Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (2 page)

“No.”

And so they stayed like this, she on the seat, he clutching the seat back with one hand and her shoulder with the other, swaying with the motion of the train for over an hour in the morning odors of the passengers. Aftershave, alcohol, cigarettes, coffee. The freshness of his own breath started to make him feel separate at first, and then a little nauseated, and his mouth began to water. They passed the stops for Nazarevo, Kazanskoe, and Esino, and the humming and screeching of the train accelerating and braking each time filled his thoughts with drills and strange metal pokers and instruments. He started to sweat at the brow and under his arms.

He closed his eyes and tried to breathe deeply for a while, thinking of Oleg’s picture girls and the stream and the sun and the tomatoes and dust that would be there when he returned. He touched the folded bills in his pocket. There were nine of them. It would be nice to be able to help Oleg for a change. It would be nice to be the one who held the treasure.

The closer they got to the city the more crowded the train became, until finally he didn’t have to hold on to his mother’s shoulder because it was too crowded for him to fall down. When the doors opened at Kurskii Vokzal in Moscow the warm, damp bodies in the aisle pushed forward with such force that Anton’s mother lost her grip on him, bruising his wrist in one last attempt to snatch him, and she had to call after the babushka next to him, “Help my boy off. He’s blind. Hold my boy.” Anton cringed, and the woman grabbed his arm so that her bag banged hard against his thigh. When they reached the steps the woman called out, “Hold still for a minute, thugs, we’ve got a blind boy here.”

“There’s the step. There you go. There’s another one, little guy.” She held tightly to his arm on the platform until his mother arrived. “Thank you.”

Anton blinked his eyes against the insult of this woman’s hand on his arm. But the air of the open station yard felt cool on his skin and contained a hundred unfamiliar smells.

“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 need 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.