Rudy's Rules for Travel Page 8

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because they are there.”

  As I am pondering just how crazy this man is, Rudy shakes his head and says in admiration, “What a guy.”

  The drama increases as we enter the outskirts of Moscow in search of our hotel. It takes us awhile to realize that the bus is circling the city, rounding the same blocks repeatedly, until an hour, then two, go by. Antonina has not been allowed to carry a city map.

  Eventually an answer is found standing on a curb. Antonina suddenly orders our driver to pull over so that she might invite onto the bus a well-decorated military man she calls General. Generals have maps.

  AFTER our introduction to Russia in its humbler towns, the Moscow hotel is startling—a glass and chrome high rise, a picture of modern construction that could stand proudly in any American metropolis.

  Inside, however, the hotel has amenities that do not remind us of home. We learn at the check-in counter that under no circumstances can we change rooms, as ours has been prepared for us alone. A key monitor sits on each floor, between the stairwell and elevator. She gives us our key to open our door, and we return it to her each time for “safekeeping.” A light fixture in each room hangs low and is mysteriously connected to the telephone concierge service—when we talk to each other about how cold the room is, the phone rings and an operator inquires about our number of blankets. In the dining room, a lamp hangs low in the midst of each small table. One can speak below it of a desire for more borscht and, within minutes, have it brought from the kitchen. Each guest room has a small television that broadcasts what we presume is national news, as well as film footage nearly twenty years old of the Los Angeles Watts riots.

  Late that first night in Moscow, Rudy beckons me to the window at the end of our hallway, where we can see the city in all its lights spread out below us.

  “This is a formidable country, a formidable force,” he says quietly.

  I startle. Do I hear a measure of fear in his voice?

  If it is fear that I hear and fear I share, it begins to fade a bit in both of us. The Russian treasures in Moscow and Leningrad—St. Basil’s, the Kremlin, the Hermitage, the Winter Palace, operas and ballets—are simply too beautiful to be obscured by fear.

  I am enthralled by the Moscow Circus troupe, but I most remember the popcorn man. Reaching the head of a long line, I hand carefully counted Russian currency to the full-bearded, apron-clad popcorn vendor.

  He smiles a bit at the correct change, looks up, and asks, “Amer-i-cain?”

  I nod yes and try to smile, aware the people in the long line behind me are leaning forward and have gone quiet.

  The man’s demeanor shifts and he scowls dramatically. “You, you have Reag-onn. Pres-dent Reag-gon.”

  I nod again, guiltily.

  “We, we have Andropov.”

  The popcorn man then lifts his two fists, facing them toward each other in mock battle, and raises his voice. “Ugh, ugh on Reag-gon, Ugh on Andropov. No. No.”

  Fists lowered then, he bursts into a wide smile and extends both arms toward me. “But you. Me. Yes, yes.” I stop holding my breath and look behind me. The people in line only stare.

  There is no denying that our group misses the Christmas season of home. The Russian white-fur-clad Father Winter is just not enough of a substitute, and the churches turned cold museums offer little comfort.

  I answer a soft knock one night at our Moscow hotel room. The middle-aged sturdy woman, our key monitor, stands holding a foot-high thin plastic tree. She hands it to me and points to our suitcases. She wants us to keep the tree. What a time for language to fail us, when we want to protest her generosity, to say the tree should stay with her and her family, to say we love her shy smile when every day she hands us our key. But we know only a simple “thank you,” and the way she backs carefully out the door rules out our hugs.

  The next day when she hands us our room key, she lowers her eyes, and we fear we have come too close. But that evening she knocks again, and this time her gestures say I should follow her. She leads me to a windowless, gray room one fourth the size of ours, her home. She pulls a footstool from under the narrow bed and indicates I am to climb on it to retrieve a box from the top closet shelf. When I do, I see the box holds a strand of tiny red, white, and green lights. They are for me.

  As the days go on, Antonina relaxes her grip on us and Rudy slips through the opening in her vigilance. She carefully avoids looking at his empty seat on the bus, for it means he has gone off in his disguise, speaking basic German, wearing old European shoes, hat, and coat. Rudy has discovered the Moscow subway system and the city is his.

  In the evenings, he and I walk through the hotel so that he can tell of the day’s adventures without the presence of our room’s listening lamp. He speaks of meeting a woman who wants to go with him to America; learning from police that one should not take pictures in a subway station no matter how grand the art; finding the Intourist office staffed by armed forces, not travel agents; and helping the department store clerk replace her abacus with a new credit card machine. Nothing in his travels upsets him except seeing the young, delicate mother in the Russian military museum, proudly showing her three-year-old the arsenal.

  IN the Leningrad hotel each night before dinner, Rudy walks slowly past the lobby bar on his way to the tourist dining room. I know it is just a matter of time before he can no longer resist the urge to meet and mingle over evening vodka. He has already visited with hotel janitors in their break room where they start the day with Fanta and vodka. True enough—one evening I find him sitting in the midst of six smartly dressed young Russians.

  “Hi, honey. My friends here asked if my jacket is Ralph Lauren and I said it was Goodwill Thrift. They think I’m joking. Their television says all Americans are rich.”

  I smile one of those tentative little pulls on the lower lip, something perhaps more like a grimace. This does not feel safe.

  The three girls take turns opening their bags to show me the fruits of their shopping tour, one displaying a new warm hat, another pulling out a brown wool sweater, the third showing three boxes of embossed greeting cards depicting the white-fur-clad Father Winter amidst a field of blue and white snowflakes.

  The sharing complete, we learn the young couples have secrets to tell. One of the girls, an international telephone operator, knows just enough English to translate in a whisper for her friends.

  “America should know. Children here, ten years old, they join Young Pioneers. They are trained to be soldiers. The television up in your room, it shows them marching in the towns.”

  “The government says homosexuals are mentally ill. They put them in institutions for years, lifetimes.”

  Her revelations end abruptly when her boyfriend notices three men in long black coats enter the lobby.

  “Do not look up,” the young man says to Rudy and me. “Go to the bar. You do not know us.”

  Rudy goes to order a drink while I sit unable to will my legs to movement. The young people head for the outside doors, and the three men do too. As she leaves, one of the girls reaches over me, placing a bag in my lap, saying, “For American lady.”

  A full ten minutes later, when our new friends are gone, when at last my fingers will move, I open the bag and find the three boxes of Father Winter greeting cards. On each card, Father Winter wears a luxurious white fur coat and hat, and carries an elegant walking stick.

  At breakfast on our last morning in Russia, Hanna in that quiet voice tells us that our group has lost members. Ingrid has flown off in the night for Paris with Henri and her steamer trunk. Her departure is likely a relief for Russian commanders, for each time she has alighted our bus, young soldiers have followed her like ducklings.

  “To think,” Rudy says, “one American blonde very nearly brought down the entire Russian military.”

  But Hanna says that Ingrid and her new love are not the only group members missing. We learn that earlier that same morning two black-coa
ted men in a gray van had picked up Mark where he waited in the snow on the corner outside the hotel. Mark had apparently defected to Russia.

  Hanna reminds us that those who have gone have left behind in our group their family or lovers, and that we are now a community with responsibilities.

  We are a somber group boarding our bus in Leningrad for our last event, scheduled to partake in what Antonina describes as our “culminating cultural experience” before leaving on the night train to Finland. There will, she says, be a “roundtable discussion” with Russian civic leaders about international relations and World War II experiences. In our days in Russia, we have grown more and more aware that the war, most especially the brutal siege and blockade of Leningrad at the hands of the German Army, is not in the past here, but very much present. And how could it not be? Our local guides cried telling of frozen winter nights, starvation, agonizing deaths of parents, grandparents, children, all defenseless for over two years, over eight hundred days, in a city cut off from food, medicines, supplies, where flour was mixed in half measure with sawdust to form bread secured by ration cards. There is not a way to forget.

  The five veterans in our group look forward to the exchange, to talking of a war when Americans and Russians fought on the same side to defeat the German Army. What our veterans have not reckoned with is that the still-present feelings of abandonment and horror in Leningrad are accompanied by anger and blame. Hanna alone seems frightened.

  As we enter the auditorium, we see there is no round table, only metal folding chairs on the floor facing six padded recliners lined up on a stage high above us. Hanna takes a metal chair and moves it far back to the corner of the large room, where she will sit. All of us, our group and those six on the stage, keep bundled up in coats and scarves against the frigid room and atmosphere. A translator comes to the microphone and the speeches begin. The two hours are like twenty—a mix of angry tears, recriminations, pictures of lost loved ones held high. There is such sorrow and anger in the chairs above us as they cry, “America left us, the world left us, left us for years to freeze and die.”

  But there is also sorrow and anger on the auditorium floor. Our World War II veterans are not invited to speak, but they nonetheless rise one by one, telling of battles they fought, flights they endured, comrades, brothers they lost. America was being wrongly accused, they say. “We did what we could. The war was everywhere.”

  I hold onto Rudy’s hand, silently begging him to stay seated. His hands are always warm, but today they are ice.

  He squeezes my hand and whispers, “Don’t worry. I’m not adding to this. There’s nothing to say to make it better.”

  The loud voices and outrage continue until, speaking of his years as a prisoner of war, the man who wants now to see villages of Siberia and Micronesia sobs and sobs. It is quiet for what seems a long time, each side replaying its own nightmares. In the end, another of our group, a woman, rises and says the words I want to say but cannot.

  “We are so sorry. We are so sorry for all that happened, both sides, to all our men and families. We are so sorry.”

  There is no response from the men on the stage, only staring eyes.

  From within the silence that continues, Hanna stands, and her voice is softer than ever. “It is time to go now. It is time for your train.”

  We have a hard time rising from our chairs, then moving toward the door. It is as if we are waking slowly from a long and frightening night and stumbling about for balance, balance that eludes us. Our veterans still weep but more and more quietly, the rest of us forming tight, protective rings around each of them.

  We drive to the station in a soundless bus and board a heavily guarded train.

  Snowfall envelops us as our old, rattling train starts to move away from the dark Leningrad station. In this one way, our trip to Russia ends as it began: as on our first day here, we press our faces against the foggy windows, straining to make sense of bleak landscape. But in many other ways, nothing is the same. We are not the group that entered the country three weeks ago. One of us defected; two ran off to Paris; two others gave up early, lured by a sunny Spanish coast. Those of us who remain are not who we were. We are not the smiling Americans who ran up a hillside to visit a couple in their dacha, nor are we the tourists who laughingly called for more soup through the lamp that hung above a café table.

  Rudy has spoken little since the afternoon encounter with the Russian veterans. When I ask him how he is feeling, he reaches across for my hand and says, “Later. We’ll talk later. It was too much talk today.”

  I know what he means. When I try to look out the small train window, I see and hear only the six men on the stage today, screaming, unyielding. It takes a long time before those faces begin to blur—and there are others before me: the key lady, the young Russians, my popcorn man.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WE ARE, WE HOPE, TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK NIGHT from Russia to the Finnish border. Rudy tries to verify our destination, speaking loudly to the guard outside our compartment. “Finland? We go Finland?” Worse yet, he tries in Russian. The guard looks more confused and, after several attempts, Rudy concludes that his handy book of Russian phrases has failed him again.

  Our train compartments are narrow, holding two passengers sitting knee-to-knee, yet tour mates do not gather in the wide, guarded corridor to share stories or souvenirs. Only in the bathroom line do we exchange messages through wide-eyed looks, glances toward guards, fingers crossed. One man in line has a small compass that he pulls from his pocket; showing it to us, his smile says we are in fact traveling in the direction of Helsinki.

  “So far, so good,” Rudy responds.

  He tries to be his usual optimistic self, even though we both know it is a façade designed to keep me from a bout of embarrassing primal screams. “Nothing to worry about, Mare. They’re probably glad to get rid of us. We weren’t exactly compliant communists.”

  I see things a little differently. “Think of how much we’d be worth in ransom.”

  He raises his eyebrows, silently looks at me over his reading glasses, and I concede. “Well, okay, maybe not much.”

  The night is long, punctuated only by the visits of an elderly, bent-over steward dressed in a worn uniform. The man carries an old wooden tray, every time with the same provisions: a dry ham sandwich to be shared and tea in two glass mugs, each covered with elaborate silver work. The mugs catch Rudy’s eye.

  “Beautiful,” he says, tracing the filigreed silver designs with his fingers. “Very beautiful, sir.”

  The steward is puzzled, but when Rudy adds a broad smile and holds one of the mugs in a gesture to his heart, the man nods.

  In the still-dark early morning, the train slows as if approaching a station or—better yet—a border. We hear each compartment’s sliding door being closed tight and locked from the outside. I need a bathroom, and I am not alone. Cries of anguish come from compartments all around us. One by one the doors are unlocked and two guards squeeze into each tiny room, peruse passports and visas, and shine flashlights under benches and behind window coverings.

  No, no one extra boarded in Leningrad, spent the night behind our tattered curtain, or shared our ham sandwich. Once assured of our innocence, the guards unlock our door and Rudy lifts our cases down from the overhead rack. Just then our steward quietly enters the compartment carrying a brown paper bag. He gestures for us to look inside and there they are, the two silver mugs. They are going home with us. We know this because he closes the door, then helps Rudy open his case and stuff them between underwear and pajamas. My sense of impending doom rises; I know our treasures will be found by customs. I just don’t know which customs.

  Rudy gives me a look that says, “Pull it together. We cannot hurt his feelings.”

  I flash him the “All right, all right” response.

  We have each secreted away a few Russian coins and now we pull them out for our benefactor. “Nyet,” he says, “Nyet,” shaking his head. He place
s one hand to his heart and gives a small bow as he steps back into the corridor.

  The border station is a long wooden structure furnished with rough-hewn benches. A small table is lined with the familiar sandwiches and tea is joined by hot cocoa. My travel companions are jubilant as Finnish agents do a cursory check of passports and cases, then escort each of us across an icy path to a comfortable bus waiting outside, lights and heater blasting against the yet-to-be-sunrise morning.

  I do not look happy, our travel companions observe. Don’t I realize our journey is over? They are right. I have fought tears since the steward backed out of our compartment. Actually, I have fought tears since I met the key lady.

  “IT’S you, it’s really you,” the teenage girl in sandals screams as she sees that our new bus driver is our earlier bus driver, the one she sadly kissed good-bye two weeks ago when we crossed into Russia. True enough, her Christmas present from the tour company has arrived, and she once again seats herself behind him so that she might view in the mirror those unforgettable brown eyes and tousled blond curls.

  Christmas Eve? It can’t be. Apparently in the land of Father Winter we lost track of our own holidays. But our guide Hanna stands at the front of the bus, all alone with no Intourist guide, microphone in hand and smiling broadly, telling us, “You have been good. It’s time for you to meet Santa Claus.”