The dacha areas were being rebuilt very quickly in those years to accommodate new arrivals; the empty lands and former fields gave rise to new lots, with six hundred square meters instead of the previous thousand. Forest borders were chopped down, roads and paths laid through the woods to the train station; the new residents settled in, and suddenly there were too many people, the forest ravines started filling with garbage, the excess of their existence. Previously, everyone knew everyone, the villagers and the dacha residents knew one another, the mushroom collectors knew the mushroomers, the fishermen the fishermen; and then in just a year or two the summer population doubled or tripled; and the appearance of a “stranger,” which used to elicit wariness and talk—Who’s that wandering around here?—became routine, but it transformed the atmosphere.
Feeling this change or perhaps alerted to the new times and the disintegration of the former order by nomadic and unsettled instincts, tramps began appearing.
From behind stoves, from seemingly abandoned cabins on the edge of villages, from a neighbor woman’s shed, from storage buildings, came the men hiding there, as if awakened from sleep.
For many long years they stayed put—living wherever they had washed up—under someone else’s roof, some did petty thieving, others drank, but all found a food source, leaned on something. Suddenly they seemed to have found willpower, intention, strength; they used to be ashamed of themselves, knowing their pathetic position in the strict village world, but now they were forming groups that quickly turned into gangs. They went out into the woods and found an abandoned forester’s hut or a child’s tent, which they furnished into a scary parody of living space: they dragged in cast-off couches and refrigerators, trashed television sets, and set up this trash around a bonfire covered by an awning or in a pit; they probably stared at the broken screen of the Rubin or Yunost TV, put leftover and stolen garden vegetables into the refrigerators, and tossed piles of clothing snatched from the line while the housewife wasn’t watching into listing cupboards.
A method of earning money appeared in the forest strongholds—stealing metal and robbing dachas; the tramps climbed over the barbed wire of the military airfield to unscrew things from planes and established an exchange with the guards. In the winter they found shelter or moved south or died of the cold, but the gangs reappeared in the spring, with new members, and the forest world grew stronger. The tramps looked down on the dacha owners, uselessly puttering in their gardens, the way in times of pestilence, starvation, and plague they must have looked at the people guarding their houses and fields.
Former convicts became tramp leaders, stupid girls were sent out to beg on their behalf, strange rumpled women walked around the villages and dachas casing the places for their friends. Of course, there weren’t many tramps, they couldn’t ruin the entire forest, and they weren’t seen in every yard, but they set something off, and rumors started in the villages, touching the dachas, too; rumors as musty as a bread box moldy from the inside, rumors that must have spent half a century under a bushel, crept into roach holes and spider corners and old women’s trunks with their burial underwear; mad, inarticulate, and portending disorder and trouble.
About army deserters hiding in the woods who killed two people last week in Pyatikhatka and burned down the house to hide their traces; about the Chernov daughter who took a shortcut to Stary Gorodok and saw two men harassing a dacha owner; about the coming revaluation of the currency, after which everyone would be impoverished; about how planes land every night at the airfield with coffins from Afghanistan and they burn the bodies in the furnace so that no one will know the real losses there—they really did switch the furnace from coal to oil, and the smoke it produced was different.
Grandmother Mara’s village women friends took grim pleasure in retelling what they heard, and in doing so took on the appearance of limping birds of prey. Their conversations revolved around coal, firewood, manure, salt, and sugar, and were interrupted by the next in a line of rumors, as if they could sense the approach, the return of something terrible and forgotten, and were happy that life was just, and that the present prosperity, albeit a relative one, was only temporary, and no one could escape their comeuppance.
The deserter theme was most frequent, the old women savored that city word in a special way, as if it were a lump of sugar to suck on while drinking tea, syllable by syllable; deserters, deserters, they repeated, and I think they meant every escapee, every tramp who went off into marginality, having abandoned their usual world order.
Or maybe they were remembering the war years, men hidden out of fear of arrest, memories of brothers or husbands who fled the front, secretly or with faked papers; cellars and distant farms, foxholes where deserters hid in the chaos of the retreat in 1941. There was a devil-may-care tone, as if they knew something no one else did, hidden in the crevasses of their wooden houses; echoes of ancient artillery thunder and astounding events were bursting inside them, demanding to be told.
Whenever an unknown man dressed in an old army jacket walked past the most distant village yards, looking at hanging laundry or a fowl that came out to drink from the big puddle, and maybe thinking about stealing something to sell for a drink, the old women knew by evening that a deserter had been seen by the Nefelyev place. Her friends brought their stories to Grandmother Mara for certification of authenticity, as if she were a notary, for her to say whether the man who looked greedily at the goose was a deserter or just some fellow; Grandmother Mara generously confirmed it—a deserter!—as if she understood the women’s need to live not ordinary lives but to be in final, terrible times, and she shared it completely.
Simultaneously with the deserter theme, another old story came up, and the children told it, but it originated with the grown-ups. The story was about a mother who had a daughter who banged her finger and her nail stayed blue from bruising for life. One day the daughter vanished—the circumstances were given variously—and the mother sought her in villages, train stations, and marketplaces; six months later at a faraway station she bought a meat pie from a platform vendor’s army-issue thermos and found her daughter’s blue fingernail in the filling.
The old women, who all seemed to be childless (either there were no children or they had moved far away), gabbed about the inconsolable mother, the vanished daughter, and the blue fingernail, as if it had happened yesterday, as if they had known both; it also seemed that they knew it was all lies, and they were sorry and wanted it to turn into truth.
The third theme, which came up on its own and roamed in and out of conversations, was rats; in fact, no one had encountered any rats, there were no rat infestations or stores of grain gobbled up. Once in a while people glimpsed one visiting the garbage pit. Yet there was the feeling that they were expecting rats. If you already had deserters and an inconsolable mother looking for her missing blue-nail girl, then rats were sure to follow; instead of harmless mice, sturdy rat teeth would soon be chewing away at the wooden supports of our houses. And that meant you had to look in the sheds for long-forgotten rat poison, set rat traps, and fill in holes in the floor with clay mixed with ground glass.
Grandmother Mara liked to recount how she killed a red rat with a shovel when it jumped at her from under the floor, and with each telling the rat grew bigger until it was the size of a dog. With the rapture of exaggeration, Grandmother Mara told them how smart rats were, how hard it is to poison them, how cats fear them, how the rat dismembered by the shovel lived on for a few seconds and stared at her with hatred. I got the feeling that they weren’t talking about animals, however smart, predatory, and dangerous in number and stubbornness, but about monsters that came from the beyond. I was amazed that Grandmother Mara and her friends had once seen these monsters, it wasn’t their imagination at work but knowledge. I couldn’t understand it, the source of this intense fear, but understood when I heard Grandmother Mara with her friend Grandmother Vera.
During the war, Vera worked as a switchman at the Leningrad Station in Mos
cow. In February or March 1941 a train arrived from Leningrad with evacuees, and rats poured out of the cars.
A train with flour stood on nearby tracks, and the rats streamed across the rails; the train was guarded, but some of the men with guns panicked. Vera grabbed a crowbar to chase the rats away from the grain, but then realized that these rats had eaten corpses on the streets of Leningrad—evacuees had told her about it—had survived by eating human flesh and had escaped the city in the trains with surviving humans.
Her enthusiasm vanished and she ran—from the rats and from the people with them in the train, in the same cars; one didn’t know who had the real power there: the weakened people or the strong rats. One of the guards had the sense to run to the engine. Still coupled, the driver moved the train with flour, the rats jumped and fell under the wheels trying to get at the flour, and then scattered, making for the platforms and the warehouses. Vera shuddered for years afterward at the sight of a rat in Moscow or in her village—Was it an ordinary one or a Leningrad man-eating rat?
I think the old women were expecting the progeny of those rats, or rather, they were willing them to come, predicting, luring them, as if they feared the looming disasters would not be bad enough. The old women put on their mended flowered dresses and shawls, met at the well or the mailboxes on the village street, and talked about exploding gas canisters, drowned fishermen, overturned buses. Their talk made the dacha area fascinatingly hostile, mysterious, open to the drafts of history, the winds from the past, its restless shadows. There will be famine, the old women said, you can’t even buy ordinary grain any more—and I recalled the submarine captain’s white locust flowers; we had one growing by our fence.
And finally, the old women got what they wanted: horrible news rolled through the dachas and surrounding villages; children were forbidden to play far from home or go alone into the woods, and soldiers patrolled the roads. They claimed to be catching deserters, but everyone knew that a maniac child killer had appeared in the region.
The maniac had a nickname—Mister; no one knew why it was the English word, but everyone said he called himself that. The bodies were found in places where you think the killer could not be unnoticed, and that increased the fear; it seemed that Mister was absolutely unrecognizable and therefore elusive; no one would suspect him of being a maniac, inhuman, the devil’s spawn.
My friends and I felt no fear at first; in a few days of playing and running around the idea came up, just for empty chatter and boasting: Why don’t we catch Mister?
Naturally, no one believed in it; but it was so exciting to imagine ourselves as brave and clever hunters, capable of doing what the police and soldiers could not. We talked ceaselessly about capturing Mister. We knew the area better than the adults, all the secret places, the dangerous corners; gradually, without a plan, we began acting like detectives, scrutinizing people, armed at all times with a penknife, nails, or metal electrodes sharpened on a brick.
None of this turned into a real search, and nobody actually wanted that; everyone wanted to amaze his friends with a story about how he found a mysterious boot print on the path by the fence and sat in ambush, we invented suspicious drifters allegedly seen in the field or by the pond; we all knew that these were just made-up stories, but we enjoyed competing in heroic lies with the knowledge that by unspoken consensus no one would be exposed.
But these fantasies did promote the idea that we could really try to catch Mister; each succeeding lie made the idea a bit more real.
The idea fermented like yeast, fed by the boredom of the longest, hottest summer days, the old women’s stories, the whispers of the adults, the rules, the faded raincoats of the patrols, young soldiers fatigued by the pointless length of their tours who sneaked off to bathe in the pond, closer to the still-white bodies of girls lounging on towels. Something was going to happen, we were all expecting it, and inside me the feeling grew slowly, slowly that I was distancing myself from my gang and that part of me was already taking the idea of finding Mister seriously.
I did not realize it yet, but the maniac murderer, elusive in the dacha area, had become a fact and phenomenon in my inner life. The rumors, the boys’ braggadocio, the details related by the villagers, were one layer—everything that is scary but does not affect you elicits interest; but there was another layer.
The dacha area changed with the appearance of Mister. I was drawn to the contrast between light and dark at the edge of a thick fir forest, the dry crackle of wires, the fragrance of peas in the field where you can open a pod and find tiny green pearls, sense their infancy, their softness that will turn to hardness. But I knew, whatever you did, whatever engrossed you, you were always either getting closer to Mister or moving away from him, and you never knew what was there, at the end of the forest path.
The world became a terrifying fairy tale realm, where nothing is random, where every object means something, says something, increases the danger that threatens the hero or mitigates it. My age kept me from feeling compassion for the ones who died in torment, and I accepted the appearance of Mister as what had been missing from my life.
THE APPEARANCE OF IVAN
Lazily discussing the latest “news” about Mister—who found which clues or traces—we played “knifesies” at the fire pit at the dacha dumping ground; what a strangely attractive game it is, you can play it a thousand times day after day and never tire of it. On the hard, ash-covered ground, you draw a circle with the knife blade and then divide it in half; two get into it and throw a knife onto the territory of the opponent; if it sticks, another line is drawn, and now you own three-fourths of the circle, and he has one-fourth; if it sticks again, your territory grows and his diminishes, but he still has room to stand. If your knife doesn’t stick, then the opponent throws, scuffing away the recent borders with his foot, scratching in new ones, and now it’s you and not him who balances on one foot.
Sometimes we’d play knifesies all day—there comes a time when frictions and unspoken injuries accumulate in a group of children; they were removed, channeled on the days we played many times against various opponents. The number of wins, the pressure and excitement of the game reset the relationships of seniority, first place going to the luckiest player.
I don’t know how other children played in other places, but for me knifesies was inseparable from the bonfire ground. The soil smelled of ashes and was cleansed by fire—as if something had been burned, destroyed completely; we smoothed the surface so that it could be cut by a knife like bread, still warm, transformed in the fire, having lost its memory of all previous borders, divisions, markings. Soil and metal, soil and knife were like paper and pen; “pen” was criminal slang for knife, and we played with a homemade knife that had a broad and thick blade, which stuck into the ground less reliably than a penknife. Konstantin Alexandrovich, my mother’s cousin, gave it to me secretly, telling me that a famous criminal had owned it and used it in self-defense when he was arrested; but I guessed that the knife had once belonged to the general, who grew up in workers’ barracks, and in giving it to me, he was remembering the boy from the lawless, thieving outskirts who’d had a greater chance of becoming a bandit than a policeman.
In my mind, knifesies belonged with books and films about the Civil War; with the Red Cavalry, machine gun carts, “in the distance by the river, bayonets flashed,” the psychological attacks by White officers, stars carved into backs, death in locomotive boilers. Not the invasion of the Germans, foreigners attacking from outside the circle, but the struggle of two implacable foes inside the disintegrating and simultaneously existing, “flickering” whole; knifesies was a Russian national game, somehow internalized and intimate.
So, we were throwing knives at the dumping ground beyond the dacha fence; I won, having pushed my opponent out of the circle, removed the line of his last holdings with the sole of my shoe, and was enjoying the ideal emptiness of the circle that belonged to me alone. At that moment, we heard a voice from the edge of the circle.
“May I play?”
The day was coming to an end, swifts swooped low near the ground, scooping up mosquitoes; something was cooking in the sky’s kettle, towers of cumulous clouds rose higher and higher, deep blue on the bottom, colliding and devouring one another, the setting sun’s rays burst through the gaps in the clouds, the light was harsh, thick, and dangerous, as if a battle was looming on high. It was the time before evening when the shadow is so much longer than the object that it seems it will overbalance it; space consists of those shadows, everything is elongated, distorted, stretched on a rack; it was out of the intertwined shadows, the stifling pre-storm air, and the agitated darting of the swifts that Ivan appeared.
We had seen him before, from a distance, but we knew who he was and his name. He was about ten years older than we were and he visited the dacha area sometimes, for his grandfather had a house here, but he never made friends—he was always on his own.
I looked at Ivan and understood that we had a long, one-sided connection, originating from me. I had met him thirty or forty times, briefly, the meetings scattered, lost as insignificant among what seemed more meaningful and memorable encounters, impressions, discoveries. But they had accumulated in secret even from me, and suddenly, in a moment, they were all there, open; words spoken about Ivan by the grown-ups, our childish conversations—it all came together and filled the emptiness that appeared while I was on the boat cruise.
This must be the way a man who runs into a woman who lives nearby might automatically or with the whim of a voluptuary casually toss into a drawer of memory the rustle of her winter wool skirt clinging to her legs, the barely noticeable limp revealed by the wear on her right heel, the slight discomfort that arose when they met by the elevator with a mild hint of flirtation, and then he let her pass, thinking lazily, why bother? And then one day, opening that additional little drawer made for ornament rather than utility, he sees her, all of a sudden, revealed to him radiantly and tenderly, sees her and feels her as if he held her in his arms.
The Year of the Comet Page 15