The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  There was the store night watchman, who picked raspberries during the day and sold them at the train station before his work began. In the hot stifling air of the prickly berry patches, where you can only hear and see the mosquitoes and horseflies thickening the heat, the watchman moved noiselessly, pulling and shaking the raspberries from their branches into the can tied to his waist. Dressed in dark heavy clothing, so as not to feel the bites and thorns, he would appear unexpectedly from the breaks in the berry patch in his white hat, and the hat that hid his eyes, unnaturally, a sterile white, contrasted sharply with his big, spade-shaped hands covered in ichor berry stains.

  The juice of the berries, which ripened in just two or three days in the humid heat, had eaten deep into his skin. Soiled hands dangling, the watchman stood resting in the empty intersection of forest passages by the red orienting pillar. The matte underside of leaves glowed on the smashed raspberry plants, and it seemed that just a minute earlier there had been a fight, an attempt to escape, breaking the bushes. The watchman stood, smoking and wiping his brow, but I could see that he wasn’t picking berries, that there was a body hidden under the branches farther back.

  One day I went really deep into the woods, where my parents and I went only rarely, when the mushrooms appeared in fall on stumps and fallen trees; firs grew there, tall, heavy, far apart. They shaded the ground, not letting underbrush grow, moss spread beneath them, and in the space between the ground and their lower dry branches an invisible daytime twilight collected, fed by the endless decay of fallen needles.

  The air was filled with the sour dampness of decay, with wood sorrel ranging among the fir roots. Yellow mushrooms, as wrinkled as brains, poked out of a rotten log; pale toadstools, a light greenish tinge around the cap, formed witches’ circles all around. I walked and I thought that my presence was awakening the witches’ circles, and they were expanding, like drops on water, and the old fir forest was expanding, opening a corridor for me, a path to the deepest part of the grove.

  I saw something through the trees: a tramp’s hovel of boards and bitumen set up in an old tank bunker. I sensed that someone or something was inside; not necessarily a human or an animal, but perhaps an ax, knife, nail, or hammer pretending to be stolen, when in fact it had been used to smash someone’s skull.

  But a thought came to me, like redemption, that the tramp’s hovel was made in a bunker where maybe a T-34 had stood, and that meant the place, even if defiled, could not be fully evil. Picturing the tank, camouflaged by branches after it had squashed the supple forest mud with its treads, I stepped inside.

  From inside, the hovel was like the belly of a gigantic animal; thin tree roots, like blood vessels or feelers, hung from the ceiling; the walls reeked of rot and the dampness of the earth’s womb. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw plank beds by the wall, human nests of filthy rags, and the floor, ankle-deep in food scraps, bottles, tin cans, cigarette butts, and rotten cabbage leaves—the people who lived here must have stolen them from the store near the station. A tall thick block of wood held dozens of candle stubs with dead, tormented looking wicks, and burned matchsticks were scattered everywhere.

  Was this where Mister was hiding? I suddenly got so scared that I ran home, imagining dying there, wounded, amid the putrefaction and mud; that disgusting death seemed so real that I dropped my intention of catching Mister. I thought that even Ivan, who had listened raptly to my stories of the headless mailman and the watchman with bloody hands and told me I was getting closer to my goal, that I had a good eye—he was now getting weary of the hunt, as if he thought he’d been mistaken in me, I was not the one to recognize Mister. It took a great effort to keep from going to Ivan and giving up the hunt; one more day, I told myself, just one more day, one more attempt, and then it’s over.

  And so the next day, I walked along the highway; it was that hot afternoon hour when yards and roads are empty, and sleep, as viscous as the drool from an idiot’s mouth, a sleep without dreams or feelings, submerges the area into a warm, starchy pudding. People, dogs, birds, cats—everyone hid, moved into the shade, and only flies wandered like somnambulists along the plains of lunch tables, clambering up the porcelain or cut-glass temple of the sugar bowl, the porous boulders of bread crumbs, and avoiding the lakes of tubs with soaking dishes to be washed later, when the heat let up.

  The smell of chewed chicken bones, soap, and burned butter fills kitchens and verandas, seeps into the rooms, and the flies, while people nap, slowly move their tiny feet over the bodies of the sleepers, approaching the eyelids, as if trying to peek behind their cover.

  No one drove along the highway. There was a pause; for kilometers in both directions, from the station and from the village, there were no cars on the road, no sand trucks from the military quarry, no sedans or buses. The few who had intended to go somewhere, maybe to meet the first commuter train after the break, delayed, or chose another road, or decided to kill some time, stopping to chat with someone near the store closed for break time, and have a smoke.

  That created a window of absence, ten or fifteen minutes lost from shared existence. The well-used highway was guaranteed to be unoccupied, as if it were the deepest corner of the forest.

  I froze: so this was the time when Mister was active, he knew, he could sense these intervals like a ballet dancer, he “landed” only in them. He was like a locater that calculated the holes outside the field of vision of people busy with their own affairs, inaccessible to their hearing, and he dove from hole to hole, appearing between people, in the quiet intervals from one passerby to another. Only a random boy could come across him, a pathetic little fool who’d wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time, which is why his victims were found in places that seemed impossible to leave without being noticed. But no one ever saw Mister.

  Then, as if through the veil of a landscape, the windshield of a parked car flashed from the bushes near the road.

  A child’s eye is always focused on hiding places. An adult sees an unremarkable landscape, while a child will find a loop in the path, where the bushes could hide a standing person, a dark space between two low pines where you could lie down; that ability is the basis of hide-and-seek, the competition of who’s best at vanishing. I understood that the car owner had not picked this place accidentally, this descent from the highway was a hideaway that pedestrians and drivers would miss. I should have walked past, looking the other way, pretending not to have noticed the car. But I turned, I turned off the road, telling myself it was only curiosity about the Lada, which I could touch, look to see what was inside, imagine myself in the driver’s seat.

  The banged-up gray Lada 9 with rusty fenders was dusty from the rural roads; a crumpled oilcloth jacket was tossed on the backseat. There was nothing else that gave a clue about the owner; but there was nothing scary, it was just a car.

  Crooked lines were etched in the mud of the doors—it often drove into the woods and had been scratched by branches; it had rained last night, but there were no drips in the dust—it had been in a garage overnight; almost bald tires, sagging suspension—it was used frequently; the license plates were illegible, covered in front and in back with clay and grass, as if the car had been stuck and had to go back and forth, to work its way out, hitting dirt with both bumpers. An ordinary rural car, there were dozens of them by the station, changing owners frequently, worked on in garages or the kolkhoz tractor station.

  But there was something else that I couldn’t catch, and I circled the car, peeking inside, under the car, sniffing. I realized what it was—the crushed grass where the car had driven was still trying to spring back into place, which meant it had driven here recently and the owner was nearby—hiding?

  He came out of the woods, slipping sideways through the thick growth of rowan bushes at the edge. He was around twenty-five or thirty, dark-haired, thin, small-boned, not a man, despite his age; his face was narrow and elongated, rather anemic, as if it did not know strong passions. He probably wanted
to look cool, fashionable, but he had a bad barber, the jeans, denim jacket, and sneakers were bought at the village outdoor market, where they sold fakes. These details—unfortunate haircut, clumsy clothing, an early stoop, a slight drag of one leg—formed a recognizable type. If I had met him at the station, I wouldn’t have given him a second look: this driver was simply, tastelessly unattractive, and I would have lost interest in him before remembering his features.

  Walking to the car, he smiled uncertainly and waved at me, I pretended to be embarrassed but continued observing him attentively through half-closed eyes. As I looked closer, he reminded me of someone.

  His softness and not complete adultness made me think he was a coach or gym teacher, people who are always around children. They like to touch, caress, hug, tickle with a blade of grass, they like to fake wrestle, they like sports, camping trips, making up competitions and games to keep up the constant running and scrambling of bare arms and legs. They are not attracted to children but to the strength that accompanies growth, which makes scratches heal by morning and quickly forgives yesterday’s hurt.

  The guy who came out of the rowan grove could never be Mister. I knew a spy could wear any guise, and I would have believed any but this one. I had a counselor like this in Pioneer camp, who adored boys’ elbows and knees, skinny, sharp, and always scraped. He softened and applied plantain leaves to scratches, smeared them with green iodine, and before taking you to the doctor he examined swollen lymph nodes or glands himself—he was tempted by these illnesses of growth, their ugly manifestations, as if he sought the ugly duckling in each child, who was rejected, needing protection and patronage. The counselor had the same pathetic haircut, avoided the loud fat cook and her jokes about him, and often walked alone in the woods.

  Mister a mailman, Mister a shepherd, Mister a forest ranger, Mister a rail watcher, Mister an electrician, Mister a tractor driver, Mister a hunter, Mister a mower, a hundred variants, a hundred faces, only not this harmless fellow who probably worked at the village school or the big Pioneer camp on the other side of the woods.

  But why was I so anxious?

  “What’s the matter, boy?” he asked, coming right up to me. “Are you all right?”

  He probably did think that I had sunstroke or was sick from the heat.

  I looked around in confusion; it was about a kilometer to the edge of the dacha settlement, no one would hear me scream even though it was quiet. We were surrounded by piles of garbage overgrown with nettles, this unattractive turnoff from the highway had become a garbage dump, and mushroom hunters and people out for a walk avoided this place; the only ones who came here were tramps and feral dogs, I saw a mutt with a low hanging belly gnawing at a plastic bag of scraps.

  “You must be really scared and think I’m Mister.” The guy smiled, gave a short, good, kindly laugh, his eyes narrowed slightly, his cheeks lifted and filled with merriment, and light wrinkles ran to the corners of his eyes. “I’m not Mister, I breed horses, you know the farm across the lake? One of our horses, Diana, is sick. She loves berries, she can eat a bucket of raspberries.” He pushed his lips forward and stuck out his tongue, showing how a horse eats berries. “I don’t know the berry places around here. Maybe you do? I’ve been wandering around for an hour, the nettles are killing me. Do you know a berry place? Just point the way, if you’re afraid. If you’re not afraid, help me out, and then I’ll show you the horses on the farm, take you for a ride.”

  He’s not Mister, not Mister, not an evil otherworldly saboteur. But why was he lying about looking for a berry patch for the last hour, when just a few minutes ago I’d seen the recently bent grass straightening under the car?

  He shook cobwebs from his plaid shirt, pulled out a pack of Opals, and offered me a cigarette.

  “Smoke? I started at your age, too. Go on, don’t be shy, I know you don’t have your own yet.” He held out the cigarette. “You all smoke, I know.”

  He was taking me for someone else. I had never smoked and didn’t want to, and who was “you all?”

  I stepped back, my back up against the car.

  “You were trying to get into the car, yeah? Wanted to steal something?” He spoke sympathetically, persuasively, not threateningly, not raising his voice, as if he would be happy to be proven wrong.

  “Thank God it’s not Mister, not a killer, just a weirdo,” I thought, looking at his hand, pale, with small red ridges—from tight rubber gloves? Small black hairs, like animal fur, grew on the back of his hand and fingers, but his face was clear, he barely needed to shave.

  “Wanted to go for a ride, yeah?” He leaned his arm on the car roof, as if he wanted to embrace me. “Wanted to go for a ride, but you can’t drive. Want me to teach you?”

  Learn to drive, even just sit in the driver’s seat, that was my dream. Besides the drive with Ivan, which didn’t even seem real to me, I’d only ridden from the dacha four times with neighbors who agreed to drop off our heavy baskets of apples in their old Zhiguli, and twice with my parents in a taxi coming home late from a party.

  The smell of the car, the blinking arrows, wheel, pedals, gear shift, mysteriously connected, that brief moment of delightful supremacy over pedestrians!

  Once again, as I had felt at the wharf in Uglich, I realized that neither at school nor at home was there attention paid to my insignificant wishes; we all lived that way—some look to borrow a smoke, others dream secretly of a rare stamp or toy car, still others wander around in search of drink. And it’s not the cigarette, car, or bottle of beer that matters, but a small friendly sign from fate, the satisfaction of your expectation of kindness.

  A random stranger says, “Would you like me to …” without even knowing how much you want it, to be shown how to drive, to be talked to as an equal for a few minutes, and then you can live, trusting the near future. He was a messenger with good news, this stranger from another life, where there are no limitations of childhood, sent to build confidence in growing children.

  I was about to admit that I dreamed of driving, but the man interpreted my prolonged silence in his own way.

  “Fine, if you don’t want to,” he said regretfully. Then he brought his face close to mine and looked into my eyes. “I left a tape recorder in the car, an expensive one, what have you done with it? I wanted to be nice about it, give you chance to confess. But you’re being stubborn. That’s not good. We’ll have to go to the police.” He took my arm. “They’ll figure it out. Get in the car.” He opened the back door. “Get in right now!”

  I resisted, not letting him push me into the car, while my thoughts raced: Maybe it would be better to go to the precinct? They knew me, the local cop often came by when Konstantin Alexandrovich was visiting, it would be safe there.

  “He must have a car,” I remembered the general’s words. “And a place where he does it all. A garage or cellar. Probably a cellar.”

  He pushed me into the car, my face ground into his crumpled jacket on the seat, and I saw the badge pinned on the lapel: “Public Environmental Inspector,” dark green, shaped like a shield, with a golden hammer and sickle on the bottom.

  “An armband of the national volunteer force, a badge of the Green Patrol, something like that. A socially involved person.” Once again I heard the general’s voice.

  I finally understood. The evil was real, my fantasies about a saboteur were not.

  The guy was leaning on me, pushing me against the seat, and I was kept from struggling and screaming by a profound regret: how could I have deceived myself, how could I have believed Ivan, who probably listened to my stories about searching for Mister with the relish of a person who had played an incredible, dangerous hoax!

  It suddenly started to rain—a brief summer shower that forms in a few seconds, falling out of nothing, from weak clouds, as if an invisible cup had overflowed in the sky. Its gigantic drops spread in flight into a rainbow of vertical strokes, unfolding a radiant curtain, so thick that at twenty paces you can make out only silhouettes, and
then the rain increases for two or three minutes, making noise, hiding all other sounds, and even the silhouettes will vanish beyond the veil of water. It weakens quickly, falls into silvery threads, and then vanishes completely, leaving the steaming ground—but the silhouettes will vanish with the rain, as if they had been created by the rain, as if no one had stood on the forest path.

  “We won’t go to the police,” the “horse breeder” said. “I’ll punish you here myself, your little thief. Get out. You deserve to be whipped with a belt, don’t you?”

  I got out without a word.

  There was nothing but the flying drops, the rain that swallowed up space. I realized that behind that rain, inside that rain, he would kill me; sensitive to nature, he had been waiting for something like this—and he found the minutes of cover.

  The world fell apart, I felt its tiniest particles, the raindrops, but I did not feel the whole; the rain glowed, the rain blazed, deepening the victim’s dreadfully triumphant joy, which would in seconds be replaced by horror, but for a second filled me entirely as if it were the most important thing in my life—I was brought to the altar of just retribution.

  “Turn around,” came his voice from behind me, not angry but agitated, hoarse with his breathing that sounded like a dog’s. “I’ll tie you up. Behave. I have to get something from the trunk.”

  He opened the trunk and reached below, to the well where the spare tire is kept. I might have tried to run, but I couldn’t even move a finger. I sensed that the pause in time the killer was using was coming to an end; far away a car appeared on a rise and in ten minutes it would drive past on the highway, its wipers removing the decreasing raindrops. The commuter train from Moscow was three stops away from ours, crammed with passengers, the store would be opening soon after the lunch break, everything would come back to life, move, fill with people. Perhaps the killer had never taken such a risk, but the quieting rain brought us together intimately, like lovers under a raincoat.