The Stone Bridge

THE FINNISH SKIER I’ve never won anything in my life. On Sundays, there weren’t many French, German or English tourists. The tour buses brought Poles, and uniformly faceless Chinese in baggy trenches came prowling. And what did they want? Gzhel ceramics, headscarves, matryoshka dolls… Serious customers came to Izmailovo market on Saturdays. One didn’t expect much on a Sunday. I nodded to my neighbor Rakhmatullin — he dealt in iron goods: samovars from the Batashov Company, old weights, padlocks, irons, bells and Melchior cup-holders from the old Kolchugino factory with the Kremlin depicted on them. Watch my things, the nod said, and I plodded to the steps leading down to the flea market. There, on wind-blown, unlit wooden balconies, tramps, orphans rejected by school and proud old ladies laid out on blankets and wax cloths the refuse of humanity scavenged and stolen from abandoned and blighted buildings: bald dolls with rolled-up eyes, kerosene lamps, tin boxes that had contained sweets and tea from “Vysotsky and Co” with the famous tall ship on the logo, Christmas decorations made of colored cardboard, and scraps of wigs that looked like scalps. You could also find tin soldiers, but they were a rarity, there were mainly just plastic soldiers and toy monsters from Kinder Surprise eggs, but last June I had bought the vintage toy set “Soldiers of the Revolution” in excellent condition for a mere 300 rubles here, and sold them online on Molotok for 200 dollars. Locals repeated a story about an old lady who was once seen here taking “whatever I can get for them” for Red Cossacks from the 1940s, which sell for 1,500 dollars each on the Internet. Not many people have seen the Cossacks even in photographs, and no one knows for certain how many and which ones there are in a set, and she didn’t even have 400 rubles to pay for a place. Why couldn’t I ever run into an old lady like that? Around Sunday lunchtime, the hot-shot souvenir sellers, connoisseurs of icons and porcelain, would shut up their goods under iron shutters and come down to the flea market with a lazy, lordly gait to look for an easy catch, to pick over the washed-up rubbish while the locals kept a nervous, hostile silence. There would never be anything left, almost never. “Coffee, please!” I called out to the Vietnamese woman in a white apron who was pushing a cart loaded with thermoses, shrink-wrapped sandwiches and a crockpot of sausages. For 10 rubles I got a steaming plastic cup, and took two more steps, before I heard Rakhmatullin call out: “The owner’s coming… Vasilich, you’ve got a customer! Come back here!” Just as there are borrowed days in spring that smell of autumn, this September Sunday was paying back its debts with sun and blue sky, as if the summer were taking a backward look. A guy with a foreign-looking face enhanced by just the right amount of tan was looking at my soldiers. He grabbed one and held it up right in front of his nose, turning it to examine it closely. Which one did he grab there, this sunburnt guy with a black coat over a white shirt, his striped scarf tied in a gay-looking knot under his throat? I looked closer. “Hyello! Eett ees skyer solzher of Feenneesh vor. Eexcluzeev. Vahn hahndreed dollars,” I said, in my best English. The guy shook his head in amazement, making his black curls bounce around his face. “Would you just look at this!” He called out, in Russian, to a friend who had the burly appearance of the guy’s driver-c*m-bodyguard. “A hundred!” and he placed the soldier on the shabby counter to have a better look. The faceless tin skier in his camouflage coat, covered with flecks of green paint, had his right foot forward in an unhurried movement. He had gloves, ski poles, boots that had long lost their black color, and a machine gun slung over his stomach with the muzzle pointing upward… The helmet, buffed by a thousand touches, gave off a dull-lead gleam. One of my favorite soldiers. I don’t like them all equally. I don’t like the Bryansk Sailors on Parade for example, or the Battle of Kulikovo set, the Astretsovo Cavalry, or cavalry figures in general. But I collect all the soldiers of the Soviet Army, in 1:35 and 1:48 scales — that’s the name of my enterprise, Soldiers of the USSR. The driver tore himself away from Rakhmatullin’s samovars, and looked from a respectful distance at his boss’s whimsical behavior. “A skier from the Finnish war. That soldier, as it happens, was manufactured in nineteen thirty-nine,” I said, switching back to Russian, and sipping my coffee. The guy studied the bait with a beatific smile on his face. He would be reminiscing now: as a child he probably pushed a tiny skier just like this across deserts of summer dust, amid grass forests, avoiding the dried shoelace forms of desiccated earthworms. “One of these comes along every year or so. I wouldn’t sell my own, my friend asked me to — he needs money to buy medicine. A Canadian bought one like this on E-bay last year for two hundred. It’s one hundred euros for foreigners, but I’ll do a hundred bucks for you. Take it or leave it.” The guy put the soldier in his palm again and brought it up to his face — the way people stare at a medallion with a miniature portrait on it in good-hearted black-and-white films — then he tossed it up in the air and caught it, clenching it firmly with his fingers. “Careful. You break it, you pay for it.” “And what about you?” the jerk smiled thoughtfully. He was a young man of around twenty-five, with a large-lipped mouth and dark empty eyes. Scum like that look older than their age when they’re young, and then younger when they get old. “You dress like that… Like a soldier. Are you a soldier? Will you fight?” There was something forced about his speech, as if he had to remember how to say things in Russian. I wondered if he was drunk. Abruptly, he leaned across the counter and took the collar of my dirty coat in his free hand. He chuckled — he was very much amused by the stars on the coat’s gold buttons. “You have the stars,” he muttered. “You’re the Red Army! Then you must fight.” I looked sideways at the driver — get your moron away from me! — and chuckled along: “You can buy everything. A coat. A cap with a badge. A holster with a pistol. And a document holder with a photo. As long as you’ve got dollars. Have you got dollars?” He let go and immediately scooped up a bunch of yellowed books from the stall. One by one, they slipped out of his grip, fell back onto the counter: Stalin On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, Stalin On the foundations of Leninism, Collective Farmer’s Calendar for 1943… He held on to one, opened at random and started reading: “There is no more so-called freedom of the individual — individual rights are now only recognized for those who have capital, and all other citizens are considered to be raw human material, suitable only for exploitation,” — and then broke off. It was as if he suddenly remembered something. He stared at the text; his lips moved, opening and closing, making shapes around the sounds, and I could see the muscles of his neck twitch around his throat, articulating — he understood what was on the page, but he somehow couldn’t speak it. He would’ve remained stuck in this loop if the driver hadn’t touched him on the elbow. Then he came to life — he slammed the book shut and soberly pronounced the title on the cover: “Stalin. Speech at the Nineteenth Party Congress.” “Four hundred rubles.” “No doubt. Between the pages, you’ll see, there’s a tram ticket. From 1952. For one trip. Thirty kopecks. As a bonus,” he said dryly. “The ticket is unused, you should hang on to it — one never knows. These books are in good condition,” the guy eyed me unpleasantly. “Do you collect them on your trips back there?” Enough smiling. I felt a stab of fear. I focused on sipping my coffee. Drunken smart-ass. He broke off, having made a decision: “Well, that’s enough. Where’s the Finnish skier?” Five five-hundred ruble notes, and the man let the soldier slide from his palm into the pocket of his black coat. The pair walked off, swift and preoccupied, through the rows, toward the main stairs where sellers hawked ragged bear pelts, yellow-fanged boar heads and small armies of stuffed snarling stoats and sables. I pulled on my torn knitted gloves and started putting my soldiers away in biscuit and tea tins. I packed the containers into my newspaper-lined suitcase, tossed the books on top and clicked the locks shut. “You sure conned them. Like a couple of kids,” Rakhmatullin praised me. He was setting out backgammon pieces on a board. “You leaving already? Why so early? Stay a little longer — there’s still money to be made!”