“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years,” she repeated. “And for signs.”
I had never heard words of such high seriousness; I understood right away their gravity, that they were but a small part of something whole, and that whole, existing higher than me, than Grandmother, higher than everything in the world, had suddenly touched me.
Were these the words that were supposed to appear in Grandmother’s wordless book, dressed in a brown leather cover? No, I thought, no, this is yet another book I do not know, perhaps even the book of books. They surround me, secret or even nonexistent, and how many more of them will I encounter?
I naturally knew the origins of the planet, the appearance of life, fish climbing onto land, man developing from apes, the beginning of history which led to the birth of the USSR. That picture had no place for God, the firmament of heaven, or lights for signs. But with the same certainty I now knew that the world was arranged differently: another key to it had appeared on my chain.
It did not occur to me to ask about the provenance of the text; it could not have come from a book, it did not have details like a title or an author. I did not reveal my presence, did not ask Grandmother to continue, to say another few lines—those phrases were enough, they contained everything, and I still had to master them.
Unable to maintain this elevated sensation, as if I had climbed too high, I fell back into the winter evening after school, finding myself again in familiar circumstances. I retained only the word “sign,” linked to the newspaper on the table, with its blurry black-and-white photo of the comet, flying like a bright, extended shuttlecock in the obscurity of the cosmos. I understood that the comet would find something, reveal something related to me, my parents, grandmothers, the past, the present, and I could not miss it, I had to read the sign—I used it in relation to myself for the first time.
Days passed, the date named by astronomers was approaching when the comet would be closest to the earth, but nothing happened. I despaired in anticipation. Every day I checked that Father’s telescope was in place, every night when they were all asleep I hid behind the curtains and looked at the sky, waiting, not so much for the comet as for changes in the skies, for example, in the movement of clouds, the glow of stars, but I found nothing.
I made a decision and asked Grandmother Tanya to tell me what she knew about the comet. She seemed to have been waiting for the question and said I should come to her room that evening, and she opened her album of drawings. A few hours later I was looking at them.
A large mansion on a hill, almost hidden by twilight, windows reflecting light. A waist-high picket fence, with two dozen people gathered by it looking up at the sky—white, old-fashioned dresses, white summer jackets and trousers. Above, in the blue-black sky, dimming the stars, spread the yellow comet, curved like a scorpion’s tail, spitting orange from its inflated head.
Who were all those people standing like friends or relatives, why were they frozen in the light of the comet? What sign were they reading in the sky, what were they learning of their destiny?
This time Grandmother had employed all her skill, and I recognized her, a little girl pressed close to a man in an old-fashioned military cap, as well as other faces from the wall of photographs in her room. I turned to the photographs, and Grandmother, noticing my gaze, gave me a look that told me I had understood the picture.
Twilight, field, fence, house, distant forest—they were all painted in dark blue tones. I realized that here blue was a synonym for the remoteness of the past, that with this drawing Grandmother was looking so deeply into her own memory, beyond any temporal magnitude I had ever known.
“What year was this?” I asked, as if inquiring about the depth of a crevasse.
“It’s now 1986,” Grandmother Tanya said, happy for the opportunity to give me a math problem. “Subtract 76 years and you will know when the comet came the last time.”
I subtracted.
“I must be wrong,” I told her. “I get 1910.”
“You’re right!” she said with a smile. “You figured it correctly. World War I started four years later. Back then everyone thought that the comet was an omen of great misfortune, and so it was. Of course, then came the revolution,” Grandmother went on, correcting herself. “And the revolution made people joyful.”
I froze. I had never known exactly how old Grandmother was, I knew she had lived a long time and that she remembered the Great Patriotic War as an adult. But 1910?
“Grandmother, you mean you were born before the revolution?” I asked, hoping that there was an explanation, a miscalculation in subtraction.
“Yes,” she replied, without a smile this time and uncertainly, catching the tone of my question.
My world was crushed by her reply. I had been certain that everyone alive was a child of the USSR. All the elderly, no matter how old, were the old people of a new time begun by the revolution and aged by that time.
Of course I knew that people born before the revolution did not die in 1917, but what happened to them later? The question never came up—they dissolved, scattered, vanished. It was not hard to calculate that they were alive in the seventies and eighties, but it never occurred to me to do the math.
Grandmother was born before the revolution; she could have said before the Ice Age or before the Cretaceous period. I studied history, I knew about the Battle of Kulikovo, about Ivan the Terrible, and the abdication of Nicholas II, but that had nothing to do with me. It was prehistoric history; real history, my history and the history of my family, began in 1917.
Grandmother Tanya suddenly became a prehistoric creature, as if she were a Neanderthal. Like the submarine commander, I was submerged too deep; I didn’t have enough breath for 1910.
Yet the picture attracted me, the comet in the drawing and the comet somewhere in the sky above the city moved closer to each other, and I was caught as if in a vise. I put my head in my hands, seeking to answer the question: Who were my ancestors, who were those twenty people in the drawing? The mansion and clothing prompted me; but my conscientious naiveté, brought up on stories of workers and peasants, resisted the reply.
Those twenty people had also had fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers; that obvious thought stunned me. I ran from Grandmother’s room, threw on coat and hat and hurried outside; I ran without thinking until I reached the empty lot near school. I was ready to learn that the Soviet Union had a hidden past, that was part of the pain of being a detective. But I could not connect myself with someone before the Union; that was a forbidden activity like dividing by zero, the mind refused to do it.
But the historical shell had cracked and there I sat, pathetic chick, enviously watching the older boys as they played soccer on the icy snow, caught up in the simple joys of the game.
I wept, and tears blurred my vision. But then they ran off, the world began to clear up, I could judge distance again—and I experienced a sense of historical scale, historical distance, for the first time, as if I had been living in a floating indefinite moment. My year of birth, my age, the years of my parents’ birth, 1917, 1910, when the comet had come, the year Grandmother Tanya was born—they all fell into place, a network of coordinates. I had acquired a field of vision.
Walking home slowly, I imagined what I would find. Grandmother Tanya had been feeling ill for the last week. I could see through a crack in the door how she sat in an armchair, put on an eye mask, and turned on a lamp with a long black handle, and how the darkened room would fill with a chemical blue otherworldly light—the night light of hospitals and barracks, the light of bomb shelters, the posthumous light of blockaded Leningrad.
Grandmother exposed herself to that light; I was told it was a treatment, but I suspected that was just a pretense, not very convincing.
After sitting motionless for the requisite time, Grandmother would turn off the lamp, remove the c
loth from her eyes, and get ready for bed.
But the day we drew the comet, she did not go to sleep—she opened the wordless book in brown leather binding and began to write.
I guessed—nothing was stronger than this certainty—that the blue lamp was a medium, an apparatus without which Grandmother could not write what she was writing; the blue colors of the drawing, the blue light of the lamp, it all came together.
I understood that the manuscript was her memoirs; special reminiscences that could be hailed, recalled, translated into heavy violet ink only after special preparation, the ritual of self-blinding.
The blindness was in the burgeoning buds of cloth over her eyes, the blue light enveloped her face, absorbed by the pores of her skin, sensed by nostrils, ears, and hair, making her face visible to the dead with whom Grandmother could speak—her lips often moved, speaking words I could not hear—but whom she was not allowed to see, that was forbidden.
I contrived to be by her door every night, to catch a quick glimpse of the blue glow, but I did not yet consider asking her what she was writing or to open the book without permission. If I asked, Grandmother would not answer, or tell me I had to grow a little older. But if I read it myself, deceiving her, then I would end up reading some other, fake, superficial text, since I had no access or key.
Perhaps if Grandmother had typed her text, the standard font would have deprived the book of its power; but even though she knew how to type and enjoyed doing so, she wrote by hand in the abrupt penmanship of an editor used to correcting other people’s writing instead of creating her own. In fact the text was an editing of myself, a rewriting of a random draft filled with inaccuracies and omissions.
A text about the past that has power over the future; I could feel almost physically that postponed power, the changes happening here and now.
As far as I know, Grandmother Tanya did not show her book to Father or Mother; they silently acquiesced to her right to solitude, or perhaps they were in no hurry to learn something new about the past, wisely delaying that moment. It’s possible that they might have asked about the manuscript, if not for the events which pushed all texts into the background.
UPBRINGING BY THE ESTATE
The telephone rang just before morning, Father walked across the room using his flashlight, and through the partly open door strange, unfamiliar words came from the hallway—reactor, isotopes, radiation sickness. Half-asleep, still sensing the light from Father’s flashlight through my lids, lulled by the slow sway of the birches outside my window, I dreamed about radiation sickness, imagining that it emanated from the body, so unbearable that it blinded other people, while the person whose body was radiating light did not suffer at all, but turned into a gas, a part of the sun, retaining mind and language. Father was still on the phone and seemed to be speaking even more softly, then hung up and went to the kitchen, where he sat immobile in the dark, but for how long, I did not know, for I fell back to sleep.
In the morning I was told not to go to school—an extremely rare event—and not to leave the house. My parents left, Grandmother Tanya knew nothing, and I sat in the apartment listening to the radio—I knew that if Father got a call in the night, in the next day or two there might be news on radio and television about an earthquake or railroad accident, but you had to be vigilant to notice it, because it would flash by, reported calmly, lost in the midst of humorous stories, hockey match results, and lottery numbers. But there was nothing on the radio, the television, or the newspapers.
Nothing the next day, either. My parents did not sleep at home, I did not go to school, and it was only on the third day that the word Chernobyl appeared.
On the third day, my mother came home, and soon after so did my father, to pack; he was headed to Chernobyl.
Accustomed to Father’s trips, the anxieties of Mother and Grandmother Tanya, the names of unfamiliar places which because they were the location of train collisions, earthquakes, chemical spills, suddenly became the names of disasters, I usually tried to visualize the catastrophe: buildings in ruins, burned metal, corroded soil—my imagination could manage that.
But try as I might, I could not imagine Chernobyl, the danger was invisible, death flowed along with water, flew with the wind, fell in the rain, grew in the grass and leaves, penetrated objects; Father went off to an otherworldly realm, the kingdom of the dead.
I was sent back to school; there were lots of conflicting stories told in the school yard—it wasn’t a power plant that blew up, but a rocket; war had broken out, there was a nuclear strike, but the public was not being told; no, others said, it was a power plant and now we have to wait for the next accidents, all the reactors have a built-in flaw; not so, others countered, a secret military plant in Zheltye Vody blew up, and they’re covering it up by talking of Chernobyl; a bomber crashed, the plane had nuclear weapons, and no one wants to admit it.
Nuclear explosion, atom bomb, “peaceful atom”—all the concepts were muddled, leading to an explosion of false information, the radiation of rumors, a vague and therefore even more frightening sign of the end.
“The energy released by a single hydrogen bomb is greater than the energy of all the explosives used in World War II,” I read in my Book for a Young Commander. “If the capitalists provoke us into a third world war, our goal will be noble and beautiful—to make that war the last in the history of humanity.”
The last in history—the echo of those words resounded in me as if I were an old man who had lived his life wasting it on nonsense or difficult and useless efforts, leaving an aftertaste of spiritual exhaustion that reduces both joy and sorrow. I could give myself up to the idea of the bomb that would put an end to everything, obviate the complex questions of daily life, spare me from the emptiness of prospects, giving the future a single, dramatic, and fateful meaning.
I had seen photographs of Kurchatov, the director of the Soviet atomic bomb project, with his long black beard; I think my father told me that he had vowed not to shave until the war was over, and then, until the bomb was made. His beard, long black tufts with gray, scared me; the smoothly shaven rocket engineers Korolev and Keldysh looked like scientists to me, and Kurchatov like a black wizard; his face, slightly Eastern, confirmed my guess. I thought they had brought in Korolev and Keldysh as a screen, to make people believe that the atom bomb was being developed by scientists, when in fact it was created by Kurchatov alone, a sorcerer who knew the dark secrets of things, who knew the real human fears.
At the Red Square parade, trucks transported intercontinental missiles, dark green cylinders with pointy red noses, which did not look like weapons. Rifles, cannons, and tanks presupposed a concrete enemy and their construction had a definite aim. Ballistic missiles were abstract in form and target; they negated the geography of war in its concreteness, in its small-scale thinking, and the figure of the enemy as such. They required an enemy as abstract as they were—alien, unknown, without characteristics—an enemy in which there is almost no trace of enemy.
War, the war has begun, I thought. I had dreamed so often of becoming a soldier, running away to fight, and I suddenly realized that my dreams were no longer valid.
We had been brought up with terms like bullet, fragment, and shell, on the idea that a soldier can play with fate, one will find a bullet and another won’t, and that maybe by behaving in a certain way, performing a heroic exploit, you can earn a reprieve from your bullet; the nuclear bomb did away with all of that.
There would never be soldiers like my grandfathers again and it was useless to think about being like them; the photographs on Grandmother Tanya’s wall were useless, so was her manuscript book, Grandmother Mara’s trophy dinner service, and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in the storeroom; one day they would all be gone in a nuclear blast.
THE ETERNAL BULLET
When Father came back from Chernobyl and crossed the threshold into our apartment, he kept me, Mother, and Grandmother away from him, would not let us touch him. He knew he was cle
an in terms of radiation, but his caution was strong; for a few days we lived as if he had the plague. Grandmother Tanya, who usually did not show maternal sentiment, became more attentive toward him, looking at him sadly, regretting something undone, something she had wanted to tell him but for which she could not find the words or did not know how to begin.
On the third day, Konstantin Alexandrovich came to visit, he was Mother’s cousin, a detective, a police major general, the highest-ranking man I saw during my childhood. Apparently he wanted to hear firsthand what was going on in Chernobyl; even he, one of the main officials in the capital’s criminal investigation department, was not getting the whole truth.
We rarely saw him, he would come for an hour or an hour and half, then a telephone call would make him rush off; a black Volga with a radio antenna awaited in the courtyard.
Gray-haired, tall, broad-shouldered, he looked as if built for the expanses of gigantic construction projects, for enormous work that would cease without his efforts, he seemed to regard himself sometimes with hidden surprise, a general, a detective of the finest caliber: How did I find the time to become a man like this?
He looked at the world from two points of view, that of citizens and that of criminals. He incarnated a certain type of the era, a person who fights universal evil, not just anti-Soviet evil, and thus becomes a major figure.
Father told him they’d laid sheets of lead on the floor of the helicopter for protection from the radiation as they surveyed the exploded reactor. Konstantin Alexandrovich said something like “Yes, it’s a well-known method.” Father was interested, because he thought they’d come up with the idea at Chernobyl.
“When we flew to Checheno-Ingushetia, we also laid sheets of metal on the floor, not lead, though, steel,” the general explained reluctantly. “They didn’t have armored helicopters back then, and when they use machine guns from below, from a crevasse …”
The Year of the Comet Page 12
