Last updated on 2024-11-26
Chapter 41: Memorial
↑ MOSKVA 190
←SUZDALSKIY PROSPEKT
SUZDAL 28 →
IVANOVO 116
That was the sign on the M7. Moskva waited less than three hours away. Suzdal lay 40 minutes to the north. Ivanovo was another hour-plus beyond. In the opposite direction, kittycorner across the complicated intersection, a Burger King peeked around the trees.
20 years ago, he’d ridden a bus through this intersection, heading east, turning north. He didn’t remember the intersection—surely it looked different then, and surely he was distracted, joking with Ken, maybe trying to read one of the pages of Pravda that Ashley had bought and was sharing with his fellow travelers. Maybe he’d looked out the window and seen Vladimir’s grey stone Golden Ring monument at that intersection. Nothing specific came back, other than the certainty that the Burger King hadn’t been there—someone would have pointed the monument to the Western invasion. But the bus had to have come this way, rolled through this intersection, rolled on to Suzdal. That bus took his friends sightseeing and didn’t come back.
Rudy turned right on the Suzdal road, but he only went a half a kilometer farther, past the bus stop, to the circuitous driveway to the Globus supermarket, an establishment with shiny silver shopping carts lined up outside a shiny glass entryway that could not have been there or anywhere between Moscow and Suzdal when he’d last come this way. He locked the bike and his helmet and walked out to the bus stop, out to the sidewalk protected by metal railing from the highway to Suzdal. Left hand on that rail, he leaned and looked north. The bus stop was at Vladimir’s northern city limit, indicated by the road sign reading VLADIMIR with a red slash through it (often when he rode by such signs, he would shout into the wind, “Down with Irkutsk! Down with Novosibirsk!”…but he did not utter “Down with Vladimir!” tonight). The Suzdal Road curved and disappeared into open countryside.
It was 8 p.m., a clear evening, mild and calm.
It was one thing to pack Ken’s journals, to read a page or two at camp, and think in the abstract about maybe seeing the places Ken had written down. Ken’s words were those places’ reality, a reality now 20 years old and remembered that way by no one else. It was another thing to see the sign, to know he could ride to Suzdal, the real Suzdal, 20 years closer to the town’s 2024 millennial celebration to which Yulia had invited them all. He could ride over the bridge over the river where they’d bathed, and have a good hour to walk around before sunset, another hour at least of twilight. He could see the memorial park… maybe even the Captain. He could ride to the hilltop—Suzdal brought his geographical memory into much sharper focus, and he was sure he could find that hilltop, west past the dormitory and the dining hall, past the old wooden church—and camp there for the night. In the morning he could climb the bell tower—which way would he fall out this time?
Maybe he would find Yulia—good God, he might find Yulia’s kids there. It had been 20 years—she could easily have a daughter who would be up on that hilltop when he got there, roasting potatoes in a campfire with her friends, all new humans since he’d last been there, all puzzled at the appearance of a biker from Siberia, but Yulia’s daughter would immediately offer a hot potato, and maybe she would recall some passing mention in one of her mother’s stories and say, “Are you that American who helped Mama build the art school and took her friend for a motorcycle ride?” Maybe that little girl—little? she might be 16, and she would look just like Yulia, blonde hair, eyes flashing between mischievous and motherly—that girl, that daughter, would snap her fingers and warp time, and he’d be back 19 years and 9 months ago, back on the hilltop, and he could say, “Holy shit, guys! Don’t go on the bus to Vladimir! Let’s all go to Galich! Let’s hijack the bus, and we’ll go see the lake!” and everything would be fine and he’d fly home. Or he would say nothing, stay out late, eat a couple more potatoes, drink one more beer (two, three, ten, why not?), stumble home in the dark with everyone else, and go on the bus with his friends so they all could never be heard from again together.
But Rudy then or time traveler now, no way could he have told Ksenia no. No way could he have left the motorcycle in the Captain’s shop and left Ksenia to fend for herself, to miss out on returning to Galich and seeing her parents and collecting her things before going to university. No way could he have gone any other way.
He went back to the supermarket, went inside, bought a sack of apples, a small bag of lettuce, a small loaf of bread, and some salami and cheese. At the curb, next to his bike, he made a sandwich, locked the apples and other food in his saddlebag, and walked back toward the highway. He ate his sandwich there, slowly, watching cars and trucks whoosh by, watching them disappear to the north around the bend to Suzdal and to the south into the rush of the main highway and Vladimir proper on a Saturday night.
“Rudy?”
The feminine voice startled him—how could it not? The last third of his sandwich jumped from as hand as he jumped from the bench. A woman, black heels, black jeans straining around thick legs, black rain jacket zipped to her neck, black dyed hair falling in a severe bob over a bright yellow headband. Under heavy false lashes, her eyes widened and gleamed. “My God! Zvezda zvezda! Rudy!”
She wrapped strong arms around him, kissed both cheeks several times. The exuberant greeting gave him just enough time to scan the area—she was not a distraction for Black Crane goons to run up and knock him out—and to process the eyes, the voice, the strange words she said. Zvezda zvezda… star star…
“Yulia? How can… how did you…?”
When he said her name, she gripped him harder, squeezed him breathless, and squelched his questions to a meager “Oof!” His head spun, time spun…
…and eventually she let him go. “The bike,” Yulia said—and now he was sure it was Yulia, under the strange black hair, under the extra Russian flesh of 20 years, work, marriage, children. She nodded over her shoulder to the parking lot. “I saw the bike, saw you come out, make your supper, walk out here. The bike, your frame, your walk… like you just came back from Galich.”
“Galich,” Rudy repeated, and without thinking, continued, “Ksenia….”
Yulia’s eyes darkened before she could blink and reset her exuberance. “Ksenia… you! Have you come back to see her?”
Did Yulia know what she was saying? “Come back? No, I….” Rudy couldn’t explain what he was doing, not to Yulia, who would see straight through any lie.
Before he dared lie, Yulia saw straight through his past. “You aren’t coming back. You never left.” She looked back at the bike, then ran her eyes over his boots, his jacket, his weathered face, his tousled hair. “It’s true. You never left.”
Promise me, she had demanded at the campfire. Her words came back, clear as yesterday. Promise me, and he’d promised, and while he’d kept his promise about Ksenia, he’d broken his promise about himself. He lowered his head. “I guess not. I’m sorry.”
Yulia leaned close again. She leaned one hand on his cheek, snaked the other around his back. “No, no, no,” she said. “No sorry. I am sorry I did not come to see you. No one in Suzdal when you got back. No one to help….”
Yulia was sobbing. Rudy was sobbing. A bus came and went; no one got off or on.
Finally Yulia stepped back, but she held his hand. “Will you come with me?”
Rudy scrunched his eyes, puzzled. “Where? Suzdal? I have—”
“No, no, I live here now. But come with me, just up the highway.”
Yulia’s were serious, no joy. Rudy followed her eyes to his own mental map and saw exactly where she meant. “The highway. Where the bus…”
“Yes,” she said. “The bus. Have you gone there? Will you now?”
Rudy couldn’t tell where it was right to go to that place. But he knew it was right to do what Yulia asked. He breathed deeply, in and out. Then he squeezed Yulia’s hand and nodded.
He walked back with her to the parking lot. He got on his bike and followed her in her car, a black Prius, back to the highway and north five kilometers, past where the guardrails ended. Yulia pulled off onto a gravel sideroad. Rudy parked next to her. Much of the Suzdal road was open, farm fields and open steppe sprawling away to rolling horizon. But here, young birches sprouted everywhere, splitting the evening sun into brilliant gold rays. The trees thinned quickly to the west, but a narrow forest ran east and north along a creek that snaked between fields.
The birch copse was all that distinguished this spot. There was no marker on the road, no memorial sign, no cross. There were no old blackened tree trunks; whatever trees had burned that summer had long since composted into the new birches and grass than ran riot to road’s edge.
Rudy tried to remember the newscast. He’d only seen the television reports that once, when they first broadcast. No clips were archived online—he wasn’t sure he’d have watched them if he had found any. Nothing about the location stuck out in memory. He couldn’t touch the pavement and say, here’s where they found Igor’s pack.
But Yulia knew the area. She took him to the shoulder of the highway. It wasn’t busy; Saturday evening, most people were where they wanted to be, at the dacha or the movies or the bars. They wouldn’t be headed home until dark, maybe not till dawn. Yulia knelt on the gravel, a meter back from the edge of the asphalt. Rudy knelt beside her.
She had brought flowers from the supermarket, a bunch of daisies and smaller blossoms amidst leafy greens. They’d been wrapped in gaudy striped silver foil. Yulia had removed and crumpled the foil and tossed it on the floor of her car. She held the flowers to her chest.
“I was coming here tonight anyway,” she said softly. “I come here when I feel sad, when I think of Suzdal, when I think of Ksenia and you and your friends. Yes, I think of you more often than I ought to think about someone who never answered our letters.”
“Your letters?”
“Mine and Ksenia’s, letters from Russia, a stack three-four years high in the back room of a post office in New Jersey, undeliverable, no mailman able to read Russian and return them to sender.”
Rudy leaned over, put a hand flat on the ground, shook his head.
Yulia put her arm over his shoulder. A Lada whooshed past, three meters away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “So much at once, you didn’t expect….”
Rudy looked at his fingers, at the dust and pebbles, a glint of broken glass, a rusty washer folded into a thin C. “This is the spot?”
He felt Yulia’s head bob, moving her shoulder, moving the arm on his back. “Our friends died here.” She pointed up the road. “The first rockets hit there and there. The bus skidded right past here, stopped at the edge of the ditch there.” She pointed just past them, five meters away. Four more rockets, fuel tank exploded, gunfire… done.”
Rain, snow, repaving—no signs of the attack were left. “How do you know these details?”
“I married a young Vladimir policeman. He worked the crime scene. This scene he could stand. The corruption he could not. Now he works in a butcher shop.”
Rudy and Yulia said nothing for a while. After another car whizzed by, when he heard no one else up or down the highway, Rudy got up and walked to the edge of the northbound lane. He looked both ways again, then stepped past the unstriped shoulder out about a third of the way into the road. Yulia stayed off to the side on the gravel and watched Rudy stoop and place both hands flat on the tarmac. He looked around at the trees, leafy but spread out on the mostly flat terrain. Did the bus driver see the Chechens spring up, see the rockets launch, see the trails of smoke unspool before everything went white and red and black?
Rudy heard another car coming from the south in the distance. He got up from his crouch, a runner in slow motion out of imaginary blocks, past Yulia, onto the shoulder, to where grass and some purple wildflowers bent over the gravel. He touched the ground again with both hands. Yulia walked over, knelt at his side, and placed her bouquet next to his hands.
Twenty years ago, Yulia’s husband—not her husband then, just a young man who had no idea what he was in for, what joy and challenge would come from Suzdal—had been on this site. He had removed charred remains, mechanical and human, from the highway. He separated bone from bus and bone from bone. He placed discernible fragments in separate containers, which other investigators sorted further into boxes, all but four sent across the ocean to America, where they were never opened, only buried.
Rudy didn’t know who received his box—one of his sisters, he supposed. The box bore his name but nothing else of his. Who knew what… materials, whose bones, whose ash, may have been mistaken for him? Who knew how thorough Yulia’s someday husband or any of his superiors had been? Who knew how much of his friends had escaped the officers’ hands, had been swept or blown to the side of the road, ground into the gravel, soaked into the dirt to nourish the trees that grew to replace those burned in ’92, or how much had been washed by the rains into the River Neri, the same Neri that to the north took in the Kamenka where they had bathed, the Neri, mingling their soap and dirt with their ashes, carrying all to the Klyazma, the Oka, the Volga, and the sea?
“Some of them all, left behind here,” Rudy whispered. “Some of them, washed away home.”
He rolled sideways and sat on the ground, beside Yulia and her flowers, back to the road, boots down the gentle slope into the ditch. Rudy leaned into Yulia’s shoulder. Tears came, to his eyes and hers, and she held him, as easily as she might have at the campfire, had he needed it, or the Sunday after the campfire, when he had really needed it. He still needed it, this embrace, these shared tears, and he was glad, beyond glad, stunned, shocked to his core to find Yulia here to give this consolation, and he cried as much at what he found—Yulia at Globus, coming here, to this place, and at the profound coin-on-edge chance invoked to bring him up this road on just this day, at just this hour, this minute, amidst everything so different (like her hair, that black hair, how would he ever recognized her if she hadn’t spoken?)—as he cried at what he had lost here, the loss, like himself and Yulia and their grief, unnoticed by the one or two cars a minute that passed on this otherwise still Saturday evening.
They let time slip. They spoke a little, and a little more as they wrung out tears, all about the past, until the light turned orange and pink and hot dim around them, sun on the horizon.
“Where are you riding?” Yulia asked softly.
“Moscow,” Rudy said.
“Better not to ride in the dark. Come home with me.”
“Your husband… won’t he think…?”
“He doesn’t think, not on Saturday night, or Sunday morning. If he stumbles home and makes a fuss at seeing you, I’ll straighten him out.”
Rudy would have pushed on that night, if Yulia hadn’t seen him at the supermarket, if he hadn’t followed her on this detour, if they hadn’t spent the last sunshine sitting by the highway. He might still have declined, might have ridden the long, lingering twilight, at least far enough to get out of sight of this spot.
But Yulia still held him, and with her arm over his shoulders, his hand on her wrist, and their knowledge of what had happened here, Rudy didn’t want to go off alone in the dark.
Rudy wiped his eyes one more time and stood up. Yulia held out both of her hands, and he helped her spring to her feet. She bounced with a hint of the young playful angel, the spirit ready to make campfires on hilltops. Rudy picked up her flowers, loosened their green ribbon, and tied them to the nearest tree, a little birch, trunk not much thicker than his arm, up high enough to be seen easily from the road. Facing the flowers, Yulia whispered a prayer, crossing herself. Rudy stood silently, head bowed, until she said the last word and he echoed her amin. As they walked back to where they’d parked, Rudy stopped, knelt, and laid his hand flat on the nubbly asphalt again. He rubbed his palm over the ground, feeling each stuck blackened stone. His lips moved, no sound—amin.