The Stone Bridge

The Bridge

THE BRIDGE

In august the ruble collapsed, and life shattered. i didn’t believe in the end of Sberbank and a people’s uprising, but everyone rushed to withdraw their money, and every morning at half-past nine I called the Sberbank office at Novopetrovskaya: are you allowing withdrawals? They gave out currency in portions.

The manager laid out the last three thousand, told me to sign in triplicate — and closed the account.

“Thank you.”

At the next teller’s window a gray-haired man refused to budge: “Give me my money!”

“Oleg Semyonovich, your pension isn’t here yet!”

“I don’t need the pension — give me my money!”

“Oleg Semyonovich, the money hasn’t arrived yet!”

“Hasn’t arrived? Everyone’s getting money, but not me, where’s my money?”

“At the Finance Ministry, with Yeltsin.”

“So I’ll go to Yeltsin then. I’m not just anyone, I’m,” he goes on stabbing his red identity card with a crooked finger, “a war veteran. Are you saying there’s no money for me?”

“There’d be money if you didn’t drink it up. I don’t know, ask your kids, ask your son, he’ll give you some.”

“I don’t have a son!”

I stopped listening, and my thoughts turned to the women in my life, familiar and unfamiliar. Whom to go to in times like these? The new or the tried and true? I had realized a long time ago that I ought to quit turning up in strange beds, but I seemed to need this truth brought home to me endlessly. Indeed, I seemed always to need undiscovered secrets, the heart-stopping instant of first nakedness, the thud, like a bell, in my chest; I needed new telephone numbers, whose seven digits promised the thrill of new parents, unmet neighbors, grandmas with phenomenal hearing, mischievous younger brothers, dogs that bit through telephone cords, and fathers who noiselessly picked up the receivers on parallel lines.

I thought of a few names, then called the one who lived closest:

“Yes,” I said, “today, now, yes, I was just out of town, I called and you weren’t there, I’ll just come to your office, where are you now?”

“On Krzhizhanovsky, the oil and gas company, Sibur.”

I met her there. She walked up to me, smiling, in red pointy-toed shoes, a black and white skirt on her wide hips. We crossed the street to an establishment that seemed halfway between bar and cafe; the waiter and the barman, dressed in white shirts, sat with their heads tossed back, faces up to the sun, on white plastic chairs they’d pulled out onto the porch.

She was seated across from me at a table in a small dining room, a large, vintage photo of Moscow on the wall, the yellow dome of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior still intact, and the waiter nodded confidently as she leafed through her menu, indicating that of course the restaurant would have each item on hand.

We ordered. I looked at her brown shoulders and asked, attempting to recall the details of her life: does your daughter still dance with that theater group? Did that friend of yours ever marry her Frenchman? Did your father find a job?

She asked about me. I answered: Me? I’m in retail now. No, nothing happened, why do you ask? She didn’t know why. Perhaps she hadn’t gotten enough sleep, she said.

At that point, absently and for no reason, we each turned to the window just in time to see the waiter making a furtive beeline for a store on the corner to buy everything we had just ordered.

We chatted further and she laughed, but I felt my throat catch, a flash of nausea at the hint of something alien in her manner, as if on the first visit to my dacha after winter I had found the place defiled by squatters, clothes scattered, drawers yanked out of dressers.

“The company’s cutting staff,” she went on. “No one knows anything for certain. Some say that everyone will be fired and Gazprom will bring its own team. Others say it’s only the management that’ll have to go, and everyone else will actually get a raise. Also I decided to go back to my husband.”

In the empty room, under the air-conditioners, I understood immediately: there we were, still sitting opposite each other, still waiting for the waiter to come back from the shop, to put the pieces of bread with cheese and ham under the grill, to dice the strawberries and bananas for the fruit salad, to scoop out chocolate ice cream, so that we could eat and speak at leisure — but I wouldn’t touch her. There was only an emptiness waiting for me there, a gaping maw, and snow was blowing in through it.

“I’m sick of going to bed by myself. And of waking up by myself. And my daughter really needs her father. He’s changed a lot, you know. He says he understood everything while I was gone.”

She wouldn’t go anywhere with me. Though in six months I’d likely get a call. Still, maybe she’d give it to me right then and there, in parting? The waiter would still be away awhile, I could hike up her skirt and put her on my lap, this lover of stockings and crotchless panties.

“You’ll move out of the city, of course?”

Her main message out, she then replied hesitantly and with effort:

“Yes, there’s a place we can have in Lozhki village. Solnechnogorsk district.”

“With a woman to help around the house. And a driver to deliver groceries. And three dogs, bull terriers.”

“Two. A bull terrier and a Leonberger.”

“The house must have three floors, though.”

“Four. A sauna and a billiard room in the basement. But what about you? What do you sell?”

“Antiques.”

“Antiques? Any other plans?”

I studied the picture behind her back, squinted and read the title. Apparently, it was the bridge that was the painter’s main subject, not the cathedral that was blown up under Stalin, and later recreated to replace the swimming pool that had replaced the original.

“Me? Well, I’m thinking I’ll work on — the Great Stone Bridge.”

“Where is this bridge? What’s so special about it?”

We talked like this for another hour. Then she left, and I crumpled up the piece of paper on which she’d written her new cell number and left it on the plate. I finished the last of my water. A blue-and-white label on the empty bottle said “Shishkin Forest. Pure drinking water. Still water from artesian well #1-99. Made in Russia. Moscow Oblast, Solnechnogorsk district, Lozhki village.”