The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  That evening I asked Father what railroad we had crossed.

  “It’s the old road to the Kommunarka sovkhoz,” he replied instantly, as if he had been expecting the question. He replied in a way that stopped me from asking why a communal state farm needed a railroad and why they didn’t use it anymore.

  On the next to last day of my vacation, I was allowed to ski on my own. It goes without saying that I followed the familiar route past the village and the black wooden church to the glade in the birch forest.

  The scary old man with the carriage of a watchman, the narrow gauge railroad to the testing ground, the abandoned railroad in the forest, the strange, sidelined, unknown roads—I had found the remains of the lost country, the Atlantis I learned of thanks to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

  Here I was at the spot where I’d found the railroad tracks under the snow. I brought a small shovel and dug around as much as I could until I found the stamp: 1931.

  Which way, right or left? The gray cloudy day gave no hint, there was no wind. Left? I thought I could see something in the distance, either a house or a gate or a watchman’s hut. But once you go a hundred, two hundred meters, you realize that even though there is no one and nothing in the woods, you are distraught by the thin twigs, like bird feet, in the snow, by the crunch of the ice crust under your skis. Don’t go left or right, the gray cloudy day tells you, go back to the guesthouse, they’re putting the soup on the stove, forget these homely birches, last year’s crows’ nests falling apart in the wind, the rusty rails under the snow and the rotting poles with tin signs no longer legible.

  I went back, not risking to go farther. But they stayed in my memory, a sleeping seed, those nameless railroads, abandoned trails of unknown things. One day I would find the explanation, I promised myself, not knowing that in five or six years I would read a newspaper article about the mass graves at the Butovo firing range, the firing trenches at the Kommunarka sovkhoz, illustrated by a photo of the narrow gauge railroad headed nowhere in the white winter space filled with the black spots of birch bark.

  Standing there in the glade, for the first time I realized that life was a chain of events elicited by my actions, I saw how one inevitably prompts the next: GSE, New Year’s party, firing range. I even smiled at how I had resisted going to the guesthouse, now understanding that events would find me, and I should trust them rather than my own intentions. The important thing was not to give up my search.

  CLUSTERS OF WHITE LOCUST BLOSSOMS

  Back in Moscow, I took up and dropped various things, unable to concentrate, behaving like a dog that lost a scent. My parents soon brought news: Grandmother Mara was getting married. They were embarrassed, they thought she had lost her mind, it wasn’t done to consider a second marriage at her age; they had gotten used to her loneliness, to the absence of older men in the family.

  But Grandmother Tanya accepted the news easily, with a light sadness; unexpectedly, she was firm about not letting my parents interfere. I couldn’t bear the thought of Grandmother Mara’s betrayal of Grandfather Trofim, which distanced me even more from him, until I learned who the prospective bridegroom was.

  Even in her late years she had several admirers, very different old men, and as a rule, significant people. The former head of a trust, a former weapons designer, the former chief engineer of an energy plant, the former director of a model kolkhoz—all were widowers and they swarmed around Grandmother Mara, sensing that they would live longer and better with her. She accepted their friendship, understood their intentions, and kept them close without putting anyone in an awkward or painful situation; this lasted for years, and they were all her husbands slightly. She took only one man seriously, the one who proposed to her.

  He was the only one I thought had the right to be in a relationship with my grandmother, the widow of Grandfather Trofim—they were both soldiers, “brothers in arms,” as they wrote in books, and there was no betrayal here. Besides which, the man embodied one of my dreams from the past.

  Pilots and submariners, two Soviet castes of free-spirited heroes; not part of the group, not in a unit, but one-on-one with the enemy, with the sky, with the water.

  Pokryshkin and Kozhedub, two fighter pilot aces whose planes were covered with stars for shot-down enemies and whose uniforms bore starred medals, were solitary men in the land of collectivism, aluminum angels of the Soviet skies; at first my heart belonged to them.

  But later, in the middle of the 1980s, living and dead submariners began floating up from the weight of the archives, the commanders of Shchuka-class and Malyutka-class ships. They had lain on the bottom for a long time, engines off; now the pressures of the depths were tossing them to the surface, the fetid air conserved in the submarines escaped from the portholes with a whistle.

  Suddenly their exploits and service were revealed; my heart switched from pilots, the geniuses of speed and maneuver, to the hidden men of the sea, geniuses of patience and obscurity.

  In the Kuzminki neighborhood of Moscow, on the lane that led to the park and ponds, there was a game arcade I liked to play at, and I saved fifteen kopeks all week before the walk to the park. And then—Oh joy!—I put my eyes to the periscope, my fingers held the triggers for the torpedo launchers, and the dark silhouettes of enemy cruisers and destroyers moved along the sea drawn on glass.

  Shoot—the torpedo makes the water foam and an orange light shines on the horizon. If you miss, the black German cruiser sails off into open sea to attack a Soviet convoy. I forgot I was in the middle of wintry Moscow, that I had never seen the sea; my fingers pulled the triggers, the torpedoes left their trail, and with ferocious glee I was blown up along with the enemy ships.

  Grandmother Mara’s fiancé was a submariner, a retired commander. He sometimes visited the dacha wearing a black uniform jacket with planks of decorations and a cap; I knew where his house was, in the village near the market: an old wooden house, an izba, with age-darkened gingerbread window carvings, with random-seeming additions, patched many times, and sinking into the ground.

  It had a huge cellar: there was a hatch with a heavy ring beneath one of the rugs in the house, and when it opened, the earth breathed damply into your face. The innumerable supplies had an earthy smell—beets, carrots, onions (the cellar was rented to the market traders). How could I connect this house, permeated with heavy human smells, smoke, the sour stink of pickling, this house where grandfathers and great-grandfathers had lived and died, this house raised on a foundation of grub, on cool darkness where potato eyes grew blindly, how could I connect it to the sea?

  I saw that Grandmother, clearly caring about the commander, still resisted a final connection with him; she had buried her husband, and the next one—husband or companion—had to be a man with a clear and simple fate, unburdened by old wounds and memory of the war; wounds and memory were identical here. I, on the other hand, kept waiting for him to talk about the war when he visited the dacha; to explain how he, a peasant son, became a man of the sea.

  That winter I came upon the commander at Grandmother Mara’s house. My parents had taken me to the dolphinarium near her apartment, and as I watched the pool with the bluish-gray glossy sea creatures, I thought of him, the commander, his habitual silence, his incredible sensitivity to sound—I think he could hear mice scrambling in the next room—the trained wariness of navigating a submarine that operated in the shallow Baltic Sea, where submarines were frequently discovered by destroyers or planes; the only story he told was about the ship getting wrapped in antisubmarine netting and how they escaped with just a half hour of air left; his ability to move silently, placing his cup on the saucer without a sound, eating without once clinking the plate with a fork, as if he was still waging his war; the dolphins, perceptive and agile, speedy, flying through a ring above the water, reminded me of him—and that very day he was visiting Grandmother Mara.

  My parents had gone, they hadn’t expected Grandmother to have company, but they left me, at her request. I had alwa
ys known that people were divided into summer folk, the ones we saw at the dacha, and winter city friends, and it was strange to see this shift in calendar, seeing the old submariner in the seriousness of his feelings for Grandmother Mara; and seeing her, heavy, suddenly aged by another’s love; she must have thought that acoustically the submariner sensed her better than she did herself, heard all the creaks and groans of her weary body.

  The commander, his hair pure white, chatted politely and easily with me about insignificant things—cross-country skiing, school, what books I was reading. I almost told him about the narrow gauge lines, almost asked him what they were, but stopped in time—I thought he would politely laugh it off and then joke forever, no matter what I wanted to learn from him.

  I sensed that Grandmother was slightly unhappy with her decision to keep me overnight, so I asked to go to bed, earning an appreciative look from the commander. She made up a bed for me, I turned a few times for show, and then was still, feigning sleep. A half hour later, Grandmother opened the door, came over, listened to my breathing, and quietly returned to the commander. I waited a minute and then moved to the door just as quietly.

  Glasses clinked a few times, I could hear quiet conversation—the old man did most of the talking, recalling how he had seen Grandmother Mara at the dacha station with two pails of strawberries. She seemed uncomfortable and she began softly singing, hitting false notes, the song “The Fragrant Clusters of White Locust,” which she loved.

  I sensed the commander putting his hand on hers, asking her to stop. I suspected that Grandmother, knowing him well, sang a song he didn’t like to get something out of him. The shot glasses clinked again, and she asked him why he didn’t like the love song, he had promised to tell her a long time ago and still had not.

  The commander replied: at first I did not understand what he was talking about, what events he was describing, they were impossible to imagine—but then I felt like a submariner whose damaged ship was sinking helplessly into the pressing depths.

  In the spring of 1932 the black locust tree bloomed in the Ukrainian village where he lived as a youth; by then the starving villagers had eaten the first grass, and stray refugees lay dying in the streets devoid of birds, dogs, and cats.

  The commander tenderly described the creamy white blossoms that he and his friend ate, bending the branches to the ground with their remaining strength. There were bugs in some of the flowers, and they ate the bugs, sour and crunchy; the two friends knew the flowers would make them sick, but their fragrance was so appetizing they couldn’t resist; once they fell into a dream state and started retching they would stop.

  The commander weakened first, the sweet toxic petals sickened him; “the fragrant clusters” had a fragrance that was too thick, luring him into dizziness, sleepiness, a deadly, starving sleep; “The night drove us mad”—the locust flowers literally did, and he got up to eat a few more petals.

  Other people came, breaking the branches and carrying them off to eat without sharing. The weakest, little children, who died first, crawled underfoot, licking the dusty clusters on the ground. A fight broke out—an impossible fight among weakened men who could not even make a fist or hold down a rival.

  A bee stung the commander, the sting as painful as a bayonet wound; his face swelled up, turning watery and soft, and he crawled home without noticing where his friend was, crawling for several hours, slinking along the fences. His friend vanished—someone saw him being taken away by two women, to the hospital they said, where there was quarantine for people with dystrophy. If we had not eaten the locust, he said, Kolya would be alive today, he was still agile, he would have gotten away, not given up.

  I had once tried the poisonous water hemlock whose umbrella heads wave in the ditches along the road, and I remembered my consciousness dissolving, I could feel what the commander had been through. My consciousness was gone now, too, I did not hear his last words, except for one phrase that sounded like a bell tolling: “Human meat in aspic does not jell.”

  They sat at the table, drinking a bitter liqueur, uncleared dishes before them; the commander was talking about the unimaginable, and Grandmother Mara did not respond to his story with surprise or indignation.

  I sensed that he was not lying, but in my system of coordinates, what he was saying could not be true—it was delirium, phantasmagoria.

  Commander, commander, why did you answer Grandmother’s question, why didn’t you tell instead of torpedoing a transport ship and hiding from powerboats, naval hunters? “If this did happen, it was only in a single place,” I told myself, “only in that tiny town; human meat in aspic does not jell.”

  But why was Grandmother quiet? Suddenly I realized why she was marrying him, what it was that united them in the past; what he and she remembered.

  There was only one salvation: to believe that both of them had been victims of monstrous circumstances, that they were exceptions. That’s what I decided.

  In the morning I no longer remembered the commander’s story accurately, it had been distorted by my febrile dreams. But I had the feeling that somewhere inside me, in the rooms of my mind there was now a hole, a well that could not be closed, into which one might fall, and from its depths came the sweet fragrance of locust blossoms.

  LIGHTS IN THE FIRMAMENT

  I returned home happily, trying not to recall what had happened at Grandmother Mara’s; I clung to Grandmother Tanya, so that when I talked or played with her, I could banish the vision of the deadly white petals at least for a time.

  That winter Grandmother Tanya, as if sensing the changes within me, started teaching me to draw. I copied postcards or drew our dacha, but neither gouache, nor watercolor, nor pencils obeyed me, and my work was poor, but this did not worry Grandmother; in exchange for my picture, she gave me one of hers. That was the point of her new game: she was surreptitiously introducing me into the circle of her memories.

  The first night battle over Moscow—the orange lines of tracers in the dark blue sky, the ghostly columns of searchlights, German planes falling like swatted midges; Stalin’s funeral—a whirlpool of bodies, people trapped in the swirling masses on the street; the German dirigible Zeppelin flying to the Arctic in 1930, a gigantic silvery cigar above the Kremlin; the autumn parade in 1941 on Red Square—gray figures with vertical strokes of rifles appearing out of the snow and marching back into it.

  I saw her pencil and pastel sketches done when she was young—pitchers, plaster heads, abstract compositions; I couldn’t say that the hand of a strong artist was visible, but the precision and solidity of the lines revealed an artist for whom the world was clear, transparent, and safe.

  But now many decades later, her style had changed completely; her drawings resembled lubok, the pictures on the walls of peasant huts. Her style became more childlike in execution, with extended captions; the drawings were turning into a homemade filmstrip.

  Later, as an adult, I saw the drawings made by prisoners in death camps, the drawings of people sent to distant penal colonies beyond the Arctic Circle, I recognized the style—childlike, as if the mind was protecting itself from the experience, translating it to the safest forms of comprehension, separating it in time, moving it back to fairy tale days, and at the same time, taming it, bringing it into the composition of memory.

  Back in that year, there was a lot of talk about Haley’s Comet approaching earth. The newspapers and television said that it would be studied with telescopes, that a space probe would be sent out to meet it; the comet was a free gift to popularizers of astronomy, a new holiday on the boring calendar. I didn’t know that Haley was the astronomer’s name, I thought it was the name of the comet.

  I noticed that both grandmothers, who rarely took an interest in that sort of news—a new nebula discovered, another spaceship launched—knew about the comet, as if there were some special reason for them to remember when it was due, the way they remembered birthdays and anniversaries.

  They were preparing for the comet�
�s arrival, and while the preparations were not manifest in action, they were palpable. Grandmother Mara softened, and contrary to her personality she let go of her old feuds and worried that she would not be able to forgive everything in time. Grandmother Tanya, an incredible tranquil person, became calmer still, more tactful, as if apologizing even to the dust she wiped away or the salt she tossed into the soup.

  It seemed that they wanted to talk about something, to tell us something, but were afraid of being misunderstood, that their statements would be taken with a condescending smile, and they kept silent, as if they knew that the mockery might later make trouble for the one who dismissed their warning so lightly.

  I sensed the aura of mystery that surrounded the comet and tried to stick closer to the grannies, in case their anxiety would make them careless and they’d inadvertently say something that explained their strange anticipation.

  Comet, comet, comet—I went to school, did my homework, made snow forts, but it was inside me, invading my dreams as the source of tormenting fears, like sounds that humans cannot hear but which resound in the body as confusion and horror. The comet was already there, it was constantly hanging over my head, and the nearness of the comet to the earth hinted at some future event, an exceedingly rare moment in time, when the veils are lifted and the invisible becomes visible.

  One afternoon I came home early—they had canceled the final class.

  Grandmother Tanya was sitting at the table, with a newspaper spread before her, open to an article about Haley’s Comet with a bold and clumsy headline referring to the “celestial guest.”

  Grandmother had removed her glasses—even though she read with them on—and seemed to be holding an invisible book before her eyes, for which glasses were unnecessary. Softly, with a cautious step, feeling the way through the path of memory, overgrown and nearly gone, she whispered words, repeating them more confidently, with fewer hesitations, each time: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.