The Year of the Comet

by Antonina W. Bouis

  He came up from behind, put his hand on my shoulder and tickled my ribs with a knife; he turned me to face him, and put the tip of the thin, nickel-plated scalpel on my nose; my eyes focused on the shiny blade, it was blinding me.

  “Fucking lousy weather!” Behind the “horse breeder,” so very close, unheard because of the rain, several men were cursing without anger, clambering over the garbage.

  Mister cursed, too, as if he had never done so in public, pretending to be the well brought up examplar, and maybe he couldn’t even curse alone, because it came out feeble and pathetic.

  He weakened instantly, becoming a child, the loud, brazen voices reminded him of something, and he lowered his hands. Four tramps came out of the garbage mound, young, hard-drinking, I think they were deserters from the army. He sobbed and exclaimed strangely, as if his liver or kidneys were moaning with pain.

  The spell was broken, I shouldered him aside and ran through the nettles to the tramps, slipped, slashed my hand on a tin can, but jumped up and ran. The car door slammed, the engine started, and the car drove off through the brush …

  I woke up on the plank beds of the hideout I had entered, thinking this was where Mister lived.

  “Who are you, young fellow?” one of them asked. “Where do you live? What was that all about?”

  “That was Mister,” I replied, barely able to get the words out.

  “We just went out to find some tarp, we were getting soaked in here,” someone else muttered in the dark.

  “You have to call the cops, boy,” the first said. “Let’s go, we’ll walk with you. But not a word about us, all right? Tell them you escaped on your own.”

  They walked me to the fence of the dacha area, wrapped my hand in a dirty rag; the rain was long gone, the sun was shining, and the water from the bushes had washed their hands and faces; the deserters were even younger than they had seemed in the dugout, around eighteen, their first year in the army.

  “Listen, bring us something to eat, huh?” the smallest one asked. “There’s nothing in the gardens yet. Please?”

  I crept into the cellar behind the house, pulled out a half-full sack of potatoes, and dragged it back to the forest. The four of them grabbed the sack, said, “Be sure to call,” and ran off, sensing that the police would be combing through the woods soon.

  Grandmother Mara was still napping in her room.

  I went up to the attic, sat at the window, and gathered my wits to wake her up and confess everything.

  Ivan. I thought about him. My thoughts were short and clear.

  Only the deserters and I knew who the killer was. But the forest tramps would not go to the police. They would hide as far away as possible or maybe leave the area.

  The “horse breeder” would also lie low, he had to understand that every policeman would know his description within an hour. He would run away, hide, stop killing. He would never imagine that I wouldn’t tell. The elusive Mister would continue to exist for everyone.

  If Mister killed Ivan, caught him on a forest path, no one would be surprised.

  I finished this thought and sensed a black liquid, a poison, slurping in my chest. Black, sticky, smelly, it came from my old offense against Grandmother Tanya, it had been inside me a long time. It all came spewing out, until the last spasm made me pass out.

  DELIRIUM AND AFTER

  I dreamed that Grandmother came and pulled me by the tongue, which unrolled endlessly like a telegraph’s perforated tape. She held me by the tip of my tongue, while I ran off, jumping over fences and railroad tracks, swimming across lakes, leaping over cities, trying to cut it off by putting it in the path of a slamming door or a hurtling express train, but the tongue wouldn’t tear, and Grandmother tugged, and I was thrown in the opposite direction through high grasses and forest branches, until I was back in the room and it all started again.

  “Did you see the deserters?” Grandmother Mara asked.

  “Yes,” I replied and only then realized that this was no dream but a sunny morning with Grandmother at the head of my bed.

  “I knew it,” she said, shaking her head. “They stole our potatoes. And scared you to death, you were unconscious all day. Well, stay in bed, here’s some hot milk for you. We won’t tell your parents, or they’ll fuss at us.”

  From the doorway, she said, “Your Ivan came by. If he comes again, shall I let him in?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  I hadn’t readjusted to the world yet, the only thing I felt was my lightness, as if I had no body. The drapes, floor, ceiling, furniture, everything was scuffed, scraped, and dusty, but it all seemed new and amazingly clean. Had yesterday happened?

  Hurried steps sounded outside the door. It was my pals, who burst in together, chattering and paying no attention to Grandmother Mara.

  “They caught Mister!”

  “The highway cop waved his baton at him, but he didn’t stop!”

  “The cops chased him, stopped him, asked him why he kept going.”

  “He said, I didn’t notice you wanted me to stop!”

  “They started writing a ticket—”

  “And the MCID cop with them said—”

  “Search the car—”

  “They found a scalpel under the seat—”

  “And all kinds of things in his garage—”

  “Mister was arrested!”

  They couldn’t understand why I only lay back weakly in the pillows. The approaching hum of a car came through the window, and I raised myself up on my elbow—Ivan’s Volga was driving toward Moscow, he was at the wheel; as he passed our house, he didn’t even turn his head, and a sixth sense told me that he was leaving forever.

  I had but a remnant of summer left, even though there were still six weeks before school. Ivan had vanished, Mister’s dangerous shadow was gone from the area, nothing flickered threateningly at the dark end of forest paths. I wandered aimlessly, retreading the routes I had taken in my search for Mister, but I felt nothing, just clocked up the kilometers, breathing dust and heat, watching indifferently as wheat, apples, and corn burgeoned.

  Only one place suited my mood. Far from the dachas lay large swampy ponds surrounded by reeds. Huge catfish lived there, and to catch them, people used special hooks made by blacksmiths and smelly dead crows as bait. They shot the crows right there, on the edge of the field where a garbage heap had formed, as it often does, from a large hole where someone had dumped a truckload of construction rubbish. Over a few years the trash spread outward from the pit filled with eviscerated sofas and broken barrels.

  I wanted to be at those ponds, walking along their swampy shores, risking falling into duckweed-covered ooze, trying to feel the edge, the edge of something in my life and destiny. The water hid big fish, blunt-headed killers I had seen swallow up ducks from the surface of the water.

  July passed and two-thirds of August, the falling stars had finished their cascades, and the long rains and packing for the return to the city began; Grandmother Mara was picking which gladioli still in bud would go in my back-to-school bouquet for the teacher.

  It was a particularly glum day, the rain pouring drearily, the puddles bubbling, and beyond the fog the express trains to Brest blared their horns. I went out on the porch and the first gust of wind from the north, scattering the clouds and clearing the sky, cooled my face. It was an autumn wind, the air was clearing, the fog heading into the distant woods, the puddles covered with tiny wavelets. I could see the heights of the heavens, marked by cirrus clouds frozen on the border of the stratosphere, and something cleared up inside me, too, and as if I had just noticed that my key was gone and there was a hole in my pocket, I recalled that the light had not been on in the second-floor window of the house opposite.

  Before Ivan there was one person I had wanted to call my friend. He was a slightly younger boy who lived across the street. I could have, but did not call him a friend; we both sensed that we should not be friends; individually, each of us was accepted in the dacha groups
, but if we had shown a mutual connection, we would have been ostracized.

  Other children grew energetically and boldly, with no fear of the future, like greedy and agile shoots of a strong plant. We existed with uncertainty, feeling our way as if in constant pain and unable to heal, unable to feel the mind-numbing and unsubtle energy of a perfectly healthy person.

  We knew, even though we never discussed it, that were we to go off and do what we wanted, drop soccer and tag and instead read books and share impressions, look for belemnite fossils among the railroad gravel, wander in silence around the dacha streets without looking for a branch of ripe plums hanging over a fence, or plant an oak or rowan tree in the far corner of the garden in honor of friendship and watch it grow—if we were to reveal our real wishes, we would be punished, our lives would be turned into a living hell over that silly tree, even if the horde of rude pals knew nothing about it, only sensed that we were sharing a secret, delicate and lofty.

  So we spent many summer seasons side by side without becoming closer, and it was only in the twilight, when the streets were empty, I could see the light come on in my friend’s window—home after playing outside and a late dinner, he went up to his room. I watched sometimes, waiting to see if his curtains would move—that would mean that he was looking at my house, my window, illuminated by the night light, and pining over the impossibility of friendship.

  They had a gazebo, covered in vines and tiny flowers, the only one in a neighborhood where people borrowed the village habit of setting tables out in the garden or on the open veranda, of which there were not many, either. They drank tea from thin porcelain cups in the gazebo, and after lunch, his grandfather sat there with a book; he was a doctor who always came when children were sick, gently refusing payment as soon as he came in, and gave the disease its Latin name, as if that would scare off the illness; Grandmother Mara disliked him because he used Latin, torn between the need to cure me and her hatred of foreign speech in her house, which underlined her illiteracy.

  How promising the gazebo would have been had we become friends! How delightful to have to sit there, hidden by the vines!

  I was inside the gazebo three or four times when his grandfather invited us to play there; we were embarrassed and hastily refused. He listened to my excuses suspiciously while I tried to retain a snapshot of the old lettuce-green paint, bristling with splinters, the smell of the vines, so that I could re-create it later in my mind: the gazebo in the middle of the garden, no kids, no adults—just the two of us and our conversations that never happened.

  Once I grew close to Ivan and began my search for Mister, I practically forgot my pal from the house opposite; sometimes I promised myself to think about him tomorrow or the next day, to miss him the way I used to—but Ivan reigned inside me.

  We met a few times playing games, and he looked at me meekly, as if to ask, Could I be third, could you introduce me to Ivan? But I was submerged in the dark spaces Mister inhabited and regarded my abandoned friend with the harsh determination to bid farewell to the past. And then he stopped falling into my field of vision, as if our time had ended.

  There was no light in the window! With belated regret I rushed to their gate. I remembered the interior, the German sewing machine turned into a workbench, the small photographs, like openings in a birdhouse, in wide wooden frames on the walls, with microscopic people reduced by time; how could I not have noticed them, how could I not have understood that he was my brother, my fellow traveler, my twin!

  His grandfather opened the gate and politely told me that his grandson had left for the city two days ago. The old man said his good-byes for a very long time, telling me how much he liked me, thanked me for my friendship with his grandson—and all the time I was dying of shame, because I thought he had guessed my treachery and was trying to console me. The old doctor would not let me go, he would stop for a second, watch the north wind tear wet leaves from the apple trees, and then repeat his words of farewell, as if he were parting with his past and his life and not with me.

  In the morning their house was empty and boarded up. We all did that, leaving the dacha for the autumn and winter, but that day the boards crisscrossing the windows seemed to be shutting me out of the big room of summer, where I had left Ivan, Mister, Konstantin Alexandrovich, the mailman, the watchman picking raspberries, the mushroom collector, the passerby with the mirror … The north wind brought the cold, and Grandmother Mara, no longer blaming the burzhuika stove for its huge appetite, fed it happily and started packing bags and baskets with jams and pickles, while I thought that inside the packages was my memory, divided up into pieces and taken away.

  I did not want to lose this, I wanted to stay in that terrible summer that meant as much as all my previous life; in my boots and raincoat and with a bag of food I headed for the dugout, where I hoped the deserters who had saved me would return; the patrols on the roads were long gone and the wanted posters for Mister had been turned to papier-mâché by the rains. How are they going to winter over here, I wondered. I’ll spend the winter with them, I’ll bring them grain in glass jars to protect it from mice, I’ll steal my father’s jacket …

  The weight of the water had torn through their roof of slab and polyethylene, and the dugout was filled with a puddle in which a soaked mass of stolen clothing floated.

  The summer was over, having stolen years of my life ahead, making them empty and almost unnecessary.

  PART FOUR

  SPRING NEIGHBORS

  Autumn and winter slipped by as if they never happened. I was awakened only by anniversaries of last year’s events: a year ago I had been at the Kremlin, a year ago the comet passed, a year ago Father went to Chernobyl, a year ago Grandmother Tanya showed me the “eternal bullet,” and then we had an argument. I lived with this refrain, existed on last year’s calendar, as if I still had to sail to Uglich, meet Ivan, fall into the hands of Mister.

  It was only in the spring, when we arrived at the dacha and I saw the neighbors’ boarded-up house, that I began to wait for my friend to arrive with his grandfather and parents; I wanted to replay last year and set it on another path. They should have come out on a weekend, aired out the house, put the bedding, blankets, and pillows in the sun, chased away the stale mouse smell. But they didn’t come, the garden was not dug, the fir branches that covered the flower beds were still there.

  Summer came, the grass grew and swallowed the paths, the occasional perennials drowning in the greedy weeds; we weeded regularly, but the weeds seemed to have run away from us to hide behind the neighbors’ fence. I secretly crept into the yard once, moving aside one of the pickets, a trick I learned from a friend. The floor of the gazebo was covered in autumn leaves and a couple of birch twigs brought in by the wind. A floorboard had rotted over the winter, tilting the table; a glass fruit cup forgotten on the table was covered with fine rings of dirt from the numerous times water collected and then evaporated in it.

  None of the adults talked about where our neighbors were, where the whole family was. I finally asked and I was told, “They moved to Israel,” in a tone suggesting they’d left on a risky adventure, and while they didn’t condemn it, they didn’t approve of it, either.

  I thought I was partly to blame for their move; I couldn’t believe it could be a good thing if they had left their house and gazebo, which would be quickly ruined by the weather—for things left unattended and uncared for develop special signs that are clear to rain and snow—pour here, fall here, drift here.

  Like the adults, I suspected that the neighbors had left on the eve of something; coming events were in the shadows, creeping up quietly, but invading the horizon. The departure, like a wartime siren, shook off their invisibility.

  Then I noticed there was someone there; I was sure the family had returned, that they’d never gone to Israel or had returned for the sake of the old house and the old gazebo. I decided to drop in right away and tell my friend I’d missed him.

  But there was a pile of unfam
iliar things on the porch, a teenager five or six years older than me was walking on the overgrown paths, a nail puller whined at the back of the house, and the nails came out of the boards with a screech.

  The layout of the yard had been created by people who loved neatness and coziness, with a sentimental attitude toward flowers and birds, a touch boring and sweet in their love of trees that they grew not for the apples but for their look, shade, and rustle.

  The teenager wandered around, irritated by the layout, picking out what to criticize, what to try to break off, “accidentally” spill, knock over, kick, or smash; he struck the weather vane with his shoulder and then stepped on the meaty leaves of the faded tulips in the grass.

  “Just don’t let him go to the gazebo,” I thought. And he went inside the gazebo, started moving the glass jar around the table top, deciding whether or not to push it into the hole in the floor; he was bored, he didn’t like the dacha, he didn’t know why he was there, but just in case, he looked and sniffed around.

  What amazed me about him were his movements; he resembled a rat, mole, or shrew who knows how to find the narrowest crack, gnaw itself into it, and squeeze through where any other creature would be stuck.

  One summer a skunk began visiting a neighbor’s henhouse. The first time, the dog scared it off, but the skunk started coming every night, looking for a way in. The chickens squawked, the neighbor lost sleep, so he put sheet metal all over the henhouse and got a second dog. He depended on his laying hens, he sold their eggs every morning at the train station. But the skunk would not retreat; the neighbor sat up all night with a rifle, shot at a moving shadow in the dark and killed two cats; one was a pet, beloved by its family, and he and the owners got into a feud; then he wrapped electrified barbed wire around the henhouse. It drove him crazy that he, a former sapper sergeant, builder, and decent hunter couldn’t handle a lousy little creature. The skunk seemed to sense the sergeant’s fury and would vanish for a while, then return again, until one night the neighbor got drunk and forgot to lock the henhouse.