The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  Gradually I pictured a vicious circle of losses: the sergeant who buried the lieutenant on the battlefield died, along with the secret of his grave; in the hospital a private who remembered the village where the sergeant was buried also died, and so entire chains of human names died off; one, two, dozens, hundreds, and Grandfather Mikhail was there among them, on the dark side of memory.

  The only object I knew for sure belonged to him was the medal “For Bravery” on a worn, shiny ribbon, alone, as if lost. It contrasted strangely with the box of orders and medals belonging to Grandfather Trofim, as if he had possessed numerous qualities that turned into awards, while Grandfather Mikhail had only one, irrational and infinite bravery, which led him too far, to the place from which no one returns, where people die without a trace; beyond the limits of the universe, where death is not an event that can reach the living.

  As a child, I probably rarely noticed that I had absolutely no grandfathers. It had always been that way, and it did not seem strange; Father was born during the war, and in some sense he was its son, as if in the war a woman could become pregnant, as in myths and fairy tales, from a military wind, the stamp of a boot, the gleam of bayonets, from the stormy, tense atmosphere.

  My father was born when all the men had gone off to war, and this collective departure of men and the subsequent return of the few somehow obviated the question of paternity, made it pointless. The boy was born into a circle of women, righting the deathly absence of men, equalizing the balance, as if life could not stand it and boys started being born on their own. What had been before the war was gone like burned archives, like the state of paradise, and there was no way back there even mentally.

  I sometimes thought that my father’s patronymic was not real, it was simply that people had to have one. My father could have been Petrovich, Sidorovich, Ivanovich, Alexeevich, as if some office had supplied the patronymics to restore the proportional relations of names in the generation lost in war. He was registered in the name of the Mikhails who had died, in a redistribution of newborns among the dead soldiers, like posthumous rations, perhaps taking children away from living fathers for the benefit of dead ones, because the dead need descendants more than the living, they have no other way of perpetuating themselves. The silence of my grandmother and my parents was a sign to me that they knew about this government operation that changed the familial ties of the whole country.

  Sometimes I thought that Mikhailovich was code, a cipher, a pseudonym; that Grandfather had existed, but lived the life of a secret agent, a spy, about whom one could not say that he existed; someone who worked for decades under a cover in a foreign land, who was anonymous even for those who worked with him.

  Grandfather Mikhail was in army communications; that was all I knew about him, but I couldn’t tell if that was true or part of his cover story. There was a huge, nonworking radio receiver on legs at home; it had broken long ago, and the tuner moved the indicator to different marks for wavelengths and names of cities without effect. Father had wanted to bring the receiver to the dacha, set it up in the attic as a retro ornament, but Grandmother Tanya always stopped him gently. I thought this was a special receiver, that it had never gotten ordinary radio stations with music and news; it served another purpose—Grandmother Tanya was waiting for a signal from Grandfather Mikhail which had been delayed for decades, lost in atmospheric distortions.

  I did not notice the exact moment when I started inventing Grandfather Mikhail the spy. The USSR was a joint creation of millions of nameless “authors” who spent a lifetime making this imaginary space, starting with children’s games of war versus the Germans or the Reds against the Whites; I made up Grandfather Mikhail because it was my obligation as a person entering the world of a certain culture. The culture had a ready-made plot of espionage as the search for the secret causes of the world, the revelation of the true face of reality; there already was the figure of the spy, the man who went abroad, beyond the known, into the transcendental.

  In trying to find the truth, to understand the past of my grandfathers, I merely immersed myself deeper into the mythological sphere that had taken them from me; I was creating it myself.

  I also did not realize that both grandfathers, while called that, were not grandfathers in age or spirit. How could they be grandfathers when they were only approaching middle age when they died, when they were young fathers? There was a generational gap, as if a scythe had swept away a certain age range.

  This optical defect of generations must have been obvious to the sculptors who filled the country with huge figures of soldiers and goddesses of victory; having died young, these grandfathers were unsuitable for grandfathers; the further back in time their death retreated, the less power they had over our memories of them. And the greater the ease with which the place they should have held in history and the consciousness of their descendants was filled with phantoms, created by indifference to individual destinies, by the dark, earthy pathos of fraternal graves.

  When I was still in kindergarten, one spring evening the teacher told some of us that we would be picked up by our fathers, and later than usual.

  We were brought out after dinner to the playground. There was a truck and our fathers were unloading huge logs, bigger than they could embrace. It was almost dark but the sky still had the bloodred, troubling sunset, like a sign whose power was longer than a single day; it extended into the future. It was no longer the sky of a bedroom suburb of Moscow, it was the sky of a fairy tale, with endless fields with the severed heads of heroes and viburnum bridges, where the sources of living and dead water flowed, where the swift falcon flew beneath the clouds and the gray wolf leaped over ravines; the sky over the field in the stories that Grandmother Tanya read to me as she picked over the grains on winter evenings.

  I quoted them, surprised that I had memorized them without even trying:

  The stunned knight came upon a field

  Where nothing lived, just scattered skulls and bones.

  What battle had been fought, what did it yield?

  No one remembered why the screams and groans.

  Why are you mute, field?

  Why overgrown with grasses of oblivion?

  I quoted them and suddenly saw that the logs being unloaded and set down on the ground were fairy tale warrior bogatyr figures carved in wood. They were set up in lots of playgrounds, used as supports for swings, huts, and wooden slides. But with the approach of nightfall and the silent labor of men—the fathers were digging deep holes and mounds of dirt piled up, as if they were digging graves—the wooden fairy tale heroes looked like ancestor idols.

  We children stared in confusion; that day we had been rehearsing for the Victory Day celebrations. We were given costumes—national costumes of all the republics of the USSR; each was symbolized by a single child, but the Russian Republic had several; the most fair-haired boys and girls were dressed in embroidered red shirts and long pseudonational skirts and headdresses.

  We were supposed to sing the anthem lyrics, “Arise, enormous country,” and a few military songs. To help us learn them, they played records over and over, and by the end of the day I was full of the refrain “Let noble anger boil up like a wave, it is a people’s war, a holy war.”

  This was not a song. The chorus voices grew stronger and crossed the limit beyond which the choir and the audience disappeared, leaving only the all-penetrating, earthshaking sound: “Arise, enormous country,” said the internal voice of the rampant universe.

  When the wooden idol-knights were dug in, I realized that they could have sung “Arise, enormous country”: they grew on the field of oblivion, and no power on earth could save them from their spell, turn them back into living people.

  I touched the closest statue and felt the firm dry wood; suddenly I understood that my father had never known his father and grandfather. For an instant under the crimson, dangerously open spring sky his drama, his double orphanhood was revealed to me.

  MY PARENTS: ORDER AN
D PAIN

  Father was hypersensitive about order. Every item on his desk at home looked as if it had been placed there by someone obsessed by geometry, a paranoiac of right angles, who could detect even one degree of misalignment. It was the ultimate arrangement, as if each time he left he might not come back and therefore assembled his things so that he might remember them forever.

  I never saw Father arrange anything on purpose or expend any effort to maintain that order; but I couldn’t say that it happened on its own. Without effort and without spontaneity, he created order by his very existence. When I was at home, alone at his desk, I lay in wait for the moment a book would be crookedly poised, hanging over the edge of the desk, as if I hoped to get through to my father via that gap of a few degrees.

  Father probably became a brilliant specialist in catastrophe theory because of this sensitivity. I think that he “got” the world only in static forms; the fear of shifts, spasms, and drift made him a marvelous “earphone,” a human radar. I sometimes saw huge graphs on millimeter-squared paper on his desk, the teeth and dips of extremes, I saw Father bent over them, and I could sense that those teeth were digging into him, wounding him, and that he was suffering; as if an ancient chthonic creature, the god of chaos, had dug its claws or fangs into him.

  He sought order, and not in the police sense of enforced regulation. Rather, he wanted the world to be fixed, once and for all. He spent a lot of time with maps, the principles of cartography, the compilation of map legends, the signs for depicting objects for seismically unstable regions. I think that unconsciously he thought of the world as a map on a scale of one-to-one. A map is a special kind of cultural object, in which reality is given in an ideal state, which can be imagined but never occurs in reality. Every map is a utopia and an anachronism, a moment of fixed time, it becomes obsolete the moment it is created, and in using maps we deal with a past that is specially organized so that it names and reveals itself.

  He had the personality of a collector, a seeker of causal relationships that can be laid out on a baize-covered surface; minerals, shells, plants, stamps—he collected a bit of everything. The collecting could not become a passion because I don’t think he had any passion in him; a collection was the model of an arrested, compartmentalized universe—there’s a reason those drawers with sections resemble prison cells. The world as it is did not suit him, the world had to be repacked, made transparent, reduced to museum methodology.

  Order was not merely observed at home; it was simply an expression of his figure, his character, his will. The collections—from badges to stamp albums—were external bastions, defensive walls protecting him from the unpredictable world around him.

  As a development of his desire for order, he had an almost painful preference for symmetry. He kept trying to restore a disturbed inner balance, placing spoon and fork equidistant from his plate, setting the toothbrush mugs in the corners of the bathroom shelf, putting books in piles, performing numerous tiny operations with objects according to unknown principles—color? form? weight? application?—setting them up in pairs, one balancing the other to achieve a harmonic state known only to him.

  He sought stability, steadfastness in daily life, sought it with such force that you guessed an unconscious fear behind it. Born in the war and four years old when it ended with Japan’s capitulation, Father must have developed a fear of history’s catastrophic nature, preferring times with no extreme characteristics, either positive or negative. After all, the period that was called “stagnation” in the history of the USSR was actually the realization of very definite hopes of the grown generation of children of the forties. And the generation of their parents.

  I think that Grandmother Tanya, who lost almost all her brothers and sisters in the war, a widow, unconsciously brought up her son to be unobtrusive, even unnoticeable. I don’t mean she wanted him to hide from everything or become a gray creature no one was interested in. Grandmother wanted him to have a glorious fate and success; but a fate and a success that were providentially safe, the kind that were not entirely real.

  I think that when he was born, she begged—this is a story for a Greek myth or a sermon—that her son never be noticed by the gods, neither with evil intentions nor with good ones. Her wish came true—the man instinctively avoided extreme situations that would bring him to the fore; a man of the firm middle ground.

  She must have been horrified by her wish come true; but the gods could not intervene a second time, even if she asked—it would contradict the first, strict condition of their agreement.

  I would think she was not the only woman to request that her child be saved from fate, that her child not be seen as a target for the forces of historical destiny hovering over continents and oceans; and she was not the only one who was heard after the great and terrible war.

  In some sense (higher than the juxtaposition of faith and atheism) they were prayer-saved children. But who knows what such children miss, if this apparent protection they allegedly received meant being left alone, left behind, separated from life.

  Not a Party member, not an activist, not a former adept of Communism, Father nevertheless accepted the USSR as an adequate form for his existence. The cumbersome state, historical, and cultural construct, incapable of development despite its progressive rhetoric, suited his profound need for stopped time, and the rest—the absurd ideology, the inconveniences of daily life, the absence of freedom—was a heavy but not impossible price to pay for that deep and crucial correlation.

  Of course, there were times when the price was unbearable and to accommodate it, to survive, he created—and imposed—crazy ideas.

  He had a central concept from which came his perceptions of people and his attitude toward life. I may be exaggerating by picking out only one aspect of a complex, but I remember the paralyzing effect that the word “willpower” had on me.

  When I did not want to do something, did not understand why it was necessary, did not want to accept something imposed upon me as my own idea, could not allow someone else’s opinion of me to become mine, did not want to give up my sensation, feeling, mood, or thought, Father would say that I lacked willpower, and said it as if my very existence was a violation of a universal agreement and I was an indecent and shameful figure.

  Willpower was an instrument of self-coercion that helped you survive in a place where your wishes and intentions were meaningless. Obstacles, barriers, and violence caused by injustice, stupidity, lies, and the absurdity of circumstances were seen out of any context that required a definite moral reaction: just a dynamic phenomenon, a useful piece of exercise equipment for that willpower.

  Thus, a person could avoid protest and rebellion and accept all the circumstances and still preserve his dignity by the thought that he had overcome private difficulties, when in fact it was the monstrous way of life that had to be overcome. Rejecting it would have shown real willpower.

  I believe it was academician Lysenko’s theory that cells are born out of unstructured “living matter.” He rejected the role of genes and DNA; his invented “living matter” was a tabula rasa in which external influences did not meet an invariant component, the conditional “selfness.”

  Father’s “willpower” was like Lysenko’s “living matter,” presuming a person’s continual ability to mentally mutate and forget oneself.

  With that, Father imagined “willpower” in purely inherited images of resoluteness picked up from industry, from metal work and turning lathes. The way to develop it was “working on oneself”: self-trimming, self-sawing with screeching metal and showers of sparks.

  Only in Mother did I encounter the flexibility I so needed, the smooth transitions from approval to disapproval, a wealth of semitones in relations. She seemed to be made of a different material than everyone else—and I sensed that this was the source of her suffering, what made her vulnerable.

  Mother often suffered from headaches. Today headaches are not perceived in the same way; advertisements offering h
ealing fizzy tablets have done their hypnotic work. Back in the eighties, with scant medications available, a headache did not seem like an easy opponent. People talked about them constantly, shared home remedies, compresses, massages; it seemed that everyone—the schoolteacher, the old man in the bus, the woman in line, the barber, the doctor—all had a headache, and the pain sometimes subsided, allowing a few days of normal life.

  It was the era of the headache, the pain was the sediment, the reflux of all feelings and thoughts.

  But Mother had a particularly fierce pain that would last several days; the attack came unexpectedly, unpredictably. This suddenness and inability to determine the cause (the doctors could not give a reliable diagnosis) gave aesthetic meaning to Mother’s suffering; this was not an illness, it was pain—pure suffering situated in the head.

  Neither coffee nor pills helped; she held her head with her hands, as if it had grown heavy; she moved through the room as if some power were twisting her muscles; she whispered in a changed voice, as if someone had possessed her.

  I thought that someone else’s old pain, wandering the world, seeking a head in which to ache, was entering her. At one point I decided to track the pain and understand how it got into the apartment: Did it seep in through a door or window left ajar, did it sneak into her purse at work or the store?

  I set traps for the pain, imagining it to be like a draft, and I hid behind the shoe rack when my parents came home in the evening, watching for a dense stream of air slipping over the threshold, moving the dust on the floor or the nap of an overcoat. While the grown-ups changed into house clothes, I looked through the grocery bag—would there be a strange object, would I notice something odd about a package of grain?

  When the attack reached its peak, Mother, who was usually very controlled and unremarkable, suddenly was emancipated in her movements and revealed herself deeply and powerfully; she tolerated the pain without tears, moans, or complaint, but the pain removed the bonds of habit and seemed to reassemble her beauty, dispersed by every-dayness, and her nonmaternal femininity. One time I saw her holding her head with both hands, as elegant as a narrow pitcher, a sealed pitcher—the pain was not penetrating from outside, the pain was always inside Mother, in the vessel of her head.