Chapter 14: Lunyovo Detour
Rudy took Pavel Pavlovich’s route around the lake. He followed the signs and the rough pavement and kept the water to his left, in sight often enough over the rolling terrain to assure him he hadn’t veered north into the country that beckoned. He took the old road (literally: the signs said “Old Road”) on the north side of the lake. He passed garden fields on the left, patches of forest and pasture on his right. He detoured onto the dirt track that ran past the dachas of the village of Turovskoe. There was no sign of a gas station or bar or any public establishment; there were no signs at all, just old country shacks, each with a sprawling garden. Two men set buckets of fish before their stocky wives and headed back toward the lake, poles and new, empty buckets in hand.
Past Turovskoye, he found the highway more forested, and the road mostly hid the lake. He would like to have made a close loop of the lake, maybe touch the shore and the water again on the north shore to wish Ksenia’s Mountain (Ksenii Gora, he said backwards in his mind, and the G was already assuming a capital of great memory) one more farewell, but the lake disappeared behind the trees. A few more dirt roads led south, but he didn’t feel like chancing them. He paused on the narrow shoulder where the road Ksenia’s father had marked began to veer northwest, away for good from the lake. He wondered if some solid dirt road might loop closely around the lake and let him make one neat circuit around the water, right back to Galich… but then he’d be going back to Suzdal exactly the way he and Ksenia had come yesterday. Pavel Pavlovich had done him the favor of marking a little longer route, still on main roads, but a chance to see maybe three hours of new country, one more sliver of Russia.
“Which way, Ksenia?” he said to the empty seat behind him.
Trust Papa, she would say.
He kicked the engine alive again and rode on west, out to Buy, down another Street of the Oktober Revolution, and down the 34H-3 toward Kostroma via Susanino instead of Sudislavl. Maybe Susanino would have bread as good as Sudislavl’s… if the bread stores were open on Sunday, if the Susanino bakery was not under remont.
He’d gotten going later than expected, but so did all of the Russian countryside on Sunday morning. The highway was quiet through Susanino (he did not stop for bread) and all the way to the edge of Kostroma. Everyone was sleeping off their own moongazing or fishing or gardening or sunbathing at the dacha, waiting to pack their cars and trundle back to the city all at the same time, jamming up the highways with the smell of Lada fumes, fish, and first tomatoes.
This route avoided the unpleasant station on the northeast edge of Kostroma where he’d refueled yesterday. When Rudy rode the big Kostroma bridge over the Volga, he shouted in Russian, “Greetings, river, great river!” words he imagined Ksenia herself might have spoken over the rumble of his engine amidst the sparse mid-Sunday traffic. The Volga itself coursed beneath him, making its own much longer trip, east to Kazan, then south to Volgograd, Astrakhan, and the Caspian Sea, all places ringing of medieval magic, all living, breathing places, and all in a mist—or at the moment, a heavy summer haze—well beyond the edges of the map in his jacket.
Now back on familiar pavement, Rudy recalled that this stretch of the highway paralleled the Volga for several miles before the river bounded east and the highway bent south-southwest to Ivanovo and Suzdal. His one sidetrack yesterday had been to the waterfall, at Ksenia’s request; today his one sidetrack would be to the great river. He’d noticed a small sign— not a typical highway sign, not official blue steel, but two upright planks nailed around a stake, weathered wood hand-lettered in white: LUN, stacked vertically, with an arrow pointing to asphalt headed east. He spotted an identical sign a few miles south from the city limits. A Moskvich was crowding a bit behind him, so he gunned his own engine (“Hang on,” he said to his absent companion) to gain space, then slowed and leaned hard left, making the turn early in front of a fish truck. The fish truck wasn’t close enough to need to brake (and the Russian driver would not have braked anyway), but Rudy knew that if he’d hit the patch of gravel at the edge of the intersection, where the cars from “LUN” turned onto the highway, he’d have gone skidding across the pavement and into the ditch.
But the Captain’s tires kept him up on the pavement, and he raced on, a couple miles through land cleared for farming. Then the road ducked between two solid forest walls, tall trees completely shielding the road from sun and wind. The forest opened suddenly at another hand-painted sign, two more planks, same style of white letters, but able here to fit four: REKA, River, and an arrow atop pointing east, down a dirt path through a sunny dreamscape of dead, broken, blackened trees still grasping for sky amidst a thick explosion of grass, bush, and skinny young birches vying with their dead ancestors for the sun.
Rudy stopped beside the River sign—there was no shoulder, only a sharp dropoff of several inches into gravel and grass. The dirt path looked dry and firm at least to its first curve an eighth of a mile ahead. He checked both ways, crossed the road, and shut off his engine. Bugs and birds— no other sounds. He dropped the kickstand—the packed earth held, and the bike did not tip—and stepped off into the bush. He put his hands and eyes on the nearest dead tree. The dead bark had mostly peeled off, but the trunk had not burned. This tree had snapped about ten feet above his head. The rest of its trunk lay half rotted amidst the grass to the east. A couple other trees in sight stood in splintered triangles: some portion of trunk still vertical, the bare rest clinging by some dry pith to the snapped trunk but angling to the ground.
Rudy waded further out into the grass of this spiky meadow. He found old dead trees completely uprooted, lying hidden in the grass and bush, trunks going spongy in moss and decay. Saplings competed with grass, but all around and to the north and east, to what looked like the bluffs of the Volga, old forest had been laid flat, and the ground was open to the sky.
Not far east from the intersection was a span where no snapped trunks poked above the grass. Here Rudy found remnants of construction: a few cinder block footprints, cracked concrete floors pierced by green and sprinkled with dusty shattered glass peeking through the accumulating new earth, a pile of splayed boards strung weakly together by shreds of tar paper, occasional dusty sparkles of shattered glass. He wouldn’t have seen these vestiges of settlement from the road; everything had been razed to the ground, with not one bit of debris taller than the grass. Not just a forest but a village had been here. The trees at least had the strength to leave a few tall broken monuments; the village was buried in grass and earth.
But something here was important enough for the sign back on the highway, a sign newer than the destruction here. Perhaps “LUN”—Moon? he wondered—lay down the road, next to “REKA”, next to river.
Rudy hopped back on the motorcycle and rode as far as he could down the dirt path, through the wrecked forest, to the crest overlooking the River Volga. It was not as high above the channel as at Kostroma; the Volga cut maybe only a hundred feet down into this earth. The snapped trees continued right to the edge of the bluff; below, older trees still shaded the trail to the water’s edge.
Rudy saw just two houses on the crest of the bluff, one with a fresh coat of green paint. When he shut off his engine, he could hear chickens clucking calmly, hidden by the grass, out behind the less colorful shack, also apparently new, freshly cut and unfinished boards under a grey corrugated metal roof. Double tire tracks led through the grass—not rutted to dirt, just flattened green—to the structures, but Rudy saw no cars.
Rudy leaned the bike against the low dirt bank next to the path. He walked down the trail, into the shade of the remaining forest, toward the river. The path was bumpy with gnarled roots and stones and washouts, but it was shallow and wide enough for trucks to pass. He counted at least a dozen cabins here tucked away in the riparian shade, all, from what he could see, much older, like the trees, clinging to the shallow west bank of the Volga.
At the bottom of the bluff, Rudy found a wide green flood plain, a good hundred yards to the water, stretching maybe a quarter mile upstream and down, covered with garden plots. Right in front of him were sprawling tomato plants, a few with fruits verging to red ripeness, and cucumbers, cabbage, onions, and herbs. Amidst these chaotic plots, he finally saw human forms, a handful scattered among the plants weeding or trimming.
And slowly winding his way up from the river was an old man carrying a large bucket in each hand, a much-scuffed brown leather satchel jouncing below his hip, and three fishing poles strapped to his back. The old man stopped, sized Rudy up from the other side of a tomato patch. “Amerikanyets!” he exclaimed. He paused, then said something in Russian about stealing tomatoes, a beating, and the dirt. His words were a little hard to understand, but his tone was more tired and surprised than belligerent.
“I’m not after your vegetables,” Rudy answered in Russian. “I’m just looking for the river, and ‘LUN’. The sign said ‘LUN’. What is ‘LUN’?”
“Lun? Sign? Ah, Lunyovo.” The old man—Rudy guessed 70, 75 years from the weathered face and slow gait, but he knew Soviet life wore faces and bodies down more quickly than the pace of life that formed his assumptions back home—set down his buckets and waved his gloved hands slowly across the garden plain. “This—we—Lunyovo. All that is left after the storm.”
Bidden by no more than the curious tilt of Rudy’s head, the old man told a long, intense story of the tornadoes that destroyed his village, Lunyovo. The old man spoke slowly, but his Russian was heavy and old, and he used a number of words Rudy didn’t recognize—American textbooks of Russian language didn’t spend enough time drilling vocabulary relating to weather disasters. Rudy was ashamed not to catch the entirety of the tale, but from the old man’s words, gestures, and eyes—burning eyes that saw the storm tearing through the forest and houses and flinging trees and men over their heads right here, right now, the storm forever alive and deadly in his soul even on this cloudless day—Rudy gathered this bulk of the story:
Eight summers ago the old man was walking with these same boots and these same buckets with his day’s fish to his house in Lunyovo. The village lay mostly atop the bluff, home to hundreds, with farms, wood shops, a small lumber mill, craftsmen who built houses from the river’s best trees. The day had started clear as this one, but windy, humid, hot, energy builtin the sky all day. Dark clouds loomed from the south by mid-afternoon. He was halfway up the trail when it started to rain, a cold rain from high up that quickly turned to hail. He sheltered in a neighbor’s hut on the bank, a small but solid place with a thick-timbered roof. He might have died outside, as the hailstones came down as big as two fists (the old man brought his bulky gloved fists together and swung them earthward over and over) and stripped many trees.
Then the rain and hail and wind stopped. There grew from the silence a rumble, then a roar from the south, the tornado that came all the way from Ivanovo. Tornadoes in pictures and movies look like fingers; this storm was not fingers but the fist of God (those exact words, Rudy heard, though when it hit, the old man was down the bank, in a hut that survived, so he could not have seen such a thing coming through the forest over the bluff; the image must have been impressed on him by the tales of other survivors, or transmuted into vision by the thunderous sound that overwhelmed his ears). That fist smashed the forest flat and swept the houses, water tanks, shops, and all of Lunyovo clean off the earth and flung their ragged bits across the river. Only the trees and huts and people who sheltered below the bluff’s edge, close to the river, survived. The fist would not touch the river.
Moscow said 92 people died in this tornado. Moscow lied. 402 died in Lunyovo alone. Disappeared, unrecognized, many of their bodies never found, erased from existence by the storm as efficiently and completely as if Beria and Stalin had been in charge.
The old man’s wife was among the disappeared. No trace remained of her or their house, a wooden cabin on blocks pulverized and swept away in a trail of useless debris.
No one came to clean up or rebuild. More than half of the survivors, maybe a third of the village, scraped together what little of their belongings they could find and ran off forever to Kostroma or Ivanovo or God knows where. A few dozen remained here, in the huts that survived the tornado down in the Volga’s loving arms. (Rudy was sure he heard the words river and arms used together, in a way he’d never heard but which the old man made clear with his own arms brought close to his chest and his sad face rested for a moment upon his hands, leaning toward his covered heart.) They lived there by the river for seven years without electricity, until last year, just before the putsch, when his daughter, an engineer in Kostroma, fucked (the old man spat) a utilities official and got him to divert ten kilometers of cable to an off-book project she led to restring one power line from the nearest substation upriver back to Lunyovo.
The old man still lived on the bank, in the stone and timber hut of his friend, who died up on the highway when the tornado threw his car from the road and smashed it to bits between two great oaks.
Here is Lunyovo, concluded the old man, what is left, where I live, by our saving river.
The old man had come round the tomato patch in his telling, to look Rudy in the eye, to grasp his arm, to turn him to look where he gestured up to the high ground and out to the saving Volga. On his last words he had walked away four steps, toward the shore. The fishing rods hung like skewed antennae over the old man’s shoulder, the reels jostling each other and his right hip.
Rudy quietly walked to the other side of the tomato patch, to the old man’s grey tin buckets. Not quite knee-high, nearly the size of five-gallon pails back home, they were each filled with water and sluggish fish. The metal handles had been wrapped in thick tape, creating grips thick enough that his fingers would not close to the heel of his own palms when he grabbed them.
Rudy lifted each bucket to his side. “Where to?”
The old man turned, looked at his buckets, up at Rudy, up the path, then back to the buckets. He plucked three small red tomatoes from the unruly plot between them. They were the only three that were ripe. He put two in his jacket pocket, pointed up the trail with the third in his right hand, took a bite, and started walking. Rudy followed, content to match the old man’s slow climb up the gentle grade, to mind his step on the uneven trail and not to slosh the buckets’ contents. They climbed three quarters of the way up, then followed a single track through the trees to the stone and timber cabin that had withstood the hail and replaced his obliterated house eight years ago. Rudy guessed it was sixteen foot by twelve, with a good peaked roof for the snow. Each wall had a small window. A small shed and a hand pump stood at the corner of the house, and beyond, down the slope a few steps, was an outhouse. A stack of firewood was wedged between the cabin and the shed. A stump held up an axe by the blade a few steps away. Everything lay under the faintly dappled shade of oaks all around that had survived the hail and reached out with new branches and leaves.
The old man ate the last bit of the tomato, stopped at the chopping stump, and pointed absently to the ground as he surveyed the forest that was his yard. Rudy set the buckets down. The old man pulled the two remaining tomatoes from his pocket, handed them to Rudy, then unfolded a sizable knife from his other pocket. “Spasibo. Bog s vami.” Without another glance at Rudy, the old man pulled an empty bucket from his shed and a wooden chair from beside his window. He sat down, laid a fish on the stump, and chopped off its head with his knife.
“And with you,” Rudy answered in Russian. “Thank you.” Rudy took a bite of one tomato and watched the old man draw a smooth cut the length of the fish. Then he returned up the trail, found his bike right where he’d left it. He finished the first tomato (bright red, like Ksenia’s jacket, like his bandana in her braid), then tucked the second in his pack next to Anna Nikolayevna’s garden tomatoes and the rest of the lunch she’d made for him, the lunch he hadn’t touched yet. He checked the map, reciting the turns to himself. He looked around once more at the forest toward the river and, in the opposite direction, the meadow, grass and saplings reclaiming the earth where the old man’s house once stood, where his wife once kept a sunnier garden, before God smashed them with his angry fist. This Russian God—like any God, Rudy supposed—would erase lives at a stroke, lives that would be forgotten by almost everyone… but this Russian God would always leave someone to tell stories, tend the garden, and keep life going.
Rudy put on his helmet and left Lunyovo for the highway.