Last updated on 2024-11-03
Chapter 11: Galich Arrival
They couldn’t stay by the falls all day… though says who? Rudy might have responded to anyone else who cast such verbal rain on their woodsy promenade. Bald Dad and baby, the thumbs-up boys, their whole happy troop—they were going to stay all night. Why not Rudy and Ksenia? It wouldn’t rain, they’d need no tent, they’d be safe and warm side by side on soft mulchy ground, heads pillowed on the pack, sheltered from the wind by the birches all night, warmer than they’d been this morning on the open road.
But his purpose was to get Ksenia to Galich, not pull her out of the bell tower with him. And they’d eaten all the bread and cheese. Riding and hiking were hungry work; they’d want some supper.
Tacitly yielding to practicality, Rudy and Ksenia walked some more amidst the birches, the brilliant white bark like lighting crisscrossing through green leaves and brown earth and blue-black-silver streams. They meandered out and back to the confluence, caught water from the falls and drank from their cupped hands (Rudy was willing to bet on forest magic over bad bacteria; what could Lenin have to avenge out here?), and made their way back, more slowly than they’d come, to the picnic area. The motorcycle, their helmets, and their jackets remained as Rudy and Ksenia had left them.
Rudy sent Ksenia ahead with the pack, to the top of the gravel trail, to watch for any cars passing or turning in to the park. Rudy strapped on his helmet, pulled his gloves snug, and followed on the motorcycle to the edge of the gravel. When Ksenia waved all clear, he gunned the engine, made a fast loop around the cinder circle to build momentum, hit second gear, stood, and climbed straight up the gravel. He didn’t look at the loose rock beneath him; he kept his eyes on Ksenia up at the top. Stones flew back, the bike sloshed around, but Rudy stayed upright. He eased off the throttle as he crested the hill, and the bike galumphed to a gentle stop on the shoulder of the road. Ksenia settled in behind Rudy, and they took off without a word.
Past Sudislavl and the park, the highway opened up again, fewer wooded stretches, more flat, open road. He imagined the winter wind barreling unobstructed across this broad plain, few houses, few landmarks, just gales of snow sweeping the icy ground and piling up in a white desert of drifts. He was glad of a perfect summer day to ride, but part of him wanted to come back and see that frozen Russia.
The highway felt increasingly like not just another place, but another time. Moscow gave the feeling of being stuck in the 1950’s, maybe the 1960’s. But this place, like some of the back neighborhoods in Suzdal and all the little clusters of homes and shops in Sudislavl, felt much older, maybe not even of this century. The towns they passed through had fewer apartment buildings, more old wooden houses, almost invariably weathered, weedy, nothing like the manicured lawns and neighborhoods of home. Every sign of civilization—shop windows, cars, tractors towing hay wagons, the cardboard sign next to another old woman’s roadside table offering jars of pickles—seemed worn, faded. Vitality lay, it seemed, only in the green grass and trees, the gold topping the wheat fields, and the frightfully clear and faraway blue sky.
The road north was in rough shape, but the country drivers took no greater caution than their city counterparts. Rudy was just glad to have more room on the open highway to avoid idiots who, just like back home, overdrove the conditions. He scanned ahead and behind constantly. Ahead he watched for gravel patches and potholes that warranted dropping below 50. Behind he watched for less attentive drivers zooming up. He was ready to take the bike to the shoulder or even into the ditch if someone came up behind too fast. Ditching rose to serious consideration just once, as a Moskvich wagon smoked up the road behind them. He and Ksenia were cruising at 80 kph; the car grew fast enough in the mirror that he guessed it might be topping 120, a remarkable speed for that boxy rattletrap to maintain. Ahead Rudy saw a hodgepodge of pavement and blacktop patches. In a second, he slowed and considered the safest angle of attack for the gravel shoulder… but the Moskvich swung hard to the left lane and screamed by them. It was packed with baskets behind two haggard, bare-chested men smoking cigarettes. With no else behind them, Rudy let up on the throttle completely. The Moskvich lurched back into the right lane and hit the patchy pavement at full speed. Rudy watched the car rock up on a bump, then veer right, left, then hard right. The car kicked up a big cloud of dust along the shoulder, then kicked up a darker plume as it tore into the turf of the ditch. The Moskvich stopped, facing back toward Rudy and Ksenia. The right front tire had blown, probably on impact with the first hard ridge of broken pavement in the patchy roadwork. Crawling past the spin-out, Rudy could see and hear the two men shouting at each other, at the car, at ill fate in general. Rudy weaved through the bumps and holes over the next quarter mile—the road ran through a reedy marsh, which probably flooded in the spring, hungry to reclaim this highway—then punched ahead, eager to put distance back between him and the angry drivers before they patched their tire and came roaring up the road again.
Beyond that Moskvich wagon, the road caused them little alarm. The needle on the gas gauge was hanging in there; Rudy guessed he could reach Galich with a good quarter tank, better than expected. He imagined the bike as a great two-wheeled Xeno’s tortoise, which could travel a quarter tank’s worth, then an eighth, then a sixteenth… it could carry him and Ksenia forward forever, always finding another interval to of infinite steppe to cover, never reaching a destination. Maybe the sun would do the same, marching halfway down the western sky, then a quarter… never reaching sunset, only casting them and the road and the blessed land around them in ever richer gold.
* * *
Neither Rudy nor Ksenia, much less her parents, could have known what time exactly they would roll into Galich. The phone lines joined the buses na remont on Friday, so Ksenia couldn’t call. They reached the dusty town limits unannounced in the richest late-afternoon sunshine. But then, at the last turn, at 17:05, at Ksenia’s last right-hand tap on his ribs, urging him to stop at the curb, there at the wide, shaded arch between two short apartment buildings set back comfortably from the street, a woman in an apron and sleeveless dress shook her hands and a white towel above her wildly pinned greying blonde hair and released a torrent of Russian piled with Ksenias and sumashedshis (lunatics) and, Rudy thought as he pried off his helmet, a reference or two to rockets—”raketnaya Ksenia!”
Ksenia peeled herself from him and from the bike before the engine’s last rop-rop. She shucked herself free of the ryukzak, which flopped softly to the ground, and ran to her mama, who wept in her daughter’s two-months-missing embrace. “Sumashedshaya, raketnaya Ksenia!” over and over… perhaps Ksenia’s assent to this trip had kept him from realizing the full fool-craziness of this method of returning a mother’s dear child home. He imagined Mama turning the towel into a cudgel. He’d have considered a quick getaway, but the engine was off, the backpack was on the ground… and this was Galich. If Ksenia’s safe arrival and kisses on Mama’s cheek did not stem the woman’s horror at her daughter’s mode of conveyance, Rudy felt it was only honorable that he remain to accept whatever wrath Mama had to issue, apologize appropriately for raising her fears, and offer some quiet assurance through his chastened presence that he was no rocket-riding madman with anything other than her daughter’s continued health and wholeness at heart. Rudy doffed his helmet, pocketed his shades, and stood to meet his fate.
Mama’s cries quieted with Ksenia’s cooing assurances. Mama mopped her face and Ksenia’s with the white towel. Mama held the towel before Ksenia’s eyes. “Smotri—gryaznaya iz puti!” Look, grimy from the road!Ksenia’s face, moist now—and Rudy could not tell if from Mama’s tears or her own—had left light streaks of road grit on the towel. “Shower you need! A ty!” Wasting no time with the formal pronoun vy—he was just another molodoy chelovek, a young man now entirely subordinate—Mama turned to Rudy and marched her tall, sturdy frame (basketball, Rudy thought, a Soviet Olympian) across the scrabbly grass to where her daughter had escaped this rocketing madman.
Mama stopped inches from him. Rudy expected a whacking. Mama looked right in his eyes—like Ksenia, she was fully his height—and raised the towel to his face. She rubbed his forehead, cheeks, and chin, not harshly, then drew the cloth back and held it open between them, close to his face. Her tears, maybe Ksenia’s too, mixed to faint mud with dirt from his face and the face of this woman’s daughter.
In softer Russian than he expected, Mama said, in Russian, “300 kilometers of Russian road, all in your eyes.” Mama looked over her shoulder. “You have brought my daughter home.” Mama lay her towel and hand against Rudy’s chest. “Thank you, young man. Come. Wash. Eat. You shall see our home, our Galich.”
“Mama,” Ksenia called, returning to the curb. “Will Papa let us keep the motorcycle in the garage tonight?”
“Da, da. He is there working on the car now. He will find room. Bring your bike, young man.”
Ksenia came forward with a teasing grin he might have mistaken for American and hefted the backpack once more. “Bring the bike, meet Papa.”
Rudy pushed each wheel over the curb and followed Mama, walking the bike through the archway. Ksenia hung beside him, whispering, “Anna Nikolayevna. Pavel Pavlovich.” She repeated the names, and he repeated them back, to her satisfied nod.
They passed through a leafy gap in a double line of trees, to a long garage, a dozen or so connected units. Several doors stood open, with men at various stages of shadetree remont, some tinkering, some scratching their heads, some just sitting on milk crates next to machines that maybe ran, maybe didn’t, not terribly concerned. At the nearest open garage stall, the second in the line, Ksenia skipped up to a short, thin man in a plain grey shirt, greyer pants, and black shoes. Oil and dirt streaked his hands but made not one mark on his clothes. He stared thoughtfully beneath the open hood of a pale blue Zhiguli.
“Papa!” Ksenia called.
The man turned. His eyes shone. He raised his hands. “I’m all grimy,” he said, in Russian, “…like you! Kiss your papa.” He leaned highwire forward, as if dreading a slip that would land a minor automotive stain on his precious daughter. They traded smacks on each cheek. Then he looked at Rudy. He said nothing, but Rudy heard in his head, “And who has so grimed you?”
Rudy kickstanded the bike and stepped forward. “Forgive me, Pavel Pavlovich,” he said in Russian. “Suzdal offered no better transport. I am called Rudy.”
Pavel Pavlovich took a grey rag from the edge of the Zhiguli’s engine compartment and wiped his hands as he approached the stranger his daughter had brought home. In those ten slow paces, he scanned Rudy and the motorcycle equally. He brought his eyes back to Rudy’s for a moment as he extended his hand and Rudy took it. With a nod, he turned his attention back to the bike. “No better transport? Amerikanyets, I’d say you found the best. Beautiful day to ride. All was well on the road?”
“Yes. No problem getting here. Should be no problem getting back.”
Pavel Pavlovich bent to look closely at the engine, to rap the tires and feel the spokes. “Solid,” he said. Then he glanced around the garage-yard. “Bring it in the garage, out of sight.”
Rudy could see the other men down the line peering up from their work and their beer. Bad enough to leave a quality machine out in the open as bandit bait; worse to sore-thumb it with an American in his boots and jean jacket and bright red bandana. He walked the bike behind Ksenia’s father and followed his direction to roll it into the narrow gap on the Zhiguli’s passenger side. He squeezed in, watching closely the centimeters between the engine, the pipes, and the Zhiguli. Unlike Pavel Pavlovich’s weekend mechanic’s clothes, the Zhiguli bore its blemishes—dust, scratches, rust—but Rudy dared not add one. He rolled the bike to the very back of the stall, as far as he could go. He lifted the back and scooted it just a couple inches closer to the car, and told himself to remember that scoot and pull it back before leaning it up to roll back out, when the time came. Then he sidestepped carefully out from between the bike and the narrow, loaded but orderly garage shelves, nervous about doing any damage, nervous about looking clumsy in front of Pavel Pavlovich, nervous that his nervousness would do him in.
Pavel Pavlovich was not looking. He had turned to his daughter and was speaking softly to her. Ksenia’s eyes were intent, serious as she replied with nods and shakes of her head, then surprised, hopeful, and, with one glance at Rudy, eager and radiant.
“Rudy,” she said, “Papa can use your hands here. Mama and I will make dinner.” And she was off with Mama, with the backpack, through the trees and out of sight… out of his sight and sense for the first time since Suzdal.
“Let’s work,” said Pavel Pavlovich, turning his soft voice to Rudy. “First car, then make my bike run like yours.”
Pavel Pavlovich pointed to the driver’s side, and sure enough, there was the dormant bike Ksenia had mentioned, an old green Ural.
And they worked. At first, Rudy worried he’d annoy Pavel Pavlovich, not knowing the words for half the tools in the old black metal box on the ground beside the driver’s door. Even at the work sites in Suzdal and Moskva, they’d done simple manual labor, hauling trash and logs, breaking concrete with hammers, nothing mechanical. But Rudy had worked on enough cars at home that he could watch Pavel Pavlovich’s eyes and hands, study the simple, sensible parts to which he gave his attention, and make sense of what Pavel Pavlovich wanted even if he didn’t recognize his words from any old Russian vocabulary list about university life or grocery shopping or study guides to Turgenyev and Tolstoy.
Not that Pavel Pavlovich said many words. If he intended any interrogation of the young man who had just risked his daughter’s life on a motorcycle on a highway filled with hooligani and banditi, he conducted it telepathically. Pavel Pavlovich expressed no suspicion, no jealousy, not even curiosity about this sudden amerikanyets. He concentrated wholly on replacing the Zhiguli’s belt (the longest, hardest of their tasks), greasing the points, changing the oil, and tightening bolts in the motor. He explained that he wanted to get the car in shape for winter, by which time he hoped he could find new tires. Pavel Pavlovich pointed to the bald spots on one of the Zhiguli’s tires. “Short trips around town,” he said, “but not the highway. They would not survive speed or distance.”
Then they pulled Pavel Pavlovich’s green two-wheeler out into the daylight to disassemble the engine. Pavel Pavlovich said he wasn’t entirely sure what was wrong, but after a long wait, he had finally tracked down a spare fuel petcock, a couple air hoses, and a carburetor compatible with this model. He just wanted to take the engine apart, install these parts, and then scrub and tighten everything up and see what happened. Rudy understood, and they didn’t talk much. They just worked.
Mama—Anna Nikolayevna—appeared from the leafy path just as Pavel Pavlovich wiped their greasy fingerprints from the side of the engine case. “Papa! Rudy!” she called. “All is ready. Come. Wash. Eat.”
Rudy glanced at his watch, the first time since Ksenia had appointed him Pavel Pavlovich’s assistant. 19:20. Over two hours had floated by. “Five minutes,” said Pavel Pavlovich. He tightened final bolts and gestured to Rudy to pick up the parts they’d removed and replaced with new and put them on the shelf in the garage. “Bring my benzin can!”
Under the shelf Rudy found a square green gas can and a metal funnel. The can was about half-full, maybe three gallons. He hauled it out. Pavel Pavlovich had already opened the gas tank. He took the funnel and can and poured in about a half-gallon, then gestured Rudy back and jumped on the starter. On the fourth try, the Ural burst to life, belching smoke for several seconds. Pavel Pavlovich stayed put, revving the motor a few times until the smoke cleared. Anna Nikolayevna shouted her husband’s name and some stream of cautions against foolishness. Then he kicked out of neutral and rode off down the drive between the garages. He disappeared through the trees, and Rudy could hear the engine growling to speed on the street all around the block. In a minute, Pavel Pavlovich returned the way he’d come, switched off the engine, and coasted right up to the edge of the garage, where without fanfare he rolled the Ural right back to its storage spot under the shelf.
“Funny,” Ksenia’s father said, arranging tools on his shelves. “I decide to get my bike running, and you bring me this nice machine from Suzdal. Trade?”
Rudy smiled and shook his head. “I promised the owner I’d return his machine. But you and I could ride together later.”
Pavel Pavlovich nodded. “If there is time. But Anna has dinner, and Ksenia has plans.”
Ksenia’s father grabbed two steel locks from a shelf near the door and tossed one lock to Rudy. It weighed at least a kilo. “Banditi vezde“—bandits everywhere, Pavel Pavlovich thought it sufficiently important to say. He pulled the garage door down, and he and Rudy clamped their locks on shining steel hasps bolted to each side of the door. Pavel Pavlovich rattled his lock, rattled Rudy’s, and walked away without a word. Anna Nikolayevna waited at the edge of the trees, and even though Pavel Pavlovich held his hands up—”Grimy, grimy,” he warned—she snaked her arm around his and clutched at his sleeve as they walked side by side into the leafy shade toward the apartment building.
Rudy followed, instantly in love with their quiet love.