The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  She probably saw it like this: she considered the culinary abundance that she created out of literally nothing, finding products in almost-empty stores, as an achievement of the Soviet regime. All those pies, soups, and blini were the substance of Sovietness for her; she did not simply cook, she participated in the shared celebration of food, bringing joy to the stomach; she created examples of the happiness and plenty promised under socialism.

  Grandmother Tanya’s refusal to try any of these dishes elicited suspicion. I think Grandmother Mara sometimes suspected that Grandmother Tanya was actually healthy and used a medical excuse to reject not the food but the regime, enacting a dietetic insurgency against the Soviets. I sometimes imagined that Grandmother Mara wanted to force-feed Grandmother Tanya to prove that normal, healthy, festive food would not harm her, and expose her deceit to the world.

  At the table Grandmother Mara kept a close eye on us to make sure everything was eaten, and no excuse or trick could spare you. You had to overeat to the point where you couldn’t swallow the tiniest bite, and only then did she smile in satisfaction.

  Her treats were sometimes a torture, I could not eat the most wonderful, freshest, finger-licking, meat pies; my revulsion went far beyond children’s sudden food antipathies.

  I wasn’t frightened by the overflowing affection—essentially all the manifestations of care were excessive in both grandmothers, as if they should have been shared among five grandchildren; I feared not the care but what was inside it, like a blade in a sheath.

  “Then why did I cook all this?” she would exclaim rhetorically and with great pathos if you refused another helping or asked her to pack less for home (this was a mandatory part of the ritual, the food made its own kind of intervention into other kitchens and tables).

  “Then why did I cook all this?” Grandmother Mara would exclaim. And there was a whole philosophy in it: create such a profusion—of food, feelings, instructions, intentions—that the addressee had to accept, with no chance of refusing without hurting the giver’s feelings or questioning the kindness of the gesture.

  In just the same way, she imposed her opinions, her understanding of the world, and established her power in relationships. Your wishes—actually the wishes ascribed to you—were always already fulfilled, and you had no space for maneuver, for acting on your own.

  I think it was Grandmother Tanya’s tact, verging on dissembling, that bothered Grandmother Mara the most. Almost unconsciously, Grandmother Mara embodied the hungry dreams in hundreds of wartime diaries, which listed the foods that would appear on the table in peacetime and described how mindfully and plentifully people would eat. She sensed that she had the right of the victors on her side, that true generosity obviated tact, but she still knew that Grandmother Tanya was more strict; and that drove her mad.

  But Grandmother Mara could not control herself, and over and over stacks of blini would appear, too many to fit in a bucket; sometimes I thought that everything she touched turned to food, as if a genie had played a joke on her.

  Even stranger was the other side of her “cooking persona,” which many people considered eccentric.

  In the spring, on the eve of blossoming, Grandmother Mara would become agitated, worried by a premonition. And then one day she would say, “The sap is running!” and send me for grandfather’s ax, as if she could feel what was happening inside the birch trees without going into the woods.

  I entered the grove cautiously, the ground made sucking noises from the recent melt, branches knocked down by winter winds were strewn everywhere, young tree trunks bearing the teeth marks of hares and elk, and the usual paths were lost under last year’s fallen leaves. The forest, which had restored its wildness over the winter, was alien to me, still in my city mode. I would have preferred to wait for the paths to be trampled once again, for foliage to hide the traces of winter, and the fallen trees and branches taken away for firewood. But Grandmother Mara brought me to help her chop through the thick birch bark, and watched with inexplicable excitement as the first drop dripped into the three-liter jar. The desire to animate herself after a long winter with sap coming from the earth turned Grandmother Mara into part-spirit, part-animal, and I avoided drinking that liquid seething from the tree. I believed it would make wood goblin fur grow between my toes.

  Also in the spring, when the earth was still a mass of dried blades of grass and last year’s leaves—it all lay as it had fallen in December, squashed by the wet and heavy snow—but the mean sharp teeth of nettles were breaking through the old grass on sunny hillocks, Grandmother Mara went with a sack to collect the nettles. When she had picked all the young nettle leaves in the closest hillocks, she came back to make soup, meatless nettle soup, which was merely “whitened” with flour.

  I watched her pick the nettles, and she seemed like a persistent herbivore who would outlive any predator, because predators cannot live without meat, while herbivores can get by on twigs, leaves, and buds. She was performing a ritual, feeding us food from the kingdom of the dead, where translucent shadows of those who died of hunger flitter around meadows and gather edible herbs, the first spring greenery, still as weak and thin as themselves. Once a year Grandmother Mara reminded us who we were and where we came from, which vegetative root was ours, for she, our ancestor, ate soup in the thirties that did not even have sorrel but only coltsfoot and birch bark.

  Spring passed, and I forgot these thoughts; but in summer the wallpaper had to be changed in the dacha rooms. Grandmother Mara mixed flour in warm water to get a white, bubbling, slurping glue. She said there was a time when she would never have thought of using flour to make glue; she and grandfather would have sat by the kettle of glue mix, taking turns with spoons, and they wouldn’t have needed anything else, not even bread, just a pinch of salt.

  Once, when she was busy, I took a spoonful of the mix and tried to swallow it; I threw up behind the shed. Maybe in other circumstances, I would have felt pity, thinking about her hungry past—but all I felt was her conviction that people should consume with joy the inedible, getting calories from glue, shoe leather, and bark, and I was inadequate, a pathetically weak descendant of real people.

  I tried eating the soft inner bark of birches; I stole a leather belt and hid in the woods, trying to boil it in a tin can, waiting for it to soften, but I was unable to chew a tiny bit. I was hounded by the fear that in case of real starvation, there would be no gradation; I would immediately fall to the very bottom, would be forced to boil insoles of shoes, to catch rats.

  My grandfathers could have taught me to retain my dignity, not fear hunger or war, live openly and boldly; but they were gone so long and so definitively, that I could only guess, catch fleeting accidental glimpses of what I had lost.

  STOLEN GRANDFATHERS

  My grandfathers were taken by the war: one died from his wounds ten years after the victory, the other was lost, missing in action. They were both absent from my time, each in his own way: one had been dead a long time ago although he had been alive, the other seemed to have never existed at all.

  I am sure that my grandmothers and parents remembered the grandfathers and spoke with them in their heads. But they never told me their biographies, never talked about them with me at all. If they had talked about one, who died, they would have had to talk about the other, who was lost, and for some reason they didn’t want to do that. So they preferred to keep both cloaked in silence. I reassembled my grandfathers in pieces, fragments of random recollections, the few remaining objects, without finding anything abnormal about it, thinking that everyone lived this way.

  Our dacha was in a place where battles were fought in the winter of ’41. The Germans took the neighboring village, but not ours. The former line of the front split the dacha region in half. The trenches and foxholes of the frontline were filled in, but in the field and woods where the Germans had stood the grass and trees grew a little differently, a shadow fell on nature even on the sunniest days. I understood how dangerously close it
was to Moscow: an hour on the commuter train.

  There were still dozens of old blinds in the woods, big trenches for tanks. Kids weren’t allowed to play around them, for there were rumors that decades ago someone was blown up by a mine. But the trenches and foxholes didn’t elicit any desire to crawl through them, they were blurred holes filled with black rotting water that digested fallen leaves year after year.

  Every little village in the area had an obelisk with a list of names and an inscription like “They Passed Into Immortality.” An artillery captain was buried near a local pond—either his unit had been stationed there or he had died on the spot. The grave was tended by the dacha residents and the villagers, but it was as if they were fixing something in their yard, so the repairs made it resemble more a rural sanctuary than a military memorial. A quiet neo-paganism arose in the region, a weakly pulsating cult of departed ancestors—“They Passed Into Immortality.” Essentially, the cult was very distantly tied to official events, fireworks, parades, gigantic monuments, and eternal flames; as if the universal sacrifice was so great that any memorial was rendered insignificant. Gradually all the ground that held the dead turned into a memorial and took on features of sanctity, blessed by sacrifice and blood.

  In this cult my warrior grandfathers had become nature: a birch, bird, brook, grass in a meadow. The phantom shadow of the German presence, the trace of the extreme edge the Germans reached in their attack on Moscow, was stronger than the imaginary presence of the grandfathers. I tried many times to imagine that maybe one grandfather had hidden in this pit from gunfire and the other’s tank stood here, but I felt nothing. Without the support of real memory, it was just a failed attempt at self-deception.

  But everything German attracted me. I had a morbid interest as one sometimes does in relation to something extremely repulsive: sores on a beggar’s leg or a dog hit by a car and smeared into a red spot on the asphalt.

  Besides which, the symbols of the Third Reich, which were unceasingly preserved and refreshed for propaganda purposes in the Soviet Union, did not go through the stages of aging and decay that the Soviet military symbols, images, and heroes had experienced.

  Soviet art had played itself out, the content was gone, leaving only the form. In some sense, what their soldier husbands had been like had already been told on behalf of my grandmothers; in any case, a solidly established canon had been imposed on us.

  Grandfathers—all the dead—had been appropriated by the state and returned in the form of ideologically laden images; their death turned out to be the main justification for the regime.

  Grandmothers might have risked going against the canon. But they could not go against themselves.

  The men’s lot was to act, the women’s, to wait; men got arrests, battles, and death, women got suffering and the passive portion of existence. Naturally, this is an arbitrary distinction, but it makes something a little more clear.

  The female line continued, through the grandmothers, while the male line was cut off with the death of the grandfathers. The grandmothers passed on only their views and understanding to their grandchild. They were afraid of history: involvement in history killed their husbands and brothers; you have to hide from history, snuggle deeper into the family circle.

  Only the grandfathers could have given an example of historical courage, historical action, historical duty—but the grandmothers, I think, were afraid that such an example could be fateful, could push me toward a dangerous path, and unconsciously they tried to protect me from the grandfathers, to hide them and keep them away from the house, the family circle, which they might destroy accidentally. The grandfathers were turned into restless ghosts who came home to the wives but were not allowed through the door and given a corner in the barn, where the women slipped out to see them, keeping their presence a secret from the family.

  I tried to imagine what my grandfathers would be like now, in my time. I went to the “Generals’ Building” on Sokol, whose terra-cotta bricks seemed to have been fired in a special flame so fierce that a fire truck had to be kept handy as part of the guardhouse. The walls displayed memorial plaques, with military leaders armored by rows of medals, and bas-reliefs of banners, weapons, laurel leaves, bayonets, funereal ribbons sprinkled with five-pointed stars; old men in uniform often strolled in its rectangular courtyard defended from the street by bastion walls, as if protecting the building from the winds of new times.

  One time I saw two old men come out the heavy doors with cream-colored curtains, one in navy black and the other in blue summer uniform, four or five rows of medals and ribbons on their chests. They must have been an admiral and a general, both around seventy, they had started in the war as lieutenants, and now maybe they were friends, married to sisters, or maybe one had saved the other on the Black Sea or the Barents Sea, during the defense of Sebastopol or in military convoys; their highly polished shoes gleamed and the old men were smiling.

  A Chaika limousine was waiting at the steps, it belonged to the admiral, I thought, and a boy a little younger than I in the backseat looked at them with longing and adoration. The admiral greeted his grandson with a smile, a squint, and a salute, while the pilot general spread his arms, long thin fingers stretching out of the sleeves—he was missing two fingers on his right hand—and pretended to be flying right from the steps to the car.

  How I wanted to be in that boy’s place! I thought my desire was so strong that like a cuckoo I could push the boy out of his body and the old aviator would come down the steps pretending to be a plane for me. But with that feeling I realized that I would be betraying my grandfathers, denying them for the sake of inner well-being, and I turned away, bitterly leaving the boy in the Chaika his old men.

  Grandfather Trofim was my mother’s father; I had seen pictures of him, heard a few stories, rather sketchy; I knew he was an officer, served in tanks, fought the whole war, and died in the mid-1950s from his old wounds.

  In fact we were separated by only three decades. But a prehistoric man looked out at me from the photographs; his features and his uniform said that he had lived in some distant time of which there were very few remnants, things made solidly and out of indestructible material—cast-iron doorstops and irons, sewing machines on cast-iron pedestals, heavy nickel silver spoons.

  Grandmother Mara kept his decorations in a candy box hidden under the linens in the closet. They were rarely taken out or shown to me, I think I saw them only two or three times, so I have no visual memory of them; I remember the weight of the box, which I was allowed to hold, and the feeling that Grandfather Trofim would not have permitted keeping his medals in a box with the word “Assortment” in gold letters.

  There was an Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Red Banner, other orders, and a dozen medals. No one really knew how he earned them or where he had fought.

  I imagined the orders and medals in rows on his chest, enveloping him with their golden glow; but each order meant a lot, “weighed” too much, and this excess of meaning that intensified the complex hierarchy of awards erected a solid wall between me and my late Grandfather Trofim.

  Once I decided to steal the medals and hide them in a place known only to me, to bury them, because they outweighed the cemetery urn with light ashes, outweighed the fleeting memory of family, as if the medals acted in their own self-interest. On the death of their bearer, they became his executors, so to speak, acquired the right to speak on his behalf, and the other material evidence of his life—papers, clothing, personal trifles—lost out to the heraldic symbols. The medals wanted to be remembered, they stole Grandfather Trofim from me, they did not steal my memory but were the key to remembering him.

  On our dacha plot, which Grandfather Trofim received from the government a few years before his death, he had time just to build the summerhouse and leave some symbolic objects, seemingly from a fairy tale.

  Grandfather Trofim transplanted this oak from the woods, they told me, pointing to a big tree whose roots had spread to a third
of the plot and suffocated the roots of other trees. The apple trees were being killed by the oak, but no one would consider sawing down this memory of Grandfather.

  Grandfather Trofim dragged this stone from the woods, they told me, pointing to the enormous glacial boulder that looked as if it wouldn’t budge without a crowbar.

  The oak and stone—Grandfather must have been bored in civilian life, performing these inexplicable exploits, measuring his strength against stones and trees, capturing them, moving them onto his land. He finally died of ennui, oppressed by this great weight, the weight of former feats; he wanted to be cremated. What he sought perhaps, in his weariness, was a definitive death.

  I studied the statutes engraved on the decorations, which order was given for what; I fought the orders and medals in my imagination, forcing them to speak, trying to imagine the enamel Red Banner fluttering, how the soldier etched on the Order of the Red Star grabs my rifle and turns to me to tell me at last how my grandfather had fought. But the orders did not come to life and I just wasted paper by drawing battles. The grown-ups were touched by my dedication to Grandfather, while I suffered attacks of despair that increased on days commemorating military achievements: the same orders were depicted on posters, glowed in lightbulbs on lampposts, and gazed at me from postcards; silent and oppressive, they were given to me as coins in place of a monetary note, instead of memories of my grandfather, as if there had been an exchange of a person for awards at some unknown rate.

  Grandfather Mikhail; no one ever mentioned his surname, I never saw any photographs or heard any talk of him; his name existed only in my father’s patronymic. It was as if he had never lived, had never met Grandmother Tanya, had no face, character, or habits, and existed only in documents, a ghost of the civil state. “Grandfather vanished without a trace” my parents replied curtly. It seemed that Grandfather Mikhail did not vanish in some specific albeit unknown part of the country, of the planet, but simply fell into another dimension.