Chapter 42: Vladimir Balcony
…tell Ksenia I miss her.
24 hours later, Rudy sat at a third-floor apartment window, watching the sun set on a winding Moscow alley, watching for Saran and Volodya to return from evening reconnaissance. Rudy’s boots and bag were behind him, in the hall. His bike was below, out of sight in the garage Saran had rented along with the flat.
…tell Ksenia I miss her.
Those were the last words Yulia said to him as he got on his bike that morning and pointed himself back toward the highway. If you see Ksenia in Moscow… and there a long pause, as if she felt her whimsy transgressed, as if she considered taking it back, but then, as if she remembered who and where and with whom she was, saw a ship long sailed, mustered some lingering magic to wish it surer than rain, to wish that Rudy would have the chance to speak those words:
…tell Ksenia I miss her.
24 hours ago, Rudy had followed Yulia back to town. She and Genrik, whom Rudy never saw, lived straight down the road from Globus, close enough to walk for groceries, if they wanted, in the northeast corner of Vladimir, in an apartment building across from a big park. From their sixth-floor balcony, Rudy could see the River Klyazma glinting in the twilight.
He and Yulia sat on the balcony, drinking Crimean wine and talking for hours, talking softly to not annoy the neighbors. They spoke for a long time about Suzdal, reawakening memories that one or the other had forgotten, little details of the basement, the dirt, the water pump, the Russian guides, the boisterous Americans, the brilliant daytime skies, the Friday campfire… Yulia had forgotten about Carter’s hot potato; Rudy had forgotten that her last word to him, with her arms around him and Ksenia, had been druzya.
They had no campfire here, just a string of gentle yellow lights glowing above them at the edge of the patio ceiling and one large white candle flickering between them and their wine on a short, circular glass table. Yulia spoke only briefly of her work, hair and nails and makeovers, making all the women in the neighborhood more beautiful than herself. She drew from Rudy stories of the particle collider, the village, Margarita’s Kitchen, wood-chopping expeditions with Ivan Ivanovich, and his rides, out to the winter cabin, around Lake Baikal, Kyzyl and Krasnoyarsk, everywhere. Travel fascinated Yulia, and she longed to see more of Russia and Europe and the Middle East, but Genrik insisted they work and save, work and save.
Early in the conversation, Rudy kept glancing back inside, sometimes when the boys—Ivan and Igor, 15 and 12, not interested in the strange man their mother brought home, engrossed in their video game—shouted in triumph or rage at digital Chechens and Chinese and NATO invaders, but especially when there was noise in the common hall. Yulia assured him Genrik wouldn’t be home until well past three, if at all.
Genrik wasn’t a bad husband, Yulia explained as the night went on. Genrik worked hard, only yelled at the boys when they had it coming. (Yulia herself yelled right at midnight that it was bedtime, and the boys immediately shut off their game and disappeared). Genrik was just depressed, as she was, that things hadn’t all worked out as they’d hoped, that he had to give up police work and cut meat to keep his soul, that they couldn’t stay young forever, that people they knew, like Ksenia, dear Ksenia, had drifted away.
“Ksenia,” Rudy said cautiously. “Have you seen her lately?”
Yulia sighed. “Not for ten years. You?”
“Ten years… that’s when I saw her, the one time. Briefly, in Astrakhan. Did she mention it, our meeting, to you?”
Yulia’s eyes were far away, farther away than the river. “Astrakhan… no, it must have been after… she’d have told me about seeing you.”
Small comfort, Rudy thought, that he wasn’t the only person from whose life Ksenia had disappeared. Very small.
Yulia’s gaze was still lost in the darkness past the railing, over the river, the far dark prairie, all under the starry sky, stars undimmed by moon well past the western horizon or city mostly asleep. The building shielded them from the relatively bright downtown; the many trees in this corner of Vladimir swallowed up most of the streetlights below. Rudy and Yulia sat in the light of one flickering candle that she had set on the small blue metal table between them. Her face echoed campfire; years dissolved, and she was looking for another bottle, another potato, another reassuring glance from her dear Ksenia…
“I always hoped…” Yulia hesitated, then stood and leaned on the rail, looking at the sky. “Zvezda zvezda. I hoped we could sit together under the night sky again and count the stars. Zvezda, zvezda… zvezda. The three of us.”
Rudy stood up beside Yulia and followed her eyes to the stars. One, two, three, a thousand… Rudy scanned the eastern sky but remained keenly aware that the balcony held just two friends. He looked at the courtyard below—no one was moving. No one was running toward the building, calling their names, calling, “Wait! Wait! Don’t count the stars without me!” Only one car was moving on the street, away from the apartment building, toward the highway. He heard trucks and other late-night motorists faintly in the distance. Maybe Ksenia was out there, on the road. Maybe they could find her, if they just went looking.
“Where did she go?” Rudy whispered. “How did we lose her?”
“I don’t know, and I have more to go on than you. We were friends for years. We called and wrote regularly while she was at university. She came to see me when Ivan was born…but not Igor.”
“Something happened in between?” Rudy asked.
Yulia turned her back on the sky and leaned against the railing, thinking through the timeline. “Her friend Andrei died. Killed, actually, caught in some gang shootout, the papers said. Ksenia went to school with him in Galich.”
Rudy didn’t notice his hands tighten on the railing, but Yulia did. “Don’t be jealous,” she said, nudging him with her elbow. “They were just old friends. She never settled on a boyfriend, said she was working too hard. And she did work for his company, some new venture then, something with trade, something connected to the big factory where their parents worked. She was upset, I’m sure, mafia taking someone so close. But she didn’t recover. She called less and less, stopped visiting. Igor was born, and with two boys, I couldn’t get away to Moscow, and eventually… nothing.”
Yulia stooped to pick up her glass and drank the rest of her wine in a hard gulp. She set the glass back on the table and paced a bit. She kept her voice low, but her tone sharpened. “I thought maybe if Genrik and I just lived our normal life, we could be Ksenia’s lifeline. She’d see us happy and peaceful here, and she’d give up whatever she was doing in the big city and come back to our real life. But she didn’t. We lost her anyway. This—an apartment, a husband, children, work—it wasn’t enough.”
Rudy leaned into the candlelight and caught Yulia by the shoulders. He turned her toward himself and held her firmly. The tear tracks on her cheeks made her look older. “Don’t think that. Don’t blame yourself. Don’t blame the good things you have here. You didn’t drive her away.”
“But I didn’t keep her. I didn’t pull her out of whatever unhappiness she fell into.”
Rudy thought of Ksenia in Astrakhan. She hadn’t seemed unhappy. Quite the contrary: up until the very last minute, she had spoken and held his hands and gaze with the same buoyancy that he had felt from the bookstore to the Restaurant Berlin. And her parents had written that she had felt that way. But the cloud had come. Something had taken her away.
“Neither did I,” Rudy said. “Maybe neither of us could.” He considered telling Yulia about the letter from Ksenia’s parents… but no, they’d asked him to keep it secret, and he had to respect their request. “We can’t know what Ksenia was thinking. We can only have faith that she knows what she is doing, and she’s doing it for good reason.”
“But to leave me—” Yulia choked up, struggled, then said more emphatically “—and to leave you like that, never another word. Why would our Ksenia do that to us?
Our Ksenia… she was so much more Yulia’s than his. He’d known the two of them for just a few days; they’d known each other for years. He felt embarrassed to compare his loss to Yulia’s, but Yulia leaned against Rudy’s chest and wrapped her arms around him, and in the energy that flowed from her trembling grip, Rudy knew Yulia very much included him in that our, that us, a collective forged instantly in work and potatoes and campfire and open air joy. Yulia felt it, Rudy felt it; how could Ksenia not? How could paths diverge so drastically?
“I’m sorry,” Yulia said. “I am just tired. Old and tired.”
“You’re not as old as I am,” Rudy said. Yulia managed to lean back, smile, to reach up and ruffle the greying hair over Rudy’s ears.
They gave in to practicality and went inside to sleep. Yulia laid a blanket and a pillow on the couch for Rudy, kissed his cheeks, and hugged the breath out of him for a very long time. Rudy imagined that if Genrik had walked in, the husband would have thrown punches first and asked questions later, and given how Rudy held onto Yulia in the dark, Rudy thought Genrik might have been justified in throwing at least one punch. But they broke their clinch without a word or prosecutable action. Yulia went to her room. Rudy lay down on the couch and fell asleep much faster than he expected.
Four hours later, Rudy’s eyes snapped open. Yulia was already up, eggs and toast and jam ready for Rudy. Yulia set no third plate at the table. No man’s shoes had joined his own boots by the door. No one snored in Yulia’s bedroom.
Rudy ate quickly and put on his boots. Yulia walked him down to open the garage.
“I’m so glad you came to see me,” Yulia said.
“I’m ashamed—I didn’t plan to visit. I didn’t know I’d see you. But I’m glad I did.”
“Don’t be ashamed—be glad. Be glad whenever chance turns friendly.”
They smiled and embraced each other. Yulia slid her hands between Rudy’s pack and his jacket, linked her hands and crushed his ribs again with all of her friendly, motherly, womanly force. Stay, Rudy thought. Stay long enough to tell Genrik not to stay out all night, not to be an idiot, not to miss what he has right here. But some things were beyond Rudy’s fixing, and work he could do needed doing. They let each other go, and Rudy got on the motorcycle.
Yulia touched Rudy’s gloved hand one more time. “If you see Ksenia in Moscow… tell Ksenia I miss her.”
“I will. I miss her, too. Do svidanye.”