicker by the darkness outside. The kitchen window was covered in steam, and I could spend hours wiping an opening in the condensation. It would cover over instantly, and I would clear it again. It seemed as if nothing existed in the world besides the kitchen, the smell of soup, laundry, and burned matches. Everyone, I thought, lives this way—scraping a small hole to see a little bit. It never occurred to me to take a rag and clean the window.

  My parents’ life appeared to have an abundance of desires; much later, as an adult, I understood that what I had taken to be the grown-ups’ desires was not that at all.

  The substitute for desire was necessity; the necessity of finding food, buying clothing, getting me into Pioneer summer camp; necessity and not desire was the spur to action. When, for example, there is an inescapable task—you must buy oil whether you want to or not—and there is a total deficit of everything that could be of any value, desires fade and are replaced by needs.

  Another factor that was exhausting and stripped life of any profundity was the petty and absurd tyranny of necessities; there are shoes but you can’t find spare shoelaces anywhere, there are five pots of different sizes on the shop counter—what luck!—but not a single frying pan …

  Whatever difficulties my grandmothers and grandfathers suffered in the thirties and forties, whatever deprivations befell them, the nature of those difficulties and deprivations were different. They could come in an endless succession, they could destroy you or break you, but they were serious, threatening, large-scale, directly linked to the historical fate of the country and the world, they bore personal and general meaning.

  The quiet absurdity of life, on the contrary, destroyed destiny and grandeur, mocked steadfastness and courage, and demanded that you make yourself commensurate to it, reduce your dreams and become one with hard-to-get items. The world of needs and deficits spun a tiny web of the power of circumstances, in which people got trapped.

  Deficit does not only mean a constant sensation of the absence of something. It creates a complex system of the ersatz, mandatory substitutions, a system of switching and redistributing functions and meanings. It makes every life situation chronically difficult, like a disease without a disease, which consists of intertwining and multiplying complications, because, in the final analysis, every thing and every phenomenon is not in its own place, its own niche, but is displaced to replace something missing.

  This is the world in which my parents lived; I existed in this world as their son. And as a son I felt things I did not feel as a grandson.

  Probably every Soviet family put their name on a list “to increase living space,” and they waited for decades, without a clear idea of what was happening at the head of the line. We were registered in a line like that. I sensed that we were links in a chain; someone was waiting for us to move so they could occupy our apartment, someone else had to move so we could obtain a new home. Our place in the world was defined by the line that lived its own life, simultaneously inexplicable and powerful.

  At some point we began a countdown marked by the phrase “So when we move,” a countdown of postponed intentions, delayed plans, and we began living in the nonexistent new apartment we’d moved into, like furniture and objects, the best features of the present; but the line did not budge, and our hopes and dreams remained on the dubious shore of the future.

  As a son I was also part of the line, sensing the pressure of its slow movement; our apartment belonged to the line, we were temporary tenants. I thought that my grandfathers would have found a different way to live, although I saw the neighboring old men who were certainly also in line. From my parents I could take only a lesson in tolerating this kind of life.

  Some evenings—because meat patties, kotlety, were always cooked for dinner—Father took out the heavy meat grinder and attached it firmly to the table edge. Mother pushed the meat, thoroughly cleaned, through the neck. But it got stuck anyway, tendons wrapping around the blades, stalling the mechanism. Father took it apart and rinsed it, and then they started again; the ground meat was passed through a second time, and sometimes even a third.

  There was something unbearably dreary in this struggle with the meat, which seemed to be taking posthumous revenge. Second-grade, and not very fresh, the beef set an example: the thick strong sinews were able to stop the blades—so one must grow sinews instead of muscles. That was more reliable than counting on spirit and heroism. You need the sinewy strength of a dying man, whom torturers will tire of beating, they will scrape their knuckles on him and give up. You have to grow up like that, not so much brave or strong as tough and unsuitable for dividing up, sinewy and cartilaginous so that your meat blocks the knives; so that life struggles with you and finally leaves you alone.

  I imagined that my grandfathers had a different strength that allowed them to maintain dignity, and the grandmothers retained some reflections of it. Father and Mother had no strength of their own, but the p
owers of a great order, which I could only intuit, moved through them. That was another reason they were my foes; if my thoughts and strivings were revealed, my parents would make every effort to make me only a son and not a grandson; if they learned what I felt picking through the grains with Grandmother Tanya, how I waited for her to write the first line in the wordless book dressed in a brown cover, our evenings at the kitchen table would be banned and the book would vanish as if it never had existed.

  THE PLASTIC HORSEMAN

  I often sensed my parents distancing themselves from me, I saw that they were not with me in some situations; they handed me over to people or circumstances, transmitting someone else’s will, like puppets.

  Kindergarten, school, hospital, Pioneer camp—they literally handed me over, silently acknowledging the right to take me. I’m not talking about a child’s experience of the alien and unfamiliar; this was a guess about the all-encompassing power of the state with its national anthem on school notebooks, October badges, Pioneer pledges of allegiance, friendship of the peoples, and concern for the health of Soviet children; a guess about the forms this took, forms that did not recognize the private yet could be softened through personal relations, but still powerful.

  My parents sent me to school not only because they wanted me to study; it was as if another will was added to theirs, one that did not coerce them as much as paralyze their ability to even consider any other possibility, say, homeschooling me; that they, like me, were part of some universal obedience class.

  In addition, the grown-ups talked about resolute action, self-reliance, and independence. But I knew, my sixth sense told me, that one day something would happen and my parents, who kept telling me that you have to stand firm and achieve your goals, would submit to someone else’s will, as if they had never lectured me at all.

  There was another power to which my parents gave me up as well, perhaps without understanding it, a power as palpable as it was faceless, without a single specific source. It was like being left in a labyrinth and exposed to radioactivity without a mask, or special clothes, or a Geiger counter, or even a warning. It was a mythical labyrinth, a forest of signs, and you were forced to comprehend them on your own, for no one ever talked to you—either at home or at school—about the nature of the symbolic.

  My parents worked for two years in Egypt on the Aswan Dam; they were taken on excursions to temples and burial sites closed to the public, to the pyramids and necropolises of animals. They had a crate of slides they brought back from there.

  Sometimes on weekends they hung a sheet on the wall and turned on the projector, which smelled of ozone and the dust burning on the hot lens; and on the sheet appeared vanished yellow sands, the ancient god Horus carved of granite, the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen, the Temple of Karnak, the sphinx alley, Luxor, Amenhotep’s columned hall, walls covered in ash from the bonfires of Napoleon’s soldiers; and most important, the hieroglyphs, everywhere, as if all the surfaces were covered with a single, endless text.

  The hieroglyphs and statues of Egyptian rulers, impossibly far from me in time and space, did not elicit intellectual curiosity but a profound interest and equally profound anxiety; I somehow knew their oppressive presence, their dead mysteriousness; I felt closeness rather than alienation.

  But all my attempts to understand where that sense of recognition came from were in vain; sometimes I almost reached understanding by a physical effort—but each time I fell short by a step, a millimeter, a second.

  Yet understanding did come.

  The Pioneer camp where I was sent had a big storage area, a windowless cellar, where they kept bugles, flags, drums, banners, posters, and costumes. It was a big camp, with probably a thousand children; these props had been kept since the camp’s founding, it seemed—the administrators were probably afraid to throw them out or burn them, since someone could write an anonymous letter revealing that Soviet symbols were being destroyed at Camp X. The job of camp director must have been a highly desirable one; it was a good location, high on a bank of the Oka River, with a view of the flood-meadows, and so the administration preferred to save this arsenal of propaganda assets for an eventual inspection.

  I was sent to help the cleaning woman sweep the storeroom; she gave me a broom and dustpan and went off somewhere. I was left alone in the dark space with burned-out lightbulbs; it was filled with cupboards, shelves, and boxes, the ones that might come in handy placed closer to the door, and farther back the old and dusty ones that were never touched.

  The particularly disorderly disorder that comes about when various people use things only from time to time was rampant in there; small poles without banners, piles of gold fringe, spools of gold braid, rolls of faded red bunting, rolled-up banners, tarnished bugles, broken drums, hundreds of small flags with stars, tattered songbooks, white belts with star buckles, scattered cockades, plastic emblems of the USSR, and costumes—moth-eaten fur hats with red ribbons, a cloak à la Chapayev. The mess formed a shipwrecked mass. Drawings from camp contests were stuffed into various cracks, and they protruded like giant cabbage leaves, always with the same elements—red stars, Pioneers, flags, tanks, foxholes, hammers and sickles.

  A spacious and innocent sunny day awaited outside, while here, in the musty cramped dark there reigned the senile promiscuity of things, the trash heap orgy of obsolete symbols. If there had been just one ordinary object, say a soup pot or an oar, the room would have resembled a storeroom, a collection of junk like the ones I’ve seen in dachas. But no—here there were only the tools of symbolism, abandoned, touched by the beginnings of corruption, when an object begins to fall apart but still maintains its form.

  I suddenly realized that for each child in the camp there were three caps, one-and-a-half bugles, two drums, two banners, five flags, and fifteen posters; they manufactured them faster than they were used up, and they didn’t wear out, just got old and accumulated. You could explode trying to blow the bugle, hold a banner, wave a flag, carry a big sign, and play the drum at the same time.

  “It would be fun to play grave robbers here,” an inner voice prompted; of course, my parents had told me about thieves in the Valley of the Kings who went down into the stone labyrinths, avoiding traps, and I often imagined myself as one—for I looked for secret places in my parents’ apartment, finding other people’s secrets, intruding on forbidden territory.

  I had just decided to play at being a robber of subterranean Egypt when I bumped into something, and the whole edifice of things reaching to the ceiling made a cracking sound and began to list. It was enough to touch one thing for the rest to fall, held by nothing. A bank of shelves fell on me, and with it a mountain of emblems, banners, and drums along with folders of rules for Pioneer games and packets of pennants. They tipped me over softly and stiflingly, pressing me onto the floor, squashing me. I tried to climb out, then laughed: how ridiculous to be buried under this! But after three minutes my arms started going numb under the shelves, I was dizzy from the heat and dust, and most important, I didn’t feel like calling for help, not out of shame or embarrassment but from a worrying, unhealthy lassitude.

  In a desperate need to free myself from the pile of dead things, I fought my way out, covered in dust and flakes of gilt paint, and ran to the river to let the flowing water wash away the decay of paper and fabric. Now I did feel like a thief who had made his way into an Egyptian tomb and was caught by dead watchmen; a thief who had not believed the stories of ghostly guardians and who then felt their spectral and yet fully real power.

  Another event at the camp advanced my understanding even more.

  In a playground surrounded by tall, dark firs stood an enormous portrait of Lenin.

  I had seen many different depictions of Lenin, some I liked, some elicited no response. But the camp portrait was special. Triple the height of a man, it stood behind us during morning roll call; you sensed his gaze on the back of your head, pushing you down into the ground. I felt that the Lenin in the portrait knew I thoug
ht something about him that the others did not and he wouldn’t stop until he squashed me some day.

  Lenin’s face—lips, cheeks, eyes—had melted downward and the forehead, huge, convex, filled with petrified thoughts, took up more than half of the head. The exposed gigantic forehead was horrifying, as if a great and terrible idea was pushing out the skull from within. When we were lined up under that portrait, I thought that Lenin’s head would burst any minute, and something bloody that had been living inside him, like a tapeworm, would crawl out; Lenin would die, but that thing would live.

  Around that time, my parents gave me Nikolai Kun’s Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece, probably for the pictures rather than the text; once again, as with the Egyptian slides, I sensed that this was something familiar and once again could not understand why I had these feelings.

  Lenin on the poster reminded me of someone or something; I imagined that once I figured it out, I would be safe; the very fact of comparison, recognition, would save me.

  Enlightenment came unexpectedly; there must have been some preliminary hint, but I don’t remember it, I remember only how I understood, and gloried in the risky accuracy of the comparison, that Lenin was giving birth to the revolution the way Zeus gave birth to Athena!

  I sensed instantly that I had performed an action for which my upbringing, education, and general life conditions had not prepared me; like a cosmonaut, I went out into space, a place where few venture.

  The ancient Greek myth and the portrait at the Pioneer camp were one and the same. This was a powerful breakthrough; I was no longer defenseless before Zeus-Lenin, I knew what he was made of, I grasped the matter of his image, I had power over him; of course, not absolute power, but enough to protect me from his pursuing gaze from the poster.