Moscow but Dreaming

YOU DREAM

This is a recurring dream, the kind that lingers, and lately it has become more frequent. And it takes a while to realize that you are not, in fact, standing in front of the brick apartment building, its doorway cavernous and warm, your hands in your pockets, cigarette smoke leaking slowly between your lips and into the frozen air. It takes you a while to even remember that you’ve quit smoking years ago. And yet, here it is, clinging to the collar of your winter coat in a persistent, suffocating cloud, and you can taste it still.

It takes you even longer to remember why you dreamt about this building on the outskirts of Moscow—that you used to live there, but this is not why; you’re there because of the boy who used to live in the same building but the other entrance. You cannot remember his name or whether you were really friends or just nodded at each other, passing by like boats in the lonely concrete sea of the yard, a fringe of consumptive poplars looking nothing like the palms of the tropical isles neither of you were ever likely to see. You know, though, that there was never any unpleasant physicality between the two of you, even after you learned to throw your body between yourself and whomever was trying to get too close.

You sit up in your bed and want a smoke, and whisper to yourself, It was never sex. Never. It was a defensive reflex, the same as a lizard that aborts its tail and escapes while some predator dumbly noses around the mysteriously wriggling appendage. You’d learned to do it with your entire body, and only the spirit escaped, not watching from the distance, running instead for the hills and the razor slash of the distant horizon. It was always about escaping.

Anyway, the boy: as far as you can recall, he had an average and pale face, he was short and slouched, his hands always in the pockets of his ratty hand-me-down winter coat, too short for him. His straight dark hair was always falling ungracefully across his forehead, and the only thing even remotely remarkable about him was the fact that even in the deadest winter cold his eyes remained warm and soft and brown, and he looked at everything with the same subdued delight. Finding oneself in the diffuse cone of his nearsighted gaze was both disconcerting and comforting, since he seemed to be the only person in the entire universe who honestly didn’t want anything from you.

You try to remember what happened to him—you think vaguely that he died as a teen after being drafted, died somewhere in Chechnya; or maybe it was his older brother, and the boy just disappeared one day. Maybe he is still there, at his old apartment, and the memory of his death is a confabulated excuse for not having kept in touch. That seems likely.

It’s time to get up anyway, and you stare out the window; you’ve moved from the grey suburbs to the sort-of center, near the Moscow River’s bend, where it is somewhat less grey and the lights of opulence are visible across the river. You try to be satisfied with your lot in life, but discontent lingers, so you eye your pantyhose, tangled and twisted into a noose, and your short skirt, the one you’re getting too old for, and you keep getting a sneaking suspicion that your immediate boss feels the same way and soon enough he’ll trade you for a newer model, like he does with his BMWs.

So you call in sick. No one minds since there’s yet another economic crisis in progress, and chances are no one will be paid until right before the New Year. And they can type their own damn reports, those twelve managers and only two of you to do the actual work. It doesn’t matter. You dig through your wardrobe and find half-forgotten woolly tights, scratchy and severe and thick, and a long gabardine skirt with a broken zipper, which you fix with a safety pin. You wrap your head in the flowery kerchief every Russian woman owns—even if she never bought one, it was given as a gift, or, barring all normal means of acquisition, spontaneously generated in her apartment. You suspect that yours is one of those, an immaculately gotten kerchief with fat cabbage roses on a velvet-black background with tangled fringe.

It is warmer outside than you expected, what with the dreams of winter and whatnot, but the wind is still cutting and it throws handfuls of bright yellow poplar leaves in your face as you walk away from the embankment. Your shoulders stoop under a grey woolen cardigan, and your walk is awkward, unnatural in flat shoes, and you feel as if you keep falling heavily on your heels, the familiar support elevating them above ground missing. Your face feels naked without the makeup.

St. Nicholas’ church is open and empty, the smell of frankincense and whatever church incense they use there tickling your nostrils and yet infusing you with reflexive peace, conditioned like a dog that salivates at the sound of the bell. You buy a thin brown candle and plop it in front an icon, wherever there’s space, and mumble something prayer-like under your breath.

The mass is long over and only black-clad old women are there, rearranging and correcting falling candles, sweeping the heavy stone tiles of the floor. They look at you with their cataracts, blue like skimmed milk, and mumble under their breath. You catch the word “whore” and try not to take it personally—after all, this is what they call every woman who is not them, whether she is mortifying her flesh with woolen tights or not. You try to will your legs to not itch and end up backing behind a column and scratching discreetly.

You are not sure what brought on this religious impulse, except for the boy you miss without having known him. Then you think of the rest of his family, his numerous siblings, always hungry and underdressed, and it resolves in your memory, finally: he was a son of a defrocked priest who was forced into disgrace and living in a common apartment building instead of a parish house, no longer surviving off tithes, but the very modest salary of a night watchman. His wife worked at the meat factory across the street and always brought home bulging sacks dripping with blood, filled with tripe and bones and stomachs, and it was never enough for their brood, which, by your estimate, was somewhere between seven and nine. Poorer and more fecund than real priests, even.

“May I help you?” A soft, stuttering voice startles you from your reverie and you spook upright, your head springing back and almost breaking the nose of the speaker.

The young priest steps back, calm, his hands behind his back. “You look spiritually wrought,” he says, smile bristling his soft beard, light as flax. “You need guidance.”

“I don’t,” you say with unnecessary force, the wraiths of your twelve bosses rearing their heads, the images of people always telling you what you need. “I need information. Why would a priest be defrocked?”

“Depends,” he answers with the same softness, the change of topic barely breaking his cadence. “Are we talking about now, or in the past? Because the synod just defrocked a priest the other day, for marrying two men.”

“No,” you say. “Before—in the seventies or early eighties. A priest in Moscow was defrocked. He had children.”

“Most of us do,” young Father says, musing. “Back then, that would’ve been insubordination, most likely. Failure to respect the hierarchy. Talking badly about the hierarchy. Or possibly a failure to inform—or maybe informing on the wrong people, the wrong things.” He sighs heavily, his grey eyes misting over. “You know, I grew up in the church. I’m not afraid of ever losing my faith—when I was young, I saw one priest beating another up with an icon.”

Normally you would laugh at the image, but his thoughtful sincerity stops you. “I see,” you say.

“Do you know that priest’s name?”

“Father Dmitri,” you say.

“No last name?”

You shake your head and feel stupid.

“Do you know what church he was assigned to before his defrocking?”

“No. I was just thinking about his son… they used to live in the same apartment building as I did.”

“Go visit them, then,” he says flatly. “They were probably too poor to buy another apartment.”

“I don’t… ” You want to tell him that you really don’t want to see anyone from your past, anyone who would recognize you and put together the images of you—then and now, past and present—and find the comparison lacking.

But he is already losing interest, backing away. “You need to get baptized,” he says before turning away, toward the old women who wait for his glance as if it were a blessing.

“How do you know I’m not?” you call after, raising your voice unacceptably.

“You’re tormented,” he calls back, just as loud.

The priest is wrong—your mother had baptized you at birth, even though such things were frowned upon back in the 1970s. She even took you to the Easter and Christmas masses, where you stood on your aching feet for hours, holding a candle that dripped hot wax on your hands. The memory brings only boredom and unease and doesn’t lessen whatever spiritual torment the priest saw in you. He doesn’t know that the church with its battling priests isn’t as calming to you as it is to him— you worry that you will now have comical nightmares of priests in their long black robes and tall hats pummeling each other with icons and candlesticks. You are really not looking for salvation from them, but from that quiet boy in your childhood. No one else had such kind eyes. You sigh, regretful that your young self was so unaware of how rare a treasure this kindness was—and you’re not even sure if such optimism should be commended.

By the time you were twelve, you certainly knew enough of those who were not kind, of the tiny cave under the very first flight of stairs by the apartment building’s entrance, the cave you always had to run past because of those who hid there—boys who would reach out and hold you against the wall and put their hands under your skirt and down your sweater. You never told your mom why you would wait for her to come home from work, when the shadows grew long, and she couldn’t understand that you were not afraid to be home alone—you were afraid of the dash up the flight of stairs, and your two-room apartment could’ve as well been located on the moon.

You do not remember the faces of those boys, just that one who never laid a finger on you; instead, he walked with you sometimes, and watched you get into the elevator, safe. Sometimes the boys under the stairs would beat him, and once they held his face down in the large puddle that manifested in your paved yard every spring and fall—held him until bubbles coming from his silted lips turned into stifled screams and only a chance passerby spooked the hooligans.

When you get home, you unwrap the kerchief and hate it for a while because your hair is now flattened and tangled and you’ll have to wash it again. Then you pick up the phone, since there’s nothing else to do but to hurl yourself toward the past, since the present refuses to surrender any answers or even passable lies.

Your mother sounds older than she did the last time you spoke, and you try not to feel guilty about her unseen decline in some sanatorium that costs you most of your uncertain salary, and of course it would be cheaper to have her live with you, here, over the black river that smells of gasoline and foams white in the wake of leisure boats. You sigh into the phone and try to ignore all of her unvoiced complaints.

“Mom,” you finally say, “do you remember that family that used to live next door, when I was little? The one with seven kids?”

“Vorobyev,” she says, her memory as flawless as always. “The youngest boy, Vasya, was such a sweet kid. Always running around in those girls’ coats from his older sisters.”

That’s right, you now remember, those were plaid, too-short girl coats. No wonder everyone teased him; no wonder his unperturbed demeanor incited them to violence—there was no point in such savage humiliation as a girl’s coat unless its victim would acknowledge it as such.

“Vasya Vorobyev,” she repeats. “Too sad about him.”

“What have you heard?” Your heart seizes up and it’s ridiculous, you haven’t thought about that kid in decades. In forever. “What happened?”

“Anya, his mother, used to call me sometimes,” she says. “He’s dead, in Osetia last year. Now she’s dead too—her heart gave out after that.”

“Too bad.” You are numb now, numb to the tips of your fingers, and they almost drop the receiver. A deep chill settles in at the loss you aren’t sure you’ve suffered. “Do you remember why was his father was defrocked?”

“No. Why would you care about something like that?”

“I don’t,” you whisper, and say goodbye. You spend the rest of the day watching TV and pacing and drinking buttermilk straight out of the bottle that fits so comfortably into one hand, and you keep thinking back to the days when you needed two to hold it.

The boy who defended you sometimes. You’re glad to have a name, but in your mind he’s still that boy—the boy. You’re glad to be dreaming about him the next night—at least there he is alive and little, even as other people’s hands press his face into the dirty pavement, his teeth making an awful scraping sound that makes you cringe in your sleep. They leave, but not before making lewd gestures in your direction, and you wait for the boy to stagger up, his feet shuffly and his knees buckling under him. He totters but remains standing. You feel lucid even though it is a dream and in it you are still small. “Why was your father defrocked?”

“Why does it matter?” He lisps a bit, his tongue thoughtfully exploring the ragged edge of the chipped front tooth. He doesn’t seem to know that he is in your dream.

“Because I need to know what did he do that was so awful, to bring you here. What was it that you were paying for?”

“Looking for the prime mover, huh?” He drops the pretense of childhood and for a second becomes terrifying—still a kid, but somehow older and deader. “I don’t know why. Who knows why shit happens, huh? Who knows why you don’t tell anyone about them dragging you under the stairs. Why you never told them—”

Your face burns with exposed shame and you snap away from him, the hem of your gabardine dress twirling around your legs, long and smooth and brown in your first pair of nylon pantyhose. “Fuck off,” you mutter darkly. And yet you understand his point, the essential impossibility of revealing one’s secrets—especially if those secrets are not one’s fault. We can get over the wrongs we do, but we cannot forgive ourselves for the wrongs done to us, for our own helplessness.

“Don’t be like that.” He catches up to you and walks with you across the paved yard, the large puddle in its center only nascent. It must remind him, you think, and then you are suddenly not sure whether the puddle incident happened before or after the chipped tooth.

You sit in your bed upright, your heart strumming against your ribs. You have to go to sleep, you tell yourself, you have to get up early tomorrow, but then you remember it’ll be Saturday. So you give up and pull on a pair of jeans and tuck your nightgown into them, throw on a jacket and run down the stairs and across the street—like a wayward moth that woke up in the fall by mistake—toward the fluorescent glimmer of an all-night kiosk.

You buy a gin and tonic in a can—make that two—and a pack of Dunhill’s, the red one. You buy a translated detective novel for good measure, and the guy behind the bulletproof glass smiles crookedly. “Got a wild night planned?”

You ignore the familiar sarcasm, so integrated into the national discourse that you notice its absence more than its presence. You spend the rest of the night sitting on the windowsill, the right angle of your legs reflected in the dark windowpane, drinking bitter gin and tonics and smoking with abandon, stuffing the butts into an empty can.

You wait until six in the morning, when the subway is open, and you walk to the station and take the subway and the bus to the street where you grew up. You hope that there’s no one there who will recognize you, and you get off at the familiar stop— forgotten just enough to feel uncanny, as if its coincidence with your memory is a miracle, like Jesus seen in a sandwich. Your hopes are dashed the moment your foot touches the asphalt—a high female voice calls your name.

“Look at you,” babbles a middle-aged woman, red coat, face painted with too much enthusiasm and not enough artifice. “You haven’t changed a bit.” She clearly expects you to say the same, and the lie would be easier if you could remember who she was.

“Natasha,” she reminds you. “Romanova. We used to be in the same class through the sixth grade. I live one building from yours.” She walks along with you, oblivious to your cringing away from her. “What are you doing here? Visiting someone?”

“Vorobyev family,” you say before you can come up with a decent lie.

“Oh,” she says. “I think they moved—well, the kids had all moved out.”

“I heard Vasya’s dead,” you say.

She looks at you strangely. “Well, stop the presses.”

“I just heard.”

She looks at you, concerned. “What do you mean? I thought it was you who had found him.”

You shake your head at her nonsense, and yet the quiet nightmare dread grabs you by the heart and squeezes harder, as you mumble excuses and break away from the talkative friend you don’t remember having and you race ahead to the poplar row that seems fatter and taller and more decayed than before. The asphalted path leads between the trees to the yard surrounded by six identical brick buildings, each nine stories tall with two separate entrances. Your house is the last one on the right, and you race past your entrance. You find their apartment not by the number but by muscle memory—your legs remember how to run to the fourth floor, taking two steps at a time, how to swing abruptly left and skid to a stop in front of a brown door upholstered with quilted peeling pleather diamonds, how to press the doorbell that is lower than you expected—you can reach it without getting on your tiptoes.

It rings deep within the cavern of the apartment, and you know by the apartment’s position (you’ve never been inside) that it has three rooms—barely enough for nine people—not counting a kitchen, and that the balcony looks out into the yard, above the puddle.

A boy with soft brown eyes opens the door, still the same, still in his coat, water dripping down his sallow face, his hair slicked into a toothed fringe over his forehead. You are mostly surprised by the differential in your heights now—something that was just beginning to manifest around the time you left home, when you were sixteen, and would rather have moved in with your first boyfriend (so much older than you) than stayed here, near those stairs that trained you in your lizard defense. Now you’re towering over him with your adult, aging self, crow’s feet and sagging jeans and all, and he is still twelve (thirteen?), and he looks up at you nearsightedly, his pale face looming up at you as if from under water. You accept it with the fatalism of someone who has bad dreams too often to even attempt to wake up.

“It’s you,” he says without much surprise. “Come on in.”

You do, as you would in a dream. The apartment has suffered some damage—there are water stains on the ceiling and water seeps through the whitewash, dripping down the browned tracks over bubbling, peeling wallpaper. The windows also weep, and the hardwood floors buckle and swell, then squish underfoot like mushrooms.

The boy stands next to you by the window, looking through the water-streaked glass at the sunshine and fluffy clouds outside, at the butter-yellow poplar leaves tossed across the yard by the rising wind. “What is it that you want?”

You are well familiar with the logic of dreams and fairy tales, of the importance of choosing your words wisely, of the fragility of the moment—waste your breath on a wrong question and you will never know anything. “How did you die?” you finally ask. “I cannot remember.” Other questions will just have to go unanswered.

He points to the puddle outside, wordlessly, and you remember the hands pressing his face into the water, and you standing there, watching, helpless, until there are no more bubbles. Afterward, you tell the grownups that you found him like that, and you don’t know who did it.

“Why didn’t you tell them?”

You’re an adult now, and the words come out awkwardly. “I was afraid of what they would do to me if I told. I’m sorry.”

He’s too much of a gentleman to rub it in your face that he had been defending you then, that he could’ve walked past and stayed alive.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he says instead. Dead in Chechnya. Dead in Osetia. Disappeared one night without a trace. Dead in a kayaking accident. You remember all his deaths and they crowd around the two of you, suffocating and clammy.

And then it’s just you again, standing on the sidewalk outside, watching the eddies of yellow leaves spiraling around the ankles of your brown boots with worn, lopsided heels. And then it is just you, walking to the bus stop, promising to yourself to never return here, to never look back at the fourth story window and all the dead faces of the boy pressed against the weeping glass.