Part 2: The Ring
Chapter 17: Wintering Down
The Captain’s motorcycle stood a foot from his wooden bunk. Had he left it outside, the bike would have been buried under four feet of snow. The lean-to was packed with the wood he chopped, so no room there. The bike had thus sat inside, warm and dry, in his sight day and long long night, where he could tinker with the wires and cables and bolts and springs that had brought him 12,807 kilometers—so said the odometer, which hadn’t spun for weeks. After an August, September, and October of constant motion, Rudy now rarely traveled farther or faster than his handmade birch-branch-and-cord snowshoes could carry him.
It was Christmas night, and he was about as far from home—a word losing its focus—and from anyone he knew as any man could be, other than sailors and cosmonauts. He was somewhere north of Lake Baikal, in the western foothills of the Baikal Mountains, 20 miles from the nearest village, a trapper’s outpost where he’d found a few huts and a general store, occupied by a handful of locals who looked more Mongolian than Russian. Thanks to the off-road tires that had appeared like divinity in Bratsk (deus ex machina, deus ex Russia, Rudy thought, deus pro machina, deus est Russia) he’d ridden the motorcycle farther up a brushy, faded trail than anyone other than the Captain might have thought possible and found the cabin amidst the ancient trees. On the dusty floor he’d found a copy of Komsomolskaya Gazeta dated September 7, 1987. The cabin had a sturdy wood stove, an axe and some other tools, a stash of thick tallow candles, ten jars of pickles long gone bad, and rotten wood on the western wall letting in daylight. In the lean-to on the east side were some greyed boards and a jar of nails less rusty than the pickles. The very afternoon that he found the cabin, he’d torn out the rotten wood and hammered in replacements from the least warped boards with the least crooked nails. He’d slept in the cabin that night and every night since. He stoked the stove and slept comfortably, sleeping bag only half zipped, even on the coldest nights.
Rudy had traveled three times to the village, once on the bike, twice snowshoeing a couple miles to the main road, then hitching to the general store for rice, sugar, and several cans of vegetables. Those provisions supplemented the squirrels and rabbits he caught in his snares, also acquired in Bratsk. He needed no freezer; two rabbits hung outside, dressed and out of reach of bears and cougars, and the temperatures hadn’t been above freezing since the first snow on October 28. He’d been hungry the first couple weeks, but he’d gotten craftier in placing the snares, and in the quick, mostly grey days and long silent nights, food didn’t matter as much as he seemed to remember. He was away. He was alone. He was at peace.
Comrade 1987 had left nine books on the shelf beside the bed: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Esenin, Zoshchenko, Yevtushenko, and Solzhenitsyn. All were slow reads, but Rudy began crawling through the Russian text, pocket dictionary at his side. When he wasn’t chopping wood or hunting, he read, by precious daylight, then at night by stovelight to conserve candles. During two months in the stillness of the forest, he improved from ten to fifty pages a day. The poems were harder—Mayakovsky and especially Khlebnikov were madmen, making mere translation the least of his problems—but he thought that, in another two months, he might manage to pass his eyes over every word in every book with at least a glimmer of comprehension.
No one had bothered him. He’d seen no other human tracks among his own snowshoe prints and the animal trails he followed. He’d heard no voices, no gunshots, couldn’t even hear the road from here on the stillest night. He’d found no other dwellings along the trail from the road or in the general perimeter around the cabin, which sat in a broad, shallow valley between two ridges about a half-mile apart. He’d climbed each ridge but found no clearings affording a useful view of the surrounding terrain.
He’d also found no sign of the cabin’s owner. The books had no inscriptions, no marginal notes, no letters or other slips of paper tucked inside as bookmarks. The small desk by the west window had no papers in its two narrow drawers, only a screwdriver that Rudy had used to tighten the wobbly legs. As far as Rudy could tell, the owner of the cabin was the only other person who knew of its existence, and he (she? Rudy had a harder time imagining a woman hiking out here by herself… but then if he dared think back six months, he should have had a harder time imagining himself here, alone, in Siberia) hadn’t come here for over five years.
He sat alone now in the cabin’s single wooden chair, back to the open grate of the stove, feet up on the rope cot, rereading softly aloud in the angry orange glow the dogged lilt of Pushkin, the same verses, the same pages he’d read that Saturday morning in Suzdal. He’d translated these passages before; now he was memorizing.
Russian education—you Americans should try it sometime.
Every now and then, between poems, he would imagine himself watching from orbit, the world spinning beneath him to reveal the billions so far from him. Across Russia, it wasn’t Christmas yet; they celebrated Orthodox Christmas in January. But across the ocean (the Pacific or the Arctic; both were far closer than the Atlantic), Americans were waking to Christmas morning, which for all the chaos in individual homes, especially those with children, was still the quietest day in America, a holiday celebrated mostly at home, with stores and restaurants shuttered, an entire day passing by with almost no business done, no news made, nearly everyone’s existence narrowed to their own four walls, or Grandma’s.
He thought only briefly about his own family gatherings, fewer cousins attending each year as families dispersed for new jobs, new opportunities, new demands, new divorces. The last couple years, he’d settled for phone calls to his sisters, one upstate New York, the other in Maryland. He wasn’t sure he would have found a working phone in the village. He hadn’t wanted to. Since August, his world had been entirely here, in the Eastern Hemisphere. He had little desire to interrupt this world, this quiet more profound than any he had known. The forest, the fire, the words on these pages—this Christmas was better than he’d expected, better than he deserved.
What of Ksenia’s Christmas?
The thought of Ksenia, as it usually did, caught his breath.
Ksenia—would she travel back to Galich to see Anna Nikolayevna and Pavel Pavlovich? Or would she spend Christmas stuck in Moscow?
Stuck—really? Surely she was not alone. Surely she had already built a new circle of friends, some of them from Moscow, with whose families she would be a welcome Christmas guest. She and her university friends would scrounge together bread and beer and cheese and have parties all over the capital of Mother Russia. And Ksenia might tell her story about her motorcycle ride in the summer with a mad American, and her friends would laugh and turn to discuss whether this new American President, this mad young fellow from the South (Rudy had seen Clinton’s name on a newspaper at the general store and realized he had missed his chance to vote), would take Russia for a ride, and the conversation would spin on to something else, and something else….
Rudy turned the page and began reading another poem aloud to himself and his four birch walls.
* * *
Rudy didn’t get to the cabin by poetry. He got there by hard work and remont. He didn’t remember much of the first few days—the fields and forests blurred with the racking thoughts of gunfire, rocketfire, a bus on fire, what could he have done? how could he have saved them? why wasn’t he with them?—but when he crossed the Urals and gazed upon the cool steppes of Asia, he counted the cash left in his pocket: one more tank of gas and a couple days’ bread. Before the arithmetic gave way to more imaginings of smoke and flame, he saw a small group of men just outside a village huddled around a pile of inert parts that might have been mistaken for a tractor. Oats waited in the field around them, apparently safe from mechanical harvest any time soon. Rudy stopped beside the men, joined their conference, and figured from their complaints and the assortment of parts removed that the tractor had refused to start all morning. He also discerned that the tractor driver’s wife, not present but figuring prominently in his speech, was an ominous creature with outlandish appetites and several male friends in nearby villages who would all laugh at the driver’s failure to bring in the harvest. Rudy found the latter tale-telling unilluminating to the task at hand. Without much pretense, he stuck his head and hands into the mess, identified the problem, bolted parts back in place, and got the engine to turn over and keep chugging, but with more smoke than a properly repaired tractor would make. The men were satisfied. The oats trembled in the breeze as the driver and a friend hitched up the harvester. One man asked Rudy if he had time to look at a generator on his farm. Rudy had all the time in the world.
Of that boundless time, the people in this village took a week, deploying his labor on one more tractor, two vans, one Lada, a water heater, and a small oil rig that hadn’t pumped since last winter. Rudy had never worked on an oil rig, and learning the basics in Russian was as much a matter of vocabulary as physics, but he figured it out—he couldn’t figure out where he was going or why he was going, but he could figure out these machines, simple, broken, fixable machines—and restored the village’s contribution to Russia’s GDP and greenhouse gas emissions. In return for his labor, six days, sunup to sundown, always something else broken or breaking, villagers provided him room, board, big bowls of kasha and pork, a full tank of petrol, a spare bag with sturdy straps, and a roll of ruble notes that he figured might last to the middle of September.
Similar work was available wherever Rudy looked. He helped bring in harvests, repaired rail cars and a dump truck, strung power lines, spread asphalt. He stopped to help stalled motorists. He reshelved books in a library for a babushka who’d been around longer than most of the books and on the rainy day he visited just couldn’t push through a flare-up of arthritis. He dug a trench by hand on a crisp September morning for a man running a water line to his dacha. He carried groceries for a mom who needed both hands to corral her two boisterous daughters. When they got home and she settled her daughters into reading Jules Verne, she repaid him with a haircut and a straight-razor shave. “With that beard,” she said as she switched from scissors to blade and aimed the razor at his neck, “you look like a terrorist.” Murderous Mom Butchers Wandering American in Siberia, he imagined the headline, but the woman shaved him without a nick, and his chin felt the cleanest it had since puberty had hit half a life ago with full hirsute force. He fixed her dripping kitchen faucet before leaving. Little favors like that he did without expectation of payment, but he didn’t turn away the occasional haircut or fill-up—even with inflation, Russian benzin remained a bargain, and he could feed the motorcycle for about the same that it cost to feed himself.
Everyone to whom he spoke recognized he was an American, a stranger where strangers were as rare as 90-degree days. But no one asked for papers or even his full name. He told those who asked that he was just passing through, with only a general plan to head east. If questions went much further, questions about his home, he kept vague and gently deflected with questions about the village, the oblast, how long the askers had lived there, and got stories that kept him out of the spotlight for the rest of the day. Foremen and contractors never mentioned paperwork; they handed him cash for his labor. In one town, where Rudy was driving an excavator and removing rubble from a knocked-down apartment building, a man in a dusty blue suit, head sweating even though he wasn’t doing any apparent work, drove up in a rattling black Russian car, a prestigious Volga, and scribbled him a voucher: “Leninsky Prospekt, at Chaika Bridge. Masha: Give this man all the groceries he can carry—U.U. Grigorin.” When Rudy presented the voucher to a mean-looking woman at the grocery by the bridge, she waved a hand toward her shelves and let him cram his spare bag with cans of beans, a jar of jam, cheese, sausage, a couple loaves of bread, soap, and a detective novel, a comically plodding tale that he read nightly for two weeks about a private investigator helping the KGB foil American gangsters trying to corrupt Soviet youth with marijuana and licentious music. It had none of the literary merits of the winter library he would discover in the cabin, but for language practice, its simplicity and predictability were perfect. It was the first Russian novel Rudy read cover to cover.
Compared to the fog in which he left Suzdal, his mental state as autumn came on was reasonably healthy. He was at least functional. He could concentrate on the road. He spotted erratic drivers and potholes, places to sleep, and opportunities to work. He could figure out why machines weren’t working and improvise solutions from God knew what spare parts, if any were available. At work he made himself useful first, friendly second, never too friendly, adopting the Russian reserve of first encounters. He did not really want to break through that reserve and get drawn into any deep social interactions. He rode for solitude. He rode to be made small by the road, the steppes, the forest, the foreignness of the endless strange world engulfing him.
Yet he regularly felt Ksenia with him, on the back of the bike, hanging on tightly, shifting softly as she turned her head to look with him at the old houses and trees and lakes, suggesting directions and detours. Sometimes he’d shout over the wind to her, not entire conversations, no, because that would be crazy, right? and besides, two people can’t sustain a conversation at 90 kilometers per hour, only little exclamations, wow! and look at that!
And with just a little more stretch of the imagination, he could imagine Ken riding along with him, with them, on a red motorcycle he spotted in a small town north of Ekaterinburg, on a noisy green dirtbike he saw tearing up a dry lake bed east of Irbit. Ken, imagined Ken, Ken pulled out and back from that fire, back to Saturday morning, in Suzdal, back in time for Rudy to say, “Sure, come along, the Captain must have another bike somewhere”—that Ken, entirely in Rudy’s mind, was like a road conscience, an alarm, scouting ahead, pointing out rough patches, noting what could possibly go wrong if he took that right turn up the forest road. Imagined Ken also liked to call out “Bet they’ve got pryaniki!” as they passed bakeries, and Rudy would stop every few days to pick up another kilo of the Russian cookies. “Eat all you want,” his imagined Ken said. “Just work harder to burn them all off.”
And Rudy did work harder, eager for any chance to lift and haul and wrestle with driveshafts and concrete and brush and logs. When he worked, he thought only about what he’d found in Suzdal and Galich and what he was finding out here, not what he’d lost. When he rode, his imagination of Ksenia and Ken brought just a touch of sadness, just a portion of grief small enough that he could handle, rough enough to sharpen his wits but not grind him into uselessness. And if he worked hard enough and rode hard enough, when he finally stopped for the night—and night was coming earlier now, advancing past equinox, daylight more precious—he was tired enough to go right to sleep, on the bare ground, in the thick sleeping bag he acquired for his last ten American dollars at a trading post in the Urals. And when he woke in the middle of the night—and he did so every night, listening to the wind, listening for the sound of footsteps or pawsteps, predators on two or four legs, trouble that never came, because maybe the trouble had exhausted itself on his friends, consumed them all so he could be left alone, so he could shudder at the thought of such costly favor—his alertness pushed grief aside, kept him focused on where he was, one small man immersed in a place that the bell tower promised would not end. Go back to sleep now, get the rest of the rest you need so you can rise and ride and work and help and see more to enjoy with Ksenia and Ken who, sure, rode with him, and what was wrong with imagining it so?
So he hopscotched across Siberia, from job to unexpected and always different job, not explaining himself, hardly introducing himself, just doing the work, bounding down roads, sleeping outside more often than on loaned beds, waking to bigger plains and forests and open sky that swallowed him up, swallowed his grief, made everything he carried smaller, small enough for Rudy and his imagined companion or companions, however the day and his feelings went, could handle or, more accurately, overlook in favor of the balance, attention, insight, and strength that the current moment required.
But at the end of October, as the freeze came on, as his hands went numb no matter how much he gloved and wrapped them, when he larked up that trail and found that cabin, when something more than the snow on the far Baikal peaks said Stop, he was willing to stop. He didn’t debate it or plan it. He just lit the stove, warmed his hands, fixed that wall and spent the night, and another, and November. He rolled the bike inside and chopped wood, harvesting dead dry trees, keeping the stove hot, watching the smoke rise from the blackened tin chimney and disappear into the grey sky. He didn’t imagine Ksenia or Ken at his side as much here as he did on the road. When other memories came, when the TV images flashed, when the fire in the stove morphed into flame and wreckage on the Suzdal–Vladimir highway, he went out into the cold to take down more trees, to pile another cord in the lean-to, to throw more snow up against the walls to insulate the cabin… or at night he turned his back to the fire and everything else and ground his mind hard against the words of the cabin library, recited them aloud to grind the words into memory and muscle, to crush and bury everything else. Hide, hibernate, then come out when the sun said so, when there would be more road to ride, more work to do, more Russia to fix, more world that he could quietly put back together.