The Boy on the Bridge

by Natalie Standiford

  “Oh! I forgot to give you your Women’s Day gift yesterday.” He went into the other room and returned with a small package wrapped in coarse gray paper. He’d decorated the paper with flowers drawn in blue pencil.

  “You didn’t have to do that.” She touched the flowers.

  “You might not like it. Open it.”

  Laura opened the package. Inside was a matryoshka, one of those nesting dolls that could be found in any Berioska Shop or souvenir stand. But this doll was not the usual smiling babushka in a head scarf. It was a close likeness of Laura. Laura as a matryoshka doll. Alyosha had painted her onto the doll, from her straight brown hair to her sheepskin coat and heavy rubber boots. Every detail was exactly right.

  Laura opened her mouth. But she couldn’t speak.

  “There’s more,” Alyosha said. “Look inside.”

  She pulled off the top of the Laura doll. Nestled inside was a smaller doll, a little guy with brown eyes, brown hair, and a familiar blue parka that didn’t look warm enough for winter. She gasped. It was Alyosha.

  Alyosha bounced on his toes and rubbed his hands together. “Keep going…”

  She pulled off the top of the Alyosha doll and there, resting at the bottom, were two keys on a Fiat keychain.

  “What is this?”

  “Keys to my apartment. So you can come over anytime. And if I’m at work or out shopping, you can just wait for me to come home.”

  She was stunned into silence. She didn’t know what to say.

  She tried to imagine Josh knowing her face and clothes so well he could paint a perfect likeness of her onto a doll from memory. She tried to imagine him giving her the keys to his apartment, telling her to come over anytime.

  All she could see were his eyes like slits, smoking a joint, not meeting her gaze.

  “You trust me with the keys to your apartment?”

  He laughed. “Are you planning to rob me? There’s nothing to steal!”

  “No, but your —” She searched for the Russian word for privacy, but there wasn’t one. She let the sentence hang unfinished.

  “Privacy?” he said in English.

  “Yes! You read my mind.”

  “I don’t need privacy from you.”

  Maybe Olga wasn’t such a threat after all.

  “Thank you.” She put the doll back together and leaned across the table for a kiss. “This is the most beautiful gift anyone has ever given me.”

  And it really was.

  * * *

  She had an essay due for Grammar class that day. She scribbled it on the metro while she rode from Avtovo to school.

  Family Traditions and Holidays in America

  By Laura Reid

  I recently enjoyed my first celebration of International Women’s Day. My hand is practically black and blue from being kissed all day. I wish we had this holiday in America. The closest thing we have is probably Valentine’s Day. On Valentine’s Day boys and girls give cards and chocolates to each other. It’s fun in elementary school but when you get older somehow it always turns out to be a big disappointment. American boys almost never kiss your hand. And they have no idea how to behave on Valentine’s Day. Instead of giving delightful cards and gifts, most of them shrug and say things like “I don’t like holidays” or “Valentine’s Day is just a corporate plot to sell greeting cards” or “It’s not my thing.” That leaves it up to the girls — one’s friends, sisters, mother — to make Valentine’s Day festive by engaging in the ritual of mass gorging on candy. It’s nice to get a card from your mother, I suppose, but it doesn’t exactly set your heart racing.

  My first year of college, my roommate bought a big jar and filled it with chocolate hearts and jelly beans for Valentine’s Day. She and I and our girlfriends across the hall kept reaching into the jar for candy and saying, “I can’t stop eating this candy! Someone stop me!” Finally, a boy who was studying math with my roommate got fed up. He said, “Let me help you girls out,” and then he picked up the big jar of candy and dumped it all out the window. “No!!!” we all screamed. “Why did you do that?”

  “You said you wanted to stop eating it,” the cruel boy said. “So I stopped you. Now we can get back to studying math.”

  I ask you, is that any way to celebrate a holiday about love and sugar? Would a Russian man throw his women friends’ candy out the window on Women’s Day? I highly doubt it. Unless he was drunk.

  The End.

  She didn’t have time to proofread it before she turned it in. She’d missed Translation and was five minutes late for Grammar as it was.

  Karen looked up with relief as she slipped into the classroom and took the seat next to her. Galina Petrovna, their Grammar professor, didn’t look so pleased.

  “Laura Reid, you missed class on Friday and now you’re late. Do you realize that your grade depends on attendance, promptness, and participation?”

  “I’m sorry, Galina Petrovna. I’ll try to do better.”

  “Have you done the homework?” Galina Petrovna glared at her as if she expected the answer to be no. Her expression didn’t soften when Laura tore three scribbled pages from her notebook and turned them in.

  Karen wrote We’re back in high school in her notebook and tilted it so Laura could see.

  “You lose a grade for sloppiness,” the instructor continued. “And that’s just to start.” She dropped the pages on her desk. “We’re going over the exercises on page thirty-five of the text. Continue, Maureen Binkowski.”

  Binky read the lesson on verbs of motion. Karen scribbled another note. Where the f were you all night?

  Laura wrote back, Later.

  * * *

  “You lucked out.” Karen pushed a tray along the cafeteria counter, sighing at the unappetizing lunch food: a blob of gristly meat, milk soup with scraps of bread in it, and cabbage. “Nina came back from a Women’s Day party a little tipsy and passed out early. I mussed up your bed before she woke up this morning so she’d think you slept in it last night.”

  “You’re the best.” Laura took a roll and a glass of milky coffee.

  “Then I told her you left early for class. Like that would ever happen.” Karen reached for a coffee and looked hard at Laura’s face. “You are blissed out.”

  Laura nodded at a table in the corner of the cafeteria and they sat down. “He said he loved me.”

  “Alyosha?”

  “Of course Alyosha.”

  “And — ?”

  “I think I love him too,” Laura said.

  “Laura, no…”

  “Why not? He’s wonderful!”

  “Yeah, he’s great, but are you sure you can trust him? He’s got a huge ulterior motive.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “You’re not the only one who thinks she’s in love. Some ballerina’s got Dan wrapped around her bony little finger, Clara has fallen for a dissident folk singer, and Mark Calletti, world’s biggest geek, is in love with three different girls. And some guy proposed to me on the street the other day.”

  “So?”

  “So, don’t you think it’s a little suspicious that we are so irresistible to Russians? That within a couple of months half the group is practically engaged? Remember what Stein and Durant told us at orientation?”

  Laura hesitated. She remembered, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought about this before. Many Russians were eager to leave the Soviet Union, and the easiest way out was marriage to a foreigner. She knew.

  But then she remembered Alyosha on the bed, listening to her read, and then not listening to her read….

  The night she’d spent with him did not feel like a lie.

  “Laura?”

  “Okay, it’s a little suspicious. For everybody else. Alyosha is different.”

  “Laura, come on. Keep your head. You know what’s happening here.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Laura insisted.

  “It always is.”

  “He hasn’t asked me to marry
him —”

  “— yet —”

  “— and I’m not planning on marrying anyone. But how can I make friends with anyone here if I’m always suspicious of their motives?”

  Karen sighed, releasing a little steam from her argument. “You can’t, I guess. But, listen — you can’t stay over at his place all night anymore. You got lucky this time, but next time Nina’s going to report you, and you don’t know what will happen then. You could get kicked out, or maybe they’ll just put somebody on your tail. They’ll find Alyosha, and he’s the one who’ll pay the price.”

  A sobering thought. She imagined a man in a suit knocking on Alyosha’s door, going through all his Western treasures, his books, his records, his clothes — just having those things was enough to make him suspect — and taking him away somewhere, never to be heard from again. Like the man Alyosha saw as a boy, arrested in the Summer Garden. His life ruined.

  She didn’t want to be responsible for ruining anyone’s life.

  “I’ll be careful,” she promised. “From now on.”

  This was how she knew she loved Alyosha: She never found herself weighing his good qualities versus the bad qualities — his sexy wide mouth, his milky skin, the roundness of his fingertips and the firm yet gentle way they gripped her hand, versus … what? She couldn’t come up with anything bad. If it was a part of him, she loved it. But that wasn’t the point. She didn’t love his good qualities. She loved him. Just him. All of him.

  And she sensed that he felt the same way about her. That he wasn’t judging her the way Josh did — did she look hot that day? Was she nagging him? Had she said something funny? Was she getting on his nerves? Alyosha didn’t seem to think that way. He just liked her.

  Loved her. That’s what he’d said. He loved her.

  That made her love him even more.

  If only she could see him all the time. But she had to go to class, had to sleep in the dorm, had to live her student life most of the time. She wandered around the city as the ice began to thaw and tried to remember how it had looked to her when she first arrived. Dingy, dreary, lifeless … Leningrad had seemed like the most unromantic place on earth. Even the name — Leningrad — sounded utilitarian, unromantic.

  But now the city had been transformed. Nothing bloomed yet; it was early spring, the mounds of dirty snow were shrinking, the ice on the Neva was breaking up and floating out to sea, but the trees showed only the slightest sign of budding, and people still waddled down the streets in their heavy coats and felt boots.

  No, it wasn’t spring that had transformed the city, but something else — her own eyes. Where once they’d seen decay, waste, and grim gray skies, they now saw beauty, history, and a moody atmosphere, a sense of mystery. The palace walls of eggshell blue and butter yellow, the gleaming golden domes of old churches, the mesmerizing classical pattern on the gate of the Summer Garden, the statues of horses and men that seemed to come alive in the dusk, the fog drifting off a winding canal, a melancholy glance between two girls her age … To her this was no longer Leningrad. It was St. Petersburg.

  Yes. That had a nicer ring to it.

  St. Petersburg. The most romantic city in the world … she thought as she passed the Sailors Monument on the University Embankment, the statue of Peter and his horse, ready to jump off the rock they were perched on, the winding canals adorned with statues, the house where the poet Pushkin had lived, the narrow streets Dostoyevsky had paced, courting madness. It was all beautiful, and she wanted to walk the streets for hours, do nothing but look at everything and dream, when she wasn’t with Alyosha.

  But of course, she hadn’t come to Leningrad to dream. She was supposed to go to class, to read and study, to write papers and learn the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t read, couldn’t do her homework, couldn’t concentrate, could barely manage a coherent conversation. All she could do was wait for bedtime to come so she’d finally be free to lie in the dark and dream about Alyosha.

  * * *

  The next time they met, Alyosha took her to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s apartment, now a museum, on Kuznechnyi Lane. “This is where he lived after he was released from prison in Siberia,” Alyosha told her. “It’s where he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, and where he died.”

  The apartment was dark and gloomy. Laura tried to picture the great writer sitting at the massive desk, scribbling novels by candlelight on the long winter nights, remembering — or trying to forget? — the horrors of Siberia.

  They looked at his books, at the notes he wrote to his daughter and left on the dining-room table, at the cigarettes he had rolled, ready to be smoked.

  They left the museum and started down the lane. Alyosha took her hand. “Want to see Raskolnikov’s house?”

  “You mean it’s a real place? But he’s a fictional character….”

  “Yes, but all the settings in Crime and Punishment are real. The police station, Sonia’s house, the pawnbroker’s house —”

  Laura shuddered. Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, killed an old woman pawnbroker just to see if he could, to prove he was a superior man. He didn’t get away with it, of course — that was the Punishment part of the story.

  Raskolnikov’s house was a nondescript apartment building on Grazhdanskaya Street. They went inside and up the dark stairwell. “Raskolnikov lived in an attic garret,” Alyosha whispered. The walls of the stairwell were covered with graffiti: Raskolnikov lives in each of us. Raskolnikov, kill my neighbor. Raskolnikov was here.

  “This is what I came for,” she whispered so softly she wasn’t sure if Alyosha heard her. Here was the Russia she’d loved since childhood, the dark, violent, passionate place where the life of the mind and spirit were as real as the life of the body. She’d found it at last. She squeezed Alyosha’s hand in the dark.

  The garret door was closed and locked — someone lived there now. Laura touched the wood. Beyond that door had once lived a tortured soul. He was fictional, but he felt real.

  “Should we knock?” Alyosha asked.

  Laura shook her head. “I couldn’t bear to see some … I don’t know, office worker or something … living in Raskolnikov’s garret.”

  “Some low-level Party functionary,” Alyosha teased.

  “Or the reporter who covers ice hockey for Pravda.”

  They laughed quietly. Back outside, it was snowing. They continued the tour, passing the murdered pawnbroker’s house, which somehow rattled with horror even though it looked ordinary enough, and the canal-side building where Sonia, the saintly prostitute who redeemed Raskolnikov’s soul, was supposed to have lived.

  “Are you cold?” Alyosha asked. “Let’s go somewhere and warm up.”

  They went to a café. It was bustling and crowded. As they wove their way through the packed tables, Laura spotted a familiar curly head in the corner: Dan.

  “There’s one of my friends,” she told Alyosha, pulling him by the hand.

  Dan was sitting with a fine-boned girl, black haired, pale-skinned, with birdlike hands. “Laura!” he exclaimed when he saw her. “Sit with us.”

  Speaking Russian as a courtesy to Dan’s friend, Laura introduced Alyosha, and Dan introduced the girl he was with as Lena. “She’s a dancer with the Kirov.”

  “In the corps,” she said modestly, but her tone was not modest at all. She and Alyosha eyed each other warily as he and Laura sat down.

  “Alyosha’s a painter,” Laura said.

  “Oh? Are you a member of the Artists Union?” Lena asked.

  Alyosha shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “No.”

  “We’re sharing a bottle of champagne.” Dan snatched the bottle from its ice bucket. “Or what passes for champagne around here. Want some?”

  “Sure,” Laura said.

  “I’ll have tea,” Alyosha said.

  Dan signaled for a waiter, who ignored him. “Legendary Soviet service,” he joked. When the waiter came at last, he or
dered tea for Alyosha and two extra champagne glasses “in case you change your mind.”

  “How can you say you’re an artist if you’re not an official member of the union?” Lena pressed.

  “I make art,” Alyosha said. “Isn’t that the definition of an artist?”

  “Yes, but any child can draw a picture,” Lena said. “That doesn’t necessarily make him an artist.”

  “Alyosha’s work is beautiful.” Laura couldn’t understand why there was so much tension between them, when, as far as she knew, they’d never met before.

  “I’d love to see it sometime,” Dan said. “Where have you been all day, Laura? I didn’t see you in class this afternoon.”

  “We went to the Dostoyevsky museum. Did Raisa Ivanovna notice I was gone?”

  “Of course she noticed. If you’re not careful, you’re going to fail Translation.”

  Laura gave a happy shrug. She couldn’t care less about anything in the world than she did about Translation class.

  “Lena’s dancing in Giselle tonight,” Dan said. “Want to come? I can get a couple more tickets — right, Lena?”

  Lena’s nod was cold, the slightest tilt of the head. Laura glanced at Alyosha, who said, “Thanks, but not tonight.”

  Laura gave Dan an apologetic look; she could tell he was as baffled by the Russians’ behavior as she was. “Maybe another night.”

  “Anytime. Just let me know.”

  Alyosha plucked at her sleeve. “We should go.”

  “But you haven’t had your tea yet.”

  Alyosha rose. “I don’t want tea. Let’s go.”

  “All right.” Laura stole a sip of Dan’s champagne, then stood up to leave. “Nice to meet you, Lena. See you back at Number Six, Dan.”

  Alyosha was already halfway out of the café when she caught up to him. “What was that all about? Why were you in such a hurry to leave?”

  “I didn’t like that girl.”

  “I don’t think she liked you, either. But why?”

  “She’s … a certain type. You can’t trust that kind of girl. Ask Olga about it.”

  “Olga?” She remembered what Olga had said about Alyosha’s old girlfriend, Tanya. How she hung around foreigners’ hotels, which was supposed to mean she was some kind of prostitute, or the next thing to it.