was faithful to be present and engaged. She would burn a kind of truth, a peace from God, into him. His thoughts of her would come to him throughout the day. A memory, a word, or a laugh. Each moment fresh to him again until he returned home. It was not always that way but he was older now, and they needed each other for so much more now.
Dima distracted the insane cat with food in order to leave the apartment. At first, when his daughter had found the cat he had told her they could not keep it. He informed her that as a patriot, a man of the community, he mustn’t take ownership of the cat. And how Ukrainian neighborhoods pride themselves on how fat they can make their strays. But she so wanted to keep the cat and they took it in because he always held before himself all that he had never provided for her.
He left the apartment, locking both its interior and exterior steel doors. He walked the long damp concrete hall to the building entrance and down the broken steps to the army-green steel entryway. He unlocked both bolts on that door and stepped out to relock them. The morning light reminded him that he lived like a coal-miner. In a full circle before him were five other nine-story structures exactly like his. Falling apart, like his. He put on his sunglasses and lit a cigarette. He caught movement around the center courtyard of the complex. Boys carried on a football match, never disturbing the handful of sleeping homeless men scattered about on the grounds of mixed asphalt, concrete and dirt.
Dima took a moment to look back at his building remembering how this was not always so rundown. When the complex was new, in 1985, when he worked the factory job he earned in military service. The courtyard had clean-cut grass and the city provided free outdoor films every weekend. The playground was newly painted and filled with young, well-dressed children laughing in the swings, not with prostitutes flicking cigarettes and killing daylight boredom. He sighed, stomped out his own smoke, and buried it into the dirt while he reordered his mind for work. This is life.
The 1982 Volga was a solid metal box coated with a mix of faded yellow paint and sea-air rust, and always unlocked because no one messed with the taxis. Dima had taken a loan five years earlier to buy it off an army buddy who had stolen it from Kazakhstan. The loan officer in Kiev, who only had a first name, had printed off papers that magically made the deal legal.
It was Dima’s now, mostly, even if he had to keep a ‘roof’ on it by paying protection fees to the local police every month. And he was also, despite his efforts to avoid it, part of an unofficial union that might call on him to transport cargo at any time. Though that had only happened once, he hoped it never would again.
Dima switched the fuel line to the two natural gas tanks in his trunk. It hurt his passenger luggage space, but liquid fuel was expensive. Most of his passengers didn’t own luggage anyhow, just the usual favorite plastic bag that every Ukrainian carried everywhere. He kissed his fingers and pressed them against the icon of Mary and Jesus glued to the center of his dashboard. Then he habitually checked the one of Saint Augustine on the visor.
The night rain had filled the many pot-holes along his way, but the holes were not hidden to Dima. They were mapped in his mind. A friend once joked that Dima drove left and right more often than straight. But in this, Dima was a serious man. A tire or axle could set him back a week’s pay and cost him a month of weekends to make it up.
The train station was typical of a mid-sized city station in America in the 1930s, when passenger trains were not yet unimportant. Unlike the larger cities, the Berdyansk station was clean and organized. Where the Kiev station had a marketplace atmosphere, mostly no one was here unless involved in travel. Dima parked outside the front entrance with the rest of the local competition. Someone had called him from Kiev needing a taxi available to babysit his American for the day. He still wasn’t sure how the man who called about the American got his number, but he sounded young and a little educated. However any lack of swear words qualified as that for Dima. The caller said the man would have red hair and would pull into the station at 10:30. An easy find.
So many bags, Americans. He worried as he looked around at the other taxis. Their foreign cars had the room for the bags and the man could change his mind. He left his taxi and walked through an exiting crowd to be ready. He would only have to watch maybe five people at a time to catch any with red hair. He barely caught the hair under an expensive ball-cap, but the man only had a small duffle bag. Italian? Then he remembered the man was just in town for the day, and maybe he had sense about him. Dima pushed his way through to the man and stepped in front of him, hat in both hands. “Excuse, sir,” he said.
“You my guy?” the man asked.
“Dima. I spoke your boss on phone. To pick you up.”
“Okay. Good. You speak English. He’s not my boss. The word is facilitator.” He averted his eyes when he spoke. “It doesn’t matter.”
Dima took the man’s bag and led him to the car. He realized he still had a cigarette in his mouth and quickly spit it out.
“This is it?”
“Da, sir.”
“Whatever. Take me to the Hotel Berdyansk. I need to check in and gonna need you to run an errand. You understand?”
“Da.”
On the drive to the hotel Dima opened his mouth to ask the usual, expecting the usual. He stopped himself not knowing why, only knowing that he was uncomfortable. Normally, he would ask why they were here and the plain-spoken Americans would say they were on a church mission trip. Or students there for a conference. Sometimes a stressed couple to adopt a child from one of the orphanages – there were three.
Dima sensed that this man was different. He glanced in the rear-view mirror and found the man staring back at him, directly. Dima bounced his eyes back to the road and straightened the icon on his dash as an excuse to touch it.
“Dima, right?”
“Da.”
“Dima, I’m on a tight schedule. Here is what I need. I may need you to translate for me at the hotel, maybe not. Then we make a stop at the courthouse. You know where that is?”
“Da. Khomyak Street.”
“Good. While I’m there you go to Soba. Have them reserve the best table, flowers, best wine. All that. For 4:00 dinner, okay?”
“Da.”
The drive was silent until they reached the hotel. Dima waited outside, paced, smoked. He was relieved that the man didn’t need him inside. He walked towards the hotel lobby windows, mostly to see if some of his associates were there. He saw two drivers he knew sitting in the lounge playing on their Nokias. After counting the number of prostitutes inside he guessed his friends were doing pick-ups from late-night drop-offs. He called his wife and talked about his daughter, as they lately often did.
“Dima, she’s missing three days of clothes, which is almost all she has. I’m scared she’s …”
“Katya is always trading clothes with her friends. You worry too much,” Dima said.
“Will you check on her?” his wife asked.
“Da, da.”
His passenger planned on running him hard, but he would make it work somehow.
The man finally came out and, already behind schedule, opened his own door to get into the taxi. Their next stop was five blocks
