Chapter 10.1: Ksenia Reverie
I can see myself in two places at once. It is the opposite of where we stand, watching two streams come together. I am the river—no, a big swamp, a marsh, unchanneled, seeking its outflow. Here is summer reversed, rolled back to spring, and this great spring flood, power and potential, washes into me, sure to burst.
I can see both streams flowing out, and I am the great swirling pool of their divergence…and now I am floating atop that slow maelstrom, spinning through strange currents that keep either stream from taking me. Thrilling, holding both prospects so real before me, and I don’t want to let either of them go. Childish. I pretend so hard, but I am childish.
I want them both, and more, every branch beyond my vision. I spin just so, keeping all streams within reach, but I lack the courage to choose. So I wait to see which current finally takes me. It won’t take much. One nudge, one moment of drift, a change in the wind, and one stream will win, will draw me to it, and I will not resist, will not look back and determine that no, I should be taking that other path.
“Remember this place”—I take Rudy’s arm. I want to cement this moment in his memory, anchor the falls, the forest, the sunshine, all of it… to me. I want to preserve in him what I must surrender, this splendid place, this moment of wonder when I am every potential, every possible Ksenia and not just one.
I am also anchoring myself to him. It makes no sense. So much is changing around us—leaders, money, names of places, rules—and I am seeking stability and certainty with a man I’ve known for less than a week, a stranger who is supposed to fly back to the other side of the world. If I really thought about what moves my hand to his arm, I would laugh. Maybe I would run, grab the pack and run home alone, letting him go.
But there is sense to it. I see around me a country falling apart. If I were older, I could better attest that the constant of entropy in our benighted homeland did not increase when the Kremlin changed its flags. Christmas was the admission of failure, not the beginning. But the flags changed at the same time I did. When the Union ended, I started paying attention, not just parsing news in our secret meetings and publishing our youthful samizdat, but noticing the details of the fuller natural world around me. I started seeing my childhood joys as true joys. I dearly love the falls here, the lake at home lake, these falls, hiking and camping and all those wonderful moments that still make my youth seem so vibrant and free. And in that bountiful natural context I started seeing the grim social details in a bigger picture, bigger than mere objects of adolescent rebellion. There has risen before me a vision I cannot shake, of a country I love as a foundering ship, one that will break apart and sink into the maelstrom and never pass intact into any stream before it. The cause is lost, effort to save it with our leaky buckets wasted. Abandon ship…
…But here is a man, a wonderful man from that wonderful undefeated place that proven it could outlast our challenge, that can always beat back entropy, will never settle for some truce with decay. If I wanted to run away, I could run away with him.
But we aren’t running away. We are running to my home, to the heart of Russia, my Russia, a country that draws him and that he “gets”. He and all of his fellow travelers enjoyed Suzdal, and I and my fellow myestnii—locals, we who belong here— enjoyed working with them. But Rudy has a sense of Russia that I don’t see in the same degree in his laughing compatriots. He appreciates Russia, respects Russia, shows an openness to take Russia as it comes to him, not as a conqueror but as a mere mortal, a guest, as he would say, going with the flow.
Can I say I am doing the same, just waiting to go with the flow? Letting Rudy take me to Galich was not some scheme; it is merely the most practical option available… and the most fun. I do not calculate taking his arm at this moment. I do so only for remembrance and gratitude It is just a friendly gesture in this moment, a perfectly natural expression between two people who are spending an entire day on a motorcycle, constantly close to each other in a way usually reserved for shared beds.
That thought wakes me like thunder from a dream. This reverie slips away, but not before…
A third stream? Only three? Stories about time travel and alternate worlds say every choice makes another stream, and behind the walls of our world lie a zillion worlds created by our constant choices, branching and branching….
A third stream: when I take his arm, for a moment, I can see leading him or him leading me or neither of us leading but grasping together that farther on is where we belong. Follow the river deep into the forest. Swim to the other side, to the place where my cousins and I climbed the slippery rocks all afternoon. Sleep under the trees and stars and never leave. Become bandits, holy fools, tree spirits….
That wild stream leads nowhere, we do not dare,I warn myself in the fading thunder echo. Yet there it is, waiting, open, always, as possible as my improbable path now, riding up the highway, out in the open, with a man whom most objective accounts would label a stranger but whom in this blink I consider my most serious friend.