Boy on the Bridge

by Natalie Standiford

  Alyosha smiled shyly and looked pleased, but he wouldn’t quite meet Laura’s questioning look. Their eyes linked for a split second, magnets catching and pulling apart quickly.

  “What are you going to do in America, Alyosha?” Roma asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe we should ask the spirits,” Laura said.

  “He’ll be an artist, of course,” Olga said. “Just like here. Only famous. And rich.”

  “Rich, rich,” Roma said. “For Olga, nothing counts unless you’re rich.”

  They asked the spirits a few more questions — would Olga have a child someday (yes, a girl), would Roma ever own a car (no, a motorcycle), would Laura have children (Olga asked this question for her; the answer was yes, three) — until the game got old and the players sleepy. Laura helped Olga clean up before joining Alyosha upstairs in the attic.

  “I warmed up the bed for you,” he said as she slipped in beside him.

  “Thank you.” They huddled together in the dark. “Alyosha — what do you think about that saucer game?”

  He squeezed her tighter. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you believe that the spirits are really answering our questions?”

  “Maybe they are. I know I’m not pushing the saucer around. Are you?”

  “No.”

  Silence.

  “But Olga or Roma could be,” she said, really meaning Olga.

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s dangerous. That’s playing with fate. You don’t play with fate.”

  This struck Laura as a strange and kind of weak explanation.

  “So what do you think of the answers they gave us?” she pressed on. “Do you believe they’ll come true?”

  He hesitated before saying, “I do.”

  “So you’re really coming to America?”

  “Somehow I will. I want to.”

  “And I’m really getting married?”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Someday, maybe…” He wasn’t answering the real question in her mind: Did he connect these two events?

  When he finally did fall asleep, she felt sad. He was right there next to her, but she missed him.

  What will I do? she thought. What will I do without him?

  Her life back home flickered in her sleepy mind like a half-remembered dream. Providence. Josh. Classes. All the friends she hadn’t bothered to write. All the places she hadn’t really missed. How could she go back to that? She was no longer the same person. Russia had changed her, and that empty life would never satisfy her now. That’s when she knew for sure — she’d do anything to be with him. Anything he asked.

  * * *

  The next morning, Laura woke up in the attic with straw in her hair. The sun was not up yet, and when it rose it was muffled by clouds that began to pour a spiky, freezing rain on the little dacha. Laura ate a quick breakfast and drank some hot tea and helped Roma and Olga pack up the house, hurrying to catch the next train back to Leningrad.

  The four of them trudged through the mud and the sleet to the station, shivering on the platform with a gnarled old man who smelled like sausage and carried his things in a burlap sack. Laura gazed at the forest through a sheet of gray rain.

  “They say if it’s raining when you leave town, that means someone is sad to see you go,” Roma said. “Do you know that superstition, Laura?”

  She poked her head out from the warmth of her scarf. “No.”

  “Who in this village could possibly miss us?” Olga snapped. “No one we know is here.”

  “Maybe he will.” Alyosha nodded at the old man, who picked up a half-smoked papyrosa off the ground, examined it, pinched the end, lit it, and started puffing.

  When the train came, the old man tossed his cigarette on the tracks and boarded with Laura and her friends. Laura leaned against Alyosha’s shoulder and closed her eyes. She knew the Russian landscape was passing by out the window, and it might be the last time she ever saw it. But she was too tired to care. She and Alyosha were together. It was almost May. They had five weeks left. The end of the semester loomed like a black train tunnel, like an abyss.

  Every moment they shared together was sweet. And yet every moment brought them closer to the end.

  I have no idea what Nina thinks you’re up to,” Karen said when Laura returned from her dacha weekend. “I feed her lies, she pretends — I think — to believe them, and we go back to ignoring each other as usual. By the way, I told her you and Dan are ‘pre-engaged.’ She thinks that’s an American custom where a couple locks themselves in a room for days, refusing to come out.”

  “That’s okay with me.” Laura flopped down on her flimsy bed. “Thanks, Karen.”

  She hadn’t been kicked out yet. Maybe Nina wasn’t as uptight as she seemed.

  * * *

  May arrived, and with it, real spring. She still needed a coat, but a lighter coat. She didn’t need the hat or gloves or boots. The three-foot-deep pack of snow was gone, the daylight stayed and stayed and stayed longer each day, the people on the street were in a better mood, and the whole city felt ready to bloom.

  The university was closed for May Day, and Dan organized a group to go watch the parade. She’d seen pictures of the May Day Parade: a grand military spectacle, hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets, tanks rolling down the avenues, the city decorated in red to celebrate the Triumph of Communism over the World. But she couldn’t go with Dan; she had plans to meet Alyosha, who would have preferred to ignore the holiday completely if he could, especially the parade.

  “May Day makes me sick,” he’d told her. “It’s nothing but a huge celebration of Party hypocrisy, a show of military and industrial strength. If we are such a rich and powerful country, why do we all feel so helpless and poor?”

  “Let’s form our own political party,” Laura had suggested, to poke him out of his sour mood. She was thinking of an old Greta Garbo movie she’d once seen, Ninotchka, about an uptight Soviet functionary who goes to Paris, where she falls in love and learns to enjoy life. “We’ll call it the Lovers’ Party and we’ll have our own salute. We won’t raise our arms or clench our fists. This will be our salute.” She kissed him. “I salute you.” This struck her as funny, especially since the Russian word for “I kiss” — tseluyu — sounded a lot like the English “salute you.”

  “I like it.” He saluted her back. They’d spent the rest of that afternoon vigorously saluting each other.

  Looking forward to saluting the Lovers’ Party some more, she took the tram from the dorm to Nevsky Prospekt, past buildings decorated with red bunting and Godzilla-sized posters of Lenin and the current premier, Leonid Brezhnev, as well as images of workers with hammers raised high and farmers brandishing enormous sheaths of wheat. Banners touted catchy slogans like We Will Carry Out the Decisions of the Twenty-sixth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union! and Let Us Raise Efficiency and Quality! and 600,000 Bushels of Wheat in the Last Five-Year Plan! Everyone wore red ribbons pinned over their hearts. Leningrad had begun to feel almost like home, but May Day reminded her that this was another world, enemy territory, not home at all.

  Alyosha waited for her at the Summer Garden gate. “Surprise!” He called out as he waved her into the garden, which spring had transformed from a barren, melancholy maze of bare trees into an oasis of budding life. The trees were supple and greening, and marble people lived among them — the statues had finally been unboxed.

  “They’re alive!” Laura said. “The coffins are gone.”

  They strolled slowly, so Laura could look at each statue for the first time. There were characters from Russian fairy tales and fables, from Roman mythology, busts of kings and queens and philosophers, allegories like Peace and Victory, Night, Sunset, Midday, Glory, Seafaring, Architecture, Fate; row after row of marble ghosts, cold to touch, heavy, alive in the spring sunlight glinting off the river after their long winte
r’s sleep.

  Alyosha took her hand. No gloves to slip into anymore. This was Anna Akhmatova’s place, the Summer Garden. Laura recited the end of the poem, her favorite part:

  … everything is mother-of-pearl and jasper,

  But the light’s source is a secret.

  “The light is really beautiful in June,” Alyosha said. “During the White Nights, you can smell the limes and see the sailboats on the river and the swans on the pond. And it never gets dark, not really.”

  Her student visa expired in early June. By White Nights she would be gone.

  Alyosha sat on a bench in front of an odd statue of a naked woman with a bird perched on one arm. The woman had a bawdy expression on her face and the bird was pecking at her breast. Carved in the pedestal was the Latin word Lusuria: Lust.

  “This was my favorite statue when I was in school,” he confessed. “Because of the bird, you know, the way he is pecking at her …” He grinned with embarrassment. “It used to make me —” He said a phrase in Russian that Laura didn’t understand.

  “It what?” she asked.

  He blushed. “You know….” He glanced down at the crotch of his pants.

  She laughed. “You perv,” she teased in English.

  “What is perv?”

  “Guess.”

  He guessed. She could imagine the effect of the weird image on a teenage boy. And then she felt warm thinking of Alyosha as a boy, just a few years earlier.

  “I wish I’d known you then,” she said.

  “Me too. But you know me now, and that’s better than never.”

  “Much better.”

  “What were you like at thirteen?”

  Laura shuddered at the memory. “I did gymnastics. I was obsessed with gymnastics.”

  “Gymnastics? Like Olga Korbut?”

  Laura nodded. “It’s dumb, I know.”

  “It’s not dumb, but I can’t picture you … you’re not like those sad little robot girls, with their exhausted eyes.”

  “I know. That’s why I never got very good at it. I didn’t care enough to exhaust myself.”

  “Better to be a normal person.” He kissed the palm of her hand. They watched a young mother push a baby in a stroller down the gravel path, a toddler clinging to the hem of her coat. “When do you leave?”

  “June third.”

  “One month.”

  “Yes.”

  “Very soon.”

  “Too soon.”

  “It will be unbearable.”

  The mother and her children rounded the corner and disappeared from sight. A ragged old man sat down two benches away from them, smoking a cigarette and picking at a hole in the knee of his pants.

  She was desperate to make Alyosha feel better, to make herself feel better. “I’ll write to you every week. And call, too, when I can.”

  “To call is so expensive. And it’s not the same.” He pressed her hand between his, the warmth, the smooth skin proof of what a phone call would be missing. “Once you are gone, that’s it. You are gone.”

  “I’ll come back someday.” She knew that there was no chance he could ever go west to visit her. No chance. Or very, very little chance. Ordinary Soviet citizens were not allowed to travel outside the country; that was just how it was. But she also knew she wouldn’t be able to return to Leningrad for at least a year, if ever. He pressed her fingers again, and she felt like crying.

  “I have an idea,” he said, squeezing her hand harder. “A way we can be together forever.”

  The tears stalled in her eyes.

  He quickly rose to his feet, then dropped to one knee, still clutching her hand. “Laura, will you marry me?”

  There it was: the moment she’d been waiting for, and dreading, for weeks.

  “I have it all planned out.” Not far away, in Palace Square, the May Day celebration was beginning. An old man’s voice roared over a loudspeaker, followed by a hoarse cheer. The tone of Alyosha’s voice, of the day, had changed. The sense of peace was gone.

  “Before you leave we will go to the Palace of Weddings and get married. Then, when you’re in the US, you file the papers to bring me over to live with you. It will take time, but if everything goes smoothly, I can join you in a year. And you will be finished with university by then. We can move to San Francisco, and I’ll become a rich and famous painter so you won’t have to work. You won’t have to do anything. You can spend all day doing just as you like, eating chocolates in our beautiful apartment….”

  Laura listened through a fog of shock. She should have expected this, yet somehow she’d been caught off guard.

  “We will be rich and free and happy,” Alyosha said. “So happy.”

  Little golden fish, grant me a wish….

  He finally stopped talking and gazed up at her, waiting for her reply. His knee was wet from the snowmelt on the ground.

  “What do you say? Say yes! Say da in your sweet American accent. Da…”

  Her tongue flapped uselessly in her mouth for a few seconds before she managed to work it into a shape that would make sounds.

  “But — I’m only nineteen. I’m too young to get married.” The word married caused a reflexive response in her — No. But it was only a reflex, she reasoned. Not a thought. Not an answer.

  He rose up off his knee and sat beside her. “Nonsense! Olga married Roma when she was eighteen. Russian girls get married as teenagers all the time. I’m twenty-two; that’s plenty old enough to get married.”

  “And I haven’t finished college yet. I have to finish college.”

  “But I told you — you will be finished before I can emigrate, so it won’t be a problem.”

  “Well —” Married. She’d never thought of herself that way before, as married. As a wife. Someone’s wife. Alyosha’s wife …

  The hopeful look on his face began to harden into a mask of desperation, and that nearly broke her heart. I love him, she thought. That was all she could think. I love him, I love him….

  And he loves me.

  Alyosha, sweet Alyosha, he deserved to be happy. He made her happy. They would be happy together.

  So why not get married?

  Really. Why not?

  The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. They were in love. Was there a better reason to get married?

  She could bring him to the US to live with her. She could open the door for him, give him opportunities he’d never dreamed of. She could change his life.

  She felt a surge of power. He had done so much for her. Shown her Russia, the real Russia, the world of romance and danger, the one she’d been looking for. And he had seen her as no one else had seen her. This was her chance to do something for him. Something big.

  And she loved him. He was the love of her life.

  “Laura …,” he whispered, “I am asking a lot. Maybe you need time to think.”

  “No,” she said. “I know the answer. Alyosha, I will marry you.”

  The engagement had to be kept secret until they were safely married. Professors Stein and Durant would try to talk her out of the marriage for sure. And if university officials found out, they might expel her and send her home before she had a chance to marry Alyosha. Talking to her parents was out of the question, and anyway, she’d already used up her two allotted calls home.

  But she had to tell someone. She was getting married!

  “You said yes?” Karen shook her head in disbelief. “Are you crazy?”

  Laura had asked Karen to go for a walk with her to give her best friend the big news — in case — in the near certainty — that their dorm room was bugged.

  “I knew you’d be skeptical, but I hoped you’d be at least a little happy for me. Don’t you like Alyosha?”

  “I love Alyosha. Alyosha’s great. That’s beside the point.”

  “Is it? Because I kind of thought being great was a requirement for the person I married.”

  “Laura, you’re nineteen. You’re still in college.”

/>   “I know.”

  “How are you going to support him?”

  “What do you mean? He can get a job —”

  “Doing what? His English is sketchy at best, and his only skill is painting movie signs. That job doesn’t exist in America.”

  “He’ll be able to do his real art. He can sell that.”

  Karen stared down Laura until she felt uncomfortable. “You’re serious? You think he’s going to make a living as an artist in the States? Do you know how hard that is? Do you know anything about the art world?”

  “No —”

  “Does he?”

  “No, but —”

  “Neither do I, but I know this much: It’s practically impossible to break into, especially when you’re a rube from Eastern Europe who’s barely even seen any art made after nineteen twenty-five.”

  “He’s smart. He could learn to do something else.”

  “He’ll have to. And until then, you’ll have to support the both of you. You’ll be legally responsible for him while he learns about banks and checking accounts and credit cards and all these practical things he’s never heard of. He doesn’t know how to drive. He’s never seen a traffic jam. He doesn’t know what to say in a job interview, how much things cost —”

  “I don’t know much about those things, either,” Laura protested. “Well, I know how to drive. And how do you know so much about it?”

  “From living in the States, watching my parents, growing up there. You know more than you think about it, too. That culture is familiar to you, comfortable. To him it will be another planet. He is going to freak out. And you will have to take care of him as if he’s a child.”

  “I don’t care. I love him. Besides, he’ll learn fast —”

  “And what if you get pregnant?” Karen nearly screamed at the thought. “Then you’re stuck with him and a baby?”

  “I won’t get pregnant,” Laura assured her. “I’m careful. I’ll keep being careful.” She moved closer to her friend, trying to make her see. “You don’t understand. Think of what his life will be like if I don’t marry him. What will his future be?”

  Karen was silent and Laura knew they were imagining the same scenario, because only one was possible: year after numbing year of painting signs for movie theaters and nothing else. A dull, colorless life of shortages, drudgery, waiting, pretending, paranoia … He deserved more. They all did, everyone who lived in this messed-up country. But she couldn’t help everyone. She could only help him.