The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  I went home, knowing that Grandmother Mara would scold me for running off and for my wet clothes, but I had no fear of her now, as if I had suddenly become the older one.

  A LETTER INTO THE FUTURE

  Ivan never came back to the dacha, Okunenko didn’t visit much, either, and I was there less and less—my grandmothers were sick, they had trouble walking, and Mother and I took care of them. No sooner would one illness pass, than another would appear, and we spent years following a schedule of pill taking, both apartments turned into hospital wards; school, homework, friends—everything was left at the door, everything took a backseat to the endlessness of illness, its power that inexorably forced me to pay attention to other people’s pulses and breathing.

  Father was traveling more frequently to places where ships sank, gas exploded, planes crashed, and buildings collapsed. He rushed from one catastrophe to another, no longer knowing what to do with them, how to explain it all; he drafted new tables, clicked his calculator keys, and brought home an aluminum cap, a part from a plane or rocket that he kept erasers in, but sometimes in the morning the cap stank of bad cognac and Mother tried to get me out the door for school faster.

  The southern borderlands, the Caucasus mountains already echoed with future gunfire; with the coming of somber times, Moscow and other cities were plunged into darkness—some crazy force had declared war on lightbulbs, and the lines were getting longer and there were fewer things to buy; I grew taller, my physique changed, and Mother resewed and refaced old clothing for the third time.

  My body demanded food, pleasure, and fun, but money, without a day’s rest in my parents’ wallet, turned into boxes of medicines with foreign names, into yellow and pink granules, green tablets, white pills, pale blue plastic capsules filled with liquid; syringes and oilcloth, bandages, ointments, and powders.

  Father came and went, weary, bowed down, argued with Grandmother Tanya, who got up when we were out and tried to help with the housework; the two grandmothers could not be kept in the same apartment, so Mother lived between two houses; Father understood that he should be helping her, but she understood that he was waging war against the elements gone mad, facing defeat after defeat. Malignant lightning flared over the distant mountains, over the borderlands.

  Father broke down in late December, in the black hole of winter, home from an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people. He was a stranger to Mother and me, exhausted, permeated with the smell of dead houses and generator fuel.

  Late that night, refusing food, he told us what he had seen with a disconnected urgency; it was not a story but a mash of words, the ruins of narrative.

  Darkness, lit only by bonfires and headlights, mounds of coffins at intersections, tanks and roadblocks, looters; the special hour when all work stops and they take acoustical soundings of the ruins in case someone is still alive under the concrete, stone, and brick.

  “We couldn’t stop the machinery at the same time,” Father said. “They brought rescue workers from all over the country, and their watches were not synchronized, everything was plus-minus fifteen minutes.”

  “One block survived,” Father said, with no connection to his previous sentence. “The usual five-story houses. The neighboring ones collapsed. We drew profiles of seismic waves in order to understand how that happened. An engineer found the documents. That particular block was built by workers from Czechoslovakia, on an exchange. They hadn’t stolen cement during its construction. The orders came to blow up that block.” Father drummed his fingers on the table. “Blow it up.”

  Mother suggested gently that he go to bed, she seemed even more tired than he was from the story of the destroyed city.

  “I can’t sleep, I haven’t slept in three days,” he replied softly, without expression. “There was a factory there, built by Komsomol workers. The factory was destroyed. Some Komsomol official came and said that there was a time capsule in the foundation, a message to future citizens. It was put there in 1972. He asked us to find it. We sent him packing, but he called somewhere, and the bulldozer was ordered to dig. He had brought a blueprint at least, he knew where to dig. He said a museum would take the capsule. We found it—a silver tube, dusty and dented. The engraving was beautiful: “With a Komsomol greeting to the builders of the future! To be opened in 1992.” The tube was dented, so it opened. And inside there was nothing but cigarette butts. And a note written on a pack of Prima cigarettes: “The Battalion Does Not Surrender.”

  “To be opened in 1992,” Father repeated. I think he felt like a woodsman who cut down a beloved tree and discovered its rotting core.

  “There it is, the future,” Father said. “Cigarette butts.”

  THE LAST PARADE

  Father went back to the earthquake zone. Despite the horror, he seemed happier there; indisputable and obvious, the ruins cut off any thoughts of the future. He had ceased being rational, he thought that the massacre in Sumgait, the Spitak earthquake, and other small and big disasters were related somehow, that nature and humans had become one. “It will start soon,” he would say, and I could see why he did not perceive everything that had happened thus far to be the beginning; the more threatening the shots and underground tremors and the longer the lines at stores, the clearer it became that these were the events that could set off an avalanche, but were not the avalanche itself; Father knew this field, he dealt with snow issues, and he used a dynamic mathematical model of avalanche for his theoretical model of catastrophe.

  And just a few months later—Father was still on the trip—I came home in the evening; Grandmother Tanya was watching television with a very strange picture on the screen—an enormous line of tanks, kilometers long. And the line was moving fast.

  They moved across a huge bridge with angular trusses, they moved in an endless flow across the Amu-Darya River back from Afghanistan, the tanks and armored carriers wreathed in blue-gray smoke with their gun barrels raised, headlights burning, and red flags waving; soldiers with their hands at their temples stood knee-deep or chest-deep in the tank hatches. It was like the movement of ice, like ice cracking in the upper reaches of a river; a chain of events had begun, events that, like people, stood in line to happen. There was such power, such impatience in that movement home that it seemed the tanks would never be able to stop anywhere, they would drive and drive, like windup cars that never run down.

  And it was true—that fall I saw the parade on the anniversary of the October Revolution. Our family and my parents’ friends had a tradition: we would meet near the U.S. Embassy on the Garden Ring Road, to see the columns of war vehicles headed toward the Kremlin through the eyes of American diplomats. The children grew up, others were born, but the tradition was unchanged. We all climbed up on a parapet, while the tanks and missiles rolled by, followed by the trucks, and marines threw their collars, navy blue trimmed with a triple line of white, with handwritten signs—DMB-84, 85, 86, 87. That moment—the flying collars with fluttering ribbons, the hands reaching for them—was repeated annually, making the parade a city holiday, not a military one, turning the military machines into something theatrical, not quite real, the setting for a film shoot.

  But that autumn the collars didn’t fly into the crowd—maybe there had been an order not to waste state property—and the tanks were grim and menacing, as if they were the same ones that could not stop, the ones that crossed the bridge over the Amu-Darya.

  Soldiers in the cab of a tented truck—I think they were border guards—waved meekly to the crowd, and then one who must have seen family in the crowd along the sidewalk shouted at the top of his lungs:

  “We’ll be back, wait!”

  The tanks, armored vehicles, trucks with marines, missile haulers, and self-propelled artillery turned onto the New Arbat, toward the Kremlin, moving out of sight, going, going, going; the huge canvases of military banners carried in open cars seemed vulnerable.

  “We’ll be back!” the solider yelled again, and now it sounded like a threat; the troo
ps stayed in formation, but it seemed that they could also move helter-skelter, for the flags of the military controllers no longer had the same power and there might be a shell hidden in the equipment; the moving vehicles made windowpanes rattle in a high mosquito-like whine.

  I don’t remember any more parades; they may have still taken place, or maybe the marshals also sensed the new mood of the tanks; we stopped going to the Garden Ring Road, my parents’ group of friends fell apart. My father quit his job and became eccentric, inventing crazy alarm systems, rescue methods for a fire, and was a regular at the patent bureau, which was a gathering place for scientists like him and stubborn autodidacts, as well.

  I grew closer to him and my mother, the grandmothers’ health kept deteriorating, and we had trouble remembering our previous life, when everyone was healthy. Illness lived in our apartment, not us, we were merely its servants and messengers, illness consumed time, took away the right to make plans, and made tomorrow both predetermined and yet uncertain; we almost never watched television and rarely opened the papers and magazines that were bloated with news and had huge print runs. To make money, they found work for me as a laborer on archeological and geographic expeditions, and in the winter I studied and indifferently passed from one grade to another.

  Two years passed this way.

  THE FAREWELL TRAIN

  The grandmothers were brought back to life by the March referendum on preserving the USSR. It’s not that they were cured, more as if they had asked the illness to give them a reprieve from infirmity, a last surge of strength. When 77 percent of the people voted “yes,” Grandmother Mara remembered the planting, the dacha where she had not been for a few years, and began reproaching us—probably we had not whitewashed the apple tree trunks for the winter or dug up the beds in the autumn for spring planting; and Grandmother Tanya asked us to buy her new glasses and resubscribe to newspapers.

  They both demanded to be with me, once again they competed in signs of attention, giving me trifles from their pensions, and they were happy that we could go to the nearest park, that I had grown, and they could brag about me to the neighbors; having lived through feebleness and knowing it would be back, and for good, they hastened to give me everything, they opened accounts in my name at the bank without consulting each other; and my parents, seeing how the former family was being reborn, asked me not to go away for the summer, not to apply for jobs, but to stay with the grandmothers.

  I was uncomfortable and embarrassed, I noticed signs of their frailty that should not be noticed, I was clumsy, self-conscious, pathetic, and unable to respond to their love. Grandmother Mara kept talking about my future, my wonderful wife, and my good apartment—she meant hers, and this kindly rejection of her own future grated on me. Grandmother Tanya was much quieter, but she started holding my hand much more frequently, as if trying to slip something into it or seeking support.

  That summer I was attracted to bridges, ancient houses, factory chimneys, and monuments. I avoided rallies, loudspeaker voices, screaming posters, and took side alleys; old stones and bricks and cast-iron bridge trusses had a better sense of the future than any orator; monuments knew more than those agitating around them. I wandered around the city, looking for advice—who should I be, how to live; I went through the places, names and events imprinted on the city’s memory.

  One Sunday I found myself at the Paveletsky Station, where the steam engine that brought Lenin’s body from Gorki in 1924 was placed on a pedestal.

  In school, we were taken to see the steam engine and a nearby monument marking the spot where Fanya Kaplan shot at Lenin during a rally at the Mikhelson factory. Back then I was unpleasantly surprised by the nearness of those two points: the shot with a poisoned bullet, as we were told, seemed to pin Lenin to the place of the assassination attempt, and six years later they brought his body back here.

  The steam engine seemed to be complicit, its wheels, connecting rods, pistons, furnace, and boiler made history; but now the steam engine looked aged, knowing it had been rendered useless and scorned by the electric commuter trains.

  To my right, thousands of dacha dwellers were emptying out of trains onto the station platforms. Into the humid and dirty city smells rolled in from the Garden Ring Road and from the Moskva River covered in mucky seaweed, the aromas of thousands of baskets with the first apples, with fragrant grushovka tomatoes, and endless bouquets of dacha flowers and jasmine came like fresh streams of scents and perfumes.

  Jasmine had bloomed during the week; everyone coming home from the weekend cut some of the flowers and saw that everyone else on the train was carrying sweet, cloying jasmine as well and the suburban platforms were covered with the tiny cups of its flowers, which resembled the tea sets of fairies.

  A storm was gathering over Moscow, the wind was rising, the dry wind that comes before a shower, not yet very strong but capable of wrinkling the heavy fabric of men’s jackets and trousers and lifting and fluttering women’s light dresses, skirts, blouses, and scarves. In the wind, the men seemed to be moving calmly and unemotionally, while the women—buds of fabric—slightly intoxicated by the jasmine, pupils dilated by heart palpitations and difficult breathing in the crowded train, were vibrating, expecting the approaching rain, listening to the car horns that had become too jarring.

  Another dozen such evenings and something was bound to happen in the city, compounded out of the electric atmosphere, dilated pupils, and excitement taken for nervousness. A woman tripped on the metal-trimmed steps, and dozens of teaspoons fell from her purse and spilled out across the stairs, ringing merrily, dazzling with their polished dimples, but everyone turned around as if there had been a shot.

  Drawn by a morbid interest, I went where Lenin had been wounded; on a Sunday evening the streets around the station were empty except near the hospital that gave rabies shots around the clock where several men with bandages were waiting—obviously attacked by a dog—and smoking silently, listening to their bodies: Was the sickness, the madness, the frothing at the mouth, coming, were the shots too late?

  The square where Kaplan had taken the shot was empty except for a bronze Lenin. Only once in a while, cars drove by on neighboring streets, the dusty and unwashed windows of the former factory looked down, recognizing nothing, and the silence seemed padded, as if the entire area had been covered with poplar fluff. The place that was once open and tragic was now surrounded by the wild growth of new houses and courtyards.

  I spent the evening wandering the streets, coming out by the Donskoi Cemetery and then the Shukhov Tower; force lines—the shining trolley tracks—led me, not letting my movement become a relaxed and unimportant stroll, pushing me forward; through them the city communicated its magnetized, edgy state before the storm.

  When the rain began, I went home, almost falling asleep on my train, where it traveled aboveground and the raw air, filled with creosote from the ties, poured into the windows.

  In the metro I had a vision, half-asleep, of an empty compartment, the long corridors of the cars, the curtained windows, the tedious jangle of a spoon stirring sugar in a glass with a metal holder, so prolonged that you couldn’t imagine that tea could absorb that much sugar; voices in the distance, muffled by the vestibules at the end of cars, flashes of light—the crossing lights—and once again the rattling spoon.

  The quickest way home from the metro was along the railroad; the signal lights shone over the empty crossing and a large pack of homeless dogs ran along the embankment.

  I was exhausted when I got home; my parents and grandmother were sleeping, and I went to bed without even washing up—a heavy sleepiness that portended a bad dream was knocking me off my feet; I fell asleep just after hearing the piercing blare of the freight train’s horn, forcing late-night idlers to recoil from the platform edge.

  I dreamed I was walking in the cool morning through a field along a railroad track; in the distance, by the switchman’s hut, enveloped in fog, a train had stopped.

  It was the tra
in that had carried Lenin’s body. The engine huffed steam, a sentry stood by the stairs to the cabin, wearing an old Red Army uniform. Coming closer, I recognized him—his photograph was probably the smallest one on Grandmother’s wall of photographs, hung on the periphery, like a distant planet or Sputnik; he was Grandmother Tanya’s great-uncle, the first in the family to sign up for the Red Army and the first to die at the age of nineteen in an armored train hit by artillery and captured by General Shkuro’s “Wolf Division.”

  He stood on watch, swaying clumsily, for he consisted of two parts, separated by a saber slash from right collarbone to left leg. But he did not fall apart, some force held the dead body together, dressed in an undershirt marked by two hoof prints.

  Seeing me, the sentry nodded toward the cabin—go in—and blinked, probably to indicate that he had recognized me, too.

  There was no one in the cabin; the tender was empty, it didn’t smell of coal near the furnace, but fire roared inside it, and the steam engine was slowly restoring the connection among pistons, wheels, and axles, becoming a machine again.

  A shout came from the boiler, but the dead sentry was unfazed. A shout, then another shout, and someone struggled in the boiler, being burned alive, trying to break the door, get through the iron walls. The train started, the screams blended into the powerful roar of the machine, as if the burning man had turned into thrust, flames, and the energy of the furnace.

  I walked through the cars; in the first was the coffin with Lenin’s body, heaped with winter fir wreaths. The fir fragrance was strong, and frost covered the windows; the black mourning crepe, stretched into tight folds, resembled the wings of bats, and the coffin seemed to be embraced by a gigantic bat.

  The stink of stale river silt filled the hallway, and a shiny black centipede crawled out from a compartment door and climbed up the wall; near the ceiling, several others waited for it. Someone was vomiting in the compartment, murky water poured into the hallway with small fry and seaweed floating in it.