Boy on the Bridge

by Natalie Standiford

  Supper tasted delicious in the warm kitchen, soup and bread and potatoes and chicken washed down with beer and tea. Afterward they took a bottle of cognac into the living room. Olga lit the kerosene lanterns — the house had no electricity or running water — and they settled on the worn antique sofas and chairs to play cards. Roma reached for his guitar and strummed softly.

  “Do you have a dacha in America, Laura?” Olga asked.

  “No,” Laura said. “We don’t have dachas, exactly. But some of my friends have summer houses, mostly at the beach.”

  Olga shook her head and tsk-tsked. “So sad. Cramped up in the dirty city with no place to play in the summer.”

  It wasn’t that bad, but Laura didn’t feel like going into it. “Yes.”

  “I love the way you say da,” Olga said. She mimicked Laura’s American accent. “It’s like a kitten speaking. Da. I’m American. Da.”

  Laura’s cheeks got hot. Olga was just teasing, but she was embarrassed. She knew she had an accent but she had no idea it sounded so funny.

  “Well, how do you say it? Teach me to say it right.”

  “Da,” Roma boomed, coming down hard on the d like a heavy knock at the door. “Da.”

  Laura tried it, lowering her voice and not drawing out the ahh like a Southern belle the way she usually did. But this only made them laugh harder.

  “Don’t worry, Laura,” Alyosha said. “It’s sweet the way you say it. We like it.”

  “Yes, it’s cute.” Olga’s smile was sweet as coconut cake, which Laura had always found a little sickening. “Americans are so charming. Like children!”

  “Spoiled children,” Roma added, as if Laura weren’t sitting right there. “Who don’t know suffering.”

  Laura glanced at Alyosha, who shifted on the couch without meeting anyone’s eye. He took the guitar out of Roma’s arms. “Let me play a song.” Laura recognized the song about the Cossack who lost his wild head, and began to hum along. Olga snuggled against Roma and sang, too. She had a pretty voice.

  Laura couldn’t figure Olga out. She and Roma seemed happy together. So what exactly was her relationship with Alyosha?

  “Remember that summer on the Black Sea, Lyosha?” Olga sipped her cognac and smiled dreamily. “We sang that song every night.”

  “Yes, yes.” Roma sighed. “You and your friends camped out on the beach, and you turned as brown as a nut.”

  “When was this?” Laura asked.

  “During art school,” Olga replied. “When Lyosha and I were in love.”

  Alyosha strummed the chords to a new song, as if that would change the subject, but Olga wouldn’t allow it.

  “You were in love?” The words caught in Laura’s throat.

  “That’s going too far,” Alyosha said. “We were together a lot. We were too young to be in love.”

  “What happened?” Laura asked.

  “Olga left me,” Alyosha said.

  “We had a silly fight,” Olga said. “I think it was over some boy I was flirting with. Lyosha got so angry — didn’t you? — and wouldn’t speak to me for days.”

  Alyosha concentrated on the strings of the guitar.

  “So I said phooey on him and there was Roma,” Olga said. “He was waiting for me!”

  “We had a little fling,” Roma said. He didn’t seem bothered by his wife’s story at all. He’d probably heard it many times before. And he was probably tipsy from cognac.

  “I meant to go back to Alyosha eventually, but by then Tanya had come along….”

  “And you got pregnant, so we got married,” Roma finished.

  Pregnant? So where was their child?

  “I had a miscarriage,” Olga explained. “So it turns out we didn’t have to get married after all, did we, Romachka?”

  “No. Turns out we didn’t.”

  Alyosha put the guitar down. “I’ll add some more wood to the stove. It’s getting chilly in here.” He went into the kitchen. Olga smiled, still curled up against her husband, who wrapped his arm around her, apparently content.

  At midnight, Laura and Alyosha climbed the stairs to the attic and made their bed on a narrow mattress on the straw-covered floor. Alyosha piled on as many blankets as they could bear. Laura pressed herself against him for warmth and closed her eyes.

  “Alyosha?” she whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “Were you in love with Olga? Back in school?”

  “No.” He kissed her temple. “She wasn’t in love with me, either. We were friends, mostly.”

  “Is she in love with you now, do you think?”

  “No. She’s just torturing Roma. She loves to tease people.”

  “But Roma hardly seems bothered by it at all.”

  “That’s why they’re such a good couple.”

  They lay together in the dark, breathing. An owl hooted outside.

  “I don’t like the way Olga teases people,” Alyosha said. “I could never be in love with her.” He shifted so his face was even with hers. She felt his breath brush her lips. “But you are different. You’re kind and good. You are exactly the kind of person I could love.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Yes, it’s very lucky. Because I do love you.”

  They nestled together, their breath a buffer against the cold, and drifted off to sleep.

  In her sleep, Laura found herself tilting her face like a flower toward a patch of sun. She blinked and opened her eyes. The attic window was coated with melting frost. Birds chattered noisily in the trees outside, and downstairs, Olga clattered pots in the kitchen and sang to herself. Alyosha was gone, his spot on the mattress still warm. She had to pee badly, but the thought of getting up and going outside to the outhouse kept her paralyzed under the heavy blankets until she couldn’t stand it another second.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead!” Olga called as Laura hurried past the kitchen to the yard. She waved to Alyosha and Roma, who squatted before a rusty grill, starting a fire. On her way back to the house, Alyosha stopped her for a kiss.

  “What are you two doing?” she asked.

  “Shashlik takes all-day preparation,” Roma explained. “The lamb is marinating, and I’m starting the fire early so the coals will be hot as the devil in a few hours.”

  “I’m his helper,” Alyosha said.

  “Go inside, helper,” Roma ordered. “Go have breakfast with your girl. I ate hours ago.”

  Laura and Alyosha went inside and sat at the kitchen table, where Olga served them tea, toast, and kasha with milk and sugar.

  “This tastes so much better than the kasha at the university cafeteria,” Laura said.

  “Of course it does,” Olga said. “I’m insulted you would even mention my kasha in the same sentence as the university cafeteria.”

  After breakfast, Laura offered to wash the dishes but Olga wouldn’t let her. So Laura and Alyosha dressed up in some of the crazy clothes they found in the closet, things that had been left by relatives and friends over the years — the fuzzy striped vest, a fur hat for Alyosha and a sailor hat for Laura, an old overcoat — and off they tramped, hand in hand, down the rutted, muddy road, through frozen fields strewn with cigarette butts and broken bottles, to the lake.

  “Why doesn’t Olga like me?” Laura asked.

  “What do you mean? Olga loves you!”

  “No, she doesn’t.” She sat on a large rock and stared at the birds picking their way over the melting lake ice. “She pretends to, but it’s so transparent. She wants me to know it, too.”

  Alyosha picked up a pebble and threw it at the water. “She’s jealous, that’s all. She likes to be the prettiest girl at the party, and when you’re around, she’s not.”

  That sounded nice, but Laura didn’t think it told the whole story, or even part of it.

  “I still think she’s in love with you.”

  “Don’t be crazy.” He sat with her on the rock and put his arm around her. “What’s all this thinking about Olga lately?”

&nbs
p; “I get a funny feeling from her,” Laura said. “She makes me uncomfortable.”

  “I’m sorry. Just one more night and we’ll be back in Leningrad. Then you never have to see her again.”

  “Unless I stop by your place uninvited.”

  Zing. “That’s not fair. I couldn’t help it that she broke into my apartment.”

  “You didn’t exactly kick her out, did you?”

  “Laura, what’s behind all this?”

  “I don’t know.” To her surprise, she started to cry. He pulled her close and kissed her salty tears.

  She couldn’t untangle her emotions. She was crying out of happiness, sadness, confusion, fear … and he seemed to sense this. He didn’t ask her what was wrong again. She couldn’t have given him a coherent answer. Instead, he talked in a low, soothing voice, about dreams.

  “I cry a lot, too, Laura. Did you know that?”

  She sniffed and shook her head. She’d never seen him cry.

  “It’s true. At night when I’m home alone in my room, I wish you were there with me. And I think about the future, the future that is coming up so fast, when I will never be able to see you or touch you, or have you next to me. That to me is a terrible future. No matter what happens in the world, if there is nuclear war or starvation or disease, nothing, to me, could be a more terrible pain than that.”

  She turned her wet eyes to him. He looked back at her tenderly.

  “So I cry,” he went on. “And to make myself feel better, I tell myself a story. Not a story, exactly; it’s more like watching a movie, the most wonderful movie ever made. Do you know what it’s about?”

  She shook her head. But she knew.

  “It’s about me in another life. I live in America — in San Francisco, where the weather is warm and there are streetcars like the trams in Leningrad, only cleaner and prettier. Every day I set up my easel on a hill and paint what I see. And what I see is the most beautiful city in the world, beauty all around me in every direction: boats floating under a swaying silver bridge, sunlight sparkling on blue water, houses in fantastic colors dotting the green hills, and beautiful people wearing wonderful clothes like I’ve never seen before.”

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her head on them, listening, imagining.

  “Then the most beautiful girl of all walks up to me. She says, ‘It’s time to stop painting now. Come home for dinner.’ So I pack up my things and I take her hand and together we walk home through the shining city. And I tell that girl, ‘Laura, I am so happy with you. I want our life to stay like this forever.’ ”

  She could see it all. She was crying again.

  “I wish that story could come true,” Alyosha said. “I would do anything to make it happen. Anything.”

  She sniffed and wiped her eyes. She felt infinitely happy and infinitely sad at the same time.

  “Anything, Laura.”

  “So would I,” she said at last.

  “Would you?” He squeezed her tighter, shook her a little. “Would you really do anything to be with me?”

  She leaned over and wrote her answer with her finger in the water of the melting lake. He read the word, caught it in the split second before it disappeared: Yes. A promise written in water.

  He broke into a wide, ecstatic grin and touched the cold water with one finger, tracing a heart. A cloud passed over the sun, turning the lake gray. “It’s getting cold. We should go back.” Alyosha stood and helped her to her feet. They walked back to the dacha arm in arm. Something had changed between them. Laura couldn’t say what exactly, but she felt it as surely as the quickening wind, the squish of spring mud under her boots, his warm arm in hers.

  * * *

  They ate the shashlik at sunset, huddling around the fire in their funny outfits, spearing the lamb meat with shish-kebab skewers and gnawing at it like Cossacks. Laura wiped the grease from her chin, feeling deliciously primitive.

  “Laura’s already a member of the Lenin Clean Plate Club,” Alyosha told Olga and Roma. “But for tonight’s valiant achievement in eating, she gets a special commendation.”

  “Here, here!” Roma saluted Laura with a skewer.

  Laura bowed. “The Lenin Clean Plate Award has always been a dream of mine. I want to thank all the little people who helped me get where I am today: my mother, who spoon-fed me mashed peas and stewed apricots; Roma, who cooked this spectacular shashlik which inspired me to eat like I’ve never eaten before…”

  Olga, Roma, and Alyosha looked slightly baffled by Laura’s parody of an Oscar speech, having never seen or even heard of the Oscars, but they knew it was supposed to be funny and laughed anyway.

  The sun went down and the cold, sharp stars pierced the blue-black sky. The fire was dying and the cold grew bitter, so they cleared away the food and went inside to warm up by the stove.

  “Let’s have a seance,” Olga suggested. “I can feel the spirits circling the house, waiting to be invited in.”

  “Olga, no,” Alyosha said.

  “Why not?” Roma got a large piece of paper and began to draw the letters of the Russian alphabet on it in crayon in a circle. “We’ll play the saucer game. That’s what we always do in the country.” He drew a pyramid and a closed eye in the center. Laura immediately had a flashback to third-grade slumber parties — the Ouija board. “It’s only a game.”

  “It is not just a game when I play it.” Olga took a saucer off a kitchen shelf and set it upside down in the middle of the paper to serve as a planchette. “The spirits come when I call. They don’t dare disobey me.”

  Roma laughed and rolled his eyes. “Queen of the Black Arts, here.”

  “Queen of the Black Arts” fit Olga pretty well, Laura thought. “How do we play?”

  “You go to the door and call to a spirit,” Olga explained. “Then we all touch the saucer lightly with our fingertips and wait for the spirit to come answer your question.”

  “The saucer points to letters on the board to spell out the answer,” Laura said.

  “You’ve done this before! I didn’t know you were interested in the occult,” Olga said.

  “Well … it was more of a party game —”

  “Yes! Exactly. The saucer game,” Roma said.

  “No, you have the soul of a sorceress, Laura. I see it in your eyes.” Olga lit two candles and blew out the lamp. “Who wants to go first? No one? Then I will.”

  She walked to the front door and opened it, calling, “Cornelius Agrippa! Cornelius Agrippa! Cornelius Agrippa!” She shut the door quickly and hurried back to the table, rubbing her shivering arms.

  “Who’s Cornelius Agrippa?” Laura asked.

  “You never heard of him?” Roma said.

  “He was a German magician in the Renaissance,” Alyosha whispered. “He wrote books on the occult.”

  “Ssshhh!” Olga hissed.

  “Poor American education,” Roma muttered. Laura couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

  “Roma, hush! We have to wait for the spirits in silence. Put your fingertips on the saucer.”

  Everyone lightly touched the saucer. After a moment of silence, Olga intoned, “O Cornelius Agrippa, come to us. Come to me and answer my question: When will I be rich?”

  “You always ask the same question,” Roma said.

  Laura felt a bump under the table that she assumed was Olga kicking Roma in the shin. “Oof!” Roma grunted in confirmation.

  The saucer began to vibrate, then move across the wheel of letters. It zoomed around in a circle, stopping at S. Then K, O … In Russian, it spelled out skoro: soon.

  “Soon!” Olga crowed. “Soon I’ll be rich!”

  “Agrippa always says ‘soon,’ ” Roma grumbled. “He’s been saying ‘soon’ for years.”

  “Soon,” Olga repeated. “Now you try it, Laura. Whose spirit will you call?”

  “I’ll call Anna Akhmatova,” Laura said.

  “Good choice,” Alyosha said.

  “She’s very popular,” Ol
ga agreed.

  Laura went to the door and said “Anna Akhmatova” three times. Then she returned to the table.

  “What is your wish?” Olga prompted.

  “Can I keep my wish secret?” Laura asked.

  “Yes,” Alyosha said. “You can ask it in silence.”

  “But I want to know what it is,” Olga said.

  “Let her alone,” Roma said. “Go on, Laura.”

  Laura closed her eyes and silently asked, Anna Akhmatova, will Alyosha and I be together again someday?

  She waited. After a second or two she felt the saucer moving. It landed on a letter. At first she couldn’t tell where this was going. But soon the message was clear: Get married.

  “Really, Anna Akhmatova?” she whispered in the candlelight.

  “That’s a very interesting answer,” Olga remarked.

  “It has nothing to do with my question,” Laura lied. Why, she wasn’t sure. She suspected that Olga controlled the saucer — Olga was the most likely suspect — and wanted to throw her off a little.

  “How do you know?” Alyosha asked. “Maybe you can’t see the connection yet.”

  “That’s true.” Olga’s eyes glittered in the candlelight. “Sometimes the spirits’ answers don’t seem to make sense, but they become clear in the future.”

  “One day you’ll snap your fingers and say, ‘So that’s what Anna meant!’ ” Roma said. “Now, my turn.” He went to the door and called Cornelius Agrippa back. “He’s one of the most powerful spirits,” he explained as he returned to the table. Then he asked, “Cornelius Agrippa, what will become of our friend Alyosha?”

  They sat around the table, perfectly still, as the seconds ticked by. This question seemed to take longer to answer than the others. “Maybe Agrippa’s out answering someone else’s question at the moment,” Laura joked.

  “Sshhh!” Olga hissed.

  At last the saucer inched across the paper. “A —” everyone said out loud. “-m … -e … -r…”

  America.

  “America! Isn’t that wonderful?” Olga kissed Laura and gave Alyosha a squeeze. “Alyosha’s going to America!”

  “That’s great!” Laura said.