The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  For three, no, four years I had noticed Ivan at the dachas, playing badminton or hide-and-seek as I went to the well; he went to the well, too, I had often seen the bench damp from the water that had slipped from his pails, and once I left the well bucket full, and Ivan, who came after me, carried that water home, and drank it, swallowed tea and soup made with it—water that I had collected, water that I raised from the icy depths by turning the handle, while the liquid reflected my phantasmagorically distorted face.

  Our connection was forged long ago; and now all its component parts, all the links in the chain, all the moments isolated from the rest of time in which we were connected by the delayed and hidden work of my heart, were electrified, under tension; we recognized, we saw each other, and blazed with the triumphant and ruthless light of understanding—it’s him!

  His figure was awkward; every adolescent goes through a time when his body behaves like a traitor, when everything you try to hide is callously revealed, the body’s stupidity, actually, its stupefaction; shyness, constraint, fear—everything is exposed, comes to light; the body is afraid to grow and change; the act of becoming a man is confounded.

  The awkwardness of Ivan’s adolescent figure was different; there was something about him of a colt of magnificent breed, born to run, and the awkwardness was because his body grew faster than he could comfortably inhabit it, but would live in it tomorrow, and with great power.

  He was tall, thin, blond; he stood out among our crew-cut boys with his long hair parted in the middle; he changed his hair later, but the first time I saw him I remembered him this way.

  When I first saw this person, it seemed he hadn’t been there a second ago, had stepped through an invisible opening from another space, from a time of eternal summer; it was all in his hair, as if the locks of a beautiful woman at the peak of her youth had been transplanted onto a teenage boy. The wavy locks glowed like the sun, with golden sparks, threads, quick zigzag snakes; the youth’s gentle, slightly frightened beauty—Acteon looked like this when he saw his crazed borzoi hounds—was combined with an avalanche of hair, sensual, arousing the flesh.

  We saw Ivan rarely, when he came to the dacha in his grandfather’s cream-colored Volga—his face behind the window, his profile against the backseat. Every boy’s dream was to ride in front, next to the driver, but Ivan rode in a car like an important person; a boss, a writer, in the back, by himself, alone with his thoughts, indolently looking out the window.

  Ivan’s whole family lived differently from the neighbors, with aristocratic casualness they returned the intended function to things that had been warped by our lifestyle. No one had ever seen sacks of potatoes hauled in the cream-colored Volga, nor was the car ever crammed with passengers, as if Ivan’s family was not subject to the powers of life’s necessities, forcing people to clump together, huddle, fit into a prescribed space. Laundry never hung on a line in Ivan’s yard—inner secrets revealed—and the property was planted with twining plants that formed a living screen; only sometimes, walking past, could you see, through a gap in the foliage, Ivan reading a book in the garden.

  You couldn’t say that the dacha kids liked or disliked Ivan. If he had been one of the gang, his behavior would have been considered a challenge, they would say he was being snotty and would take revenge—they would break the dacha windows or jump him and beat him up; but for the dacha youth Ivan did not exist, as if no one knew which language, which words to use to think about him.

  Over the dacha summers, everyone observed him, everyone probably understood that Ivan was a kid like any other, then an adolescent, then a young man; not burdened by excessive physical strength, unlikely to stand up for himself in a fierce fight—we had learned about fighting from the local village lads who were not averse to brawling with bike chains and pieces of metal pipe. It seemed that a boy three or four years younger, who was used to scrapes, roughhousing, and clumsy cursing, could scare and beat up Ivan; but Ivan never landed in that kind of story.

  Yes, there was something feminine about Ivan, but there is a necessary correction here: if boys sense something girly about a boy, they will inevitably make him miserable. But the femininity in Ivan was—and this was clearly felt—not a weakness or flaw, but just another side, inaccessible to others, of his strength, a plastic, flowing strength, the strength of a much greater emotional range than an ordinary person.

  Ivan entered the circle; I bent down to draw a line dividing the circle in half with my knife and it looked as if I were bowing to him; he looked at me without surprise or mockery. But I felt an aching anger: I want to stab Ivan, kill him in this circle, on this slightly salty, ashy, velvety soil scorched by fire; this was no game at all. My friends watched with interest, they did not consider Ivan a serious competitor, and they were happy to watch someone their own age beat him.

  We did rock-paper-scissors; I showed a fist and Ivan covered it with his hand; Ivan got to go first. I usually threw the knife to immediately cut the opponent’s side in half; then divide the remaining fourth; Ivan acted the same way. The knife we used had a secret—the handle was weighted, filled with lead; it had to fall absolutely vertically to stick into the ground, and that required practice. I hoped that Ivan would fail on his first throw; however, he threw it, very carelessly, without looking, as if he’d merely dropped it; the knife plunged into the dried soil and divided my part of the circle exactly in half.

  Ivan erased the line just as unhurriedly and carelessly, increasing his space to three-quarters and reducing mine to one-fourth; he threw again, and each time I thought the knife wouldn’t stick. But no—it entered the earth smoothly and firmly. I experienced a strange excitement; I had never lost this easily and indisputably, but it wasn’t just the loss; as Ivan’s share swallowed up mine, my desire to run away or attack Ivan vanished. I wanted the game never to end, for the division of my piece of ground to continue to infinity, so that I would diminish before Ivan and that there would be another chance to grow smaller, give up yet another part.

  The burning ground inside the circle was my life now, and Ivan was reshaping it, taking everything for himself; he was whole and I was becoming part of that whole. I seemed to know that Ivan, in humiliating me and herding me into a reduced sector of the circle, would later make up for it.

  Ivan threw the knife the last time; there was no place for me to stand, and I left the circle, acknowledging his victory.

  “Come over some time,” Ivan said. “Gate’s not locked. Or I’ll come over and pick you up. Well, so long.”

  He turned and left as if he hadn’t just been playing; before me was the circle, still full of him, belonging to him; the knife stuck in the ground, casting a long evening shadow, like the marker on a sundial.

  Ivan won me—from my own self. My pals could tell that I had not simply lost the game, I was happy to have lost, I wanted to be friends with Ivan.

  They dubbed me Ivan’s girlfriend; I couldn’t go past our fence, they were waiting for me, hiding in the bushes, armed with rock-hard sour apples. I would creep up to the bushes and hear their conversations, which I’d but recently been a part of, and I bitterly missed the idiotic friskiness of speech, the hurrying, the gasping, the rush to talk, the constant exaggeration, the lies, the stupid boasting. The group was talking about Mister again, telling the same old stories, overgrown with outright falsehoods, while in my solitude I sensed that so many things had been rolled together into one clump: Ivan, Mister, my desire to show Ivan I wasn’t like my pathetic comrades, to show my comrades I was braver than them, that they could only make up stories and pick on someone ten against one; the desire to do something exceptional, to block a black car’s path, to prove to myself that I’d been right to turn away from Grandmother Tanya and the brown book; yes, yes, I thought, I’m like the son of the regiment, I will draw fire away from others; one dream hurried and pushed the next, and with the relief of a soldier weary of waiting for an attack, I sensed that soon I would take a step.

  THE GENERAL
’S VISIT

  It was June, close to the solstice; the summer was dry, hot, and scorchingly sunny; it made the heavy fir forest beyond the dacha fence seem even blacker. Late evening and nighttime, when children are usually afraid, did not seem scary that summer; scary and horrible were the afternoons, when the streets were empty, hot haze shimmering above the asphalt, distorting and hiding perspective and the horizon; in the boiling jelly of that haze, the figures of passersby could suddenly appear very close, shimmering, inaccurate, flowing, and worrying; blessed was the cool of the evening, clearing the air and chasing away the ghosts of the day.

  Those were the days when Konstantin Alexandrovich always visited the dacha. No use in hiding it—I was proud when his black Volga stopped at our gate, the numbers and letters on the license plate not random gibberish but a brief readable code, a sign of power and strength.

  The general arrived at the moment the first cucumbers were ripening on the vine; Grandmother Mara brought them out on a plate, freshly washed, fragrant with the energizing, cooling scent of early morning and dew, which seemed to bring out the bumps on them. Konstantin Alexandrovich ate these first vegetables of the summer when they were still babies, thin-skinned, covered with a transparent and tender silvery fuzz. I honestly couldn’t understand what made the general so happy, why this ritual was repeated year after year.

  Then the table was set in the garden, the gramophone was brought out, a square box with a windup handle and an orchid-like trumpet. Manufactured in 1900, the gramophone was older than everyone around it; you could study its history in its scratches, lumps of lacquer, and dents in the trumpet. They used records, heavy ones, one song on each, and the gramophone rasped out “La Cucaracha,” “La Cumparcita,” and melodies from Alexandrov’s comedies. No one remembered how the gramophone came into the family; I even thought that the family appeared because the gramophone was first; it was one of those long-lived objects that are unthinkable without a certain lifestyle, and if a gramophone shows up in someone’s life, it will unite a man and a woman, marry them, give them children and grandchildren, a dining table, and curtains.

  The record spinning, the slowing of the viscous sound when the springs wound down—the gramophone was a machine for producing familial happiness, and I was happy to turn the handle that dozens of hands had touched before me.

  This time the general arrived toward evening, when everyone had thought there was no point in expecting him that day—that often happened, when urgent business held up Konstantin Alexandrovich or canceled his visit.

  Watching Konstantin Alexandrovich’s pleasure in washing up with well water, wiping his face with a linen towel that Grandmother Mara handed him, how he hung up his uniform jacket in the closet and came out in ordinary clothing, handily setting up the chairs, adjusting the tablecloth, carrying out the narrow faceted shot glasses between his fingers, and constantly looking around at the apple trees, the vegetable plots, the old house with flaking paint—I understood that the dacha was the closest thing to the lost world in which he was born. He was relaxed here, stopped being a general, returned to his postwar childhood, to the villages where soldiers settled; one lieutenant or captain joined the police as a patrolman, another became a bandit, and the boy grew up seeing both.

  Later, just as the party was warming up, I was sent to bed. Usually, because of my attachment to Konstantin Alexandrovich, I was allowed to stay up to the end, but here, I noticed, the general glanced over at me to show it was time for me to go to sleep.

  Mister!—the general knew something that he wanted to tell my parents.

  I had the idea that if I could tell my friends what Konstantin Alexandrovich said, casually dropping his name, lying that he had told me personally, I would be able to get back in their favor, end their campaign against me, and become top dog: the reflection of Mister’s horrible fame would make everyone listen and obey.

  I said good night. I was to sleep in the attic, because Konstantin Alexandrovich was here, and after waiting a few minutes, I opened the dormer window, the hinges of which I had oiled because I liked climbing out on the roof at night. I crawled on my belly to the drainpipe and sat above the garden party. While I crawled, I decided that I wouldn’t tell my pals about the general—let them sit in the bushes with apple cores—I would go to Ivan. Now I would have something to intrigue him and keep him. For some reason, I had no doubt that Ivan was interested in Mister.

  “They’re not talking about this now,” the major general spoke softly. “Trying not to talk. We have just one witness, a boy, a friend of the first victim. The artist’s renderings are made from his description. They were together at Pioneer camp and sneaked out during quiet hour. Some people think the witness is a phony. He did see something, but much less than what he’s telling us. He gave a description of the man who led his friend into the woods, very detailed, without any discrepancies, he said the killer scared him, warned him not to tell the police anything or he’d come back for him. We’re hunting for the man described by the boy—height, hair color, a navy tattoo on his hand, something complex, and so on. And that nickname, Mister, allegedly he called himself that.

  “It all seems true, but I’ve talked to that boy … I think he got scared and ran off before the killer even noticed there were two of them. Our witness saw nothing but a shadow, a silhouette. But he invented this Mister, told the camp counselors about him. He wanted the attention. Then the police and the prosecutors kept at him, and now the boy can’t admit that he lied. He knows he’ll be punished. He’s heard about giving false testimony. However, a lot of the investigators believe the boy. It’s easier to hunt for this Mister. Lots of distinguishing marks.”

  “This doesn’t sound right,” Father interrupted. “Doesn’t he understand that he is putting other people in danger?”

  The general did not respond. I had conflicting feelings. On one hand, I was embarrassed by my father’s question; didn’t he understand what power there was in that lie? And on the other hand, I was scared, because I could easily picture myself in the boy’s place and I knew I could have done the same thing, invented Mister.

  “He must have a car,” said Konstantin Alexandrovich. “And a place where he does it all before tossing the remains in the woods. A garage or a cellar. Probably a cellar. And here’s one more thing,” he added. “He is attracted to boys of a very certain type. Aged ten or eleven, not shy, not spic-and-span with no physical flaws. Not mama’s boys, but boys who like to wander around on their own. The faces of all six boys are similar.” The general stopped. “Bold, clear. Even at that age, no one would say, ‘What a nice boy,’ rather ‘What a great guy.’ Something was going through my mind,” the general said and struck a match, tobacco smoke rose to my rooftop, “they reminded me of something. I finally remembered. It seems strange, but I keep thinking it. When I was a kid and we played war, you’d go into the woods, find an old hazel with thick, far-flung branches. You’d climb into the center and that’s where the thin new canes are, completely straight, as if they came from a different root than the clumsy branches. You cut down a switch like that, you can make a bow or an arrow, anything at all—it’s flexible, sturdy, springy, as if it has absorbed all the power from the ground. I look at photographs of those boys, and I think of the hazel tree. Maybe I’m just making it up, but I think he senses that quality in them. He sees it from afar. And he chooses them.”

  I froze. Konstantin Alexandrovich was saying something he could not know. It was my secret: I cut hazel switches like that and hid them in the nettles outside the fence, they were my weapon against the confusing deep forest, filled with spider webs. With a cane like that, turned into a sword, I could enter deep into a grove with borrowed courage, knowing that it did not have power over me.

  Konstantin Alexandrovich told them about increased checkpoints at all the suburban stations along our line; about military helicopters flying over the region; about soldiers combing the woods; about checking old files and solving dozens of crimes along the wa
y; about undercover police pretending to be mushroom hunters, bathers, fishermen; about a group of immediate responders, ready to come instantly; about the fact that both the MCID—Moscow Criminal Investigations Department—brought in to help the local police, and the Minister of Internal Security himself were in charge of the case; and that the killer would be caught any minute, the ring was narrowing, he would definitely make a mistake and reveal himself.

  My parents didn’t consider taking me back to the city to wait until the maniac was caught. No one even brought it up. Instead, they sat there, depressed, helpless, Mother wrung her hands, bringing them up into the air as if pleading to a cruel power for mercy.

  I remembered where I had seen that movement before, those maternal pleas; I remembered the album of pictures from the Dresden gallery that my father brought back from the GDR and I leafed through secretly; a painting by Breughel the Elder, with snow, redbrick houses, dark sky, hounds, trees—and men in red on horseback, scattering throughout a village, dragging women by the hands, killing infants.

  The mother and father in the painting also clasped their hands, fell on their knees by the stirrups, stared lifelessly in the direction of yellow patches of thawed snow, wept by the walls of houses. No one interfered, picked up pitchforks or scythes, the villagers showed not just docility but a primal readiness to accept the deepest suffering.

  I might have wanted to leave the dacha, but my parents couldn’t break the usual rhythm of life, to act differently than they ever had, sharply and roughly—you couldn’t even consider that. The adults were worried by the threat to their child, but they looked at the neighbors, who also lived in dachas with children, and told themselves not to panic—as if submitting to the habit of bearing things and obeying the power of circumstances, awaiting their fate like the men and women in Breughel’s painting. The power was Mister, Mister-Coming-From-the-Woods, Mister-Taking-Away-Your-Children. Not a single resident of the dacha complex left, took away their children, they all lived as if hypnotized by a boa constrictor.