The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  Chapayev was inside, vomiting sand and filthy water, centipedes climbing out of his ears, and his eyes were white, like a boiled fish.

  In the restaurant car, twenty-six men were celebrating, black-haired, so tanned that even death’s pallor could not touch them; they drank wine from clay jugs and the wine poured out through the bullet holes in their chests.

  Also in the restaurant car, sailors in striped shirts and round caps were gathered around a basin of macaroni, and watched entranced as the noodles turned into white maggots that gobbled up the meat.

  There were other cars, other people, men, women, missing legs, arms, and eyes, marked by torture, in uniforms of various eras or half-naked with red stars carved into their backs.

  Alongside the train, a hundred cavalrymen raced over meadows and ravines, passing through trees and strata of earth, creating fox fire in the decaying swamp wood. The horsemen passed the train, then fell behind, swooping out on the right, then the left, galloped in the air over the roofs of the cars, nimbly, like swallows or swifts. Semitranslucent, with silvery moon faces, the riders pointed the way with their sabers, and their horses—clots of forest shadows, flowing and slipping—picked up speed effortlessly, leaping over rivers that could not catch their reflection.

  The train exited the forest and hurtled down a long valley; in the distance, by the horizon, more banks of fog appeared. The riders sped through hay ricks without disturbing a single straw, occasionally startling a bird; I was thrown from the car, the train vanished in the fog, and the horsemen galloped in farewell, dissolving into swarms of lightning bugs and sparks from steppe campfires.

  In the morning, I did not remember the dream right away but I awoke with a sense of loss—I did not yet understand what or whom I had lost.

  Noon found me near the metro station at Revolution Square.

  The famous sculptures—the army scout with a dog, the sailor signalman, the revolutionary laborer, the young woman who was a Voroshilov sharpshooter, the Stakhanovite worker with a raised hammer—had turned from ordinary monuments into monuments to a lost era, as if overnight the historical clocks had been reset.

  PEOPLE AND ANIMALS

  In mid-August I dropped by to see my mother at the Ministry of Geology on Krasnaya Presnya Street. Her windows opened onto the zoo, and in the summer heat you could smell the animals, a scent unthinkable in a city, foreign to asphalt and glass.

  The hippos, elephants, and crocodiles wallowed in the pools in their enclosures, ate, excreted, mated, and the zoo stank of putrid water, rotting cane, and tainted meat.

  A vulture’s revolting call from behind bars was answered by a jackal or hyena. Once in a while, a random pedestrian, aroused by the scents of hay beds, nests, and dens, wet puppies and naked fledglings, the odors of predators and herbivores, mutually repellant, would discover the prehistoric creature within and with a quick look around send up a pithecanthropic hunting cry, responding to the animals with a ferocious animal sound.

  The ministry hallways, carpeted in long runners, were filled with the clacking of electric typewriters; there were oases of quiet near the doors to the bosses’ offices, where people slowed down and lowered their voices as they passed.

  The ministry countered the wild scents of the zoo with the smell of paper—it seemed that opening any door would reveal papers piled to the ceiling; even in the cafeteria on the first floor, the paper smell mixed into the flavor of soup, schnitzel, and fruit compote.

  That day something had changed in the ministry corridors. The machines would start typing and then stop. There were fewer people. But most important, there was a new kind of air current, as if previously the draft had moved along the corridors in accordance with a general plan, decorously and strictly, and now the currents were all mixed up, new ones appeared that did not know how to behave in a ministry; they tore papers out of people’s hands and slammed doors and windows shut.

  The ministry bureaucrats, extremely sensitive to such things, waited it out, staying put at their desks; the document flow stopped until it was clear what was going on, and the huge ministerial machine spun its wheels. There was still a long line at the security desk, maps, reports, and rolls of millimeter-marked paper were still carried from office to office, but the tension of power, the electricity that generated decisions, had slackened suddenly, and the four floors of the ministry building resembled a hive where the queen bee had died.

  I went into my mother’s office; it was empty, she had gone to lunch with her colleagues. The insolent draft had pushed open the poorly fastened window and the office was filled with flying papers stamped “For Internal Use Only” and “Secret” that had been left on desks in violation of the rules. The zoo smells were no longer just swamp decay and rancid feed, but unrest, anxiety, as if the animals’ blood, warmed by the heat, was taking in a constant drip of hormones, and every gland was awakened, swollen and pulsating, responding to the stirrings in the air. The animals sensed this more deeply than the humans.

  The animals were not lying down, they wandered, pushing against the cages, whipping themselves with their tails; suddenly an elephant trumpeted, lions, bears, and tigers roared, rhinoceroses and oxen screamed, as did every creature whose jaws were big enough for their voices to be heard. The noises clashed, tumbled, whirled until they blended into one sound that was no longer the cry of wild animals. It seemed it was not flesh and blood but a thing screaming, as if suddenly there was an onset of metal fatigue at some gigantic construction site, seams bursting, I-beams and channel bars collapsing, a wave of deformation traveling across all its elements, and the tower—I imagined it was a tower—began falling sideways, twisting into a corkscrew and emitting that scream of a disintegrating whole.

  THE FRACTURE OF AUGUST

  The next day was Saturday and my parents went to the dacha, leaving me in charge of the grandmothers. They were taking a long weekend, planning to return in a few days, but we did not meet until a week later.

  Over the weekend it felt like there was a human flow across the city, the start of a vortex; the seemingly relaxed passersby were going about their business, but one had the impression they were carried along, led by an invisible force. I wandered the streets; I thought that everything had a secret meaning, and the policeman who didn’t pay attention to the Zhiguli that crossed a solid line knew something and was lost in thought, and the man with a suitcase hurrying to the train station had reason to rush; something had happened, people and things had changed, you could push your finger through a brick, fall into the metro through the thickness of the sidewalk, meet a talking dog, win five thousand rubles on a trolley ticket, and walk by unnoticed through the security at the Spassky Tower entrance to the Kremlin. It was only the general habit of belief that bricks were hard, the ground solid, and sentries vigilant, that kept the city in its former state.

  Monday morning, the human flow in the city increased when the radio announcer, seemingly sedated, read: “In the aim of preventing chaos and anarchy … The collapse of society … Forming the State Committee on the State of Emergency in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”; the voice wanted to calm people and called them to order, but it was so recognizable, so laughable, that when it used the simple-folk pronunciation of Vice President Yanaev’s patronymic, calling him “Ivanych” instead of “Ivanovich,” more and more people left their radios with every word and went out into the street, albeit not yet knowing what to do or where to go.

  That evening I found myself by the White House. The period had begun in which the concepts of “day” and “date” had lost meaning—it was a gap in eras when time itself becomes an event. Rumors moved among the thousands of people like rustling waves: “The Dzerzhinsky Division is headed this way,” “There’s a column of tanks on Komsomolsky,” “The ‘shoot to kill’ order has been given.” Barricades appeared and grew out of nothing.

  Benches, newspaper kiosks, boards, pipes, cars, buses, streetlamps, grates—they remained in their places, they had a precise func
tion. Suddenly, as if someone had looked at the city with a different view, the view of a revolutionary, a fighter, things began to move on their own, forming obstructions, lying down and dovetailing beneath memorial plaques commemorating the first revolution, the battles of 1905.

  The White House, as the House of Soviets of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was known, hearkening back to the history of the Soviet regime, was built in a “dormant” historical zone, with the Barricades movie theater, the Barrikadnaya metro station. Like an enormous paperweight, it held down the crumbling ground of Krasnaya Presnya, which was already squashed by a high-rise, the house on Uprising Square.

  The power of names turned out to be longer-lived than the power of stone, and the memory of the uprising, encoded in monuments and street names, responded as soon as it was hailed. Druzhinnikovskaya Street, named in honor of worker combatants, Shmitovsky Alley, named for the revolutionary factory owner, the Trekhgornaya Mills, where Lenin was elected as a deputy; the sculptures by the 1905 Street metro station—a woman catching the bridle of a Cossack’s horse—the sculpture by the White House—a worker in an apron picking up a dropped rifle; symbols of uprising, protected and multiplied, were gathered here.

  Volunteers were gathering at Presnya River again, 1905 was being repeated, but on a larger scale; barricades grew around the White House, and this was an inversion of history—the House of Soviets was turning into a bastion of resistance to the Soviet regime.

  But just a few hundred meters from the White House people sat in cafés, strolled, shopped; men’s shoes were delivered to the store on 1905 Street, and the line for them looked more tight-knit than the ranks of defenders of the barricades. From inside the defense rings, the White House looked like the epicenter of events, but if you moved just a bit to the side, it began to seem that the White House and everything around it was suspended in midair and taking place with no grounding whatsoever; part of the capital had plunged into a different dimension.

  I found its border as I walked down the street, the ground beneath my feet was oscillating slightly, as if predicting a coming storm. In the next block there was only the trembling caused by the metro trains traveling near the surface. You could choose one or the other register of perception, but there was no smooth transition between them; an invisible line divided the city.

  That night by the White House people sang songs around bonfires, and dozens like me sought something among the heaps and smoke, among the arriving crowds; men in civilian clothing with guns appeared, attentively surveying the scene—who were they, who sent them? The more people, the harder it was to understand who was one of us and who wasn’t, and whether there was an “us” and “them” or whether it was all a masquerade, a phantasmagoria, that there weren’t any foes or any clear antagonists but only the blood-raising attraction of major events.

  Okunenko was in charge of building a barricade at the entrance to the White House; he was giving orders to three dozen people, most of whom were older than he was, but he was more energetic, more precise, he gave smart and accurate directions on where to put what, where to place the concrete plate, the dozen benches, the tracks; it seemed he had a special mind that could easily combine mutually exclusive objects—plates, benches, tracks, concrete flower boxes, and furniture—into a sturdy construction that would be hard to break and move.

  Okunenko, matured, electrified by the events, stood on the top of his barricades, indicating “left, left, more to the left” to men dragging a lamppost knocked down by a bulldozer.

  The barricade was finished; I expected Okunenko to tell his comrades to move on to the next one. But he got down, lit a cigarette, spoke with his subordinates and stepped away, and it was no longer clear whether he had commanded anyone or it just happened that the men building the barricade took him for a manager of elemental construction.

  He walked among the bonfires and barricades, no longer the clever and efficient builder—he had turned into a concerned simpleton, for whom everything was new and interesting. He looked inside camping kettles, respectfully studied the armature prepared for hand-to-hand combat, stopped near people arguing, smiled to a pair of policemen with automatic guns, struck a match for a soldier’s cigarette, and gave disorganized civilians a pitying look.

  Okunenko had gestures and objects for every situation, like an improvising magician; he did unnoticed work, helping, joining, supporting, advising, approving, sharing cigarettes—whatever it took to make the crowd more focused and thicker. He made several circles around the White House and later that night moved toward the Arbat; I followed him, and I saw a common thread in the patchwork of events.

  Parked in the courtyards near the Arbat, which looked empty from the sidewalk, were cars with men in suits, doing nothing, and heavyset men were smoking in dark doorways; no one looked into the faces of passersby, no one stopped anyone, everyone pretended to be there by accident.

  I almost lost Okunenko a few times, but his way of moving made him easy to spot. Both the military and the police—they were the ones smoking in doorways—were tense, and many must have understood that the symbols on their uniforms would soon be meaningless; they stood listening to their radios, awaiting belated orders, but Okunenko delighted in this night, he was practically dancing, sensing that there would be no orders given.

  He sat inside a Moskvich car for a few minutes, then jumped out and ran back to the White House, to the intersection of Novy Arbat and the Garden Ring Road; in the quiet, well-lit courtyards where sounds seemed to fall from the sky, the distant rumble of military machines grew stronger.

  The infantry vehicles came down the Garden Ring Road from the side of the zoo, along the old parade route.

  The mechanical reptiles crawled along, warping the asphalt with their caterpillar tracks. They represented the ancient threat of nature, which had created shells, spines, claws, and teeth; the teeth were for opening up the shells, the spines to protect the neck from the teeth, claws to get to the soft belly, and armor plates to protect the belly; behind all that power was the narrow brain of the predator, its tiny eyes peering out from deep inside the skull.

  The city rose in buildings, spread in lanes, glittered with lit shop windows, signs, kiosks, and street signs, and the armored vehicles were moving in, waiting for the order to destroy everything, to find and destroy the sources of the rebellion. The exit from the Novy Arbat tunnel was blocked by trolleybuses, as if the civilian urban technology had come out to stop its crazed relatives; the boxy blue trolleys with their snaillike antennae huddled together, blocking the tunnel’s throat; it was clear that everything would be decided here, at this intersection.

  The armored vehicles drove into the tunnel and crawled out, pushing aside the trolleybuses, which the crowd had moved toward the army machines. Above on the overpass, a long-haired man was trying to light a Molotov cocktail, but the matches kept burning out; Okunenko grabbed his hand—I thought he was going to hit him, but no, he struck a match while protecting it from the wind with a graceful gesture, and the bottle flew in a basketball arc, flames shot up on the armored car into the sky and seeped into the ventilation holes. The truck swerved, another bottle was thrown from the overpass, two more armored vehicles broke through the trolleybuses; there was a mash up of men and metal and then everything stopped—someone had been crushed to death.

  I lost him there by the tunnel; I went back to the spot where Okunenko came either to report or to get instructions, but the cars were gone, the courtyard empty, and there was nothing but butts in the doorways. I spent the next two days rushing around Moscow, trying to understand where the main events were taking place.

  Thursday night I was on Lubyanka Square; the pedestrian flow brought me there at the moment when the mountain climber had reached the neck of the secret police boss Dzerzhinsky’s statue and was slipping a noose attached to a crane around it; I was tired and dizzy, and I thought it was all a dream—how can you hang a monument?

  Next to me by the wall of th
e Polytechnical Museum several men, dressed identically in civilian clothes, obviously KGB officers, were smoking; they stood and watched calmly as their chief was dragged off his pedestal.

  Observing them, I noticed their colleagues, leaving by a side entrance and mixing with the crowd. On the sidewalk you could still tell they were KGB, but then they became faces, sleeves, hats, shoulders, and heads in the general crowd, vanishing without a trace, without adding a single person but raising the density of the living mass. Probably later you could find them in photographs, chanting about freedom, raising their arms, embracing neighbors, waving their fists at “Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky.”

  Beneath the windows of the KGB, Lubyanka agents were enjoying the overthrow of the Lubyanka god; they had developed the art of mimicry to such a degree that it was stronger than their dutiful respect. I had thought that some general had given orders to the surveillance service, but orders no longer had their former power, and the surveillance agents had changed into civilian garb and left, beginning their private lives from that moment on.

  The moment was joyful and partially comical—albeit with a note of danger; the spies were gone and the moment when they could have been identified and counted was gone, too.

  The statue of Dzerzhinsky fell across the square, the soft and heavy thud of metal on asphalt blocking the roar of the crowd; and at that very moment Ivan came out of the museum.

  I was still trying to figure out who was coming toward me so headlong, as if he wanted to arrest me, when he was just three steps away; he was practically running, like an actor performing in two plays on the same day, buttoning his jacket on the go; he did not recognize me as he went past to open the door of an empty car, parked right there; the car came alive, flashed its headlights, the driver, who had been hiding or sleeping, appeared; the rear lights drew red looping lines in the twilight and disappeared into a lane.