The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  One day, grandmother left her purse open; a shiny corner of some metal object was sticking out. Out of simple curiosity I pulled on it—and brought out a ruler without millimeters and centimeters, only unusual, nonexistent measures of length with carved names: Nonpareil, Cicero, Sanspareil, Mignon, Parangon.

  Nonpareil; Cicero; Sanspareil; Mignon; Parangon—fright made me drop the ruler, for I had accidentally touched a thing from Politizdat, a magical artifact! What did those measures mean, those names, so like incantations? What sorcery took place there on Pravda Street?

  Pravda Street, the name began to glow with awesome light; all my trifling transgressions, my searches of the apartment, my secret thoughts, everything I thought reliably hidden now lay before the six gigantic letters PRAVDA as if under a magnifying glass.

  From then on, as soon as Grandmother Tanya said, “I’m going to Pravda Street,” something hearkening back to olden times overwhelmed me with primal fear.

  Grandmother Tanya was probably the only person with whom I used to feel spiritually safe. The feeling that she had suddenly acquired all my secrets—for I understood the real meaning of the adult threat “I can see right through you!”— undermined the very possibility of my existence.

  So I decided to go to Pravda Street, to see it, to be assured of its supernatural powers; it was a desperate move.

  I had no idea what was there, whether I would be able to even access the street (when Grandmother went there she took a red leather ID with gold letters), or how to find the building where she worked. But I set out without asking for permission, alone so far from home for the first time. When I turned onto Pravda Street from the big boulevard and saw the signs, I thought I had the wrong street: there were ordinary houses, trees, courtyards, stores—nothing supernatural.

  I thought perhaps the real Pravda Street could not even be found in ordinary topography, perhaps it was something hidden, with only one unobtrusive entrance. Could ordinary people even get in, the ones who don’t know the secrets of Nonpareil and Cicero, who don’t know the secret password? Was Politizdat in another world whose existence was proven by Grandmother’s ruler without the usual centimeters?

  I decided to walk to the end of the street. After a few blocks I was ready to turn back when far on the right I saw the corner of a building that seemed to come from another planet; aha, corner of Nonpareil, corner of Cicero, I recognize you, Politizdat!

  The building was like a blueprint of itself: naked form stripped of ornamentation. It was a Constructivist crystal, the ideal of cutting up the universal into indivisible simple elements, the ideal of thinking with these elements, ready to be checked for correctness against an ideal. The building stood alone against chaos, against the bustle of the streets, against the city and its residents. It extended beyond its limits, as if the axes drawn on paper by the architect continued into the air along invisible lines of force; the building tried to even out the neighboring block, to straighten the line of the other buildings, and to organize the rhythm of pedestrians.

  Across the street was a yolk-yellow culture club, framed by a colonnade, ornamented with plaster, bas-reliefs depicting the joy of Soviet people—marching off in columns, some waving banners, others sheaves of wheat, still others model airplanes.

  The House of Culture with its plasterwork and columns, built much later than Politizdat, seemed like an artifact from the deep past, from Soviet antiquity. In the Soviet eighties the Constructivist architecture of the thirties looked like science fiction; the Futurism that projected the future still worked a half-century later. Constructivist design, which incorporated the complete cycle of truth production—from the editor’s office to the printing press—bore the sense of a severe wholeness that subsequently fell apart, decayed, was replaced by an abundance of attributes and décor. I could not tie Constructivism to a certain era—there was very little of it left in Moscow—and so it seemed that the house was built outside of time, alien to everything and with power over everything.

  I circled the building a few times. Politizdat was exactly what I had expected. But there was something that confused me. I looked through the spacious windows: huge paper cylinders turned and the printing presses tossed out reams of newspapers.

  The day before, our school had announced another collection of wastepaper for recycling; the school was in the regional competition, and all pupils were instructed to show up with at least three kilograms, and if you brought in five, they would raise your grade in deportment.

  The last collection was in the previous quarter, but the neighbors’ apartments had filled up again with unneeded copies of Izvestia, Pravda, Komsomolets, and Vecherka. In the morning all the pupils showed up with piles of newspapers; the older ones hauled two or three piles, some helped by their parents, some using old people’s satchels on wheels. Piles and piles, some still white, others yellowed—I don’t think the school officials had expected so much, and now they were trying to reduce the paper overload, seeing something indecent and seditious in the haste to be rid of newspapers. Paper to be pulped kept increasing, no longer fitting in the cloakroom, and everyone who walked in froze at the sight of so many old words surrounding him.

  The school porch was strewn with bits of paper; the remains of transcripts of Party congresses, editorials on international aid for Afghanistan, feuilletons on the American war machine, articles on record harvests and heroic tractor drivers.

  The paper shreds and ashes made me recoil instinctively. On the school porch I recalled Grandmother’s ruler, the names Nonpareil, Cicero, Sanspareil, Mignon, Parangon—scary but majestic and endless, and I thought proudly that through my grandmother I was in touch with the mystery of deathless words.

  And now to see that Politizdat had something to do with newspapers! I took a very deep breath. Two men walked past, printer’s ink spotting their clothes, and one held a sheaf of freshly printed pages and was declaring heatedly to the other: “I told them we needed Nonpareil here!”

  Nonpareil, the incantation had been spoken on the street, anyone could hear, anyone could learn. It stopped being an incantation. The magic was gone.

  Watching the ream of paper spinning in the pressroom, I experienced the deepest disillusionment and the deepest relief simultaneously. I was sorry about the self-deception that had made life profound and significant, but the joy of liberation was greater: I knew that I could feel completely safe with Grandmother Tanya.

  Once again the days stretched out, the months of my existence near her; I went back to waiting, observing, spying, seeking the false bottom of life. I noticed that Grandmother Tanya treated old things with a hidden pity, she repaired and darned clothing, sent old books to be rebound, as if they had suffered from the cruelty of the age. But she never grew attached to anything, she did not accumulate souvenirs, the trifles to which people entrust part of their memory.

  She had only one thing of that sort, a small porcelain figurine—three green-glazed frogs: one covered its eyes, the second its ears, and the third its mouth.

  “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.” Grandmother Tanya explained the meaning of the figures, which she kept on constant view.

  Other people’s possessions were separate and at a remove, by virtue of not belonging to you, but Grandmother Tanya seemed to have purposely placed the three frogs right on that very boundary separating me from “other people’s possessions,” as if to train me to notice them and understand their meaning.

  At first I thought my grandmother was teaching me how not to live: the three frogs were a satire, a caricature like the ones that appeared on the back page of newspapers. But gradually I began to look deeper at the frogs and tried to grasp what set them apart from their surroundings in Grandmother’s room.

  The room had a large table with papers, a wooden darning mushroom over which a torn sock or stocking was stretched, a velvet pincushion, a basket with pieces of fabric, an old portable sewing machine, books, and table games always ready for me. It was all so well-studied,
so reliable, always in the same place, determined long before my birth, and it seemed that life went on year after year, attaching objects and people ever more firmly to their place, gently and not quite really aging them.

  Only the three frogs, as tiny as Japanese netsuke, meant something different. Sometimes, when no one was home, I sat and looked at them, trying to understand them whole, as a triple statuette, three syllables of a single word. I sensed an old suffering in them that was causing the glaze to gradually crack and chip.

  Once during winter vacation, I was dying of boredom as I recuperated from a bad flu and high temperature. Still sensing the remains of the fever, I wandered the rooms agitatedly, looking for something, picking up and putting down objects, seeking a release from illness to freedom. I found nothing; tired, irritated, I turned on the television—at twilight during vacation they ran adventure movies for schoolchildren.

  I don’t remember the film, one of the many Soviet movies about our intelligence agents in the West, shot on pretty much the same streets of Tallinn or Vilnius. Fired up by the shooting and fighting, still reliving the chase and shoot-out at the end, I wandered around the apartment again, found myself in Grandmother’s room, and my eyes were fixed on the three frogs at the edge of the table.

  In spy movies a small detail—a beige handkerchief in a jacket pocket, a bottle of wine on a café table, the rear window lowered in the car—shows the invisible spectator that the surveillance has failed, the operation is off, connections have been figured out, and danger is all around, dissolved in the carefree day, for any passerby could be counterintelligence. But the sign has to be extremely natural, unobtrusive, so no one watching could guess it was a special signal.

  Suddenly, with the same certainty as the movie’s hero, I understood that the three frogs were such a signal. Grandmother Tanya decided to give it to me, to show how people really live—see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. My intuitive guess about the vast expanses of silence had its second proof, after the book in the brown binding, the book without words.

  I took the statuette and moved it under the lamp, to show (in the tradition of spy movies) that I had noticed it and got the message.

  Grandmother Tanya came home. Awhile later she dropped into the room where I was reading and gave me a quick look. Then I walked down the hall past her room. The three frogs were still under the lamp, where I had moved them. The brown book lay before her on the table, opened to the first glossy white page. Grandmother was scribbling with a ballpoint pen on a scrap of paper in preparation for starting a line. There was no determination in her pose, she brought the pen to the top of the page and then put it away, picked up another pen that might not be as messy; it was as if she knew that the first word would inexorably oblige her to continue.

  I understood that Grandmother had sat this way many times before, fighting with herself, remembering all the previous failed attempts, and that today the pen would not touch the page, either. But at the moment I sensed that my future had been born. I was prepared to wait.

  THE POWER OF THE AX

  My attachment to Grandmother Tanya weakened over the summer vacation, when Grandmother Mara took over—my summertime dacha grandmother; in the city she lived separately, but I spent the three summer months with her. Heavy, solid, and physically strong, she was a true dacha sovereign. Our small plot was filled with apple trees, plums, cherries, currants, gooseberries, sea buckthorn; we grew potatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, turnips, beets, squash, pumpkins, and herbs. Grandmother Mara would walk around the garden looking for a bit of space to plant something else. It seemed she lived from spring to fall, barely tolerating winter, waiting for the first warm sunlight to put seedlings in cans and milk cartons onto the windowsill next to the frosty glass.

  She’d gone through many professions. She’d been a maid, a warehouse keeper, a seamstress, she worked the elevator in a clinical laboratory. When they showed me pictures of her in her twenties and thirties, I thought I was being fooled, for I had seen that woman in the mosaics at the Kiev metro station and in the sculptures on Revolution Square. I could not consider that young woman a relative any more than you can consider a figurative or architectural style a relative. At one with her generation, she was the embodiment of the era’s heroine, “a simple Soviet girl,” a peasant from a leading kolkhoz, a swimmer, veterinarian, or student.

  They were women who had not acquired femininity, often not pretty, but even the pretty ones retained the soft dullness of peasant rag dolls; in astonishment at getting used to blouses, jackets, shoes, simple necklaces; joyous and inspired, dynamic in metro frescoes and static, caught by a camera; as accustomed as nudes in an artist’s studio to seeing themselves depicted on gables and ceilings, to identifying with the great construction, with socialism, which had chosen them as heroines, or to use today’s language, as top models, for just as today runways and magazines are used to display fashions, it was through their features and clothing that they portrayed the new times.

  Her father gave his daughters peasant names as dowries: Mara was a family nickname for Marfa, and her sisters were called Fevronya, Pavlina, Agrippina, Felka, and Lukerya, old-fashioned village names. It was probably the only thing he could give them, sending them out into the world, before dying in the Civil War. She grew up in post-revolutionary orphanages, and for all her determination to have a family, she retained a sort of unease about her femininity, which apparently was taken as emancipation by the men who courted her.

  In the photographs from the war years, of the sort that have vanished, a clearly feminine image appeared, as if the four-year wait for her husband and fear for her children had given her a face. Gradually, the individuality wore away; in the war years she approached the peak of self-awareness and then gave herself back to the era so it could fill her head with the appropriate thoughts, concepts, and ideas. Grandmother Mara enthusiastically gave herself up to this important work until there was an upheaval in her later years. She thought the world was broken, Communism was broken; bitterly she locked herself in her memories of the past. But then I was born, and she turned to me as passionately as she had welcomed the new future in the thirties.

  She liked lipstick and kisses, she liked sweets. She always had candies in a bowl, chocolates and caramels with jam filling. My family considered sweets excessive, an indulgence that ruined not only teeth but character and attitude, the start of spiritual decay; they brought me up with ridiculous seriousness, unable to distinguish between the essential and the trifling, taking extreme positions on everything, as if it were party politics and not candy.

  Only Grandmother Mara lived as if we had earned all this—chocolate, cake, candy, halvah, caramel, marmalade, meringue—just by surviving, by being born despite the war, destruction, and hunger, and therefore, we should celebrate and sweeten every day.

  When she entered a room it felt as if several people had come in. Having grown up in horribly crowded peasant huts and workers’ barracks, in the human rivers of trains and stations, she never could separate herself completely from the masses. She walked around the room, she gestured, as if trying to fill the space with people; every movement presumed the presence of someone else, a line, a parade, a meeting of party members, a crowd storming a store counter. Internally, I staggered, feeling the wave of her presence, intensified by the odor of her perfume that rolled over me.

  She lightly sprayed her throat and neck, but in combination with her personality the already overwhelming fragrance of Red Moscow seemed incredibly cloying, sticking to everything, narcotic, as if she remembered a completely different smell—rot, smoke, decay—and was trying to kill it with this perfume, unconsciously adding more than necessary.

  She had two lipsticks—crimson and purplish brown; her face powder was in a red compact; the bottle of Red Moscow perfume with its ruby top looked like the Kremlin towers and their stars; she managed to desacralize red, making it her own. From the color of blood shed for the revolution that saturated the banners, red tu
rned into the color of a vivacious blush that came from health, joy, and sensual appetite. In fact, all of Grandmother Mara’s cosmetics created a range of blushes, as if she wanted to demonstrate her satisfaction with life under socialism.

  Grandmother Mara’s looks were clear evidence that she appreciated the material side of life. An inattentive observer might conclude that she was a loud, impulsive, bossy but essentially harmless pensioner.

  Yet the first time I heard the word “ruthless,” I intuitively understood its meaning through Grandmother Mara. No, she wasn’t cruel, she knew how to be tender, and she loved sincerely and fully; ruthlessness is something else—it is the absence of intermediate states. Grandmother Mara did not know how to internalize an experience, she always overcame it—or solved it—in a single movement; therefore she could be ruthless even in kindness.

  If a tree was not fruitful, she had it cut and dug out in order to plant a new one. I learned to use ax and shovel, to dig out and to chop clinging roots. I approached the task reluctantly, hoping that Grandmother Mara would change her mind and spare the tree, but the first chopped root unloosened the ties of pity, and I fiercely dug into the ground to find the main root that kept the apple tree firmly in the ground. I struggled like a fairy tale hero with the power of the tree, deep, dispersed, and intractable.

  I think at times like that Grandmother Mara felt special pangs of love for me, certain that I was her grandson more than I was Grandmother Tanya’s, or the son of my parents. My father would remove the cherry or apple tree three times faster, but he would do it without passion, just another job. Grandmother Mara kept the garden not out of love for gardening; the garden was her domain, her little empire, and she was using her Communist upbringing on the irrational plants, believing that a fruitless plum tree was setting a bad example for the others and therefore had to be destroyed before the others were tempted by the joy of fruitless growth.