It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter

When I was a child, what scared me the most was the end of the world. I was afraid of change in general. It seemed intuitive that changes would largely be for the worse—changes for the better were not likely. I was surrounded by nice things, and it was nice being among them. In the morning the sun filtered in through the bedroom windows, which faced east, and lit up the orange drapes. It was a nice sun and they were nice drapes. My nice grandfather pointed out the nice stars in the evening sky and, in the spring, the budding leaves—which were also, as you may have guessed, nice. Summers at the dacha, I would wake up in a joyfully expect­ant state of ease, and my friend Nadya would come over, an inev­itable deck of cards in her pocket. Even then it was obvious that it would be best never to grow up. “Someday you’ll understand that happiness is anticipation,” my father said once.

One of the adults I knew said that children could have a kind of complex consisting of a fear of change and the desire for every­thing to remain as it is. I certainly had that complex. And the end of the world was the manifestation of the most frightening change of all. There were also some terrible facts of a cosmic nature to consider. My grandfather had told me about entropy, and I understood that chaos increases exponentially, and the uni­verse is moving toward its death. Then, at school, we were shown a movie about the impending death of the sun. There were simu­lated shots of how the sun would become huge and red, then parts of it would start falling to Earth, then Earth would catch on fire, and then the sun would finally die. After the movie ended, just to be sure, I went to my teacher and asked: “Lyubov Mikhailovna, when will the sun die?” Lyubov Mikhailovna apparently didn’t know and asked another teacher, who said it wouldn’t be for a long time, not for millions of years, and I was somewhat calmed by this temporary reprieve.

I had another reprieve, too, though this one wasn’t as long. As a very young child I’d heard about a prophecy made by Nostradamus, according to which the end of the world would come about in 1999, brought on by a star called Nemesis, mean­ing “vengeance.” There was an exact date: August 11. So I counted the years: in 1990 I told myself, “It won’t happen for a while, a whole nine years,” in 1992, “a whole seven years,” and so on. Another time, somebody having frightened me yet again, I asked my grandfather what he thought about the prophecies of Nostradamus, and he told me that everything would be as the Lord God wills.

Another version of the end of the world was the Second Coming. Also as a very young child, I asked my mother whether there was a God, and Mama told me there wasn’t. Some time went by, and I asked Mama again whether there was a God, and she told me there was, because in the meantime she’d become a believer. During perestroika a lot of literature appeared on the shelves that hadn’t been available before; Mama started reading all kinds of esoterica and as a result of her reading came to the conclusion that God existed after all. Well, fine—if He exists, He exists. Thus I also became a believer. Once, Mama and I were taking a stroll on the avenue, walking west by the neighborhood library, and the sun was setting, the sky was flooded with brilliant crimson-gold light, and Mama said, “It looks just like Christ in His Glory is about to appear in these clouds.” So, overall, every­thing pointed to the end of the world happening any minute now. It was basically closing in on all sides.

One summer at the dacha, Sanya started teaching me and my girlfriends magic. Sanya and I had a romance going. He said that the world would end next year, the year 2000, and that the final war would happen then, too. We were going to fight in this war, all of us together: me and Sanya, Yurik, Nadya, and Nyuta. Later I’d learn that Russians have been expecting the end of the world and the final war for hundreds of years, in the most varied, wild, and ridiculous sectarian variations. So in the nineties we had this, too. The war we were going to fight in was, for some rea­son, the war in Afghanistan, which really hadn’t ended. But at the same time, it was going to be the war that marked the beginning of a new world, in which Earth would merge with another planet, its magical double, home to dragons, elves, and gnomes. And at the same time it would be the final battle of Armageddon. We were all preparing to really go to this war and to die there; Sanya had already ordered special military uniforms for us. Sanya badly wanted to join the army, but they wouldn’t take him, because he started telling the admissions committee that he did magic. They didn’t believe him and said, “Make something happen, then.” He made it so that one of the women on the committee got a headache, but they still wouldn’t believe him, and gave him a diagnosis of schizophrenia. My grandparents had no idea that I was going to go to war and die, I couldn’t tell them that, but I felt extremely sorry for them, and for all my nice, familiar, and beloved things. I began to see them as already lost forever: here they were, my nice washbasin, some nice bushes of mead­owsweet, my nice grandfather watching TV, my nice cat who’d come out to lie in the sun. Each day I lived through became, for me, my last day at home before the war.

I was thirteen, and it was a nice summer. Sanya and I went on walks in the woods and once accidentally sat on an anthill; we rode around on his old motorcycle and I burned the platforms of my boots putting my feet on the exhaust pipes; at night we sat between the roots of an ancient, enormous oak, drinking Black Monk wine; Sanya came to see me after work (during the sum­mer he worked in the village as a plumber), and hid behind my stove from some friends of his who were looking for him, Gapon and Master, about whom there was a joke going around that they’d drunk a little too much brake fluid. Jealous, he’d come along when I went to visit lanky Andrei. It was a beautiful sum­mer of waiting for the war and the end of the world.

Then I went back to the city, to school, to the eighth grade, and Sanya promised to visit me in a month and to call, but time went on and he did not appear—and by late October I found out that he had actually been in the city for a while, had apparently dumped me, and was now dating Nyuta, though by that point he had already half dumped Nyuta and was with Nata, a school friend of Nadya’s. Such was the end of my first love and that strange, unforgettable fairy tale, and also the end of my child­hood and the world.

I began taking a lot of walks by myself, skipping school, writ­ing poems, and it was astounding to me that everything in the world went on as before. Up until the very beginning of spring I waited for the war to begin. I started seeing Yurik, who was officially Nadya’s boyfriend, just to stay in the friend group, so they’d take me to war with them. Yurik told me that in our past lives we had all fought in Afghanistan and died there. I had been a military pilot and crashed my plane, Nadya was a nurse, Nyuta was a sniper, and not one of us had survived. The world I knew, my childhood world, continued to dissolve: I looked around our tiny kitchenette with its red-and-blue linoleum, where I’d sit and talk on the phone with Yurik, and at the painted roosters on the serving boards, the old Lysva electric stove, and I thought about my grandparents, who sat in the next room distressed by these calls with Yurik; I thought about my entire life up until then, perishing before my eyes, how Mama and I had gone to Sochi when I was ten, how I once had a caterpillar that I fed rose hip petals. All around me, things were terribly vulnerable, they were melting away and crying out to me for help, but I had to accept that by going to war, I would destroy them—had already destroyed them, in fact, by making the decision to go. I was in ter­rible despair, because I really had made that decision, and it had strained my soul to its limit. That fall and winter I said goodbye to everything. I wandered by frozen rivers and dark trees, rode the subway aimlessly, hung out at the train station from which we usually left to go to the dacha, walking the platforms, and went a few times to the neighborhood of high-rises by the bay where I had lived for the first three years of my life, to throw myself from the roof of one of those buildings, but it was either the case that the entrance to the roof was locked, or that I couldn’t even get into the building, or that I stopped wanting to do it. At night I lis­tened to the radio on my headphones, to rock music, and I wrote poems. There was something new hatching inside of me, tearing my heart to bits, but it couldn’t quite hatch all the way. Among the concrete fences of industrial districts I wandered in darkness, hoping that I’d be raped and murdered by some drunk. Around this time I started drinking a bottle or two of Baltika 9 beer a day.

Spring came, and nobody went to war. We said it had been rescheduled, maybe, or made up some other reason. Then Nadya broke up with Yurik, Sanya broke up with Nata, and gradually we all stopped seeing each other. Nata, whom I saw a few more times, started working as a salesgirl at the market and living with her alternating boyfriends; after ninth grade Nadya studied sewing and pattern-making, worked at a photography studio, became an accountant, got baptized, lived for a long time with a common-law husband, then married another guy and had a son; Nyuta initially shaved her head bald, dropped out of nursing school, hung out all over the city with all kinds of people, hitchhiked around the country, and managed to get diagnosed with “dromomania,” wanderlust syndrome—but then, pretty early, around eighteen, she got married and had a child, then was divorced, and now works as a surgical nurse. Yurik was divorced several times, quit drinking for his health, and now assembles furniture; Sanya, too, got married and then divorced, and also works somewhere, and God bless him, hon­estly, but I still remember how we lay in the pine forest holding hands, and there was so much that bound us together that even now, for me, it belongs in the category of things that can’t be spoken of. After all, all of us, ages thirteen to nineteen, died in the war that never came.

I’ve stopped being scared of the end of the world. I’ve begun to love it. I’ve come to know its ways: when it comes, it passes by very quickly, and all that’s left for you to do is shout something senseless in its wake, and when it doesn’t come, some people dread it while others expect it and believe that when it arrives, they’ll be able to exist within it forever, but then they find themselves in front of the TV with a bottle of beer. It comes and doesn’t come simultaneously. And you look on in astonish­ment as the whole world crumbles, but the most frightening thing about that is that everything stays the way it was. The same trees, streets, houses, people. And a child’s fear that the world will end is just a joke when you understand that there’s not going to be any more end of the world, nobody’s coming to unlock the crystal jewel box of the world in all its unbearable eternity. All my little life I tried to protect the world, to save it, to keep it from dissolv­ing like clouds and seafoam, but the world tricked me and turned out to be solid, quite solid.

My father once said, “Happiness is anticipation.” To which I might add: happiness is the anticipation of the end of the world. I know now that the end of the world is the border and the break, the fulfillment and the miracle, and its function, like the function of borders generally, is to exist and not exist at the same time; to happen, so that you give yourself over to it and perish, and never to happen, and nothing else would ever be enough. The end is not outside but at the very heart of the experience of the world, and Apocalypse is only one of its names, since the end of the world is also its beginning. I want to live at the heart of the end of the world. I continue to learn to love it. To recognize it under new and different names in the company of new people, to be on time for it, to work hard to expand it over the space of life. And no matter how oppressive the solidity of the world becomes, and how var­iously all of us, the young magicians of that summer, meet our deaths, all of us are—or at least I am—a little bored in the world, because after the floods ended, boredom came, and “the Queen, the Witch who lights her coals in the clay pot, will never want to tell us what she knows, and which we do not know.”