Chapter 51: Ceremony
The sky got cloudier, the road rougher, the bugs thicker. Rudy and Ksenia wore their gloves and rolled their collars up to their chins. They had the road mostly to themselves. The signs along the road offered directions in Russian and Finnish. Joensuu was the main Finnish city listed, the farthest destination shown, 90 kilometers beyond the border, which they would now cross by land, on the bike, on the Captain’s bike…
“The Captain!” Rudy blurted into his mic. He was still in a bit of a daze over their encounter and the swift escape from Petrozavodsk.
“Who?” Ksenia asked.
“Viktor,” Rudy answered. He’d never heard the Captain’s name. “He’s the mechanic in Suzdal. Here? How?”
“Viktor was mafia in Soviet days. When the Union collapsed, he held Suzdal’s economy together, keeping trucks running and bringing groceries to the town. His garage, the garage you walked into, was mafia central for the entire district. He bossed every thief from Vladimir to Ivanovo. I met him through business. I knew he was the man who made our trip to Galich possible; he knew I was why you visited him. He gave me a fair deal: protection of our shipments through Suzdal for markdowns on heavy equipment.”
“Is he still… a boss?”
“No. Other gangs grew, and he didn’t like being so close to Moscow. He thought about getting out entirely, but instead he chose to work for others who wanted out. He sold his garage and his interests in Suzdal and moved out here to Karelia. He’s run his… travel office since then. Everyone in our circles knew they might need such service, so everyone left him alone. Totally trustworthy…but now, it appears, out of business. We may be his last customers. We just keep moving.”
Moving made sense to Rudy. The FSB was onto the escape route. They had taken the Captain’s shop and were probably watching for Ksenia or other Black Crane leaders coming to Petrozavodsk. But he and Ksenia had ridden right past the agents. No one was in his mirror. On the bike, Rudy and Ksenia apparently remained incognito and a step ahead of however many agents were looking for them. Keep that step, keep moving…
But that motion was now Plan B—not even a plan, just all they had left now that Plan A, Plan Only, had blown up in Petrozavodsk. Ksenia had intended their road to end there: Viktor would have made Rudy a fake passport, and a plane would have flown them to safety. They’d have flown above the potholes, the mosquitoes, the forest, and the border and been in Finnish airspace already, headed for a Finnish airport, where Rudy would have… what? He hadn’t gotten past that part of the plan, and Ksenia hadn’t said anything about where they might go, where they might hide in Finland or Europe or back in America, where hiding was not nearly as easy as it was in Siberia. Could he return to his old life? Show up at an American consulate, say, “Hi, the Chechens didn’t actually get me 20 years ago”? Such an appearance would draw too much attention, too many questions. Maybe he could come up with a plausible cover story—spent the time out in the forest chopping wood, lived on bread and kasha, finally decided it was time to come home, and, oh yeah, came home with this strange lady who is absolutely not a Russian mafia queenpin.
But Rudy wasn’t answering those questions yet. He was not at a consulate in Helsinki or at the border. He was on a road that neither he nor Ksenia knew. They had no map. They just had to keep going. Don’t go back to Moscow. Don’t go back to the hornet’s nest of St. Petersburg. Keep going north, into the woods, out of reach, out of sight….
Ksenia was quiet and holding on tightly. Rudy felt a hint of the pistol in her jacket pocket against his back. Her left hand lay across the gun in his own jacket. “So…” he said, “…the plan isn’t to shoot our way across the border, is it?”
Ksenia took a while to answer. “No. Believe me, Rudy, shooting is not my preferred solution. It is my last option. I hope to be done with shooting. When we get to the border, we will throw our guns in a swamp.”
Rudy watched the road, watched the clouds accumulating, watched the sun break through less frequently. Even if it turned overcast, they still had hours more daylight. Unless the road turned really bad, he guessed they would reach the border a good two or three hours before sunset. Whoever manned the border would see them coming.
“You know, you have a passport, and I don’t. You can get across, but if I try to go with you, I’ll only draw attention.”
“No—”
“I’ll only draw attention,” Rudy repeated, “and if they scrutinize me, they’ll scrutinize you. I can take you to the border, drop you off, see that they let you through, then disappear into the woods.” They zipped past an intersection with a couple telephone poles festooned with signs for truckers and engine repair and other announcements from a village tucked away in the woods alongside another lake. “A guy could chop a lot of wood up here.”
“Leave me alone, in the forest, in a foreign land, to walk by myself to the next town?”
“You can take the bike. I can walk back.”
“I cannot drive this bike. I’ve never handled a motorcycle.”
“Never?” Rudy was surprised; now, as 20 years ago, she felt perfectly natural on the seat of the bike. “No matter—I can teach you in 10 minutes—”
“—no—”
“No, really, it’s the best way. You take the bike, get across, I find my own way.”
“No!” This was Ksenia’s boss voice, the voice she’d used in the Moscow office. “We cross. Together.” With the last word, she squeezed his chest sharply, as sharply as she dared without affecting their balance.
They bumped up onto a patch of new, smooth asphalt and roared ahead at 110. Rudy waited a long couple kilometers before venturing, “But… how?”
“I… we’ll think of something. We have time.” Ksenia’s hands slid down to his waist, and she leaned back a bit. The tension in her grip and tiny shifts in their balance hinted that she was looking around at the forest whooshing by. After a couple minutes, she settled forward, resting her helmeted chin on his left shoulder, facing forward so she could watch the road with him. “Tell me,” Ksenia said, “about your favorite rides. Tell me about Lake Baikal, and Tyva, and the Urals.” Rudy spoke, and Ksenia kept him going, asking about mountains and Mongol horsemen, about coldest nights under the stars and hottest days in the desert, about spare tires and welders in the woods, about whether he’d stopped thinking of himself as an American and started thinking of himself as a Russian.
“Does a change like that ever happen?” Rudy turned that last question over in his mind for a kilometer. “I’m not Russian. 20 years, and still… I feel like a stranger. I think I’ve always been a stranger. I’ve always felt a little outside whatever else was happening, not quite at home, even at home. Maybe being in a strange place—sometimes the strangest places—makes being a stranger feel normal.”
“The road is a strange place,” Ksenia said wistfully. “Always moving, always something else. That is why you feel at home here…” she reached out her left hand, pointed at the side of the road, “…and here… and here.”
“And here,” Rudy pointed alongside her, “in that dead tree trunk, with the chipmunks.”
“And behind that tree, and up that trail, with the bears.”
“There are bears here?”
“Always there are bears.”
They saw no bears, but Rudy couldn’t help thinking they might if they had to go off road… and that was all the more reason to hope they could think of a plan that didn’t involve going off road. Would their pistols stop a bear? Would a gunshot scare a bear off or just make it mad?
They saw fewer signs, too—unmarked gravel and dirt roads led away into the wilderness, but Rudy didn’t see any intersecting highways. This highway felt like the sort of road where no one expected directions: travelers were from here, they knew where they were going, and there was nowhere else to go but onward. Villages along the way were announced abruptly. Suoyarvi was the only place they saw more than once, ahead of time. Suoyarvi 80… Suoyarvi 54… Suoyarvi appeared to be the only town ahead worth mentioning, the sole landmark of progress toward Finland.
Ksenia kept Rudy talking about his travels, and the kilometers to Suoyarvi slipped by quickly. Without warning, they found the outskirts of the town. The woods rolled back from a broad intersection. A raised concrete platform, its sides painted blue, stood at the crook of the intersection, reaching to the very edge of the roadway. There were two small shelters, painted the same blue but trimmed in red, toward the back of the platform. It looked like a stage with small dressing shacks where actors might switch props or hats before running back out to declaim more Shakespeare for passing vehicles that might stop mid-trip for a dramatic soliloquy.
Ahead a big yellow sign offered phone numbers for travel information, one in Russian, another in Finnish. That sign did them no good—their phones were back in Moscow, several blocks apart, smashed. But beside the stage was a wooden kiosk painted several times over in brown with a tourist map under scratched plastic. Rudy pulled right up to the big map, killed the engine, pulled off his buggy helmet, and studied the routes available.
The map focused on trails for fishing and hiking around Suoyarvi’s lakes north of the highway, a knot of green threads around the long, snaking waters. Three solid red lines branched from Suoyarvi: southeast back to Petrozavodsk, southwest to Lake Ladoga and St. Petersburg, and north-northeast through unknown territory to a bold blue arrow at the corner of the map that promised the White Sea. Northwest was a tan line, snaking up to the thin dotted black line separating Russia and Finland. The road to the border was unpaved.
Rudy looked at the scattered patches of blue still breaking the clouds. The air was still. Rain coming from Finland, the shopwoman in Buy had said. Tomorrow in Buy… had they ridden far enough to catch that rain today? Would the road turn to mud and stop them before the border guards got their chance?
95 kilometers to the border, the map said. One village marked a third of the way up, then nothing until the Finnish side. At safe speeds, on dry dirt, an hour and a half. If it started raining… impossible to guess; the tan line could mean anything from gravel well-packed by hundreds of Finnish tourists and logging trucks every day to rutted dirt and mud that would eat the bike and leave them a hard day’s hike from anywhere.
Rudy sniffed the air, felt the absence of breeze, savored a change in the light as a blue spot rolled slowly past the sun. Maybe they could beat the rain. Maybe they would get to the border on dry ground. Maybe.
But… “We better fuel up,” Rudy said to Ksenia. “Do you see any signs for benzin?” Suoyarvi was the largest town on the big map; if it was the center of whatever tourism happened out here, it had to offer gas. But neither the map nor the sparse signage around the T-intersection made clear where one could fuel up. And whatever entrepreneurial spirit might exist out here in the woods had not yet manifested itself in a gas station right at the intersection that every visitor to the town had to cross. A bar, yes, and a hairdresser, but no gas station in sight.
Ksenia was still in her helmet, visor up. She looked at the map, up and down the roads, and then back at the map. “Take this one,” she said, touching the red path leading into the part of town closest to the lake shore. “Northeast.” She snapped her visor down; Rudy put his helmet back on, and they briskly wheeled around to head up the road. In a minute they found a single gas pump outside a building labeled Bread. An army-green logging truck with a trailer piled three meters high with stripped birch trunks occupied the pump and 20 meters of road behind it. Rudy pulled up right behind the trailer—the trunks smelled very fresh—and hoped the logger was mostly done filling his two 200-liter tanks. One tank like that could get the Ural all the way to Oslo. Rudy could hear the pump whirring and clanking, as if complaining at how much fuel the logger was taking and warning Rudy there wouldn’t be much left.
Ksenia got off while Rudy held their spot. “Must stretch,” she said, pulling off her helmet and adjusting her scarf to keep her auburn hair mostly hidden. Rudy kept an eye on her as she walked ahead toward the bread store. If they were topping off the bike, Rudy thought, maybe they ought to top off their stomachs as well, pick up a loaf of local bread to eat here, another to keep with their remaining snack bars, in case they had to spend more time than expected on the road, or in the woods. And bears didn’t like bread, did they?
Ksenia did not go in the store; she walked back, then fixed her eyes on something far past him. Rudy glanced back and saw a tiny gold dome sticking up from the tiled tower of a church peeking up over the trees. Before he could look further, the logging truck growled to life. Rudy fired up the bike and rolled forward into the cloud left by the truck next to the pump. As the truck’s fumes dispersed, he smelled bread near the door of the shop. Ksenia stayed by the road, so he dashed in to pay from his dwindling roll of cash. His tank was still close to half, and he hadn’t tapped the reserve, so he paid for just ten liters (and two Russian loaves, fluffy white), and that amount brought the level right back to the cap. If all went well, if the road stayed dry, if they could keep moving smoothly, they wouldn’t have to buy gasoline until a couple hours into Finland.
Two more cars had lined up behind the motorcycle while Rudy fueled, so once he replaced the cap, he wheeled around to park right beside where Ksenia still stood on the shoulder. Her eyes were still on the church. Rudy offered her one of the loaves he’d just bought; she pulled off a bit of the end and chewed absently on the crust. Rudy tore off his own handful to eat and stowed the second loaf in the left saddlebag.
At every other fuel stop, once the tank was full, Ksenia was right by the bike, helmet cinched tight again, ready to roll. Now Rudy waited, finishing his piece of bread in four big bites (and it was good bread, an afternoon batch, still warm inside). Ksenia nibbled and said nothing just kept looking past the trees to that little gold dome.
Just as Rudy thought he might interrupt to suggest they get going, Ksenia turned to him. She jumped a little, as if she hadn’t expected to see him there. But who else would be there, and where else would he be other than right there at her side? She hadn’t jumped like that last night, when she’d turned from her office window and realized he was the Ring Group’s emissary. Black Crane’s chief couldn’t be surprised, couldn’t let herself be surprised by anyone around her. But the sudden light in her eyes here on the highway in Suoyarvi, the recognition that caught her off guard, reminded Rudy of the way she had jumped when she turned and saw him at the bookstore window in Astrakhan, the jump that reflected his own feeling at that sudden encounter, the sudden recognition not just of the person in front of her but the feeling inside of herself.
“Rudy,” Ksenia said, pausing to frame and convey the question and the intention behind it so forcefully with her eyes that the words seemed only an echo of the actual request, “marry me.”
In her eyes, Rudy saw boss Ksenia step back and yield to Suzdal-Sudislavl-Galich Ksenia, the girl who helped haul out the rubble he made in a basement in Suzdal, who accepted his ride to Galich, who shared the tea he bought from chai-babushka on the highway, who showed him the falls at Sudislavl and the lake at Galich, who put her note to the future into two bottles and into the ground at the happiest place on earth, who tied his bandana into her hair (that bandana, right there now on her neck) and promised to ride with him again when he came back to Galich or Suzdal or Moskva. Ksenia yielded to herself, and that yield restored a light that had disappeared right before she left the table in Astrakhan. That light shone fully now for the first time on this ride.
Marry me… Rudy remembered being on the edge of saying that to her in Astrakhan. You don’t just blurt things like that out, Rudy remembered saying to Vitaly in Samara.
“Marry you?” Rudy said now.
“Yes, marry me.”
He was afraid she would hate him for doubting, but he had to ask. “To cross the border? To get past the guards?”
The light in Ksenia’s eyes did not change. “Yes. And.” Ksenia took Rudy’s hand. Now he was afraid she would feel his entire body, going weak.
“What did you think would happen,” Ksenia said quietly, “when you offered to take me to Galich—not last night, but 20 years ago? This is the logical outcome. This is what Ken and our friends cheered in the park. This is what would have happened if you had stayed another minute in Galich.”
Rudy saw that bright Sunday morning in his memory. The ache made his legs weaker. “But I left.”
“Yes. And I left in Astrakhan. Each time we have met, the idea was out of reach. Other things pulled us other ways. Now everything that pulled us away pulls us together. Marry me.”
Rudy looked up at the gold dome, and Ksenia’s eyes followed. Northwest. Ksenia may have been looking toward the church, but she could easily have been staring right past it, over the hill, in the very direction that tan line on the map would take them.
They fixed their eyes on each other again. 20 years flashed through his memory… but somehow, and, he hoped, with no disrespect to Vitaly and Kolya and Alenka and Galina Filipovna, his colleagues of nearly all of those 20 years, the people he’d seen daily, worked with, built with, and to all the places he had seen that no one he’d known in the first half of his life ever had or ever would, his memory folded into a tiny package wrapped in a handful of days: a weekend in August, a day—no, just a few blissful minutes—in Astrakhan, and now, after the chaos and catastrophe of last night, the soothing balm of nothing but road, woods, sky and motor shared with Ksenia, with him every minute, midnight and noon and now staring into an approaching evening, maybe an approaching rain, surely the approaching hazard of armed guards watching for smugglers and spies and asking what they were doing crossing an imaginary line in the woods without proper papers.
And now they would approach as they properly, logically ought, promised explicitly.
“Of course I will marry you,” Rudy said.
* * *
Yes, and…For the moment, they needed papers more than the Church’s blessing. The gas pump baker pointed them to the city records office just up the street, on the way to the bridge around the corner that would take them up to the church. A bored woman with an hour left in her shift waited behind a barred window in a dim, empty hallway adorned by a lone photograph, near the entrance, a color portrait of the mayor, a pale, unsmiling man in a dark suit and tie, seated at a desk with a pen in his hand but no papers in sight. The clerk sat penned between rows of file cabinets. An electric typewriter sat beside her. At the back of the room, a computer occupied a table. Its screen was off.
Ksenia announced their purpose without fanfare or emotion, as if she were asking for a copy of her tax assessment. “Bandits stole our things. We need new marriage license.”
“Passports?” the clerk asked. She was maybe 30 but worn down by provincial bureaucratic life to 50. Her dull grey eyes showed no interest in the travails that had led them here.
Ksenia handed her fake passport through the slot below the bars. “Had mine on me. Kasha-for-brains here left his in the bag the bandits stole.”
The clerk gave Rudy one brief, scornful look, then opened Ksenia’s passport. She glanced at the photo, then at Ksenia, her sister in suffering at the foibles of blockheaded Russian men. The clerk handed the passport back and slid a form under the bars. “800 rubles.”
“Money he keeps on him. Pay the woman,” Ksenia said gruffly, slapping his arm. Keeping his eyes down, as much to hide his amusement as to play along, Rudy fished out some bills from his pocket and pushed them to the clerk. Then he watched Ksenia fill the form with mostly false information. She put their actual first names and ages (though she copied her fake birthdate from her passport and gave Rudy hers, July 31) and their physical descriptions: hair and eye color, height and weight (she guessed Rudy’s height spot on, 180 centimeters, and was under his last weigh-in by just two kilograms). But Ksenia fabricated everything else. Her passport name became her fictitious maiden name. But once married, she would become Ksenia Belova, wife of Rudolf Belov. She was born in Nizhniy Novgorod, he in Vologda; both now resided in Moscow.
Would they really be married, Rudy wondered, if they lied on this form… and if they lied to the priest?
Ksenia signed the form and handed Rudy the pen. He started writing his own last name, the name he’d adopted 19 years ago in Irkutsk, the name on his own fabricated passport, which had already been picked up with the morning trash from a bin down the street from his crushed phone. He turned the first down leg of his T into the spine of his new B and finished the name, with letters distinctly stiffer than those in his first name. He scanned the sheet and noted the requirement that applicants return after 32 days to receive their actual marriage license. But when Ksenia slid the sheet through the window, the clerk opened a drawer, pulled out a license, transcribed their information, stamped it, and handed the paper over without a word.
“Thank you. Come on, sweet kasha-for-brains,” Ksenia said, pulling Rudy out past the grim, dutiful mayor.
“32 days?” Rudy asked outside.
“She thinks we already received a license. Besides, the regular fee is only 500. To the church!”
It took just a minute to ride over the bridge and up the hill to the Church of the Nativity of Christ. The church—orange brick, white trim, darker orange roof tiles, three little golden domes with ornate crosses perched on top—appeared to occupy the highest point in town. When they climbed the rather imposing stone steps from the parking lot and reached the hilltop, they could see around the church and through the trees to the lake below and the gray horizon.
“Now listen,” Ksenia said, pulling Rudy’s attention away from the view and toward the church doors. She’d removed her helmet and her gloves. Rudy did the same. Ksenia loosed her scarf, smoothed her hair, and covered her head again. “We need the priest’s signature and seal. The church expects the man to be in charge of these matters. We are traveling on honeymoon, papers stolen, need marriage license for my new passport, because after motorcycle trip, we fly to Cyprus.”
“And am I still kasha-for-brains?”
Rudy was joking; Rudy was grateful for Ksenia’s performance at the clerk’s window, maybe the only funny thing to pierce his steeled nerves all day. But Ksenia stopped him at the church doors and looked him squarely in the eyes. She started to smile, but her lips turned to a quiver, an apology, and every other emotion of the day. “No,” she whispered. “You are my… my Rudy. Ready and brave.” She pressed against him, cheek to cheek, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. Rudy carefully laid one hand on her waist and the other on the back of her head. She shook with one hard sob, then one more. Rudy’s cheek felt damp beside hers. He leaned back just enough to kiss her, gently, once on her wet, salty cheek, and then, softly, on her lips.
Rudy’s eyes opened at the same time as Ksenia’s, radically close but perfectly clear.
“Let’s go get married,” Rudy whispered. Ksenia pressed her cheek to his one more time, and they went inside.
The sanctuary was dark and empty, of course, late on a Monday afternoon. Only a couple electric lights dispelled shadows around the icon wall. “Who is there?” a woman’s voice called from off to the side, somewhere around a corner to a well-lit hall.
Rudy wasn’t used to churches. His parents had taken him to church only intermittently when he was little. He’d stopped into churches only a few times since coming to Russia, just to see the architecture or, once on the way to Novosibirsk, to get out of a sudden thunderstorm. He worried he would bump something, or do something wrong. “Hello?” he called back. With Ksenia in gentle tow, he walked tentatively toward where the woman’s voice had originated. Out of the sanctuary, down the hall, a thin woman in a long black dress and boots and a dark grey sweater stepped out of an office. Her hair was straight and sandy and tied behind her neck in a simple pony tail that reached to the waist of her dress. “Can I help you?” she asked. Behind her, Rudy heard a tinny transmission of classical choral music.
“Forgive us,” Rudy said, stopping an unthreatening couple meters away. “We are motorcycling on our honeymoon. Bandits stole our papers. We got a replacement marriage certificate from the city clerk, but we need a priest to—” he glanced at Ksenia “—authorize it.”
“And your rings?” the woman asked, casting her sharp grey eyes at their bare hands.
Again, Rudy glanced at Ksenia, who feigned a remarkable loving sadness. “My Rudy was going to fight for them,” she said, making her voice brittle and anxious, “but I looked at my strong man, and he realized they were only things, and he could keep me safest by letting them go. The bandits took our rings and went away, and I still have all that matters.”
Rudy squeezed Ksenia’s hand and fought to keep his smile from breaking into wholly inappropriate laughter. “I just want to make sure we have all of our papers in order so my dear will have no more trouble on our special voyage.”
“One minute,” the woman said. She turned back into her office. “Gleb!” she called. “Father Gleb!” They heard a door open. Once more, “Gleb!” and then a small crash and a muffled thud. The woman yelped, a man groaned, and then under the woman’s exhortation and explanation they heard hurried steps that brought to the office door a man with thin arms and legs but a round belly straining his black shirt. His face looked no older than 20, but his pale scalp showed through thinning and tousled white hair. This man, the priest, straightened his silver-rimmed glasses and blinked at them with waking eyes. His collar remained askew.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a high, nervous voice. “Traveling, you say? Marriage?”
“Marriage certificate, yes,” Rudy said. He pulled the carefully folded document from his jacket and offered it to the priest. “If you would, Father—”
“Yes—Oah!” Father Gleb took the paper and immediately let it slip from his fingers. Both he and Rudy tried to catch the certificate, and they bumped their heads with a dull knock. Rudy stood back, rubbing his forehead, and let the priest recover the paper from the floor. Rudy noticed Ksenia pressing her fist to her lips. The woman looked on from the door, exasperated but apparently unsurprised.
“Sorry,” said the priest, standing again and unfolding the certificate. He squinted at the paper, then pushed it to arm’s length and peered at it over his small eyeglasses. “Yes, please, here….” The priest turned and bumped into the woman, who had been reaching up to realign his collar. “Oof! Forgive me, Varyushka!” She followed him back into the office. He returned a few moments later, with his stole and a communion kit in hand and his collar closer to true north. “Come, come,” the priest said, bustling past them down the hall, snapping light switches, and heading into the sanctuary. Rudy and Ksenia followed the priest toward the icon wall, a humble display of five holy paintings amidst the wood panels. The electric lights seemed stuck at half-strength and shone on plain plaster walls that exhibited none of the extravagance of larger cathedrals.
Father Gleb somehow tangled himself in his white stole and dropped his communion kit on the floor by the lectern. He beckoned them forward even as he stooped to pick up the little black case. “Come, come,” he said, settling the black case on the lectern. “Do you have rings?”
“No,” said Rudy. “The bandits—”
“Varyushka!” The priest squawked, but the woman—church deaconness? the priest’s wife? the diminutive indicated they must be close, and the priest certainly needed a woman apparently so serious and put-together to keep him from falling over his own shoes—was already striding into the sanctuary with her right hand held before her, fingers pinched around something evidently important. Varyushka—Varvara, Rudy thought, I mustn’t offend her by mimicking the priest’s familiarity— reached for Rudy’s hand. In his open palm she carefully placed two wooden rings, almost white, brightly polished, clearly showing their grain. “Birch,” Varvara said, her stern expression unchanged. “I carve these rings myself, for forgetful husbands and other unfortunate souls.” She folded Rudy’s fingers over the rings, touched Rudy and Ksenia on their shoulders, and crossed herself. Then she turned to the priest and handed him the ribboned crowns she held in her left hand. “All right, Father Gleb, have at ’em”—and stationed herself behind the strangers for whatever Father Gleb was about to deliver.
Rudy had gotten the impression from Ksenia that they just needed a signature and a stamp of some sort and they’d be off. Rudy didn’t know Orthodox liturgy, but he got the impression that Father Gleb was launching into a full wedding service. And as Father Gleb warmed up, his clumsiness disappeared. His back straightened, his voice strengthened from startled to steady and resonant tenor and filled the space with proper humble power. Father Gleb incanted from the oversized gilded bible on the lectern. He spoke directly to Rudy and Ksenia about the solemnity of the union they had chosen. Without asking about their orthodoxy, the priest gave them communion from a single small cup, which, after they had finished, the priest crushed under his heel with a confident stomp—”so no other may partake of what these two promise each other.”
The priest had to pause to retrieve the wedding certificate from his own pocket to get their names, but he did not stumble as he asked Rudy to present the rings for blessing. Father Gleb took Ksenia’s hand, placed it on the open palm in which Rudy cradled the rings, then laid his own cool, pale hand atop theirs and spoke his blessing.
Following Father Gleb’s direction, Rudy took one of the rings—he noticed now that one was smaller than the other, and took that smaller one—and placed it on the ring finger of Ksenia’s right hand. It went on with just a little resistance at the last knuckle. He handed Ksenia the larger ring, and she pressed it onto his finger. Again, a nearly perfect fit. Rudy glanced behind them. Varvara was watching their hands closely, and Rudy caught her nodding slightly, satisfied with her craftsmanship and her choice of rings for these strangers.
Rudy turned, and Ksenia took both of his hands. He looked at their rings. The white birch stood out against the dark hairs of his knuckle and the skin tanned from years of handlebar sun. Ksenia’s hands were lighter, softer than his, but not as light as the birch ring that, like his, seemed to glow softly.
Father Gleb then took up the delicate golden crowns, joined by a single white ribbon, and placed them on Rudy’s and Ksenia’s heads. He spoke for another minute or so. Then he asked Varyushka—”Varvara Vasiliyevna, please”—to step forward so he could hand her the crowns. With the crowns out of the way, Father Gleb loosened his stole and wrapped one end around Rudy’s and Ksenia’s ringed hands. “Come,” said the priest, pulling gently on their wrapped hands. He led them in the traditional three rotations around the lectern—”Nothing like your trip here on your motorbike, much shorter, but also much longer—this voyage is forever,” the priest said, and Rudy wondered at such words, smoothly ad libbed by a man who on his way out of his office looked like he had trouble stringing two steps together, let alone two words.
Father Gleb stopped where they had started. Still holding their hands bound in his stole, the priest chanted a lengthy prayer for their fidelity, their health, and their happiness into all the long years the Lord may grant. “Amen.”
The sanctuary quickly went silent. Head bowed, Father Gleb held their hands for several seconds before releasing them. Turning to the lectern, he pressed the folded marriage certificate flat and asked Varvara Vasiliyevna for a pen. She stepped forward, around Ksenia, and handed the priest a pen, which he promptly dropped. All three of them took a step back. Father Gleb retrieved his pen and signed the marriage certificate. Before he could ask, Varvara laid on the lectern a heavy metal embosser and slid the document in its narrow jaw. She adjusted the paper, then nodded to the priest, who reached over and pressed the handle down, crinkling his signature and the paper around it with the blessing of his office. Varvara pulled the signed and sealed document out of the embosser and laid the paper on the lectern. She tucked the embosser under her arm and began unwrapping the priest’s stole from the newlyweds’ hands. When Varvara stepped back with the stole, Father Gleb handed Rudy the certificate. “What we have blessed here today,” he said, his voice still priestly resonant, “let no man, and no bandits, take from you. Go with God.” Then he turned and walked away, tripping over the threshold to the hallway. “Come, Varyushka,” Father Gleb said, regaining his balance and his high, awkward voice. “Let’s go home. I shall boil potatoes.”
Varvara Vasiliyevna faced them before she left. “The rings are yours. Take care of them as you take care of each other. I’ll turn off the lights after you leave.” Then she followed Father Gleb, calling after him loudly, “Wait! I’ll not have you burning down my kitchen again.” Their conversation trailed off down the hallway, leaving Rudy and Ksenia alone in the silent sanctuary.
They leaned, slumped against each other. Rudy cherished the weight of her shoulder against his, cherished the silence that he realized was likely the last tranquility they would experience that day. They had to run, but for a moment, they didn’t move.
Rudy stared at the icon of the Virgin Mother and Child. “That was… real,” he said softly, intending a question but becoming sure before he finished. He felt Ksenia nod as she wrapped her hand around his arm.
“I never imagined…” she said.
“No. Neither did I.”
Ksenia gave no signal that she wanted to leave, but Rudy knew that she knew that they had to.
On the way to the main door of the sanctuary, Ksenia stopped at the collection box and dropped in the last of the cash she’d brought from Moscow, about a thousand rubles in small bills, more than they’d paid at city records. She thought a moment, then opened the Captain’s envelope and drew out two 5,000-ruble notes to add to the collection box.
Outside, clouds now covered the sky. Rudy saw no rain yet across the lake and the forest, but the chances of staying dry were literally dimming. “We should gear up,” he said. “Best case, this is our last stop before the border.” He checked his watch: 17:55. Five hours, maybe more, until sunset.
They put on their rain gear. Rudy wrapped the marriage certificate in a spare plastic bag and zipped it into the jacket pocket with Ksenia’s note and the useless key. Those papers sat opposite the pocket with the pistol.
They rode down the hill, out of town, and, after a brief stop at the stage and map for Rudy to commit the route to memory, into the woods on that unknown gravel road.