I don’t write the stories. They come to me in my dreams. Then my hand puts them on paper. People read them and they create a picture in their mind of my dreams. Sometimes I am afraid the dreams will stop. There will be nothing for my hand to do and someone else will create the picture in people’s mind. I guess it is a fear of lack of purpose, which is more evil than death.
Behind every glamorous job there is a lot of hard, dirty work. A janitor has a cleaner job than a writer does, and I have been both. I jokingly tell people I worked my way through college cleaning toilets, but it really is the truth. I liked my job as a janitor. I worked at night, nobody bothered me and I had time to think. I also liked to read the walls the kids wrote on before I scrubbed them. These were smart kids. Funny kids. They also had a sense of social justice. Except for Skip. Skip was gay and always horny. I washed his phone number off the wall so many times that unfortunately I still remember it. A janitor cleans up what people leave behind. Be it a thoughtful quote on the wall or piss on the urinal. But there is a purpose. Writers don’t write for other people. They write for themselves. A janitor cleans toilets, a writer attempts to cleanse his soul.
She came to me in my dreams. Yes, I had known her, but not in the setting in my dream. In my dream she had sparkling blue eyes and ash blonde hair that fell down in her eyes. She looked like this in reality, with an unusual way of blinking both her eyes when she smiled at me. Something I found charming. But in my dream she had bright red lipstick and was naked except for a garter belt and seamed black stockings, bright red lipstick and a thick triangle of pubic hair. Her hands were clasped over her naked breasts and the smile was not there. A picture of her face in the black and white trappings of the 1950’s.
It was in Evansville, Indiana in the 1980’s, I am sure, and we were both young. Indiana has a good size city in every corner of the state. Gary in the northwest, Fort Wayne in the northeast, New Albany in the southeast and Evansville in the southwest. Evansville does not have much to crow about. The only thing it is known for is that it is the largest city in the United States without an interstate highway running through it. The old, black man in John Mellencamp’s song sure didn’t live in Evansville.
Billy and I were on the road working in Evansville. I have fond memories of Billy, although I suspect he is dead now. Succumbed to the liquor that helped him make it through the day. Billy was a small, wiry man with what is commonly referred to as a penitentiary face. But he was a hard worker and tough. He grew up in an orphanage and stole a car when he was seventeen. The judge gave him a choice of jail or join the Marines and go to Vietnam. He spent 10 years in the Marines. He was usually calm but when the liquor wasn’t working he became rattle brained and surly. We worked well together, but once again when the liquor did not work, he could fly into a rage and call me every foul name in the English language. Cocksucker was his favorite. It usually lasted only ten minutes or so and then we went back to work as if nothing had happened. I suspect Billy is dead. or if not, he is in the process of dying. I haven’t spoken to him in twenty years. The thought of his death saddens me.
Billy met her before I did. They were arguing in the hallway of the hotel. She looked to refined to be a common streetwalker and I never asked later. Billy was drunk and was refusing to pay the lady. I paid her and put Billy to bed. The next morning when he was sober, Billy paid me back. Billy and I always enjoyed a nice hot breakfast together. He ate lunch and drank his supper. He was not hard to keep happy. While we were having breakfast, I asked him about the woman. “I don’t remember much about her, just a whore,” Billy said. “I am not surprised you don’t remember much,” I replied. He shrugged his shoulders.
We worked on a stream that day. Measuring its fall and volume so that the government could determine who would or wouldn’t flood in the proverbial 100-year flood. It was warm that summer day but not unbearable and we drove back to town for a plate lunch. I think we were only supposed to take a half-hour lunch but I usually stretched it to an hour so we didn’t have to eat cold sandwiches in the field. I haven’t heard the term plate lunch in years, but a plate lunch was served at small independent cafés. They were usually cooked by someone’s grandmother and included a meat course (meat loaf was a common component of the plate lunch) several side dishes and bread or cornbread, all for the price of a burger combo at the local fast food. Plate lunches are becoming increasingly rare.
She was in the lobby of the hotel when we returned at the end of the day, dressed in a blue print cotton dress and flat sandals, and looking nothing like the prostitute she was. Billy didn’t even recognize her when we came in. I nodded my head to her and she walked over to speak to me. “Thanks for last night,” she said in an accented voice that twenty years later I would recognize as Russian, but didn’t at the time. “Oh, he is really a pretty good guy, he was just drunk last night,” I replied. “Do you want to spend some time together tonight,” she asked. “Oh, I really doubt that I can afford it, but thanks anyhow.” “Its free gratis.” “Well, let me go upstairs and clean up and I will meet you in the bar.” She gave me a pretty smile and blinked both of her eyes at me as I walked away. Not the standard hooker come-hither look.
She was sitting at the bar when I walked in, smoking a cigarette and sipping a drink, her bare legs crossed. I sat down next to her and asked the bartender for a glass of tea. “Che’ it is called in Russia.” She said, “but we only drink it warm.” “ I would presume the accent is Russian.” I asked. “Yes, I have only been here for a short time.” “But you speak English very well.” “There is a reason,” she said. “Why would you want to meet me here tonight, if not for money.” “You have a Russian face and how do you say, I am homesick. Are you of Russian descent?” “ I don’t know. I was born in the southern United States, and perhaps my grandfather was German.” “Well, wherever you were born, you have a Russian face. Do you know anything about Russia?” “Well there is not much to read about Russia in a small southern town in this country. It is a mysterious place to Americans. I have read some about the Revolution and of course I know Moscow and Leningrad. The newspaper always refers to the leader of Russia as a communist dictator, but I am smart enough to know that communist is the antithesis of dictator.” “I don’t know this word.” “It means opposite.” “Yes, and our newspapers refer to Americans as capitalist slaves. Could it be that they are both wrong?” “Yes, or perhaps they are both correct.” “I am a Cossack girl. Do you know of the Cossacks.” “I have read the word, but honestly I don’t know what people it refers to.” “ The Cossacks are a culture of people, not a race. Like gypsies, but much more noble. Our men were great warriors and horseman. They traditionally were defenders of the Czar until the Revolution came. There is not much need for the Cossack warriors in today’s Russia.”
“I guess I have to ask you why you are in Evansville, Indiana and why you are employed in such a line of work.” I said. “It is a very long story. I have a doctorate in the English language in Russia. I have a two-year-old daughter born of a Russian man, but I am married to an American man. He is old and very ill but he provided me with residence in this country and I am very thankful for that.” “Does he know what you do for a living? “No, I tell him I work at the bowling alley. It is best that he doesn’t know. By the way, my name is Alyona. It translates to Helen. The short name is Lianna and your name is Kevin.” “How do you know my name?” “I saw an envelope on the dash of your truck.” “It could have been the name of the other man who works with me.” “His name would not be Kevin, of this I know. I never intended to leave Russia, but it was best that I did. I was the only child. My father had fought in the Great Patriotic War. What you call World War II. He was hit in the head by shrapnel. My mother was much younger and worked as an electrical engineer. I grew up in a town called Barnaul in Southern Siberia. My family had been moved to Siberia from Moscow during the Great Purge, for some offense either real or imagined. There were many worse places than Barnul. My father was a good man, but when I was three or four he developed a brain tumor and was constantly ill until he died when I was twelve. My mother raised me as best she could and I was chosen to learn English. British English. For what reason, I don’t know, but I did become a translator and taught at the University of Moscow. I married a doctor, who is the father of my daughter. But he was a violent, alcoholic and I left him and took my daughter. He made accusations against me and wanted to take my daughter from me. I decided to leave the country rather than lose my daughter, as he was a very powerful man. The underground made me a fake passport allowing me to leave the country. I was frightened to death. If I would have been caught I would have faced many years in prison, but I made it to the Netherlands and Amsterdam. But they would only allow me a six-month visa. I was fortunate to meet my current husband in Amsterdam and he was kind enough to marry me so that I could gain permanent residence in your country. That is why I am in Evansville, Indiana.”
The conversation had taken three hours and I reminded Lianna that it was getting late. “Do you want to have love with me,” she asked. “Hmm, I don’t think so tonight,” I replied. “I am usually at the Blue Lamp lounge in the evening,” she said. “It is just down Barnes Street from your hotel.” “Yes, I know where it is.” “Will you walk me to my car?” “Yes, of course,” I replied. We walked to her car and stood by the driver’s side. ”Will you hold me and kiss me so that I might feel again what it is like to be in a Russian man’s arms. “Yes of course,” I said. She did not want the embrace to end.
I met Lianna at the Blue Lamp lounge the next night and was with her for the next three weeks I stayed in Evansville and yes, we had love together. In my youth I presumed I was in love with her. But I had to go to the coast of Maine and I would be there for three months. On our last night I asked her to go with me. Of course she refused. She had a daughter to raise. As a mature man with a lot of experience in life, I can look back and say she was the most erotic, sensuous and passionate woman I have ever met. At the end of that night, I held her in my arms as great sobs of grief welled up from inside her. My youthful ego assumed she was crying because I was leaving. I know now that she was crying for a way of life that had been lost. She pressed an address written on a torn piece of paper in my hand and a pocket watch. “My husband must never know. This is the address of my mother in Barnaul. The world has a funny way of repeating itself.” “I wish you a good and happy life.” On the plane the next morning, I reached into my bag and took out the watch. It was a Russian-made watch with lovers embracing on the scroll on the front. I opened it and saw a beautiful flowered face on the watch and on the opposite side a photograph of Lianna. It was with a very heavy heart that I flew over Evansville the next morning on my way to Maine.
It was some twenty years later and I was living in California. I had been married and divorced and had my own business now. I am not good at remembering dates but I do remember it was in January of 2004. A phone call came in on a chilly, overcast afternoon. Would I be willing to go to Russia and work on a lock and dam on the Volga River, in the middle of a Russian winter? I was forty-two years old at the time and my sense of adventure stymied as a child had returned. I didn’t have a clue how to get to Cheboksary, Russia and the Chuvash Province, or what to do when I got there, but yes I would go.
I left San Francisco on a Monday morning with the dawn casting the first rays of sun on the Bay, a rare sight in San Francisco in the wintertime. The plane turned east and would continue east for 8,000 miles with a short stop in New York. Some seventeen hours later I landed at Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow. Cheboksary is a moderate size city about 500 miles southeast of Moscow. I went to catch my connecting flight and was informed there were not enough passengers, so the plane would not fly that day. How might I get to Cheboksary today? “The train of course,” I was told. And how might I get to the train station. “A taxi, of course,” I was told. At least the people were accommodating. A taxi driver robbed me only modestly to deliver me to the train station in Central Moscow some forty miles from the airport. Taxi drivers rob travelers in every country. It should be accepted with good humor as the price of admission. Besides, it was well worth the cost as I was allowed to see Russia from the inside for the first time. The driver wanted to know everything I knew about American basketball.
The train station was a huge monolith of Stalinist architecture. Stalin did not care how garish a building was, as long as it was big. It was fascinating for me to walk through a building of the new, free Russia with the smell of 70 years of human passage in my nostrils. I secured a ticket for the evening train to Cheboksary and spent the day wandering the streets and practicing the few words of Russian I had learned. In the evening I boarded the train and left for the overnight trip to Cheboksary. It was on this night that I fell in love with the Russian trains and on subsequent trips never traveled inside Russia on anything other than the train. It had a romance about it that could not be denied. I arrived in Cheboksary early the next morning and found my way to my hotel.
I spent two weeks on the Volga River in Cheboksary. That is a story in itself. Suffice it to say that the people were warm and inviting. I rarely ate at a restaurant. One of the workers would always invite me to their home in the evening. Usually a small flat in a Stalin Era high rise that sheltered several generations of a family. They were very poor people but they wanted to show me their best. They wanted me to eat their food, learn their customs and give me small gifts. What little they could afford. It was here that I learned the mistake of associating people with their governments. Since that trip I have traveled many places in the world and I keep learning the same lesson. People are the same everywhere. They all have the same basic wants and needs and passions. We are much more alike than different. It is rare for an American to be in a town like Cheboksary so I hope I left them with a good impression of the American people even if they did not have a good impression of the American government. It was on my last night in Cheboksary that I opened my briefcase and reached in the corner pocket and pulled out a pocket watch with a smiling blue-eyed girl on the inside cover and a tattered note with an address in Barnaul, in South Siberia, written in Russian. I had time before I had to return to the U.S.
It is a forty eight-hour train trip from Cheboksary to Barnaul. A pleasant trip though. It was winter of course and the days were short but I spent the daylight hours watching the Russian countryside go by. Huge stands of Douglas fir, birch and pine trees interspersed with open prairie and small villages with the traditional Russian architecture. In the dark hours I read or fell asleep to the sway of the train. I was surprised when I reached Barnual and found the city had built a lovely new train station. I sit in the station for a couple of hours and gathered my thoughts.
I went outside and found a taxi driver and gave him the address on the tattered note. It was only a fifteen-minute drive to the address. The building was another typical high rise apartment like the home of nearly every Russian except for the very rich. The flat was on the fifth floor and I climbed the stairs rather than take the elevator hoping to rid my stomach of the butterflies that had gathered in it. I knocked on the door and I was staring into the blue eyes of Lianna, that I had not seen in twenty years. She had aged well. The skin still clear, the hair ash blonde and the eyes with the unusual blinking. It could not have been any other. She stared back without recognition for a minute. My beard was gone, my hair streaked with gray and the sun had burnt wrinkles into my face. Then she said in English, “The eyes, I could not forget the eyes. Kevin, Yes?” “I nodded my head and said, “How are you Lianna?” She replied “I could not have imagined you would be here. It is not a good time. My husband will be home soon. Will you meet me at the train station tonight.” “Yes, of course.”
I sat on the polished wooden bench in the train station wondering what one might say to a lover after twenty years. People came and went. The young people excited over their future in a new Russia and the older people, their eyes weary with the tumultuous life of change that had occurred in the last fifteen years. Whatever one might say about Communist Russia, the people were guaranteed an education, a job, medical care and a pension. This had all disappeared in the halting struggle of a new Russian democracy.
I saw her enter, wearing a fur cap and long brown fur coat, shaking off the bitter cold as she entered the station. She smiled, blinking her eyes and walked straight for me, taking off her coat as she walked. I need not have worried about how to greet her. I stood up and she folded into my arms as I tucked her head under my chin. “My American man with the Russian face. You have grown more handsome with age and now you even smell like a Russian man. It is so nice to be in your arms again. Please sit and rest. I know it has been a long journey. Do you remember che?” “Yes, of course. I have drank much che since I have been in Russia.” I replied. “Then please stay while I get some for both of us.” She returned with paper cups of hot tea. “ I would like to think you have come all this way to see me, but I am sure that is not the case.” “No, I would like to tell you that is the case, but I came to Cheboksary to work on a dam. I had time left over and of course I did want to see you.” “ I hope the Russian people have been hospitable to you.” “Yes, very much so. They are very warm people.” “So what has happened to your life in twenty years.” She said. “ Oh, the story of everyone’s life. I could never have imagined the joy nor could I have imagined the tragic sadness. But I have led a good life. I am not rich in money but I am rich in the experience of life. And you?” “I guess I should start from the beginning, which of course was the end for you and I. I stayed in Indiana for five more years. I regret to tell you that I continued in the occupation that I was engaged in when you met me, but there was a purpose. I will explain later. During that time my elderly, American husband passed out of this life. He was a good man and kind hearted and I am ever thankful for what he did for me. I am sure you know that during that time in Russia there was the Glasnost, the Perestroika, and then the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation. I was free to return to Russia and came home in 1992. With the opening of Russia and the business brought into Russia, I found work as a translator. It was hard. The economy collapsed. But things improved a few years later and I live a comfortable if not extravagant life. I met and married my husband in 1998. We have been married for six years now. He is an electrician. He is not an educated man, but he is a good man and treats me well. I do not love him, but I will spend the rest of my life with him. Did you come hoping that we would be reunited?” “No, I am not a young man anymore and I know the ways of the world. I came to see if you were well. I could not have come to Russia without trying to find you. The memories of those three weeks with the Cossack girl so many years ago will never be forgotten though,” I said. She smiled and blinked her eyes “And they will never be forgotten by me either. The money I made working in Evansville so many years ago when we met paid for my daughter’s education. She will graduate from the London School of Economics this spring. I am sorry that we met under such circumstances, but as I said earlier, there was a purpose. It is getting late. I must be home soon. Will you hold me in your arms and kiss me like you did so many years ago.” This time it was I who did not want the embrace to end, but we parted at last. She turned and walked to the entrance of the train station but did not look back.
In my dreams come visions of past, present and future. They await only my mind to acknowledge and interpret them. My hand to put them on paper. I can’t explain the dream that started this story. I can acknowledge it but I can’t interpret it. I only know that it was the impetuous to write this. To write of love and loss and the tragedy that make up the human tapestry of everyone’s lives. To write of youth and the perspective that maturity puts on it. If I live, in another twenty years I will be sixty-six. The body will ache, the mind will fumble for words sometimes and what I could do at twenty-six, or at forty-six will not be possible. But one night I will dream of a blue eyed girl with ash blonde hair standing by the railroad tracks. She will be wrapped in a fur coat, standing ankle deep in snow as white as the petals of a daisy. Standing next to a birch tree. She will be smiling and blinking her eyes at me.
© Kevin D. Burgess 08/01/2008