The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  She let me use Grandfather’s ax—a terrible executioner’s tool, which had somehow survived all the moves and the wartime evacuation, as if such objects do not vanish, as if they were more than things, with a fate and a soul; resembling a Scandinavian battle ax, it was an instrument and a weapon; life began with it in a bare spot, with no people; it gave birth to a house, utensils, fence; peasants fought with it against swords and rifles; a weapon of labor and a weapon of rebellion.

  I felt it, I felt the power of that ax, which was still too big for me. I picked it up and the ax made me grow to match its size, taught me how to use its weight effortlessly to chop branches and wood. When a tree indicated by Grandmother Mara was turned into a pile of branches and a stump—an octopus-like shape, resembling a terrible animal—I looked in amazement at the emptiness cleared of trunk and branches. The space was a result of that ax, and the labor became profoundly justified, as if I were repeating the actions of many generations of peasant ancestors.

  I dragged the green branches beyond the fence; a short breather. Grandmother Mara fed me like an adult worker, like a man, and then she handed me a matchbox to start the main part.

  Grandmother Mara believed that the best ashes for fertilizing came from freshly sawn trees, burned while the leaves were still firm, while the foamy sap still dripped from the cuts. I made a big bonfire, putting old dry logs on the bottom, for a hot and long-lasting fire, and threw the fresh branches on top. They caught reluctantly, slowly drying on the fire of the bottom logs, so the burning lasted until twilight. I stood in the smoke and trembling air, amid the sparks and searching breaths of the flames, stunned by the heat, thinking of taking a rest but knowing that somewhere in the yard that had grown viscous in the heated air, Grandmother Mara was watching me work.

  The next morning, tired, with aching muscles, I still rose early, for I had to see the culmination of my actions; Grandmother Mara, who never slept past seven and often rose with the sun, living in the ancient peasant rhythm imbued in her from childhood, came out to sift the ashes.

  At the hour of thickening dew and the first sun rays, not so much warm as luminous, I could see her approaching frailty; her dress refused to fall smoothly and freely, keeping its angles, seams, and darts, as if her bulky body had weakened inside and the fabric hugged her like a sheet does a very ill patient, gathering the smell of unaired linen in the folds; in the hour of morning dew she came out like a witch, a sorceress, with a trough and an old sieve, as if she was going to cast a spell.

  She used a trowel to gather the still hot ashes, putting portions into the sieve and sifting it over the trough; a mound of delicately gray ash, with darker flecks, grew in the trough; the finest dust that could not be held by the sieve flew in the air, settled on the grass, while the coals that did not burn fully rattled around, black bone trees, the broken joints of burned branches.

  I was amazed that the apple or cherry trees that were alive and full of juice just yesterday, cracking under the blade of the ax, had been burned, and that the old woman was sifting their ashes; but it could be no other way because of all the grownups only Grandmother Mara was capable of deciding without a second thought what would live and what would die; she stood on the border of life and death, ordering one to be chopped and burned in order to fertilize another, more worthy tree.

  Here I understood why some of the old men in the dacha compound called her (behind her back, of course) Soviet Power; “Has Soviet Power gone by yet?” “Have you seen Soviet Power?” Without mockery, half-jokingly, half-seriously. Grandmother Mara had never held any official posts, had no titles or awards, not even the most trifling, merely nominal ones; but when she showed me which tree to destroy and I followed her orders, it seemed that we were serving something greater than concern over the harvest; Soviet Power was revealed to me as a life force and the mystery of annihilation simultaneously. Grandmother Mara, despite her lowly public position, was an apostle or at the very least a Soviet zealot in the true, invisible hierarchy.

  There was only one circumstance which made me feel that Grandmother Mara knew much and had seen much that did not quite fit into the Soviet canon, but either hid it or forced herself not to remember it.

  When we visited her in the winter at her Moscow apartment, she put a tablecloth on a big round table—we did not eat like that at home because of our cramped quarters and harried life—and set plates from a porcelain service that was kept in the sideboard.

  Grandfather Trofim brought the service back from Germany after the war, along with the sewing machine and silk bedspreads in the Japanese style, embroidered with birds and dragons.

  The bedspreads and sewing machine were almost never used; Grandmother Mara used a Soviet machine for sewing, the spreads were kept in the closet, but an exception was made for the porcelain service for certain family meals. These three things were metaphysical trophies, as if Grandfather Trofim had returned from a distant kingdom with three special objects.

  The marvelous objects were equivalent—with adjustment for time and place—to family treasures, for which every generation had its own attitude. Paid for in blood, Grandfather Trofim’s early death, they created the family, the community of people allowed to eat soup from German porcelain, admire the bedspreads, and appreciate the mechanical beauty and harmonious structure of the Singer sewing machine.

  The bedspreads had a citrusy fragrance—Grandmother Mara saved the skin of oranges and tangerines and used the dry bits against moths; a repairman came once a year with tiny tools, like dental instruments, and a narrow-necked oil can, to tune up the Singer; we weren’t allowed to scrape our spoons on the bottom of the plates so as not to scratch the enamel.

  The service enchanted me with the sophistication of its creator’s mind; five kinds of plates, three kinds of cups and saucers, tureen, salad bowls, cream pitcher and many others—with wide and narrow necks, with thin noses like a beak; pots, jugs, vases—nobody knew what they were really called or for which foods they were intended; no one could imagine a life where there was so much food that all these forms and shapes were needed.

  “This must be for jam,” Grandmother Mara said, and everyone carefully put jam in the thin dish, but no one was sure that it was intended for jam, and it seemed that the dishes that remained on the sideboard looked down on us with aristocratic displeasure.

  The service was for twenty, and I kept wondering: Why so many? Were there families with so many close relatives? For a while I consoled myself with the guess that it had been made with extras, in case something was broken. But then one day I saw Grandmother Mara’s gaze while she set the table, as she looked from the mountain of unneeded plates to the photograph of Grandfather Trofim. And I understood, I realized that Grandfather Trofim brought this service back from Germany in the hope that he would one day gather together the large prewar family, all the relatives. Maybe he even imagined them sitting at the table; having been separated by war, they would meet again, passing bread, serving one another, pouring vodka, and these gestures, arms crossing and fingers touching, would renew their family ties; the German service would stop being specifically German when the victors broke bread and raised glasses over it.

  Grandmother Mara’s eyes saw what I did not—the emptiness, the absence. For me, four people at the table was the norm, the maximum, while for Grandmother Mara it was the remains, a small part of something larger. She set out the service to remember, to count all the dishes and cups that did not appear, all the unneeded bowls of soup.

  I pictured the wall of photographs in Grandmother Tanya’s room; for a second I pitied both grandmothers, who were irreconcilable and so similar in their loneliness.

  BETWEEN GRANDMOTHERS

  It is both simple and difficult to compare my grandmothers; they were so different that each defined herself through negation—I am not her—which over time bound the two so tightly that one could not live without the other.

  One could say that our family was the result of a historical misalliance;
both grandmothers were born before the revolution, one a noblewoman of an ancient line, the other a peasant from recent serfs, and it is unlikely they would have had a grandson in common if not for 1917, the Civil War, and the establishment of Soviet rule.

  For peasant Grandmother Mara everything beginning with 1917 was her history, her time. While Grandmother Tanya lived, perhaps without fully realizing it, in an alien time; it merely moved her inherent era farther and farther away. The two women could not have come together: time flowed differently for them. Their conflict could only grow.

  Naturally, as a child I did not know that Grandmother Tanya belonged to the nobility, did not know that the family was divided by a temporal marker into “present people” and “former people”; that our family was in its essence not something finished but a continuing attempt to find a common tongue, to coexist, realized in the children and in the grandchild, that is, in me; that I was in effect something experimental, a child of two times.

  Grandmother Mara, a Communist who did not belong to the Party, should have been impressed by non-Party Grandmother Tanya, an editor at Politizdat, a person with entrée to the ideological inner sanctum. But it seems that Grandmother Mara did not trust Grandmother Tanya, knowing her dubious social heritage, nor Politizdat itself or the very genre of ideological speech.

  Lenin and Stalin were immutable for her; they had said it all, their speeches were no longer words, they were signs on tablets, and there was no need to say or write anything more; therefore the official language elicited an unrecognized protest in her that grew into a quiet war, an overthrow of grammar and orthography.

  I think she found inexplicable bliss in talking about “communisum” and “socialisum,” stretching out the terms, stomping tight shoes to fit the big clumsy feet of a peasant girl.

  Saying “perscription” and “supposably” was not simply a vulgarization of awkward “intellectual” words to suit the speech of village, not a parody of buzzwords used in inaccessible spheres of culture.

  No, she killed complex words just because, she was certain that words were not important, there was no ontological faith in them, they were to be mocked like the vanquished. She saw the future of communism as wordless somehow: the kingdom of the final truth would have no words.

  Even in insignificant situations she spoke aggressively, pushing, harsh, trying to tear the words apart, use them all up so that the final silence could come.

  For me, Grandmother Mara’s aggressive speech merely epitomized what I sensed in the speech of all adults. Grandmother Mara immediately invaded your side of the field with words, as if she used their meaning not for communicating but as bellicose weapons.

  Grandmother Tanya spoke softly, both in intonation and in choice of words, her sentences always left space for a response. She used neutral language, and I always felt free with her, like a soldier during a truce, when you don’t have to keep expecting shots and looking for the closest cover.

  In every conversation, Grandmother Mara (no matter what was being discussed) tried to exact some special proof of the speaker’s sincerity and existential attitude. She seemed to believe no one, and condemned herself for that lack of trust, but still attacked, insisted, as if she needed the person to tear his shirt, claw his chest to the flesh and blood, exposing the gaping flesh of feeling, even though they might be discussing ways of pickling cucumbers.

  Her fixation turned Grandmother Mara into an investigator, a torturer: Is there truth in the person? The connection she had felt with you—was it still true? She perceived lying as absolute evil and would never admit it was a psychological mechanism that could perform, say, a defense function as well.

  Grandmother Tanya allowed me to maintain some moral mystery inside me, a hidden moral life. Her principle was “just don’t lie to yourself.” But Grandmother Mara thought the more important principle was “don’t lie to others.” She demanded that I tell everything, as if cleansing from guilt could come only in confession, preferably before several people, not just one. The most ordinary formulas of apology in her presence took on the weight of repentance.

  I have to mention here what I later called the metaphysics of remarking. The concept—remarking—was key in education; “I was given a remark,” “You will get a remark,” “I’m writing a remark in your notebook.”

  A remark is not just some words with moral content; the words are secondary, first comes the act of remarking, the act of a specifically organized seeing. This seeing is not neutral, it nearly unconsciously fixes on almost anything wrong, latches on to it, calculates, classifies, and only then do the clichéd words come.

  Wherever you were, you were watched by the collective hundred-eyed Argus, the visual field of existence was not safe and free; it was bad enough that you practically had no private, personal space; intense moralizing held sway in the public domain; everyone watched everyone else, zealously hurrying to be the first to make a remark, to execute a microact of power.

  This feeling—that every person is both policeman and judge, that you are surrounded by people without eyelids, who never blink—this very feeling is probably what I experienced, and Grandmother Mara was its most vivid personfication. Once, in a good mood because it was May Day and there was a parade of thousands, she explained to me, “Soviet power is you and me and we are all together, that’s what this power is like, it is ours, it belongs to everyone.” I understood what power Grandmother Mara had in mind—the power of remarks.

  The difference in language and morality was the first distinction I made between the grandmothers; gradually, a few dropped words and details created other distinctions, deeper ones.

  Grandmother Tanya sometimes spoke of her childhood, the most insignificant episodes that had no historical context, walks in a meadow or a trip to the sausage store. These episodes were an expression of her person; her recollections were detailed, extended, filled with moments of understanding, moments of revelation of her own individuality.

  Grandmother Mara’s recollections could not strictly be called recollections. Turning to the distant past, she wandered in twilight where vague visions appeared that did not seem to relate to her life; she could not clearly define where the existence of her brothers and sisters ended and her own began, she did not have a personal view of the world and therefore no personal memory.

  But it all changed come the revolution; that and the establishment of Soviet power pulled her out of her former dissolution in everyone else, tore her out of the darkness of communal living where the concept of “individual” was rather vague.

  So Grandmother Mara’s creator was Stalin. Naturally, the social and psychological upheaval was done by the revolution, but that thought was too complex for Grandmother; she needed an “author,” a demiurge, a “father” for her new personality, because attributing her second birth to historical events meant that she was both an orphan and vulnerable. A peasant daughter, her greatest and unacknowledged fear was being alone in history, without instruction and edification, without a leader’s guidance.

  Lenin merely “lit the way,” he was a prophet, while “Stalin brought us up to be true to the people,” as the 1943 anthem said, and for Grandmother Mara her birth as an individual was “registered” in Stalin’s name. The name Stalin was not just a symbol of victory and faith and Communism. When she said “Stalin,” she was giving a name to a complex and contradictory alloy of traits of her own personality and the qualities of an era.

  Cruelty and the readiness to quash disagreement, to sacrifice herself and others, was what she called “Stalin,” thereby justifying them and making them the necessary part of the whole. They were connected to honesty, concern, and sincerity—the bad and good in such a monstrous mix that “Stalin” was an incantation joining the incompatible and forbidding all attempts to understand oneself, which would have ended—given her meager intellectual means—in an inner tragedy.

  For Grandmother Tanya the comparable character-forming concept was the blockade of Leningrad, or sim
ply The Blockade.

  Grandmother Tanya never spoke of her sisters who starved to death in Leningrad, and I heard her say the word “blockade” only two or three times; that evinced how deeply The Blockade had taken root inside her and become a way of being. Talk of the inhuman horrors of blockade life were not welcome; what was welcome were descriptions of heroic exploit, and Grandmother was left behind in the prison of silence that surrounded the death of her sisters, and she found in this the only correct and honest way of relating to life, history, and destiny.

  Grandmother Mara never mentioned the siege of Leningrad as part of the war; this may be explained by the fact that she had no relatives there, that Grandfather Trofim had fought in the south, and her worry for family was tied to other points on the map.

  The shadow of the blockade fell on Grandmother Tanya’s everyday life; an old illness made her keep a strict diet: porridge, boiled vegetables, boiled fish, unsweetened tea, a bit of fruit. She probably did not need to be this inflexible, she could have spoiled herself a bit without worrying about her health; but people of her generation had difficulty giving into laxity, following their mood; they did not know how to handle it, they had been trained by an era that did not recognize intermediate states, vacillations, mutability. It was easier for Grandmother Tanya to deny herself all small culinary pleasures than to permit herself to enjoy them from time to time.

  Grandmother Mara loved to eat and derived pleasure from feeding others: her cooking creations overwhelmed you not so much with their taste as their number, opulence, satisfaction, and Rabelaisian forms.

  On the one hand, Grandmother Mara had great admiration for steadfastness. But on the other, she sensed something in Grandmother Tanya’s behavior that in the thirties would have been called something like “counterrevolutionary lifestyle.”