The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  “Let’s go for a swim?” he said invitingly.

  “A swim?” I repeated; it had never occurred to me that Ivan could go swimming. No one had ever seen him at the dacha pond where every adult and child spent time splashing in the water, sunbathed on old towels in the trampled grass, played cards, baked potatoes and caught fish and crayfish. I thought that his skinny body—he never wore shorts, T-shirts, or shirts with short sleeves—was too aristocratic to bear openness, his nature could not stand the democracy and casualness of water that turned everyone into similar amphibians, bringing them closer, while air separated them; bathers are amazingly similar, they form a subspecies of humanity, and the only way I could picture Ivan at the pond was in the role of a natural scientist studying that subspecies.

  “Swimming,” Ivan replied. “Let’s go.”

  “What if we get stopped?” I asked, embarrassed, even frightened by this swift new closeness with Ivan that had required nothing from me.

  “I actually have a license,” Ivan said, opening the glove compartment, with his wallet inside. “Get in.”

  We drove off; we drove past the pond, the nearby woods, the village, and the pea fields. Ivan drove smoothly, enjoying this unrushed “grown-up” style of driving, as if he were an old hand at it. The Volga passed a tractor, with kolkhoz women sitting in the hay in the trailer, returning from the field. Ivan slowed in the empty oncoming lane, and on my right a multiarmed, multifaced, tanned female creature floated by; the wind ruffled the dresses and kerchiefs, the fabrics were sweaty with labor; a young woman, using a burdock leaf as a visor against the sun, waved it like a hat, while another cupped her heavy breasts with a significant gesture. I was embarrassed, but as he drove in front of the tractor, Ivan gave a quick wink, as if to say all sorts of things can happen when you’re with me, he winked without salaciousness, enjoying the burdock leaf, the smile, and the lovely breasts.

  We were driving to the Moskva River; the car dove into an old fir forest, the road led down into the valley, I knew this road, sometimes I came here with my parents by bicycle. But Ivan turned in a different direction, honked at the barrier, said something to the guard, and we drove inside the brick wall, where the same forest grew, but here it seemed darker and quieter, as if it were warning visitors. Another few hundred meters, two turns, and we came upon a brick castle in the English style, red and white with ornamental towers; people in bathrobes strolled along the paths, paying no attention to the Volga. I had never known this castle was in our neighborhood, it was my first time on the property closed to outsiders, and this was yet another miracle that occurred when you were with Ivan.

  “The castle of Prince Kerbatov,” Ivan said, as if he were a personal friend of the prince and was about to introduce me. “If not for the walking corpses, this would be a perfect place.”

  The place was beautiful; the fir grove gave way to a pine grove, hazel bushes ran down toward the river, and I could see patches of white sand through the grass, and it seemed that just stepping on the warm ground sprinkled with fragrant needles would release an invigorating sensation that mounted from your heels to your lower back. This was the slope of the valley, with hidden layers rising to the surface, natural springs, and the vegetation was thicker from the proximity to the river and its fertile fogs.

  I recognized that the strollers were high-placed old men, perhaps generals, officials, men of power. Before, when I met them in the courtyard of the building on Sokol, I was afraid they would notice me, think it wrong that I was wandering on their sidewalks. I was used to the importance of their uniforms, their gray overcoats and hats, their right to barricade themselves behind barriers and fences, to live in special buildings, stroll in bathrobes down paths of an unknown castle, while their heavy uniforms and suits, ironed by servants, hung in the closets here.

  But Ivan’s remark showed me a different picture: the old men were turned into ridiculous figures who did not suspect that their time was coming to an end. I was sure he had the right to talk that way—without adolescent irony, just as a person who knows.

  Leaving the car, we went down to an empty wooden dock, where there were several rowboats without oars. Children and teenagers from local villages were swimming on the other bank, flickers of tanned bodies, shimmering splashes, and a fast current carried the swimmers down around the river bend. Here it was quiet, the nettles had a bitter and delicious tanginess, and the orange fins of tiny roach fish flickered amid the long shaggy water grasses.

  Ivan had a white body; in the sunlight, against the rampant bright green grass, in the inflorescence of the clover, it seemed almost like marble. The sun, the rushing water, the splintered boards of the dock, the shouts and merriment on the far bank—all that was nobly alien to Ivan, and he squirmed in the sunlight, as if it burned.

  Then he turned, and I saw the birthmark on his left shoulder blade. It was a delicate coffee and cream color; not a disfigurement of his skin, but a parchment seal, the form of which could have been an oak leaf, or a bat, or the paw print of an imaginary beast; it was noticeable, the size of half a hand.

  Ivan’s mark spoke of his inner scale, the sign was beautiful, it attested somehow to Ivan’s already obvious specialness and superiority, a manifestation of higher powers.

  Uncomfortable, I decided it was better to swim than to reveal my interest in his birthmark. I dove, swam to the middle of the river, and came back struggling against the current, while Ivan watched me from the dock, perhaps enjoying the simplicity of my joys—river, light, the bleak fish leaping near the surface in the translucent layer of sun spots.

  I climbed out onto the dock; Ivan stretched, and then slipped into the water without a splash, as if he had been waiting for me to finish my swim and leave the river to him alone.

  Downstream from the dock and closer to the middle of the river, a glacier boulder lay on the bottom. Above the surface there was a small gray roundness, like an elephant’s forehead, that looked harmless. But if you looked closer, you would see that the clear river water darkened behind the boulder—there was a powerful whirlpool there, pulling in the river streams, you could feel its hidden power from the shore.

  Ivan swam toward that funnel. He did the crawl, then the butterfly, he was a fish then a bird taking off, and the current was carrying him to the boulder. Standing on the dock, I pictured the river to the very bottom, saw its depths, shallows, and snags, sand banks, and flinty rapids. I perceived the entire boulder—huge, the size of a railroad car, separating the river in two; the whirlpool had dug an enormous hole behind it, and the icy springs could burn muscles into spasm; no fish entered there.

  The boulder was waiting in the river—for a weakened swimmer, a child risking to cross to the other bank, and I had time to wonder if it had once lain on the neighboring sandy cliff, if people made human sacrifices upon it.

  I shouted to Ivan not to swim toward the boulder, but he did not hear me, his head appeared only for a second at a time, he must have been swimming with his eyes open, looking at the fish and grasses.

  He swam headlong, fast, on a straight path. But now he crossed the outer circle of the whirlpool, his arms caught in a deadly chop, and his agile body started moving against his will, sucked into the deep.

  Ivan dove, then surfaced, and started stroking harder, but the whirlpool slowly spun him around, and the strong swimmer became a trapped, floundering creature. Why had he swum in that direction? I thought, while I looked around for an oar; if there were boats tied up, there had to be oars, and I doubted they were far away. I found them under the dock, I pushed out a light plastic shell and rowed to Ivan. He was trying to reach the boulder, to climb on and catch his breath, but the rock pushed him back with a wave, filling his eyes and mouth with foam; Ivan stopped swimming, hoping the current would carry him out, but the whirlpool dragged him down.

  The boat scraped against the stone, the vortex turned it around. Ivan, crazed by the struggle, waterlogged, still saw the shadow that blocked the sun and grabbed hold of
the line I threw him. A few moments later, soaked, he was in the boat; his eyes held fear, anger, and joy. “You saved me,” he said with unexpected pleasure. “You saved me.”

  I knew that I would never have dared to fight the whirlpool and regarded him as a hero who took on the water spirit in his den; who was Ivan, where did he come from, what did his spot mean, what was he doing among ordinary people?

  Then we sat on the shore, and when he was rested, Ivan told me that he sometimes came here to fight the whirlpool and that he always survived. They must have released water from the dam upstream and the river had not calmed yet, supposed Ivan, and that’s why the whirlpool was more dangerous than usual; I examined him quietly, saw how his muscles were strained, the veins swollen, and I was in awe, as if I had created this body, pulled it out of nonexistence in a single motion.

  I never did understand what happened that day. Was Ivan acting from beginning to end, pretending that the whirlpool was sucking him in and he could not swim out? Had he started off pretending only to have the water unexpectedly get the better of him? Or was he not pretending at all and had he actually underestimated the vortex?

  “You know what the old generals call this rock?” Ivan asked unexpectedly. “Generalissimo. Some call it Iosif Vissarionovich. But mostly, Generalissimo. They’ve been coming here for decades, they know all each other’s war wounds here. The head of the sanatorium is also an old frontline soldier, this is their favorite place, their own little private club. No one remembers now who first called the stone Generalissimo. They bring the new ones over to meet it. Here’s the fresh spring, here’s the dock, here’s the pine allée, and here’s the Generalissimo. I saw them bring one over, an aviation major general, gray-haired, scarred …”

  Ivan paused, finding the right words, and I thought back to the building on Sokol, the generals coming down the steps, the gray-haired pilot who pretended to be a plane for his grandson—could he be the one?

  “A very serious old man, the locals are mostly flabby now, but this one seemed to be hewn from metal,” Ivan continued. “I thought he would laugh and say the geezers had gone gaga, too much rich food at the sanatorium has gone to their heads, the mineral water bubbles affected the brain and soon they would be naming the trees. But the pilot, and you could tell he had been shot down, his face cut by pieces of the windshield, stood there and then saluted. The old men nodded and swayed: he’s one of us, he is, and they led him to the main building and looked at one another as if their impotent little crowd might have drowned him, if he had not acknowledged the stone as the Generalissimo.”

  Ivan stared at the rock that almost took his life, while I processed the meaning of his words, remembering the two boys who ran across the street in front of Stalin’s black car. Who was he, who was Ivan, if he could throw out this challenge to the Generalissimo and fight him? I had no doubt that the ancient boulder, deified by the old generals who gave it the name of the Supreme Commander, was in some sense today’s Stalin.

  If I had been more attentive, I would have realized that Ivan had made up something in this story; after all, I did the same thing.

  At school, where my teacher knew that my parents had traveled extensively around the country, I began making up journeys for myself: saying I had seen Mount Communism in the Pamir Range and had even gone up into its foothills, had been in the Ural River in the place where Chapayev had drowned, had visited Shushenskoe and gone inside the house where Lenin and Krupskaya had lived in exile.

  I made up the first story because I was bored, and I based it on a few facts—they really had considered taking me to Pamir. But I realized that our strict teacher, who never allowed us to stray, was treating me as if I had made a pilgrimage to holy lands; I, a child, had become more significant and authoritative than the adult. I couldn’t resist continuing the fantasies that protected me from disciplinary zealousness and moved further and further from reality.

  But I couldn’t ever imagine that Ivan was fibbing or lying. Why lie to me? Knowing my tendency to mislead, I felt it had been forced upon me: I didn’t completely believe my grandmothers and parents, I could feel that they were leaving a lot of things out, hiding things, and I had become wearily accustomed to my own lies of omission. But Ivan? Ivan had come to me as a messenger of truth, an outsider who certainly had no need for me not to know something or to believe in some allegedly redeeming deception.

  Could I have guessed that Ivan used falsehood as a tool? The one who lies has power over whoever believes him; Ivan was not interested in deceit per se, as are fantasizers and fabulists like me. Deceit was a form of power, it created the power; out of false assumptions he cultivated real feelings, real attachments, and I think that was what thrilled him.

  But this kind of reasoning was beyond my abilities.

  “Last night I thought about what you told me,” Ivan suddenly said. “You’re right. Mister is really a spy or saboteur or they would have caught him a long time ago.”

  After the battle with the Generalissimo, I was prepared for Ivan to give me clear marching orders on how to catch Mister; he continued slowly, still exhausted, “It’s your mission. Only yours. I can’t help you. I’ll only scare him off. Or he’ll kill me.” Ivan shut his eyes for a second, as if examining his exhausted body, and I lost my breath from the sincerity of his words, his confession of weakness.

  “I would risk it anyway,” said Ivan, “but you’ll be better at it. And I’ll help however I can.”

  Maybe I would have come to my senses, pretending that nothing had happened—even at the cost of breaking apart from Ivan—if not for a single detail, a circumstance that decided everything.

  While talking to me, Ivan grew agitated, blood infused his usually pale face, and a thick crimson bead of blood slowly dripped from his left nostril. Ivan sensed my look before he tasted the salty viscous warmth over his lip, took out a handkerchief from the shirt lying on the dock, patted the blood, leaving a pink print on his skin, and as if forced to apologize for something improper, said, “Weak vessel.”

  That phrase—weak vessel—decided it. While the blood dripped—a second, two seconds, an eternity—along his pale skin, I experienced physical lust for Ivan’s blood, saturated, overfilled with red. I was in love with a man whose body literally bled when he was agitated, I understood the flawed superiority of my body and my mission—to protect Ivan so that nothing would upset this higher being who elicited dizzying delight and anxious pity.

  “Weak vessel.” Ivan’s body was a weak vessel, and I—as life had decided—became guardian of the vessel, that was the reason I was born into this world. I would catch Mister so that Ivan would be unharmed, so that he would not go on a hopeless hunt that would result in his death.

  FISHING WITH LIVE BAIT

  Day after day I stubbornly wandered around the empty areas near the dacha, trying not to be seen by anyone I knew and to be noticed by the terrible unknown Mister. The occasional people I came across showed me that everyone, almost everyone, had a secret life that can be discovered in the keyhole of a random moment, if you know how and want to see.

  It started with a bicyclist, the village mailman, I recognized him eventually, but at first I just saw a man on a bike. He was riding through the wheat field, going uphill, he was bent over the handlebars and for a second I thought the pedals were being pushed by a headless body in dark trousers and a patched jacket. The headless corpse flickered, and once again there was a man riding toward me, but I felt a jolt of fear. The bicyclist came closer, and I grew even more frightened, not of him, but of his bicycle.

  The bicycle looked like a ferocious torture machine—the spokes were spinning and they could tear off your finger if you stuck it in the wheel, the sharp teeth of the gears worked the chain that could break bones.

  The scariest part for some reason were the nickel-plated handlebars, with a shiny bell with a metal “ear” attached to them like a well-fed snail. I thought that if the rider were to ring the bell at me, it would be the last lou
d sound I would hear in my life. The bicycle, its quiet tires making an unobtrusive trail … no one would consider tying the murder to a bicycle track, there were many trails on the road, plus it sounded silly—the killer got away on a bike. We were alone in the field, visible to all and to no one, because no one was watching, this was a convenient moment for villainy, the evil hour. The cyclist drove past, nodding at me, and only then did I realize it was the familiar mailman.

  There were others. Early in the morning a man was carrying a large unframed mirror along the side of the highway. He was passing a dangerous curve where there were frequent accidents. Alders, impregnated with the roadside dust, grew in the ditch, and faded, worn wreaths hung on them; a monster that devoured people and cars must live in the messy den of the forest.

  The mirror was too big to carry under his arm, and the man held it in front of him, with a newspaper folded in four to cushion his hands. This made the sharp edge of the broken mirror come sharply—literally—into focus. I was walking toward him, and toward myself, reflected in the mirror. On my side were the rotting alders, the ditch, never cleared of the debris of car accidents, and it was filled with broken headlights, crumbled windows, pieces of upholstery, rubber snakes of belts, clots of oil, spark plugs, leaking batteries. I walked and waited for my face to be changed through the opaque amalgam into one with warts, tight red nodules, like on aspen leaves, the face of a satyr, a forest spirit, as if from inside the reflection. I would become frozen, understanding everything, and turn off into the woods, while only the mirror would remain on the road, leaning against a clumsy alder and reflecting the dark undergrowth on the other side of the highway.

  There was a mushroom hunter, an old man who wore a black raincoat in all weather, with a big, frayed basket and long kitchen knife, thinned by sharpening, turned into a thin steel probe, that could deftly slip through fear-stiffened muscles, squeezing under the ribs; its thin point, as narrow as a bird’s tongue, would find the most sacred and alive part in the darkness of your body and end life with a single touch. The old man wandered in the distant aspen forests, rummaging through the leaves with a stick, even though it was too early for the mushrooms that grow under aspens, and it seemed that he was seeking a meeting, a knot in the confused clump of small forest paths.