The case with Lenin was more of an exception; more often my feeling about Soviet symbols was what I had experienced in the camp storeroom—lifelessness. I regretted that I had not lived in the times when the heroic legends were created, before there were children’s red flags and pins.
Every year my parents took me to the photographer’s studio near our house, where they had a small pink plastic horse, a toy Red Army stallion. It came with a yellow plastic saber in a blue sheath—the random motley colors proved that the toy was fake even as a toy—and a knit wool cap with an October star and a pointy top, a fake Budyonny broadcloth helmet.
Sitting in the plastic saddle you were supposed to raise the plastic saber over your head, as if riding to the attack; the photographer commanded “Flash!” with an important air and my parents squinted and smiled in satisfaction. For them, this was fun and the props seemed appropriate for my age. Maybe they wanted to even give me some historical images, a sense of connection to the past, in safe form. But for me, this was painful and insulting nonsense, as if they were intentionally mocking me.
Exposing me with plastic saber to the camera, showing the photos to friends—the shots were a guaranteed success and people always said that I would grow up a “real Budyonnovite”—my parents always hit me in my sorest spot, my secret desire to be someone’s heir, to take on a great fate, exploits, and glory; they stressed that this was a childish and insignificant game.
The plastic horse was popular at the photographer’s studio, because all the parents wanted to capture their sons on it, with the saber; while I was being photographed, someone was waiting his turn, hat-flattened hair being combed. But I was the only one of the kids to have seen a real saber!
One of my parents’ friends had a saber in a scabbard hanging on the wall; it belonged to his uncle, a Red Army commander who had started fighting back in World War I.
The scabbard was beaten up and scratched, as unattractive as the legs of our old dacha table that had been scuffed by boots for a century. At first I even pitied it, as if it had outlived its usefulness and had wandered around, falling on hard times, and it was kept out of kindness on the wall instead of in a trunk.
But once—Father was sick and stayed home while Mother and I went to visit—they took the saber down and let me hold it. I almost dropped it, it was so heavy. They took it out of the scabbard and it scraped the trim around the throat—and showed itself all at once, more than a meter long, with a lengthy groove in the blade, from the guard to the tip, tempered, with a violet-blue sheen and a patina of hardening.
The handle was at my eye level, and I imagined what that sharpened steel does to a body, how a single blow at a third of one’s power would cut me in half, vertically or diagonally. I understood the mechanics of a cavalryman, borne forward by the raised weight of the saber, the horse’s legs in unison with the chopping blows. I pictured clearly—as if someone else’s blood had come to play in my veins—that I could have been a soldier in the Civil War, a Red horseman.
“Born in the saddle,” “one with the horse,” they traveled through books and films. The best fighters of the Red Army, the spirit of the Civil War, warriors without front, rear, or flank, creatures covering forest and steppe in their maneuvers, appearing where least expected, turning upside down all the planned dispositions of troops; strange immortal creatures who cared nothing for time and space!
They forced me to sit on a factory-made plastic horsy on wheels, while I wholeheartedly wished for real things that could pass something along to me, without realizing that I sought them in a very contradictory way.
I was capable of simultaneously desiring my grandmother’s secret book and penetrating the space of silence, and also wanting to become a hero in a Soviet epic—a horseman from Budyonny’s army, a partisan of the Great Patriotic War, son of the regiment, the boy who handled the shells, the messenger for the underground who never named names when arrested.
The pendulum swayed continually, and I swung one way and then the other, living in two registers of perception, two planes of existence.
In one, the reality around me was a cardboard shell hiding the entrance to the real past; the cardboard did not protect from the terrible icy winds.
In the second, the secret of the past was not horrible, but entertaining; reality was a landscape of boredom and longing for great events, for exploits, as if our ancestors had performed them all, leaving nothing for their descendants to do. These two layers occasionally intersected, interacting in a strange way, but they still followed different paths.
The USSR, continually editing and reshaping its mythological past, was essentially a matryoshka doll of images and myths that sprouted from one into another; some formed cause-and-effect connections, others were pushed aside; inside each construction you could endlessly search for the truth, accepting the legends of the previous era which became the “real past” by virtue of seniority.
You could climb into a pit, descending deeper and deeper, without realizing that the entire construction was artificial; that was why you didn’t know where to put the spaces of silence, areas that were forced outside the limits of the Soviet universe.
The temptation was always there to admit that those spaces were nonexistent, that they were the fruit of my imagination; to seek myself only within the Soviet historical myths, to consider them as having a real existence.
In choosing myth, you acquired the richest milieu for self-definition, self-construction, for fantasy; in admitting the veracity of the spaces of silence, you found yourself alone, in a bare, viewless place. That choice was a constant motif throughout your life: constantly balancing on the edge, leaning one way then the other, flickering, living in incompleteness, rechecking your feelings: Who are you, a lonely, impotent spy or a rightful heir to the past, a Soviet Theseus who will find his sandals and sword under a rock?
The former demanded patience and the ability to live without hope, the latter, bravery and desperate belief; and so I took both paths, thinking I was taking one, unable to distinguish the obstacles along different roads.
IN SEARCH OF WHOLENESS
By now there was a hint of the collapse, a brink-of-war disorder in daily life; things were definitely vanishing from hardware stores. The first to go were items that fasten—nails, screws, wire, cement, glue, without which boards and bricks are useless and pointless.
Father had a small shed at the dacha for his tools; there were also jars and tins with nuts and bolts. They were picked up on the side of the road or taken from things in the dump; every nut found on a dacha path, perhaps fallen off a bicycle, was examined for its thread, cleaned, soaked in kerosene, and then put in the appropriate jar. Bent lengths of wire, aluminum, copper, steel, of varying diameters and sizes, hung from long nails in the shed; wire was not bought, either, but found somehow. Going through an old structure, Father pulled out all the nails with a claw bar, straightened them with a hammer, and diligently saved them.
Of course, we collected old boards, planks from vegetable and fruit crates, pieces of baseboard—they could come in handy for the never-ending dacha repairs. But a quiet abnormality appeared only in the collection of things that could be called connective material; there was a huge shortage, as if the material world reflected the changes in the nation, in the political object called the USSR.
Grandmother Tanya also participated in the gathering of fasteners: she kept various buttons in round candy tins. Hundreds of buttons, matched and unmatched, cut from our own clothing or of unknown provenance; buttons from a military uniform, buttons with British lions, pretty mother-of-pearl buttons from a blouse, wooden toggles and huge plastic buttons from a fashionable ladies’ coat. You could probably use them to re-create the history of clothing for several decades or write dozens of novels—for example, a meeting between a man in a jacket with British lions on the buttons and a lady in a jacket with bronze clasps. I used to go through the buttons and try to imagine the fate of the people who had worn them, as if they
were all gone and only their buttons survived them, hard, resilient, and huddling together.
Zippers, of various lengths, colors, and teeth, had their own place; together, there were enough buttons and zippers for a hundred articles of clothing. Grandmother Tanya, who had spent a lifetime working with paper and did not tolerate a casual attitude toward it, who knew the value of paperweights that protected sheets of paper from drafts and clumsy people and affirmed the fact that any movement of paper as document could be fateful—Grandmother Tanya kept stores of paper clips and paste.
All the grown-ups at home saved connective material as if it were part of a secret universal undertaking. But I, led by a different feeling, suffered in several ways over the diffusion and decay, the loss of wholeness.
At school, we also collected scrap metal; every quarter all the classes, including the lowest ones, went out to scour the neighborhood for lost metal—and always found some, even though just a few months prior, at the last hunt, we’d thought we’d cleared out every corner. But no, metal appeared out of somewhere, as if a huge mechanism had just fallen apart midoperation, with nuts and bolts and springs bursting from of its belly, ruining some of the mechanical connections, but the machine kept working without knowing that some essential parts were lost and no longer functioning. We went through yards, back lots of garages, collecting the remains of the machine’s self-destruction, so they could be melted down and made into new parts that would not repair the machine but could cobble it together enough to keep it going.
There was a political map of the USSR on the wall—I guess my parents wanted me to learn geography as well while I played with my grandmother. She was starting a quilt and had settled into an armchair beneath the map with all the pieces of fabric, scissors, needles and thread.
I had always seen the USSR as a whole. The rest of the world was fragmented, but our one-sixth of the world could not be separated; it was like an ingot.
Of course, the union republics were shown in different colors on the map. I had never paid any attention to their differences, it had never occurred to me to look at the map from that point of view; the Union as a whole absolutely predominated over the particulars, whatever colors and names they had.
But now—horrors!—I fell into a different dimension in which the USSR looked like the quilt Grandmother Tanya was sewing.
I was being cruelly mocked, given for an instant a jester’s vision that turned concepts into their exact opposites. The USSR could not, did not have the right, to look like a quilt!
The Union, “the indissoluble Union” of the anthem, was a guarantor of the dependability of the world in its everyday minutia: light in bulbs, beets in the store, ink in my pen, bus at the stop, tea in the pot, the postman’s ring at the door, a new coat for school—all that was the Union. Its existence affirmed that water would run, snow would melt, and sugar dissolve, as if without it, without its indefinable power, even simple physical processes would cease.
Yes, I did sense that an unknown force had cut short the life of my ancestors, had stolen the memory of them, that the three frogs “see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing” on Grandmother’s table showed how we really lived. But that was weakly related to my concept of the USSR; if the Union could be imagined as a person, I would have said that the USSR-man did not know what strange things were happening inside him.
I would have been happy to forget the image of the quilt Union, but I could not; it was deeply ensconced and periodically returned in waves of fear. The more I chased it away, the more clearly I saw that my usual picture of the world had developed a crack and that this was only the beginning.
The only domestic space I had not studied thoroughly was Grandmother Mara’s apartment. I visited only with my parents and I was always supervised, so even if I had a few minutes of solitude, what could I do in that time, especially when the adults were in the next room and could come in at any moment?
But Mother got a bad flu and I was sent to spend my fall holiday with Grandmother Mara. She was rarely home, it turned out, taking walks, visiting friends, and she did not insist that I accompany her.
At first, I was uncomfortable in her house—there was no place for books, neither shelves nor cupboard; only the book she was reading at a given time lay on her nightstand. I was surrounded by a world of fabrics—drapes, runners, tablecloths, napkins, antimacassars; the mass of her dresses, entangled and resembling a bud, pushed against the closet door.
Naturally, I searched her two rooms very quickly, but it was a disappointment. Besides the war trophy porcelain set, silk bedspreads, and sewing machine, the rest of the things were like idiot servants: stupid cups, stupid combs, stupid mirrors, stupid marking pencils, some of them old but still like newborns, without memories, unable to tell me anything.
I started watching Grandmother Mara; at home both my parents and Grandmother Tanya were beginning to suspect that I was getting into the wrong places, but they explained it as searching for sweets. Grandmother Mara didn’t know this, so if I watched her closely, she could lead me to the hiding place or the object that I did not suspect. To tell the truth, I wasn’t certain of success—Grandmother Mara’s straightforward nature did not give me much hope that she had a “false bottom.”
There was a storeroom near the toilet that served as a kind of Siberian exile. Things that survived from the past were kept there: a bag of bluing, a kerosene lantern, a suitcase of household soap, cast-iron irons, washtubs, dried up washboards, cabbage cutter, cleaver, spinning wheel, laundry baskets, lengths of unbleached linen. She forbade me to go in there—without explanation, just “no.”
Of course, one more ban when I had violated so many meant nothing. But when I approached the door in her absence, I remembered Blue Beard’s secret room. My hand froze as I reached for the doorknob.
I had peeked into the storeroom beneath her arm and it did not seem scary. But now alone in the apartment, where water coughed in the old pipes, I grew uneasy.
Back in the living room, I found the candy box with Grandfather Trofim’s medals, and I attached the Red Star to my shirt. I would not have done that before, but I needed support and security, and I was not usurping his award but using it as a sign of his protection.
With the star tugging at the fabric of my shirt and a flashlight in my hand, I entered the storeroom. There was a weak scent of dried-out soap and aging wood and metal. Empty jars filled the shelves, ready for summer canning, and they reflected the flashlight in dozens of flickers.
What was there to fear here, what should I be looking for? I was ready to leave, ashamed of my fear, ashamed that I needed to put on the star, when I noticed that the washtub seemed to be covering something.
Beneath was a large square object wrapped in worn oilcloth and tied with string. Grandmother Mara knew how to make clever, complicated knots, she said Grandfather Trofim taught her when they had to move and pack up; Grandfather Trofim was a soldier and he probably knew how to tie up a prisoner and join two steel ropes to pull a truck out of a ditch; a genius of the small skills that evince human reliability.
It was a difficult knot that showed she used what she learned from Grandfather Trofim. I knew I would not be able to duplicate it, my fingers would get lost in the loops, forget which end of the string went where. The knot would give me away—if I tied it my way, Grandmother would know that someone had been in the secret place under the washtub. But I also knew: if what I was seeking, what I needed, was there, then I would be able to re-create the knot. I didn’t know the way now, but afterward I would. I pulled on it.
Under the oilcloth was a row of dark burgundy volumes with gold inscription, obviously old, overly large, as if books had degenerated since then.
With the tenacity of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Hittite cuneiform writing, the gibberish abracadabra, the deepest secret transcribed into ordinary letters struck my eyes: A to ACONEUS, ACONITE to ANT, ANTARCTICA to BACON, BARBARIAN to BEDLAM, BOREDOM to CANADA, DELHI to DYNASTY, and so on to HINDI to IMPE
RIALISM. Here the row of leather-bound books, ornamented in gold letters, stars, sheaves, and machine gears, broke off.
My soul heard the echo of the words Nonpareil and Cicero, the ghost of my previous self-deception.
I could not resist those consonances, I could not get enough, and my recent disillusionment had not been a lesson.
This was the GSE, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in the 1920s-1930s edition. I perceived the GSE as a great book of spells fallen into the hands of an underage ignoramus; there were missing volumes, as if someone tried to destroy them. Who? People? Time?
I was not bothered that among the unfamiliar and clearly magical, unreal, secret words, there were familiar ones like Germany and Iron. I understood—discovered—the real setup of the world, where Germany or Iron, the names of countries, things, and actions, were merely a small part of the truly real, where iron is connected to imperialism (a connection it was possible to imagine), deficit with Donetsk, and Germany with the mysterious Gerhardt.
The encyclopedia contained names of vanished things and like the International, its language was the language of ancient magic, but power had deserted these words. Not knowing how many more of these books remained, I assumed that perhaps I was seeing the only extant copy in the world, a gift from the gods of the past to me.
Comprehending nothing, incapable of figuring anything out, I spent the remaining days at Grandmother Mara’s reading the GSE the minute she stepped out the door, intoxicated by the smell of old yellow paper. I had stepped on the Atlantis of books, the continent of the past that had floated up from the ocean depths. Gradually there appeared a world about which I knew nothing. Those names, phenomena, and events did not exist in my time, or if they did, I intuitively sensed that they were presented in a completely different way.
The Year of the Comet Page 9