Chapter 28: Talk on the Train
Rudy and Vitaly pushed through the remainder of their project, four more days, nothing but servers, cables, crawlspaces, backups. Finally, Sunday afternoon, all the tests, on site and remote, checked out, and they could pack up all their gear, go back to the hotel, and rest up before Vitaly’s train left Monday morning.
Rudy didn’t talk again about Ksenia, and Vitaly didn’t bring her up, until Sunday evening.
Around 19:00, Vitaly came in through the door from his room to Rudy’s carrying two pizzas from the little shop across the street from the hotel. Rudy raised his head from his pillow; his eyes had lolled in the general direction of the news playing softly on the TV—mafia leaders found murdered in the Khimki Reservoir, Moscow police suspect rival gang—but he hadn’t been paying attention. Vitaly set the pizzas on the bed and flipped open the thin boxes. “Sausage… and vegetables—’Garden Tsar’, the shop calls it.” The first pizza, sausage sliced lengthwise and thick, looked like Stonehenge knocked flat; the vegetable pizza looked like a mulch pile, the tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and mushrooms and sprouts so thick one could hardly see the cheese and sauce. “I know you like your greens.”
Rudy picked a couple cucumber slices off the top of the nearer pizza. They were still fresh, crisp, placed after the baking. He plucked up a cluster of sprouts and ate them before reaching for a whole piece, which dropped a trail of greens on the bed.
Vitaly finished one piece of the sausage pizza and was halfway through the second before he spoke. “I was thinking about your Ksenia.”
Rudy finished a bite. “You and me both.”
“She obviously meant a lot to you.”
“I don’t know,” Rudy said over news of a cold snap and early frost surprising Moscow gardeners. “Did she? Maybe she just caught me off guard.” Rudy took a big bite, chewed hard. “Maybe I was just tired… imagining things. I mean, what kind of fool goes to dinner with a girl he hasn’t seen for ten years thinking… well, thinking…?”
“Thinking you might ask her to run away with you?” Vitaly took another bite and pointed at Rudy with his crust. “Same fool who ran away with her on a motorcycle ten years ago. Same fool who then ran away to Siberia. Same fool who bottled those feelings up for ten years and then is surprised when they all burst out. Same fool who thinks he can now tell me he was just imagining things, that he doesn’t really care about this Ksenia so he doesn’t really need to feel bad.”
Another long silence between them. The TV reported that a Finnish shipping company had bought a St. Petersburg football team.
Vitaly finished his second slice, then picked off a couple mushrooms and wolfed down a vegetable slice, raining sprouts on his lap. “Come with me,” he said, chewing up the last bite of that third slice. “On the train.”
Rudy tilted his head. “I can’t do that. The motorcycle.”
Vitaly brushed crumbs from his hands and waved away the objection. “We have money. They have freight cars. They’ll make room.”
Rudy squirmed on the bed. “No, I planned… I shouldn’t….”
Vitaly reached for his fourth slice, back to sausage. He brought the pizza to his mouth, stopped, and sighed. “You shouldn’t be alone,” Vitaly said, setting the slice back in the box. “You should be with a friend. You’ve gone most of this week without talking, and you should talk more. We should talk more…about your Ksenia, so you don’t get lost in your head, or lost on the road.”
Rudy’s eyes flicked away. He thought of the ride up the Volga a week ago, the detours, alternative routes, opposite routes that had been running through his mind since then, behind the concentration he needed to keep up with Vitaly and do the job right. It was easier to think such things when he was by himself. But with Vitaly in the room, asking for his company, Rudy felt embarrassed to have such maps in his mind. He let those routes fade, let the pull toward oblivion go slack. Vitaly’s request didn’t snap that cord—no, that hook was still there, ready to tug, ready to wrench and make him run if other moorings gave way. But Vitaly wasn’t going to give way that easily.
“Besides, look!” Vitaly said, gesturing toward the television. A computer map rolled west to east, across Russia and its neighbors, pausing every couple time zones to show forecast boxes and dripping clouds across the continent. “This is the last sunny day we get. Tomorrow, here to Irkutsk, rain every day, all along the road. Why be miserable? Come home on the train, with me. Ride at home, when the sun comes out.” Vitaly picked that fourth slice back up and took two big conclusive bites, as if the matter was settled, as if they could enjoy the rest of their dinner and the Moscow detective drama that came on after the weather.
Rudy was far from settled, but he ate more that night—when he and Vitaly finished, only a slice and a half of the Garden Tsar, a few discarded mushrooms, and trails of sprouts remained—than he had in a sitting since watching the salmon go cold at the Berlin. They let the formulaic and violent detective show play on TV—they laughed in places, suggested easier tech solutions to the detective’s dilemmas, but mostly lost the thin thread of the plot under their own conversations, about Rudy’s next big project on campus (the heated skyways over Karl Marx Street, finally permitted by the city, heating elements with sustainable power consumption finally located), about Nina’s smart management of the Ring Group’s foreign portfolio, about Maria and her continued interest in having children, even though her doctor advised against it.
Vitaly’s right, Rudy thought. I need to get out of my own head.
The next morning, with Vitaly’s help, Rudy rolled his motorcycle into a freight car at the train station. They tied the bike into a back corner and Vitaly’s half-empty trunk in front of it as a bumper. With his backpack and a sack of groceries (“Oranges!” Vitaly declared when they abandoned the movie and ventured out to the only late-night grocery in the neighborhood. “Like the old sailors, we must fight scurvy!”), Rudy followed his friend to a sleeping car, where they found their four-bunk cabin, stowed their gear, and watched Samara creak away behind them.
* * *
Just a couple hours out from Samara, the train met clouds. In another hour, rain came, and the train barreled through cold rain most of the rest of the way to Irkutsk. The sun broke through just one day of that trip, through ragged clouds. In Novosibirsk, they met downpours and gales that would have driven Rudy off the road and trapped him in a hotel or roadside shack for a full day.
Vitaly bought a deck of cards in drizzly Ufa, and they spent most of the time in their berth playing all the variations of durak that Vitaly could think of, dealing in the travelers who rotated in and out of the other two bunks. None of strangers who joined them were traveling as far as Vitaly and Rudy.
When they weren’t playing cards, they’d look out at the grey landscape and talk. Rudy tried to keep their talk on work, on Galina Filipovna, and on Vitaly’s home life with Maria. But his thoughts kept dragging him back to Ksenia, and Vitaly, overcoming his own awkwardness with such talk, got Rudy talking.
Rudy talked about the keen understanding Ksenia had shown of the people around her. In Suzdal, Ksenia trusted Yulia, saw through Ashley… and when Rudy had offered her the ride to Galich, she’d understood that his intentions were honorable, that he would only protect her. Otherwise she wouldn’t have gotten on that motorcycle. In Astrakhan, she must have sensed he was different, that he was part of something unseemly. He could tell himself that he was helping a basically criminal enterprise for the good of the Institute, the Ring, Galina Filipovna, but maybe that rationalization worked only on himself, not on others, not on a woman like Ksenia.
Ksenia must have left for good reason. That good reason must have been judgment on Rudy, judgment on his actions, judgment that he had changed since she saw him last and she could no longer trust him.
And why would he doubt Ksenia’s judgment?
Rudy didn’t say all of that at once. Vitaly questioned and listened and let Rudy weave and wander through his confusion. Vitaly didn’t want to sidetrack or stifle his friend with arguments, not until Rudy himself had aired his thoughts, shared them, and thus made himself accountable for the full scheme of his thinking.
On their third evening of traveling, somewhere west of Krasnoyarsk, Vitaly swept the cards to the windowsill and set out the last of their oranges and a quarter-full bottle of vodka forgotten by an early companion who got off in Chelyabinsk. He splashed just a couple thumbs’ worth into their paper cups, enough to relax himself, just enough for Rudy to politely sip along.
As they raised their cups, a drunk traveler lurched into their cabin. The stranger was a wiry man, maybe only a few years older than Rudy and Vitaly. They’d seen him come aboard in Kemerevo, alone and red-eyed, with no bag, swaying toward the dining car. Now they all met each others’ eyes, and the stranger greeted them with an incoherent drawl. Vitaly graciously offered their bottle, but the stranger shook his head and let it drop to his chest. After a few moments in silence, the stranger looked up. With an unlikely burst of agility, he sprang up the ladder and into the bunk above Vitaly’s. Face to the wall, he appeared to fall immediately to sleep.
Vitaly turned the lights down to their last setting and raised his cup again. He and Rudy tapped their cups together. Vitaly drained his cup, while Rudy took a long sip.
Vitaly spoke softly. “Rudy, I think I can boil down your situation. A woman dumps you, stands you up, and you blame yourself. You know why that is?”
Rudy slid his glass back and forth on the little table that folded out from below the window. “Because I’m probably to blame?”
“No. Because you find it easier to doubt yourself than to cast any doubt on your… perfect… Ksenia.”
Rudy stopped moving his glass. “Are you sure you want to pursue that thought?”
Vitaly kept his eye on Rudy’s strong hands. “No, I’m not. Look, I won’t question her character. But however perfect her character may be, her knowledge is imperfect. She knows… what, a week of you? A good week, as you tell it, you at your noble best, but long ago, capped now by 15 minutes on a sidewalk, in a restaurant? I’ve known you—Kolya, Nina, Galya, we’ve all known you… for nine years. Every day we’ve seen at least as good of a guy as Ksenia saw in Suzdal and on that bike. And my Maria—do you think she would try fixing you up with her girlfriends just to tease you?”
“She might.”
“Well, it’s not just that. You’re always respectful to Maria, even when she’s being too much. She knows you’d be a good catch. I know that. Maria and I, all of us at the Institute, we have far more knowledge of you than Ksenia does. Don’t let one woman, even this woman, overrule all of us. Trust the people who know you.”
Rudy leaned away from his cup, away from the window table, and slouched over his knees. “I know you’re just trying to make me feel better—”
“I’m trying to tell you the truth. The truth should make you feel better.”
“Yeah, but… why? Why would she leave if… if I didn’t do something wrong?”
“You keep coming back to that doubt,” Vitaly said, pouring just a little more vodka into his own cup. He downed his second and last shot of the evening before continuing. “But if you insist… maybe what you did wrong wasn’t in Astrakhan. Maybe it was in Suzdal, or Galich. Maybe you never should have left. Stay in Galich, build big cranes, never let Ksenia out of your sight.”
Rudy thought of the last day at work in Suzdal, the picnic, his talk with Marty, his own insistence, his certainty, that it was the bell tower, the horizon calling him, not… “No, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t the time.”
“When is the time?” Vitaly asked. “When you find the most wonderful girl in the world, when you get her to take a long motorcycle ride with you, you show the good goddam sense to marry her before you get to the end of the road.”
To Vitaly’s great relief, Rudy broke out laughing. It was the first full laugh Vitaly had seen from Rudy on the entire trip. Rudy immediately stifled the sound, but his shoulders shook for several seconds. The stranger in the bunk above Vitaly did not stir.
Rudy reached for the last half of the orange on the saucer by the dark, rain-streaked window. He split the sections and handed Vitaly his share.
“Ridiculous,” Rudy said, popping orange into his mouth.
Vitaly contemplated the two orange sections in his hand. “Maybe. Or maybe ridiculous is hiding from this feeling all this time.”
The stranger in the bunk above them snorted in his sleep. Rudy hunched forward, looked at the floor for a long time. Vitaly ate his orange pieces in silence.
Then Rudy hmph‘ed. “Well, ridiculous or not, there’s nothing to do about it, is there? Ksenia walked away. She doesn’t want any part of my ridiculousness.”
Vitaly leaned closer. His eyes were clear, unclouded by the vodka. “That’s the part that doesn’t make sense… so here’s what I’m going to believe. I’m going to believe everything you’ve told me about her. She’s sharp, and kind, and good. What you saw in her eyes, what you felt in her hands, in Astrakhan, was as real as your feelings about her. I was two words away from losing my best friend to a dream woman who was going to ride off with him to Bombay or the Horn of Africa. But then she realized something, I don’t know what, but something that said she had to leave, not because she doesn’t love you but because she does.”
Rudy shook his head. So did Vitaly. “I know,” Vitaly said, “it doesn’t sound right, but it’s where logic leads us. It’s the logic of your own heart. Don’t let her shake your faith in yourself, and don’t let her shake your faith in her. Have faith that she is the smart, perceptive girl you met ten years ago. She did what she had to do for good reason, and until you hear otherwise, until she calls or writes or comes to Irkutsk and says I’m sorry, here’s what happened, forgive me, take me, I’m yours… just leave it there. Have faith in her decision… and go on with your life, with the good life you have with us.”
They sat quietly for a while, swaying faintly with the train. Rudy looked out the window. “Still raining,” Rudy said to the wet streaks across the glass.
“Yeah,” Vitaly said. “Probably for a while.”
They chatted idly for a few minutes. They took turns brushing their teeth with paper cups of hot water from the samovar at the end of the car. Then they shut off the lights and lay down to sleep.
When Rudy and Vitaly woke before dawn, the train was lurching into the Krasnoyarsk station. Their overnight cabinmate had already vacated the top bunk. Rudy and Vitaly put on their boots and jackets and stepped out. The drunk from Kemerevo was waiting by the exit, squinting into the slowing platform lights. When the train stopped, he stepped off smartly, without a bag, without a word, and jogged down the platform, into the rain, out of sight.
Rudy and Vitaly stepped out after the stranger. Vitaly grabbed Rudy’s arm and tugged him in the opposite direction. He pointed toward a kiosk near the end of the mostly empty platform where a youngish woman sold vegetables and fruit from a cart under a blue tarp. “Let’s get some more oranges.”