Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Read online

  The cafeteria in the lobby smells of fish and boiled fat, and is closed half the time anyway. When there’s breakfast it’s tea and something like oatmeal with chunks of pink meat mixed in. Some days they are open but have nothing to sell; other days it’s alien concoctions like aspik and kompot. Like most of the people we’ve met in Moscow, our clothes are drooping and we sleep with our arms cinched around our middles. Like good Communists, we’ve congealed as a group and refer to ourselves in the plural, always we.

  Then one morning in August our group leader, Mary, calls us into her room to say we won’t be going to class. She’s American, a dispirited grad student with compromised hair, who insists on speaking only in Russian to us. But something has happened, is happening, something so grave that she puts the big words in English. Gorbachev is incapacitated, or on the losing side of somebody’s grab for power. He was scheduled to sign a treaty today that would give more autonomy to each republic, but—here she hesitates and throws in some qualifiers—it seems that maybe some hard-line Communists bent on preserving the old Soviet dominance have decided to depose him before he could sign the treaty. We’re in the heart of the biggest country in the world, with its eleven time zones and fifteen republics, its thirty thousand nuclear warheads. And for today at least, nobody knows who’s in charge.

  Beyond Mary’s window our quiet side street goes about its business as usual. In slow motion, a grandmother navigates around a vast puddle, clutching a little girl with one hand and a wheeled shopping bag with the other. One boy chases another down the sidewalk. Near the corner, some workers are tamping down hot asphalt with their shovels, which as usual don’t seem like quite the right tools for the job.

  We’re told to go back to our rooms. As foreigners we’re special, Mary says, then swaps the word out for vulnerable. If she scares us, we’ll be easier to watch. She throws in her usual threats to remind us: We can be sent home, we can be failed, we can be picked up by police, or worse.

  In the hallway we find Jane just coming in from a jog. She says she saw tanks lined up along Leninskii Prospekt. How many? She shakes her head, lots. A long silence shudders through us.

  “Maybe they’ll send us home early,” Eileen says. She has a boyfriend at home, which has become our collective misfortune.

  We go down to the lobby, where there’s a shoddy TV, but the only thing coming out of it is Swan Lake. Like every other day, there are guards at our door. If our parents could call us we could tell them how very secure we are. How insulated we’ll always be from this city, no matter how many burdensome words we learn.

  It starts to drizzle outside but we keep our windows open anyway, listening for booms, sirens, signs of change. We think of our friends and teachers and their families, even the guys who sell things by the metro, even the awful woman at the bread store who berates us when we mispronounce things. Like asylum inmates, we lean in to our radios, getting nothing but static and, occasionally, Beethoven. Some of us try to write home, do our homework; some wash clothes in the sink, do sit-ups, clip nails. We wait; we are useless. One of the guys digs out granola bars he brought from home; someone else has M&Ms. We share alike.

  Then a French girl from the floor below us comes into our room with wet hair and says we’ve got visitors. She goes over and leans out our window, waving her arm.

  It’s Andrei down there, in the courtyard with the tall, skinny boy and his face, his matted black hair. They’re huddled together under a big red flowered umbrella. “Privet!” Andrei calls, waving like he’s on a ship. He shouts something along the lines of “Let’s go see history.”

  “They locked us under,” Jane calls down.

  “So what?” Andrei says. “Come out the back way.” Jane slowly focuses her big black camera and takes a picture of him.

  “The guards,” I say.

  “I’ll work it out,” he says, which I guess means he’ll pay them off. Andrei, we’ve discovered, is a fartsovshik, a black marketeer, which is why he dresses in American clothes and almost always has money and usually gets what he wants.

  Most everyone has filtered into our room. “You guys up for it?” I say to the others, but they just glance at the floor and the walls. Even the French girl says, “No way.” With their expensive educations and sculpted resumes, they have real things to lose. I don’t blame them. But I’m just a C+ state school kid whose future will be shaped by student loan payments and the vast, jobless Midwest. I might never in my life do anything more than this.

  Jane’s voice gets very low and anxious. She lost her mother last year but I’m the only one here who knows this. “This is a stupid, stupid idea. You think bad things can’t happen to you.”

  “Bring something to drink,” Andrei calls. “I’m really thirsty.”

  Andrei takes my coming downstairs alone as a sign of my commitment to him. When he commandeers my bag and arm I bristle, but there’s a bright fear glowing in me so I go ahead and let him take ownership. The skinny boy, Edik, maintains his radio silence as we walk, glancing up only to make sure he doesn’t lose track of us. On the Ring Road ahead of us, a lone tank trudges past, as if lost.

  Andrei and Edik disagree about where to go. Edik heard people were demonstrating at Manezh Square. Andrei says we should go to Krasnopresnenskaya, head to the parliament building, which everyone calls, with some irony, the White House. For a second they look at me, as if I could possibly know anything. I see two women heading into the metro station with a tri-color Russian flag, not the Soviet hammer and sickle, collapsed between them. So I say, “Could be we follow them.”

  At Krasnopresnenskaya Station the quick current of the crowd sweeps us past all the bronze bas reliefs of workers and revolutionaries raising flags and building barricades. The only people who seem to notice them anymore are tourists. Every station in town is a cathedral to the worker, the soldier, the revolutionary. Marble columns, vaulted ceilings, chandeliers, mosaics, stained glass. It’s a city clogged with monuments. I hold on to Andrei’s hand and let myself be pushed and funneled onto the steep, narrow, ultrafast escalator that carries us several stories up from underground. I once heard a rumor about a second, secret metro system that supposedly runs below this one, designed to evacuate the most important people in the event of—here Russians stop the story, because what they were about to say would be impolite—in the event that your country annihilates us with those weapons.

  When you’re jammed into a thick crowd and you can’t feel your feet, it’s best to look up, at the chandeliers, and think about the people who built this. It’s best not to think about where we’re going, or what kind of clashes or crackdowns await us. Andrei twists around to face me on the long ride up. He says, “Don’t worry,” which is actually, “Don’t uncalm yourself.” His hand in mine is cool and loose, his posture against the rubber railing as leisurely as a honeymooner’s. I turn to see Edik behind me, and he’s shaking.

  Up at ground level everything’s gray and raining, and the crowd clots up again in the confusion of popping umbrellas. Then they wander off in various directions on their separate errands. It turns out there was no surging collective purpose. Most of them don’t even stop to consider the line of tanks that’s creeping down the street.

  “They’re all over town,” Andrei says, collecting himself after an odd silence. “It’s really true.”

  In Baku last year, Soviet tanks rolled in and killed hundreds of demonstrators. In January, they killed over a dozen in Vilnius. In ’56, as even a mediocre Russian major knows, they took out thousands in Hungary. I think about how I promised my mom I’d be careful. But here I am, unaccounted for, moving toward the parliament building with a growing cluster of strangers. They say Yeltsin’s been making speeches to the crowds, calling for a general strike. Edik says, “God, they’ll kill him.” An old guy near us says, “They haven’t even arrested him.”

  We’re quiet for a while, until Andrei says, “I guess somebody cut a deal with someone.”

  Closer to the White House a
nd the river embankment beyond it, people are dragging junk along the street—metal street signs and construction rebar, garbage and bricks from God knows where. Three teenagers scrape a whole phone booth along the pavement, which incites a roar of approval. The pay phones more often than not don’t work anyway. When the boys pause to rest, so many people step in to help them that they get squeezed aside and stand back, laughing as their phone booth moves off without them toward the makeshift barricades.

  Across the river, a long, thick line of tanks and troop-filled trucks is inching along Kutuzovskii Prospekt toward us. The roar of them seems louder than it ought to, and the crowd stiffens and goes quiet. “We need more stuff!” a woman yells, and we reanimate: A chunk of people breaks off, looking for more debris. To me though, these flimsy piles of junk look mainly symbolic; even a decent Jeep could find a way around them.

  The tanks along the perimeter of the White House sit like turtles, just waiting. The soldiers, poking out of the hatches to smoke, look oddly casual and tired. A cluster of old women gathers around, and one says, “You wouldn’t shoot your own grandmother, right?” The boy in the hatch has dimples and red hair and smiles back at her, shaking his head ever so faintly. “You hungry?” she says, and hands him a bag of bubliki. He takes it, a little too eagerly.

  The crowds dwindle and swell with the rain, so it’s hard to say how many we are, or how many there might be in other parts of the city. On Tverskaya, they say, and at Manezh Square, they’ve overturned trolleybusses for barricades. Some people somewhere, we hear but don’t see, have set up tents and campfires, hunkering down for the long haul. Pedestrians on errands make brief detours to see us. They linger at the edges like shy kids near a playground. Some stay, some go. This can’t hold.

  Then across the crowd I see a woman with her arm up like a Lenin statue. She’s waving, which is fine, but at me. When I make out her face it’s Anna Petrovna, one of my Russian teachers, she of the stifling hot classroom and Cheburashka cartoons. For a second I realize this may mean I’m in trouble, but the grin on her face says otherwise. She winds her way through the crowd to me. “Isn’t this strange,” she says. “Fantastika.” She’s pale, maybe forty, with intensely bleached hair and the unrestrained smile—so rare here—of a gold medalist. All our teachers have been distant and formal, but something about running into me here has changed that.

  “I’m so glad you’re here for this. Where are the others? Take my picture. Take pictures of all of this.” As usual though, I forgot my camera. She clutches my arm and from then on we’re attached.

  Andrei’s getting restless. He says, “Let’s go get something to drink, why don’t we?” We’re soaked and chilled but Edik and I hold still. Anna Petrovna dismisses Andrei with a look.

  He sighs. “This is just people standing around. Whatever’s going on, the real stuff, is going to happen in some back room. A handful of big guys are trading offers right now. This out here means nothing.”

  An old man near us says a brash three-syllable word to him that I’ve never heard before.

  “I don’t care,” I say. This out here is all we have. It’s beyond curiosity, beyond being barricades or witnesses. Here in this place the abstract idea of collective power is finally palpable. If we go home, and can’t even see this on TV, we’ll never feel it again.

  “I don’t think you want to be out here after dark.” Andrei gestures toward the tanks. “In the dark they can do whatever they want to you.” For a second, a romantic thought flushes through me: If things should go violent, if I should be a victim, would that make the U.S., the West, pay more attention to this? Could I finally, for once in my life, become significant?

  A reporter with an Australian accent approaches some men near us for an interview.

  “Don’t get your picture taken,” Andrei says. “Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know.”

  “OK,” I say. So it’s just me and Edik and Anna Petrovna, and a swell of maybe ten thousand people, from a city of over nine million. As Andrei walks away he pauses to light a girl’s cigarette, and he listens for a moment to whatever she’s saying to him in her beautiful language.

  The apartment is small, one long, good-sized room. Small kitchen, tiny bathroom, no bedroom. The couch in the main room opens up, and at the far end a single bed is pushed against the wall and covered like a sofa. Anna and Edik help me carry my bags inside.

  We open the windows to air the place out and pull open the door to the balcony, which is completely filled with crates of empty bottles and jars.

  It’s the last day of August and already getting chilly. Anna shows me how to light the stove and boils some water for tea. All the utensils, pots, and pans are here. A bowl of salt and a small jar of sugar. There’s even a short little fridge and a telephone.

  Edik goes in the bathroom and calls, “Hot water!”

  The place is furnished right down to the cluttered contents of the drawers; it belonged to Edik’s friend’s grandfather, who died last spring. It’s forty dollars a month, as long as I don’t call attention to myself. No one knows, right now, who really owns the place, or how long it’ll take the government to realize that Viktor Sergeevich has died and freed up this little pocket of the state’s vast real estate holdings. At this point nobody even knows who the state is. In the meantime, I’m not to talk to the neighbors, not to make noise, not to look like a foreigner—at least not like an American. I’m OK with that. I’m ready for total immersion.

  My Russian has improved, but still when I’m tired I get very quiet, which is what I’m doing at the kitchen table while we drink our tea. Anna Petrovna reaches across and clasps my hand like a grandmother. “You’ve lost your group,” she says. “This is a sad day.”

  We all moved out of the dorm this morning, but the rest of the group took a bus to the airport and I, like a fool maybe, said good-bye and came here. It’s been a week and a half since the coup, which lasted only three days, took only three lives. Hardly any violence, for the fall of the evil empire. It’s made the world wonder if all our grand fears were invented.

  On the phone with my parents last week I tried to explain the job I’d found: translating articles for a new independent news agency. A decent apartment for next to nothing, a front seat to whatever was going to happen here. What was my last year of college compared to this?

  “You’re not going to turn Commie, are you?” my dad asked, in a voice half joking, half sour. I could hear the TV behind him, the jingle of a local furniture store. “I give her till Christmas,” he said to my mom as he handed off the phone. They’ve always had a habit of letting me drift far, letting me out of their sight.

  My mom was quiet for a long time. “It sounds as if you’ve thought it all out,” she said very carefully. Since I left for college, she’s taken to watching her grammar when she talks to me. “I don’t want to get in your way,” she said slowly, and something in me collapsed. I was sitting in a greasy booth in the main post office on Tverskaya, having waited in line three hours for an international phone connection. I traced my finger through the germs on the plexiglass, glancing around the room, where all sorts of desperate-looking displaced people were calling abroad, dying to get there. “You have enough money?” my dad interjected from a phone in the other room. I screwed up the courage to say, “I love you,” but my mom just said, “What?” and then our time ran out.

  “This is a very green area,” Anna Petrovna says. She lives nearby. “Many want to live here. Look at the trees.” The building is set back from a busy street, Profsoyuznaya, by half a block of asphalt and pipes and dumpsters. Down in the dirt yard out front, someone has built a homemade contraption for lifting weights. But there are clusters of tall trees all around, and from the fifth floor, if you only look out and not down, you see mostly foliage, and it glows. I try to ask them how to say treehouse, but the more I explain the more alarmed they look at the idea of kids living in trees.

  “So what happened here, to your face?” Anna Petrovna asks Edik i
n the sweetest voice, pure curiosity.

  He crinkles up his asymmetrical eyes. “Just a little accident, as a kid.” His voice is scuffed up at the edges.

  Skeptical, she watches him, but decides to let it go. “I have to go now,” she says, kissing us on the cheeks. “But I’ll come back tomorrow and show you the neighborhood.”

  Edik and I go in the other room and flop onto the couch, watching in silence as the afternoon sun moves across the room in trapezoids. It lights up the polished dining table, the small white bust of Lenin on the shelf, the dead little TV, the yellowing plastic radio perched on top of it. The dead man’s slippers are lined up by the door; his brush waits under the mirror. Before too long, when it gets colder, I’ll go ahead and use his bathrobe. I ask Edik how long it’s been since he went home to Tomsk for a visit. He says over a year. I ask about his family, but he just curves his lips into a false smile and shakes his head slightly. His eyes are deep brown and buggy, constant. His nose, clearly broken. His forehead is divided in two by a deep reddish scar that creeps down from his hairline. It picks up again in his pursed upper lip, and again on his throat, near the clavicle. He is a boy who takes you out of the loop of beauty, who makes beauty seem what it’s always been: arbitrary and cruel. Imagine a world without beautiful people. There’s something thrilling about it. I decide to run one thumb down the middle of his forehead, in that groove.

  He rushes in like a middle-schooler to kiss me, as if the chance may never come again. But after a few seconds he pulls back and says, “You feel alone now? Is that the reason?”

  It is and it isn’t, so I just pull him closer. When it comes to the more perplexing sentiments I’m handicapped by my meager vocabulary, still scared of botching every message. Like him, I’ve come to appreciate silence and gestures. His hip bones move against me and we’re both very thin these days so my hand slips easily up his shirt, down his pants, quick to remove the fabric that separates us.