The Year of the Comet

PART TWO

Great events sometimes send messengers, a sign: be alert, be open and sensitive, don’t miss it, don’t interfere by deed or feeling, or it will not happen!

Almost nothing remains in my memory of the long winters of childhood except sledding down an icy hill and skiing; I remember only the moments of movement. Flying on a big piece of fraying cardboard along icy ruts, rusty whorls of last year’s grass in the ice, always with spots of blood—because someone smashed his face or cut his hand—flying to the deep garbage ravine filled with old tires. Two skis before your eyes as they pass each other, intersecting and separating tracks. The creak of the snow, the scuffle of ski poles on the ice crust, sliding, sliding, coming home, hot tea with cranberries, a heavy meal, and a heavy, dreamless sleep.

Only one winter left a long memory; the winter in which my awakening to my own life began with the Kremlin New Year’s party.

The weather was good, vacation’s end still far away, Father came to visit us at the boardinghouse, and I demanded we go skiing every day—everything in me demanded action, apparently senseless movement and quests.

The embankment of the narrow gauge train line that joined the railroad from the opposite side of the station had pieces of colored glass, light blue, violet, lilac, blue, and green, looking like shards of ingots. I was not allowed to collect the glass, I was told it could contain dangerous chemicals; I would have believed them, but there was another condition—I was not allowed to cross over to the side with the narrow gauge line. I think the first ban was merely a consequence of the second.

Gradually I learned from phrases not intended for me that the glass was being carried from a place that had, or used to have, a testing ground. There were few words which could excite as much, except for “airport,” “military unit,” and “secret laboratory.”

One day, getting permission to play at the nearby ponds, I crossed the tracks and headed along the narrow gauge line. Pieces of colored glass glittered in the embankment gravel, and I could follow the trail endlessly. But a growing unease made me uncomfortable: the pieces of glass, iridescent, smoky, colored, were luring me, long warehouses and dumps stood on either side, but I could not see a testing ground, a big, wide space.

Two men came toward me, fishermen; dressed in cotton batting jackets with waterproof covers on their felt boots, with icebreakers and short winter fishing poles, they were headed to the ponds I had allegedly gone to see.

I cautiously asked them where the testing ground was. One man, round-faced, with silly, droopy ears, still shiny-faced from his wife’s blini or waffles, looked at me in confusion, preparing to say, “What testing ground?” The other, almost an old man, with a narrow face marked with swollen red capillaries, tall, the icebreaker slung over his shoulder like a rifle, blocked my way, pulled a huge fur mitten from his right hand and took me by the shoulder, his fingers on a vulnerable bone. I sensed that if he pushed, pain would shoot through my shoulder. I had noticed that inside the fur mitten, his wool glove, mended many times, had three fingers; I knew it was an army glove for winter shooting, leaving the index finger free to pull the trigger.

“How do you know about the testing ground?” the old man asked, not joking, as a man who had the right to pose such questions. “Who told you? Why are you here?”

I looked down at my feet, saw a bluish-white piece of glass, and realized that there was no point in a story about looking for colored glass. The second fisherman moved away, while the old man let go of my shoulder but put his hands on my cheeks and drew my face closer to his, his eyes pressing on me.

A train came round the sharp bend, the engineer blew the whistle, and the old man let me go with a rasping, “Go away, pup.” The locomotive and its chain of cars hauling gravel left us on opposite sides of the track.

I scrambled down the embankment and ran for it. I realized the adults knew something was wrong with this place, for we’d picked mushrooms on the testing ground for tanks near the dacha, but this was a different kind of testing ground, and the old man with the glove like the ones guards wear in winter may have even saved me. He obviously had worked there, and even in retirement he continued his vigilant watch.

Two or three days later we skied particularly far from the house. Crossing a long field, with the occasional tufts of grass, we could see a village of a dozen houses and a wooden church in the distance. We entered a bright birch grove with a glade. The glade was slightly raised above the road, as if dirt had been added to it; I was just thinking about that when my ski hit something metallic.

“Come on,” my father said, noticing that I had stopped. “Let’s go! We’ll be late for lunch!”

I nodded, but as soon as he turned, I cleared the snow away with my ski. I saw a rusted track of a narrow gauge railroad. While we skied along the path, I saw among the trees a few old poles, rotting and gray with age, pieces of barbed wire on the insulators.

That evening I asked Father what railroad we had crossed.

“It’s the old road to the Kommunarka sovkhoz,” he replied instantly, as if he had been expecting the question. He replied in a way that stopped me from asking why a communal state farm needed a railroad and why they didn’t use it anymore.

On the next to last day of my vacation, I was allowed to ski on my own. It goes without saying that I followed the familiar route past the village and the black wooden church to the glade in the birch forest.

The scary old man with the carriage of a watchman, the narrow gauge railroad to the testing ground, the abandoned railroad in the forest, the strange, sidelined, unknown roads—I had found the remains of the lost country, the Atlantis I learned of thanks to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

Here I was at the spot where I’d found the railroad tracks under the snow. I brought a small shovel and dug around as much as I could until I found the stamp: 1931.

Which way, right or left? The gray cloudy day gave no hint, there was no wind. Left? I thought I could see something in the distance, either a house or a gate or a watchman’s hut. But once you go a hundred, two hundred meters, you realize that even though there is no one and nothing in the woods, you are distraught by the thin twigs, like bird feet, in the snow, by the crunch of the ice crust under your skis. Don’t go left or right, the gray cloudy day tells you, go back to the guesthouse, they’re putting the soup on the stove, forget these homely birches, last year’s crows’ nests falling apart in the wind, the rusty rails under the snow and the rotting poles with tin signs no longer legible.

I went back, not risking to go farther. But they stayed in my memory, a sleeping seed, those nameless railroads, abandoned trails of unknown things. One day I would find the explanation, I promised myself, not knowing that in five or six years I would read a newspaper article about the mass graves at the Butovo firing range, the firing trenches at the Kommunarka sovkhoz, illustrated by a photo of the narrow gauge railroad headed nowhere in the white winter space filled with the black spots of birch bark.

Standing there in the glade, for the first time I realized that life was a chain of events elicited by my actions, I saw how one inevitably prompts the next: GSE, New Year’s party, firing range. I even smiled at how I had resisted going to the guesthouse, now understanding that events would find me, and I should trust them rather than my own intentions. The important thing was not to give up my search.

Back in Moscow, I took up and dropped various things, unable to concentrate, behaving like a dog that lost a scent. My parents soon brought news: Grandmother Mara was getting married. They were embarrassed, they thought she had lost her mind, it wasn’t done to consider a second marriage at her age; they had gotten used to her loneliness, to the absence of older men in the family.

But Grandmother Tanya accepted the news easily, with a light sadness; unexpectedly, she was firm about not letting my parents interfere. I couldn’t bear the thought of Grandmother Mara’s betrayal of Grandfather Trofim, which distanced me even more from him, until I learned who the prospective bridegroom was.

Even in her late years she had several admirers, very different old men, and as a rule, significant people. The former head of a trust, a former weapons designer, the former chief engineer of an energy plant, the former director of a model kolkhoz—all were widowers and they swarmed around Grandmother Mara, sensing that they would live longer and better with her. She accepted their friendship, understood their intentions, and kept them close without putting anyone in an awkward or painful situation; this lasted for years, and they were all her husbands slightly. She took only one man seriously, the one who proposed to her.

He was the only one I thought had the right to be in a relationship with my grandmother, the widow of Grandfather Trofim—they were both soldiers, “brothers in arms,” as they wrote in books, and there was no betrayal here. Besides which, the man embodied one of my dreams from the past.

Pilots and submariners, two Soviet castes of free-spirited heroes; not part of the group, not in a unit, but one-on-one with the enemy, with the sky, with the water.

Pokryshkin and Kozhedub, two fighter pilot aces whose planes were covered with stars for shot-down enemies and whose uniforms bore starred medals, were solitary men in the land of collectivism, aluminum angels of the Soviet skies; at first my heart belonged to them.

But later, in the middle of the 1980s, living and dead submariners began floating up from the weight of the archives, the commanders of Shchuka-class and Malyutka-class ships. They had lain on the bottom for a long time, engines off; now the pressures of the depths were tossing them to the surface, the fetid air conserved in the submarines escaped from the portholes with a whistle.

Suddenly their exploits and service were revealed; my heart switched from pilots, the geniuses of speed and maneuver, to the hidden men of the sea, geniuses of patience and obscurity.

In the Kuzminki neighborhood of Moscow, on the lane that led to the park and ponds, there was a game arcade I liked to play at, and I saved fifteen kopeks all week before the walk to the park. And then—Oh joy!—I put my eyes to the periscope, my fingers held the triggers for the torpedo launchers, and the dark silhouettes of enemy cruisers and destroyers moved along the sea drawn on glass.

Shoot—the torpedo makes the water foam and an orange light shines on the horizon. If you miss, the black German cruiser sails off into open sea to attack a Soviet convoy. I forgot I was in the middle of wintry Moscow, that I had never seen the sea; my fingers pulled the triggers, the torpedoes left their trail, and with ferocious glee I was blown up along with the enemy ships.

Grandmother Mara’s fiancé was a submariner, a retired commander. He sometimes visited the dacha wearing a black uniform jacket with planks of decorations and a cap; I knew where his house was, in the village near the market: an old wooden house, an izba, with age-darkened gingerbread window carvings, with random-seeming additions, patched many times, and sinking into the ground.

It had a huge cellar: there was a hatch with a heavy ring beneath one of the rugs in the house, and when it opened, the earth breathed damply into your face. The innumerable supplies had an earthy smell—beets, carrots, onions (the cellar was rented to the market traders). How could I connect this house, permeated with heavy human smells, smoke, the sour stink of pickling, this house where grandfathers and great-grandfathers had lived and died, this house raised on a foundation of grub, on cool darkness where potato eyes grew blindly, how could I connect it to the sea?

I saw that Grandmother, clearly caring about the commander, still resisted a final connection with him; she had buried her husband, and the next one—husband or companion—had to be a man with a clear and simple fate, unburdened by old wounds and memory of the war; wounds and memory were identical here. I, on the other hand, kept waiting for him to talk about the war when he visited the dacha; to explain how he, a peasant son, became a man of the sea.

That winter I came upon the commander at Grandmother Mara’s house. My parents had taken me to the dolphinarium near her apartment, and as I watched the pool with the bluish-gray glossy sea creatures, I thought of him, the commander, his habitual silence, his incredible sensitivity to sound—I think he could hear mice scrambling in the next room—the trained wariness of navigating a submarine that operated in the shallow Baltic Sea, where submarines were frequently discovered by destroyers or planes; the only story he told was about the ship getting wrapped in antisubmarine netting and how they escaped with just a half hour of air left; his ability to move silently, placing his cup on the saucer without a sound, eating without once clinking the plate with a fork, as if he was still waging his war; the dolphins, perceptive and agile, speedy, flying through a ring above the water, reminded me of him—and that very day he was visiting Grandmother Mara.

My parents had gone, they hadn’t expected Grandmother to have company, but they left me, at her request. I had always known that people were divided into summer folk, the ones we saw at the dacha, and winter city friends, and it was strange to see this shift in calendar, seeing the old submariner in the seriousness of his feelings for Grandmother Mara; and seeing her, heavy, suddenly aged by another’s love; she must have thought that acoustically the submariner sensed her better than she did herself, heard all the creaks and groans of her weary body.

The commander, his hair pure white, chatted politely and easily with me about insignificant things—cross-country skiing, school, what books I was reading. I almost told him about the narrow gauge lines, almost asked him what they were, but stopped in time—I thought he would politely laugh it off and then joke forever, no matter what I wanted to learn from him.

I sensed that Grandmother was slightly unhappy with her decision to keep me overnight, so I asked to go to bed, earning an appreciative look from the commander. She made up a bed for me, I turned a few times for show, and then was still, feigning sleep. A half hour later, Grandmother opened the door, came over, listened to my breathing, and quietly returned to the commander. I waited a minute and then moved to the door just as quietly.

Glasses clinked a few times, I could hear quiet conversation—the old man did most of the talking, recalling how he had seen Grandmother Mara at the dacha station with two pails of strawberries. She seemed uncomfortable and she began softly singing, hitting false notes, the song “The Fragrant Clusters of White Locust,” which she loved.

I sensed the commander putting his hand on hers, asking her to stop. I suspected that Grandmother, knowing him well, sang a song he didn’t like to get something out of him. The shot glasses clinked again, and she asked him why he didn’t like the love song, he had promised to tell her a long time ago and still had not.

The commander replied: at first I did not understand what he was talking about, what events he was describing, they were impossible to imagine—but then I felt like a submariner whose damaged ship was sinking helplessly into the pressing depths.

In the spring of 1932 the black locust tree bloomed in the Ukrainian village where he lived as a youth; by then the starving villagers had eaten the first grass, and stray refugees lay dying in the streets devoid of birds, dogs, and cats.

The commander tenderly described the creamy white blossoms that he and his friend ate, bending the branches to the ground with their remaining strength. There were bugs in some of the flowers, and they ate the bugs, sour and crunchy; the two friends knew the flowers would make them sick, but their fragrance was so appetizing they couldn’t resist; once they fell into a dream state and started retching they would stop.

The commander weakened first, the sweet toxic petals sickened him; “the fragrant clusters” had a fragrance that was too thick, luring him into dizziness, sleepiness, a deadly, starving sleep; “The night drove us mad”—the locust flowers literally did, and he got up to eat a few more petals.

Other people came, breaking the branches and carrying them off to eat without sharing. The weakest, little children, who died first, crawled underfoot, licking the dusty clusters on the ground. A fight broke out—an impossible fight among weakened men who could not even make a fist or hold down a rival.

A bee stung the commander, the sting as painful as a bayonet wound; his face swelled up, turning watery and soft, and he crawled home without noticing where his friend was, crawling for several hours, slinking along the fences. His friend vanished—someone saw him being taken away by two women, to the hospital they said, where there was quarantine for people with dystrophy. If we had not eaten the locust, he said, Kolya would be alive today, he was still agile, he would have gotten away, not given up.

I had once tried the poisonous water hemlock whose umbrella heads wave in the ditches along the road, and I remembered my consciousness dissolving, I could feel what the commander had been through. My consciousness was gone now, too, I did not hear his last words, except for one phrase that sounded like a bell tolling: “Human meat in aspic does not jell.”

They sat at the table, drinking a bitter liqueur, uncleared dishes before them; the commander was talking about the unimaginable, and Grandmother Mara did not respond to his story with surprise or indignation.

I sensed that he was not lying, but in my system of coordinates, what he was saying could not be true—it was delirium, phantasmagoria.

Commander, commander, why did you answer Grandmother’s question, why didn’t you tell instead of torpedoing a transport ship and hiding from powerboats, naval hunters? “If this did happen, it was only in a single place,” I told myself, “only in that tiny town; human meat in aspic does not jell.”

But why was Grandmother quiet? Suddenly I realized why she was marrying him, what it was that united them in the past; what he and she remembered.

There was only one salvation: to believe that both of them had been victims of monstrous circumstances, that they were exceptions. That’s what I decided.

In the morning I no longer remembered the commander’s story accurately, it had been distorted by my febrile dreams. But I had the feeling that somewhere inside me, in the rooms of my mind there was now a hole, a well that could not be closed, into which one might fall, and from its depths came the sweet fragrance of locust blossoms.

I returned home happily, trying not to recall what had happened at Grandmother Mara’s; I clung to Grandmother Tanya, so that when I talked or played with her, I could banish the vision of the deadly white petals at least for a time.

That winter Grandmother Tanya, as if sensing the changes within me, started teaching me to draw. I copied postcards or drew our dacha, but neither gouache, nor watercolor, nor pencils obeyed me, and my work was poor, but this did not worry Grandmother; in exchange for my picture, she gave me one of hers. That was the point of her new game: she was surreptitiously introducing me into the circle of her memories.

The first night battle over Moscow—the orange lines of tracers in the dark blue sky, the ghostly columns of searchlights, German planes falling like swatted midges; Stalin’s funeral—a whirlpool of bodies, people trapped in the swirling masses on the street; the German dirigible Zeppelin flying to the Arctic in 1930, a gigantic silvery cigar above the Kremlin; the autumn parade in 1941 on Red Square—gray figures with vertical strokes of rifles appearing out of the snow and marching back into it.

I saw her pencil and pastel sketches done when she was young—pitchers, plaster heads, abstract compositions; I couldn’t say that the hand of a strong artist was visible, but the precision and solidity of the lines revealed an artist for whom the world was clear, transparent, and safe.

But now many decades later, her style had changed completely; her drawings resembled lubok, the pictures on the walls of peasant huts. Her style became more childlike in execution, with extended captions; the drawings were turning into a homemade filmstrip.

Later, as an adult, I saw the drawings made by prisoners in death camps, the drawings of people sent to distant penal colonies beyond the Arctic Circle, I recognized the style—childlike, as if the mind was protecting itself from the experience, translating it to the safest forms of comprehension, separating it in time, moving it back to fairy tale days, and at the same time, taming it, bringing it into the composition of memory.

Back in that year, there was a lot of talk about Haley’s Comet approaching earth. The newspapers and television said that it would be studied with telescopes, that a space probe would be sent out to meet it; the comet was a free gift to popularizers of astronomy, a new holiday on the boring calendar. I didn’t know that Haley was the astronomer’s name, I thought it was the name of the comet.

I noticed that both grandmothers, who rarely took an interest in that sort of news—a new nebula discovered, another spaceship launched—knew about the comet, as if there were some special reason for them to remember when it was due, the way they remembered birthdays and anniversaries.

They were preparing for the comet’s arrival, and while the preparations were not manifest in action, they were palpable. Grandmother Mara softened, and contrary to her personality she let go of her old feuds and worried that she would not be able to forgive everything in time. Grandmother Tanya, an incredible tranquil person, became calmer still, more tactful, as if apologizing even to the dust she wiped away or the salt she tossed into the soup.

It seemed that they wanted to talk about something, to tell us something, but were afraid of being misunderstood, that their statements would be taken with a condescending smile, and they kept silent, as if they knew that the mockery might later make trouble for the one who dismissed their warning so lightly.

I sensed the aura of mystery that surrounded the comet and tried to stick closer to the grannies, in case their anxiety would make them careless and they’d inadvertently say something that explained their strange anticipation.

Comet, comet, comet—I went to school, did my homework, made snow forts, but it was inside me, invading my dreams as the source of tormenting fears, like sounds that humans cannot hear but which resound in the body as confusion and horror. The comet was already there, it was constantly hanging over my head, and the nearness of the comet to the earth hinted at some future event, an exceedingly rare moment in time, when the veils are lifted and the invisible becomes visible.

One afternoon I came home early—they had canceled the final class.

Grandmother Tanya was sitting at the table, with a newspaper spread before her, open to an article about Haley’s Comet with a bold and clumsy headline referring to the “celestial guest.”

Grandmother had removed her glasses—even though she read with them on—and seemed to be holding an invisible book before her eyes, for which glasses were unnecessary. Softly, with a cautious step, feeling the way through the path of memory, overgrown and nearly gone, she whispered words, repeating them more confidently, with fewer hesitations, each time: “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.

“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 cloth 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.

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.

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 clean 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…”

I repeated the story to Grandmother Tanya close to her ear; two or three years earlier the police had undertaken raids in the mountains of the Caucasus, looking for caches of gold; it all began with large thefts of gold from the Kolyma mines, traced to Checheno-Ingushetia.

What the general described was war, even though neither he nor my father used the word; ambushes, shootouts, and so many bandits it was more accurate to call them partisans. I couldn’t understand: What about the peaceful Caucasus, the djigit in his turban on the Kazbek cigarette pack, the Narzan mineral water Father was drinking after Chernobyl? Grandmother Tanya looked as if the general’s story was not news to her. He seemed a bit irritated, rummaged in the right pocket of his uniform jacket and laid a piece of chewed-up metal on the table.

“Look, a bullet pierced the metal,” Konstantin Alexandrovich spoke into Grandmother Tanya’s ear. “It went through and then struck me beneath my heart, leaving only a bruise. I carry it with me now.”

Grandmother rose swiftly, went to her room, and started rummaging in the round woven sewing and knitting boxes. She came back and placed a small piece of cloth on the table, about the size of a quarter of a handkerchief, uniform fabric with a hole torn in the center.

Like a bit of a mosaic, a fragment from which one could reconstitute a larger image in various directions, rough, stained with mud, blood, and gunpowder. A whole world, a soldier’s world, fastened with the straps of a soldier’s pack, squashed by the heavy rim of a cannon wheel, unfurled from the remnant of an old uniform. The hole in the center wrapped it up, swallowed it; it seemed that the entire universe could be pulled into that hole like a fine shawl through a ring.

They lay next to each other, the piece of cloth and the bullet that struck Konstantin Alexandrovich in the chest; they suited each other, like a lock and key. I desperately wanted—oh, how I later understood Saint Thomas’s desire—I wanted to push the bullet through the hole in the old cloth.

“My great-grandfather’s uniform,” Grandmother said to the stunned general. “All that’s left. He died in the Caucasus. In the last century. He was also a general.” Grandmother gave a thin, apologetic smile. “Slain by a Chechen bullet, as they told us when I was a child. ‘Slain’; we were brought up poetically. His uniform was burned later, the epaulettes, the old officer class, that was not approved. My sister and I cut out this piece and kept it. She gave it to someone being evacuated from the siege of Leningrad. They found me in 1947. She didn’t pass along or save anything of her own, only this ill-fated piece of fabric.”

Father and the general looked at them with distrust and a childish horror; I think they wanted to do the same thing I wanted—to combine the bullet and the hole in the cloth.

“A tsarist general,” Konstantin Alexandrovich said. “Tsarist.”

He pushed the bullet through the hole in the uniform fabric as if in slow motion. Father was embarrassed, for he had not known about his ancestor who’d been a general, and like me, had never peeked beyond the border of 1917, even though he was born in 1941. I think he was planning to have a serious talk with Grandmother Tanya after Konstantin Alexandrovich left, to explain that you can’t come out with family secrets just like that, it’s embarrassing, uncomfortable… Grandmother did not notice Father’s reaction and gently smiled at her thought, happy that she had finally shared the family secret with him, as if he had become another person after Chernobyl, one with the right to know.

Amazed by the ease with which Grandmother revealed the secret, I took it to mean something else. I did not know how long it takes to write a book so I was certain that Grandmother had completed her memoirs—how else to explain the opening of the curtain of silence?

She had spent a month on them; I thought a month was plenty to tell everything completely, to climb into all the cubbyholes of memory, it would take a few days, no more than that. Excited and confused, I wanted to know everything about the general killed in the Caucasus, I could not wait, afraid that Grandmother would take out only pieces of the past from her hiding places, like a magician, without showing me the whole picture; she would torment me with sudden revelations, like inoculations or electric shocks.

Having convinced myself that Grandmother wanted to show me her manuscript but did not know how to give me a sign, I boldly went to her before bed and asked, May I read it? She pretended not to understand, adjusted her spectacles and gave me a disappointed look: Don’t you understand… Stubborn in my stupid certainty that the book was now completely written, I asked again: May I or not?

Grandmother shook her head: No. She was uncomfortable, sorry she had shown me the secret of the book, sorry that now everyone in the apartment seemed united against her, and she wanted to hide, vanish, but had nowhere to go and nowhere to take the book.

But my desire and hurt were too great; instead of apologizing, I turned and left. It’s for me, for me, whispered the petty demon awakened inside me, why won’t she show it to me?

The next day I waited for Grandmother to go to the kitchen and I crept into her room. The book in the brown cover lay on the desk, with a bookmark—very close, too close to the beginning. I noticed this, realized that she was only starting, but my hands opened the book by themselves.

“For my dear grandson,” I read the inscription. “For my dear grandson, when I am gone.” Shame burned my heart; I turned, Grandmother was in the doorway.

Without a word she took the book from me, put it in a drawer with her papers and locked it with a key that she wore around her neck like a cross. She picked up the pen, tightened the cap, and put it in the glass with pencils. The pen jangled against the glass bottom, and it was irreversibly clear: there would be no book. I had ruined everything, cut it off at the very beginning. There would be no book. Grandmother sat down, picked up the newspaper crossword—which she never did—and picked up the same pen, then changed her mind, and took a pencil and moved the three frogs to the edge of the table.

See nothing.

Hear nothing.

Say nothing.

I should have fallen to my knees and begged for forgiveness. But the pain of shattered hopes was too deep, and so my thoughts ran in the opposite direction. I didn’t need any stupid book! I didn’t need to wait! I renounced Grandmother Tanya and became the grandson of Grandmother Mara, who would have been horrified by the news that I—the grandson of Grandfather Trofim, the brave tank soldier, and of Grandfather Mikhail, the imaginary spy—had a tsarist general ancestor.

It will be summer in a month, I kept telling myself, I’ll be sent to the dacha, away from Grandmother Tanya, and there I’ll… I didn’t know what I would do, but my despair told me I had to undertake a risk, like in the story about the son of the regiment who drew artillery fire to save the men.

That day the book in the brown cover vanished and no longer appeared on Grandmother’s desk. She continued to study and play with me, but treated me as a child whose interests were the playground and school; there were no more picture memories in the album, no more poetry; and she never again invited me to sort grains with her.

If parents only knew what ideas they accidentally give their children!

Sometimes my mother took me to the medical clinic near the Kiev Station. She had lived there with Grandmother Mara and Grandfather Trofim before and after the war, so revisiting her childhood places, she grew younger, cheerful and free, liberated from Father and Grandmother Tanya, and happily told me stories: how they made a special hook to steal bread from the downstairs bakery’s truck; how in winter bandits used to throw dead bodies into the warm water seeping from the local steam baths; how German prisoners of war built houses and how they frightened her, she worried about who would live in them, who would be punished by being forced to move there. And at the same she wondered how Germans, who only killed and destroyed, knew how to build so neatly and deftly—maybe they weren’t Germans at all?

I liked being in that neighborhood; the huge glass canopy over the platforms was like a magnet—you could be pulled in under the canopy, to the ticket office, and then onto a commuter or long-distance train, even though you weren’t planning on a trip. Buses and trolleys pulled up and drove off, river ferries were docked at the landing, and Mother was energized by the hustle and bustle, she bought me ice cream and let me eat as we walked; we entered into a wordless conspiracy and didn’t tell anyone at home how good it was, just the two of us.

Soon after my falling out with Grandmother Tanya, Mother took me to the clinic. We were crossing the bridge over the Moskva River while a motorcade, surrounded by motorcycles, passed us on the embankment in the direction of Leninsky Prospect and Vnukovo Airport: three shiny black Chaika limousines with opaque windows. Traffic had been stopped and the Chaikas raced along the empty street, led by a highway patrol Volga, siren blaring, showering puddles and store windows with flashes of blue light.

I stopped, thinking that Mother would go on while I watched the motorcade and then caught up with her. The cars reached Sparrow Hills and I discovered that Mother, who was not interested in cars or privileged persons, was also staring helplessly at the now-invisible motorcade.

I wanted to go on, but she stood still, in the grip of some emotion. Down under the bridge at the corner by a traffic light a boy my age stood with his mother, impatiently stamping his feet, while his mother held his hand, pulling him away from the curb.

My mother was looking back and forth at the asphalt, the double white lines dividing traffic, and at the boy who was obviously chafing at the delay and would have run across against the light had he been alone. He would probably have pulled a prank trying to scare an inexperienced driver by pretending to run in front of the car. Coming closer I saw that Mother was crying, but only her left eye was tearing up, as if, being a righty, she had more control over that side. Slow tears accumulated in the eye’s corner, and she wiped them away, pretending to be dabbing some speck with her hankie.

I could not remember my mother ever crying out of the blue like that. My mother was lighthearted; she could be sentimental, but in a fierce way, not weepy; at a moment of separation, a moment of fear, she always smiled encouragingly. But now she was crying with pity for herself, and I sensed that the cause of her tears was somewhere in the past of the girl who had yet to meet my father and become my mother. I realized that she had spent most of her life without me and a significant part without my father. Stunned by the unexpected separateness of a person I had always considered an immutable part of my world, I stepped away to give her privacy.

Later, as we sat in the clinic corridor, Mother talked—into space, to the side—about a boy she liked when she was at school not far from the train station, and how when she was twelve, she decided to marry him when they grew up, but then disaster struck.

Daily, at a certain hour, Stalin’s motorcade of several identical black cars flew down Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya thoroughfare to the Kremlin. The local boys came up with a game: they tied their hands together with a clothesline and ran across the street right in front of the cars. Why did they do that? Mother did not say.

The police and secret service did not try to stop the children, even though they ran across the street more than once. The guards seemed to be spellbound by this strange behavior, they, too, wanted to see if the boys would succeed and to experience those moments of delight, horror, and delicious fear that someone dared to play this game with the Leader, teasing the tiger in dangerous proximity to his whiskers. Probably no orders came from Stalin’s bodyguards, the ones in the cars, as if they knew that their boss liked it; they had developed an animal sense for approval and disapproval, they must have perceived the impulses of his will directed at the backs of their shaved heads.

The cars hurtled past the children without reducing speed. One day two of the boys, one of whom was my mother’s crush, decided to run extremely close, so close that Stalin would be able to see their faces. They ran, but a policeman blew his whistle—they said he was new, his first day on the job, and didn’t know this game. The whistle violated the general pact of noninterference, the secret service agents ran onto the sidewalk, but it was too late to catch the boys. The black cars were racing down Dorogomilovskaya, hubcaps gleaming, parting space, sending everyone—pedestrians, police, guards—reeling back toward the walls. Only the two boys raced across the street; the policeman blew the whistle again, and one boy lost his stride, tripped on the line, and knocked over his friend. They tried to get up, the rope stretched out and the nickel-plated fangs of the front car’s bumper caught it, dragging the children. About one hundred meters later, right by the bridge, it stopped, and against all regulations, so did the whole motorcade.

It’s most likely that Stalin wasn’t in it, otherwise the cars would have continued on. But no one was thinking about that then. A great and total silence ensued, so quiet you could hear the ticking of the black cars’ cooling engines. No one rushed to help or to call an ambulance, everyone froze in place waiting for Stalin to open the door to see who dared play this outrageous and delightful game. Maybe only a boot would appear, the boot would touch the ground but the Leader would stay inside. The boot would be even more threatening and majestic than Stalin whole—no one would have any doubts about whose boot it was—the boot would be Stalin.

No one remembered how long the silence lasted. Mother said the trains at Kiev Station seemed to have stopped too. The two boys, tied by the clothesline, their skin scraped to the flesh by the asphalt, with twisted joints and broken bones, also lay there in silence, trying to move but not moaning, for a moan could change the balance in the scale of punishment and clemency.

Guards came out of the black car, picked up the children and loaded them into the vehicle. They headed in the direction of the closest hospital, while the motorcade went to the Kremlin, and the crowd broke up, people trying to forget what they saw, erasing the boys from their memory until their fate was resolved.

The boy my mother had liked returned a month later from the hospital: against all expectations, there was no punishment. The absence of penalty and its anticipation destroyed the boy. The broken bones knitted properly, the wounds healed, but he never got over it; he hanged himself in the woodshed, with a clothesline.

I took the story in a different way than Mother intended. She was protecting and warning me, surely aware that bad things were brewing in me.

But I heard something else: a child can perform a deed that adults fear, he can throw himself in the path of a black car and stare into its headlights. I understood the spirit, the mood, of the boys; I realized that my mother was afraid of that—that one day either accidentally or intentionally, now or twenty years from now, as an adult, I would do something similar; run out, leap, rush headlong where I should not go.

I did not yet know what I would do, what I would achieve, but I absolutely knew how—like those two boys who dared to run across the road in front of a black motorcade that never stops.

As a reward for his trip to Chernobyl, Father was given a union-paid holiday—a few days aboard an excursion cruise on the Volga. It was May, navigation season was just beginning, it was practically the first voyage, which usually went half-full, but the ship was completely booked.

No one knew where the fallout would spread, where the radioactive rains had fallen; there were rumors that Western countries had registered higher radiation and people were guessing how bad it was in Russia.

A lot of people tried to send their wives and children wherever they could as long as it was far from the reactor. These were primarily scientists and military men who understood what danger radiation posed; in Moscow the first pre-evacuation whispers circulated.

The cruise ship left in the evening, and we would go through the locks of the Moscow-Volga Canal at night. We arrived at the Northern River Station, that relic of the 1930s, where plaster volleyball players eternally fly up over an imaginary net and plaster female swimmers dry themselves with towels. Parts of the sculpted images had fallen off, the athletes stood on rusty rebar stubs like prostheses, as if they were crumbling, dematerializing, vanishing into thin air with each new navigation, which for them meant time passing.

In a landlocked capital, the river station gathered five seas under a five-pointed star on a spire, which had once twinkled on a Kremlin tower; I sensed that this was not the feckless dock for quick ferry rides but a more important place.

In ring-encircled Moscow, here was the secret exit, a river road. Yet Russian history flowed along rivers, the rivers grew cities on themselves, dictated the geography of principalities—and the echo of that was palpable there: the station for ships bound for Yaroslavl, Uglich, Kostroma, the forests beyond the Volga, and the very word Volga, which was spoken more frequently than others at the station, with its deep and rolling o, ready to spill out of the word like a gemstone from a setting.

It so happened that my parents had traveled in all directions out of Moscow but never north. In childhood, that kind of randomness is perceived as a deeply-reasoned principle. Therefore, in my personal topography, the North was the land of fairy tales and historical legends. The mysterious city of Kitezh, vanished principalities, extinct nomadic tribes, the Polish regiment that seventeenth-century martyr Ivan Susanin lured into the swamp, Tsarevich Dmitri, exiled to Uglich, where he died—these stories were all jumbled into a narrative about extreme lands where people perish, vanish, get lost, a narrative about enchanted, unstable places that can open up and swallow, as if history had not yet “set” there, but was still a thin and spotty film of rust on the surface of swamps.

Mother and I settled into the cabin while the boat left the dock and moved into the night. She promised to show me the locks; I had drifted off to sleep and she woke me when the ship had passed the watershed and started going down the lock ladder to the Volga. Bright violet-white lights hit our portholes, and we went out on deck with the crowd of passengers.

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.

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.