Boy on the Bridge

by Natalie Standiford

  “What is that stuff?” Karen asked.

  “Bison Piss,” Dan said. “I got it special at the Berioska. It’s flavored with buffalo grass, or something, that grows in Poland.” He produced a stack of short paper cups and poured out shots for all of them.

  Binky stared dubiously into her cup. “Looks like a urine specimen.”

  “Don’t look at it — drink it. Na zdorovye.”

  They tossed back the vodka. Dan grunted, “Akh!” Russian style.

  “You’ve really gone native,” Laura said.

  “Same to you,” Dan said. “How’s Alyosha?”

  “Fine.” Just hearing his name gave her heart a jolt. “How’s Lena?”

  “A bitch. As you saw. But she’s pretty.”

  “Why was she so snooty to Alyosha?”

  Dan shrugged. “They’re both after the same thing. And they don’t want other Russians sniffing around and spoiling their game.”

  Laura bristled.

  “What are you talking about?” Binky asked.

  “Lena’s looking for a ticket out of here,” Dan explained. “So’s Alyosha. But they don’t want us — their tickets — to see how valuable we are. How many people want us. They don’t want us to realize that they’re using us. They want us to think they’re in love with us, that it’s real, the one and only thing.”

  “Alyosha’s not using me,” Laura said.

  Dan laughed. “Good one.” On Laura’s hurt look, he changed his expression. “I mean, come on. You know how it works here.”

  “Can I have some more vodka?” Binky asked.

  “You like to think she’s using you because then it gives you a free pass to use her,” Laura shot back. “It’s just a game to you. Not love. A game. And if that’s what you want to do, that’s fine. But don’t you dare say that’s what’s happening with me and Alyosha. You’re not there. You don’t see.”

  Dan passed her the bottle without looking at her. “Laura, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean he doesn’t care about you —”

  Laura passed the bottle to Binky without drinking. When she was with Alyosha, she had no doubts about him. It was when she was away from him that the doubts crept in.

  The trip would be a test. A test of her faith, her feelings, her resolve. She would return to Leningrad with her doubts about Alyosha growing — or more in love with him than ever.

  Maybe that was why Alyosha didn’t want her to go away. He didn’t want her feelings tested, in case they didn’t pass.

  Mark Calletti knocked on the door. “Hey. Who’s got the vodka?”

  Soon there was a full-on party raging in Laura’s compartment. The train jolted, lurched, and chugged slowly out of the station. By morning they’d be in Moscow.

  * * *

  She woke up at sunrise and peeked out the window. The train rolled through the snow-covered countryside, past birch forests and tiny wooden villages out of a fairy tale.

  She put on her coat and slipped into her boots for the walk down the chilly corridor to the bathroom. At the end of the car, a babushka busied herself with a tea cart. She sold tea and rolls for a few kopeks each. On her way back to her compartment, Laura bought four rolls and a pot of tea.

  Outside, the scenery was quickly shifting from villages to small cities, factories, desolate apartment buildings, a smoky sky, grimy streets. They were getting close to Moscow.

  * * *

  The grand avenues of Moscow rolled by through the steamed-up bus window while Irina, their Intourist guide, lectured them on the sights. Laura was glad she was spending the semester in Leningrad; Moscow was ugly. As they neared their hotel, the medieval spires of St. Basil’s Cathedral rose over Red Square, striped, multicolored domes that looked as if they were made out of Play-Doh, the glorious monument to Ivan the Terrible and the dark and bloody history of Russia.

  At the Hotel Rossiya — a massive rectangle built in the 1960s in the Soviet Modern style, sterile and ugly but conveniently located next to Red Square — she and Karen roomed with Binky. They picked up their keys from the cranky woman who guarded their floor from a desk at the end of the hall. She kept all the keys, and hotel guests had to stop at her desk whenever they came or went from the hotel. She also had a samovar for tea.

  “Because it’s inhuman to ask a person to go more than an hour without tea,” Karen said.

  “Just one more way for them to keep track of us,” Binky said.

  After a hotel breakfast they met their guide, Irina, for a tour of the Kremlin. Hundreds of people were lined up around Red Square to see the corpse of Lenin in Lenin’s tomb. Irina led them past the armed guards straight to the front of the line — the usual special treatment.

  “Vladimir Ilich Lenin died in 1924,” Irina lectured as they stared at the bald, goateed, waxy corpse lying on a bed of red silk and encased in crystal.

  “He looks like an exhibit at Madame Tussauds,” Binky whispered, but all Laura could think of, strangely, was Snow White lying on her crystal bier after she eats the poison apple, before the prince kisses her back to life.

  “They’ve kept this corpse together for almost sixty years,” Dan said.

  “Jesus,” Karen mumbled.

  “When do we get to go to the Berioska?” Binky whined. “I heard the Moscow shops have stuff you don’t see in Leningrad.”

  “I’m dying for a bite of Jarlsberg cheese,” Karen said. “Just one bite.”

  * * *

  That night, Laura went with Dan and Karen to the Marine Bar at the US Embassy. It was Dan’s idea. The sight of US Marines — armed, on duty, guarding the American Embassy — was a bit of a shock. The marines, crisp and shorn in red, white, and blue, looked healthy, rich, and clean.

  The Marine Bar was crowded. It was movie night, and they were showing Take This Job and Shove It. The room was decorated to look like a roadhouse, with American movie posters and pennants from American sports teams strung along the walls. Country music played on the sound system as Laura and her friends settled at a picnic table, ready to devour some hamburgers, milk shakes, and Budweiser.

  “I don’t even like Bud.” Karen plinked her beer can with her fingernail. “But this does taste refreshing.”

  Laura’s chocolate milk shake arrived while they waited for their burgers and fries. She took a sip.

  “How is it?” Karen asked. Laura had been looking forward to a milk shake for weeks. Her stomach was primed. But she made a face.

  “Disappointing. Not chocolatey enough.” She took another sip. “And it has that weird Russian-ice-cream taste. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not right.” It tastes like cream, she remembered Alyosha saying. She took one last sip, then pushed it away. “I’m going to get a Pepsi. Anyone want anything?”

  Dan and Karen shook their heads.

  She went to the bar. “Where y’all from?” a marine asked her as she waited for the bartender to bring her Pepsi.

  “All over the place,” Laura replied. He was about her age but looked younger, with his hair cut so short his face looked exposed — not raw, exactly, but uncooked, like bread dough. “We’re college students studying in Leningrad. Where are you from?”

  “Huntsville, Alabama,” the marine said. “So you’re learning to speak Russian?”

  “Uh-huh. And you?”

  “Can’t speak a word. Well, okay, I know hello, good-bye, please, and thank you. Four words. No point in learning much more than that — I never get to talk to Russians.” The bartender gave her a bottle of Pepsi and a glass of ice made from mineral water — safe, non-contaminated ice — and waved away her dollar. “Welcome to Moscow.”

  When she returned to the table, the hamburgers had arrived. They looked delicious and smelled even better. Dan already had his mouth full and was nodding appreciatively.

  “Do you think they have an inner life?” Laura watched the marines carousing at the bar.

  “Does who have an inner life?” Karen asked.

  She nodded toward the soldiers. “Them.”


  “Everyone has an inner life,” Karen said.

  “How do you know? I mean, they come to a foreign country and spend all their time doing pretty much whatever they’d do at home. They don’t learn the language or see much of the country beyond what they’re forced to see for their jobs. And look at their faces. They look so … unmarked.”

  “They’re young,” Dan said.

  “No younger than we are,” Laura insisted.

  “Do you mean, do they have a soul?” Karen asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Laura said.

  “I think there are people who can spend their lives watching TV and going to work and eating at Burger King and never have a soul-stirring moment or thought, ever,” Karen said.

  “Their soul might not be stirred, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have one,” Dan said.

  The lights dimmed and the movie started. The theme song, “Take This Job and Shove It,” blasted through the bar. The marines whooped and cheered. Laura felt uncomfortable. She hadn’t said it out loud, but when she talked about an inner life she was worrying about herself: the gaping void she felt inside herself that she wanted to fill with something real, something good. Something she hadn’t found at home. The larger life she had come here looking for.

  Drama. Passion. Soul.

  She’d heard Russians say that Americans had riches but Russians had soul, and she always said it wasn’t true.

  But what if it was?

  Alyosha had soul. That much she knew.

  They sat through the movie. She could hardly pay attention to it. Her mind wandered off to memories of Alyosha, memories already, although she’d hardly been away from him for a day.

  The way he listened hard as she read a page of Dickens to him, straining to understand the unfamiliar words, enjoying the sound of them anyway.

  Lying next to him while the sky outside the window darkened.

  Falling asleep while he told her a folktale.

  She missed him.

  One whole week, she thought. I’ll never make it.

  They spent a lot of time on the tour bus. Irina talked as the bus rumbled through the city from one sight to another, from the Stalinist wedding-cake-on-steroids that was Moscow University to the site of the 1980 Olympics. They passed the classical white columns of the Bolshoi Theater, where they’d be seeing the Stravinsky ballet The Firebird later in the week. Irina took them inside the Art Deco department store GUM, or Government Universal Store, a glass-and-metal shopping arcade, to spend money on souvenirs they didn’t really want. They rolled along the redbrick walls of the Kremlin and stopped at the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy to admire the gargantuan statue of the Worker and the Collective Farm Woman. He held a hammer, she a sickle, and together they strode into the glorious Soviet future. That night the Americans went to the circus, where they saw a bear riding a motorcycle. They were kept busy every moment, no chance to get up to mischief, whatever that might be.

  Laura barely heard a word Irina said. The whole time she stared out the bus window, thinking about Alyosha. Wondering what he was doing. Wondering what Olga was doing. She knew he had been to Moscow several times on trips with his parents and his school, and she wondered how the broad avenues and massive government buildings had looked to him as a boy.

  On the third morning of the trip, as the American group lined up to board a bus to the Novodevichy Convent, a flash of blue — a familiar shade — caught Laura’s eye. Someone loitered near the hotel entrance, behind a tree, and she glimpsed part of an arm — an elbow — and a bit of fur trim on a parka that looked just like Alyosha’s. One sneakered foot stuck out — Alyosha’s sneaker?

  She stepped out of the line, thinking to dash across the sidewalk and look behind the tree — of course this mystery person couldn’t be Alyosha, but she had to make sure. Irina herded her back in line, snapping, “Get on the bus, come on, come on, we’re late!”

  Laura took a seat next to Karen, leaning across Karen’s lap to catch a glimpse through the window of the mysterious stranger.

  “What are you doing?” Karen was grumpy from lack of sleep. Actually, everyone was. They’d gone to the hotel bar after the symphony and ended up singing ABBA songs with a gang of Swedish chemists who were in town for a conference. They closed the hotel bar at two a.m.

  “Nothing.” The mysterious person had disappeared. Laura felt foolish. Of course it wasn’t Alyosha. What would he be doing in Moscow? She was thinking about him too much. It made her see things that weren’t there. It made her crazy.

  Crazy crazy crazy crazy.

  She leaned back for the ride to the convent, while Irina filled them in on the history of the place they were about to see: a sixteenth-century fortress filled with churches, icons, art treasures, and a famous cemetery.

  Dan popped up from the seat behind hers. “Did you know Peter the Great stashed his first wife in the convent when he didn’t want her anymore?”

  “Nice,” Laura said.

  “That’s what convents were for,” Karen said. “A place to get rid of unwanted women without having to go to the trouble of killing them.”

  “Students who are talking in the back,” Irina barked over her microphone, “you may want to listen. You are missing important information.”

  “ ’Kay, sorry,” Dan whisper-grumbled, and Laura and Karen snickered. Irina glared at them.

  “Where do they find these guides?” Karen whispered. “They’re so cranky.”

  “They send them to Crankiness School,” Laura joked. “The People’s Institute of Sullenness Training.”

  “The Soviet Union,” Dan muttered in a mock announcer voice. “Come for the food. Stay for the crankiness.”

  The three of them broke up in giggles, drawing a glare from Irina that went well beyond cranky.

  Laura sleepwalked through the churches, ditching the tour (another glare from Irina) to wander through the cemetery. It was a brisk, breezy, early-spring day, the rawness in the air softening at last. She wove her way through ancient headstones and monuments, pausing at the graves of Chekhov and Shostakovich, Gogol and Bulgakov. She lingered before the tomb of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet and playwright who had written “A Cloud in Trousers.” The poet Alyosha loved — one of them. The book Alyosha had been reading the first time she met him for coffee.

  The headstone was a huge slab of red marble set on a larger slab of gray marble, and in front of it was a bust of the poet, handsome and rakish, his thick dark hair curling over his forehead. She read the dates: 1893–1930. He had killed himself over lost love at age thirty-six.

  There it was, that mix of love and death, violence and poetry. Now that she’d found it, she wasn’t sure she wanted it anymore. Her heart pounded. In two months, her semester abroad would end. She would have to leave Leningrad, possibly forever. That meant leaving Alyosha, too — possibly forever. Probably forever.

  She wanted love without the death, poetry without the violence.

  And then, from behind the large marble slab, out stepped Alyosha.

  She gasped, terrified at first that she’d really gone crazy. Or that he was a ghost. But he had surprisingly rosy cheeks for an apparition.

  “Shhh!” He slipped his cold hands inside her gloves.

  “What are you doing here?” She pressed her cheek against his. “Are you real?”

  “What? I’m real. I’m real.” They stood in the cemetery, cheek to cheek for a long moment, until Alyosha broke apart to kiss her.

  “I had to come see you. I couldn’t stand to be away for another day.”

  “But how did you get here?”

  “They have a metro in Moscow, too, you know.” Eye roll.

  “I know. I mean, how did you get to Moscow?”

  “I took the train, just like you. Last night. I’m staying with a friend of mine from art school, Dima. Sleeping on his couch.”

  “And how did you find me?”

  He grinned. “You told me you were staying at the Rossiya, so I
went there and waited. Before long, out comes a troop of American students who look around my Laura’s age, and a tour guide babbling about Novodevichy Convent. And there comes a girl in a sheepskin coat who looks a lot like my Laura. And what do you know…”

  “It is.” She kissed him again. “But now what?”

  “Now we spend the rest of the week in Moscow together.”

  “But I can’t. I have to stay with the group.” They had rules for the trip, just like they had in Leningrad. Everyone must stay with the group, except for designated free periods. Everyone must attend every outing unless they are sick, and then they must get permission from Dr. Stein or Dr. Durant….

  “Do you have to stay with them every minute of the day?”

  “Well, not when we’re free, I guess.”

  “So? What’s on the schedule tonight?”

  “The opera. Eugene Onegin.”

  “And what would happen if you slipped out during intermission and didn’t come back?”

  “I’d get into huge trouble.”

  He frowned. “Okay. What’s on the schedule for tomorrow?”

  She pulled the crumpled mimeographed sheets from her pocket, the itinerary for their week in Moscow. Alyosha noted every hole in the schedule — what few there were — and claimed them for himself. He gave her Dima’s address and phone number, with the familiar instructions to be careful when she called. They made a plan to meet the next afternoon in Red Square.

  “At St. Basil’s.” He pulled his hand out of her glove, took her chin in his fingers, tilted it toward him. “One o’clock. Promise.”

  “At St. Basil’s. Promise.”

  He kissed her. Then he looked up, glanced around, and disappeared among the graves.

  She found herself staring at Mayakovsky’s head, wondering if Alyosha had really been there, or if she’d daydreamed him into existence. She heard a footstep behind her, turned, and there stood Karen, frowning.

  “What’s he doing here?” Karen demanded.

  She’d seen him.

  Karen went on when Laura didn’t answer. “Just happened to be in town, I guess?”