Last updated on 2024-11-04
Chapter 12: Dinner, Red Moon, Bottles
Bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, fish, wine—it was a fine, simple meal, and, save their lunch at the falls north of Sudislavl, it was the calmest, coziest meal he had had in three weeks. In Suzdal they’d eaten in the restaurant (“PECTOPAH!” the other boys enjoyed joking over the English-legible Cyrillic letters, drawling peck-toe-pah instead of the Russian res-to-ran). In Moscow they’d eaten at the dorm or at the monastery. At all of those tables, Rudy had been with the group, a couple dozen fellow Americans, always finding some cause for revelry, even in the nuns’ dining hall, whispering their amusement, the ever-present sense of “My God, we’re really here!” They shared, reflected, and amplified each other’s sense of adventure. They held onto each other psychically, raising the one or two spirits that would flag day by day. They all, after that bad second night in Moscow, watched over Brenda.
Now in Galich, there was no one for Rudy to watch over, not even Ksenia, safe now in her home with her parents. His attention needed extend no further than the three people with him around this one small table. It was his first real meal in Russia, with a real family and just that family, away from the traveling crazy colony that a cluster of noisy Americans always established on foreign soil. It was his first family meal of any sort in over a year.
They spoke entirely in Russian. He answered Anna Nikolayevna’s questions and managed a few of his own. She spoke freely of her and her husband’s work at the great crane factory, Craneworks of Galich, where she kept books and Pavel designed and drafted heavy equipment. Ksenia’s father said little but savored his salad and fish and the presence of his wife and daughter, whose nearer hands he reached out and patted several times. He sat across from Rudy and looked politely in his eyes when the young man spoke. Rudy sensed no hostility, only a casual comfort in his own home, a sense that food, his wife’s conversation, and his daughter’s company were sufficient hospitality for any man.
When Rudy finished his fish and wine—and he noticed that Anna Nikolayevna did not push him to drink more, as he feared Russian hosts unleashed on a lone American might—the sun still lingered, fat and orange, just at the edge of the trees. It shone through the haze, through the open window, over Pavel Pavlovich’s shoulder, right into Rudy’s face. Pavel Pavlovich turned to his daughter. “Ksyusha, to the street, you wish?” That’s literally how Rudy heard the Russian words.
“Yes, yes,” Mama joined, “see the town, if our extravagant feast has not exhausted you travelers.”
Ksenia had been quiet like her father through most of the meal. Rudy had wondered if the early rise and the trip were catching up with her. But her eyes lit up immediately, as they had at the garage. “Spasibo, papa i mama. Rudy, would you like to a walking tour of the great city of Galich?”
Rudy wouldn’t let Ksenia down. As surely as he could ride that motorcycle as far as the roads and benzin would last, he could walk as far as Ksenia (and her parents, her willing parents, he had to marvel!) wished.
He had washed up before dinner, scrubbing his face, neck, and chest and changing in the tiny bathroom to the clean shirt and jeans he’d tucked beneath all of Ksenia’s things. His work boots were the only shoes he had, but he’d brushed off the dust as best he could. He was as ready as he could be for a Saturday night in Galich.
Rudy stood and started to clear his place.
“Nyet!” said Mama, herself standing and placing her hand on his. “That’s my work. Amerikanyets in Galich, you and Ksenia, hurry along! Sun and moon!”
And out they went, with Rudy’s thanks and Ksenia’s kisses to her parents.
* * *
Among the many earthly joys we are lucky enough to encounter are two distinct experiences, one abstract, one concrete.
The abstract is a moment out of time, an hour or a day or some lucky time more when every action seems unpinned from the normal course of our lives, when we live as if in a dream, free to act or not act, with no impact on the normal existence that we will resume… later, at a resumption point that we cannot hasten or delay and for which there is nothing we need do to prepare.
The concrete is something every human being wants as surely as food and water: to walk with a companion. To be, wholly and solely, with someone who matters.
Sometimes both happen at once.
Ksenia’s parents said nothing about expecting her back by a certain time. They only made abundantly clear that Rudy would sleep on their couch when he returned and be fully rested and fed before they let him ride back to Suzdal.
Rudy himself had no sense of needing to sack out by a certain hour. He would sleep… whenever, and leave tomorrow… whenever. The long northern twilight warped his sense of time—even after the sun finally dropped out of sight, it lingered teasingly just below the northern horizon. Night didn’t really fall; it just left an IOU. In plain daylight, Russia felt otherworldly enough, a freshly shaken and sifted country, reeling as if brought jarringly back out of its own decades-long loop outside of normal time, still unsure how to proceed; Galich by twilight, a town he’d never heard of until this week, felt like a loop within a loop, a dream within a dream.
Rudy’s only imperative here and now was to walk with Ksenia. He relied on her for direction—even with a clear sky and slowly turning stars shining through the faint lights of a provincial town not much bigger than Suzdal, he doubted he could navigate in the twilight back to Ksenia’s apartment. Besides, he was not counting steps or marking turns. He was watching their surroundings—the weedy walks and lots, unkempt shrubs, piles of garbage—watching for the banditi whom Pavel Pavlovich said were vezde… but if the bandits really were everywhere, would Ksenia’s father have allowed his freshly returned daughter to roam the streets on a Saturday night with only one road-weary American to watch her? Whatever the hazards, Rudy kept an eye open. In this time out of time out of time, Ksenia was Rudy’s to watch and protect, as much as he was hers.
But mostly Rudy paid attention to Ksenia. With just a few simple questions, Rudy nudged Ksenia to do most of the talking. She was eager to tell him all about her home. She told stories in the way they never could in the group, in the park back in Suzdal, where everyone was eager to interject or laugh. At supper they’d spoken with her parents entirely in Russian; on their walk, Ksenia practiced her English, then slipped into Russian for a few minutes, and so on, back and forth. Rudy noted occasionally that he seemed to be keeping up with her Russian surprisingly well for not having touched the language for four years. For the most part, though, he kept his language-classroom mind quiet. Rudy was just there, listening, seeing, sharing Ksenia’s walk through her town and her history.
Galich seemed unlively, ramshackle, either falling apart or maybe never built up by the Soviets, yet Ksenia showed no dismay for the familiar disorder. She seemed sure that simply seeing the streets by twilight, her school, the church she and her parents rarely attended, the street her parents took to work each day at the crane factory, the mostly abandoned central square, all of Galich would please any visitor… and in Rudy’s case, she was right.
One bar was open in the town center. The barkeep, a black-haired fireplug with mutton-chop whiskers, a white shirt buttoned halfway, black pants, and a short bar apron, occupied a stool in the open doorway, alternatively enjoying the calm summer air and slow puffs from a hand-rolled cigarette. A television squawked out to the street the urgings of a crowd in Barcelona at an Olympic soccer match. Otherwise the bar was quiet. 21:30, and there were no customers. Perhaps the regulars were all at their dachas.
Rudy asked for two bottles of Fanta, not at all certain that the barkeep would budge, let alone find any limonad in stock. The owner rolled off the stool, went inside without a word, and returned with two orange bottles. “Pyat,” he signaled with his open hand, and Rudy answered with a five-ruble coin. The barkeep handed Rudy the bottles—only faintly cooler than the air—and waved him on, content that they each occupy their separate bliss for the evening.
Ksenia tucked the bottles into the small satchel she’d brought along. “Let’s drink them on the lake,” she suggested. That was fine with Rudy; he had caught glimpses of the water from street to street, and the promise of a wide open vista from the shore drew him away from the town center just as the view from Suzdal’s bell tower had drawn him here.
They walked for another twenty minutes, to the end of the streets and scattered streetlights, to dirt paths winding among garden plots. They crossed springy plank bridges across three muddy ditches. Ksenia said the ditches were usually filled with water that irrigated the gardens. This summer’s drought reached up from Moscow and Suzdal to Galich, lowering the level of the lake below many of the ditch beds, forcing the gardeners to pump water up from the lake.
They pushed through tall grass and reeds to a muddy shore littered with makeshift rafts. Ksenia hurried forward fearlessly in the dim light, picking up and shaking rafts until she found one that met her standards of seaworthiness. “Grab those two poles,” she said, pointing. “We will drink on the lake.”
“Wait—on the lake? I thought you meant ‘on’, like here, on the shore.”
“Don’t be afraid. The fish won’t bite.”
Rudy laughed and grabbed the poles she wanted. One was a long board, its edges long worn round by water and hands; the other was a dark plastic pipe.
“We’ve always kept boats and rafts here.”
“We? Your family?”
“No, all Galich. We plant gardens here, then pole out to fish and to swim out past the islands. Everyone tends the rafts; they belong to everyone.”
Islands? Rudy squinted out across the water. Sure enough, he could see dark lines breaking the glistening surface. He helped Ksenia carry her chosen raft to the water’s edge. If she hadn’t leapt right aboard and stood upright near the back edge, he wouldn’t have believed it would hold her. “Come! I can’t navigate alone!” Still envisioning wet disaster, Rudy stepped from the mud to the raft… and it held, more solid than he expected. They stood on opposite sides and poled away from the shore. Their poles sunk no more than a meter into the water, maybe another foot into silt.
“The water is so low,” Ksenia said, surprised, as they brushed and heaved through several weedy patches. “Usually this part of the lake is just water, and the way is clear to the islands.”
They pushed through the last raspy reeds and poled quietly across the water. The only waves were the ripples from their own progress. Looking past Ksenia, Rudy could make out a couple of other rafts. From one raft farther off he heard singing—not boisterous Saturday night drunken revelry, but heartfelt storytelling, in duet.
He and Ksenia fell into a quiet rhythm, poling side-by-side. He thought of yesterday afternoon in Suzdal, when he and the other men on the crew were sledging the concrete to bits in the basement of the old monastery. He and Ken and the other guys had pounded their way to the wide center of the floor and had room to spread out and swing. Their hammer blows and bar strikes began falling in synch. Possessed with the noise and power and freedom of movement, venting aggression toward the spartan conditions they endured on the job site and in the dorms (more luxurious, more certain than what Russians lived with every day, and with a promise of soon escape, but these were Americans, operating on centuries’ less put-up-with than their hosts), they began singing. Rudy couldn’t remember who sang first—he had the strange impression the music arose spontaneously from all of them. They cried and grunted strange sequences of tone and imprecation, channeling Maori haka, chain gangs, and their own primal urges, following each other in sound across the cracking floor, shouting and cursing the concrete apart, rejoicing in the fissures and fragments they made and the dirt and sweat they released. They remained in that battering groove until they found themselves bumping into the back wall. When they came back to their senses, huffing and dripping in great grimy streaks, Russians watching from the doorways (“Dikie indeyts“—wild Indians, he heard Igor declare, bemused and smiling), almost all of the floor that had remained at lunch was smashed, and spare shafts of afternoon sunlight angled in from the narrow ground-level windows through the temporary studs to rubble strewn over a dirt foundation a half-meter below where the demolished concrete and brick floor had lain. They’d broken up so much concrete that they didn’t swing a hammer for another hour; it took everyone shoveling, prying, and hauling debris out on the hand carts to clear the new rubble and level the dirt for whatever Alexander the developer planned.
Rudy did not sing or shout now; the faint strains from the far raft were enough, intertwining with the swirling water around their synchronized poles. But like the afternoon with the hammers, the steady rhythm brought them to the island faster than he expected. The dry land was not very high at all—Rudy could see over the eastern edge to the dark northern shore a couple-three miles away and the northern twilight above it, aglow in a way he never saw the northern horizon back home.
Ksenia laid her pole on the deck and stepped to the front of the raft. “Go easy,” she said. “Shore coming up… coming up….” Facing astern, Rudy stopped pushing, actually dragged his pole in the muck below to slow the raft’s gentle cruise. The runners under the raft caught bottom. “There! Push a bit!” Ksenia ordered, scooting back next to Rudy and lifting the bow a couple inches out of the water. Rudy leaned on the pole and shoved the raft forward over the silt a few more feet. When his arms could make no further headway against the mushy friction, the front edge of the raft was just inches from the edge of the water. Rudy laid his pole down—it wedged gently in the gap between boards—and followed Ksenia’s spritely leap to shore. The raft shifted back a bit under his jump; to be safe, Rudy squished into the mud at water’s edge, worked his fingers under the wet, slick wood, and hefted the raft a couple feet up onto dry land.
“Don’t want to be stranded here?” Ksenia teased.
Rudy looked back across the water, toward the sparse town lights that now shimmered back at them from several hundred meters away over the ripples trailing from the resettled raft. “I can’t swim that far, and I think we’d both get stuck trying to wade through that mud.”
In the faint light, Rudy made out Ksenia smiling at his practical response as if she’d asked an entirely different question. “Nu, shto?” he asked. “Shto? What?”
Her smile did not change. “Come. To the mountaintop.”
They followed a sandy path to the “mountaintop,” a crest no more than a hundred yards away and maybe twenty feet above lake level. It was crowned with low, scraggly bushes. The path snaked beyond into the dark.
Ksenia tugged him down to sit on the ground with her. She handed him the bottles from her bag. He pried off the caps (he’d used the bottle opener on his pocket knife these last couple weeks more often than he had in an entire year back home) and they sat shoulder to shoulder and drank to each other’s health. They pursued semi-earnestly the question of which would shorten their lives more, the Fantas in their hands or their pivos at last night’s campfire. Ksenia argued that beer was at least organic. Rudy responded that no one got in a car wreck drinking limonady, which Rudy still found a funny word for any kind of pop… and Ksenia laughed at that word, and Rudy learned the Russian word for onomatopoeia. They both agreed Russian vodka beat every drink by far in lifespan-diminutive ability.
Then they turned to books. Ksenia listed books she’d read in school and books she’d read this summer to get ready for university. They talked about War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago, which she’d read four years ago but which Rudy had not tackled until university. She asked about Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath, which she had picked up in English last year and finally finished this spring. Rudy was embarrassed to admit his only Steinbeck was Of Mice and Men, but Ksenia hadn’t read that and was happy to listen to his retelling (hazy from his high school reading, but the story coalesced under the persistent northern twilight and stars above) and look for parallels to what she’d read in Steinbeck’s larger work. They spoke of the history in those books, and of home—Ksenia’s home, Galich, Russia, not Rudy’s home. Again Rudy let Ksenia take the conversation where she wished and do most of the talking.
The story-singing from a distant raft came and went. Rudy and Ksenia listened to the music in their own pauses. When the faint serenade stopped and did not resume for a few minutes, Ksenia asked, “Do you sing?”
Rudy chuckled. “Well, you heard us in the basement.”
“Not war-song,” she said. She waved an arm generally toward the water, toward the floating serenadists. “Song-song, like them.”
Rudy thought of the few Russian songs he’d learned in school and just these last couple weeks on the bus from Brenda and Marina. He tried them out, and Ksenia sang with him. She sang to him some he didn’t know, all softly, so as not to disturb the couple on the raft that still floated equidistant between island and shore, black shadow on smooth glass. Neither of them were great singers, but Rudy picked up Ksenia’s words and sang choruses with her or hummed along. He’d sung with friends under a blaring car stereo, but he could not think of a time when he’d sat outside and sung with no stereo and no accompaniment but a friend’s voice.
Rudy’s eyes were entirely adjusted to the dark. He could see his boots and Ksenia’s sneakers, see their heels making small divots in the sandy soil. When he turned, he could see Ksenia’s dark eyes, the brightest of all the tiny lights in the far-off world around him.
Now Ksenia’s eyes took on a new light. “Look,” said Ksenia. “Moon.”
Back the way they’d come, the moon was rising, fat and red, over Galich, over the southern half of town, away from the large hill in the middle of town. “To the moon!” Rudy said, and they clinked their bottles, drank their last drink, and blew low notes on their empty bottles as they watched the moon rise. Like the sun in this northern land, the moon took its time, rolling along Galich’s treetops for several minutes before seeming to bounce free into its low, full orbit.
“So red,” said Rudy. “From the wildfires.” On the drive up to Suzdal from Moscow (just six days ago, but in another loop of time, a world away), Igor had told them they might need to detour around the fires burning up forests northeast of Moscow. Those fires were hundreds of miles away, but Rudy remembered four summers ago seeing red sunsets in New Jersey from the Yellowstone fires half a continent away.
“Rudy,” Ksenia asked in her lowest voice, “what does the red moon say to you?” Rudy repeated her words, to make sure he’d understood her. The question seemed improbably poetic… but on this trip, what wasn’t? Her eyes, glinting faintly in the moon, showed no sign of joking.
“What do you mean?” Rudy asked.
She studied his face in the dark and smiled. “I mean…” she trailed off as she turned again to the moon and gave it a good long stare. “I listen to the moon, and it tells me… not to despair. Things are dire all around us, but I can bring some order to our chaos. Dear Russia always struggles through these cycles of dark, but the moon comes and pulls it through to another day. Everyone sees the sun giving life, but the moon is the quiet partner.”
“Is that from a book?”
“No, it’s from the moon. Listen… what does the moon say to you?”
“Now I think you’re just trying to hypnotize me,” Rudy chuckled. “Stare at the bright red ball, you’re getting very sleepy.”
“Never,” said Ksenia. “And not I. Suzdal, the bell tower, the sky over the horizon—that’s what hypnotized you, before we got on the bike. Now listen to the red moon. What does it say?”
Ksenia was entirely serious. Rudy acquiesced and listened to the night, to the sky, to the impact of photons on air molecules and particulate matter from the fire, to the absorption of wavelengths and the passage of red. He listened for the groan of the tidal bulge rolling across the earth’s crust, the burble of magma below stirred… what? inches? feet? by the vectoring gravity. Ksenia bade him listen for unseen forces transmuting into speech.
“The red moon says…” he tried to pull the moon closer, search its features, see its lips move “… go. Keep going.”
“Go where?”
“Out there. Anywhere. Anywhere but… home.”
The word hit Rudy unexpectedly. He stared hard at the moon as it rolled a few more arcseconds up and west, thinking the moon might actually explain.
“Home,” Ksenia repeated. “Suzdal? The airport? New Jersey?”
“Yeah. I mean, I can see that entire path: ride back, get on the bus, get on the plane in Moscow, step off in Newark…and never be as happy and alive as I am right now.” He waited for embarrassment to catch up and strike him dead the way he imagined it would have if he’d spoken like this to any girl at any lake or the seaside back home, but he was bathing in the river in Suzdal again, stripped bare, not minding, and not minded by anyone around.
Ksenia placed her hand on Rudy’s shoulder and leaned her cheek against his jacket. “Do you say such things,” she asked, “to impress all the girls on first dates?”
His heart raced, and his hands would have followed, but he held himself back, specifically because he liked her so much. “Do you ask such things,” he responded, “to make all the boys impress you?”
Ksenia jolted upright, looked at him wide-eyed, and then burst out laughing, a bright crackling laugh that rang across the silent lake all the way to Galich. She punched Rudy’s shoulder, which freed him to laugh, too. He laughed with her, hard and loud until she brought her hands to her lips and stilled herself. From the lake, they heard an echo—not their voices, but faint laughter from the singers, still adrift, hidden among the islands.
“Forgive me,” Ksenia said, parting her hands to let the words out. “You mean the words you say. I should, too.” She collected her thoughts. “The moon is saying what you’ve been thinking all week. You got that bike and brought me here to test yourself, to see if you would give in, run off, never return.”
Rudy looked at Ksenia in the growing moonlight. She didn’t look smug—look how well I read you!—or angry—how dare you use me as a prop, an excuse! She looked concerned, and curious.
Rudy let out a long, heavy breath. “I’m probably not thinking straight. Not enough sleep.”
“You are wide awake.” She was right about that: even as he mentioned sleep, he felt no hint of fatigue, and no desire to close his eyes and lose consciousness of this splendid moment. “You are the straightest thinker in your group. You are just thinking about something really big.”
Rudy tried to think as clearly about what was bubbling in his mind as Ksenia seemed able to divine by moonlight. “I still don’t know, totally, what I felt in Suzdal, in the bell tower. And I couldn’t, not with everybody else around. I mean… Ken, Marty, Brenda, I love them all. Maybe that’s just the trip talking—throw people into tough circumstances, they bond. But that love’s real… but it’s also like… static.” Rudy sat forward and waved his arms toward the lake, the moon. “I wanted to hear this, all this. I wanted to get clear of everybody else and just be…” Rudy’s speech slowed, as he could see the last word coming, could feel it was the wrong word, here, now, with the friend (friend, friend, he reminded himself) who had made this here-now possible, but the sentence had its own momentum “…alone.”
Rudy dropped his hands in his lap. He sat back. A little apologetic, a little more scared, he looked at Ksenia. Her expression hadn’t changed. She still wanted to help him think through this big thing.
“Alone alone?” she said. “You haven’t been alone all day. You haven’t been out of my sight, except for your remont time with Papa.”
“But you’re not static,” Rudy said. “You’re part of… the bell tower. The feeling. You… and your parents! The way they walk together, the way your dad reaches for your hands during dinner. Your quiet town center. The raft. The moon. The waterfalls where the streams meet. Chai-babushka… all part of it.”
“And benzin-man in Kostroma?”
“No, not that son of a bitch,” Rudy snapped, swearing in Russian for the first time in front of Ksenia. “I see him again, I’ll punch the snot out of him.”
Ksenia laughed, and made Rudy laugh again. “See?” she said. “Still thinking straight.”
She turned to sit shoulder to shoulder with Rudy again, facing the moon.
“So… how do you answer the moon?”
That touch through her jacket and his jacket dared him not to move, to wait ’til sunrise or September to answer. He told himself she wasn’t trying to get him to stay. He told himself he wasn’t saying these crazy things just to sweep her off her feet. Ashley had tried that, words upon words, and Ksenia had seen right through him.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll figure it out tomorrow.” Rudy worried he would disappoint Ksenia: she said he was such a straight thinker, but all he felt was his mind spinning in place. He shook the circular thoughts away and looked around at the moon, a little yellower now. He followed those brighter moonbeams to Ksenia’s brighter face. “But I do know this is the most interesting day of this whole trip… the best day ever. Thanks to you.”
Ksenia leaned into him, and Rudy leaned with. They swayed together, side to side, and started singing again. Three, four more songs, then, sometime after their voices trailed away, Ksenia reached for Rudy’s empty bottle and stood it next to hers on the dirt. “Do you have pen and paper?”
Rudy fished from his jacket pocket his pen and a folded sheet, the flight and trip itinerary he’d printed back home. He hadn’t looked at that sheet since finding the connecting gate in Amsterdam. He handed that paper and his pen to Ksenia, who spread the paper out on her knee and wrote carefully on the blank back of the sheet.
“What are you writing?”
“A message… do you still have the bottle caps?”
Rudy had pocketed both Fanta caps, thinking of souvenirs. “Sure.”
“Then a message in a bottle. In two bottles!” She finished writing, folded the sheet vertically, and tore the paper along the crease. She rolled one half into each bottle. “Can you get the caps back on?”
They were old flat crown caps, not screw tops, but Rudy crammed them back on, pressed them flat, and bent their ridges down again to make decent seals with the glass. “No guarantees they’ll stay afloat.”
“No guarantees that you or I will float. Here—” She set the bottles in his lap and dug into the sand, first with her heel to break through the thin vegetation, then with her hands to scoop out the sand below. In seconds she had a hole big enough for both bottles. He handed them over, and she interred the bottles side by side in the dark.
“What did you write?” he asked.
She tamped the dirt with her palm, then her shoe. “Just a message… to the future. We can read it when you come back.”
They both stood up, gazing down at the little bottle grave. Without warning she wrapped him in a full-body hug, her moist cheek against his. Without thinking, he put his arms around her, one hand on her back, the other on the back of her head, lightly stroking her long hair, which still curled from the motorcycle braids she’d undone before dinner. Ksenia did not speak, did not move, just held on tightly.
Then just as abruptly as she’d embraced him, she released him and walked away. He understood to follow.
They launched the raft toward the moon, which had risen to its low zenith, no longer red but strongly gold, tinged with orange. “Do svidanye!” came a gentle cry from that other, distant raft, followed by giggles. Ksenia and Rudy did not try to discern the low silhouettes of the gigglers. He and Ksenia poled into the moon, to the shore. They hauled the raft across the sand and laid their poles across it.
Without a word, Ksenia took his hand, and they walked side-by-side back up the trails, together on those precarious plank bridges, and up the rugged streets, silent as if not to wake Galich, silent as if not to rouse the banditi, silent really because to preserve the joy of simple companionship, in an untimed midnight that lay outside any course they could imagine.