Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (10 page)

He awakens to the smell of smoke and the crackle of brush fire. The air is ablaze, and the weeds along the beachline catch fire. He wants to run, but he can’t find his feet, and his belly feels ready to split open if he moves. The monkeys are screeching, but there are no people anywhere. Finally, with one hand holding his stomach in, he gets to one knee and pushes himself up to stand.

A tug from his leg pulls him down again. There’s a rope tied around his left ankle, he sees, and at the other end of the rope is a little girl, a different one, fatter. “I’m helping you,” she says. “Come on.” The fire is right at his back, burning his skin.

But every time he tries to get to his feet she tugs at the wrong moment and trips him again. “Goddamnit!” He summons his last strength to coil the rope between them and yank her off her feet. He pins her thick shoulder into the sand and gets up. He manages a few steps toward the ocean, dragging her.

“Hey!” she says, laughing. “Hey, knock it off!”

He falls again and can go no farther. They’re only a few yards from the moat she has dug, and beyond that the ocean is very near. She leans against the rope like a bargeman. He holds his side and watches the muscles in her legs straining. They move. With each step she grows larger and stronger, so that when they reach the moat she just bends down and cradles him up, crossing the moat in one stride and bringing him right to the waterline. She lays him down in the shallow water where the waves tug and push his body. She is tall as a house over him. The saltwater stings, but she says this is good. “The fish will clean you out.”

T
he World Series is over.

Egypt Air flight 990 goes down off Nantucket.

Microsoft is declared a monopoly.

Neil is gone; there are new people in his place. There is never a shortage of faces here.

John comes by now and then to say hello. His wife has been moved to a regular room on the third floor, and sometimes I see them in the courtyard: she, strapped tight to her chair, her chin squeezed convulsively against her chest, and he, shuffling behind her with nothing but a cigarette. She seems unable to speak or understand, and he doesn’t introduce me. “So sad,” my mother says, unaware that worse things could happen to us still. We are worn down, tatters of our former selves, grateful for things like water, like air.

“Do you remember the time,” she says to me one day while we’re watching my father’s body, “when you spray painted flowers all over the side of Dad’s car?”

“No way.” I blink at her. “You’re making that up.”

“Hardly.” She snorts. “You were a handful, always trying to goad him.”

It seems impossible that I could have blacked out a transgression as big as that, but I close my eyes and, after asking her which car, which color flowers, I imagine myself in our old garage, shaking the rattling cans and squeezing the trigger. It comes back: the aerosol smell, the cramped hand, my own vicious chuckle. It was a brand new Buick Riviera, black. I had offered to help him wash it earlier that day, and he’d responded with nothing but a booming, “Don’t touch.” She isn’t lying.

“How come you never reminded me before?”

She shrugs. “It was done, I guess. Sleeping dogs.”

So now there is nothing for me to be sure of. All my memories seem faulty, invented like dreams. The man before me bears no resemblance to that towering one in my mind. This one, the flesh one, on day twenty-eight now, has begun to wake up regularly. A piece of clear tape covers a sore on his right ear. His mouth is free of the tube now; they have cut right into his trachea. When he slips down in the bed he pushes with one heel and wrestles from side to side until he works himself back up toward the pillows.

“See how strong he is?” My mother smiles. “You’re so strong, Tommy,” she shouts into his ear.

But he ends up skewed, lopsided on the bed. And the skin hangs loose from his forearms, the muscles wilted. The stump of his leg, wrapped tight in ACE bandages, snaps high in the air, as if astonished at its sudden weightlessness. His one leg is still wrapped in the inflating cuff; the other cuff dangles under the bed, inflating and deflating around nothing. He is a fraction of my father, powerless to terrify. At long last, after so much resistance, I’m ready to learn my mother’s skills; I’m ready to give the benefit of the doubt.

When he sleeps, when no one is looking, I can run my fingers through his soft, white-blond hair. When we ask if he’d like us to swab his mouth, he stretches his jaws to the limits like a nested bird, hungry for any small thing.

And when my mother leaves the room for Mass I remain here, teetering above my father, dreaming his dreams for him. Every now and then he pushes the air extra hard through the tube in his throat and seems to be struggling to speak. The doctors say this is good; this is progress. He may come off the ventilator soon. “What is it?” I say, pushing my ear against his stubbled cheek. He wheezes and strains through the tube, needing something, and between us a long life of uncomprehending silences stretches its arms out and yawns.

He falls back, exhausted, pointing his taped-up fingers at the air in some vague gesture.

“What is it?” I prod him again, ready to start over from zero, amnesic. I push at his shoulder and shout, “Just say it!”

But he flashes his eyes so violently I know I’ve gone too far. I whisk my hand away and he relaxes, making an almost smile. I can see him relish, like a child, the small satisfaction of having controlled me.

It is a small thing. I kneel down next to him, and quietly, so as not to provoke him, I ask, “What do you want from me?” What else can I do?

I
N OUR
R
USSIAN
culture textbooks this is the night when everyone pours into the forest and stays out till dawn jumping over bonfires and searching for magical fern blossoms. The girls are supposed to put messy wreaths of flowers on their heads and dance like sprites in loose peasant dresses, then find some body of water and set their wreaths drifting off with their wishes. It’s called Ivan-Kupala, all of this, which means John the Baptist, according to Amy. What John the Baptist has to do with ferns or fires, nobody knows.

Yet when we come out of the metro and onto the street, nobody else in the crowd heads toward the forest. Most people trudge the other way, toward the blocks of identical high-rise apartments, their arms thick pendulums swinging their loaded bags. It’s ten o’clock but still light out. The days here stretch long, like fantasies.

Vadim’s in the lead of our group and says to hurry up. The two bottles of vodka in his string bag clink together as he lights his cigarette. He knows the way. Sasha has pickles and a bottle of moonshine. The tall, silent guy with the broken-apart face has a soccer ball and some black bread. Andrei, who keeps bumping into me, has a bag full of shashlik meat that’s been unrefrigerated since morning. What I’ve got is a bottle of orange Fanta and the bedspread I stole from my dorm room, which has bedbugs.

From the station to the woods it’s a long walk past shuttered kiosks on a crumbling road to a big park that has a few festering ponds in front. Rising on a hill beyond them is a sparse, dusty forest—dark wood, not birch. There’s a half-built castle in there somewhere, an abandoned palace called Tsaritsyno. Or so they tell us.

“This place used to be called Black Mud,” Amy says. She did a field trip here on her last study abroad.

“No,” says Andrei with great certainty. But then, “Is that true?”

“Didn’t John the Baptist get his head, you know, taken away?” I ask in my cockeyed Russian, but nobody knows. The Americans shrug; the Russians look at me like I’m a religious zealot. Andrei leans in and whispers a question about swimming, about water. “What?”

He tries again, breaking it down for me: “Did a priest, so to speak, put you in the water and say a prayer over you?”

Was I baptized. “Oh. Yes. But I was a…kid,” I say, groping for the word
baby
, until I remember they don’t really have a word for baby. Or for thumbs. I rock an invisible small thing in my arms to illustrate.

He makes that thrilled grin they produce when they learn something exotic about us. We do it to them too.

There are eleven of us—five American girls, six Russian guys, all of us college students in Moscow from elsewhere. The Russians are Soviets, actually, from places like Tbilisi and Minsk and Dushanbe. By the end of the year the word Soviet will be obsolete in the present tense, and their homes will become separate countries. For now it’s still July 1991, still perestroika. Still empty stores and lines around the block and murals shouting
WE’RE BUILDING COMMUNISM!

“Is this holiday about the…most long day?” Jane says, then asks Amy how to say solstice.
Solntsestoyanie
, it turns out. I repeat the word in whispers but an hour from now it’ll be gone.

Andrei and Vadim make some kind of joke that even Amy only half understands. She confers with them, then translates for us: “They said mostly the holiday has to do with sex, with mating.”

“They used the word
mating
?” I say. “How do you say mating?”

Jane, my sweet, sheltered roommate, draws herself inward. Sarah and Eileen cluster away from the guys, bouncing between them a look that says,
Why did we agree to this?

I just keep walking. The next time Andrei brushes against me, I jog ahead and start kicking the soccer ball forward with the tall, silent, harmless boy whose name is either Edik or Erik or Adik—none of which ever appeared in my Russian books.

The air gets darker deep in the woods, but twilight hangs with us past midnight, until an almost-full moon steps in. I don’t see any castle. There are no sprites in the woods, no other revelers, no flowers or glowing ferns. Just the mosquitoes, making noises like portable fans. The boys drop their things and go off to collect firewood, and we, accustomed to their gender divisions, just spread out my bedspread on the hard-packed dirt and wait. We’ve even worn skirts.

“Why don’t they ever have grass anywhere?” Eileen switches to English while they’re away.

“Cement and dirt and weeds.” Sarah knocks on the ground. “No wonder there’s no food. It’s the most anemic looking soil on the planet.”

“Radioactive,” Eileen says, which is their running joke. Amy shushes them, because the Soviets understand this word, and don’t find it funny at all.

We’re not quite so idiotic at home. Sarah and Eileen go to Yale. We’ve turned into idiots here, with our broken tongues and perpetual frustration.

I shoo some bugs away from the bag of meat Andrei left on the ground. The guys come roaring back full of purpose and dispute fire-building strategies until at last the flames rise steadily and we can start up with the drinking. They’ve brought glasses for everyone. They drink only shots and only all at once, in a circle, after a toast. We know this by now. To drink between toasts, or not drink at all, is
nil’zya
. Round one is
To Ivan-Kupala!
Then,
To us!
and
To love!
and
To those who couldn’t be here!
The toasts get longer and sloppier:
To the forces of fate that brought our parents together to make us, and the fortune that brought us all together right here!
Eventually we run out of things to toast and resort to
To international friendship!
—which we all shout out sarcastically, because it’s painted in big red letters across the lobby of our dorm.

After a while we get hungry enough to swallow the suspect shashlik. We even dig our fingers into a can of oily fish, and then some of the girls go off behind trees to puke. Some pass out; some disappear in pairs; the rest of us wander through the woods and find some ruined fortress walls growing out of the dirt. “It’s really true,” I can’t help shouting, and Andrei, whose broad-shouldered handsomeness suddenly occurs to me, says, “You were doubting?”

It seemed like fairy tale stuff—the magic ferns, the wishes, somebody commissioning a whole palace way out here in the middle of nowhere. And then looking it over and saying, “Nah, tear it down. Rebuild it. No, that’s not right either; let’s just abandon it all and go live somewhere else.” When I scramble up onto a broken wall Andrei and Vadim go wide-eyed for a second, like I’ve just climbed onto a crucifix. But then they glance around giddily and decide to join me, and Amy and Jane and the quiet boy follow along. His face is like two different faces sewn together down the middle. “So it was Catherine the Great that was build this?” I say, and Andrei says, “No, I think she’s the one who tore it down.” Someone else says, “I thought her crazy son did something.” The guys look to Amy for verification, but even she can’t remember the truth anymore.

Somewhere around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. we put together a soccer game inside the walls, and it’s bright enough to see the ball just fine. We find no glowing ferns, no flowers, and our bonfire dies out before anyone remembers to jump over it. By dawn when we trudge back toward the metro, Andrei’s got my hand locked up inside his, and he plants a kiss on me but it’s just wet smoke. “Now you’re really here,” he announces. It feels like the sun never went down, but it must have, at least for a while.

They make the Soviets live in cockroach-infested dorms an hour from the city center, but we get to stay in a brand-new building near the Park Kultury metro station, which is actually all the way across the river from the Park of Culture and Rest Named After Gorky. For some reason we never go over there, though sometimes we walk to the dead end behind our bread store and look across the river at it: ferris wheels, paddle boats, ducks, roller skaters. Tourist stuff, we say. What we do instead is sit in sweltering classrooms bungling verb conjugations. Sometimes we sing songs, children’s songs. A lone cat prowls the halls. They show us cartoons.

In our dorm rooms, the radios fixed to the walls above our beds have no
ON
or
OFF
switch and no way to change the station—just one bald volume knob that doesn’t go down to mute. So we’re subjected at all hours to whispers from state radio and the brash static when the signal falters, and the mind-bending
ding dong dong
whenever they want our dim-witted attention. It’s hard not to feel we’re being watched, being fed propaganda while we sleep. We submit to this, to the paranoic inefficiencies of Soviet life. On a little three-month visit, we can afford to go along, be bemused.

The cafeteria in the lobby smells of fish and boiled fat, and is closed half the time anyway. When there’s breakfast it’s tea and something like oatmeal with chunks of pink meat mixed in. Some days they are open but have nothing to sell; other days it’s alien concoctions like
aspik
and
kompot
. Like most of the people we’ve met in Moscow, our clothes are drooping and we sleep with our arms cinched around our middles. Like good Communists, we’ve congealed as a group and refer to ourselves in the plural, always
we
.

Then one morning in August our group leader, Mary, calls us into her room to say we won’t be going to class. She’s American, a dispirited grad student with compromised hair, who insists on speaking only in Russian to us. But something has happened, is happening, something so grave that she puts the big words in English. Gorbachev is
incapacitated
, or on the losing side of somebody’s grab for power. He was scheduled to sign a treaty today that would give more
autonomy
to each republic, but—here she hesitates and throws in some qualifiers—it seems that maybe some hard-line Communists bent on preserving the old Soviet dominance have decided to
depose
him before he could sign the treaty. We’re in the heart of the biggest country in the world, with its eleven time zones and fifteen republics, its thirty thousand nuclear warheads. And for today at least, nobody knows who’s in charge.

Beyond Mary’s window our quiet side street goes about its business as usual. In slow motion, a grandmother navigates around a vast puddle, clutching a little girl with one hand and a wheeled shopping bag with the other. One boy chases another down the sidewalk. Near the corner, some workers are tamping down hot asphalt with their shovels, which as usual don’t seem like quite the right tools for the job.

We’re told to go back to our rooms. As foreigners we’re special, Mary says, then swaps the word out for
vulnerable.
If she scares us, we’ll be easier to watch. She throws in her usual threats to remind us: We can be sent home, we can be failed, we can be picked up by police, or worse.

In the hallway we find Jane just coming in from a jog. She says she saw tanks lined up along Leninskii Prospekt. How many? She shakes her head,
lots
. A long silence shudders through us.

“Maybe they’ll send us home early,” Eileen says. She has a boyfriend at home, which has become our collective misfortune.

We go down to the lobby, where there’s a shoddy TV, but the only thing coming out of it is
Swan Lake
. Like every other day, there are guards at our door. If our parents could call us we could tell them how very secure we are. How insulated we’ll always be from this city, no matter how many burdensome words we learn.

It starts to drizzle outside but we keep our windows open anyway, listening for booms, sirens, signs of change. We think of our friends and teachers and their families, even the guys who sell things by the metro, even the awful woman at the bread store who berates us when we mispronounce things. Like asylum inmates, we lean in to our radios, getting nothing but static and, occasionally, Beethoven. Some of us try to write home, do our homework; some wash clothes in the sink, do sit-ups, clip nails. We wait; we are useless. One of the guys digs out granola bars he brought from home; someone else has M&Ms. We share alike.