Last updated on 2024-11-06
Chapter 25: Drafts to Galich
Dorogaya Ksenia, privyet!
I have stared at that greeting for half an hour, unable to write the next line. “How are you?” “It’s been a long time…” “How strange it is to write your name…” “You’ll never believe…” “As Pushkin said….” I’ve thought of a million ways to start this letter, but I can’t start.
Ksenia, I miss you. I know, you wouldn’t know it. I haven’t written you. I haven’t called. The postal service and the phones haven’t been na remont this whole ten years since we met, since we said, “Until the next meeting.” Why haven’t we met again? Why haven’t I made that meeting happen?
I’m embarrassed—is that it? Maybe. Even the most sensible Russian—and you are most sensible—respects a strong man. And I wasn’t strong.
Every sentence, every other word, I pause, and a hundred other words rush in. I keep thinking there’s so much other stuff I need to tell you before I tell you what I really want to tell you. It’s been ten years—new decade, new century, new millennium, blah blah blah… so much has happened to me and surely to you that we can’t just walk up to each other on the street and be like, “Hi, how are you?” and pick up right where we left off, can we? We have to know all that’s happened, all we’ve done, so we know who we’ve become, so we know where we are picking up, right? Where we left off is so long ago I can’t even be sure it was real.
No. It was real. You, the bell tower, our friends in Suzdal, our ride, the waterfalls, supper with your parents, our walk through Galich, TV in the square, raft, mountaintop, bottles, notes, singing, moon—all real. All still too vivid in my mind not to be real.
It was real. It set off a tremor in my heart, and I thought it was going to shake me apart. You, the bell tower, everything I could see… I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know what to call it.
But now I think it was joy.
Joy. Such a strange word. Such a strange feeling. We don’t feel joy every day. I don’t feel it now—I mean, I like where I live, I like my work, I like the people I work with. (See? I ought to be telling you all about those little things first, so you understand the big thing I’m trying to tell you.) I like getting on the road, and I still love this place, this big, boundless place. I’m happy enough, most of the time. But it’s not what I felt when I was with you, and with Yulia and Ken and Marty and everyone else in Suzdal, working, swimming, picnicking… and then riding, with you. That was joy.
Maybe we aren’t meant to feel joy every day. Maybe we aren’t built to handle that much joy. Maybe joy can only exist in tiny bursts, to stand out from the norm.
Am I writing to you, or am I writing to myself?
If I am writing to you, not just talking to myself, I should pause here and listen. You’d have something to say, something mysterious but illuminating.
But I can’t figure what you’d say. I’ve imagined you saying many things, in many imagined conversations (sorry, weird, but it happens, that’s what your memory does), but right now, I say, “Joy”, and I see the memory of you waiting, saying nothing, saying that of joy, you will only speak to me in person.
Joy in Suzdal. Every day, every minute, joy was happening, and not just to me. Did you feel joy? I’m pretty sure Ken did. That’s what I read in his journals (I have those little notebooks—I could share them with you). So did Lily, and Carter, and Marty, in his own cool tough way. Why else would we jump in that river? Why else would I jump on a motorcycle and take you to Galich?
There was joy… and then there wasn’t. It was taken away from everybody else. But I was still there, feeling joy for a moment when they could not, and I was ashamed, and it all hit me, and it was too much, and all I could do was run away.
I suppose that’s the part I need to tell you so this makes sense. I didn’t go home. I got on the Captain’s bike—he said it was o.k., kinda—and I kept riding. I’ve lived and worked here in Russia, out here in Siberia, in Irkutsk, this whole time. Maybe you can tell that from my Russian, smoother now than when we met and patched together our conversation in Russian and English and waving hands… though maybe in this letter I’m even harder to understand.
I’m sorry. As I said, I’m embarrassed. I don’t know what a strong man would have done, but I can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t what I did.
But here I am, in Russia ten years now, living, working, and riding the same motorbike that we rode together to Galich.
I told you I’d write, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry.
I told you I’d go home, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry… not that I didn’t go, but that I didn’t do what I told you I would.
I told you that I’d always be wishing I was on that bike, with you. And I do. I ride that bike all the time. I rode it yesterday, a hundred kilometers, out in the country. And every time I ride it, I think of you. Maybe just for a moment, maybe just in the little pause after I start the engine, when I wait for you to get on, get settled. Or I get going, and I see flowers in the ditch, or a babushka sweeping her front step, or a stream or an eagle or a fox in the woods, any of those things that make me happy, and I think if I could say to you, “Hey, look at that!” or if you could say that to me about the things that you see that I miss… what joy that would be.
Rudy dropped his pen on the letter he was writing at his kitchen table and shook his head. He’d been home for a week since Novosibirsk, three weeks since Kyzyl.
It took that long, and a rainy Sunday to keep him from riding out to the lake, for him to finally put his thoughts on paper, to allow those thoughts about Ksenia to take any form firmer than the comfortable roadway fantasy of her company that had come and gone, as it did on every ride, on the road up from Kyzyl to Novosibirsk and the three days of easy riding back to Irkutsk, to choose words meant not for mere reverie but to engage the actual Ksenia, to reopen their communication.
These words wouldn’t reopen communication. If he sent them to Saran first, to ask if this is what she had in mind, Rudy imagined Saran would laugh. He imagined Ksenia would laugh, too, for different reasons.
This letter was too much. It was true, all of it, true… but Rudy couldn’t send Ksenia that letter. People don’t send letters like that, not in the deepest fever of a St. Petersburg midnight sun, not on any day, normal or not. He tore those papers from his notepad— but gently, keeping the edges straight, so they would fold neatly away. He ran his hand over the next blank sheet, as if to erase any impressions from his first mad draft.
Dear Ksenia, hello!
I hope this letter finds you, and finds you and your family well.
You may be surprised to learn that I am in Russia. I live here now. I would like to see you again, if that would please you, or at least correspond. I would like to hear what success you have found in your studies and your work. Please write and let me know if we may reconnect.
Your friend, Rudy.
p.s.: If we can meet, I will bring the motorcycle.
“There, Saran,” Rudy said to his kitchen, to the single sheet that he freed from the notepad. “You told me to write to her. I’ve written to her.” He glanced at the folded five pages at the edge of the table. “Twice.” He understood Saran wouldn’t be satisfied with this mere act. He had to write, but he had to write to her… but one step at a time, please.
Rudy picked up both letters, the first wild draft and the second, single, sensible sheet, took them to his small living room, to the bookshelf, and tucked them, folded in half, into Zoshchenko, second letter at the front, first toward the back.
* * *
He did not take the letters out again. Every morning as he passed the bookshelf, he sensed them both asking, “Hey, are we going to the post office or what?”
“Not today,” Rudy said, mostly to the second letter, though a mad tiny corner of his soul refused to completely dismiss the first. “When I’m ready.”
A week, a month, and another went by, and then came Astrakhan, a surprise proposal from a surprise prospect, a private consulting firm. Rudy convinced himself without much effort that now was not the time to revisit old adventures, that he should instead focus on preparing for the trip, studying the office and server schematics the prospective client sent, looking up local suppliers, maybe getting measured for a new suit. The client was suggesting a contract big enough to justify postponing their Samara Polytechnic project by a week, not to mention postponing sending a letter to Galich.
So Rudy’s letters went nowhere, while Rudy went to Astrakhan.