K climbed up to help them get down safely. They were American tourists like us, it turned out, as we shouted back and forth over the faint background noise of more yelling and sirens. Small black flakes floated in the air – ash, I guessed—and there was a smell of burning. The older of the two wouldn’t agree to be lifted down onto safe ground unless K first took her purse and handed it over to me. (This he did; the purse seemed more important to her in her panic than her own safety.) Then he lifted her off the balcony with me at the bottom to receive her, purse dangling off my forearm. The second woman climbed down with less help, then wandered away the moment our backs were turned. We were focused on Rose – the one who had zealously protected her purse – because we saw, now that our adrenalin rushes were subsiding, that she was terribly hurt: the pale, frail skin of her arms, already as thin as parchment, was deeply burned. She needed medical help right away.
In a moment the sirens were keening close at hand, winding down, and our hopes soared when an ambulance pulled up on the street beside us. But they were quickly dashed when the rear doors were flung open and two uniformed EMTs jumped out: children. Well, teenagers, we saw on closer inspection, but they looked even younger because their faces were blank and confused. Behind the ambulance, we could see more victims roaming the streets, burned and shell-shocked.
The ambulance contained no equipment save for a single stretcher and blanket. There wasn’t even a first aid kit that we could see – not even a Band-Aid.
Rose spoke no Spanish and the child paramedics spoke no English; she seemed disoriented, even scared, and the teenagers did too. Although our own versions of Spanish were crude, we figured they might be better than nothing. So I asked one of the teens where the ambulance would take Rose, and after we watched it pull away, we ran to our truck, looked up the address on K’s phone, and drove.
It turned out to be a clinic run by the military, maybe four rooms in total: later we found out there’d been so many people wounded in the accident – a boiler explosion – that the survivors had to be spread out among all the town’s medical facilities. We waited as they worked on Rose’s burns, and when she had been treated and lay recovering in her bed, bandaged up, we stood beside the bedside. We did our best to translate what the doctor and nurses said to her, and what her responses were to them. Rose was 93, she told us. She was still shaky, but managed to communicate with us her urgent worry about her traveling companion, Jerry.
‘He’s just a young man, you see,’ she said. ‘His name is Jerry. Please, go look for him! I have to know if he’s alive. You see, he’d gone to the back of the restaurant. He got up from the table and went to the bathroom…’ And with that she gave a small sob and closed her eyes as the sedatives kicked in.
We knew from the medical staff’s descriptions of the explosion that this meant Jerry had been nearer the boiler than Rose had – Jerry had been at higher risk. But by now it was late and we could hardly even speak, we were so tired. The doctor told us our search would be more fruitful by daylight, so we went back to the condo and collapsed.
The next morning we got up early and strategized about how to find Jerry. We weren’t confident we could make ourselves understood in Spanish over the phone, or understand anyone else’s Spanish either. We’d have to hit the pavement. So we brewed some coffee to go and started making the rounds in our truck, driving to every medical outpost in town, one after another.
Our worst stop came in the early afternoon: the town’s central hospital. Outside it, milling on the sidewalk, were crowds – families waiting to hear the news and families who had just heard it, standing huddled in pairs or small groups and crying. We walked through these clusters of mourners with our faces down, not wanting to disturb them, trying to be invisible as ghosts. If we’d been home, we would have caught fragments of speech, would have had words to hang onto, words to give the dead and injured, and the people mourning them, detail and personhood. Maybe we would have spoken to someone. Here, where the language wasn’t our own, it was like wading through a sea of grief – we couldn’t see where our feet were.
But Jerry wasn’t there, and he didn’t seem to be anywhere. Again and again, no Jerry. Only after many hours of long and frustrating searching – our childlike Spanish kept our progress through the levels of bureaucracy to a snail’s pace, and some places we visited twice – we finally found our man.
He wasn’t too badly hurt, though he, like Rose, lay weak on his back in a hospital bed. We understood the second we saw him why our description of ‘young’ Jerry hadn’t resonated with staff at any of the hospitals or clinics: ‘young’ Jerry was in his late seventies. Clearly, by Rose’s standards, he was still a spring chicken. When we told him she was alive, he burst into tears.
After a few minutes he asked us to do something for him while he was bedridden. Could we make a trip to retrieve his documents and money from his car? He’d left them in the compartment under the armrest, he said, because Rose had been paying for their lunch that day. Their passports were in the armrest, he said, with their cash and insurance cards. The vehicle was in the parking lot beside the restaurant; he described its location and gestured for the plastic tray that contained his belongings so we could pick out his key ring.
The lot was cordoned off now, and police were teeming over it, dark forms in the dusk. Once we explained why we were there, they lifted the yellow tape for us. We walked along the rows of cars toward the building wall against which Jerry had left his Jeep parked. And there the Jeep was, or what remained of it. No keys would be needed, clearly. The car was gutted, with nothing left of its body but a few blackened metal bones. We stood beside the husk, looking in between those metal bones. One piece of vinyl had survived completely intact, so pristine that it looked as though it had never been engulfed in flame at all: the armrest compartment on the center console. It was still perfectly whole. We pried open the lid of the compartment, and inside, also in perfect condition, found Jerry’s and Rose’s documents – and hundreds of dollars in mint-looking cash.
A couple of minutes later, trying to leave the parking lot again, we were forced to hand over Jerry’s bundle of bills to the policemen. We counted it carefully first, suspecting corruption (as it turned out, we were able to reclaim the money for Jerry at the police station the next day after filing about a ream of paperwork). The documents, though, we were allowed to take to the two clinics, Jerry’s and then Rose’s, where we gave them back to their rightful owners. We also had to file a report on what we’d witnessed; for that, too, we spent hours waiting in lines at the police station. And when we weren’t making our way through dense hedges of Spanish-language formalities, we carried messages back and forth between Rose and Jerry. Administrators at Rose’s facility were making plans to airlift her back over the international border, and Jerry needed to be moved to her clinic beforehand so they could ride back in the helicopter together.
By the time we saw them reunited – Jerry at Rose’s bedside, both smiling and crying as they held hands – it was the last day of our trip. After they were airlifted out, we, too, would cross the border and go home, back to everyday routine and our jobs in Tucson.
We ended up at a different bar on our last evening, after saying goodbye to them. (We’d never see them again, as it turned out: we parted company without asking for phone numbers or addresses, and both of their names were common.) This second bar was right next to the condo complex, instead of downtown, and frequented mostly by Anglos. It had a more generic feel – a bar that could have been anywhere, or at least anywhere-USA. Spatially it was in Mexico, but its culture was pure American empire. We drank beers instead of margaritas and walked back to the condo, still exhausted, after only two. The feeling of empty time was gone; leisure had passed us by.
We never did take a classic honeymoon vacation, strolling aimlessly and happily on white sands. Years later, divorced but still close, we came to feel that was alright. The time with Rose and Jerry and a small-town Mexican bureaucracy had been a
bout shock, the sadness of others and the practical work of picking up the pieces – no idylls at all. Then again, neither of us is really cut out for free time; most hours will find us bent unhealthily over our laptops.
These days, with a little girl who’s 11 and a little boy who’s 7, we travel mostly for work – me to promote my novels, K to promote the conservation of endangered species. We do that travel separately, but we’ve still managed to take the children to Hawaii together, and to Europe, and for road trips and river trips across the West.
For us real travel is travel that isn’t just a commodity or a rest from real life. It’s more often a change of texture, a shift into rawness and vulnerability. When you venture into unknown places, especially places where you don’t speak the language, you give up much of the social power you’ve come to rely on as an adult. Travel has a way of turning us into children again, whether we’re 93 or only 35, and how vulnerable that makes us is mostly a matter of chance, money, and the kindness of strangers.
But as long as we come out in one piece, it’s not so bad to be vulnerable. It’s not so bad to be surprised, even by hardship.
LYDIA MILLET is the author of 13 works of fiction, most recently Mermaids in Paradise, a satire about a couple honeymooning in the Caribbean who discover strange creatures in a coral reef. Her previous books include the novel Magnificence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle and Los Angeles Times book awards; My Happy Life, which won the PEN-USA fiction award; and a story collection called Love in Infant Monkeys, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in the Arizona desert and works at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity; her next novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, will be published in 2016.
In Smolensk
LLOYD JONES
Our paths would never have crossed, but for an official in the Kaunas city office telling me a few days earlier, ‘Well, course, you will have to go to Smolensk.’
A desk divided us, and the official and I leaned back in our chairs. For a pleasant half hour he shared the problem surrounding the bones of Napoleon’s Grande Armée turning up in the ploughs of farmers each spring.
The difficulties, he said, were of a diplomatic nature. The French don’t want the bones repatriated, and the local farmers don’t know what to do with them.
The ‘bones impasse’ had come up in conversation after I’d told him of my plan to retrace the route taken by Napoleon on his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1814.
So many of the invaders caught by a barbarous early winter never made it back across the Neiman River. The retreating army froze to death or died spectacularly – catching light as they tried to warm themselves, or were eaten by bears, or run down by pursuing Cossacks, or drowned in the snow and blizzards, slowly capsizing into a sleep from which there was no return.
Some of the survivors never made it back to their country of origin (for this was one of the first ‘great coalitions of the willing’) and stayed on in Russia, absorbed, or adopted, into local communities.
The city official told me the murals in one of the local churches had been painted by one such straggler.
I can’t recall the church or its whereabouts, or a single detail of the paintings I took in later that day, but I do retain a vivid memory of the woman whose knees were swaddled in bandages as she crawled and dragged herself across the flagstones in the direction of the altar.
I thought at first she was crippled, and I watched appalled by the spectacle of this poor woman’s attempt to drag herself up the aisle to get closer to, presumably, God or his emissary.
I went and bought an ice cream (vanilla) from a huge woman in a white apron scooping it out of a wooden vat on wheels next to a chocolate-coloured phone box.
I don’t recall much of the road to Vilnius bifurcating the historic oak tree where, the official said, Napoleon had taken a nap.
I do remember my eagerness to see it, and my edge-of-the-seat concern that the driver might have already passed it.
I am not even sure of where I caught the train to Smolensk. I suspect it was Vilnius. Probably it was. Of the train trip, nothing passing in the window has stuck as well as the magnificent pastel-coloured station with its cathedral atmosphere that I strode out of that spring morning in 1995.
A road climbed to the old walled town of Smolensk. A section of its stone wall was still intact, and nearby I spied a Ferris wheel. There was no line. I have an idea I was the first customer. And I think it was my idea for the operator to stop the wheel at the top of its arc.
Of the view I don’t recall much, apart from the unnerving height at which my bucket seat came to a rest, and my sudden awareness of the disheartening amount of rust and corrosion in the framework around me.
I probably made notes; that’s what I usually do. But where are those notes now? I have no idea…
I am in Smolensk that day for no other reason than to search out my own event while in pursuit of another.
My train is scheduled to leave Smolensk for Moscow that evening, so there is the rest of the afternoon to kill. I am, I suppose, just another mysterious and clueless visitor pretending they are not lost. That shop and that corner lead me to another, and another, and then I am crossing a busy road to a park. Here I may relax, because the obligation of anyone in a park is to forget where they are; a wander in a park is the nearest thing to dreamily treading water in the sea.
The day has turned unexpectedly warm, and wintry faces grimace in the mad wind that is suddenly sweeping the park. Across the road the doors of the Lenin Institute are banging loudly.
The woman approaching me on the path has been caught out, apparently like everyone else, by the soaring warmth. The man at her side also wears a coat, although his is dark and suavely hangs off the points of his sloping shoulders.
He is tall, and thin. He seems agitated. More so now, as I think back to this moment. The way he stops, and starts. He stops when she doesn’t want to. He moves off again before she is ready to, or is convinced – her face is one you see at checkpoints; it wants to be persuaded of something which he is withholding. That is how it seems to me now. But that is after many replays. At the time their progress simply appeared to be marked by some minor disagreement.
They are still making their slow way along the path when they stop again, this time for the man to shake a cigarette loose from a packet. His coat falls off his shoulders. He reaches for the woman. Alarmed, she takes half a step back. He still manages to catch her and place each hand on her shoulder, then his knees bend and he proceeds to slide down her front, melting away from her, to sit, and to roll on to his side, dead.
The woman calls out in distress. She kneels down and gently shakes his shoulder. She strokes the man’s cheek, talking to him, hoping no doubt that he will suddenly spring awake until she looks up for help, and her eyes alight on me and she begins speaking hurriedly and urgently in Russian which I don’t understand, have at best only a few words for asking directions and in the politest possible way saying, ‘No, thank you’ and ‘Yes, please.’
She has one hand beneath the man’s shoulder, so that part of him is slightly raised while his head droops back.
I say something in English (probably ‘Can I help?’), and then, for a moment that feels unbearably long, certainly long enough for the absurdity of the situation to take its full measure, we stare at each other – the woman with a look of incomprehension.
Another arrives, a knowledgeable and useful person, and he crouches down to check the fallen man. He and the woman quickly converse, and reach agreement. The woman gets to her feet and scrambles off, presumably to find help.
Now, years later, I have just remembered she is carrying a large handbag. And this ridiculous accessory swings uselessly from her arm as she hurries away. She wants to run but has long forgotten how. And we watch her topple into the lanes of traffic and make a beeline for the crashing doors of the Lenin Institute.
The other fellow seems quite unbothered by the dead man. A
s though it is a regular occurrence. Especially on Sunday afternoons, and at this time of the year.
He lights himself a cigarette, then he crouches down to get his hand under the dead man’s shoulder, and together we hoist the poor fellow on to the park bench. We are able to arrange him so that the bench supports him as far as his waist; however, we leave his legs drooping down to the ground, and his shaggy head turned away from the public.
We squeeze in to the little remaining space, and we sit, and we wait, the Russian man with his elbows on his knees, blowing smoke at the ground, and myself, colossally inadequate to the requirements of the moment, totally extraneous to the scene, but implicated by the chance of my being there, as history was made.
Who were they? Man and wife? Lovers? Is the woman still alive?
I imagine I have featured many times in her account of the day ‘Ivan’ died, so unexpectedly, so heartbreakingly, and the first person on the scene was someone from the other side of the world and without a drop of Russian.
I imagine she has furnished me with details that I can’t recall of myself – what I wore, my expressions, my responses, and the strangeness of an encounter which the invaded will recall with clarity for generations after.
LLOYD JONES is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. Among his published works are Biografi: An Albanian Quest, The Book of Fame, Mister Pip (which received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), Hand Me Down World, and The Man in the Shed. His most recent book is A History of Silence.
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