Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (13 page)

Last month, Edik and I were riding home on a train from a friend’s dacha, and the little bundled-up girl across the aisle fell asleep curled in her grandma’s lap. Touching. All of us lulled together by the bounce and clatter of the rails. Except all I could think was that
this
was his iconic memory of childhood travel, while mine took place in the back of a station wagon, locked in a private nuclear family, in a car unlike any he’d seen or would see. Memories so different they could never be fused. He reached for my hand, maybe sensing that I’d stopped breathing. It was nothing I could explain to him.

Eventually the guy who hit the old lady bumbles drunkenly toward me and flops down. “You’re new.” His name is Jacob. From Miami. Really? Miami.

He’s saying, just to me, “We should have gone after her. She was limping, you know? This is gonna dog me the rest of my life.” He’s looking at his lap, where his hands are twisting the hell out of his shirttails. Only after he’s done talking does he glance up, as if surprised to find me still here, listening. His eyes go all grateful as he takes me in, until something startles him and he laughs. “Wait, what is this you’re wearing? You’ve got sequins, even?”

In the winter like this, when the light lasts only six hours a day, and Christmas is coming and you’re just twenty-one, this kind of talk can seduce you. For the first time you understand why the word
language
so often comes from the word
tongue
. Of course it’s this base, writhing thing you survive on, this thing that unfurls from your core, where you can’t see its origins. You can try to escape yourself, but you’re still here.

Jacob has bath salts. A long, deep tub in a big, tiled bathroom with ceilings fifteen feet high. The place has been partially renovated for foreigners but retains the mysterious Soviet design trend of a transom window between the bathroom and the kitchen, so while I soak he calls to me from the stove, asking if I want pesto or red sauce. He wanders in and refills my wineglass, then leaves again. It’s that kind of life now, all through the spring. He has satellite TV; he buys cases of wine; he wears a grown-up overcoat, though he’s not yet twenty-five. We’re on the twelfth floor of the famous Kudrinskaya Ploshchad building, one of the seven glories Stalin built to embellish the city’s horizon. Everyone says the apartments are bugged, but we’re not sure who would be listening at this point. The place is smoky and not very clean, but there are big windows framing the city, and a piano, and french doors between the rooms. For work Jacob does some kind of trading for an American firm—iron and steel, I think—but he seems to work little, and more for amusement than money. He dresses in suits that were clearly once beautiful but are now dingy and loose, with a spot somewhere on every shirt. He keeps his face angled down most of the time, glancing up to make eye contact only in nervous rushes.

He has an international phone line and lets me call my parents and friends. I expect thrilled, heartfelt conversations each time, but in reality our topics in common have dwindled. My friends from school are all on the verge of graduating, looking for jobs. My old roommate’s engaged and says, “Why are you talking that way? You sound Canadian or something.”

Like Jacob and his friends I no longer fit there, but I don’t quite fit here, which would almost make us all fit together if we weren’t just misfits by nature. These are people who speak four or five languages, who drift from one country to another every year or two, who keep dog-eared
How to Learn Welsh
or Turkish textbooks on the floor next to their toilets. Jacob can sit for hours just reading a dictionary.

With them I see another side of the city, the expat bars and hard-currency shops, where big guards check passports to keep out Russians because the only kind who would spend this sort of money would have to be mafia men or hookers—more trouble than they’re worth. I see inside all the grand hotels—the breathtaking art nouveau Metropol, the French bakery inside the Cosmos, the Spanish restaurant in the lobby of the Moskva, where one day we wind up next to former senator Gary Hart, who broke my spirit freshman year with his campaign scandals.

We roam and roam. I have to jog every few steps to keep up as Jacob lopes absentmindedly through the city, chain smoking and occasionally stopping to point at a business and say, “Was this here last week?” I never know, but he’ll stop a stranger to ask, chat for ten minutes with any willing Russian about the history of a neighborhood. When our cabbies get lost he gives instructions so detailed they double take him suspiciously.

Today we’re down by the river embankment, in front of a sleek new Italian clothes store on a brand-new, deserted street.

“We should go get you something nonpolyester.”

“Hey, I’m fine. Do you know how fast this stuff dries?” I’m still doing all my laundry by hand, in my bathtub.

He draws me inside anyway, and the clerks greet him as if they know him already, but maybe they’ve been trained to do that. He makes odd humming sounds to himself as he picks his way through the store. Hovering over a stack of women’s sweaters, he says, “This color would be good on you.”

To see merchandise displayed for us to fondle, instead of trapped behind counters guarded by babushkas, gives me an anxious giddiness, and I can tell that the shopkeepers, though trained to accept the practice, still rise up on the balls of their feet as they watch us making ourselves at home.

I shake my head and twist away as he holds up a sweater to me. It’s soft as a rabbit, pale blue-gray, and simple, probably dry clean only.

“You’re never going to blend in anyway,” he says, gesturing at my Russian ensemble. “Not like this, anyway.” He says to the shopgirl, “Guess where she’s from.”

She’s model beautiful and blushes, shakes her head. “Davaite,” he says. Come on.

She shrugs and smiles helplessly. “U.S.A.”

I make a swift move for the door and lean against the wall outside, mortified for some reason.

He saunters out and lights a fresh cigarette and reaches back for my hand as he starts to cross the street. I put my hands in my pockets and watch him go.

He glances back just once, then heads through a vast construction zone toward the river. The truth is I’m all turned around, I’m lost, and there’s not a car or metro station in sight, not even a bus stop. What have I been doing? It’s a gray, drizzly day and the light is fading and his hulked-over figure is getting smaller and smaller. When I’m close enough that he can hear my footsteps he slows down and waits for me, stretches back a hand for me to take. At the far edge of the construction we have to climb a low fence to get to an old red wooden tugboat on the river that seems like something out of a
Popeye
cartoon. Onboard, there’s a beautiful mahogany bar inside, and we are the only foreigners. Again, the bartender says hello as if he knows Jacob, and when I respond in Russian he smiles at me as if I’m a charming accessory. We sit in a small booth by a window, and the water outside brings me back to the vast, brown Mississippi.

“So north is that way?” I point upriver, desperate to reclaim my bearings. “Does it run north and south?” Jacob laughs and pulls a battered map out of his coat, and I’m faced with the maze-like path of the river through the city. “It goes just about everywhere. It’s no kind of landmark to use. How can you not know this?”

I tell him to quiz me on any part of the metro map, but he just shakes his head. “That’s easy. That’s tourist stuff.” He orders us some Dutch beer and then sets a bag on the table. It sits there, tissue paper and all, through three rounds.

“You should try it on at least,” he says once we’re managing smiles again.

The bartender’s drunk and glancing over conspiratorially. I peel off my glittery green and pink turtleneck and shiver in my dingy t-shirt for a second while Jacob bites the tags off the sweater and hands it over. He tilts his head to one side to take me in.

“Well?”

A slow smile spreads across his face. “What are you so afraid of?”

I shrug. “Nothing.” But it comes out like a bluff.

Suddenly Jacob straightens his posture. A lanky blonde is headed right toward us. She’s Russian; it’s obvious from every sleek move. He stubs out his cigarette but doesn’t stand up, and she surveys me with the briefest of glances as he introduces us.

“That was fun the other night,” she says in Russian and starts to prattle about a dance club they apparently went to last week. She places one long slender hand on his shoulder, and he holds still. It’s hard not to be intimidated by the seemingly flawless Russian women who hover around foreign men, acting as though they’d do just about anything to get a ticket out of here. They’re gorgeous and smart and perfectly fluent—walking, breathing language coaches operating on their own turf. Jacob sighs and avoids looking at me. I focus on the water out the window.

“Oh, come on,” he says outside afterward. “You have Edik.”

“Right,” I say, but of course I don’t. Edik’s not an idiot, and I couldn’t lie to him. I haven’t seen him in months. I haven’t fed anyone, haven’t thrown any parties. I take the metro home alone in the sweater, and sit on my balcony through half the night, trying to remember who I used to be.

I’ve missed the deadline to start school in the fall so I stay another two months, socking away money for tuition. By Christmas I’ll be home, or where home used to be. Sometimes I go for walks with Anna Petrovna but mostly I leave my apartment just for work and food. When I get especially lonely I go down to a little pizza place that’s opened up not too far from work and I sit at the bar and order two beers and one pizza margherita. They have CNN on satellite, and all the lonesome new expats with no friends and no Russian skills sit around staring at it.

One night they show a clip of Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on Arsenio, and it makes me blush. Then somebody plops down next to me, saying, “Nu, privet,” in a deep, familiar voice.

It’s Andrei. He has a big bruise across a third of his face and a scab through the middle of his left brow.

“What happened to you?”

He shrugs it off. “Car accident,” he says, but that feels like a lie.

“How’s business?” I say.

“Outstanding. Bez problem. Better all the time.” He owns four kiosks now, and is looking into buying a bar.

“Good for you. And you don’t have…opponents?” I say, wondering about his face.

He shrugs. “Everybody has enemies. That’s just business.”

A soccer game comes on and we talk about that for a while. We share a pizza and a couple of beers, no shots, no toasts.

“Oh, I’m going to be a dad,” he says. “In March.”

“Wow,” I say, in English, because he always liked the way that sounded.

“
Owow
,” he says, in a slow and careful effort.

“You should really call Edik, before you go,” he says at the end of the night, and I nod. I know I should, but where would it land me? I give Andrei my parents’ address and phone number, just in case, for the future. A few weeks later, I’ll translate an article about a Russian businessman killed in a drive-by shooting on the steps out in front of this restaurant. It won’t be Andrei or Edik, but for a minute my brain’ll go white with the possibility. There’ll be more of these kinds of shootings to come, many more.

The last night I remember of the city is election night, 1992. Some American companies sponsor a party at the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel, by Kiev Station. They put out an open invitation to Americans to come watch the returns all through the night into morning. Some people from work talk me into going, and I’m both drawn and repelled by the prospect of seeing Jacob there. It’s been weeks. Over a thousand people show up, more Americans than I ever imagined were here. It feels like a huge high school dance, except we’re of all ages in our motley jeans and wet boots, with our limp hair and tired eyes as the night goes on.

There are free Nestle Toll House cookies and Pop Secret popcorn and Coke, free Pizza Hut pizza and Miller Lite and KFC. They’ve got big screens set up all over the room, projecting the returns on CNN, and when the chairs fill up we lounge across the floor—unthinkable behavior in the city around us.