Boy on the Bridge

by Natalie Standiford

  She considered the skeevy guy waiting outside for her. What did he want? He might be a black marketeer, hoping to get jeans or dollars from her. He might be on the make, trying to pick up girls. He could be a dissident genuinely in trouble, but she didn’t see how she could help him if he was. He could simply be crazy. Or he could be a KGB agent trying to get information from her. Donovan, the cowboy drug dealer, claimed that every American student had a KGB agent assigned to follow him or her.

  If that was true, her agent must be bored out of his mind.

  Or maybe not. Maybe Alyosha was not who he said he was. Maybe he was her KGB agent. After all, he had that nice apartment all to himself….

  Laura went to the door to see if the coast was clear. The stalker was gone.

  She continued down Nevsky Prospekt to the bookstore, turning around every so often to make sure the man wasn’t following her. The street was so crowded, it was hard to tell for sure. But she didn’t see him.

  Alyosha was waiting for her in Poetry, just like before. Today he was reading Marina Tsvetaeva.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Some guy was following me.”

  “A guy? What guy?” He made her describe how the man had acted and tell her everything that had happened. When they walked out onto the street, he looked around carefully.

  “Do you see him?” he asked.

  “No. He’s gone.”

  Alyosha frowned. “What did he look like?”

  She described his scruffy goatee, his vinyl jacket, his gold tooth …

  “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

  They stood on the street for a few minutes, letting the crowd jostle them. Alyosha eyed everyone who passed by. Laura lifted her face to the pale, weak sunlight. In another hour it would be dark.

  “It’s not so horribly cold today,” she said. The clock down the street said the temperature was -10 Celsius.

  Alyosha jiggled his hands in his pockets. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  He led her up Nevsky Prospekt toward the Hermitage. They stopped to buy ice cream from a cart on the street. The ice cream was not quite white and not quite brown, not quite vanilla and not at all chocolate.

  “What flavor is this?” Laura asked.

  Alyosha shrugged. “What do you mean? It’s ice cream.” He tasted his cone. “It’s cream flavored.”

  In Decemberists’ Square, they admired the statue of Peter the Great, founder of St. Petersburg. Alyosha mumbled some words under his breath.

  “What are you doing?” Laura asked.

  Alyosha blushed. “Nothing. Just reciting some lines from a poem we learned in school.”

  “What poem? Let me hear it.”

  “No. I don’t like it. But I’ve been so programmed I can hardly walk past this damn statue without muttering the words.”

  “Let me hear them. Please.”

  He recited:

  Miracle and beauty of the North,

  Arose in pride and stood in splendor

  Both from the darkness of the woods

  And from the swamps of endless marshes …

  “We were just reading that in Translation class,” Laura said. “It’s that Pushkin poem about Peter the Great.”

  “We memorized a lot of poetry in school,” Alyosha said. “Memorizing and reciting was practically all we did.”

  “I hardly know any poetry by heart. Just one Emily Dickinson poem I memorized once when I was too heartbroken to do anything else.”

  “Which one?”

  She recited in English: “ ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes …’ ” She stopped, embarrassed. “Now I know why you felt shy about it.”

  “Keep going. I like the sound of it.”

  After great pain, a formal feeling comes —

  The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —

  The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

  And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

  The Feet, mechanical, go round —

  Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —

  A Wooden way

  Regardless grown,

  A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

  This is the Hour of Lead —

  Remembered, if outlived,

  As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —

  First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

  Clouds had rolled in off the Baltic Sea, and the sky had grayed since they left Dom Knigi. They stared at the leaden river.

  “That poem could have been written here,” Alyosha said. “It could be by Anna Akhmatova, feeling suicidal during an endless Leningrad winter, or during the siege. What made you memorize it?”

  “A sad winter. Probably not as sad as the German siege, though.”

  He laughed. “I hope not.”

  “Yes, definitely not as sad as that.” She told him about that sophomore winter, a year before, when she went home to Baltimore for Christmas and hooked up with her high school boyfriend, Duncan. She’d been lonely in Providence all fall and was hoping to get back together with Duncan, even if it had to be long-distance, since he went to Penn.

  They made a date for New Year’s Eve and ended up at a party where he talked to another girl all night. She felt melancholy on the train back to Providence, as if something she’d once counted on had been lost forever. In the back of her mind, she’d thought Duncan would always love her. But he didn’t. Maybe he never had.

  She’d barricaded herself in her room for the rest of the winter, reading poetry, living on Wheat Thins and Tab. Was she sad about Duncan? She wasn’t sure. She just felt terrible.

  “Wait a minute,” Alyosha said. “I don’t understand some of these things. What is Penn? What are Wheat Thins and Tab?”

  She explained East Coast geography to him, the distances between Baltimore and Philadelphia, Baltimore and Providence. She told him that Wheat Thins were crackers and Tab was like Pepsi with fake sugar. He made a face at that but didn’t question it.

  “Then May came, and suddenly everything was better,” she said. Partly because Josh had started hanging around. But she left that part out.

  “So you have a sad love story in your past,” he said. “I have one, too.”

  They walked along the embankment in front of the Hermitage, past the Field of Mars, and into a gated park. “The Summer Garden,” he announced as they walked through the gate. “Have you been here before?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “It’s a good place.” They strolled along the winding paths, which were shadowed by bare winter trees poking out of the snow. All along the paths stood giant wooden boxes like upright coffins.

  “There are statues inside,” Alyosha explained. “They cover them up for the winter. In the spring, the statues come back from the dead, emerging from their winter shrouds.”

  “Can we come back in the spring?” The park was crowded with the coffins, almost a hundred of them, and she wanted to see the statues.

  “We will absolutely return in the spring,” Alyosha promised. “It is a requirement of your Russian education.” He paused in front of one of the boxes. “This one is special — my favorite as a boy. I will make a special point of showing it to you when we come back.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you. I must show it to you. It’s too soon to share such a thing, anyway.”

  “Share what?” She stared at the brown, snow-stained box and wondered what could be living inside it that meant so much to him, yet was too sensitive to talk about.

  “Another poem has spontaneously erupted in my brain,” he announced. “But if you are tired of poetry, I can suppress it.”

  “Don’t suppress it. It’s not healthy to suppress things,” Laura said.

  “This poem is by Anna Akhmatova and it is called ‘Summer Garden.’ ”

  Laura listened, straining to understand the unfamiliar words. She liked the last part the best:

  … every
thing is mother-of-pearl and jasper,

  But the light’s source is a secret.

  “My mother liked to bring me here in the summer,” Alyosha said. “When I was older I sat on this bench and practiced drawing the statues. Once, I saw a man get arrested right there, near the fence.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. He was young, but he had a long beard, which looked strange. His legs and arms twitched nervously, as if it took all his strength not to bolt out of the park. He restrained himself from running, but his eyes darted around in a panic. Suddenly three men in suits surrounded him. It was very subtle. They spoke quietly to the bearded man, and all three walked calmly out of the park and got into a car.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “That was it.”

  “Did anyone say anything?”

  “No one else seemed to notice that anything unusual had happened. Though maybe they were just pretending not to notice. Everyone here learns to pretend. If you notice what they’re doing, they might come after you next.”

  In spite of the cold, they sat on a bench. Laura thought of the man who’d followed her off the tram and she shivered. This place was full of hidden dangers, and she hardly knew how to recognize them.

  “Are you going to tell me your sad love story?” she asked.

  “Maybe later.”

  She wondered who the star of that story was. Olga? Or maybe Tanya, the girl Olga hinted was a prostitute?

  “What do you do when I don’t see you?” Alyosha asked. “Have you made any friends?”

  “Lots of new friends,” she said. “Karen and Dan and all the other American students, and the Hungarians in the dorm, and some of the Soviet students…” She laughed. “Then there’s my other roommate, Ninel. She’s such a…” She slipped into English to find the right word. “A pill.”

  “A pill?” he echoed.

  She tried another English word. “A drip?”

  “Like water?” Alyosha asked, returning to Russian.

  “She likes to follow all the rules, to the letter.”

  “Ah, a real Ninel. I always feel sorry for those girls named Ninel.”

  “Her brother is named Traktor.”

  Alyosha shook his head. “She has serious Communist Party parents. Either they really believe in the system, or they think giving their children patriotic names will protect them.”

  “Protect them? From what?”

  “From trouble. Who ever heard of a traitor named Traktor?”

  “I’d never heard of anybody named Traktor till now.”

  “Don’t you have people named Lincoln and Washington?”

  “Yes, but … that’s different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Lincoln and Washington were people, not farm machinery.”

  “And everyone in America has a gun. Right? Do you have a gun?”

  “A gun? No! No one I know has a gun.”

  “That cannot be true. Statistically, there’s at least one gun for every person in America.”

  “Maybe so, but in that case a few people are carrying the majority of the guns.”

  “So it is not true? Many Americans do not have guns?”

  “Yes. No. It’s not true.”

  Alyosha looked pained for a minute, but then he said, “I’m sure you are right. Here, television always gives the wrong idea about everything.”

  “Don’t feel bad. Our TV is not so trustworthy, either.”

  He looked sad. “When I was little, I believed everything. I lived in the best city in the greatest country on Earth. My father was a captain in the greatest navy in the world. I went along with it all, the whole thing. I was a Young Pioneer, a Komsomol Youth leader, I wore my red kerchief. My parents were proud of me….”

  His voice trailed off. A seagull squawked from a floe of river ice.

  “Then what happened?” Laura asked.

  “My mother died. She went into the hospital for a routine surgery and got an infection there. It killed her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Her doctor was incompetent, but my father refused to admit it. He can’t admit anything is wrong with our system, with the government, with anything — ever.” He touched his upper lip, as if it felt vulnerable. “I think he blamed my mother herself for dying. Like it was her fault. A heroic Soviet doctor could never make a mistake.”

  “How old were you when she died?”

  “Fifteen. That’s when I started drawing — I mean, seriously drawing. I’d always liked it, but I never thought of being an artist. My father denounced art as a waste of time. But after Mama died, the only thing that made me feel better was drawing. So I drew constantly. I did nothing but draw. I neglected my schoolwork, my friends, everything….”

  She touched his hand, glove on glove. He took off his glove and slipped his hand into hers. The two hands merged inside the warm cocoon.

  “It was as if a veil fell from my eyes. Suddenly I saw everything differently. The hospitals are dirty, the stores are empty, the people are poor while the Party takes everything. The hypocrisy, the secrecy, the lies, the bullshit … I saw it all very clearly. I couldn’t pretend to be a part of the system anymore. But that’s what’s required of you here — you don’t have to believe the lies, but you must pretend you do. That’s all that matters: the pretending. That’s what keeps the whole system going.”

  “No one believes in it?” She touched a callous on his index finger, a rough bump.

  “Maybe a few do. It doesn’t matter. We don’t get punished for what we believe; we’re punished for what we say we believe. If people started telling the truth, what’s really in their hearts and minds, the house would collapse. That’s why dissidents are exiled or put in prison or into mental hospitals. If you dare to criticize the system, you must be crazy. You must be denounced. That belief is all that’s holding this empire together.”

  The wind picked up and scraped Laura’s cheeks. She knew all this. She’d heard it before. But she’d never met someone who’d been personally hurt by it before. And that made all the difference.

  “Papa expected me to be an engineer, but I went to art school instead. After art school, the Artists Union would not accept me. They said my paintings were subversive, and consigned me to a menial job painting signs. Everyone must have a job of some kind, but we don’t always get to choose what it is.”

  “Has your father seen your paintings?”

  “Yes. He agreed with the Artists Union and called me decadent. He called me a parasite, a traitor. We had a big fight. He hasn’t forgiven me or spoken to me since.”

  “So you’ve lost both of your parents.”

  “I understand how Papa feels. He lived through the war, starved in the siege, sacrificed everything for the good of his country. He has to believe in it. He can’t allow himself to think it’s all a sham. That would mean his life had been wasted.”

  “But what about you? You’re his son. He’s sacrificing you, too.”

  Alyosha smiled ruefully. “A small price to pay for the glory of the Motherland.” His nose was red. He rubbed it. “You must be cold. Let’s walk.”

  They left the park, keeping both hands inside her glove, and started for the Palace Bridge. Everything — the river, the bridge, the buildings, the snow — looked dreamy and half-formed, veiled by the dusk.

  They paused at the bridge. She would cross the river, and he would go underground into the metro.

  “I wish you could come back with me,” he said.

  “I do, too.” She wished she could go anywhere but Dormitory Number Six. Someplace where she could be with him just a little bit longer.

  “Call me soon.” His hand still warmed hers inside the glove. She pressed her fingers against his.

  “I will.”

  He pulled his hand out of the glove at last. She immediately felt its absence, cold air where his warm skin had been.

  He put his hands, one gloved, one bare, on her shoulders, and bent his head to
ward hers. He kissed her, just a touch on the lips, but slowly, lingering there for a second longer than she thought he would. Then he raised his head, tilting it slightly to the left, and looked into her eyes as if searching for something.

  His were brown, flecked with green and gold, and very sad.

  He removed his hands from her shoulders with effort, as if resisting a great magnetic force. He turned and walked away to the metro. She stood on the edge of the bridge for a long time, watching him.

  Check it. Mail from home.” Karen tossed a thin bundle of letters onto Laura’s bed.

  Laura flipped through the mail: three letters from her parents, two from her Brown roommate, Julie, one from her little brother, Sam, and one from Josh. She opened Josh’s first.

  Dear Laura,

  I hope this letter reaches you before you leave. Right now I’m sitting in my apartment listening to reggae (Marley) and drinking Morning Thunder tea, even though it’s 11 o’clock at night. I spent the day walking around trying to prove or refute a recent theory I formulated about women who wear very faded jeans. I think that they must screw like rabbits. I suspect women who wear dark jeans are repressed. So far I found two women who would seem to support the thesis and one who goes against it. I’ll continue to collect the data until I reach a definitive conclusion.

  Laura couldn’t read further without pausing to mumble, “Ugh.”

  “I heard that.” Karen was lying on her stomach, reading her own mail.

  “Listen to this.” Laura read Josh’s letter out loud.

  Laur, I really wish we could have continued the talk we started the night before you left. When your roommate showed up it broke the momentum, and when she finally went into her room I just couldn’t continue — the talk wouldn’t flow. So we never really settled anything —

  I’ve got to split for a few minutes, bye. ——— Back again. Hello.

  Anyway, I don’t feel like I know you well enough to promise anything, but I do want to say that I would like to see you when you get back to the States, and get to know you better. Maybe this is a stupid, not-well-thought-out response, but that’s how I feel. So if you still like me in June, look me up. I’ll be in Providence for the summer.