vossipian's Journal

Et rasskazik naverno 6-7 letnei davnosti ( stydno stalo chto nichego ne pishu :-))))
Return

As the bus slid along Broadway, Andrew tried to occupy himself with the landscape outside and not look at the boy. Turning his head all the way to the window, Andrew felt so tense that his muscles started to ache. The boy, in a blue and white striped sweatshirt, was sitting just two seats ahead of him, sobbing. His grief seemed so enormous, so engulfing and real that it made Andrew feel uncomfortable. First he had this urge to go and hug the boy and ask him what had happened, but the more he thought about it the more ridiculous it seemed: such an awkward thing to do.
The bus stopped at the intersection, and Andrew kept staring at the sign of the restaurant that he and his girlfriend Susan had visited quite often lately: " Nostalgia". The wind picked up a scrap of an old yellow newspaper from the sidewalk and carried it away. The windows of the restaurant seemed black.
Andrew couldn't wait for the bus to start moving again and didn't understand why it was taking so long for the lights to change. Had he followed his impulse right away and spoken to the boy, the situation wouldn't have become so embarrassing: now it would be even rude if he started talking to the boy and then had to say that he didn't really have time because he was late for work. He was afraid to hear his own voice, which would sound -- he was sure -- uncaring and empty, like an echo coming from a deep cave.
The bus started to move again. A stranger could think that the cafes with the kitschy posters of female singers with languid looks, and the grocery stores with their lively pyramids of apples and oranges were all new to Andrew, so attentively he looked at them. From time to time he would throw a quick glance at the boy, at his thin shaking shoulders, his pathetic wisp of hair on the top of his head, and then turn to the window again.
The boy was trying to restrain his sobs to the point of choking, swallowing his tears, and Andrew felt if the boy failed, his scream that would come out would tear the world, like old wall paper, uncovering something that nobody should look at, turning the world inside out.
The bus was several stops away from the subway station when Andrew decided that he could walk the remaining distance and reached for the cord to signal the driver. The sign, however, didn't light and the bus began to move even faster. The landscape outside started to change, as if somebody was fast- forwarding a film -- the houses replaced each other with enormous speed, faster and faster, and Andrew felt that the bus was going to crash if he himself didn't stop it. The bus was jolting violently, so that Andrew could hardly remain on his feet, as he walked to the front, clutching at the steel handrails. There, in the drivers seat, he saw the boy, who was now clasping the wheel with his small hands, tense and somehow determined. The boy looked at him with such contempt, that it almost turned Andrew into stone, and unable to say anything, feeling worthless, he had nothing else to do but to sit down. Thinking that the bus was going to crush and that there was nothing could do, Andrew even felt some relief. At least he wouldn't have to call his job to tell them he would be late. At that moment the bus shook so strongly that the pain previously contained in Andrew's neck went down his spinal cord, tearing his body apart. The boy abruptly turned the wheel, and the bus, making a shrilling sound, hit a brick wall. The crash threw Andrew in the air, and when the clouds dissipated, he was soaring above a river, a mountain with an old, half-ruined fortress, some houses, and narrow winding streets. As soon as he realized that it was the town where he was born and grew up, his body grew heavy and the earth began approaching abruptly….
Andrew awoke all sweaty and trembling. He had been sleeping in an awkward position, his neck hurt and he had to massage it to be able to turn his head. His teeth and jaw muscles ached from being clenched and he had a salty taste in his mouth. Andrew slowly got up and, without turning the lights on, walked through the hall to the kitchen to get some water. He opened the window and started to breathe the fresh air. The moon was still there. The elongated blue shadows of the poplars reached the children's playground like thin dark fingers. Nothing was moving, except for the rusty old swing, and Andrew felt that its piercing creak was the only sound that had ever existed.
Andrew returned back to bed and lay there with his eyes wide open, looking at the trees outside. As long as he could remember he had trouble falling asleep, and even though Susan complained that she woke up at his place so early because of the sun, he didn't let her put curtains in his bedroom. The darkness at night was choking, and he had to have something to look at. His father used to say that it was just because he liked to wake up late and didn't get enough exercise. Andrew remembered the fights that his mother had had trying to convince his father to let him stay up later and read. However, nothing came out of it except for her tears and the light being rudely turned off, even when he was fifteen, at eleven o'clock. He remembered having this dread of the coming night since he was five or six, the dread that he would have to go to sleep at the other end of the apartment and lay in bed long after the television in the living room had been turned off and the voices of his parents had faded. He watched the lights in the building across go off, slowly, one by one, worrying that he would not be able to fall asleep before the last one had gone.
With Grandma, it was different. His father would say that she spoiled him and didn't like it when she took him to her place on weekends. She would sit with Andrew till he fell asleep. He was thankful for that, but thinking about it now he realized that the very fact of her sitting next to him holding his hand didn't let him sleep. He would always be afraid of the moment of falling asleep. He knew that she would leave, disappear, and his eyes opened with the relentlessness of an executioner at her slightest movement. Every time she would just tell him softly to close his eyes and try again. And he would try, and usually when he was almost carried away by sleep, he would suddenly see her going, or sitting far away in her chair, under the orange lamp with the fringe, reading with her glasses on, and realizing that she would go away, he would gather all his strength to shake off the sleep. When he finally came back to his senses she would still be holding his hand.
He thought it was a shame that he hadn't spoken to her for a month. He remembered the excitement in her voice when she would pick up the phone and realize that it was him. It pained him, because he felt he had nothing to say. Her usual " what's new" irritated him, as if getting new jobs, eating, and going out was all life consisted of. He knew exactly where her questions were leading and tried to sound distant when he felt that the question about " someone special" was imminent. And when she would finally get to it, he produced something like " Uh, who needs them girls…".
Soon after Andrew left town, his sister, Anna, got married and moved to Moscow. Grandma moved in with his parents because it made more sense to keep one household instead of two. His mother said that his father and Grandma were getting along fine, now that the three of them were left alone in town. Andrew remembered the last couple of years when he still lived there; sometimes days would pass with the power turned off in most of the town. If there was the moonlight it made the long black boxes of the houses look even more ominous. His mother said the situation was much better now; they got electricity according to a schedule, and at least they had cold water all the time.
Andrew thought that he should call them in the morning. He had almost hung up on his grandmother the last time they spoke: he couldn't believe that Grandma was beginning to try to manipulate him, telling him in their last conversation that she was growing old and that she really wanted to see him before she died. Now when he calls he will probably tell her about Susan. Things have gotten better lately, and Susan agreed to move in with him. He complained jokingly that having her in his apartment would be like having a shedding cat with all this red hair all over the place. It was nice thinking about Susan, anticipating how they would live together, how she would be here with him every night, her things, in his apartment, her books, and her, sitting in his big armchair, reading. He thought about how he would look at her slightly asymmetrical face and her eyes with those tiny yellow spots inside irises.
It was around noon that Andrew woke up the next day. The window let in all the familiar sounds -- the loud voices of children on the playground, the honking of the passing cars, the dogs barking. It finally was Saturday, the long awaited weekend. The time was all his, and he was happy that he hadn't gone with Susan to visit her parents this weekend. Her moving in with him gave him courage to decline the invitation. He couldn't even explain why it always happened -- he would be planning to stay in town and spend some time on his own, but the moment she asked if he was going with her he would simply start packing and follow. He remembered what it was usually like -- time dragging in preparation for dinner where everyone had to help out Annie, Susan's mother to make this impression of a loving family, happily having dinner together. Afterward there would be endless munching with the expected exclamations about the tenderness of meat, the sharing of cooking techniques, and then he would have to sit through the tea and dessert listening to conversations about health insurance, buying houses and sending the children to college. He would end up awaiting the last hours of the evening with the nauseating feeling of wasted time, quiet, like a shadow. And sometimes-- this was even worse -- out of politeness, just to make him participate in the conversation, somebody would ask, how his parents and Grandma were. He would answer that he was just planning to call them, and that the life there was difficult, but that his family was okay. And after a short uncomfortable silence the conversation would safely switch back to discussing the travelling plans of Susan's sister's and her husband's.
He had never gone back to his town. He often thought of it, about the buildings that in the old part of the town, the ones that had been destroyed during the civil war. They still existed in his memory, these phantom buildings, and especially the one that stood right in front of the main government building -- the museum of town history. It was always empty, no visitors, and he could hear their echoing steps, his and Karine's, his first girlfriend's. Her lips were so bright that he always half seriously attempted to erase that non-existing lipstick.
They had missed a lot of classes the last year of high school. They couldn't just wander the streets carelessly: their uniforms usually attracted a militiaman, inquiring why they were walking aimlessly at that time of the day when everybody was supposed to be either working or studying. The museum of town history was not far from the school, and the guard, though he looked at them disapprovingly, had never said a word, so they went there quite a few times. Andrew remembered when, hiding from the guard, they ate tangerines that he had brought from home, and how next fall, when Karine was already married, he found dry rinds in his pocket.
He couldn't believe how time had passed. That early spring day, sunny and warm, seemed so far away, that it was almost as if it was from somebody else's life. He was sitting with Karine on a black window sill of the museum, while the workers down on the street were demolishing a monument -- a heavy legged, horse-like farmer woman crossing her sickle with a hammer held by a worker. He and Karine were watching, holding hands, hardly believing that it was possible, listening to the steady powerful blows. These deafening claps would scatter into a cannonade of gunfire of the civil war just two years later and the same force that demolished the monument would eventually blow up the museum and efface the little ice-cream café and the used bookstore that stood next to it. Town would change completely; the silence at night would be disturbed only by occasional shootings, or the howls of stray dogs, and the darkness that would flood the streets, would cast its shadows on the people who would walk around in the morning, reminding ghosts. Karine would leave town and die in the car accident in Moscow, together with her husband, a husband that Andrew had never met. And at times Andrew would scare Susan staring at her, thinking that her thin gracefully curved brows, the little beads of perspiration around her mouth, the warmth coming from her skin, that all of this one day would just turn into nothing.
When Andrew looked at the clock, it was two in the afternoon, and he thought that if he didn't call his parents it would become too late. With almost nine hours time difference, he never managed to call during the week, always finding excuses, not able to sacrifice any second of his morning sleep, or coming home when it was already too late to call. He thought that tomorrow he would not be able to call them either because Susan was returning to the city and he needed to help her move in to his place. He got up and went to the living room.
After dialing the number wrong for the third time, he started to look for his notebook, thinking that he had probably forgotten the correct country code. Turning the pages he couldn't remember where he had written it down. He never thought he would need it -- for so many years he had had no problem remembering the number. Then he thought that the code was apparently written down in another notebook, from an earlier year, and got up again. When he opened the desk drawer, the phone rang.
After a brief moment of silence somebody burst into tears, and then his sister's voice said: " Grandma died". He heard his own voice as if it was coming from someone else instead, muffled, saying these simple phrases, words, sounds, and it kept talking, word after word, continuously, as if nothing had happened; and they were still talking on the phone, he was talking to his sister Anna, who lived in Moscow and had a husband and was expecting a baby, the great grandchild his Grandma would never see. And the meaning of the word "never" kept escaping, slipping away, and he tried to understand, to imagine how it was possible. Hearing Anna's voice he kept thinking that he would never be able to tell Grandma about Susan. He remembered the photograph of him and Grandma on the boat in Crimea, and heard her laughing and saw himself, smiling, wearing that blue and white stripped sweatshirt and funny haircut with the hair sticking out in all directions on the top of his head. Anna told him to call their aunt, and he answered, " Yes, I will, I will", but he didn't want to let Anna go, he wanted her to continue talking, dropping word after word, keep the sounds changing, moving, just to keep them moving, even though he was barely listening. He remembered how often he had imagined that this would happen, even when he was still a boy, and that particular day, the day she was down with pneumonia -- how he sat there in her room the whole night, thinking that if only he could stay awake and concentrate enough, to think about her all the time, then the mere intensity of his thought and his desire would change the force field around her, keep her, save her….
When Anna hung up he called his aunt. Tried to reach Susan, leaving messages on her parent's answering machine and with her roommate in the city. He left messages at work and took out his big travelling bag, starting to pack. When his mother called, he told her that it wasn't her fault, and that she just had to let it go, that at least Grandma hadn't suffered. And then he even joked telling her that the reason Grandma did all this was to bring him home.

Advertisement