[I told you I was going to write something else. Here it is, my first novel. Many chapters to come…]
Chapter 1: Suzdal, In the River, In the Bell Tower
On his second Thursday in Russia, Rudy crouched nearly naked by the river, letting the August sun and the faint breeze rolling down the embankment dry him off. His old boots, socks, t-shirt, and tan coveralls lay among other bunches of workclothes—dusty jeans and sneakers, sweaty shirts and bandanas, Lily’s hot pink tank top (the cause of minor scandal and envy among their Russian coworkers)—dotting the grassy south shore. Rudy’s compatriots, the twelve willing to brave another open-air bath, half their contingent, remained in the water, Lily and Carter swimming out to the deep, the other ten still crowding the submerged platform, scrubbing away the sweat and brick dust from the basement they were demolishing. He saw Ken hand one of the communal bars of soap to Brad, then dive into the water, leaving a thin trail of suds from his soapy head. Ken swam to shore, stopping at the dock to dunk his head and scrub out what was left of the soap in his short, spiky hair. Then he hauled himself out of the water—the bank was steep and weedy underwater; the bathers had to use the shaky, slick-runged ladder nailed to the dock—and came dripping and laughing up the dirt path.
”Whoo!” Ken said, picking up his blue t-shirt, folding it beneath him, and sitting in his briefs on the grass beside Rudy. “It’s like being little kids, taking a bath together, brothers and sisters, and no one knows the difference. Can you imagine us out in our skivvies like this back home?”
Rudy nodded gently but didn’t say anything. He hadn’t thought of home, New Jersey, America, for days. Looking at the happy knot of Americans, washing away their day’s toil in the River Kamenka (Little Stone River, no older than any river back home, he told himself, but the river felt older nonetheless, like every car and house and breath of air here in Suzdal, same as in Moscow), he felt it impolite to let his thoughts wander back across the ocean. Here so much life, so much to be seen…
…like what he’d seen from the bell tower.
Earlier—when? Wednesday, just yesterday? Days were hard to track as everything on this trip ran together, so much was happening, they were working so hard, even Ken had to stop and count to put the right date next to his journal entries… but yes, Rudy figured, yesterday, their fourth full day, fourth work day in Suzdal, when their guides took them on a brief morning detour up to the top of the bell tower. They saw the tower, white walls, blue dome, each day north of the route they walked to the school they were helping renovate. Rudy didn’t remember who asked, but someone wondered if they could climb that tower, and Tall Igor, their lead guide, found the priest and got permission to take two dozen Americans up the winding stone steps to the highest point in Suzdal.
The bell tower—that’s where Rudy felt it. He looked out the portico and gravity tilted. He felt himself falling, not down, which must end swiftly, abruptly, and unpleasantly, but out, out through the rusty rail that would surely crumble on contact, out past the town’s edge that felt as near as the tower’s rail, forest-ward, steppe-ward, tundra-wars, out toward the vast terra-Russia-incognita, a weightless horizontal freefall that need never end because Russia had no end.
The tilted gravity was that vast expanse saying, Come this way, see it all, and his own body (for gravity is always an interaction, mutual) responding, You bet, here I come. The strength of that appeal and his instinctive accession to it surprised Rudy, and frightened him just a little. If he didn’t plant his feet and hold firmly to the old stone walls, he’d fall right out.
Maybe not the worst idea, Rudy thought… but he put out his right hand to catch himself. His hand landed not on stone but on Ken’s shoulder. They were both at the portico, looking outside, looking far away.
”This view,” Rudy said softly, as if they were in church, and they were, atop one, at least, but the feeling followed Rudy beyond the Orthodox churches they visited, out to their worksites, the bread shops, the creeks where they bathed, and now almost everywhere in small, quiet Suzdal.
The tower had been built, Tall Igor said, to celebrate Russia’s victory over Napoleon, but shouting Victory! seemed entirely the wrong sentiment for this vantage point, this tower that raised men up, victors and vanquished and visitors alike, to humble them into silence before a vast, unconquerable world.
“This view,” Ken echoed, barely whispering. “You could go forever.”
So you feel it, too? Rudy thought through his hand into Ken’s shoulder and soul. It’s not just me?
”Hey guys!” Ashley from Princeton interrupted from the top of the stairs. The rest of the group was headed back to earth. “Time to go!”
Neither Ken nor Rudy looked away from the window. “I suppose that floor won’t remove itself,” Ken sighed, referring to the old concrete they had to break up and haul out of the school basement.
“No, I suppose not,” Rudy answered, patting Ken’s shoulder. “Let’s go to work.” But Rudy’s mind kept working on that view, that gravity, that falling outward, as they worked through Wednesday and today, as they ate their tomato and cucumber salads and strange sausage sandwiches, as they scrubbed and swam in the river, and now as he and Ken sat stripped to their shorts, drying in the sun and breeze.
Now Ken laid his hand on Rudy’s shoulder. “Rudy, you o.k.?”
”Hmm? Oh, yeah, vyse v poryadke”—everything in order, though Rudy’s mind felt notably disordered.
”You’ve been kinda quiet today. Feeling all right? No Lenin’s Revenge?”
They had walked from the dormitory down Ulitsa Lenina—Lenin Street—Americans in shabby work clothes and bright bandanas (Lily had bought a couple at an outdoor market near their dorm in Moscow and worn one to their volunteer work at the monastery south of the city the next day; by the end of the week, everyone, including their unflappable tour leader Marty, had gotten a bandana from that same vendor to wear around the neck or wrist or sweaty forehead as an unplanned team uniform). They marched down Lenin Street with voices and laughter loud as milk trucks. They had crossed the bridge that spanned the river just downstream from the dock, clamored down the bank, and plunged into bathing hilarity as if the whole world belonged to them. And in 1992, the first full year of free Russia, of the sudden awkward peace that billowed up like dust from the USSR’s collapse, did the world not belong to them, the happy, victorious Americans?
”Lenin will have no revenge on us. His city is gone. His street won’t last. And he can’t beat your water filter. You’re doing good work, for all of us.”
They were doing thirsty work in summer heat—hot by New Jersey standards, not to mention Russian standards—and while they would jump in creeks, no one wanted to take a chance drinking Russian water, treated or untreated. Ken had brought a backpacking filter, and he spent every lunch break standing by the well, drawing up the bucket and hand-pumping water through his filter into everyone’s bottles and canteens. The well water probably didn’t have the contaminants that flowed through the city’s pipes, but no one wanted to risk getting sick, not with so much to do and see. No one wanted to be the one who couldn’t keep up, who couldn’t help get their portion of the work done by Friday, who couldn’t make it to the next surprise to share with everyone. Russia was filled with miracles in its muddle, and even if they didn’t understand those miracles, these Americans sensed they were seeing… something… and they wanted to be healthy for all of it.
Ken squinted into the sun and gently shook Rudy’s shoulder. Ken was focused on the moment, on Rudy’s state of mind and body. “Glad to help. You let me know if your tummy does get queasy. Our water filter should last the rest of the trip. But if anyone feels sick, I want to swap in the spare right away.”
”I still can’t believe you didn’t get sick from that goat milk this morning.”
Ken laughed. “Mmm, fresh from the udder! You could still taste the goat.”
”Yeah, warm goat.” Rudy was one of three on their crew—the whole group wasn’t open to every small miracle—who had sampled the jar of goat milk brought to them that morning by one of the neighboring babushki, the old grandmothers who tended their animals and berated each other’s men, children, Americans, anyone who stepped out of line, whatever obscure lines the grannies believed still governed human affairs. Rudy didn’t know if this babushka lived near the dorm or on the grounds of the former monastery or somewhere else in Suzdal. He didn’t even know her name. But up she’d trundled to their loose morning muster, glistening white jar in hand, and offered them a drink. One warm sip was enough for red-haired Gloria, who struggled not make a face in front of the old woman. Rudy took a couple polite swigs. Ken took the jar, looked around for other eager takers, and seeing none, drank the milk to the lees (and let’s not think about what constituted those lees), even after Ashley extracted from his conversation with the babushka that the milk was from not korova—cow—but her own kozyol—goat.
”Hey,” Ken said, licking memory on his lips, “nice little old Russian lady brings us something to drink, I’m going to drink and be grateful.” And Ken had expressed his gratitude, shaking babushka’s hand, and she pulled his head down to kiss his cheeks with her shaking lips, one two three smackeroonies, and scramble his hair with her knotted fingers before taking her empty jar and trundling home. “Only milk I’ve had here… and the best milk I’ve ever had. I mean—man! We’ve got cows all over back in South Dakota, but all we drink is store-bought. Babushka’s goat milk was the real deal. No machine, no truck, no factory—“
”No pasteurization.”
”—nope, nothing. Just the goat that m-made it and the woman who m-milked it, handing it right to me. Real deal.”
The two young men—Rudy was 26, Ken 20—sat quietly for a bit, side by side on the dirt path, their hands resting easily on each other’s shoulders. The evening was still sunny and warm, and Rudy felt loose and refreshed, but Ken was starting to goosebump and shiver. The breeze had evaporated the river from his bare flesh and taken a fair bit of body heat with it.
”You should get on my other side, get in the sun,” Rudy said.
”Maybe I sh-should just get m-m-my pants on,” Ken said, voice shuddering along with his shuolders. Then Ken burst out laughing, as if that was the funniest thing he’d heard all day. He was close to right; the only thing funnier, for Rudy, had been hearing Ashley shout Kozyol! and knowing slangier Russians not party to the milk interaction might think he was shouting not Goat! but Asshole!
* * *
Rudy and Ken and the couple dozen other American volunteers had flown into Moscow two weeks ago. They had not quite another week before they would get on a plane and return to their normal lives in the states. Most of the group were college students. Ken, Lily, Brad, Carter, and a dozen others had come with their Russian language professor, Brenda, from South Dakota. Ashley came from Princeton, a couple from Cornell, two more from Ohio State. Rudy was one of the few working people on the trip—well, some of Ken’s classmates worked as many hours in a school week as Rudy did, but Rudy was one of only three people on the trip not going back to university at the end of the month. Of course, Rudy still didn’t know where that work would be, or for whom….
They’d all come to Russia through Plowshare, a small-scale Peace Corps for tourists. Couldn’t uproot yourself for two years to do public service overseas? Plowshare flew people into developing countries for much shorter work trips. Tourists couldn’t really drop into a foreign country and teach English or direct a water pipeline project or anything else that required long-range planning, so Plowshare offered local projects free manual labor from gaggles of well-meaning Americans for a couple weeks at a time, with weekend breaks for sightseeing. Plowshare had worked for a decade in Central and South America, they joined several optimistic non-profits in expanding operations to Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down. This trip was Plowshare’s inaugural mission to post-Soviet Russia.
It was also Rudy’s first trip to Russia, his first time overseas. He liked Russia. He liked the work. He liked that he wasn’t just sitting on a bus following a guide with an umbrella to take pictures of old churches (though that was part of their weekend excursions, and their Russian guides had fascinating stories about the Gorbachevian transition that had turned into a freefall out of Communism, and the old churches vibrated with stamina and reawakening). Rudy liked that, five days out of each week, they earned their keep—well, not really: they’d all paid a couple thousand dollars to fly here and haul wood and break bricks and concrete, a point Carter joked about every day when they were sweating and straining—“These Rooskies are getting our money’s worth.” But Rudy appreciated that they weren’t just extracting experience and souvenirs from the country; they were doing something—not much in a country that needed so much repair, but then whose job anywhere amounted to much greater?—to put their energy back into the places that hosted them. Tourism was fine: it put dollars in the economy, but the locals had to drive buses and hang art and admit gawking Americans into their cathedrals and put up with their shouting and laughing and jumping in creeks. Here, in Suzdal, just like last week in the monastery, they got sweaty and dirty and dog-tired. They were all noisy Americans who would never fit completely in Russia, but at the end of the day when they trooped back to the dorm worn out from work, if they looked no further ahead than a bath, supper, a stroll in the park, and as good a rest as possible on thin, musty bunks, they could allow themselves the mild conceit that they looked and felt a little like the locals.
Ken and his friends knew they were headed back to school when they got home. Brenda knew she’d be teaching. Forty-something Elaine, who wasn’t enjoying the sweat and strain nearly as much as Rudy, talked too much about getting back to selling houses in Virginia.
Rudy wasn’t thinking about what came next. That was exactly what he’d come to Russia not to think about. His parents had died almost a year ago, one year September 5, and he’d drifted since. He’d shown up for work at the bank, Dad’s bank, dutifully, every day from one week after the funeral until the July 14, when his two-weeks’ notice kicked in, and he went home, cleaned and slept and packed for Russia. Collecting a paycheck and climbing the bank ladder for bigger paychecks had no appeal. Rudy wanted to get out of his chair, get up and do something. The only work that had engaged him all year had been a couple weeks when he excused himself from his desk one day to help and electrician who had two helpers call in sick. No one in then bank seemed to notice, and he spent a week helping run wires and cut in new outlets. He was used to keeping up at least the appearance of ambition to please Dad and Mom, but suddenly without them, he wasn’t doing a great job of picking his own direction.
Being half a world away didn’t magically give him direction, but it felt… not as bad as going through the motions back home. Here in Suzdal, in the back of his mind, he wondered if he might talk to Marty about openings at Plowshare. Maybe he could lead work teams the way Marty did, to Russia, where he could use his college Russian courses, or to Poland or Bolivia or wherever. Or maybe he could do work like this back home, move to Arizona, frame houses, be outside, wear himself out every day to sleep soundly through the night. Maybe he just needed to get out, move somewhere, anywhere that he would never god-damn ever cross that highway, that stretch his parents drove almost every day and that last day, that intersection with an absolutely clear view of oncoming traffic….
But Rudy hadn’t formed any plan, and right now, on the river bank, and each day hammering away, he wasn’t planning. He only wanted to shut all that out, past and future, and being in Russia, in Suzdal, working and swimming with Ken and Carter in a town nearly a thousand years old, was keeping that door closer to shut than anything else he’d done in the past year. Don’t plan—plans go to hell, anyway. Just be in this moment, be one of these laughing, creek-bathing Americans hearing voices in bell towers, hold onto this moment for as long as it will last.