Separate Kingdoms (P.S.)

by Valerie Laken

  “This city,” his mother said. “I don’t see how people can stand it. Let’s go.”

  They walked arm in arm up the platform toward the noise of the station buildings. Women in heels clicked erratically around them, people brushed past them and overcame them from behind, and all the while the trains were coming and going with the ding dong dong of the departure announcements.

  “Where to now?”

  “We’ll go down to the metro station and take it through the center, then transfer down to Profsoyuznaya,” she said.

  “Is it far?”

  “We have plenty of time. Hold still. Let me wipe your face.”

  “What direction are we going now?”

  “This is”—she stopped walking a moment and turned around a little—“I think this is south.”

  “That’s south,” a man next to them said.

  “Oh. We’re going east right now, dear.”

  They walked on toward the station buildings, and the sound from the loudspeakers got louder. There was the smell of shashlik grills already being fired up to the right where the cafés and kiosks must be. Some men brushed past them smelling of fish and stale alcohol. They were speaking a strange, jumbled language.

  Anton inhaled and gathered his courage, then squeezed his mother’s arm. “I’d like to buy a magazine,” he said.

  “What?”

  “For Oleg. Oleg wants a certain…he wants a car magazine.”

  “A car magazine? What for?”

  “I don’t know. He likes them.”

  “Car magazines. What will it be next?” She stopped and pulled him out of the line of traffic. He could feel her body leaning in different directions, looking for the right kiosk. Then she led him a few steps to their right, which Anton figured must be south. They were up against the cool metal of a kiosk now; it was still damp from the morning. A man leaned in over Anton’s shoulder and said, “Komsomolets,” then shifted to reach for his paper. Anton’s mother pulled him to the side again.

  “What kind of car magazine?”

  “Do they have a lot of magazines? Is it a well-stocked kiosk?”

  “They’re all well stocked nowadays. What they wouldn’t sell you. Which one do you want? They have Avtomobil from May and July, and two foreign ones—that one has a lovely purple car. Very strange.”

  Anton paused.

  “Well? What do you think he’d like?”

  “I think…I think he has those already. I think it’s supposed to have a truck. Something with a truck.”

  His mother asked the woman through the window about trucks. They didn’t have any truck magazines.

  “But they have lots of magazines?”

  “Yes. Do you want a different one?”

  He could be grown-up like Oleg. They could be equal.

  “Do you have to go to the bathroom, Mama?”

  “Anton, stop this. What is this about?”

  “I…I—” A mechanical female voice interrupted him through the speakers over his head, announcing the departure of the next train to Kursk. Anton felt as though he were being swallowed up by her voice, by the vibrating speakers everywhere, by the crush of strangers poking in at him through the void before his eyes. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

  “You have to go to the bathroom.” Her words came out slowly, but Anton could hear the frustration welling in them. She pulled him toward her by both shoulders and snapped her words into his face. “Anton. This isn’t funny.”

  He’d had enough too. “I know.”

  “Well, you’ll have to wait till Dr. Nicholson’s. We’re not going in any train station bathroom. I’ll tell you that for sure.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” he lied. He didn’t know what he was doing. In his mind a vague plan was struggling to take shape. His muscles stiffened one by one and a cold tingle swept up his limbs to his throat. He clenched his jaw against the idea of Dr. Nicholson’s instruments and imagined himself taller and broad shouldered, strong. He imagined himself so big that his mother couldn’t drag him anywhere. “I’m going to be sick,” he said again.

  She sighed. She lightened her grip on his arm. They started walking again, eastward. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. She paused and asked someone about a bathroom. “Inside by the ticket booths,” a man said.

  “Didn’t you go before we left?”

  Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. “I guess not.” They turned right. Forty-eight, forty-nine, through heavy doors that pushed in both directions, into a heat wave of bodies standing sweating in lines, foreign voices, more announcement bells, a puddle, and down six steps, then around a landing and down seven more. Fifty-six, fifty-seven, to the right. He could find his way back to the kiosk alone. Seventy-four, seventy-five, seventy-six. They stopped. He could take a breath in the bathroom and calm himself, break free of her and find his way back to the kiosk and to Drezna and the tomato fields and the Shurins. He could do that. She could go see Dr. Nicholson without him.

  They had neared the bathrooms: The smell of waste seeped through the air. “We’ll have to wait for help,” his mother said. She was breathing heavy with disgust. It was an area where no one would choose to stand around.

  “I can do it alone.”

  “No.”

  He shuffled and squirmed. “I’m sick, Mama. I’m sick.”

  “Excuse me.” She reached out to a man passing by. No response. They waited. “Excuse me,” she said again to another. “My son needs to go to the bathroom.” No response. He must have walked away.

  “I can do it myself.”

  “I said no.”

  “Excuse me.” This time her voice was urgent. And she must have gotten someone’s attention, for it turned soft again. “My son here needs to go to the bathroom. Be kind, would you take him in for me? He’s blind, see.”

  “Well, hello.” The man smelled of yesterday’s cabbage soup.

  His mother drove a finger into his back. “Hello,” he said.

  “Well, let’s go then.”

  His face was hot. He took the man’s arm, which felt frail under his textured suit jacket.

  “You can do everything yourself, right?” the man asked in a low voice as they walked through the door and deeper into the stench.

  “Yes. Of course.” The floor was wet and slippery.

  “How did it happen, may I ask?”

  “What?”

  “The eyes.”

  Hundred seven. Eight. Nine, right on nine. The room was quiet except for a faucet dripping somewhere.

  “Don’t like to talk about it?”

  Anton said nothing. He didn’t know how it had happened. He was born to this.

  “That’s all right. Here you go.” The man took Anton’s hand and placed it against the cool porcelain of the urinal. “Don’t touch it too much, but here it is right in front of you. Is that all right?”

  If there were another door he could slip out of, if he could make himself small, unnoticeable, he could slip away from this old man and his cabbage smell and count his way right back to the kiosk. One hundred nine steps was nothing; it was half the distance from Oleg’s house to the river. And he could ask someone for help if he got lost. He could do it. He could slap his bills down for the lady in the kiosk and say Pentxaus with authority, without fear or hesitation of any kind. He would walk away a man, like any normal man, with the magazine tucked into his pants under his shirt. He would catch the next train to Drezna and be back in time for lunch with Oleg and Grandma Shurin. And she’d be sorry, his mother. She would worry and worry. She would think twice about her American dentist.

  “Is there another door in here?”

  “What?” The man shuffled around a little and came back to Anton’s side. “No. Just the one.”

  The dripping faucet echoed against the walls and floor around him. Anton felt his face beginning to twitch.

  “Well, what’s the problem, son?”

  There was nowhere he could go.

  “I ne
ed a toilet.”

  “Oh, I see. Right.” He took Anton’s arm again and turned him around, but in turning the old man slipped on the wet tile and began to go down. “Oi!” He clutched at Anton’s torso with both arms, pressing Anton’s head into his hot, damp chest. They wavered a moment, flailing, but did not go down. They stood upright on the tile floor, trembling, without so much as a bumped elbow to knock the thrill out of their bones.

  All of his numbers were gone, flown from his head. All his bearings, all his points of reference. He didn’t even know where the door was. He wasn’t going to get to the kiosk alone, or to the train or Drezna or anywhere. He was a little boy clutching at an old man in a stinking threadbare suit in the basement reek of Kurskii Vokzal, with his mother worrying at the door. And he was not sick at all, though the stench was enough to turn anyone’s stomach, and Oleg was home in the field pulling weeds and dreaming of his girls without so much as a thought for Anton or the money he’d given him.

  “Well, are you going in or not?” the man said, pressing Anton’s hand against the gritty door of the stall.

  He stood in his tight pants with his hand on the metal door. “Go to hell,” Anton murmured. From behind them came the click of dress shoes and then the sound of someone urinating.

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard me,” Anton whispered.

  “This is how you treat an old man?”

  “Go to hell.”

  This time the man slapped him. Not on the face, like his mother did on rare occasion. On the behind. He spanked him.

  The tears came now; there was no chance of stopping them. “Pervert,” Anton hissed in one last attempt at manliness. “Get your hands off me.”

  “What’s going on here?” the dress-shoes man at the urinal said.

  “Kids. Kids today don’t know how to behave.”

  “Stop touching me!” Anton cried. “Don’t touch me.” The old man removed his hand and took a step back, and now Anton was alone against the door of the stall, sinking down. He crouched low on the wet, filthy floor, and the tears came. He sucked at the air in unsteady patches. There was no one anywhere, not even the foreigners, who could fix this.

  “Dorogoi moi,” his mother’s voice came rushing in. She crouched down on the floor and folded him in her arms.

  “What have you done?” she hissed at the old man.

  “He’s crazy,” the old man said.

  “I just found them like this,” said the man who had been at the urinal.

  And then the room seemed to clear out and get quiet, and she rocked him there on the floor against her chest, back and forth. She let him erupt in her arms without asking questions. She stroked his hair and the back of his neck and said, “That’s all right, druzhok. That’s all right.”

  “I don’t want to go to Dr. Nicholson’s.”

  “You’re sick. It’s all right.” She stroked his back. “You’re not feeling well.”

  In time it subsided and Anton was left feeling hollow, his nose wet, his voice deep and thick with mucous.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “How about that?”

  “Let’s go, let’s go. I want to go home.”

  So they wiped themselves off and she straightened his clothes. They stood very upright and walked together out of the men’s room in the basement of the station, and whether anybody was watching them he did not know, but he knew that his mother had been a great beauty in her day and that she carried herself very nicely, always in top form, and she was thin now and supple at his side, and he was proud to be with her. They walked an even forty steps straight ahead this way, as if on parade with their shoulders back, breathing deeply, and then they went up the seven stairs and around the landing, up six more, and through the swinging doors out of the stink and heat toward the left into the open cement yard of the station. The loud speakers were at it still but the morning rush had subsided, and they were able to walk freely without being jostled. It was twenty-nine steps to the ice cream stand with the heat of the sun on their faces, and at the window she gave Anton the money and let him order for them, two Eskimos. They walked back to their platform holding the ice cream bars, cold in their hands, not opening the wrappers until they had reached a bench in the middle of the platform where they could feel the push and pull of the trains coming in and going out as they waited for the next one leaving toward Drezna.

  SPECTATORS

  THEY DROVE THE eighty miles from Elgin up to Delavan Lake on cruise control without saying more than a few tight, courteous words. Marion had been experimenting with reticence lately. Though she had told Arnie not to take it personally, he found it hard not to add this to his list of worries. When they parked at the golf course he wanted to help her out of the car and stand next to her as she took her first look at the place, the event, but she flapped her hand at him and made the face that said he was starting to act old again. She pushed her door open wide and scooted herself around sideways, lifting her left leg with one hand and setting it down outside on the pavement. From inside the car he watched her hoist herself upright onto her good leg and then straighten her pants out where they tended to catch in the socket of her prosthesis, though they hadn’t caught this time. She didn’t get her cane out of the back seat. One of the things she liked about the golfing, he suspected, was that she could use her driver for support instead. And she was getting better with the walking. She could go eight or ten steps on a flat surface without a cane or a golf club or anything. All in all she was doing really well, Arnie thought. That was what he told everyone. There was nothing to be afraid of; she’d be fine.

  But when he got out of the car he could see the shadow of a grimace on her. “Nothing,” she said when he asked her about it. It was a bright blue day, already hot before eight in the morning, and the golf course stretched out calmly around them, as if waiting. Marion wasn’t looking at the soft curves and dales of the ninth fairway though; she was squinting with distaste at the big orange plastic banner overhead, which made a rough clapping sound each time the breeze shifted. SIXTH ANNUAL MIDWEST REGIONAL AMPUTEE GOLF TOURNAMENT it said in black letters.

  “Subtle,” she muttered.

  She avoided the vocabulary of this new predicament, threw away the booklets from her prosthetist and physical therapists, stashed the ointments, kept the leg itself perpetually hidden under pants.

  “Sixth annual. They must be doing something right,” Arnie tried, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Let’s get someone from inside to help with your clubs.”

  “Oh. Can’t you do it, Arn?” she said absently.

  He hesitated. “Sure. Sure.” He bent over the open trunk and braced himself for the needles that would punch into his back and legs, starting with the two herniated discs between his shoulder blades and moving down past his knees.

  Suddenly Marion gasped. Poking his head out of the trunk, Arnie saw it too: pairs of suntanned players, smiling, chatting, moving with their mismatched limbs and herky-jerky gaits from the clubhouse to the neat rows of golf carts waiting in the shade. “Oh God.” Marion turned away from them. “Here they come.”

  Arnie himself had never been any good at golf, though he had always appreciated the tidy green isolation of golf courses, the way people’s voices dropped naturally to church tones, as if there were something in their midst to worship. He liked the cocktails and groundskeepers and the old-fashioned shoes, and the way serious adults could abandon the jagged concerns of their lives to focus for a few quiet hours on the flight of a small dimpled ball. There was a kind of frivolous beauty in that, a weightlessness.

  When they were first married, back in the sixties, Arnie had often caught men watching Marion as she teed off. In the brief seconds following her swing, while she stood, mouth ajar, eyes tracing the ball’s quick sweep over the fairway, Arnie liked to glance back to watch the people watching her. From the clubhouse lawn or adjacent holes, they shook their heads, eyebrows raised. Sometimes a faint whistle escaped through their teeth; he could
hear it.

  Now he stood on the cart path behind the first tee, watching as Marion bent low to the ground to tee up her ball and then wobbled herself upright again. She’d spent weeks getting this move right in physical therapy, and each time he watched her do it, Arnie felt himself clench up and concentrate, praying she wouldn’t fall. If she glanced back at him now, he would give her a quick thumbs up. But she didn’t. She just took two quick practice swings, then squared up to the ball, inhaled, and hit it. Nowadays, she really only took half a swing, all from the shoulders and restrained, as if she feared she could knock herself off her feet if she really let loose. But still, he liked to watch her. Each skill she reacquired seemed like a brick rebuilding her. When her ball cleared the water hazard and landed just a few feet off the fairway, in the fringe but not the rough, he couldn’t help clapping and saying, “There you go, girl.”

  The other golfers in her foursome made encouraging noises, but Marion just shook her head and walked back to Arnie.

  “It’s a good start,” he said. “Really.”

  “So you’ll wait here at the clubhouse?” she asked. Most of the other spouses and friends had already cleared out, looking for other things to do at the resort.

  “I’ll sit right there on the patio.”

  “In case I get tired or something,” she said. This had been one of her conditions before agreeing to come: If she wanted to quit early, back out, he’d be right there to take her home. No questions, no guilt trips.

  “I remember. I promise.”

  “OK, then,” Marion said, moving away as he reached for her. “Off you go.”

  He walked back to the clubhouse patio to join the few remaining spectators, leaving her alone then, shyly withdrawn from her foursome. The organizers had put her with two men from Indiana who appeared to be friends, and a woman from Black Earth whose left leg stopped just below the hip. She wore no prosthesis, and Arnie watched as she dropped her crutches near the edge of the tee and hopped into place. After only one practice swing, she steadied herself again and smacked the ball low and straight, almost a hundred yards.