as well have been one of her weekend shopping trips to Tulsa with her girlfriends.
They linked hands, walking a few cabin doors down.
Jenny stopped them and spread the curtains on a window. She squeezed his hand while he stared at her looking out at the passing urban landscape.
“We’re almost out of the city now. What are all those metal boxes? Mini-storage?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think so. Those are assigned car garages for the nearby apartment buildings.”
“Oh. That makes sense. There are a lot of small cars here.”
“Really? Whatever.”
“What?”
“Look at those garages. How can you validate them? They’re ugly welded steel boxes. And the apartments are worse than our ghettos at best.”
“What’s your point, Martin?”
“Nothing. I feel weird here. Everybody zipping along a never-ending junkyard and acting like everything is normal.”
“This is their normal. Get some sleep,” Jenny said.
She smiled and kissed him good-night.
Back in his cabin, Martin climbed into his top bunk. He lay there; face three inches from the ceiling, struggling to breathe for several hours. Though brochures declared some trains were now fitted with air-conditioning, his was not. The train shuddered through several slowing-to-stop experiences. One seemed to take longer to slow than others as outside lights flash-filled his cabin. Sensing the big city he saw on the map earlier and still in his clothes, he crept quietly out of the compartment and out onto the terminal platform.
A monotone Russian female voice echoed through the air reading something informative and boring over the station loud-speakers. The tone reminded him of that hollow flat gong and dull sound of the Greenwich Mean Time statement on short-wave radios. The kind his uncle gave when he was a kid. The one he had fiddled with in lieu of having friends. The station was surprisingly quiet and empty in the darkness of early morning for a city as large as Dnepropetrovsk. He walked along the long line of makeshift kiosks made of old cargo pallets covered with large canvas and plastic tarps. Some kiosk owners slept curled next to their sales-stands, wrapped tightly in blankets and Persian carpets. He imagined how busy they would soon become, full of smiles and desperate sales pitches. All of them running back and forth from train to train to make change.
A large cement slab stage separated train tracks, providing Martin ample room to pace and stroll. All the trains were painted solid blue, each with a long yellow stripe along the sides, matching the colors of the national flag. Most of the boxcars were newer, maybe ten to twenty years old. The older trains interested him more as he imagined early cold war drama around them. Never leaving sight of his train car, Martin counted the cars as he walked. His home was on the other side of the planet while here he was a stranger. He felt the sudden loneliness of that fact.
Jenny had urged—and he had planned to follow her suggestions—to take many pictures and make diary entries, interacting with as many locals as possible to deepen his travel experience. But his poor disposition concerning change and the stress of it was too much. Every time he thought to follow her recommendations, he simply did not have the energy. He was into day two of ten and had no more interest in anything than getting to day ten and ending the trip. To get back to the life he had neglected to reflect upon and appreciate. But at the same time, Martin knew he was wasting something good for himself, something lasting.
The question burned from his chest, “Why do I do what I don’t want to do? Why don’t I do what I want to do?”
The woman’s voice came over the speakers again. This time he associated the sound of it to a scene in Doctor Zhivago, adding another layer to his surreal experience. She mentioned the transit number for his train and he double-checked his ticket. One of the attendants of his train hung from the edge of the steps, waving him over.
It was accommodating to have their assistance in getting back to the right car quickly, but it annoyed him. He certainly didn’t need anyone’s help.
Berdyansk, Ukraine
Dima woke, like most every morning, to his spastic cat attacking his feet. He punted the cat off the bed and rolled himself upright, carefully setting his feet to the floor, wary of another ambush. He reached one hand behind him, habitually, to feel his wife at rest. The power had come back on in the middle of the night so the radio and TV competed for his attention as he moved through his second-floor one-room flat. On his way into the kitchen, he stopped to silence Lady Gaga and the Ukrainian version of the sitcom The Nanny. The room was divided by a wooden fold-out panel he had devised from lumber found near the complex dumpster. For this, as with all his ideas, he was inspired by a need. In this case the idea was prompted when his daughter became a teenager and needed her privacy. In recent years it also helped for when his brother-in-law would sometimes stop over, uninvited, to sleep off his vodka binges.
In the kitchen he parted the yellowed linen curtains and pulled open the windows. He had installed them to open inwards so they would stop banging against the steel bars attached to the window frame outside. Dima didn’t trust the city tap water except to water his wife’s plants along the windowsill. He watered them now, as he did every morning. He set down the watering cup and turned to the kitchen counter to plug in his sheet-metal electrolysis contraption, and poured the tap water into the attached filter. The white and yellow sediment that dropped to the container’s bottom always fascinated him. Dima broke open a packet of oatmeal and poured the clean water into a separate tin pot to boil. Warm oatmeal and a banana for breakfast. He sat at the table and waited, sipping on thick black Turkish coffee made from water saved from the day before.
He was almost happy this morning because he had gotten some guaranteed business. Looked like it would be a solid day’s worth of carting an American around town. They tipped better than anyone, but it was never in a haughty way like the way some of the Europeans did. Sometimes it was worse, though, because Americans often conveyed a kind of desperate compassion that reminded him he was in need.
His daughter was getting dressed for work at the kiosk on the boardwalk. The tourist season was about to hit and half of Kiev and Moscow would descend upon them. She walked into the kitchen and Dima forced his eyes to his bowl for as long as possible.
“It’s not supposed to be that hot today,” Dima croaked.
“Papa, please. These are normal clothes.”
“What clothes?”
“Papa!”
Dima inwardly berated himself again for the early years. The neglect, driving the trucks. Always gone. Food, the need of it always on his mind. Did whatever it took to get them the food, maybe some education. In the end his daughter was as skinny as a bamboo rod and probably had read three books in her life. He stared at his bowl with intense disdain. This is life. He left the bowl half-eaten and went to the room to get his jacket. On a hot day everyone would know why he wore a jacket. People need only to think he carried a knife or gun to keep him safe from unknown troubles. His wife was up now and came to the hall to thank him for boiling the water. She placed his prized cap on his head. For a moment they
