know you heard us talking. I don’t need to know how much you heard, you understand. That is enough to know.”
“Why are you talking to me?” he asked.
“I want you to know how serious this is. You know the cook – she was here only six weeks.”
He did remember. The woman had simply disappeared one day. But she had made friends in her short time and they tracked her down to her home town in time to attend the funeral. Because she had accidentally drowned three days before. Drowned in a river she had grown up swimming in every summer of her youth.
The bus pulled up to the curb and the man stood with no intention of a response. Something in him, some primal survival message, told him to speak before boarding the bus. “I understand,” he said.
“Good. Very important.”
“Da,” he replied.
The man stepped onto the bus, found his window seat and dropped into it. He knew she was looking at him but he could not look back. The bus moved and after some time he found the interest to look out the window as they passed the city port and then flowed through downtown Mariupol. The bus slowed and he peered down at two policemen talking it up with each other. He recognized the short one from a day in the director’s waiting room. The grounds-keeper had been there replacing a telephone the director had ripped from the wall and thrown against another wall. The short policeman had been there to get paid for turning a blind eye. When he was young, he believed the uniformed men were really something. They were the people’s refuge and ambassadors of the law. He knew now that the Soviet dream was just a prelude to a nightmare. His people were stronger than that and their heritage deeper. He had always imagined his last days to be of respect and honor. But the image was only four hours old and remained with him. He had been on that wing of the second floor a hundred thousand times before. This day was just unfortunate.
Three blocks from his Kiev hotel, he stood in front of the doors. The doors to the shop were obviously locked but Martin Johnson shook them anyhow. His need for caffeine hoped in any possibility. Even that which was seen with his eyes was not necessarily true, not absolutely. Dawn was breaking but the shopkeepers were not yet active. He turned around to see only old men slouching on park benches, chatting, feeding pigeons breakfast, and one set playing chess. Martin remembered Benjamin Franklin’s saying of “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”. From the looks of the men, Martin learned that health and wealth had very subjective and circumstantial definitions. He had left a note for his wife, Jenny, early in the morning that he would be venturing out alone and scribbled down the number to his new cell phone. He started to approach the old men but changed his mind. Six months of hard study prior to this trip and he was still not confident in his Russian enough for random conversations.
This first cool morning in-country, an overwhelming pang settled in his gut as he left the storefront to walk the city sidewalks. It was mostly because of his need of coffee but he could not ignore the fact of his new anxiety. The last time he felt something like this was prior to his wedding day. Not a foreboding, instead a kind of concentrated gravity, deep in meaning and personal.
Martin didn’t like radical change or discomfort of any kind. Joining up with the little group on their mission to help an orphanage was something he had committed to for a lack of something better to do. He was diligent in this and in life to always count the cost, to never blindly leap into anything new. With all of his preparation, and being just a day into Ukraine, it did not feel like a honeymoon. He couldn’t even get coffee the instant he wanted it and feared that there might be more inconveniences that lay ahead.
As he walked the endless broken and cracked asphalt sidewalks of Kiev, the mix of grand Stalin period buildings with their tall columns, carved stone window frames and inlaid with first floor cheaply built modern store-fronts enthralled Martin. He worked his mind away from his normal inclinations and passions, thinking of prayer but without praying. This thing prayer only came to him in times of extreme distress or boredom. He crossed a river; the bridge’s entry way was marked by tall stone posts, topped with golden hammer and sickle ornaments. Martin passed over to the island and then meandered down towards the left embankment of the Dnieper River. A whole community of Soviet period apartment high-rises nestled in place on what his map said was an historic artificial island called Rusanivsky. Nothing was open there either. He continued on carefully down cement steps to the canal level and rested on what was left of a green painted wooden park bench at the water’s edge. He would wait the shopkeepers out. Looking out to the new light expanding across the algae infested water, he ran through the questions burdening him, questions he had not been used to asking. Why was he so tense? What lay ahead for him in the next 10 days? No matter, he was happy just to not be working wherever he might be. If nothing else, he planned to make a vacation out of it all.
Martin looked at his watch and thought of the meetings and ledgers he would normally be entertaining at work at that time. For the 15 years since leaving college, he had been an accountant with the small company. A job he also did simply for lack of interest in something else to do. Most of his promotions were generated by attrition and had been fittingly anticlimactic. It was rumoured that he was on a short list for the future position of comptroller. He knew he didn’t “get along” as well as others, so this had surprised him. Then he remembered the time difference. He’d actually be fast asleep if back home. Martin looked to his map and bits of history knowledge drifted to the forward of his thoughts but the power of their certainty fizzled. The “Evil Empire”, the name he’d been taught from his youth, clearly did not fit this place, or the people. They struggled, maybe, under an overtly oppressive government, but were not partakers of that power. Not folks like him anyhow. In fact, so far it seemed much like his Oklahoma but in an alternate universe. A universe without an EPA, building codes, or fast food and large grocery chains every hundred feet. Martin tightly clamped his eyes and pressed his thoughts out into a single desire and plea to have the wretched question of his anxiety answered. He waited as if for a miracle cure to cancer. But nothing. An hour later, nothing, the pressure of an unspoken purpose was still enveloping him.
He trudged himself back the way he had come and slowly passed one lone old man sitting on another bench. The man, in his 80s, leaned forward with his arms folded over his crossed legs. Martin estimated that his wide-lapelled plaid suit coat must have survived for at least forty years. He was compelled to stop before the man and felt strangely at home near him. The man looked at him as someone pleased, a kind of lonely old uncle expectant of company.
“Hello,” Martin said in his uncertain Russian.
“Hello, friend.”
They remained in silence for a time, what seemed like a very long time to Martin. The man never dropped his aged but alert piercing blue eyes from him.
“You are American,” the man said in English.
“You know?” Martin asked.
“Yes. You are bold.”
“Your English is good,” Martin replied. Bold?
“Thank you. You see that ship there? By the crane.”
“Yes,” Martin answered.
“It’s named after an older riverboat. I worked on that one.”
“Providence.” Martin said.
“Very good. You read Russian.”
“Well, I know the alphabet. You know where I can get coffee?” Martin again
