Boy on the Bridge (18 page)

T
he American students took their final tests and received Certificates of Achievement at a special ceremony in the great hall at the university. They packed up their stuff, said good-bye to their friends, and prepared to fly home to the States. The semester would be over in five days.

Laura felt disoriented, waking from one dream to find herself in another dream, where nothing felt real. She wrote an essay, she studied her vocabulary and memorized her Pushkin, but whether any of this was sinking in, she had no idea. She lived in a fog of heartbreak and guilt and all she could think was
Alyosha Alyosha Alyosha
.

* * *

She stood up from the round table in her dorm room and stretched, walked to the window, and looked out at the street. The tram rumbled past on its way over the Builders’ Bridge. The river flowed, calm and blue. Laura remembered her first view
out this window, the snow piled along the streets, the sparks from the tram glowing in the frosty air. Now it was spring. Everything was different.

“I need a break,” Laura told Karen. “Want to take a walk?”

Karen looked up from
Oblomov
. “No, I never want to leave my couch, ever.”

“Seriously, Count Oblomov.”

“Seriously. This book makes me feel lazy.”

“I’m going out. Want anything?”

“Cookies. You know the ones.”

They were addicted to these puffy, soft cookies with a sweet white glaze. She put on her jacket and went outside. The city shined. She caught the tram over the Builders’ Bridge, across Vasilievsky Island and over the Palace Bridge. She got off in front of the sleek, space-age Aeroflot office on Nevsky and started walking. She didn’t think about where she was going until she recognized the bronze globe of Dom Knigi a block away.

She went inside, one last time. She wandered the aisles, staring at old manuscripts and maps protected by glass cases. She found herself drawn to the poetry section. And there he was.

For a second she thought she was seeing a ghost. He was thin and pale, his hair shaggy and dirty, with deep circles under his eyes. Alyosha gave her a sad smile and put his finger to his lips. He was holding a copy of Anna Akhmatova’s poems. He
put the book down on the shelf, still open to a page. Then he slipped away.

She wanted to shout,
Wait!
but she didn’t dare. She went to the shelf and looked at the book. He’d left it open on “Summer Garden.”

She closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Then she left the shop and walked up Nevsky toward the river.

He was waiting for her in the Summer Garden, under the funny statue of Lust, the woman with the bird on her arm. She nodded at the spot next to him on the bench — was it okay to sit there? — and he nodded back. She sat down beside him. He touched her hand briefly, then pulled away.

“It’s okay to be seen with me?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “But this is okay, for a few minutes. We are simply two strangers occupying a park bench.”

“What happened to you? Where have you been?”

He tucked his hands into his pants pockets. “I was arrested by the KGB. They questioned me about you and many other things. Some things I know nothing about. But that is normal.”

She’d known this was probably what had happened, but she couldn’t hold back a gasp, the nervous pace of her heartbeat at the word
arrested
.

“Alyosha, I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

“My sweet Laura, it is not your fault. None of this is your fault. Someone reported me for antipatriotic activities, and I can’t
deny that I have engaged in quite a few of those. Not all of which are you.”

“But who reported you?”

“I don’t know. It could be anyone.”

Laura thought of Nina. Could Karen have let something slip to Nina, or to one of their professors? To Stein and Durant, who would certainly want to stop her from marrying on their watch?

Or Olga, she thought, and she didn’t know why. She could imagine Olga betraying a friend, if she had a reason.

Her own thoughts made her shudder. How had this happened? She was suspicious of everyone.

“It’s true. I like Americans,” he said. “I like being friends with them. They’re funny and crazy and they’re not afraid. They talk about interesting things, things we never hear about here, like new music, all the strange things one can eat, what’s happening in the rest of the world. They think everything is funny. And they really are my friends, and they weren’t all girls, you know. Lots of times I picked out a guy to be friends with, if he looked like someone who loved rock music or art.”

She nodded and bit her lip.

“But you are different. I’m in love with you. That never happened with the other Americans. It has never happened to me before, with anyone.”

Her breath caught in her throat.

“I understand your dilemma,” he went on. “You think I want
something from you. You see it all around you. People will do anything to get what they want. They are petty and ruthless. They will turn in their own cousins to get an apartment, they will knock a woman to the ground for a piece of meat. They lie and cheat, and when something valuable crosses their path they take it quick, before someone else does. I’m Russian, too. Why should I be any different?”

He stopped there. He did not claim to be different. He did not defend himself. His brown eyes were wet and they looked straight into hers, not defiantly but affectionately.

Nothing about him was petty or ruthless or greedy. She couldn’t read his mind, but she knew how he had treated her from the first day they met: kindly and generously. Always.

“So — you are free now? Will everything be all right?”

He nodded, but he looked so drawn and tired. He looked ten years older. Her dear Alyosha.

“You’re so thin,” she said. “Delicate and wispy. Like a cloud in trousers.”

“I am a cloud in trousers, transformed by love for you.”

The first time they met in the bookstore felt like years ago.

“I still want to marry you, Laura. More than anything. I wish we could get on a plane and fly straight to San Francisco right now.”

“I will marry you,” she whispered, desperate and hoarse. She wanted to shout it. “I will marry you, Alyosha. I’ll do anything to save you.”

He pulled his hand from his pocket and swiped it over hers, pressing her palm for a second. “It’s too late, little fish. I have a record of dissident activity now. Even if you marry me, the authorities will never let me leave. You will apply and apply for my exit visa, over and over again for years. And year after year they will say, ‘No, he cannot leave, he is a criminal, a dissident, he must stay here where we can watch him….’ ”

The tears came without effort, filling her eyes to their borders and spilling over down her face like a river recently thawed.

“Still, we could try,” she said.

He nodded sadly. “We would have had a beautiful life together in California. I would find us an apartment with a view of the bay, and every day I would make a new painting of you, bathed in sunlight.”

She’d once resisted the idea of marriage, but now it sounded lovely to her, and she longed for this fantasy life he described more than she’d ever longed for anything.

Alyosha continued. “Someday, through some miracle, I will get there.”

“I’ll meet you there, Alyosha.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, crying. She wished she could throw her arms around him and cover him with kisses, drink up his tears, but she didn’t dare. The park was green now, birds sang melancholy songs in the trees, and couples strolled arm in arm down the lanes. The green, the birds, the spring made the moment even sadder than it would have been in
the ice and snow. Everything was open, ready to bloom, but they had to hide, keep their feelings to themselves amidst this beauty.

“I remember the night you told me the story of the fisherman and the little golden fish,” she said at last.

He smiled. “You fell asleep before the end.”

“That’s right — I never heard how the story ends. Will you tell me the end of the story?”

“Well, you remember how it begins, right? The fisherman catches a little golden fish who can talk, and the fish offers to do him a favor if the fisherman will free him. But the kind fisherman frees the fish without asking for anything. When the fisherman’s wife hears about this, she sends the fisherman back to find the fish and ask for bigger and bigger things —”

“A new washtub, and then a house, and then to be a lady, and a
czaritsa
,” Laura said. “
Little golden fish, grant me a wish….
I think that’s where I fell asleep.”

“The fisherman’s wife finally asks to be ruler of the sea and all its denizens, including the golden fish himself. This is too much. So without a word the golden fish swishes his tail and swims away, deep into the sea. And when the fisherman goes home there is nothing left of his wife’s wishes. She sits on the steps of their old shack, holding the broken-down washtub. They had found a golden fish, a fish who could grant wishes, but in the end they are left as poor as they began.”

He sighed.

“We’re leaving on Saturday,” she said. “When will I see you again?”

He didn’t speak, just shook his head and pulled a small package out of his coat pocket. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. “Open it when you are alone.”

She took the package. It was the length of her finger, square and flat, like a tiny painting. “Is it okay if I write to you?”

“Please write to me. I don’t know if I’ll get your letters, but try. And I’ll write to you, too, every week.”

“I promise to write every week, too.”

“You’d better go now. You leave first, and I’ll go later.”

“No —”

“Laura, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. But you must go now. Please go. And hide the gift I gave you well. Find someplace in your suitcase where customs won’t look too hard.”

“Okay.”

“I love you, Laura.”

“I love you, too.”

She kissed one fingertip and pressed it against his cheek. Then she stood up and walked away. She wanted to turn around and look at him, but was afraid to. When she passed through the garden gates, she turned at last and saw him sitting alone on the bench.

I may never see him again
, she thought, and her heart cracked like a mirror.

* * *

Back in her room, she unwrapped the package. It was a tiny painting of her and him, standing together in an airy apartment, in front of a window. Nearby was a table set for dinner with golden plates and lots of food — a whole fish, green salad, a bottle of wine, a bowl of grapes. He had his arm around her and she fitted against his side, her head on his shoulder. He kissed the top of her head and she glowed like a saint in an icon. Through the window behind them: a broad blue sky with two puffy white clouds, a bay dotted with sailboats, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

H
er end-of-term report card was mixed, to put it politely. She got a 5 in Phonetics and Conversation, a 3 in Translation, a 4 in Grammar, a 2 in Composition, and a 1 in Literature. Semyon Mikhailovich, her Phonetics professor, wrote:
Laura clearly enjoys learning idioms, songs, and poetry and takes great care with her pronunciation. Somehow she picked up a lot of idiomatic Russian phrases and slang on her own. She was a delightful student
.

Yeah,
somehow
. On the other hand, her Literature professor commented:
Laura Reid missed almost half her Literature classes, particularly when they fell on Friday afternoons. When she was present, she rarely participated in discussion because she hadn’t done the reading. Therefore, I failed her.

This was the first failing grade Laura had ever received, but she accepted it with a shrug. She
had
missed half her Lit classes — she’d developed a habit of slipping away to see Alyosha on Fridays. It was worth it.

The Americans gave away almost all their clothes and anything else they didn’t need — disposable razors, books, cassette tapes, soaps, shampoos, and toiletries — to their Russian friends, who accepted them gratefully. Laura gave Nina her favorite sweater, two pairs of corduroys, and the five pairs of nylon stockings she’d been told to bring before she left. She wished she had more to give her, so she and Karen made a last-minute trip to the Berioska Shop for a jar of instant coffee, a tin of sardines, and some fancy chocolate.

Nina gave Karen and Laura each a copy of
Don Quixote
translated into Russian and a watercolor she’d painted of a church in her hometown in the Ukraine.

“I didn’t know you could paint,” Karen said. “It’s very good, Nina.”

Nina smiled shyly. “Thank you.”

The painting was graceful and sweet: onion domes glittering in the summer sunshine, surrounded by leafy green trees. It showed a side of Nina that Laura hadn’t noticed in the five months they’d lived together. There’d never been any evidence that Nina had ratted on Laura’s bad behavior — at least, no one from the program had scolded her for staying out overnight and breaking so many rules. It was possible she’d somehow turned in Alyosha, but Laura didn’t think so. She didn’t think Nina knew who Alyosha was. Laura still didn’t know how Alyosha had come to be arrested. It was one of the many mysteries of life in Leningrad.

“Thank
you
, Nina,” Laura said. “And thank you for putting up with us.”

“Oh, you are joking….”

Laura was touched: Nina actually seemed choked up to see them go. And all this time Laura had thought Nina hated them.

“I hope you get that teaching job you want in Siberia,” Karen added.

When Laura first heard that Nina was hoping to teach Spanish in Siberia, she thought it was absurd. She still thought it was absurd, but after five months in the Soviet Union she no longer thought it strange. It made its own, weird kind of sense.

* * *

It was raining the day they left Leningrad. Laura rode through the city one last time on a bus headed for the airport, staring out the window at the pastel buildings set off against the gray sky, the gray river.

“I heard that if it rains when you leave town, that means someone is sad to see you go,” Karen said. “It’s an old Georgian superstition.”

“I’ve heard that, too,” Laura said. Roma had said it as they left the dacha. That weekend seemed far in the past.

At the airport they picked up their luggage and lined up to be inspected by Passport Control. For such a serious business, the actual, physical setup of the airport was pretty flimsy. Customs was divided from the waiting room by cardboard screens, and that was all. Passengers lined up in the waiting
room, and when it was time for their luggage to be searched, an officer beckoned them to a table beyond the screen.

Laura had hidden Alyosha’s painting — and Nina’s, for it was illegal to take any art out of the country — in her luggage. Alyosha’s fit nicely in a tampon box, surrounded by tampons. She hoped the customs officers would be too embarrassed to look closely in there. She’d rolled up Nina’s watercolor and stuffed it in a pair of tights. She didn’t want to lose either picture, but if they confiscated Alyosha’s San Francisco icon, she’d be devastated.

The waiting room was crowded with passengers and people saying good-bye. In a corner, deep inside the crowd, Laura thought she spotted a familiar pair of sneakers. A babushka who was sweeping up dust moved out of the way and there he was: Alyosha. He kept behind the crowd, watching the group of Americans from a discreet distance.

He shook his head at her, ever so slightly, and she got the message:
Do not openly acknowledge my presence.
So she didn’t. She gave him a sad smile, the tiniest smile, an ambiguous, Mona Lisa smile like the one he’d painted in his portrait of her.

He smiled back, also sadly. He raised one hand, almost a wave, but after holding his palm up to her for a split second, he rubbed his bare lip where the mustache once sat.

“Next!” a guard shouted at her. “Come on!” He waved her over to a table beyond the screen. Laura braced herself for the scrutiny.

Two men in uniform unzipped her suitcase and riffled through it. They patted the pile of tights without seeming to notice the paper hidden inside. They glanced at her school notebooks without catching the diary she’d shuffled among them. They opened the cardboard tampon box, peered delicately inside, and put it down.

She put away her things and zipped up her suitcase. She couldn’t resist taking one last peek at the waiting room before boarding the plane.

She looked for Alyosha, but he was gone.