Last updated on 2024-10-27
Chapter 13: Galich Goodbye
Rudy’s eyes opened to soft daylight through thin curtains. He reached for his watch next to the television—06:42. Ksenia had bid him good night and left him alone in Pavel Pavlovich and Anna Nikolayevna’s living room at 02:41. Those four hours of sleep felt like an instant, but his eyes would not close again. He got up, still dressed, from the thin-cushioned couch and pushed the curtain aside. The street was empty, the western sky clear.
He pulled his bathroom kit from his backpack behind the couch and shuffled down the hall, awkwardly in the slippers loaned so insistently by Anna Nikolayevna. The kitchen was open; the two bedroom doors farther down were closed. The apartment was silent. Rudy closed the bathroom door gently behind him and ran trickles of cold water in the old sink to scrub, shave, and brush. He rubbed some mud from the cuffs of his jeans, careful that the dirt fell in the trash can, not on Anna Nikolayevna’s floor.
In the kitchen he poured a small glass of milk from the half-full bottle in the small refrigerator. He found three keys on a notepad on the table. “To Garage” the top note sheet read in slim, slanted script. On their way through the yard, Rudy had mentioned he wanted to check the bike before leaving. Ksenia had made him promise not to slip away without a proper goodbye. Rudy scooped up the keys, traded slippers for his boots and jacket—he looked for his bandana, thought he’d tucked it in his jacket pocket, but not there, but no matter, he’d find it when he got back—and slipped out the apartment door.
The garageyard was empty, two rows of silent unpainted steel doors. The sun had just come over the eastern building and shone brightly on Pavel Pavlovich’s door. The locks were warm. The door screeched and rattled open, reverberating through the frame of the long building. The Captain’s motorcycle, Pavel Pavlovich’s Ural and Zhiguli and tools and benzin can—still there, unbandited.
Rudy eased the Captain’s bike out past Pavel Pavlovich’s Zhiguli and into the full sunlight. He checked the oil and tires and every other part he could reasonably do something about (the Captain’s repair kit, tucked under the seat, included tire patches and a hand pump) and found everything in order. He’d ask Pavel Pavlovich about the nearest benzin station, to assure himself of a full tank on friendly recommendation before striking out on his own.
His own. Alone.
He didn’t know what time Ksenia’s family rose on Sundays. Traveling with Americans, staying in dormitories, separated tourists from the normal local routines of life as much as from their routines back home. Wanting to minimize his disruption, he put the bike away again, locked the garage, put the keys back in the apartment, and went for a walk.
Rudy paid far closer attention to Galich alone in daylight than he had with Ksenia as his guide. He saw the names now of the streets he crossed and jotted them down from the signs tacked to corner buildings—Revolution, Freedom, Lenin, Riverside (or Speechmaker? or maybe just some historic name in which he could read no literal meaning?). Defying the dry summer, Galich’s grass and shrubs and trees seemed to draw on hidden moisture to grow in profusion and threaten to swallow up all the old rough houses, making all timber, brick, asphalt, and steel seem like temporary aberrations.
In just a few minutes he was at the lake again, a nearer shore than the one Ksenia had taken him to. He passed through an open steel gate—he looked for signs, saw none shouting “Forbidden!” or “Dangerous to Life!”—and walked to the water. Past the sandy shore and the unrippled, algae- and scum-streaked water, he could see where Ksenia and he had rafted and the “mountaintop”, a grassy patch on the water over a kilometer away, bright in the morning sun. All around, land and water alike were flat and dwarfed by the great vault of clear Russian sky, smoky to the south, pure blue to the north. With his back to the city, he could see a world not much changed by the Soviets or the Russians or any of their forebears… and rarely if ever seen by anyone from New Jersey.
He could not see the roads beyond the rim of the lake. He knew the road back lay to his left, south and west to Suzdal. He looked right to the farther shore, imagine the road north and east—how far? how many days? He could ride through Galich, on through steppe into tundra, on until road turned to permafrost or snow or sea. Daylight should have made the thought seem more mad, but this was the same daylight in which he had seen Russia from the bell tower in Suzdal.
The thought that called him back at this moment was the Captain. Not any of the Americans, not those he could call his friends after just those several days together, but the Captain. Rudy had paid the Captain $300. He didn’t have a Russian Blue Book to tell him the going rates for motorcycles on the newly freed market against depreciating rubles. But the Captain had taken his money and parted with his machine under Rudy’s promise to return it by this evening. The bike had held up the Captain’s end of the deal; Rudy would hold up his.
He walked some more. It was good to walk, wake his body up, get his lungs and heart and muscles pumping before sitting down on the bike. He found the town square again, and nothing was open, not the bakery, not the little Fanta pub from last night. 8 a.m., and if he’d wanted a sandwich or a loaf of bread (his stomach wasn’t growling yet, but a loaf of bread in his pack for the road was always a good idea), he wouldn’t have gotten it downtown. He met no one else walking; down one cross street he noticed one babushka sweeping her walk with her switch-bundle broom.
Never had Sunday felt more like Sunday—the world gone quiet, normal life stilled, replaced with simple homebound tasks. But careful with that word normal—were workday fuss and noise normal? Was the constant commerce of typical weekdays that crept increasingly into weekends back home normal? Or was sweep-babushka normal, sweeping old dust that would return every day with a broom her babushka and her babushka before would have recognized and bound together as she had bound this one with her own hands?
That old woman surely had bread in her kitchen. Perhaps she would make bread today from her own flour bin. She would buy some groceries tomorrow. She would get through the week, probably with more difficulty in these strange days than she and her mother did in the safer if not saner Soviet days. She had survived worse than this under Stalin and shortages.
And if she could survive here, Rudy could, too. He had money in his pocket, wheels waiting for him up the street. He could return the bike to the Captain and stay and work in the Captain’s shop. He could turn his back on Suzdal, hitch (unthinkable for Ksenia, but for him, why not?) back north or east or both, as far as the roads and his cash would carry him, then wherever he landed, take up a shovel or hammer or an electrician’s kit. Remont was not merely a cynical joke; repairs were happening. Russia was not paralyzed. It was not working well, but it was working, and Rudy could work. And the strange vision of himself here in Galich, or in some mental mishmash of Galich and Suzdal and the monastery south of Moscow now projected far across the vague green map in his mind—himself, Rudy, adopting Russian tools and curses as he poured Russian concrete or bolted Russian timbers or strung Russian wires through Russian walls suddenly struck him as a more real vision of where he would be a week or a month from now than any idea of what he would do back home. He hadn’t thought past this trip, hadn’t thought past Russia, hadn’t thought much for the past year beyond his weekly routine of work and rest. For these two weeks, home, New Jersey, America had disappeared, and now he could see how easily it could stay disappeared, how different a path he could follow.
The scritch-scritch of the broom ceased. Old sweep-babushka was looking up the street at him. She had swept toward him, clearing the length of the pavement, in front of four houses. Now she walked the remaining distance between them, rocking heavily step to step. “Molodoy chelovek!” she announced herself by calling him young man, and she stopped squarely in front of him, a full head shorter but her eyes firmly on his, her spotted left hand clamped firmly around her broom handle, sure of her superior rank. She searched his eyes for a second, then began crossing herself with sweeping gestures of her right hand and chanting what sounded like the same prayer the old woman with the roadside tea had intoned over him yesterday. She lost some words in ritual, but he heard the same pattern twice, and he heard the words doroga, rabota, dusha—road, work, soul. Then she dropped her eyes, stayed silent for a second, then looked up one more time. “Molodoy chelovek! Bog s vami. Bog s vami”—God be with you, God be with you, and she patted his chest with her hand each time she said Bog. Without waiting for a reply, she turned and resumed sweeping.
Would every day be Sunday here, time out of time, with Madonnas young and old reading his thoughts?
And just what road and what work was the old woman blessing?
* * *
As they finished breakfast—buckwheat kasha, hardboiled eggs, and slices of green apple—Rudy asked Ksenia’s father if he was up for a quick ride around town. Pavel Pavlovich looked briefly at Ksenia. She expressed no objection. “Be careful, Papa,” she said. “Don’t let him lure you away to Suzdal.”
Anna Nikolayevna shook a warning finger at her husband. “No rocket man.”
Not-rocket man got up, kissed his wife and daughter each on the forehead, and took one more shelled egg from the bowl at the center of the table. “Let’s go, young man.”
Both bikes started fine. Pavel Pavlovich’s Ural ran louder and smokier, but they rode without trouble. They took up the lane, side by side, but Rudy watched and followed Ksenia’s father’s signals. They rode through the town center and north to the crane factory. “My work!” Pavel Pavlovich shouted, waving to big green and blue and red machines with arms raised high above the iron fence. Pavel Pavlovich then led Rudy out to the country, just a couple kilometers, beyond the northeastern lobe of the lake to an intersection surrounded by low shrubs and trees, no houses in sight. “When you go, come this way, turn west here,” Ksenia’s father said as they paused at the side of the road, engines still humming. “Around the lake, then south again, back to Suzdal. Good road, all paved.”
They backtracked a bit from there before Pavel Pavlovich led them on a detour around the back side of town, out of sight of the lake behind the town’s great hill. They passed a couple villages and weaved along until Rudy recognized the main highway he and Ksenia had followed to town yesterday. Pavel Pavlovich waved Rudy right, right again, then pulled into a service station that didn’t look open, but when they stopped, a man in green coveralls popped out of the garage. “You got it running!” the man shouted before Pavel Pavlovich had removed his old green helmet.
“Yes,” Ksenia’s father said, “with the help of this kindly Amerikanyets. Any benzin left?”
The station man looked Rudy up and down. “Molodyets!” he blessed the stranger, then pulled a key from his chest pocket and unlocked the nozzle from the red cylindrical tank standing next to the garage. “Enough for two bikes.”
Rudy insisted he should pay for their fuel, but Pavel Pavlovich insisted harder. “You earned room and board, for yourself and your bike.”
Rudy listened while the two men talked about tires. The station man said his supplier had stopped Friday and said he didn’t expect any new auto tires until October. Pavel said the craneworks was scrambling to find tractor tires; when they resumed production later this month—if they resumed, if the steel suppliers got their act together—they might ship cranes without tires at a discount and tell customers to swap tires from their old cranes for the time being.
Rudy saw no meter on the tank. The station man ran a stopwatch while pumping benzin into the bikes. When the station man finished filling their tanks, he drew a brown notebook, like Ken’s, from his other chest pocket and marked down the sale, perhaps in seconds instead of liters. He took no money from Pavel Pavlovich.
They rode back into town, over the railroad tracks, down a couple streets that started to seem familiar, and over the curb, into the garageyard, just fifteen minutes after they’d left. They shut off their engines at the same time in front of the family’s garage.
“Your bike sounds good,” Rudy said.
“It feels good,” Ksenia’s father answered, bouncing a little, rubbing the handlebars. “I will ride it to work tomorrow.” He swung out of the saddle and stood next to his bike, leaning across the seat, looking seriously at Rudy. “You’ve made Ksenia very happy, and us. She’s been gone much of the summer, and soon she’ll be gone to university. This time together is precious to us. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Pavel Pavlovich.”
They stowed the motorcycles again; Rudy kept his close to the door. As they walked toward the apartment, Pavel Pavlovich said, “When you bring Ksenia next time, stay longer. Come see the factory. Help Anna in her garden.”
Bring Ksenia… next time…
Back in the apartment, Rudy packed alone in the living room while those words bounced about in his head. Anna Nikolayevich kindly distracted him, bringing a small bag of vittles—sausage, bread, and two ripe tomatoes—to make up for some of the empty space Ksenia left in his ryukzak. She helped him look for the runaway bandana, riffling through the other jackets hanging in the hall, looking under cushions in the living room, but with no luck. Pavel Pavlovich gave him a folding map with the route he’d mentioned around the north side of the lake marked with blue ballpoint-pen stars and arrows at each turn. “The map is a few years old,” he said, “but the roads are the same. Just more potholes.”
While he packed, he heard Ksenia washing up in the bathroom. He was looking under the couch for his bandana when Ksenia stepped out into the hall. She wore a clean white blouse and a long skirt, plaid in muted blues and greens and thin lines of red. She had rouged her lips and cheeks and twined her auburn hair into one thick braid, draped over her right shoulder, ending with a dash of red… his red bandana, the one he’d worn around his neck on the bike yesterday. She had washed it and woven it into the end of her braid.
Ksenia glanced shyly down her shoulder. “I hope you don’t mind. May I propose… a trade?” She held out her blue scarf, pale blue, with teacup designs, the scarf in which she’d brought their breakfast yesterday, the scarf she’d worn all day on the road.
Rudy held out his hand, and Ksenia lay the scarf on his palm. It was a lighter, thinner fabric than his cotton bandana. Without a word, Rudy tied it around his neck and tucked it under his jacket collar, leaving the knot and drooping corners out in front.
“Very attractive,” she said.
“Very attractive,” he repeated, looking at Ksenia, changing the Russian adjective from masculine to feminine, and not just for bandana.
Anna Nikolayevna and Pavel Pavlovich stepped out of the kitchen, and they all understood it was time to get moving. Rudy pulled on his boots and shouldered his pack. Ksenia opened the door and walked out at his side. Her parents followed them down to the garage. Pavel Pavlovich undid the locks, shook Rudy’s hand, and thanked him again. “Drive carefully, dear rocket boy,” Anna Nikolayevna said, and then reached for Pavel Pavlovich’s hand and walked with him back to the apartment, leaving Ksenia and Rudy alone by the bike.
“Very serious, this trip,” Ksenia said. “Are you ready?”
Something between feeling and premonition jumped him again, as it had in those great forested miles before Galich. He was twenty, forty years away. He was in a chair, at a large desk, looking to the side out a window. It was raining. He was not in Russia.
“Rudy, what do you see?” Ksenia asked.
Asked at that desk, asked away from Russia, he’d have hesitated, shrugged off the question, shrugged off the entire sensation. Here on the dirt path outside Ksenia’s apartment block, in the shade of the mountain ash, he told Ksenia exactly what swirled in his head. “When I go home, I will spend the rest of my life wishing I were still riding this motorcycle, on this road, with you.”
His pre-memory whisked back to almost now, only two seconds ahead, when he could hear himself repeating “with you,” and he could see that if he said those two words once more, he would keep saying them, and the words would bind them in a bubble of space and time disjoint from the rest of existence.
“With you,” Ksenia said—and where his repetition would have sealed them away, hers only paused the world, let him recover, and attend to the rest of what she said. “I am very glad to have this time, this road, all that we have seen together. When you come back to Galich, or Suzdal, or Moskva, I will be happy to ride with you again.”
Ksenia tugged one tail of his scarf, her scarf, and they kissed each other’s cheeks, both cheeks, four times.
“Write to me,” she said, “from New Jersey, yes?”
He thought of sitting at that desk with a notepad. What would he find back home that would be worth telling Ksenia about? What magic could he find that would compare to this? Whatever he wrote, perhaps he could roll it up in a Fanta bottle. Surely he could find one down at the import store, or across the river in the city, in the Russian quarter. Pad it, box it up, pay a mint in overseas freight—entirely worth it, he imagined, if he could find anything magic back home worth telling her about.
“You, write to me,” he said. “Tell me of university, of Moscow, of bringing the moon’s order.”
She hugged him. He hugged in return. They separated, and she smiled at him, clear-eyed. He smiled back, so hard his cheeks hurt. After taking a long mental photograph—sunshine on Ksenia’s left, auburn braid sparkling, dark eyes and lips steady, as maybe, just maybe, she etched his face in her memory, too—he put on his sunglasses, tugged on his helmet, cinched the chin strap, and stepped away from Ksenia to climb aboard the Captain’s bike. He patted his chest and felt her father’s map crinkle under his jacket.
Ksenia stepped toward the bike and placed her hand in that same place on his jacket, pressing the map to his heart.
“Do svidanye“—Until the next meeting, Rudy said, more softly, with more intent, than he had ever uttered those parting words.
“Do svidanye,” Ksenia replied, hand on his chest for one more moment, excepted and parenthesized from the counted flow of time. Then back to clockwork, she stepped back as his left hand swung to the handlebar. She took her second step as he kicked the bike to life. Third step, and she turned away as he turned around her, a nice tight circle off the dirt, onto the road, and north, up the street. She stared at the ground, touched the edges of the bandana knotting her braid, and listened to the motorcycle’s engine thrum. She listened to Rudy shift and rev, second, third… even fourth in the light traffic of the four lane, and with each shift, she rocked on her heels, feeling ghosts of the slack and tug of each shift in the saddle behind him.