The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  At home with my parents, I often read the SSE, the Small Soviet Encyclopedia published in the 1960s, primarily out of a superficial curiosity, the empty passion of an erudite. And that helped me so much; numerous people the GSE wrote about with a view to eternity did not figure at all in the SSE. Geographic and scientific concepts were the only things the encyclopedias had in common.

  I thought that if one were to read the entire GSE, aloud, like a prayer, even without understanding the meaning, the reading would give birth to, create the USSR, the forgotten Soviet Union of the twenties and thirties, gone into the past.

  In one of the volumes I found a dry maple leaf, and lazily wondered what happened to the tree from which it fell; I doubt it survived. I shivered with foreboding; what if the past that gave rise to the encyclopedia does not exist at all? What if it wasn’t preserved at all except in this one book?

  It didn’t give me pause that Grandmother Mara, who didn’t like to read and would have trouble with encyclopedia articles, had the GSE. An encyclopedia that survived by accident should be kept by a person who would never be considered a Guardian. Maybe Grandmother Mara didn’t even know what was in the package, maybe she’d never looked, following Grandfather Trofim’s orders.

  The flyleaf of each volume was the color of dark straw, like the soldiers’ uniforms in the 1940s. Against that background, bright crimson thorny vines twisted into a single pattern, looking both like branches of a prickly shrub and barbed wire; not an abstract design or an ornamental element, it was a naturalistic depiction, a martyr’s epigraph to the book, doubling, tripling its weight and significance, as if the knowledge it contained had been paid for in blood.

  In the list of editors, I knew only two names: Kuibyshev, also the name of a city, and Schmidt, who gave his name to an iceberg—a polar explorer, organizer of all the northern expeditions, conqueror of the Arctic, and creator of the drifting North Pole Station. I remembered that when the volume I held in my hands was published, Schmidt was in the Arctic, exploring the Northern Sea Route, and could not have worked on the encyclopedia, where he was listed as editor in chief. I knew that for certain, because I had read a lot of books on polar explorers—the Arctic, the great white “nowhere,” was a blank page perfect for manufacturing ideal exploits and heroic figures, and those figures, without an ideological sell-by date, were still featured in books and films in my day.

  That meant the GSE had been made by the rest, the unknown people whose names were preceded by the red thorns on the fly-leaf. I reread the list twice, and I found two names—Bukharin and Piatakov; I couldn’t remember how I knew them, but they must have slipped through the conversations of adults, flickered like ghosts, outside time or context; ghosts surrounded by an aura of greatness, or significance, or tragic death, or betrayal and villainy, or maybe all of the above.

  Juxtaposing the celebrated fate of Schmidt and Kuibyshev with the silence and obscurity surrounding the others, I began to understand that the USSR I knew and inhabited was just a copy, a piece of the other, earlier one. I set my flashlight on the floor and on the very first try I replicated Grandmother’s tricky knot on the package. I was right, it was intended for me.

  When I returned home after my school holidays at Grandmother Mara’s, I went to the Small Soviet Encyclopedia and I did not find Bukharin or Piatakov; instead, there were articles on Bukhara and Piatigorsk where their names should have been.

  The inviolably singular USSR was shaken; I had never heard the Soviet Union used in the plural, it was impossible, contradicted the dependence of the world upon the singularity of the USSR; but I risked it—slowly, with difficulty, as if pushing those gigantic stone letters, I said to myself: USSRs. Two USSRs. That USSR. Today’s USSR.

  USSRs.

  Now I kept asking to visit Grandmother Mara. My parents were happy, they thought I had gotten over my dislike of her. What I cared about was being near the secret books hidden in the storeroom and watching Grandmother Mara: Had she guessed I had been in there? Did she know what she was concealing? Grandmother continued her everyday life, so ordinary that I wondered if I had dreamed up the hidden ancient encyclopedia.

  I was counting on spending the winter holidays at Grandmother Mara’s so I could get back to the GSE. To keep my parents from denying my as-yet unvoiced request, I worked on my studies and ended the quarter with excellent grades. But the night I brought home my report card and was about to ask at dinner to stay at Grandmother Mara’s, my parents beat me to the punch, exchanged a cheerful look and announced that because I had done so well at school they booked us a stay at a boardinghouse and the school had awarded me an invitation to the New Year’s celebration at the Kremlin.

  I don’t think they understood my disappointment, which I was unable to hide, and I explained it as the result of being overworked at school, but they were hurt I didn’t appreciate the gift. I was in their power, and I reflected sadly that this must be how it is—a secret book is opened only once, and whatever you did not have time to learn from its pages is gone forever. How angry I was at them, unwitting accomplices of a life arranged to hide secrets! I meekly agreed to go on vacation and to the Kremlin party; I was even forced to pretend to want to go so my parents wouldn’t start wondering why I was so eager to spend the holidays at Grandmother Mara’s, which I’d never wanted to do before.

  In the final days of December, Mother and I moved into the vacation boardinghouse, planning to return to Moscow for one day, for the party. Snowy woods, early dark, cartoons in the hall, and other children to play with—Grandmother’s storeroom was shunted aside, disappeared, the great GSE volumes vanished, leaving only the role of child enjoying the holidays, which I grew into.

  I did not want to go to the Kremlin but was afraid to say so, for the party at the Palace of Congresses was a kind of unmatched peak in a Soviet childhood, the highest recognition of achievements and reliability.

  I had never understood the festive crowds on Red Square gathered for the fireworks; the space was dangerously exposed to the winds of ancient times. O, how empty and terrible it was in early morning bad weather, the navel of the earth from the ascent to the Museum of the Revolution down to the Vasilyevsky Slope, a place where the curvature of the globe is clearly visible! The body of the square looked to me like the squashed chest of a bogatyr, the scales of his armor the cobblestones, and in the corner lay his chopped off head, the round Execution Place. Saint Basil’s Cathedral blazed like a funeral pyre, the spiral designs on its domes combining war helmets and the multiple heads of a dragon; a place of ancient battles, a place of executions, its cobbles buckled by the wild forces of the earth beneath it; a place of victims and funeral feasts. Across the square, by the wall, stood the Mausoleum ziggurat; the tense diagonal between Execution Place and the Mausoleum burst open the square, turning it into a parallelogram, making an already distorted space even more lopsided. How could anyone stroll around Red Square without anxiety?

  From the warmth and light of the boardinghouse Mother and I stepped into the frosty early twilight, the icy dark hole of December, and took the long walk to the train. Snow-filled forests and fields surrounded us, we saw only occasional lights, and it was hard to believe that a big city was only a dozen stations away. Time did not exist for these woods and fields, they were the same as they had been centuries ago. Daylight made them charming, they were suburban, filled with vacationers, but in the evenings, when the last skiers hurried to the train, they became wild again, lost in snowy expanses, stolen by the dark.

  The day before we had gone on an excursion to an old nearby estate, the mansion yellow and white, with columns at the main entrance and sculptures in the parkland, but now I thought that the estate was gone, the trees visible in the daytime were gone, and we were walking on a road from nowhere to no place. We might run into horse-drawn sleighs from the last century, and so we had to firmly believe that a railroad station awaited us at the end of the road and that we had left the boardinghouse behind us. Otherwise we might no
t reach our goal or find our way back.

  We reached the station, Mother led me by the hand confidently. The commuter train, covered in frost and battling dirty winds, rattled along, its irrational mechanical heart beating in the engine car, while the darkness beyond the frosty windows gathered, turning into corners of buildings, platforms, and people in the light of streetlamps.

  The noise, crowds, and marble of the metro closed in on us and then threw us out near the Kutafya Tower by the Troitsky Gates of the Kremlin.

  We passed through the Kremlin walls. I had been transported from the rarefied air and timeless darkness of the forests outside Moscow and now I was immured in stone—the towers, walls, crenellations, chimes, the brick ensemble of the Kremlin oppressed me. The sight of the Ivan the Great bell tower, the towers and cathedrals floodlit by klieg lights against the sky was so powerful I thought my ears would ring and my nose would bleed. It was impossible to breathe there, impossible to feel, because my feelings were in spasm.

  One sensation did get past the spasms—the Kremlin could see me, even though it was incredibly large and I was insignificantly tiny; it was indifferent to the other people walking next to me, but I had a flaw which the citadel could sense.

  At the time, I was sure that the Kremlin had been built in the Soviet era; this belief coexisted without contradiction with the knowledge that the chief architectural symbol of the Soviet Union was much older. The red brick walls and ruby stars made the Kremlin an incarnation of the Union, the chimes on Spassky Tower counted out the hour in the enormous country; it wasn’t the symbol of Soviet power, it was simply power.

  I realized what the Kremlin knew about me; it knew about my vision of the patchwork quilt Union, it knew I had opened the secret, banned book of the GSE and had spoken the impossible word “USSRs”; it exposed me—How could I have not foreseen it, how self-reliantly and forgetfully had I risked venturing inside its walls!

  For an instant I thought guards would ask us to show our tickets again and they would find a problem; we would be separated and led away. I thought back to the guesthouse where our clothes were drying on the radiator and suddenly saw other people in our room, other clothes drying after a ski outing.

  The hallucination passed but the Kremlin’s gaze remained.

  In the lobby of the Palace of Congresses teenagers were helping the arrivals; they were dressed in Pioneer uniforms even though they were too old to be Pioneers.

  One of them, tall, handsome, wearing the Pioneer outfit as if it were a military uniform—I even thought he might have had it made in some expensive shop, otherwise the baggy trousers and too-short jacket would never have fit that way—pointed out our section of the coat check and turned away, as if we were bothering him with trifles and had called him away from his important post. The white wavy curtains on the huge windows, the immaculately clean collar of his white shirt, the dashing drape of the red tie, the crease in his trousers and his pointy shoes—the Palace would have made him the gatekeeper, and he liked being in the Palace, he liked telling people where to go. This was his party, his evening, and for a second I wanted to be him, to feel as comfortable and confident in the Kremlin.

  We were seated close to the stage. The performance began. Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, was kidnapped by a villain, the usual plot, and all the children screamed: “Come out, Grandfather Frost!” clutching our cardboard gift boxes with the sticky smell of chocolate. I had an acute sense of the meaninglessness of the party, the play, Grandfather Frost, the costumed actors, fake beards, confetti and paper spirals, the shiny tree ornaments; I had aged in minutes and was weary with monstrous adult ennui.

  My childhood was over—I had dreamed of it so often, but now I sat, deafened, confused, feeling the unwavering gaze of the Kremlin, practically hoping they would take me away and lock me up with others like me.

  My childhood was over; still, I did not regret opening the forbidden book—if they did not take me from the concert hall, did not lead me by the elbow as we were leaving, there would be events arising from my contact with the book, and those events were near! The new year was coming, and for the first time it would truly be new, not like the previous ones that followed the same pattern.

  Discoveries and unknown sacrifices awaited me, perhaps the sacrifice of my life—the gaze of the Kremlin supported that possibility—but I was naively prepared to make sacrifices, even wanted them, delighted that this desire found approval from the Kremlin.

  Two days later, when the television showed the chimes of the Kremlin marking the last minute of last year, I no longer felt its gaze. A blizzard raged around us, I slipped away from my mother to run outside, to touch, to hold the first snow of the new year. Cold penetrated my hand, I heard the thrum of guesthouse residents behind me, and I stood looking out onto the illuminated emptiness of the tree-lined lanes.

  My time had come.

  PART TWO

  UNKNOWN ROADS

  Great events sometimes send messengers, a sign: be alert, be open and sensitive, don’t miss it, don’t interfere by deed or feeling, or it will not happen!

  Almost nothing remains in my memory of the long winters of childhood except sledding down an icy hill and skiing; I remember only the moments of movement. Flying on a big piece of fraying cardboard along icy ruts, rusty whorls of last year’s grass in the ice, always with spots of blood—because someone smashed his face or cut his hand—flying to the deep garbage ravine filled with old tires. Two skis before your eyes as they pass each other, intersecting and separating tracks. The creak of the snow, the scuffle of ski poles on the ice crust, sliding, sliding, coming home, hot tea with cranberries, a heavy meal, and a heavy, dreamless sleep.

  Only one winter left a long memory; the winter in which my awakening to my own life began with the Kremlin New Year’s party.

  The weather was good, vacation’s end still far away, Father came to visit us at the boardinghouse, and I demanded we go skiing every day—everything in me demanded action, apparently senseless movement and quests.

  The embankment of the narrow gauge train line that joined the railroad from the opposite side of the station had pieces of colored glass, light blue, violet, lilac, blue, and green, looking like shards of ingots. I was not allowed to collect the glass, I was told it could contain dangerous chemicals; I would have believed them, but there was another condition—I was not allowed to cross over to the side with the narrow gauge line. I think the first ban was merely a consequence of the second.

  Gradually I learned from phrases not intended for me that the glass was being carried from a place that had, or used to have, a testing ground. There were few words which could excite as much, except for “airport,” “military unit,” and “secret laboratory.”

  One day, getting permission to play at the nearby ponds, I crossed the tracks and headed along the narrow gauge line. Pieces of colored glass glittered in the embankment gravel, and I could follow the trail endlessly. But a growing unease made me uncomfortable: the pieces of glass, iridescent, smoky, colored, were luring me, long warehouses and dumps stood on either side, but I could not see a testing ground, a big, wide space.

  Two men came toward me, fishermen; dressed in cotton batting jackets with waterproof covers on their felt boots, with icebreakers and short winter fishing poles, they were headed to the ponds I had allegedly gone to see.

  I cautiously asked them where the testing ground was. One man, round-faced, with silly, droopy ears, still shiny-faced from his wife’s blini or waffles, looked at me in confusion, preparing to say, “What testing ground?” The other, almost an old man, with a narrow face marked with swollen red capillaries, tall, the icebreaker slung over his shoulder like a rifle, blocked my way, pulled a huge fur mitten from his right hand and took me by the shoulder, his fingers on a vulnerable bone. I sensed that if he pushed, pain would shoot through my shoulder. I had noticed that inside the fur mitten, his wool glove, mended many times, had three fingers; I knew it was an army glove for winter shooting, l
eaving the index finger free to pull the trigger.

  “How do you know about the testing ground?” the old man asked, not joking, as a man who had the right to pose such questions. “Who told you? Why are you here?”

  I looked down at my feet, saw a bluish-white piece of glass, and realized that there was no point in a story about looking for colored glass. The second fisherman moved away, while the old man let go of my shoulder but put his hands on my cheeks and drew my face closer to his, his eyes pressing on me.

  A train came round the sharp bend, the engineer blew the whistle, and the old man let me go with a rasping, “Go away, pup.” The locomotive and its chain of cars hauling gravel left us on opposite sides of the track.

  I scrambled down the embankment and ran for it. I realized the adults knew something was wrong with this place, for we’d picked mushrooms on the testing ground for tanks near the dacha, but this was a different kind of testing ground, and the old man with the glove like the ones guards wear in winter may have even saved me. He obviously had worked there, and even in retirement he continued his vigilant watch.

  Two or three days later we skied particularly far from the house. Crossing a long field, with the occasional tufts of grass, we could see a village of a dozen houses and a wooden church in the distance. We entered a bright birch grove with a glade. The glade was slightly raised above the road, as if dirt had been added to it; I was just thinking about that when my ski hit something metallic.

  “Come on,” my father said, noticing that I had stopped. “Let’s go! We’ll be late for lunch!”

  I nodded, but as soon as he turned, I cleared the snow away with my ski. I saw a rusted track of a narrow gauge railroad. While we skied along the path, I saw among the trees a few old poles, rotting and gray with age, pieces of barbed wire on the insulators.