The Year of the Comet

PART FOUR

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 unfamiliar 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.

In the morning, hungover, sobbing, he brought out hen after hen and spread the white bloodstained chickens on the grass; they lay there, just piles of feathers, and he moved them around and called them by name. The dark forest beyond the fence was filled with the malicious glee of the skunk that had killed all the hens and had waited three months—ages for a small creature—for the owner to make a mistake.

Nimble, quick, and as sensitive as an animal, the teenager turned around, feeling my gaze. I recognized him: it was the teenager pretending to be the ideal Pioneer who met Mother and me at the Palace of Congresses, enjoying his role as usher and his part in the party at the Kremlin. It was his face; but my imagination could not put the Pioneer uniform on him, as if he had outgrown it, like a snake shedding its skin. It had happened a little over a year ago, and I sensed that I was falling behind, unable to let go of last summer, while everything around me was changing rapidly and irrevocably.

I watched the new neighbors for several days as they surveyed and circled their property, chopping it up with their eyes, and I understood that my worry over the gazebo was pointless: they would tear down the gazebo and the house, redo the entire lot and would not stop within its borders.

The dacha association had 150 members who could vote at meetings, they’d been there a long time, and they discussed the poor manners of the new neighbors who had not come to introduce themselves, did not make a polite visit to the association chairman, and who had already filled up the communal dump—an annual fee of a ruble per household—with stuff that belonged to the previous owners. People were angry, and the angriest were ready to go over and explain how things were done and that the old ways had to be respected.

I saw workers carting things away. I watched the first trip out of boredom, the next with growing interest, and then I couldn’t tear myself away.

I wasn’t attracted by the private life that now belonged to no one and was being discarded, but by its absence. In the first cart I had noticed an old radio, just like the one we used to have, a lampshade that I’d seen at the dacha of Father’s friends, and a few other things that were familiar in color and shape. So I decided to wait for the next cart—I was curious.

There were familiar things in the second, third, and fourth cartloads. When they formed the interior of someone else’s house, standing together, shoulder to shoulder, they were hard to recognize as “doubles.” But separated, loaded like corpses on the cart, deprived of mutual support and protection, they lost the domestic charm that gave them individuality and color. All day long, without haste, taking smoke breaks and drinking a pint of vodka over lunch, the workers brought things out—and I knew that if you were to open and gut any of the other dachas, the workers would bring out the same light fixtures, cabinets, refrigerators, and armchairs; that similarity held a vulnerability that the old dacha residents did not recognize.

The time had come for all those things to be worthless, old-fashioned, ridiculous, unneeded, laughable. That would happen tomorrow, or the day after, or in six months, all of a sudden, like a stock market collapse, and the people who bought lot No. 104 were harbingers of that change.

“These are new people here,” the association chairman said to the women gathered at the well with their buckets. “New people, understand? They’ll get used to it, they’ll become like everyone else.”

“New people,” I said, testing the words. “New people…”

When Father arrived for the weekend, Grandmother Mara demanded he immediately rebuild the fence that faced the street. She wanted solid planks so that when she was on her own property—the dacha was hers—she would never see the new neighbors.

Grandmother Mara was in mourning—the submarine captain had recently died, having been her husband for just a little over a year; but through her grief you could sense her gratitude to him that he had died well, in his sleep, as if he had lived through something very important with her, something he had previously lacked, and then left. Grandmother dressed in mourning, but she was cheerful and worked in the garden, as if she had paid a debt and that gave her strength.

Father was stunned by her harsh demand and launched into explanations, but Grandmother Mara stood her ground: if he didn’t build a tall, solid fence she threatened to sell the dacha the very next day—she shoved a packet of documents under his nose—and she would sell it to people like the new neighbors, show-offs and scoundrels, who had no regard for elderly and respectable people.

Grandmother’s fury had a simple explanation; the day before she’d been out planting strawberries and she had a few runners left of some precious and prolific variety. She went over to offer them to the newcomers, and at the same time learn what kind of people they were. They explained indifferently that they didn’t need the runners, they could buy strawberries at the market, and they had no intention of “mucking around in the soil.” Just before that, Grandmother Mara had shown the new neighbors an example of hard work, digging up long potato rows by the fence in the hot afternoon.

She visited all her friends that evening to tell them the shocking news—the new dacha people weren’t going to plant anything at all! Forgetting that the Latin names the old doctor used had upset her, forgetting their move to Israel, which she used to mock—the hyenas ran off—she now hit all the chords in her changed tune about the wonderful old owners; she promised to write and tell them who had moved into their old place, even though, of course, she didn’t know their address.

She had a very hard time dealing with the strangers’ lack of connection with the soil. That night as I was falling asleep, she was still upset, heavily pacing the room, using a cane, which she never had before. Like a sleepwalker, she kept repeating the same words in a low, mindless voice—What if there’s a war? A war! No, it’s too soon to give up on the potatoes! Only potatoes will keep us fed! Potatoes! They’ve never seen how people plant just the eyes, no they haven’t! Time will tell, if Stalin were still alive, he’d grab them by the ear and toss them over the wall for that kind of behavior!

It seemed that Stalin was just like her, an embittered old gardener or a lame spirit thrown out along with the furniture of the previous owners, circulating under the foundation, creaking the floorboards to make the newcomers feel uneasy. Grimly, as if he himself had grown out of an ugly potato plant, he demanded that they plant potatoes. “Don’t fool with the soil,” as Grandmother Mara repeated.

“Stalin, Stalin, Stalin”—she was roaring like an airplane now, realizing the uselessness of all other words. Just that terrible hooting, owl-like, “Stalin, Stalin, Stalin,” merging with the nocturnal wind, with the scrape of a branch on the waterspout.

Her voice started to change, there were modulations now; it was the voice of a little girl in the dark woods calling for her father, who was cruelly hiding behind a tree, the voice of a nun suffering from the destruction of a sacred place, the voice of a widow many years after her husband’s death whispering his name, forgotten by her lips. Then the various voices disappeared, leaving only one, moaning and groaning, like the blade of a scythe on a sharpening stone.

“Stalin, Stalin, Stalin”—and then everything stopped, no more creaking floorboards and thumping of her stick. A few minutes later I peeked into her room—she was sleeping at the table, her head on her arms, and her head was reflected in the mirror illuminated by the moon, as if she had been trying to tell her fortune, looking into the mirror’s depths, seeking a glimpse of a beloved’s face, a shadow of her intended.

Father did what he always did in these situations: he got a book on do-it-yourself building for dacha owners, took drafting paper marked in millimeter squares, and started sketching various fences, calculating the spacing of the posts, counting the number of posts and boards, cleaning away excess pencil marks with a razor blade, and grumbling that he didn’t have a good ruler, and without one the fence might not be right.

Grandmother’s heart, which had required instant action—hurrying to buy boards, hammering, drilling, banging in the posts—settled down. She couldn’t stand Father’s measured drawing, and she made a face and told him to forget it—I’ll do it myself later, later—as if he had been moving the pencil point on the part of her herself she could not protect.

Knowing her personality, I assumed that she would start sniping at the neighbors, writing to the district attorney to demand they check where the money to buy the dacha came from, and that she’d soon drive them away with the secret help of her village friends, who could send kids to break windows or saw through the seat in the outhouse toilet.

But Grandmother Mara retreated instantly, as if she sensed her death in those new people. The fence was never built, but it existed in her imagination. For the rest of her life she never looked in the direction of the neighbors’ house or spoke of lot No. 104. Everyone thought she was expressing scorn, but I knew she was suffering. One day we were supposed to go to the store for flower seeds, but when the bus pulled up she scowled and said we’d walk—the bus was on route 104.

For some reason I was sure that the young Okunenko boy (Grandmother had learned their last name) would definitely try to befriend Ivan once he started running into him at the dachas.

But it happened faster than that. Okunenko, who had no idea Ivan existed, who never exchanged a word with any of the dacha people, nevertheless met Ivan on the first day of his arrival, when Ivan was getting out of his car to open the gate. He had predisposed Okunenko to himself, as if he were billiard ball rolling along a hustler’s table, always in the direction of the needed hole.

Ivan did not drop in to see me that day or the next; however I often saw him at the gate of the neighbor’s house and even more frequently saw Okunenko heading toward Ivan’s; sometimes they walked down the road together—a strange couple, resembling a nucleus and an electron.

I was still troubled by occasional ghosts of last summer, I still retained traces of my former adoration, my former attachment to Ivan, but I now preferred the role of aloof and independent observer. Now I could see what an invisible effect he had on me since I last met with Ivan; he had poisoned me, in the unique way to which I was susceptible by my age, with extracts of feelings and emotions that could have killed me but, once the danger was past, also accelerate maturity.

I did not seek a renewal of our friendship; I watched Okunenko hang around Ivan, giving him American cigarettes—Ivan had taken up smoking; watched them drive off in the Volga to Moscow and return happy and excited, as if they had pulled off a successful deal—and perhaps that was the case.

Coming back from the store one day, I saw Ivan heading toward our neighbors’ house. I was going to slow down and avoid him but realizing that I wasn’t expecting anything from Ivan, I kept up my original pace.

It was the first time in a year that I’d seen Ivan up close; he was a completely different person now, as if last year’s hunt for Mister, when like a hypnotist he moved me between life and death, feeding on my delight, fear, and hope, had aged him by three or four years. I alone would not have been enough for Ivan. Or maybe he wouldn’t have been able to deceive me so easily and naturally now, for he had acquired a seriousness that interfered with pretense and deceit.

“Hi,” he said, as if we had parted just yesterday. “How’s life?”

“Good,” I replied. I felt the difference in our ages, which had not seemed apparent last year.

Ivan stood still for a few seconds as if pondering which toy in his pocket to give me; then he seemed to realize something and said, “I’ll drop by one of these days. We’ll go for a walk.”

And one of those days, Ivan kept his promise. A storm was coming from the west, from Borodino and Smolensk, and whirling columns of clouds with imprisoned lightning bolts within them moved toward us. The trees shivered, sagging power lines began to whine, ripples covered the darkened ponds and moved into the reeds. We strode past the railroad station and the freight trains in the sidings. Platforms, cisterns, bunkers with grain, containers—everything seemed filled with anxiety, as if on the eve of war. With the first drops of rain we reached the old House of Culture—patches of plaster falling from the bas-reliefs, cracked columns, worn steps. Opposite, in the scrawny park, stood a propeller on a foundation—a monument to pilots killed in the war; carnations rotted in a jar with green water beneath the propeller.

“Look.” Ivan pointed to the building’s pediment.

I didn’t see anything except for the faded spackling. Something had been written there many years ago, but now there were only vague shadows and runny letters left.

“Just look,” Ivan repeated.

Rain bucketed down on the settlement, bending trees. The drops flew horizontally, harshly, the streets were boiling with water, lightning struck the rod on the boiler plant chimney, and the nearby thunder rattled windows. The rain lashed the pediment, the violet flashes of electricity outlined the shadows of the columns. The shadows fell to the left, then to the right, as if the old building were tottering on its foundation.

Suddenly I saw the inscription appearing from inside the soaked spackling, and in an oval above it, a portrait.

LONG LIVE COMRADE STALIN—the erased letters were clearly visible in the storm’s strange light; so was the profile, hair brushed back and large, predatory nose.

A profile—Stalin was not looking at you, but he could see you, he saw everyone everywhere, his gaze was not a line but a bell jar that covered the universe in all 360 degrees.

LONG LIVE COMRADE STALIN—the storm raged, tossing old crow’s nests from the trees, breaking branches of apple trees, the foamy sap meant for the apples spraying into the air. I thought that long-dead corpses would start rising at the village cemetery from beneath the pyramids with red stars, the metal and wooden crosses, the slabs of granite and labradorite, the forgotten blurred earthen mounds, and the new coffins lowered on top of the old rotten ones.

I thought of Grandmother Mara’s fervent pleas—“Stalin, Stalin, Stalin!”—and understood that after her death she would join the army of these corpses, that the lifetime connection would become an inseverable umbilical cord.

The leader had stamped his name on them—and they responded to that branding, they were enslaved in the afterlife. They were people of his era; I saw that I had lazily united them all by the name Stalin, repeating their own loyalty to him when he was alive, the way serfs were called by their master’s name.

Ivan stood entranced by the rain, which was penetrating deep into the soil, to the roots of the cemetery trees, hammering on the sheet metal, tearing away weather vanes and down-spouts, seeping into the dried-out attics. He was a priest of a new, victorious faith, come into the temple of the old gods in order to sense his own power; he did not sense the awakening of the dead, he heard and saw something else: the spectral letters, the irony of oblivion that allowed the generalissimo to feel how completely he was forgotten—there was nothing but the inscription on the gable that appeared in storms with a westerly wind.

The rain was letting up; I was soaked, shivering, and my face was covered with cold drops.

Ivan was next to me, tired, drained; I understood that he had showed me the most personal and intimate thing he could show another person; he had come across that inscription and held on to it as if it were a jewel, showing it to no one, so as not to turn it into a local attraction.

I wanted to tell Ivan how Grandmother Mara cried out Stalin’s name, but I didn’t think he would understand, he would just laugh at an old woman’s stupidity. He had brought me along because he needed an audience and because he did not want to be remembered only as a deceiver; he could have not bothered about me at all—who cared what the little kid thought of him?—but he liked the opportunity to turn a difficult situation in his favor without having to admit guilt, easily resolving the unsolvable.

He was giving me a gift, allowing me to join in the glory of his power, in the feeling that the future was his, that his time had come, which meant that he’d been right about everything.

We were back at the dachas, soaked in the muddy streams carrying rubbish and leaves, and we stopped at my gate, opposite the Okunenko house.

“He’s a zero who dreams of standing next to a one, to make ten, and to be able to call that ten ‘us,’” he said, having guessed my secret and most burning question. He was generous, the way people are generous before a final farewell. “But I will need zeros like that. Many of them. He’s the first. You have to respect precedence.”

I thought Ivan was wrong; he haughtily thought Okunenko sought his society and was nothing on his own, he amused himself playing with what he considered an empty man. But I had seen Okunenko at the Palace of Congresses, and I was stunned by his ability to change, I sensed that Okunenko was not a zero. Grandmother Tanya, who liked to play solitaire, explained the meaning of the cards to me, and I thought that Okunenko was the joker, the card that can become any other; the fool who in certain circumstances can acquire the highest power and disrupt the balance in an instant.

“So,” Ivan said. “Go. Go dry off.”

He turned and strode off to his place. I wondered—should I run after him, tell him what I knew about Okunenko? And I stopped. I was interested in seeing what would happen with the two of them. The situation was reversed: now I had Ivan in my power because I knew what he did not. Without feelings of revenge or jealousy, I said: let things be.

I went home, knowing that Grandmother Mara would scold me for running off and for my wet clothes, but I had no fear of her now, as if I had suddenly become the older one.

Ivan never came back to the dacha, Okunenko didn’t visit much, either, and I was there less and less—my grandmothers were sick, they had trouble walking, and Mother and I took care of them. No sooner would one illness pass, than another would appear, and we spent years following a schedule of pill taking, both apartments turned into hospital wards; school, homework, friends—everything was left at the door, everything took a backseat to the endlessness of illness, its power that inexorably forced me to pay attention to other people’s pulses and breathing.

Father was traveling more frequently to places where ships sank, gas exploded, planes crashed, and buildings collapsed. He rushed from one catastrophe to another, no longer knowing what to do with them, how to explain it all; he drafted new tables, clicked his calculator keys, and brought home an aluminum cap, a part from a plane or rocket that he kept erasers in, but sometimes in the morning the cap stank of bad cognac and Mother tried to get me out the door for school faster.

The southern borderlands, the Caucasus mountains already echoed with future gunfire; with the coming of somber times, Moscow and other cities were plunged into darkness—some crazy force had declared war on lightbulbs, and the lines were getting longer and there were fewer things to buy; I grew taller, my physique changed, and Mother resewed and refaced old clothing for the third time.

My body demanded food, pleasure, and fun, but money, without a day’s rest in my parents’ wallet, turned into boxes of medicines with foreign names, into yellow and pink granules, green tablets, white pills, pale blue plastic capsules filled with liquid; syringes and oilcloth, bandages, ointments, and powders.

Father came and went, weary, bowed down, argued with Grandmother Tanya, who got up when we were out and tried to help with the housework; the two grandmothers could not be kept in the same apartment, so Mother lived between two houses; Father understood that he should be helping her, but she understood that he was waging war against the elements gone mad, facing defeat after defeat. Malignant lightning flared over the distant mountains, over the borderlands.

Father broke down in late December, in the black hole of winter, home from an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people. He was a stranger to Mother and me, exhausted, permeated with the smell of dead houses and generator fuel.

Late that night, refusing food, he told us what he had seen with a disconnected urgency; it was not a story but a mash of words, the ruins of narrative.

Darkness, lit only by bonfires and headlights, mounds of coffins at intersections, tanks and roadblocks, looters; the special hour when all work stops and they take acoustical soundings of the ruins in case someone is still alive under the concrete, stone, and brick.

“We couldn’t stop the machinery at the same time,” Father said. “They brought rescue workers from all over the country, and their watches were not synchronized, everything was plus-minus fifteen minutes.”

“One block survived,” Father said, with no connection to his previous sentence. “The usual five-story houses. The neighboring ones collapsed. We drew profiles of seismic waves in order to understand how that happened. An engineer found the documents. That particular block was built by workers from Czechoslovakia, on an exchange. They hadn’t stolen cement during its construction. The orders came to blow up that block.” Father drummed his fingers on the table. “Blow it up.”

Mother suggested gently that he go to bed, she seemed even more tired than he was from the story of the destroyed city.

“I can’t sleep, I haven’t slept in three days,” he replied softly, without expression. “There was a factory there, built by Komsomol workers. The factory was destroyed. Some Komsomol official came and said that there was a time capsule in the foundation, a message to future citizens. It was put there in 1972. He asked us to find it. We sent him packing, but he called somewhere, and the bulldozer was ordered to dig. He had brought a blueprint at least, he knew where to dig. He said a museum would take the capsule. We found it—a silver tube, dusty and dented. The engraving was beautiful: “With a Komsomol greeting to the builders of the future! To be opened in 1992.” The tube was dented, so it opened. And inside there was nothing but cigarette butts. And a note written on a pack of Prima cigarettes: “The Battalion Does Not Surrender.”

“To be opened in 1992,” Father repeated. I think he felt like a woodsman who cut down a beloved tree and discovered its rotting core.

“There it is, the future,” Father said. “Cigarette butts.”

Father went back to the earthquake zone. Despite the horror, he seemed happier there; indisputable and obvious, the ruins cut off any thoughts of the future. He had ceased being rational, he thought that the massacre in Sumgait, the Spitak earthquake, and other small and big disasters were related somehow, that nature and humans had become one. “It will start soon,” he would say, and I could see why he did not perceive everything that had happened thus far to be the beginning; the more threatening the shots and underground tremors and the longer the lines at stores, the clearer it became that these were the events that could set off an avalanche, but were not the avalanche itself; Father knew this field, he dealt with snow issues, and he used a dynamic mathematical model of avalanche for his theoretical model of catastrophe.

And just a few months later—Father was still on the trip—I came home in the evening; Grandmother Tanya was watching television with a very strange picture on the screen—an enormous line of tanks, kilometers long. And the line was moving fast.

They moved across a huge bridge with angular trusses, they moved in an endless flow across the Amu-Darya River back from Afghanistan, the tanks and armored carriers wreathed in blue-gray smoke with their gun barrels raised, headlights burning, and red flags waving; soldiers with their hands at their temples stood knee-deep or chest-deep in the tank hatches. It was like the movement of ice, like ice cracking in the upper reaches of a river; a chain of events had begun, events that, like people, stood in line to happen. There was such power, such impatience in that movement home that it seemed the tanks would never be able to stop anywhere, they would drive and drive, like windup cars that never run down.

And it was true—that fall I saw the parade on the anniversary of the October Revolution. Our family and my parents’ friends had a tradition: we would meet near the U.S. Embassy on the Garden Ring Road, to see the columns of war vehicles headed toward the Kremlin through the eyes of American diplomats. The children grew up, others were born, but the tradition was unchanged. We all climbed up on a parapet, while the tanks and missiles rolled by, followed by the trucks, and marines threw their collars, navy blue trimmed with a triple line of white, with handwritten signs—DMB-84, 85, 86, 87. That moment—the flying collars with fluttering ribbons, the hands reaching for them—was repeated annually, making the parade a city holiday, not a military one, turning the military machines into something theatrical, not quite real, the setting for a film shoot.

But that autumn the collars didn’t fly into the crowd—maybe there had been an order not to waste state property—and the tanks were grim and menacing, as if they were the same ones that could not stop, the ones that crossed the bridge over the Amu-Darya.

Soldiers in the cab of a tented truck—I think they were border guards—waved meekly to the crowd, and then one who must have seen family in the crowd along the sidewalk shouted at the top of his lungs:

“We’ll be back, wait!”

The tanks, armored vehicles, trucks with marines, missile haulers, and self-propelled artillery turned onto the New Arbat, toward the Kremlin, moving out of sight, going, going, going; the huge canvases of military banners carried in open cars seemed vulnerable.

“We’ll be back!” the solider yelled again, and now it sounded like a threat; the troops stayed in formation, but it seemed that they could also move helter-skelter, for the flags of the military controllers no longer had the same power and there might be a shell hidden in the equipment; the moving vehicles made windowpanes rattle in a high mosquito-like whine.

I don’t remember any more parades; they may have still taken place, or maybe the marshals also sensed the new mood of the tanks; we stopped going to the Garden Ring Road, my parents’ group of friends fell apart. My father quit his job and became eccentric, inventing crazy alarm systems, rescue methods for a fire, and was a regular at the patent bureau, which was a gathering place for scientists like him and stubborn autodidacts, as well.

I grew closer to him and my mother, the grandmothers’ health kept deteriorating, and we had trouble remembering our previous life, when everyone was healthy. Illness lived in our apartment, not us, we were merely its servants and messengers, illness consumed time, took away the right to make plans, and made tomorrow both predetermined and yet uncertain; we almost never watched television and rarely opened the papers and magazines that were bloated with news and had huge print runs. To make money, they found work for me as a laborer on archeological and geographic expeditions, and in the winter I studied and indifferently passed from one grade to another.

Two years passed this way.

The grandmothers were brought back to life by the March referendum on preserving the USSR. It’s not that they were cured, more as if they had asked the illness to give them a reprieve from infirmity, a last surge of strength. When 77 percent of the people voted “yes,” Grandmother Mara remembered the planting, the dacha where she had not been for a few years, and began reproaching us—probably we had not whitewashed the apple tree trunks for the winter or dug up the beds in the autumn for spring planting; and Grandmother Tanya asked us to buy her new glasses and resubscribe to newspapers.

They both demanded to be with me, once again they competed in signs of attention, giving me trifles from their pensions, and they were happy that we could go to the nearest park, that I had grown, and they could brag about me to the neighbors; having lived through feebleness and knowing it would be back, and for good, they hastened to give me everything, they opened accounts in my name at the bank without consulting each other; and my parents, seeing how the former family was being reborn, asked me not to go away for the summer, not to apply for jobs, but to stay with the grandmothers.

I was uncomfortable and embarrassed, I noticed signs of their frailty that should not be noticed, I was clumsy, self-conscious, pathetic, and unable to respond to their love. Grandmother Mara kept talking about my future, my wonderful wife, and my good apartment—she meant hers, and this kindly rejection of her own future grated on me. Grandmother Tanya was much quieter, but she started holding my hand much more frequently, as if trying to slip something into it or seeking support.

That summer I was attracted to bridges, ancient houses, factory chimneys, and monuments. I avoided rallies, loudspeaker voices, screaming posters, and took side alleys; old stones and bricks and cast-iron bridge trusses had a better sense of the future than any orator; monuments knew more than those agitating around them. I wandered around the city, looking for advice—who should I be, how to live; I went through the places, names and events imprinted on the city’s memory.

One Sunday I found myself at the Paveletsky Station, where the steam engine that brought Lenin’s body from Gorki in 1924 was placed on a pedestal.

In school, we were taken to see the steam engine and a nearby monument marking the spot where Fanya Kaplan shot at Lenin during a rally at the Mikhelson factory. Back then I was unpleasantly surprised by the nearness of those two points: the shot with a poisoned bullet, as we were told, seemed to pin Lenin to the place of the assassination attempt, and six years later they brought his body back here.

The steam engine seemed to be complicit, its wheels, connecting rods, pistons, furnace, and boiler made history; but now the steam engine looked aged, knowing it had been rendered useless and scorned by the electric commuter trains.

To my right, thousands of dacha dwellers were emptying out of trains onto the station platforms. Into the humid and dirty city smells rolled in from the Garden Ring Road and from the Moskva River covered in mucky seaweed, the aromas of thousands of baskets with the first apples, with fragrant grushovka tomatoes, and endless bouquets of dacha flowers and jasmine came like fresh streams of scents and perfumes.

Jasmine had bloomed during the week; everyone coming home from the weekend cut some of the flowers and saw that everyone else on the train was carrying sweet, cloying jasmine as well and the suburban platforms were covered with the tiny cups of its flowers, which resembled the tea sets of fairies.

A storm was gathering over Moscow, the wind was rising, the dry wind that comes before a shower, not yet very strong but capable of wrinkling the heavy fabric of men’s jackets and trousers and lifting and fluttering women’s light dresses, skirts, blouses, and scarves. In the wind, the men seemed to be moving calmly and unemotionally, while the women—buds of fabric—slightly intoxicated by the jasmine, pupils dilated by heart palpitations and difficult breathing in the crowded train, were vibrating, expecting the approaching rain, listening to the car horns that had become too jarring.

Another dozen such evenings and something was bound to happen in the city, compounded out of the electric atmosphere, dilated pupils, and excitement taken for nervousness. A woman tripped on the metal-trimmed steps, and dozens of teaspoons fell from her purse and spilled out across the stairs, ringing merrily, dazzling with their polished dimples, but everyone turned around as if there had been a shot.

Drawn by a morbid interest, I went where Lenin had been wounded; on a Sunday evening the streets around the station were empty except near the hospital that gave rabies shots around the clock where several men with bandages were waiting—obviously attacked by a dog—and smoking silently, listening to their bodies: Was the sickness, the madness, the frothing at the mouth, coming, were the shots too late?

The square where Kaplan had taken the shot was empty except for a bronze Lenin. Only once in a while, cars drove by on neighboring streets, the dusty and unwashed windows of the former factory looked down, recognizing nothing, and the silence seemed padded, as if the entire area had been covered with poplar fluff. The place that was once open and tragic was now surrounded by the wild growth of new houses and courtyards.

I spent the evening wandering the streets, coming out by the Donskoi Cemetery and then the Shukhov Tower; force lines—the shining trolley tracks—led me, not letting my movement become a relaxed and unimportant stroll, pushing me forward; through them the city communicated its magnetized, edgy state before the storm.

When the rain began, I went home, almost falling asleep on my train, where it traveled aboveground and the raw air, filled with creosote from the ties, poured into the windows.

In the metro I had a vision, half-asleep, of an empty compartment, the long corridors of the cars, the curtained windows, the tedious jangle of a spoon stirring sugar in a glass with a metal holder, so prolonged that you couldn’t imagine that tea could absorb that much sugar; voices in the distance, muffled by the vestibules at the end of cars, flashes of light—the crossing lights—and once again the rattling spoon.

The quickest way home from the metro was along the railroad; the signal lights shone over the empty crossing and a large pack of homeless dogs ran along the embankment.

I was exhausted when I got home; my parents and grandmother were sleeping, and I went to bed without even washing up—a heavy sleepiness that portended a bad dream was knocking me off my feet; I fell asleep just after hearing the piercing blare of the freight train’s horn, forcing late-night idlers to recoil from the platform edge.

I dreamed I was walking in the cool morning through a field along a railroad track; in the distance, by the switchman’s hut, enveloped in fog, a train had stopped.

It was the train that had carried Lenin’s body. The engine huffed steam, a sentry stood by the stairs to the cabin, wearing an old Red Army uniform. Coming closer, I recognized him—his photograph was probably the smallest one on Grandmother’s wall of photographs, hung on the periphery, like a distant planet or Sputnik; he was Grandmother Tanya’s great-uncle, the first in the family to sign up for the Red Army and the first to die at the age of nineteen in an armored train hit by artillery and captured by General Shkuro’s “Wolf Division.”

He stood on watch, swaying clumsily, for he consisted of two parts, separated by a saber slash from right collarbone to left leg. But he did not fall apart, some force held the dead body together, dressed in an undershirt marked by two hoof prints.

Seeing me, the sentry nodded toward the cabin—go in—and blinked, probably to indicate that he had recognized me, too.

There was no one in the cabin; the tender was empty, it didn’t smell of coal near the furnace, but fire roared inside it, and the steam engine was slowly restoring the connection among pistons, wheels, and axles, becoming a machine again.

A shout came from the boiler, but the dead sentry was unfazed. A shout, then another shout, and someone struggled in the boiler, being burned alive, trying to break the door, get through the iron walls. The train started, the screams blended into the powerful roar of the machine, as if the burning man had turned into thrust, flames, and the energy of the furnace.

I walked through the cars; in the first was the coffin with Lenin’s body, heaped with winter fir wreaths. The fir fragrance was strong, and frost covered the windows; the black mourning crepe, stretched into tight folds, resembled the wings of bats, and the coffin seemed to be embraced by a gigantic bat.

The stink of stale river silt filled the hallway, and a shiny black centipede crawled out from a compartment door and climbed up the wall; near the ceiling, several others waited for it. Someone was vomiting in the compartment, murky water poured into the hallway with small fry and seaweed floating in it.

Chapayev was inside, vomiting sand and filthy water, centipedes climbing out of his ears, and his eyes were white, like a boiled fish.

In the restaurant car, twenty-six men were celebrating, black-haired, so tanned that even death’s pallor could not touch them; they drank wine from clay jugs and the wine poured out through the bullet holes in their chests.

Also in the restaurant car, sailors in striped shirts and round caps were gathered around a basin of macaroni, and watched entranced as the noodles turned into white maggots that gobbled up the meat.

There were other cars, other people, men, women, missing legs, arms, and eyes, marked by torture, in uniforms of various eras or half-naked with red stars carved into their backs.

Alongside the train, a hundred cavalrymen raced over meadows and ravines, passing through trees and strata of earth, creating fox fire in the decaying swamp wood. The horsemen passed the train, then fell behind, swooping out on the right, then the left, galloped in the air over the roofs of the cars, nimbly, like swallows or swifts. Semitranslucent, with silvery moon faces, the riders pointed the way with their sabers, and their horses—clots of forest shadows, flowing and slipping—picked up speed effortlessly, leaping over rivers that could not catch their reflection.

The train exited the forest and hurtled down a long valley; in the distance, by the horizon, more banks of fog appeared. The riders sped through hay ricks without disturbing a single straw, occasionally startling a bird; I was thrown from the car, the train vanished in the fog, and the horsemen galloped in farewell, dissolving into swarms of lightning bugs and sparks from steppe campfires.

In the morning, I did not remember the dream right away but I awoke with a sense of loss—I did not yet understand what or whom I had lost.

Noon found me near the metro station at Revolution Square.

The famous sculptures—the army scout with a dog, the sailor signalman, the revolutionary laborer, the young woman who was a Voroshilov sharpshooter, the Stakhanovite worker with a raised hammer—had turned from ordinary monuments into monuments to a lost era, as if overnight the historical clocks had been reset.

In mid-August I dropped by to see my mother at the Ministry of Geology on Krasnaya Presnya Street. Her windows opened onto the zoo, and in the summer heat you could smell the animals, a scent unthinkable in a city, foreign to asphalt and glass.

The hippos, elephants, and crocodiles wallowed in the pools in their enclosures, ate, excreted, mated, and the zoo stank of putrid water, rotting cane, and tainted meat.

A vulture’s revolting call from behind bars was answered by a jackal or hyena. Once in a while, a random pedestrian, aroused by the scents of hay beds, nests, and dens, wet puppies and naked fledglings, the odors of predators and herbivores, mutually repellant, would discover the prehistoric creature within and with a quick look around send up a pithecanthropic hunting cry, responding to the animals with a ferocious animal sound.

The ministry hallways, carpeted in long runners, were filled with the clacking of electric typewriters; there were oases of quiet near the doors to the bosses’ offices, where people slowed down and lowered their voices as they passed.

The ministry countered the wild scents of the zoo with the smell of paper—it seemed that opening any door would reveal papers piled to the ceiling; even in the cafeteria on the first floor, the paper smell mixed into the flavor of soup, schnitzel, and fruit compote.

That day something had changed in the ministry corridors. The machines would start typing and then stop. There were fewer people. But most important, there was a new kind of air current, as if previously the draft had moved along the corridors in accordance with a general plan, decorously and strictly, and now the currents were all mixed up, new ones appeared that did not know how to behave in a ministry; they tore papers out of people’s hands and slammed doors and windows shut.

The ministry bureaucrats, extremely sensitive to such things, waited it out, staying put at their desks; the document flow stopped until it was clear what was going on, and the huge ministerial machine spun its wheels. There was still a long line at the security desk, maps, reports, and rolls of millimeter-marked paper were still carried from office to office, but the tension of power, the electricity that generated decisions, had slackened suddenly, and the four floors of the ministry building resembled a hive where the queen bee had died.

I went into my mother’s office; it was empty, she had gone to lunch with her colleagues. The insolent draft had pushed open the poorly fastened window and the office was filled with flying papers stamped “For Internal Use Only” and “Secret” that had been left on desks in violation of the rules. The zoo smells were no longer just swamp decay and rancid feed, but unrest, anxiety, as if the animals’ blood, warmed by the heat, was taking in a constant drip of hormones, and every gland was awakened, swollen and pulsating, responding to the stirrings in the air. The animals sensed this more deeply than the humans.

The animals were not lying down, they wandered, pushing against the cages, whipping themselves with their tails; suddenly an elephant trumpeted, lions, bears, and tigers roared, rhinoceroses and oxen screamed, as did every creature whose jaws were big enough for their voices to be heard. The noises clashed, tumbled, whirled until they blended into one sound that was no longer the cry of wild animals. It seemed it was not flesh and blood but a thing screaming, as if suddenly there was an onset of metal fatigue at some gigantic construction site, seams bursting, I-beams and channel bars collapsing, a wave of deformation traveling across all its elements, and the tower—I imagined it was a tower—began falling sideways, twisting into a corkscrew and emitting that scream of a disintegrating whole.

The next day was Saturday and my parents went to the dacha, leaving me in charge of the grandmothers. They were taking a long weekend, planning to return in a few days, but we did not meet until a week later.

Over the weekend it felt like there was a human flow across the city, the start of a vortex; the seemingly relaxed passersby were going about their business, but one had the impression they were carried along, led by an invisible force. I wandered the streets; I thought that everything had a secret meaning, and the policeman who didn’t pay attention to the Zhiguli that crossed a solid line knew something and was lost in thought, and the man with a suitcase hurrying to the train station had reason to rush; something had happened, people and things had changed, you could push your finger through a brick, fall into the metro through the thickness of the sidewalk, meet a talking dog, win five thousand rubles on a trolley ticket, and walk by unnoticed through the security at the Spassky Tower entrance to the Kremlin. It was only the general habit of belief that bricks were hard, the ground solid, and sentries vigilant, that kept the city in its former state.

Monday morning, the human flow in the city increased when the radio announcer, seemingly sedated, read: “In the aim of preventing chaos and anarchy… The collapse of society… Forming the State Committee on the State of Emergency in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”; the voice wanted to calm people and called them to order, but it was so recognizable, so laughable, that when it used the simple-folk pronunciation of Vice President Yanaev’s patronymic, calling him “Ivanych” instead of “Ivanovich,” more and more people left their radios with every word and went out into the street, albeit not yet knowing what to do or where to go.

That evening I found myself by the White House. The period had begun in which the concepts of “day” and “date” had lost meaning—it was a gap in eras when time itself becomes an event. Rumors moved among the thousands of people like rustling waves: “The Dzerzhinsky Division is headed this way,” “There’s a column of tanks on Komsomolsky,” “The ‘shoot to kill’ order has been given.” Barricades appeared and grew out of nothing.

Benches, newspaper kiosks, boards, pipes, cars, buses, streetlamps, grates—they remained in their places, they had a precise function. Suddenly, as if someone had looked at the city with a different view, the view of a revolutionary, a fighter, things began to move on their own, forming obstructions, lying down and dovetailing beneath memorial plaques commemorating the first revolution, the battles of 1905.

The White House, as the House of Soviets of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was known, hearkening back to the history of the Soviet regime, was built in a “dormant” historical zone, with the Barricades movie theater, the Barrikadnaya metro station. Like an enormous paperweight, it held down the crumbling ground of Krasnaya Presnya, which was already squashed by a high-rise, the house on Uprising Square.

The power of names turned out to be longer-lived than the power of stone, and the memory of the uprising, encoded in monuments and street names, responded as soon as it was hailed. Druzhinnikovskaya Street, named in honor of worker combatants, Shmitovsky Alley, named for the revolutionary factory owner, the Trekhgornaya Mills, where Lenin was elected as a deputy; the sculptures by the 1905 Street metro station—a woman catching the bridle of a Cossack’s horse—the sculpture by the White House—a worker in an apron picking up a dropped rifle; symbols of uprising, protected and multiplied, were gathered here.

Volunteers were gathering at Presnya River again, 1905 was being repeated, but on a larger scale; barricades grew around the White House, and this was an inversion of history—the House of Soviets was turning into a bastion of resistance to the Soviet regime.

But just a few hundred meters from the White House people sat in cafés, strolled, shopped; men’s shoes were delivered to the store on 1905 Street, and the line for them looked more tight-knit than the ranks of defenders of the barricades. From inside the defense rings, the White House looked like the epicenter of events, but if you moved just a bit to the side, it began to seem that the White House and everything around it was suspended in midair and taking place with no grounding whatsoever; part of the capital had plunged into a different dimension.

I found its border as I walked down the street, the ground beneath my feet was oscillating slightly, as if predicting a coming storm. In the next block there was only the trembling caused by the metro trains traveling near the surface. You could choose one or the other register of perception, but there was no smooth transition between them; an invisible line divided the city.

That night by the White House people sang songs around bonfires, and dozens like me sought something among the heaps and smoke, among the arriving crowds; men in civilian clothing with guns appeared, attentively surveying the scene—who were they, who sent them? The more people, the harder it was to understand who was one of us and who wasn’t, and whether there was an “us” and “them” or whether it was all a masquerade, a phantasmagoria, that there weren’t any foes or any clear antagonists but only the blood-raising attraction of major events.

Okunenko was in charge of building a barricade at the entrance to the White House; he was giving orders to three dozen people, most of whom were older than he was, but he was more energetic, more precise, he gave smart and accurate directions on where to put what, where to place the concrete plate, the dozen benches, the tracks; it seemed he had a special mind that could easily combine mutually exclusive objects—plates, benches, tracks, concrete flower boxes, and furniture—into a sturdy construction that would be hard to break and move.

Okunenko, matured, electrified by the events, stood on the top of his barricades, indicating “left, left, more to the left” to men dragging a lamppost knocked down by a bulldozer.

The barricade was finished; I expected Okunenko to tell his comrades to move on to the next one. But he got down, lit a cigarette, spoke with his subordinates and stepped away, and it was no longer clear whether he had commanded anyone or it just happened that the men building the barricade took him for a manager of elemental construction.

He walked among the bonfires and barricades, no longer the clever and efficient builder—he had turned into a concerned simpleton, for whom everything was new and interesting. He looked inside camping kettles, respectfully studied the armature prepared for hand-to-hand combat, stopped near people arguing, smiled to a pair of policemen with automatic guns, struck a match for a soldier’s cigarette, and gave disorganized civilians a pitying look.

Okunenko had gestures and objects for every situation, like an improvising magician; he did unnoticed work, helping, joining, supporting, advising, approving, sharing cigarettes—whatever it took to make the crowd more focused and thicker. He made several circles around the White House and later that night moved toward the Arbat; I followed him, and I saw a common thread in the patchwork of events.

Parked in the courtyards near the Arbat, which looked empty from the sidewalk, were cars with men in suits, doing nothing, and heavyset men were smoking in dark doorways; no one looked into the faces of passersby, no one stopped anyone, everyone pretended to be there by accident.

I almost lost Okunenko a few times, but his way of moving made him easy to spot. Both the military and the police—they were the ones smoking in doorways—were tense, and many must have understood that the symbols on their uniforms would soon be meaningless; they stood listening to their radios, awaiting belated orders, but Okunenko delighted in this night, he was practically dancing, sensing that there would be no orders given.

He sat inside a Moskvich car for a few minutes, then jumped out and ran back to the White House, to the intersection of Novy Arbat and the Garden Ring Road; in the quiet, well-lit courtyards where sounds seemed to fall from the sky, the distant rumble of military machines grew stronger.

The infantry vehicles came down the Garden Ring Road from the side of the zoo, along the old parade route.

The mechanical reptiles crawled along, warping the asphalt with their caterpillar tracks. They represented the ancient threat of nature, which had created shells, spines, claws, and teeth; the teeth were for opening up the shells, the spines to protect the neck from the teeth, claws to get to the soft belly, and armor plates to protect the belly; behind all that power was the narrow brain of the predator, its tiny eyes peering out from deep inside the skull.

The city rose in buildings, spread in lanes, glittered with lit shop windows, signs, kiosks, and street signs, and the armored vehicles were moving in, waiting for the order to destroy everything, to find and destroy the sources of the rebellion. The exit from the Novy Arbat tunnel was blocked by trolleybuses, as if the civilian urban technology had come out to stop its crazed relatives; the boxy blue trolleys with their snaillike antennae huddled together, blocking the tunnel’s throat; it was clear that everything would be decided here, at this intersection.

The armored vehicles drove into the tunnel and crawled out, pushing aside the trolleybuses, which the crowd had moved toward the army machines. Above on the overpass, a long-haired man was trying to light a Molotov cocktail, but the matches kept burning out; Okunenko grabbed his hand—I thought he was going to hit him, but no, he struck a match while protecting it from the wind with a graceful gesture, and the bottle flew in a basketball arc, flames shot up on the armored car into the sky and seeped into the ventilation holes. The truck swerved, another bottle was thrown from the overpass, two more armored vehicles broke through the trolleybuses; there was a mash up of men and metal and then everything stopped—someone had been crushed to death.

I lost him there by the tunnel; I went back to the spot where Okunenko came either to report or to get instructions, but the cars were gone, the courtyard empty, and there was nothing but butts in the doorways. I spent the next two days rushing around Moscow, trying to understand where the main events were taking place.

Thursday night I was on Lubyanka Square; the pedestrian flow brought me there at the moment when the mountain climber had reached the neck of the secret police boss Dzerzhinsky’s statue and was slipping a noose attached to a crane around it; I was tired and dizzy, and I thought it was all a dream—how can you hang a monument?

Next to me by the wall of the Polytechnical Museum several men, dressed identically in civilian clothes, obviously KGB officers, were smoking; they stood and watched calmly as their chief was dragged off his pedestal.

Observing them, I noticed their colleagues, leaving by a side entrance and mixing with the crowd. On the sidewalk you could still tell they were KGB, but then they became faces, sleeves, hats, shoulders, and heads in the general crowd, vanishing without a trace, without adding a single person but raising the density of the living mass. Probably later you could find them in photographs, chanting about freedom, raising their arms, embracing neighbors, waving their fists at “Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky.”

Beneath the windows of the KGB, Lubyanka agents were enjoying the overthrow of the Lubyanka god; they had developed the art of mimicry to such a degree that it was stronger than their dutiful respect. I had thought that some general had given orders to the surveillance service, but orders no longer had their former power, and the surveillance agents had changed into civilian garb and left, beginning their private lives from that moment on.

The moment was joyful and partially comical—albeit with a note of danger; the spies were gone and the moment when they could have been identified and counted was gone, too.

The statue of Dzerzhinsky fell across the square, the soft and heavy thud of metal on asphalt blocking the roar of the crowd; and at that very moment Ivan came out of the museum.

I was still trying to figure out who was coming toward me so headlong, as if he wanted to arrest me, when he was just three steps away; he was practically running, like an actor performing in two plays on the same day, buttoning his jacket on the go; he did not recognize me as he went past to open the door of an empty car, parked right there; the car came alive, flashed its headlights, the driver, who had been hiding or sleeping, appeared; the rear lights drew red looping lines in the twilight and disappeared into a lane.

I went into the museum, up the empty stairs to the roof; there were no workers or guards, just a toy robot’s blinking lights on one floor; the door to the roof was wide open.

From above, the dark heads of the crowd looked like black caviar, a viscous mass that had filled the square, a strange dish for gourmets of this sort of spectacle. I stood on the roof in front of a barrel of caviar, an accidental guest at someone else’s banquet, and I expected cutlery to appear from the sky for the real diners prepared for the feast, for gluttony, to devour as much as possible without even tasting it.

Moscow had spent the previous years in lines; there were fewer individual pedestrians on the streets than people standing queuing up, looking at the back of another’s head. At any one moment, sometimes even at night, a family member was in line, sometimes people passed along their number to somebody else, writing it down on somebody’s hand, and my school pals and I tried not to wash them off—number 87, number 113—showing off what long lines we had been in.

The ability to form a chain was a skill, a form of existence; there were lines for lines: you had to stand in one for the right to sign up for another.

And this was just such a line spread out over Lubyanka Square, taking up its entire area and splashing out into the lanes, where human currents were pouring into the big sea of people standing in line for the future. If I had been in the street, I would have wholeheartedly rejoiced, kissing and hugging strangers; but from the roof I could see the waves of emotions and unstable feelings traveling over the square; I was happy to see them born and grieved over their quick death.

The year before I had worked as a laborer on an expedition in Kazakhstan. We traveled across a steppe where half-wild horses lived; the magnificent, free creatures galloped across an ideal plane, animals that had never seen a tree, house, fence, or corral, born for an unbounded plain. To me they weren’t animals, not flesh and blood, but spirits of motion.

A month later our expedition came back the same way—there were thousands of dead horses in the steppe; there had been a pestilence.

I was astonished by the speed with which a heavy mass of beauty became a mass of dead meat; the stench was unbearable, and it was impossible to believe it came from bodies that I had seen so recently not as bodies but as spiritual symbols.

I could not believe that beauty could die this way, it should have had a different death, pure and incorporeal. But the sun had turned the steppe into a rupturing abscess, and small predators scurried around the horse carcasses, foxes intoxicated by the abundance of meat were not afraid of cars and got run over, the horse plague had overwhelmed everything, and vultures circled in the sky, hypnotized by the sight, not knowing where to land, which carcass, for there were thousands of carcasses. This chewing, burping, grunting, and flying horde, consisting of teeth, beaks, and bellies, made a sound like the quiet buzz of a circular saw.

On the roof, where the emotional wave did not reach, spreading horizontally and sending throbbing sounds upward which resembled the tide, I realized that this communality was held together by short-lived emotions. Disintegration awaited it, the decay of feelings that, like the meat of victims of a cataclysm, will clutter the space, and in that environment ideas with the air of deterioration would form and carrion-eating creatures would be born. The physical sensation of feelings doomed to an early death moved me away from the edge of the roof.

It was time to go down.

I got home late; Grandmother Tanya went to sleep without waiting up for me; the high moon filled her room with a weak emulation of the blue glow of the lamp she used to radiate herself with long ago. I went to my room; the light was on—I thought she had gone in and forgotten to turn off the lamp.

On the table, in the lamplight, among last year’s textbooks I had forgotten to turn in, lay a large book, the size of a barnyard ledger, in a brown binding, with neat stiches of waxed thread. Next to it was Grandmother’s porcelain statuette, the three frogs “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing”; it seemed to me that they were no longer covering their mouth, eyes, and ears.

Frightened, I went to check on Grandmother Tanya: after writing that, even though I didn’t know what that was, she could die, maybe she had lingered on in order to complete this work.

Barricades and bonfires still filled the city’s squares; shells and bullets were still loaded in weapons; and the book—had Grandmother really been writing it for five years, hiding it from everyone?—seemed like a kind of a weapon, too.

Grandmother Tanya was breathing, breathing more evenly than usual, more calmly, as if her illness had left her. I envied her, she seemed so at peace, complete and finished; I wished that someday I would lie as calmly, and I lightly touched her gray hair, thinning with every year; the planet of another person’s mind, weightless in sleep, rested on the pillow.

Carefully, I turned the heavy cover and leafed through the pages, not reading the words, recognizing the colors of the ink—I had seen these pens on Grandmother Tanya’s desk—recognizing the various forms of her penmanship, the various stages of illness, when pain directed her fingers and the letters grew bigger, childishly disobedient, and then diminished in size when the pain weakened.

Here were the first lines, the first sentences. But what was it—had she decided to write a novel instead of a memoir, a novel stylized as a family chronicle, invented from the first letter to the last, kindly and edifying? Why fiction, why artistic invention, when I had thirsted for truth, even if it were meager, but still truth?

“The history of our family goes back to the XIV century,” Grandmother wrote. “Our family had military men, heads of the nobility, priests and metropolitans, generals and naval men, revolutionaries and philosophers, officers tried in the Decembrist plot and terrorists in the Socialist Revolutionary organization. Your great-grandfather, about whom you know nothing, was a nobleman and military doctor. And you, my grandson, are the seventeenth generation in our line.”

“You, my grandson.” It was only on the third reading that I understood this was not a stylistic turn and that Grandmother truly was addressing me. I was the seventeenth generation of the line.

A swarm of dead men, previously invisible, appeared and turned into the rustle of August foliage, into moonlight, as if they had seeped one by one through a crack in time, into the joint of eras, awakened by the soldiers’ boots stomping on cobblestones, the fall of monuments, the rumble of tanks, and the din of the crowd.

The wind picked up and trees trembled in the dark, and I thought, honestly sensing my own smallness, that it would be better to destroy Grandmother’s manuscript and throw myself from the balcony; no one would understand, but living with this was more than I could bear. I had been counting on a personal truth, a small, manageable piece of it, and I had been given too much.

Mechanically, I reached out in a farewell gesture and touched an apple; we brought them from the dacha and kept them in boxes on the balcony. Sharp, angry, boiling with an excess of flavor, the juice burned my mouth; I discovered that I was like an animal, chewing and choking on that apple, enormous, juicy—the harvest had been a good one that August, the tree branches cracked under the weight of the fruit, even though we propped them up—and the desire to live seethed and raged within me.

I was to be born anew.