I repeated the story to Grandmother Tanya close to her ear; two or three years earlier the police had undertaken raids in the mountains of the Caucasus, looking for caches of gold; it all began with large thefts of gold from the Kolyma mines, traced to Checheno-Ingushetia.
What the general described was war, even though neither he nor my father used the word; ambushes, shootouts, and so many bandits it was more accurate to call them partisans. I couldn’t understand: What about the peaceful Caucasus, the djigit in his turban on the Kazbek cigarette pack, the Narzan mineral water Father was drinking after Chernobyl? Grandmother Tanya looked as if the general’s story was not news to her. He seemed a bit irritated, rummaged in the right pocket of his uniform jacket and laid a piece of chewed-up metal on the table.
“Look, a bullet pierced the metal,” Konstantin Alexandrovich spoke into Grandmother Tanya’s ear. “It went through and then struck me beneath my heart, leaving only a bruise. I carry it with me now.”
Grandmother rose swiftly, went to her room, and started rummaging in the round woven sewing and knitting boxes. She came back and placed a small piece of cloth on the table, about the size of a quarter of a handkerchief, uniform fabric with a hole torn in the center.
Like a bit of a mosaic, a fragment from which one could reconstitute a larger image in various directions, rough, stained with mud, blood, and gunpowder. A whole world, a soldier’s world, fastened with the straps of a soldier’s pack, squashed by the heavy rim of a cannon wheel, unfurled from the remnant of an old uniform. The hole in the center wrapped it up, swallowed it; it seemed that the entire universe could be pulled into that hole like a fine shawl through a ring.
They lay next to each other, the piece of cloth and the bullet that struck Konstantin Alexandrovich in the chest; they suited each other, like a lock and key. I desperately wanted—oh, how I later understood Saint Thomas’s desire—I wanted to push the bullet through the hole in the old cloth.
“My great-grandfather’s uniform,” Grandmother said to the stunned general. “All that’s left. He died in the Caucasus. In the last century. He was also a general.” Grandmother gave a thin, apologetic smile. “Slain by a Chechen bullet, as they told us when I was a child. ‘Slain’; we were brought up poetically. His uniform was burned later, the epaulettes, the old officer class, that was not approved. My sister and I cut out this piece and kept it. She gave it to someone being evacuated from the siege of Leningrad. They found me in 1947. She didn’t pass along or save anything of her own, only this ill-fated piece of fabric.”
Father and the general looked at them with distrust and a childish horror; I think they wanted to do the same thing I wanted—to combine the bullet and the hole in the cloth.
“A tsarist general,” Konstantin Alexandrovich said. “Tsarist.”
He pushed the bullet through the hole in the uniform fabric as if in slow motion. Father was embarrassed, for he had not known about his ancestor who’d been a general, and like me, had never peeked beyond the border of 1917, even though he was born in 1941. I think he was planning to have a serious talk with Grandmother Tanya after Konstantin Alexandrovich left, to explain that you can’t come out with family secrets just like that, it’s embarrassing, uncomfortable … Grandmother did not notice Father’s reaction and gently smiled at her thought, happy that she had finally shared the family secret with him, as if he had become another person after Chernobyl, one with the right to know.
Amazed by the ease with which Grandmother revealed the secret, I took it to mean something else. I did not know how long it takes to write a book so I was certain that Grandmother had completed her memoirs—how else to explain the opening of the curtain of silence?
She had spent a month on them; I thought a month was plenty to tell everything completely, to climb into all the cubbyholes of memory, it would take a few days, no more than that. Excited and confused, I wanted to know everything about the general killed in the Caucasus, I could not wait, afraid that Grandmother would take out only pieces of the past from her hiding places, like a magician, without showing me the whole picture; she would torment me with sudden revelations, like inoculations or electric shocks.
Having convinced myself that Grandmother wanted to show me her manuscript but did not know how to give me a sign, I boldly went to her before bed and asked, May I read it? She pretended not to understand, adjusted her spectacles and gave me a disappointed look: Don’t you understand … Stubborn in my stupid certainty that the book was now completely written, I asked again: May I or not?
Grandmother shook her head: No. She was uncomfortable, sorry she had shown me the secret of the book, sorry that now everyone in the apartment seemed united against her, and she wanted to hide, vanish, but had nowhere to go and nowhere to take the book.
But my desire and hurt were too great; instead of apologizing, I turned and left. It’s for me, for me, whispered the petty demon awakened inside me, why won’t she show it to me?
The next day I waited for Grandmother to go to the kitchen and I crept into her room. The book in the brown cover lay on the desk, with a bookmark—very close, too close to the beginning. I noticed this, realized that she was only starting, but my hands opened the book by themselves.
“For my dear grandson,” I read the inscription. “For my dear grandson, when I am gone.” Shame burned my heart; I turned, Grandmother was in the doorway.
Without a word she took the book from me, put it in a drawer with her papers and locked it with a key that she wore around her neck like a cross. She picked up the pen, tightened the cap, and put it in the glass with pencils. The pen jangled against the glass bottom, and it was irreversibly clear: there would be no book. I had ruined everything, cut it off at the very beginning. There would be no book. Grandmother sat down, picked up the newspaper crossword—which she never did—and picked up the same pen, then changed her mind, and took a pencil and moved the three frogs to the edge of the table.
See nothing.
Hear nothing.
Say nothing.
I should have fallen to my knees and begged for forgiveness. But the pain of shattered hopes was too deep, and so my thoughts ran in the opposite direction. I didn’t need any stupid book! I didn’t need to wait! I renounced Grandmother Tanya and became the grandson of Grandmother Mara, who would have been horrified by the news that I—the grandson of Grandfather Trofim, the brave tank soldier, and of Grandfather Mikhail, the imaginary spy—had a tsarist general ancestor.
It will be summer in a month, I kept telling myself, I’ll be sent to the dacha, away from Grandmother Tanya, and there I’ll … I didn’t know what I would do, but my despair told me I had to undertake a risk, like in the story about the son of the regiment who drew artillery fire to save the men.
That day the book in the brown cover vanished and no longer appeared on Grandmother’s desk. She continued to study and play with me, but treated me as a child whose interests were the playground and school; there were no more picture memories in the album, no more poetry; and she never again invited me to sort grains with her.
RUN IN FRONT OF THE BLACK CAR
If parents only knew what ideas they accidentally give their children!
Sometimes my mother took me to the medical clinic near the Kiev Station. She had lived there with Grandmother Mara and Grandfather Trofim before and after the war, so revisiting her childhood places, she grew younger, cheerful and free, liberated from Father and Grandmother Tanya, and happily told me stories: how they made a special hook to steal bread from the downstairs bakery’s truck; how in winter bandits used to throw dead bodies into the warm water seeping from the local steam baths; how German prisoners of war built houses and how they frightened her, she worried about who would live in them, who would be punished by being forced to move there. And at the same she wondered how Germans, who only killed and destroyed, knew how to build so neatly and deftly—maybe they weren’t Germans at all?
I liked being in that neighborhood; the huge glass
canopy over the platforms was like a magnet—you could be pulled in under the canopy, to the ticket office, and then onto a commuter or long-distance train, even though you weren’t planning on a trip. Buses and trolleys pulled up and drove off, river ferries were docked at the landing, and Mother was energized by the hustle and bustle, she bought me ice cream and let me eat as we walked; we entered into a wordless conspiracy and didn’t tell anyone at home how good it was, just the two of us.
Soon after my falling out with Grandmother Tanya, Mother took me to the clinic. We were crossing the bridge over the Moskva River while a motorcade, surrounded by motorcycles, passed us on the embankment in the direction of Leninsky Prospect and Vnukovo Airport: three shiny black Chaika limousines with opaque windows. Traffic had been stopped and the Chaikas raced along the empty street, led by a highway patrol Volga, siren blaring, showering puddles and store windows with flashes of blue light.
I stopped, thinking that Mother would go on while I watched the motorcade and then caught up with her. The cars reached Sparrow Hills and I discovered that Mother, who was not interested in cars or privileged persons, was also staring helplessly at the now-invisible motorcade.
I wanted to go on, but she stood still, in the grip of some emotion. Down under the bridge at the corner by a traffic light a boy my age stood with his mother, impatiently stamping his feet, while his mother held his hand, pulling him away from the curb.
My mother was looking back and forth at the asphalt, the double white lines dividing traffic, and at the boy who was obviously chafing at the delay and would have run across against the light had he been alone. He would probably have pulled a prank trying to scare an inexperienced driver by pretending to run in front of the car. Coming closer I saw that Mother was crying, but only her left eye was tearing up, as if, being a righty, she had more control over that side. Slow tears accumulated in the eye’s corner, and she wiped them away, pretending to be dabbing some speck with her hankie.
I could not remember my mother ever crying out of the blue like that. My mother was lighthearted; she could be sentimental, but in a fierce way, not weepy; at a moment of separation, a moment of fear, she always smiled encouragingly. But now she was crying with pity for herself, and I sensed that the cause of her tears was somewhere in the past of the girl who had yet to meet my father and become my mother. I realized that she had spent most of her life without me and a significant part without my father. Stunned by the unexpected separateness of a person I had always considered an immutable part of my world, I stepped away to give her privacy.
Later, as we sat in the clinic corridor, Mother talked—into space, to the side—about a boy she liked when she was at school not far from the train station, and how when she was twelve, she decided to marry him when they grew up, but then disaster struck.
Daily, at a certain hour, Stalin’s motorcade of several identical black cars flew down Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya thoroughfare to the Kremlin. The local boys came up with a game: they tied their hands together with a clothesline and ran across the street right in front of the cars. Why did they do that? Mother did not say.
The police and secret service did not try to stop the children, even though they ran across the street more than once. The guards seemed to be spellbound by this strange behavior, they, too, wanted to see if the boys would succeed and to experience those moments of delight, horror, and delicious fear that someone dared to play this game with the Leader, teasing the tiger in dangerous proximity to his whiskers. Probably no orders came from Stalin’s bodyguards, the ones in the cars, as if they knew that their boss liked it; they had developed an animal sense for approval and disapproval, they must have perceived the impulses of his will directed at the backs of their shaved heads.
The cars hurtled past the children without reducing speed. One day two of the boys, one of whom was my mother’s crush, decided to run extremely close, so close that Stalin would be able to see their faces. They ran, but a policeman blew his whistle—they said he was new, his first day on the job, and didn’t know this game. The whistle violated the general pact of noninterference, the secret service agents ran onto the sidewalk, but it was too late to catch the boys. The black cars were racing down Dorogomilovskaya, hubcaps gleaming, parting space, sending everyone—pedestrians, police, guards—reeling back toward the walls. Only the two boys raced across the street; the policeman blew the whistle again, and one boy lost his stride, tripped on the line, and knocked over his friend. They tried to get up, the rope stretched out and the nickel-plated fangs of the front car’s bumper caught it, dragging the children. About one hundred meters later, right by the bridge, it stopped, and against all regulations, so did the whole motorcade.
It’s most likely that Stalin wasn’t in it, otherwise the cars would have continued on. But no one was thinking about that then. A great and total silence ensued, so quiet you could hear the ticking of the black cars’ cooling engines. No one rushed to help or to call an ambulance, everyone froze in place waiting for Stalin to open the door to see who dared play this outrageous and delightful game. Maybe only a boot would appear, the boot would touch the ground but the Leader would stay inside. The boot would be even more threatening and majestic than Stalin whole—no one would have any doubts about whose boot it was—the boot would be Stalin.
No one remembered how long the silence lasted. Mother said the trains at Kiev Station seemed to have stopped too. The two boys, tied by the clothesline, their skin scraped to the flesh by the asphalt, with twisted joints and broken bones, also lay there in silence, trying to move but not moaning, for a moan could change the balance in the scale of punishment and clemency.
Guards came out of the black car, picked up the children and loaded them into the vehicle. They headed in the direction of the closest hospital, while the motorcade went to the Kremlin, and the crowd broke up, people trying to forget what they saw, erasing the boys from their memory until their fate was resolved.
The boy my mother had liked returned a month later from the hospital: against all expectations, there was no punishment. The absence of penalty and its anticipation destroyed the boy. The broken bones knitted properly, the wounds healed, but he never got over it; he hanged himself in the woodshed, with a clothesline.
I took the story in a different way than Mother intended. She was protecting and warning me, surely aware that bad things were brewing in me.
But I heard something else: a child can perform a deed that adults fear, he can throw himself in the path of a black car and stare into its headlights. I understood the spirit, the mood, of the boys; I realized that my mother was afraid of that—that one day either accidentally or intentionally, now or twenty years from now, as an adult, I would do something similar; run out, leap, rush headlong where I should not go.
I did not yet know what I would do, what I would achieve, but I absolutely knew how—like those two boys who dared to run across the road in front of a black motorcade that never stops.
THE RIVER OF HISTORY
As a reward for his trip to Chernobyl, Father was given a union-paid holiday—a few days aboard an excursion cruise on the Volga. It was May, navigation season was just beginning, it was practically the first voyage, which usually went half-full, but the ship was completely booked.
No one knew where the fallout would spread, where the radioactive rains had fallen; there were rumors that Western countries had registered higher radiation and people were guessing how bad it was in Russia.
A lot of people tried to send their wives and children wherever they could as long as it was far from the reactor. These were primarily scientists and military men who understood what danger radiation posed; in Moscow the first pre-evacuation whispers circulated.
The cruise ship left in the evening, and we would go through the locks of the Moscow-Volga Canal at night. We arrived at the Northern River Station, that relic of the 1930s, where plaster volleyball players eternally fly up over an imaginary net and plaster female swimmers dry themselve
s with towels. Parts of the sculpted images had fallen off, the athletes stood on rusty rebar stubs like prostheses, as if they were crumbling, dematerializing, vanishing into thin air with each new navigation, which for them meant time passing.
In a landlocked capital, the river station gathered five seas under a five-pointed star on a spire, which had once twinkled on a Kremlin tower; I sensed that this was not the feckless dock for quick ferry rides but a more important place.
In ring-encircled Moscow, here was the secret exit, a river road. Yet Russian history flowed along rivers, the rivers grew cities on themselves, dictated the geography of principalities—and the echo of that was palpable there: the station for ships bound for Yaroslavl, Uglich, Kostroma, the forests beyond the Volga, and the very word Volga, which was spoken more frequently than others at the station, with its deep and rolling o, ready to spill out of the word like a gemstone from a setting.
It so happened that my parents had traveled in all directions out of Moscow but never north. In childhood, that kind of randomness is perceived as a deeply-reasoned principle. Therefore, in my personal topography, the North was the land of fairy tales and historical legends. The mysterious city of Kitezh, vanished principalities, extinct nomadic tribes, the Polish regiment that seventeenth-century martyr Ivan Susanin lured into the swamp, Tsarevich Dmitri, exiled to Uglich, where he died—these stories were all jumbled into a narrative about extreme lands where people perish, vanish, get lost, a narrative about enchanted, unstable places that can open up and swallow, as if history had not yet “set” there, but was still a thin and spotty film of rust on the surface of swamps.
Mother and I settled into the cabin while the boat left the dock and moved into the night. She promised to show me the locks; I had drifted off to sleep and she woke me when the ship had passed the watershed and started going down the lock ladder to the Volga. Bright violet-white lights hit our portholes, and we went out on deck with the crowd of passengers.
The Year of the Comet Page 13