Last updated on 2024-12-11
Chapter 2
Suzdal: Memorial Park, Mechanics’ Shop
A couple hours later, Rudy and his fellow bathers, now clothed and dried and almost sufficiently fed on salad and soup and hard rye bread from the cafeteria, occupied the monument at the memorial park, a fenced, woodsy block just up the street from their dormitory. Through the black iron fence, Rudy saw Ksenia coming up the street. She was one of the Russian students spending the summer in Suzdal renovating the former monastery into a school for architectural restoration. Around thew worksite, when she wasn’t straining over a handcart of broken brick, Ksenia carried herself with a grace and self-possession that distinguished her from the other five Russian students, all girls, all on their way to university. But now the grace in her walk was somehow tightened, tangled, off rhythm. She wasn’t looking ahead, wasn’t reaching out to the world with her piercing blue eyes. Her attention was turned inward, so much that she didn’t notice Rudy and his friends lounging at the monument.
Rudy’s urge was to call her name, but he was getting better at not using his American voice all the time. Instead, he handed Ken his bottle, got up from the marble step, and jogged out the gate to the curb where Ksenia was just about to cross. “Ksenia, privyet!” he said gently. She turned, surprised, and he saw in her eyes the strange collision of her usual friendliness and an uncharacteristic desire to be far away. “How are you?” he asked in Russian with immediate concern.
”Oh,” Ksenia replied—and for a moment, Rudy had the terrible impression she might turn and cross the street without another word. A quick, rather fierce internal battle showed in her face, but she resolved it quickly, face him squarely. “The buses—all na remont.”
”Repairs?” Rudy asked. “All of them?”
”All that run from Suzdal, yes,” she replied.
”Then how will you get home?”
Ksenia’s face hardened, and she glanced away.
There was the problem. Tomorrow was the last workday, for the American tourists and the Russian students. Ksenia was to head home, her hometown to the north, Galich, Rudy thought he recalled the name, and enjoy a few days with her parents before heading down to Moscow to start university. No bus meant no trip home.
”Come,” Rudy invited, thinking Ksenia might need a break. “Will you sit with us? We found…” he hesitated, not wanting to sound like the superficial tourist, but what more could he offer? “We found limonad.”
Her smile came resistingly, as if she knew, too, a simple bottle of pop was no solution. But she walked with him back through the gate to the boisterous cluster of Americans on the monument. Ksenia said hello to the others, then say on a bench next to Lily. Rudy retrieved his bottle, which was down a healthy swig taken by Ken, and offered it to Ksenia. She took a sip and handed it back. “Ksenia says she can’t catch a bus home,” he said to the group.
Commiseration rang out, and Lily led the questioning. N public buses, drivers unhappy with wages that hadn’t been paid regularly or in full since June—remont in this case a euphemism exemplary of its many uses in the collapsed Soviet Union. Their group’s private bus wouldn’t be affected: tourist dollars staved off “repairs”. Her parents’ Lada was not reliable enough for the trip. Ksenia’s relatives in Suzdal, an aunt with a second husband, had a car but hadn’t been able to afford parts to rectify some mechanical failure since spring. Ksenia mentioned hitching a ride to Galich, but the Americans were aghast at the suggestion, and even calm, confident Ksenia acknowledged that Russian highways were not as safe as they were as recently as a year ago under the watchful patrol of Soviet police. Ksenia figured she would be stuck here in Suzdal with her aunt looking for another way home and, more importantly, down to her first week of classes in Moscow. It wasn’t the end of the world, Ksenia tried to convince herself and the Americans, but she would miss returning home to retrieve her winter clothes, swim in the lake one more time, and help her parents in the garden.
Help her parents… Rudy slipped involuntarily out of this moment, back months, eleven months and a couple days, back to Mom calling, asking if he wanted to come down to Wilmington with them, spend Labor Day weekend at the beach with the Mervins. He hadn’t spent time with his parents since the Fourth of July, and Mom and Dad’s college friends, Bud and Bari Mervin, had a guest cottage fifty paces from the Atlantic, a cozy place they visited almost every month. But Rudy’s car needed new tires, and holiday overtime would cover that bill, so “Next time,” Rudy said on the phone. “Maybe October.”
October. Wilmington, Never got there.
Rudy snapped back to the moment but kept quiet. Ksenia glanced at him only occasionally. She still looked distressed, in a way she never did amidst the dust, grit, and sweat of the demolition, but when she looked his way, he’d offer his bottle again, and she’d take another shy sip of his cherry cola (the buses weren’t running, but somehow a shop in Suzdal could get hold of the only twenty cases of cherry cola between Astrakhan and Murmansk), and a grateful, teasing smile would peek through.
Rudy listened to the conversation, missed not a word, but his thoughts ambled down a parallel track, and not a fully conscious track. If Ksenia or Lily had interrupted the conversation to ask him what he was thinking, he wouldn’t have been able to verbalize each subconscious, sublogical step that led him to hand Ksenia the quarter-full bottle that had touched his lips just once, excuse himself, leave the memorial park, and jog down the block toward the dorm. He didn’t go back to his room. He went across Lenin Street to the courtyard of the complex across the street.
The mechanics were there. Rudy and his friends had seen the mechanics every evening, sitting at the edge of the sidewalk, and the mechanics had seen them. In the morning, when Rudy’s group went over to breakfast and then to the school, the door to the windowless garage behind the courtyard’s stout metal gate would have three heavy locks on it. The mechanics—one woman and four men—would take their places sometime in the afternoon, sliding open the gate, unlocking the garage, hauling out their toolboxes, uncoiling their air hoses and power cords, and rolling out their ongoing projects. They worked past sunset, under bright humming shop lamps. Rudy and his friends would come back from walking excursions around the town and find the mechanics still at it under their lights, bottles of beer amid their tools. Drills would whine, engines large and small would sputter and pop and either rev to life to satisfied shouts of triumph or die to more vigorous dialectical expressions that Rudy hadn’t learned yet. The occasional gust of oil and petrol exhaust were about as strong as the whiff shashlik that one of the mechanics would grill outside, behind their workspace. The mechanics appeared to be open for business: Rudy had seen townsfolk coming and going late into the evening, with a blender, a chainsaw, a couple of Ladas. One evening he had seen a little boy carry a hair dryer—not a handheld device, but a big helmeted beauty shop model, pole and all, to the mechanics. The tallest, skinniest man had laid it across a worktable, unbolted the casing, fiddled with the innards for half a minute, then closed it, plugged it in to show it worked again, and returned it to the boy, who hurried back up the street with the dryer over his shoulder. Rudy had seen no money change hands.
Rudy had also seen a motorcycle among the mechanics. It wasn’t being fixed. It belonged to a compact, thick-armed mechanic whom Rudy had seen each evening in a faded striped sailor’s t-shirt. The man sat back from the street, and activity among the mechanics revolved loosely around him. Automatically, the title “Captain” had popped into Rudy’s head. Rudy had seen the “Captain” ride that motorbike into the shop one day, bouncing easily over the curb and parking it behind the work area. Every evening it was there, dark green gas tank, black leather seat, shiny handlebars and pipes and wheel spokes and small square letters on the side: URAL.
The boisterous Americans strolling down the street in Suzdal drew attention under any circumstances. Americans could not not stand out. But striding so briskly, so clearly not on a typical evening gulyanka, Rudy understood the surprised looks, even alarm from the tallest mechanic as he approached. From half a block away, they were watching Rudy heading their way. Rudy slowed down as the man he wanted to talk to, the Captain, set the innards of a (best guess) belt sander on a tray of parts on the ground and stepped through his circle of associates toward the sidewalk.
Rudy stopped just past the gate, just a couple meters from the Captain. Every mechanic’s hands had stopped; their eyes, curious and suspicious, were all on him. “Dobriy vecher,” Rudy said in careful Russian. Good evening.
”Dobriy vecher, amerikanyets,” the Captain answered, his arms at his side, his voice low, calm. “Kak u vas rabota?”
All the way down the street, Rudy had been mentally rehearsing the Russian words he thought he’d need to conduct the business that had materialized in his mind. He had expected to start with his own question. He wasn’t ready for the Captain’s opening query. Rather than asking for clarification, though, as he would have with their guides or Ksenia or her friend Yulia, Rudy waited, thought through what he’d heard, found the context. The Captain was asking about work, Rudy’s work.
”Work goes well,” Rudy replied in Russian. “Still much to do.”
”Will you finish?” the Captain asked, pulling Rudy further from his intended course of conversation. Rudy looked for some sign of challenge in the Captain’s face, but the Captain offered common Russian impenetrability.
”Our part, yes,” Rudy replied slowly, thinking ahead to avoid trapping himself in a linguistic dead-end. The two weeks in country had revived his Russian more than he had hoped, but he knew his vocabulary could fall short in an instant if he wasn’t careful. He thought of the school executive’s name. “Aleksandr Vladimirovich will work for years to build this school. Our work is small. His is big.”
The Captain gave the smallest nod, just enough to make Rudy think he could proceed. “I would like to buy a motorcycle. I have seen that yours runs well. Would you be interested in selling it?”