The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  Above us rose the locks, looking like churches, with colonnades and porticos, yellow and white, illuminated in the night. Between them, down in the channel, were the heavy black gates, slippery with water and seaweed. Other gates shut behind the stern, and the boat slowly sank into the lock pit. A rotten river stench emanated from the walls covered with grasses and shells; the grasses moved like worms, black moisture streaming down; I thought we were being lowered into a bottomless well.

  The big river’s water, agitated by the pumps, revealed its secrets; its smell—the smell of silt, crayfish, and leeches, the spirit of pike and burbot—precipitated like water on the skin. I thought that if we rose up again—there beyond the black gates—we would surface in a world like that of the fairy tale river king, where the lower edge of a fishnet sometimes floats in the foggy sky.

  The boat stopped descending; the gates began to open silently. The boat started forward, and we sailed past the water-corroded walls; their fishy smell, the weeds, cartilaginous lumps and declivities—they were like walls of an enormous stomach.

  In the morning I resisted leaving our cabin for breakfast, for I did not want to discover that my foreboding had come to pass—that we had sailed into an underwater kingdom; but Mother did manage to talk me into going upstairs for lunch.

  The places along the walls were taken, but in the middle of the restaurant, beneath a glass cupola that collected the sun’s rays like a lens, stood several tables placed together and formally set; the head of a sturgeon looked at me from a silver tray with its boiled eye. The head, as big as a teapot, with splayed gills revealing its jellied innards; a jaw half-open as if it would speak; the eye, dead but still seeing, the size of a coat button, perfectly round, with a black pupil in the center.

  The sturgeon’s body—from the first fins to the tail—was cut into even slices and laid out around the head. The funereal tray gleamed; the head, blanched in boiling water, was dull silver; its shape, like a pointy helmet, made it look like the head of a slain fish knight—or a knight who was transformed into a fish, slain and chopped into thirty-three pieces. The sturgeon looked out with an empty and terrible gaze—not food, not a dish, not a treat but a natural corpse, served up to the table of those who vanquished and killed it.

  Now, I assume that it was the birthday of an important boss on the fleet; the ordinary passengers did not approach the center table, edging away from the party for high-ranking bosses, and that is why the sturgeon head stuck out in the white starched emptiness.

  Then I saw what I had guessed correctly—here he was, the dead king of fish, and we were in his otherworldly realm. I twisted out of Mother’s grasp and ran up onto the deck to see what I had been hiding from and to throw myself into the water, since we were already in it, anyway.

  The Volga attacked me; I saw a mighty flow of water that could no longer be called a river. The centripetal force of the gigantic plain had collected innumerable streams, brooks, and rivers, with names in dozens of languages, mossy, woodsy languages in which forest spirits laugh and sprites giggle; the Volga was a continent of moving water, raised above the low lost land, above the distant lines of shores.

  My entire life seemed a glacial, frozen existence. In delight, I sensed that it was not only the Volga moving, but my fate, too; the source and force of that movement were in me.

  I ran to the stern, when the roiling water splashed out from the propellers, and threw the word “Fate!” into the watery furrow like a seed, I threw it endlessly, and I thought that the waves grew more powerful and violent upon hearing it. Fate! Fate! Fate! I shouted until I was hoarse and no longer knew why I was shouting, why I was facing down the water spraying from the propellers.

  Catching my breath and stepping away from the rail, I sensed that something had changed. Wherever I had gone, wherever I was, I always knew where my parents and grandmothers were, no matter how near or far; they were orientation points, a lighthouse.

  The lighthouse went dark, and that feeling was gone.

  I was alone.

  THE SIGN OF THE DEAD TSAREVICH

  Mother caught a chill looking all over the boat for me, and she did not go ashore at Uglich, the last stop, but sent me along with a friend of hers.

  The friend was one of those women who bring discomfort wherever they go—as if they worked as funeral mourners and everyone knew. Bustling, sharp-angled, she led me by the hand, but since she was childless she didn’t lead me in a maternal way but as if she were planning to turn me over to an orphanage. Her gait and behavior, the wharf and gangplanks, and the expanse of the Volga behind me brought to mind Grandmother Mara’s long-ago talks about being evacuated near Engels on the Volga, images taken from someone else’s memory—satchels, sacks, a desert of water, wailing infants, inhospitable houses.

  I didn’t want to go anywhere, pleaded to be left on the boat, but my escort was implacable in executing my mother’s request.

  There were not many men on the boat, and they headed off to find a liquor store; the excursion consisted entirely of women. The noisy crowding on the wharf, the hurried descent on the gangplank, and the wind that prompted them to put on scarves, somehow turned them into peasant women, homeless, evacuated; there was a readiness for transfers, negotiations and struggles for seats, rather than a quiet trip; the women were nervous and agreed to split up—one would go for groceries, the other would fill her in on the sights.

  The tour guide was a young woman of thirty or so, redhaired, narrow-hipped, ungainly; it seemed that she had lost the equilibrium of her life and stressed the instability, the readiness to fall, by wearing high-heeled shoes.

  She wore a necklace of large amber beads, big earrings of landscape agate framed in silver, heavy rings on her narrow fingers, handmade by a jeweler but still ready to slide off. I don’t think she wore them for beauty and charm, the ornaments were for someone who could no longer see them, a dead husband or fiancé, perhaps a young officer who died in Afghanistan—hence the slight air of mourning about her, the shadow of an imaginary veil over her face.

  Every day she met cruise tourists, led them down the same routes, and she would have been better off in jeans and sneakers rather than shoes and a dress beneath a raincoat that was long and a bit old-fashioned, setting her apart from the provincial crowd. A personal tragedy had hardened her heart, left her here, tied her to this city. The expectation of revenge, something that did not happen, kept her here. The force of the hidden emotion made her the medium of the place, the voice of its silent land.

  The city, museum-like and overvisited, abundantly gifted with churches and monasteries, waited with bated breath. There were too many churches and monasteries, they had been placed intentionally: they held down, contained, and soothed the unstable land.

  The convulsions of the Time of Troubles, which had come from here, from Uglich, from the moist soil washed by the Volga, had been too terrible and powerful. Generation after generation built up this place in a special way. That’s why the city felt heavy, overloaded, not a city at all but an outpost with a border within its very self, a city padlock enclosing the abyss that had once opened here; a city of silence, of muteness, for a word spoken here could reawaken the Time of Troubles.

  My presence here was a hindrance, an insignificant one. I had the same feeling at the Eternal Flame at the Kremlin: separated by an invisible line, the soldiers stood on guard, and the people on this side of the line, dressed up, falling silent before the memorial, were trifling compared to the perfection and severity of the guards’ silent vigilance, by the flame that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, from magma. The soldiers guarded not the memory of war so much as this dangerously open place; and so Uglich stood still on watch, forced to allow everyday life into the city, the chatter of lines for food and excursions from tourist boats.

  The guide told us about the life of Tsarevich Dmitri, and the cold spring wind from the Volga, blowing dusty swirls on the streets, fluttered red hair around her face. The strands of hair rose
up like snakes, surrounded her face like a glowing halo.

  She did not talk, she almost sang the words; the dead Tsarevich Dmitri, the dead husband, perhaps the unborn child—the female and maternal in her merged into a single passion, a single desire.

  Before her eyes stood the boy tsarevich, the imagined fruit of her womb and the adolescent tsar, already estranged, born again in the womb of the land in order to rule. She spoke of the exile of the Nagikh family to Uglich, and each word had a sensual form like that of an auricle, of lips; the fire of obsession was in every word. Thank God no one was listening, they were busy with their own thoughts about the stores and what they saw in the windows—I thought.

  The guide brought us to the place where Tsarevich Dmitri died, in the red and white church with lapis lazuli domes—clots of heavenly blue ornamented with stars; the Church of St. Dmitri on the Blood above the Volga, on a promontory cliff. I’ve been there since and saw that the promontory is small, just a slight headland of the shore on a low cliff. But as a child I felt the nakedness of the promontory, sharpened like a compass needle; invisible arrows of events still looked down from the air onto the spot where Dmitri, who wounded himself, had fallen.

  The church was rather childlike, not grown-up; the domes seemed like toys—blue glowing bulbs dusted with gold stars, toys for a dead tsarevich; if you touched them they would tinkle, like fresh new ice; church as cradle, church as crib.

  The guide recounted the story of how he died, playing with friends and falling onto a knife. Now her words were crowded, jumbled, radiating a female heat ready to escalate into hysterics.

  The words pushed and shoved like fleshy large-bodied peasant women, hot from the kitchen and laundry, sweating, smelling of fried potatoes, onion skin and fish scales, ashes and dirty sour water. The guide did not lose herself in the speech, remaining lofty in gestures and pose, but the words were older and stronger than her. In her spoken intonations the drama played out: the people running from their houses, the alarm bells, the tsarevich’s body crumpled in an epileptic fit, the bloodied throat—and the primordial power of the female element, which comes not from heart or head but belly, womb; the element that combines lust and birth pangs, in which a panting woman is half mad with passion or hatred, in hot armpits, below the belly, in the very roots of her hair.

  The women, it was the women who tore apart the tsarevich’s friends accused of murder; they did not allow the tsarevich to really die, to the end, they did not allow death to occur—with the power of the passion they resurrected the nine-year-old boy and turned him into an adolescent, handsome and innocent. From mud and blood, bits of human flesh and scraps of skin, squeezed-out eyes, torn entrails, mucus, urine, and feces, the true heir to the throne was born.

  I listened and watched the women give in to the guide’s words; they adjusted their scarves, drew their children closer, started rummaging in their purses without knowing what exactly they were looking for, leaning forward, greedily looking at the church and the ground around them. A distant, weak echo of what had happened here enflamed them. It was a cloudy gray day—as it had been hundreds of years ago in May; a tugboat dragged a barge of timber along the Volga past the church, a radio played in the distance, but the guide’s voice was floating, we were all floating somewhere, as if the Volga were moving the shore with the church.

  Now the women stood in a circle, listening closely, crowding one another, pulling back hands and elbows as if an electric current flowed between bodies. A slow clockwise movement began as they moved, the better to hear or see the guide, who could not stay in place and walked inside the circle; the crowd tightened ranks, and when the guide recounted how the tsarevich’s coffin was opened, the circle froze, a charged emptiness in its center.

  Despite the coolness of the day, it was hot, it smelled as though something were being heated up, the smell of the crumbs that collect in the bottom of pockets, of poorly washed stains, of the dirt under fingernails, and the metallic bitterness of buttons. There, in the center of the circle, in the emptiness, someone had to appear, different, pure, untouched by our foul lives.

  A cry rang out, a boy in the front row must have sensed a threat in the movement of the adults and tried to hide, but his mother held his hand so tightly that he bit her palm.

  We shuddered and moved apart—there was no longer a compact crowd, just a group of adults shivering in the breeze and a boy being scolded by his mother, as she wrapped her bitten hand with a used hankie.

  No one was looking at the guide, as she lightly adjusted her heavy bracelets, silver fetters, amber and malachite bridles; her hair was snaking in the wind again, and the passion cooled in her eyes.

  The return trip on the boat was like a half-dream; I remember only the excursion in the shoe factory in Kimry. They were fulfilling an order for the military, and I saw thousands of wool boots; they were piled up, but in one place one of the workers jokingly set up a line of pairs of boots, as if they belonged to a unit of soldiers. There was something upsetting in the emptiness of the boots, as if somewhere there were people for whom the boots were intended but who were still living their individual lives, not knowing that their lives were predetermined.

  The banks, not yet covered in green, were empty; the emptiness of water surrounded the boat. Mother was still sick, and I spent all day on deck.

  I sensed significant images and faces leaving their usual places inside me, my inner arrangement changing, like a map of the heavens in the hands of an astronomer ready to add a newly discovered constellation.

  I ended the school year poorly, my final May grades spoiling the quarter and the annual assessment; I could not do exercises or solve problems, and my parents decided to send me to the dacha as soon as possible, thinking I was exhausted by the end of the school year and that summer life would heal me faster than lectures and admonitions, than concern and care.

  I was clearing space for future emotions, feelings, and events; they were prearranged, and I was the only draftee who knew that the factory was already making his boots.

  PART THREE

  THE SUMMER OF MISTER

  The summer began with a household catastrophe—the old stove, built by Grandfather Trofim, collapsed; he had not been a professional bricklayer, but he learned to build, to create out of nothing, and his stove had served for three decades, until it buckled under its own weight.

  It was cold and damp in the house, Grandmother Mara tried lighting the stove a few times, but the rooms immediately filled with smoke coming through the cracks in the plaster; the village stove builder refused to repair it, he said it had to be taken down and a new one built.

  Grandmother Mara was not prepared to do that; I think she secretly felt that the collapse of the stove was retribution for infidelity to his memory, since she was marrying the retired captain; the old submariner was told not to come to the dacha for now, and he obeyed without complaint; Grandmother ordered Father to find a temporary stove.

  Rather shady characters, of an inscrutable age and who knew their way around money, gathered at the village marketplace, ready to procure what was not available and would simply not be found in the stores. Father bought a burzhuika cast-iron stove from them, paying an arm and a leg and overcoming his disdain for swindlers and cheats. He brought the stove home in a wheelbarrow, seeking approval for obtaining the hard-to-find item and his willingness to overlook his principles for the good of the family.

  But Grandmother Mara burst into tears: she wanted the stove carted off, Father to go away, everybody to leave her alone.

  Outrage, confusion, Father’s explanations—we understood that Grandmother Mara had spent her whole life trying to escape from the freestanding stoves that gobbled firewood and fit into the smallest barracks room—and now, completing an enormous historical circle, the burzhuika was back.

  Grandmother Mara was so enervated by the sight of the stove wrapped in wax paper that without raising her voice, in a monotone, she started telling me what she discovered when she r
eturned from wartime evacuation in the winter of 1943: her former room in Moscow was occupied by new people registered to live there; of the things she had left with relatives to hold, only the Great Soviet Encyclopedia survived. They had traded the rest for food for the winters of 1941 and 1942, but kept the encyclopedia, maybe because it garnered a paltry exchange rate.

  That cold winter in a tiny cell right by the barracks door, which opened and closed five hundred times a day, letting out the warmth and letting in the crisp frosty air, in that tiny room where she lived without official permission, Grandmother Mara waited for nighttime, so that no one would see, to feed the cracked and corroded stove with volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, two volumes a night.

  Things improved quickly, a package came from Grandfather Trofim, and she began receiving food parcels at work. But even decades later, she could not forgive her apostasy. She chose the volumes that did not have Lenin, Stalin, the Communist Party, the USSR, the RSFSR, Communism, or Bolsheviks—but even so, she said, she probably burned a volume that should not have been destroyed, on which everything depended. All our misfortunes come from that, Grandmother repeated, all our troubles! And there is worse to come!

  Grandmother Mara told us how she and Grandfather Trofim traded alcohol for the GSE with some small town council, where the books had been sent for the local library, and where the set stood unopened. She and Grandfather didn’t need an encyclopedia but they were thinking about their future children, they wanted the GSE for them. And now the stove appeared before Grandmother as a testament to her ancient crime, an accusation of an unforgivable sin.

  So that’s why there were missing volumes, I realized. My parents tried to console Grandmother Mara, saying, There are no troubles, no misfortunes, everything is fine—but I could tell they didn’t believe their own words and sensed changes on the horizon that were unlikely to be for the better.