Last updated on 2024-12-11
Chapter 15: Not Coming Back
Rudy benzined up in the center of Ivanovo, at a station that wasn’t quite as busy as the outer-ring stations that were catching the early Sunday dacha traffic. Yesterday it had felt immediately natural and easy to simply go where Ksenia pointed: Chai-babushka, gas, bakery, park, waterfall, mountaintop…. Today it felt strange to pick out a place to stop on his own, without Ksenia’s guidance. It felt strange to stop and not hold the bike steady, not wait for Ksenia to touch the ground first. It felt unbalanced to hang just one helmet on one handlebar, especially when the other helmet, the borrowed blue helmet with flowers, sat empty the whole way, not to be taken up from its position on the back end of the seat, strapped firmly to the little grab bar that Ksenia hadn’t used once.
Based on yesterday’s mileage, Rudy figured the Ivanovo fill-up would get him to Suzdal with about three quarters of a tank left. He would top it off if he could find an open, working pump when he returned, but if he couldn’t, he figured he’d fold a ten-dollar bill around the throttle cable for the Captain.
On the highway, the air pressed against him. It eddied behind him in the space Ksenia had occupied up this road yesterday—just yesterday! Time telescoping—a mere week in Suzdal felt like the entire summer; the team’s stay in Moscow and treks south to the monastery, before Ksenia and her friends and the new restorers’ school, felt like a different year; the flight here through JFK and Amsterdam—inconceivable, otherworldly, another century.
The wind swirling behind him formed the road vortex that adds to the drag on any moving vehicle. Yet he had not felt it yesterday the way he felt it today, a force urging him to reverse course. It was not physics alone pulling him back. It was not just the thought of the girl now absent, the girl who had kept him slotted perfectly on the road, had made his eyes and ears and hands and spine tingle keenly to the slightest sense of any hazard. The pull came from Galich, where he had yet to climb the hill in the center of town, to have dinner out, to buy groceries for an entire week’s stay, to put in a shift at the crane factory (a shift? an apprenticeship? who said he couldn’t just build cranes for the rest of his life?), to sit by the lake in the afternoon and eat pryaniki in the sun, to ski across the frozen lake in January and cross the spot where the bottles would lie buried beneath a foot of sand and three feet of snow. And the pull came from beyond-Galich, every unknown place he could see and tread and de-abstract from letters on maps to real memories.
A slow Zhiguli loomed up in front of him. He shook off the alluring resistance, scanned the road and his mirrors, then punched around the dawdling driver, leaning crisply in and out of the left lane. The quick, sure thrum of the engine made Rudy feel he was driving the best-oiled, best-tuned machine in all of Russia. If he gave in, if he turned around and never came back, he sensed the Captain’s bike would never wear out… and neither might he.
You could go forever….
Forever pulled his attention from the road, and Rudy had to pull it back, keep the bike tight between the ditches, keep his eyes tight on the road, keep his mind tight on the fact that today’s mission was as important as yesterday’s. He’d promised to get Ksenia home safely—check. But he’d made promises all around. Find his way back, return the bike, tell Ken everything he saw so Ken could write down every fuckin’ word.
Ken—yeah, Rudy thought, I’ll talk to Ken. Rudy didn’t want to go back and pretend to be Mr. Man of the Hour, the center of attention. Ken and everyone else would have fun stories to tell about Vladimir and the wooden churches they saw. They’d have souvenirs to pass around, and Rudy wanted to catch up.
Souvenirs—I don’t have a single picture of Ksenia, Rudy thought. He hadn’t brought a camera. Gloria was the group’s biggest shutterbug; maybe she had captured Ksenia at work, at the park, at the campfire Friday night. Maybe he could send Gloria some cash to make a copy of the album she was compiling and send it to him.
But he’d have no pictures of Ksenia on the motorcycle, Ksenia on the road from Suzdal to Galich, Ksenia with Chai-babushka, Ksenia at the falls, Ksenia outside the Fanta-pub, Ksenia on the raft, Ksenia beside him on the mountaintop in the red red moon. He recited those things to himself and other little details over and over, kilometer after kilometer, but how would he remember all that?
Her blue scarf would help. But so would Ken’s words. Rudy would tell Ken every detail, as promised, and Ken would listen, better than anyone else, getting what the ride was about, like he got what the bell tower was about. Rudy wasn’t much of a writer, but Ken would journal it all down in his notebooks, on the bus, in bed, on the plane back home. Rudy could ask Ken to transcribe his journal, to type up what he wrote about the motorcycle ride and send it to him. Or if Ken wrote fast enough—they still had packing and touring to do before the Wednesday flight… would Ken have time to write it all down?—maybe they could find a copy machine at JFK and Rudy could keep the images of his trip in Ken’s handwriting, in that manual EKG of the excitement Ken would feel hearing and retelling the adventure.
Rudy didn’t remember when the bus was supposed to return that evening. He didn’t remember if they were eating on the road or at the cafeteria in Suzdal, or if he’d make it back to Suzdal in time to eat with them. But they’d have the evening free, and Rudy could return the motorcycle, put his pack away, and spend the evening with the others by the creek, or in the park, or strolling around town, or all three, sharing stories, and giving Ken the details to help keep Ksenia and the ride real, in words, for Rudy to keep along with the blue scarf.
Get back to Suzdal, Rudy thought. Gotta tell Ken.
Rudy couldn’t say how many highway signs he missed while his mind spun through the pull and the memories and the necessary reminders of all promises made. But whenever he refocused and searched, the highway signs appeared few and far between. (Russians knew where they were going, so who needed signs?) But he eventually noticed a couple ticking off kilometers to Suzdal: 35, 21. More cars crowded the highway. Amidst the auto fumes he smelled smoke, wood smoke, growing stronger. It was not the occasional gust of smoke from some campfire or dacha brush-clearing; the whole highway was infused with the smell. The sun, still four or five hours from setting, was a hazy orange. He had seen clearly Wednesday (again, time telescoping, impossibly far, lost in a week of mad work and pivo and immersion in this other world far from the center) from the bell tower to the mystical north from which he was now returning. Now when he got clear of the woods and the highway opened up with what should have been a clear view of Suzdal and the bell tower, Rudy saw only a murky gray horizon. Perhaps the wind had switched. Perhaps the fires had worsened.
How many Lunyovos ahead, south of Suzdal, might be burning? How many villages were being swept from the Earth by a fiery hand of God? How many people would find their homes forgotten by a broken state, their land reclaimed by the grass and the birches and the mountain ash trees? How many old men would the fire consign to live in forgotten forest enclaves saved by a river, surviving on fish and garden tomatoes, sustained by a single electric line diverted to their huts sometime next century by one engineer driven by necessity and the massive collapse around her to sacrifice her dignity?
Suzdal materialized slowly from the smoke. Rudy’s eyes stung a little, but he could make out the bell tower, then a couple of church domes, and the hilltop where they’d roasted potatoes. He recognized the intersection where he’d turned around on his test ride. The Sunday afternoon road was busier than Thursday night—Suzdal was returning from the dachas, and every kilometer Rudy passed a couple of cars on the shoulder, undergoing unexpected remont after the strain of hauling back baskets of berries and asparagus and fish on top of their other weekend country gear. Some drivers worked diligently under their hoods; a few took their breakdowns as an invitation to drink and sunbathe and snooze, for really, what rush was there to get back to town?
Rudy spotted a service station at the edge of Suzdal. He signaled—marking himself as a stranger with such caution, but safety first on two borrowed wheels—slowed, and pulled in behind a line of seven dacha returnees and a truck at the single pump in the gravel lot. The line meant there had to be some fuel left. Rudy didn’t need much—as expected, the needle was just touching three quarters—and he could stand to wait, alone, surrounded by normal Russia, for a while longer. He shut off the engine and walked the bike forward every few minutes as the slow pump topped off another tank, another driver left, and the line crunched ahead.
During the long, slow wait, Rudy tried to see the world as closely as he’d seen it in the park north of Sudislavl, but his attention drifted inward, hopping and skipping to everything he’d seen. The Volga, the waterfalls, the mountaintop. The fisherman’s tornado story and his axe in the stump. Ksenia’s father riding in the morning sun. Pavel and Anna walking hand in hand. Ksenia’s message to the future—of course he’d come back so they could unearth those bottles, pull out the halves and put them back together to read, but how long would he have to wait? How far into the future had she written? Ksenia’s eyes, reading his mind. Her braid, her bandana knot…. As Rudy sat on his bike, he raised his hand, without thinking, to his collar, and his thumb rubbed the blue knot.
A flickering screen dragged his attention outward again. A television played on a crate just outside the service garage. Two women sat in the shade of a lean-to tin roof watching the screen; a third woman would come out from the cashier’s till next to the garage and watch with them until the next driver would plod across the gravel to pay, at which point the woman would plod back through her private door in the garage to the till behind the small station window. On the screen Rudy could see a man reading the news in front of a plain blue studio wall, but Rudy couldn’t make out the audio until he was third from the pump, behind a dusty yellow Lada carrying a lone man and a backseat piled with radios, behind a milk truck whose fuel tank he expected would take three times as long to fill as each car before it. The announcer’s words became distinguishable above the noise from the highway:
Terrorists… morning… attack… Vladimir… tour bus… Americans… wildfire worse….
The screen switched from the studio to outdoor video, providing context that helped Rudy piece together the announcer’s report: the charred, empty frame of a bus, once white and blue, like the one that Rudy had ridden to Suzdal, remains of tires still smoking; cut away to burning trees and grass, then back to debris on the road—
29 bodies… explosion… heat… papers burned… 25 Americans, three guides, driver….
On the screen: camera shakes as cameraman approaches one item standing out amidst the blackened remains, a red canvas lump on the pavement, straps charred and splayed—a small duffel bag. The camera gets closer, lens lowered to within inches, focusing on the bag, a patch on the bag, still colorful, the Grateful Dead logo, the lightning skull.
Igor—not Tall Igor—had bragged about that patch at their first dinner together. Two years ago, when he’d worked for Intourist, he traded a California banker a set of World War Two Hero City pins for that patch and the corresponding album, a cassette of Steal Your Face, a work Igor declared one of the finest artifacts of Western civilization that Mother Russia had so gladly defended from barbarism throughout the millennium.
That was Igor’s patch. That was Igor’s bag.
Federal security service… Chechen terrorists… promise to capture….
The car behind him honked. Yellow radio-Lada had rolled ahead. Milk man was walking to the cashier’s window to pay before fueling. The cashier left the television again to take the money. Rudy walked the bike out of the queue, allowing the driver behind him to pull up to the bumper of the milk truck. Rudy dropped the kickstand and walked across the gravel right up to the television. He ignored the looks of surprise from the two women. He heard the word motorcycle and a questioning tone from one woman’s lips but didn’t process whatever she might have been asking. He just stared at the screen, watching until the bus and his friends—the wreck of the bus, the wreck of his friends—disappeared into images of the Russian and American presidents on their vacations, doctors in a lab, football matches, a woman in a prim grey dress with outlandish ruffles at the throat and wrists drawing a cold front from Poland to the Crimea, and back to the anchorman in his brown jacket reciting rockets… machine guns… fire… police… 29… unrecognizable….