Boy on the Bridge (8 page)

They ran upstairs to their room. “He didn’t stop in the office to write down our names,” Karen whispered. “Maybe he won’t report us.”

“Maybe by morning he’ll think he dreamed the whole thing,”
Laura said. “And now to deal with the wrath of Nina.” Donovan had told them that all the Soviet roommates in their dorm had been specially chosen for their willingness to report on the foreign students’ activities, and Laura had no reason to doubt him. She was beginning to see that reporting on neighbors greased the gears that made the Soviet system work.

They opened their door slowly and quietly. The room was dark.

“She’s asleep,” Laura whispered.

They undressed in the dark and got into bed. Like magic, the spot where Alyosha had kissed her was still warm on Laura’s lips. The long walk in the cold hadn’t made it go away. Nothing could make that feeling go away.

“Stenka Razin’s Dream” drifted through her mind as she fell asleep: “You’re going to lose your wild head…”

Too late
, she thought sleepily.
My wild head is lost.

L
aura opened her eyes the next morning to find Nina already up, sipping tea and studying. Karen snored softly in her bed. Laura turned over. Nina looked up.

“Oh. You are awake,” Nina said coldly.

“Mm-hmm.” Laura sat up and rubbed her eyes. Her tongue was a wool sock, and tiny elves seemed to be hacking at the backs of her eyes with mini icepicks. Karen stirred at the sound of their voices.

“You missed breakfast this morning,” Nina said.

“Oh no,” Laura said. “What will I do without my morning gruel?” Breakfast in the university cafeteria consisted of weak coffee, strong tea, and gloppy gray kasha. That beat lunch, which, last time Laura had bothered to show up, featured fish head soup and mystery meat. It was best to stick with black bread and margarine.

Nina’s face showed no reaction beyond an almost
imperceptible narrowing of the eyes. She slurped her tea. Karen lifted her head.

“What? What?” She looked around the room, smiled at Laura, let her head fall back on her pillow. “Morning, girlies. I’m too sleepy to speak Russian.”

“I’m glad you are finally awake, Karen.” Nina may not have understood Karen’s English, but in any case she ignored it and plowed ahead in Russian. “I have something to say, and this way I can say it to both of you at the same time. I will not have to repeat myself.”

Laura sat up and slid her feet into her slippers. “Can it wait just one minute while I run to the bathroom?”

“It won’t take long,” Nina said.

Sadist
, Laura thought.

“I went to bed at eleven o’clock last night and the two of you were not home yet. I don’t know how you got in after curfew but I’m glad you did. I’d hate for you to freeze to death on the street. I know that happens often to homeless people in America, but we don’t allow it here.”

Laura and Karen blinked at her, too sleepy to argue, just wanting the lecture to end so they could get on with their lives.

“The rules are very clear,” Nina said. “You must sleep here in the dorm every night. You must be in your room by ten o’clock each night. If you’re not, I’m supposed to report you. If the university wants a reason to send you home, they can use this.”

“We’re sorry, Nina,” Karen said.

“Yes, we’re sorry.” Laura hoped that would satisfy her.

“I like you,” Nina said. “I want to be friends.”

“So do we!” Karen said. “We just lost track of time, and, uh, the metro was late.”

“The metro is never late.”

Laura couldn’t argue with that — she’d never known the metro to be anything but punctual. “We won’t do it again, Nina.”

“We promise,” Karen said.

“All right,” Nina said. “I will make you some tea.” She stood up and moved out of the room with a cowlike slowness that had an odd, heavy grace.

“Close one.” Karen sat up and switched into English. “I have a hangover.”

“Me too.” Laura could still taste the vodka in the pores of her tongue. She remembered Alyosha’s kiss and touched that spot on her lips. Still warm. She pulled on her robe and snatched her towel off the armoire door for the trip down the hall to the bathroom.

She passed Nina in the kitchen, gossiping by the stove with Alla, Binky’s roommate. On her way back from the toilets, she spotted Ilona slipping out of Dan and Sergei’s room, her blond hair very mussed. Hmm … Dan or Sergei? Laura suspected Dan. He was deceptively suave for a skinny geek in John Lennon wire-rims.

Laura returned to the room to find the table set with three glasses of tea and three small bowls of oatmeal. “It’s like the
Three Bears’ house,” Laura said. Nina didn’t get it. “Where did the oatmeal come from?”

“Alla’s roommate … Pinky?”

“Binky.”

“She gave this to Alla, who shared it with me. It’s from America. Magic oatmeal.”

“Magic?” Laura tasted it. Apple cinnamon. “You mean, instant?”

“Yes. It’s good, no?”

“Very good. Thank you, Nina.”

“A peace offering,” Nina said.

Karen caught Laura’s eye. Peace offering, or bait to lull them into complacency? Laura knew Karen was suspicious. But what could they do? It was oatmeal. It tasted good. They ate it.

* * *

A few days later, Alyosha invited her to go for a walk. She set out on the tram for their usual meeting spot.

She nabbed a seat next to a young woman. A man stood in the aisle next to her, hanging on to the strap. He was dark and goateed and wore a fake-leather racing jacket. Something about him made her think of Atlantic City and cheap casinos. He winked at her. A gold tooth flashed when he smiled.

Laura looked away, determined not to meet his eye again. She was against winking as a general principle, but in this case it was especially unnerving. What did a wink mean? It could
mean anything from “Hey, baby” to “I know what you’re up to and you’ve got nowhere to hide.”

“You speak English?” the man asked in heavily accented English. “Where you from?”

She ignored him, but he wouldn’t stop. “From England? From Germany? From France?”

The woman next to Laura got up, and the man took over her empty seat. “You very pretty.” He pawed at her glove. “I kiss your hand.”

She yanked her hand away. “No! Please leave me alone.”

“America? You from America?”

“Yes, okay?” She tried to be polite, but she didn’t understand what he wanted with her. She got off the tram before her stop but it was no use — he followed her off and dogged her down Nevsky Prospekt. She had to lose him. Whatever was going on with this strange man, she didn’t want to get Alyosha involved.

“Come to bar with me, yes? We practice English.”

“I can’t,” she said in Russian. “I’m meeting someone.”

“Please,” he said. “I’m nice guy. I must talk to you. I’m in trouble!”

Great, he was in trouble. Whatever that meant — if it was true — it was sure to mean trouble for her, too.

But what if he really needed her help? She looked at him, but was quickly overcome by waves of skeeviness like cheap cologne. She couldn’t help him. He might not be in trouble at all.

“I’m sorry.”

He tugged at her elbow. “Please! Stop and listen to me for one minute!”

She was desperate to get rid of him. They approached the European Hotel and suddenly she knew how. She nodded at the uniformed guard out front and pushed her way through the gleaming glass doors. Inside, another guard stopped her. “Passport, please.”

She showed him her passport. “Are you a guest in the hotel?” he asked.

“Yes,” she lied. The guard stepped aside to let her into the lobby. She glanced back through the door. The strange man paced outside the hotel. How long would he wait for her there? If he hung out in front of a foreigners’ hotel for too long, he’d look very suspicious … unless he was KGB, in which case he could do whatever he wanted.

She sat down in the lobby to wait him out. The desk clerk squinted at her. She smiled and nodded at him as if she were completely at ease. She watched the guests come and go: a sleek German couple in expensive coats, four ratty British students underdressed for the cold, and a tall, handsome, oddly familiar-looking man with gray-blond hair … Who was he? When he spoke to the clerk in a crisp English accent she recognized him as an actor she’d seen on
Masterpiece Theater
.

She considered the skeevy guy waiting outside for her. What did he want? He might be a black marketeer, hoping to get jeans or dollars from her. He might be on the make, trying to pick up
girls. He could be a dissident genuinely in trouble, but she didn’t see how she could help him if he was. He could simply be crazy. Or he could be a KGB agent trying to get information from her. Donovan, the cowboy drug dealer, claimed that every American student had a KGB agent assigned to follow him or her.

If that was true, her agent must be bored out of his mind.

Or maybe not. Maybe Alyosha was not who he said he was. Maybe he was her KGB agent. After all, he had that nice apartment all to himself….

Laura went to the door to see if the coast was clear. The stalker was gone.

She continued down Nevsky Prospekt to the bookstore, turning around every so often to make sure the man wasn’t following her. The street was so crowded, it was hard to tell for sure. But she didn’t see him.

Alyosha was waiting for her in Poetry, just like before. Today he was reading Marina Tsvetaeva.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Some guy was following me.”

“A guy? What guy?” He made her describe how the man had acted and tell her everything that had happened. When they walked out onto the street, he looked around carefully.

“Do you see him?” he asked.

“No. He’s gone.”

Alyosha frowned. “What did he look like?”

She described his scruffy goatee, his vinyl jacket, his gold tooth …

“What does it mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

They stood on the street for a few minutes, letting the crowd jostle them. Alyosha eyed everyone who passed by. Laura lifted her face to the pale, weak sunlight. In another hour it would be dark.

“It’s not so horribly cold today,” she said. The clock down the street said the temperature was -10 Celsius.

Alyosha jiggled his hands in his pockets. “Let’s go for a walk.”

He led her up Nevsky Prospekt toward the Hermitage. They stopped to buy ice cream from a cart on the street. The ice cream was not quite white and not quite brown, not quite vanilla and not at all chocolate.

“What flavor is this?” Laura asked.

Alyosha shrugged. “What do you mean? It’s ice cream.” He tasted his cone. “It’s cream flavored.”

In Decemberists’ Square, they admired the statue of Peter the Great, founder of St. Petersburg. Alyosha mumbled some words under his breath.

“What are you doing?” Laura asked.

Alyosha blushed. “Nothing. Just reciting some lines from a poem we learned in school.”

“What poem? Let me hear it.”

“No. I don’t like it. But I’ve been so programmed I can hardly walk past this damn statue without muttering the words.”

“Let me hear them. Please.”

He recited:

“We were just reading that in Translation class,” Laura said. “It’s that Pushkin poem about Peter the Great.”

“We memorized a lot of poetry in school,” Alyosha said. “Memorizing and reciting was practically all we did.”

“I hardly know any poetry by heart. Just one Emily Dickinson poem I memorized once when I was too heartbroken to do anything else.”

“Which one?”

She recited in English: “ ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes …’ ” She stopped, embarrassed. “Now I know why you felt shy about it.”

“Keep going. I like the sound of it.”

Clouds had rolled in off the Baltic Sea, and the sky had grayed since they left Dom Knigi. They stared at the leaden river.

“That poem could have been written here,” Alyosha said. “It could be by Anna Akhmatova, feeling suicidal during an endless Leningrad winter, or during the siege. What made you memorize it?”

“A sad winter. Probably not as sad as the German siege, though.”

He laughed. “I hope not.”

“Yes, definitely not as sad as that.” She told him about that sophomore winter, a year before, when she went home to Baltimore for Christmas and hooked up with her high school boyfriend, Duncan. She’d been lonely in Providence all fall and was hoping to get back together with Duncan, even if it had to be long-distance, since he went to Penn.

They made a date for New Year’s Eve and ended up at a party where he talked to another girl all night. She felt melancholy on the train back to Providence, as if something she’d once counted on had been lost forever. In the back of her mind, she’d thought Duncan would always love her. But he didn’t. Maybe he never had.

She’d barricaded herself in her room for the rest of the winter, reading poetry, living on Wheat Thins and Tab. Was she sad about Duncan? She wasn’t sure. She just felt terrible.

“Wait a minute,” Alyosha said. “I don’t understand some of these things. What is Penn? What are Wheat Thins and Tab?”

She explained East Coast geography to him, the distances between Baltimore and Philadelphia, Baltimore and Providence. She told him that Wheat Thins were crackers and Tab was like Pepsi with fake sugar. He made a face at that but didn’t question it.

“Then May came, and suddenly everything was better,” she said. Partly because Josh had started hanging around. But she left that part out.

“So you have a sad love story in your past,” he said. “I have one, too.”

They walked along the embankment in front of the Hermitage, past the Field of Mars, and into a gated park. “The Summer Garden,” he announced as they walked through the gate. “Have you been here before?”

“No, not yet.”

“It’s a good place.” They strolled along the winding paths, which were shadowed by bare winter trees poking out of the snow. All along the paths stood giant wooden boxes like upright coffins.

“There are statues inside,” Alyosha explained. “They cover them up for the winter. In the spring, the statues come back from the dead, emerging from their winter shrouds.”

“Can we come back in the spring?” The park was crowded with the coffins, almost a hundred of them, and she wanted to see the statues.