Last updated on 2024-12-17
Chapter 3: Test Ride
The mechanics shot looks around their circle, to the motorcycle, to Rudy and the Captain. Even the Captain’s eyes jumped a bit and looked uncertain for what Rudy suspected was a rare moment. “Sell… you want to buy this motorcycle?”
Rudy realized he should say rent, not buy, but the Russian word wasn’t coming to him. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it in his textbook lessons years ago. But he plunged on. ”Yes.”
”To take home? To America? And how will you fit it in your suitcase?” The Captain spoke deadpan; his associates chuckled.
”Not to America,” Rudy said. “To help a friend… who needs a ride home.”
”Americans buy motorcycles to give rides home? Your friend cannot take the bus?”
Rudy cautiously mimicked the fatalistic scowl that he saw all around on the streets and at the understocked markets. “Remont.”
The Captain snorted, and his cohort laughed. Rudy felt relieved: they understood he was in on this national joke. Rudy nodded now toward the motorcycle. “So you haven’t said: is your motorcycle for sale?”
The Captain now scrunched his lips together. After looking Rudy up and down, then casting a long gaze on the motorcycle and a calculating look at the dirt at his feet, the Captain said, “For sale? Possibly. But first, we should see if you suit the machine.”
With one wave of his hand, the Captain invited Rudy through the circle of mechanics, back to the motorcycle. My God, Rudy thought, he’s considering it. Rudy walked among the tools and makeshift worktables and benches. The other mechanics watched cautiously. The Captain produced a blue handkerchief from his pocket and, with a hint of half-mocking ceremony, brushed some dust from the speedometer, the handlebars, and the seat. Then he stood back and let Rudy look.
Resisting the urge to hop straight on and chase the midnight sun north, Rudy squatted beside the bike and looked it over. The wild impulse that had brought him down the street made Rudy suspicious; as with his sentences, he was looking ahead of this impulse, trying to make sure it wouldn’t lead him to something he couldn’t complete.
The appearance of the machine did not disappoint him. The tires were not new, but they had plenty of tread, and the sidewalls had no cracks. The motor was a little dusty but not grimy, no leaks, well-maintained. The chain was snug, the cables tight. Rudy took his time, saying nothing, feeling the bolts and hoses and spokes, summoning all of his amateur mechanical knowledge to catch any little thing that might be out of order. But his inspection indicated he could trust this bike.
As Rudy stood, the Captain spoke. “You will want to ride, of course.”
Rudy tried not to let boyish eagerness supplant the serious analytical look on his face. “Tell me first: how long have you had it?”
”Since Gorbachev came to power. I have maintained it better than he maintained the Union.”
Rudy asked a few more questions: size of tank, mileage (kilometrage, Ken would tease him later), engine size, how much weight the Captain thought it might carry. All the answers fit Rudy’s hope that this very machine could do the trick.
”But these answers mean little,” said the Captain, “if you do not ride.” The Captain and his mechanics seemed to be as eager now as Rudy was to get him on the bike and see him on the highway.
Rudy thus obliged, throwing his right leg over the seat and sitting down firmly. He bounced the shocks, found them set tightly, good for the Captain’s heavier body… or for two smaller passengers.
”The controls,” Rudy asked, gripping the handlebars, “like American?”
The Captain stepped in front of the bike. “Clutch, front brake, rear brake, shift, starter,” he said, pointing to the hand and foot levers. No surprises. The Captain described the shift sequence. Then he leaned forward, gripped the handlebars, and swayed the bike, with Rudy on board, a couple inches right and left. “Not too heavy?”
The Ural was a big bike, and the Captain outweighed Rudy by a good fifty pounds. Rudy remembered trying a friend’s bike a couple summers ago, a decked-out Goldwing, with twice the features, twice the weight of the Captain’s Ural. Rudy had sensed right away that the Goldwing outweighed him, before turning the key. He’d ridden around the block and taken a brief shot up the highway at 45, but he couldn’t get comfortable with that much mass under him.
The Captain let go, and Rudy shifted his weight, leaned the Ural as far right as he dared, then hefted it back up. His right knee strained, but he made it. He repeated the exercise to his left, came up fine. He rocked side to side for a few more moments, adjusting his weight, finding his center. The Ural didn’t feel like the Goldwing. He could lift this bike if he needed. He felt more in command.
Rudy met the Captain’s eye. Both men nodded, and the Captain stepped back, leaving a clear path to the sidewalk.
For a moment, one mildly warning voice sounded in Rudy’s head: You’re about to ride a Russian motorcycle. On a Russian road. With no helmet. Bad idea. Rudy considered this warning, then turned to what, at the moment, under every mechanic’s eye, including the woman’s, struck him as a greater concern: demonstrating that an American could start a Russian motorcycle.
Rudy took a look at the bare ground ahead, the curb twenty feet away, and the highway. He scanned the bike one more time, and himself, hands ready, jacket buttoned, boot laces tied. He squared his hands and feet and breathed in, out, and in. Then he turned the throttle and jumped on the kick-starter. The motorcycle grunted and growled to life with a few small bursts of blue smoke. Rudy let the motor run for a few seconds, revving it gently, listening to and feeling the Russian baritone response of the engine.
Rudy shifted into first gear and released the clutch. The motorcycle crept smoothly through the work area toward the curb. Rudy braked just shy of the edge, making sure he wasn’t about to get creamed by a Russian truck (no need to fear buses, he thought, they’re all na remont). The northbound lane was clear.
”Don’t get lost!” the Captain shouted right behind him. Rudy glanced back and tipped his chin (he thought about fighter pilots, Tom Cruise, thumbs up, but Brenda had heard conflicting responses on whether Russians saw raising a thumb as flipping the bird, so Rudy checked his bravado). Then he eased the bike off the curb and headed north.
Instantly, riding this motorcycle felt wildly novel. Not the physics, the balance, the play of the gears—that was all familiar. Rudy had seen pavement zipping by at this increasing speed beneath his feet. He had ridden without a helmet, wind in his hair, one inattentive bump over a pothole or seam or possum away from a lot worse than road rash. But this was Russia, where everything, every normal thing, felt different. He had seen this street for five days, walked up this sidewalk to the park and back each evening, but he had not traveled anywhere in Russia alone and under his own guidance, speed and direction entirely his decision, care and survival entirely his responsibility. He’d been in traffic, but only on the bus, insulated by steel and windows and babbling American enthusiasm from post-Soviet highway anarchy. He and his traveling companions had joked about Russian drivers, including their own tour bus drivers with their occasional bold choices. Now Rudy was on the road himself, with nothing between him and the pedestrians and signs and cars and trucks and everything else along the Russian road.
But that quick road demanded that Rudy keep his reverie under control. The three-minute walk past Lenin Square and the park zipped by in what felt now like an instant. He didn’t glance to see if his friends saw him. He concentrated on the gears, the highway, pedestrians crossing, a crow dashing between him and an oncoming truck and living to crow about it. The narrow slice of town he knew disappeared in a minute, and he was riding through Suzdal incognita (incognitsky, his brain’s Russian module tried to cook up before being shouted roundly down by every other fiber his mind—We’re driving here! Pay the hell attention!). The bike raced him past trees lining the highway, then a span of houses crowded together, a gas station, a truck depot… and much sooner than he thought, the north edge of town.
A year ago, he’d never have seen this city limit, this countryside and country highway completely open to him. Soviet tour guides would never have let him walk to the park alone, never mind hop on a motorcycle and drive out here, which was most definitely outside the formal itinerary filed by the tour company still had to file with the federal government. KGB minders would have materialized from the passersby and grabbed him before he reached the Captain’s compound. But now… would anyone notice? Did the KGB care? How far…?
The bell tower feeling came back hard. He emerged from a forested strip to a wide flat stretch of highway surrounded by pasture and oat fields with clusters of dachas dwarfed by the sky. The bell tower feeling, now on a motorcycle: ride, ride, with no reason to stop….
He eased back on the throttle, worked unhurriedly back down through the gears, eyed a spot on the shoulder, then swerved hard and checked the brakes. The rear wheel grabbed gravel, threw some stones in the ditch, but Rudy kept his center and stopped easily on the dusty shoulder. The engine thrummed, seemingly as happy as Rudy to have come this far, wiling and eager to go farther.
No reason to stop—no, he had reason, this evening. The bike would work. But he had to ask the Captain his price. And he had to ask Ksenia….
Just ride. Just ride.
Rudy was a little unnerved to find that the Captain, the small matter of property rights, Ksenia, the whole sudden plan that had brought him out here, five clicks north of Suzdal, on a highway shoulder where quite possibly no American had ever sat on a motorcycle to ponder his fate—that all of his obligations might not be enough to turn him around. Just ride….
An old station wagon (again, everything on the highway seemed old) whizzed by from behind, then two more cars. Rudy waited for a townbound tanker truck—RYBY, it read on the side, a steel tank of fish—then made a patient U-turn and revved back to speed, following hundreds of live fish at 50… 70… 80 kph. The bike charged along smoothly, the tight suspension softening each bump but not without notice.
Russian bike—some bolt should fly loose, Rudy thought, the headlamp should rattle right off, fall beneath the wheel, knock him end over end. The handlebars should shake free, leaving the bike to twist and collapse beneath him. This trip should end with the bike and him in the ditch, in pieces.
But everything felt tight, no errant rattle, no play in the brake. I’ve got to be missing something, Rudy thought, but he pushed the bike to 85 and felt plenty left in the throttle and the yowl of the engine (but the fish truck had no such get-up-and-go, and passing seemed an unnecessary adventure). The machine beneath him felt entirely solid, right down to the axles, ready to run as fast and far as Rudy wanted.
Town again,—the fish truck slowed, and so did Rudy, riding into thick clouds of exhaust and now the distinct smell of its cargo. He backed off, trying to keep his distance from the truck so he could see more of what lay ahead. But slowing down brought up a surge of traffic, cars catching up behind him. He would be back at Lenin Square in a moment… but he wasn’t done. The straight run to the country was fine, was really all he was worried about, but practically, he should see how the bike handled in town.
Excuses—he didn’t want to stop.
The motorcycle had no turn signals; this would be a fully manual affair. Rudy shifted down, extended his left arm crooked up (he wasn’t sure Russians used turn signals of any sort, let alone the American hand signals he hadn’t used for years), and leaned right, around the corner at the north end of Lenin Square. The blue Lada behind him came close enough that he could smell its engine burning oil, but he made the corner fine and revved up toward the old monastery.
Again, it disoriented him to zoom down a street he knew only by walking. The north end of the bazaar, the cafeteria, the courtyard with the water pump, the north entry to the monastery/school jobsite—zoom, all passed in half a minute. The world was always different from the road.
Rudy rode on to the neighborhood they had strolled through on their second night (second? Monday? time stretched and blurred like the stones in the pavement). He slowed down, riding the rough street under 30. The few pedestrians he passed were surprised to see him. Did they recognize the Captain’s bike and wonder why another man was riding their repairman’s machine? Was it strange to see an American on wheels? To hear wheels that ran this smoothly?
Along this street, the houses spread out. The more modern apartment buildings (“more modern” in Suzdal could mean do revolyutsii, anytime since the Bolshevik Revolution) gave way to individual houses, old wooden structures separated by gardens and grass and tumble-down sheds. The pavement gave way to cobbles, then gravel, then dirt.
Rudy reached what felt like the western edge of town, although formal boundaries were hard to find in this old chaotic place. The street simply faded to a two track dirt path cut into grass. Rudy followed this dry, curving path out to the river bank and north along the river, then east on a branch of the path that went up a hill. Rudy shifted down, and the bike hummed along, handling the rougher track without problem. Rudy didn’t plan to go off-roading, but as far as he knew, the road from Suzdal to Galich could itself go off-road.
He gunned the engine, and the motorcycle charged up the hill as fast as he dared, without a hint of struggle. If necessary, this bike could haul.
At the top of the hill, Rudy stopped on a flat patch, planted his feet in the grass, and switched off the engine. The wind and engine rumble disappeared, and all was quiet. He could see the western half of the city below him, far enough away that faded paint and rickety walls blended into a simple postcard idyll. The white walls and blue domes of the working river monastery and, beyond, the bell tower above the trees and buildings downtown all gleamed in the low evening sun. Surely if he looked hard enough, or just lingered incautiously by himself with this valuable machine past dark, he could spot some hooligans, opportunists willing to violate this peace. But now, in the slow-going daylight, from this high place, Suzdal and all the Russia he could see was quiet, tranquil, and utterly safe.
On the ground a few stones lay in a campfire ring. Charred wood fragments were scattered within, mixed with a pile of ashy beer bottles. None of the bottles were broken; their necks all pointed toward the center. Rudy looked around, saw the river, the countryside beyond, farmyards and pasture dissolving into swaths of forest and haze. A midnight campfire on this hill might be seen for miles around. And as the fire died down, as the final beers were drained… well, even from the center of Suzdal, they could see the Summer Triangle and dozens of stars within, but from here, on clear nights, Rudy imagined one could read by the Milky Way. If there was time, maybe he could bring the rest of his group here.
Business remained tonight. He had been gone… how long? Fifteen minutes? The Captain couldn’t be worried about theft: where would an American go with his motorcycle? What American would simply disappear into the steppe and tundra? Rudy shivered with a conceivable answer… but he didn’t want to undermine Marty’s mission, world peace through good work, with grand theft moto.