The Boy on the Bridge

by Natalie Standiford

“I won’t regret it. How could I? He’s Alyosha!”

  Karen shook her head. “We can’t read the future. If only we could.”

  * * *

  She let herself in with her key, the one he had given her. There was no Olga, thank goodness. The only surprise was the sound of water running in the shower, and Alyosha singing “Only Love Will Break Your Heart” in his adorable accent.

  “I’m here!” She popped her head into the steamy bathroom. He peeked out from behind the shower curtain.

  “Rebyonok!” He gave her a soapy kiss. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  She took off her coat and went into the kitchen. A vase of red roses decorated the table. She couldn’t help but notice the very small package on the table beside the vase.

  He came out of the shower all warm and damp, his hair spiking out as he rubbed it with a towel. He grabbed her and kissed her. She pressed against him and kissed him back. He was already naked, his skin damp and warm and smooth, so stumbling over to the bed and falling down onto it was the natural thing to do.

  She peeled away her clothes — sweater, turtleneck, corduroys, bra, panties, socks — until they were both naked on the cool sheets and under his scratchy blanket. He kissed her over and over, gently and softly. His skin felt springy, almost rubbery, resilient. He had a dimple on each hip, where the muscle cupped inward, and she rested her hand there. She wished she had a muscular dimple like that, wished her hipbones jutted like his, but he seemed to like her pillowy softness, so it was okay.

  After a while, they lay side by side in bed, watching the darkness deepen outside the window. He held her hand. She thought, Soon this man will be my husband. The word husband sounded strange, too adult. But she’d get used to it. And after a terrible year or so when they must be apart, he’d come to her and they’d be together forever.

  She couldn’t imagine a day when she wouldn’t feel happy about that.

  “Stay here.” He got up and padded barefoot into the kitchen. The light went on; she saw a yellow square of it against the bedroom door. In a few minutes, after some shuffling, he returned with a glass of water and the small box.

  “I bought this for you. I hope you like it.”

  She unwrapped the box and opened it. Inside was a plain silver ring. Engraved along the inner rim were the Russian words To Laura with love from Alexei.

  “For our wedding,” Alyosha said.

  She slipped it over her ring finger. “It fits.”

  “Good.” They kissed again to seal their pact. We are married now, whatever happens, she thought. She didn’t know why those words came into her mind — whatever happens — but they did.

  He put the ring back in the box, to save for their wedding. They dressed and started fixing dinner. While he cooked, Alyosha explained what would happen. As soon as possible — tomorrow, if she could — they would go to the Palace of Weddings to register and set a date for the ceremony. This had to be done at least two weeks before the wedding, so there was no time to waste. Then, in about two weeks, they’d return to the palace for the ceremony. She could bring Karen as her witness, and he would invite Olga and Roma. “Afterwards we’ll go to a restaurant and have a little party, with champagne.” He’d ask his father to come, too, but Alyosha doubted he’d respond.

  Laura thought of her own parents with a stab of regret. They wouldn’t see her get married. They’d be sad about that. Once Alyosha arrived, surely they’d throw a big party for the new couple. It wouldn’t be the same as a real wedding ceremony, but there was nothing to be done.

  “If my father met you, maybe he’d change his mind about me,” Alyosha said. “He would take one look at you and fall in love, like I did. How could anyone not fall in love with you?”

  “Believe me, it’s possible.” But she laughed, not caring who loved her, as long as Alyosha did.

  I knew it from the beginning.” Olga met Laura outside the Passage department store to help her shop for a wedding dress. “From the first time I met you, I knew you were the one for him.” She grabbed Laura and kissed her cheeks three times. “I’m so excited! Perhaps someday Roma and I will come visit you in San Francisco!”

  “I hope so.” They went inside and Laura eyed the dresses in the shop windows skeptically. They were so shiny and cheap-looking. She didn’t want to wear a traditional wedding dress, just something nice, and the two baggy dresses she’d brought with her weren’t appropriate for a wedding.

  A wedding. The nerves were beginning to get to her.

  “I think you should wear blue,” Olga said. “With a matching corsage.”

  A corsage. It sounded like prom wear. They walked into Dress Shop Number Three — how it differed from Shops Two and One wasn’t clear — and looked at a blue polyester dress on a mannequin. “Here it is.” Olga pulled another dress off a rack. “Go try it on.”

  A salesgirl led Laura into a dressing room. She sat down on the bench and sighed at herself in the mirror. This wasn’t how she’d imagined her wedding preparations, when she’d bothered to imagine them. Her marriage would be witnessed by three people she’d known only a few months. They were lovely people, but they weren’t part of her history, her real life. Her parents wouldn’t be there to see her get married. Or her brother, or her roommate, or any of her friends from high school or college. They wouldn’t even know about it until she got home. Surprise! She wondered how they’d take it. It wouldn’t matter anyway, because the deed would be done.

  None of that matters, she told herself. What matters is that I’ll get to be with Alyosha again. Someday.

  She tried on the dress and twirled in front of the mirror. She’d never wear this normally. She stepped out of the dressing room to show Olga.

  “Gorgeous!” Olga and the salesgirl clapped when they saw her. Olga had taken off her vinyl coat and draped it over a chair. She was wearing a tight pair of Calvin Klein jeans — the first pair Laura had seen in Leningrad.

  “Where did you get them?” Laura asked as Olga modeled them proudly.

  “From Alyosha, of course.” Olga kept her voice low, one eye on the salesgirl. “For my last birthday.”

  “From Alyosha? But how did he get them?”

  “How do you think he gets any of his stuff?” Olga stopped to look at a frilly orange chiffon dress that Laura wouldn’t be caught dead in. “The records, the books, the clothes? From his American friends.”

  “What American friends?” Laura asked. She’d never seen him with any Americans other than Karen and Dan.

  “You know,” Olga said. “Like you.” Laura blinked at her. “Every semester, when a new group of American students arrives, Alyosha makes a new friend.”

  Laura flinched.

  “They come and they go,” Olga said with studied casualness. “We’ve been hoping he’d find a girl to marry him and take him away from here, but none of them would do it. Until you! Lucky you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, every semester, when the new students arrive, he waits outside the university gates and … you know … picks one out.”

  “But — we met by accident —”

  Olga laughed, but her laughter slowed when she saw that Laura wasn’t joking. “Sweetie. You don’t believe that?”

  Laura sat down. “No!” the salesgirl shouted. “You can’t sit down in that dress until you buy it.”

  Laura stood and walked stiff-legged back into the dressing room. Whatever else she did that day, she would not be buying a wedding dress.

  She slowly unzipped the blue dress. The zipper snagged. She pulled the dress over her head anyway.

  The gypsies. That first day, he had rescued her from the gypsies. It had been so chivalrous, so lucky. Fate.

  Or so she had thought.

  Olga’s words sank in like a punch in the stomach. Alyosha loved her! Didn’t he? Had it all been a lie?

  Was he just like Lena, the cold-hearted ballerina, after all?

  Scenes of the past few months replayed like a movie in he
r mind. She watched those moments — when she’d been so happy — and was overwhelmed by waves of sadness, enough to drown her.

  She’d been foolish. Really, she hardly knew him. She’d met him in January, and here it was, May. She was living in a foreign country where she didn’t understand everything people said, why they did what they did, it was all so strange to her, and she didn’t know what she was doing….

  Why was she getting married to a stranger?

  She was at his mercy. She was lost.

  She put her own clothes back on and walked out of the store without looking at the salesgirl or speaking to Olga. She just left.

  “Laura! Wait!”

  She ignored Olga’s shrill, birdlike call. She walked through the department store and out onto the street. She hardly saw where she was going. The people who bustled in front of her barely registered. That was why she bumped right into him.

  Alyosha.

  “Laura! Have you found a dress yet? Don’t show me; I want to be surprised….”

  She couldn’t speak. She looked at his face, the eyes she loved, trying to see evidence of the truth she now knew. Where was it? Where was the hard-heartedness that would allow him to lie to her, use her, deceive her for his own gain? She couldn’t see it.

  “What’s the matter?” He held her by the shoulders, looking into her face. His eyes moved beyond her to someone on the street. Someone who she knew must be Olga, looking horrified or at least embarrassed. “What happened?”

  He released her and something snapped.

  “I know what you’re doing,” she said quietly. “I’m one of a long string of American girlfriends, the dumbest one of all, because I fell for your tricks. Or almost did. I know I mean nothing to you. Soon you will mean nothing to me.”

  She broke away and ran up Nevsky Prospekt. Alyosha shouted and chased her. She saw the Astoria Hotel up ahead. As she’d done so many times to avoid pesky Russian harassers, she flashed her passport and went inside, went to a place where he couldn’t follow.

  If you look for the answers to your soul’s deepest problems, your everyday happiness will be destroyed.

  This thought occurred to Laura during a discussion in her Monday afternoon Russian Literature class, so she scribbled it down in her notebook. They were reading Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov, a nineteenth-century novel about a “superfluous man” who did nothing but lie on a couch all day long, eating, sleeping, and fretting about the changes imminent around him. He was paralyzed by his fear of change, and that paralysis eventually killed him.

  But if examining your life led only to misery, what was the alternative? Stumbling blindly along, hurting people and being hurt without thinking, without learning how to live better?

  “Laura, your problem has nothing to do with the unexamined life,” Karen said. “Or the examined life. It has to do with material reality. You have something someone else wants: a US passport. He does what he can to try to get it. You decide whether you want to share it or not.”

  Karen had not turned out to be the type of friend who resists saying “I told you so” when she is right. Laura couldn’t blame her. Now that she saw the Alyosha situation for what it really was, what it had been all along, she felt like an idiot.

  Because she had been an idiot.

  And she was still an idiot. Because even though she was furious, angry, humiliated, and ashamed … she still loved him.

  And if she could carry a contradiction like that inside her, maybe he could, too. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, she couldn’t quite believe that he didn’t love her. Her head repeated it like a drumbeat — he doesn’t love me, he doesn’t love me, he doesn’t love me — but her heart could not accept it.

  When classes ended, she and Karen walked across the campus, past the OGNEOPASNO! wall, and through the university gates. Laura paused involuntarily — half expecting that Alyosha might be lurking nearby, waiting for her. Karen read her mind and tugged at her elbow.

  “Come on, devushka. No moping, no hoping. Just keep walking.”

  They crossed the Builders’ Bridge, where the gypsy women gathered, their babies all still babies, not one of them having gained a pound.

  At the memory of that first day with Alyosha, her heart lurched and ached. She’d treasured that memory, the meet-cute story she would tell her children, and now it was a sham.

  “What did you do to these poor gypsies, anyway?” Karen asked. “They won’t even look in your direction.”

  “The secret password is militsia,” Laura said.

  “Hmm.” Karen nodded as a truck loaded with clean-shaven, uniformed young militiamen rumbled by. They lounged in the back of the truck, machine guns resting casually over their shoulders. “Makes sense.”

  Below the bridge, the gray waters of the Neva River flowed smoothly at last to the sea, free of ice and smelling of brine. The city sparkled in the sunlight, pastel walls and golden spires glinting like jewels. “Too bad we have to leave now that it’s finally warm,” Karen said. “In January I couldn’t wait for May, but now that it’s here —”

  “I know,” Laura said. “We feel like we belong.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but yeah, sort of.”

  When they reached the dorm she paused at the door, staring down the street toward the phone booth, blocks away, that she had used to call Alyosha. The man with black glasses — was that him? He looked different without his fur hat — rounded the corner with his dog, ambling in the direction of the phone booth. He stopped to let the dog pee in the gutter. He was just a dog walker, she decided. No threat to her at all.

  Karen put an arm around her and led her gently inside. “You’re better off this way, and you know it.”

  * * *

  Before school, after school, she looked for him every day, but he was never there. Soon all she cared about was seeing him again. She was heartbroken and angry and she wanted to confront him one last time. Let him try to explain his way out of it. She would tear his explanation to shreds and then leave, finally satisfied. On Friday, she took the keys he’d given her and went to find him.

  Alyosha was usually home from work by that time, playing records and painting before dinner. She paused outside his door, took a breath, listened. The hallway was quiet, the apartment was quiet. She knocked.

  Quiet.

  No one came to the door. She knocked again.

  The elevator clicked, hummed, rattled. She heard the car rising through the building, stopping somewhere, perhaps the floor below. The door clanked open, clanked shut.

  Silence.

  She took out her key and unlocked the apartment door. It swung open, bumped the coat rack with a muffled ump. A pale square of sunlight leaked into the hall from the bedroom window.

  “Alyosha?” she called. She stepped inside.

  The apartment was empty. The breakfast dishes — a tea glass, a small plate, a knife and fork — were clean and dry in the dish drain beside the sink. The bed was neatly made as always. Everything looked fine. Surely he would be home soon. She took off her jacket and shoes and sat on the bed to wait for him.

  A painting stood propped on an easel in the corner across from the bed. It was a new one; she’d never seen it before. It was a portrait of her.

  She sat motionless in the silence, staring at the picture. He’d painted her in her favorite blue sweater against a bright background of heavenly blue. Light glowed behind her head, giving her a halo. She was half smiling, not happy, not sad, but confused and thoughtful.

  He loved her. The love was in the picture. He’d painted love all around her, on her face, in her hair, in the shade of blue he chose, in the light that bathed her.

  Her anger melted away. She didn’t care why he had asked her to marry him. She didn’t care whether his love was real or tainted by his desire to leave.

  She still loved him.

  She felt ashamed. Alyosha was good. She understood why he wanted to leave, and she didn’t blame him for doing anything he could to ge
t out. She could still help him, if he let her.

  She would wait for him.

  My time in Russia is coming to an end, she thought as she sat and stared in a trance. Soon this will all be gone. The rough wool blanket on the bed. The low tea table. The guitar in the corner, the old folk songs. The carefully tended shelf of rock-and-roll records, the well-dusted East German stereo. The tiny plaster squares painted with exquisite scenes of Leningrad street life: stray cats; bloated babushkas sweeping rubbish in alleys; mysterious archways and doors; old men in wool caps smoking papyrosi; girls looking beautiful in ill-fitting clothes. I will leave, and this will all disappear in a cloud, like a dream. This room will be a place I once saw in a dream, and perhaps will see again in a dream, but never as real and solid as this. I will go back to my world in another dimension, a parallel world where none of this is real.

  She sat and waited as the evening light faded and grew fuzzy. She lay back on the bed and fell asleep.

  She woke up suddenly in total darkness, except for two glowing lights in the room — the clock radio beside the bed and the green light on the stereo. It was nine fifteen.

  She sat up. Alyosha had not come home.

  She crossed the room to the stereo. A Neil Young record sat on the turntable. It was not like him to leave the stereo on, or even to leave a precious record out of its case.

  She pushed the OFF button and the green light went out. She turned on the overhead light. Alyosha had not been there all day.

  She had to get back to the dorm. Maybe he’d gone to Olga and Roma’s after work, for a party or something, she told herself as she put on her sneakers and coat. She tried not to worry. But something wasn’t right.

  * * *

  She went back the next afternoon. Everything in the apartment was just as she’d left it. The same dishes in the drain. The same record on the stereo. He hadn’t been home.

  Where was he? She didn’t know what to do. She looked in the refrigerator and took out some eggs. She made eggs for herself, and tea, and spent the evening watching the light fade over the trash-strewn field outside his window. She propped one of her shoes against the door, in case someone sneaked in while she slept — she’d know the door had opened if her shoe moved. When it was completely dark, she got undressed, slid under the covers, and went to sleep.