“I can’t build a relationship on a lie.
The lies come later.”
The Simpsons
I would love to finish my story in an epic manner, with something like, “I plunged myself into deep waters, without having tried it before, not even knowing how to swim, and now, after all, I could say that I savored every minute of my adventure.” However, not once or twice I botched the chance of making that speech of praise with my own foolishness. It was all right though. I wasn’t trying to be as bad as a lazy perfectionist, but the biggest twist was still waiting for me.
The subsequent phases of my trip had been relatively uneventful. The suburban train surprisingly came on time, and I spent almost an hour in a stuffy carriage, jotting down my impressions on the tiny block note. The view outside the window was the same exact replay of the road movie I had seen three days ago.
It was the end of the day, and the train was full. I sat on the edge of a bench with half my butt hanging in the air, pushing with my legs against three guys next to me, not letting them push me out of my seat completely. I couldn’t complain, as there were others who were standing — or rather swaying — in the aisle. My back and legs, especially my calves, ached. I felt dizzy, probably because of motion sickness or the ethanol-powered guy sitting straight in front of me. Gradually, I started feeling all the tiredness and fatigue that my body had accumulated over those three days. It felt like I had had enough adventure to suffice for a long time. I missed my mom and dad, my home, and my friends. I just wanted to see them — to hell with all those heroic tales. I was fed up, saturated to the brim, up to my top deck, with the beauty of nature. I needed a quiet room, my old couch, and a nice book about pirates from the late seventeenth century. My mind needed it like a psycho needed his invisible paper hat. The train ride soon became unbearable for me. I felt cheated, even betrayed, like a Japanese tourist who had spent a whole year saving money and learning about romance de Paris, only to come out of the Gare du Nord and see a random local guy wetting a tree.
I imagined one of those old ships jam-packed with prospectors, carrying them from Seattle to Alaska by the “poor man’s route” during the Klondike Gold Rush: people in warm cloths swaggering awkwardly upon the crammed deck, talking, laughing, full of prospects and hope; barking dogs; heavy sacks with provisions and equipment piled in the middle; the smell of burning coal and unwashed bodies; stubborn eyes and unshaved beards; the axillary sails flapping in the cold salty wind; lazy, heavy waves; the dim horizon covered with mist — that’s what real adventure looked like. No, I couldn’t complain. By those men’s standards, I was still playing rather than dealing with real peril.
The train stopped. I looked around. More people with dragon breath pushed into the carriage — more dark backs, threadbare sleeves, and pale faces under sweaty hats; even more backs, bags as big as the looter’s penance, heavy jackboots, and weary fur collars. I couldn’t escape from that sardine hell anymore, as the crowd held me in securely. People stood even in the gaps between the facing and non-facing seats.
Then, there was a swift movement in front of me, flawless like a guard change: the man who was sitting in front of me left his place and started to squeeze himself through stiff bodies toward the exit. The seat was taken immediately by a middle-aged woman. She could have been forty or sixty — I couldn’t tell as a tired face could make all of us look older. She adjusted her clothes, crossed her arms on her lap, and started to stare blankly, not at my chest but far beyond, through it. She was tastefully dressed in a mixture of black and grey colors. Her eyes were dim and deep, revealing a glimpse of a never-ending struggle, like the eyes of many other women who had to be resourceful, clever, and patient to get along with their hegemonic husbands.
Living behind the Iron Curtain, our mothers, grandmothers, and sisters were deprived of the luxuries of the world’s beauty and fashion industry. Despite all that, they wanted to look beautiful, and they did look beautiful. They knew how to sew fine things by their own hands. They had so little — a few small pieces of cosmetics or perfume “from France” bought for an exorbitant price and kept away, like a precious thing; a small piece of gold, usually earrings, reserved just for the proper time and occasion — but they did so much for their men.
The lady in front of me was still studying the space behind my jacket buttons. The clawed hand of aging couldn’t leave traces on her cheeks. The dark circles under her eyes and hard lines around her lips made her look older. Then, she wearily stood up and disappeared into the thick crowd of woolen coats. Her place was taken by a big, scruffy man. His general look told me that he liked Fridays, hated Mondays, and his genuine love for hairy dogs was chiseled on his face. I needed a muse, though, not a satyr.
The train stopped again, and plenty of people poured out, leaving behind a cloud of stale air. I looked randomly for something that could catch my attention and spotted a young girl sitting on the other side of the carriage. I could only see her head and shoulders — the rest was hidden by the bench back. She was looking down, with her eyes fixated on something. I guess it was a book.
She was wearing a blue beanie, blue scarf, and trendy dark-blue padded jacket. She was a beautiful blonde in her twenties, with a thick, gold-and-honey plait resting on her right shoulder, an oval, clean-cut face without any makeup, golden, thick arches of brows, a delicate chin, and accurately lined lips. She was sitting squeezed in between two massive individuals, dressed in black working jackets and worn-out fur hats. Their puffy faces looked vexed and had virtually no notable features.
Between them, the girl looked like a fairy whose sheer wings had gotten stuck to a tar-painted wall. “Oh, enough of that, you rhapsodic idiot,” I told myself and swept my eyes away from the trapped beauty. “She knows her onions, skip it.” I glanced at her again. She was staring at me warily now, like an alert gazelle. I looked down against my will. I hated my guts. Her eyes were ashen-blue, big, and tranquil. Then, she rose from her seat — her neighbors’ bulky figures swallowed up the freed space like a swamp — looked at me abruptly again, this time curiously rather than with caution, and made her way to the exit. She left the train two stops before mine, with a pile of books tucked under her arm. So, she was a student. A little bit older than I, but… I couldn’t take my eyes off her walking away.
“Well, well,” cracked my internal sarcastic voice. “Are you in love? Again? Gonna find her? Godspeed to you, pal. But, weren’t you boiling with holy anger, just two days ago, at your would-be, might-be, prospective whatsoever girl when Sergey only hugged her for one-hundredth of a second? It was just the other day, and now you’re drooling over another girl? Shame on you, lad!”
I arrived at the central railway station without any further adventures, with sunken cheeks and an unshaven chin, going unnoticed by anyone but a bored policeman at the exit. I went promptly to the bus station and had nearly forgotten to call Gleb. I made a quick stop by the row of heavily abused pay phone cabins and, after a long digging in my pockets, found two precious coins which could be used as tokens. The first one was swallowed instantly by a shabby communication device that pretended to be sick and didn’t deliver any connection. The second pay phone was in a perfect working condition but Gleb didn’t answer. I waited for a long time — no reply. I needed more coins, which I could borrow only from the passersby. I had already made one unsuccessful attempt when my eye caught the anticipatory look of a policeman. Perhaps, in his eyes, I was a bum (after three days in the forest I indeed looked like a vagabond) who was going to beg for money. I had no desire to spend a night in the police station among real scum; so I promptly retreated to the bus stop and got lost in the waiting crowd. Whatever happens, I had to arrive home on time. After all, I could call Gleb from my apartment. That simple plan pacified my ever-suspicious mind, and my head became busy again with a swirl of thoughts that stretched from making peace with Redhead to saving the world from a global ecological disaster. Besides, I felt sick and tired. I wanted to take a shower, and reach my bed and books as soon as possible.
The weather, like my thoughts, started to get nasty. On the horizon, long, torn, lead-colored clouds cut their way through the blue sky, like a squadron of battleships coming from another world. The rain was supposed to start in the late afternoon. It was probably the only fact that I was sure about at that moment.
A nasty feeling popped up in my chest as I approached my house — a long, grey four-story apartment building with a flat, dull face, which stood in the company of its kind on the outskirts of the city.
I saw a small, grim-faced crowd loosely scattered at the entrance. We never had a bustling community life in our quarters, and such a gathering outside might usually be observed when one of the dwellers had passed to his eternal rest. When I came closer, the murmur stopped, and all eyes turned to me fearfully as if they had seen a man who just a minute ago had been lying still on his deathbed. My legs got cold and weak, as I slowly figured out what was happening there. At once, I started to feel all the blisters, muscle cramps, and sprains in my limbs — an abrupt illness that could have prevented me from going any further. But I had no choice.
I went through the entrance and found the door to our flat wide open. It was incredible for our neighborhood where burglaries were like a 24/7 laundry service. I caught the voices of my parents — unusually loud and angry — mixed with somebody else’s voices, which sounded soothing and patient. At that moment, I wished the earth would swallow me, at the doorstep of my flat, as it had tried the day before in the swamp.
Yes, I had read about Murphy ’s Law. I knew all about it and all its adaptations, but Murphy was American, probably of Irish origin, and we lived in Central Siberia, thousands of miles away. How did that rule get here? I had no pluck to step on. I stood stupidly at the entrance, trying to buy some time. Then, somebody, a stranger, peeped out of the room and spotted me. The backstory of such an inglorious ending was as follows.
My friends and I had parted, and we had gone our separate ways. I had started my quest through the forests, and they had set up camp by the river three train stops down the way. Everything went fine until the boys ran out of fuel and decided to buy booze from the nearby village. They marched to a local shop and tried to get some liquor. I have forgotten to say that since 1985, alcohol had been prohibited in the country, like in the American 20s, and buying a bottle of spirit might be a complicated, even dangerous task.
I wasn’t particularly informed about the details of the negotiations the guys conducted with a local saleswoman whose hands were decorated with grim tattoos, but the fact was that the boys had to flee from that shop, like two cats from the vet’s scissors. However, it wasn’t the end of the story.
The tattooed lady announced an urgent mobilization of all the men in the nearby settlement, the vast majority of whom were former long-term prisoners on bail. It took some time though, so my friends got the opportunity, leaving behind all their belongings, to get away. The criminals took the incident very seriously and launched a large-scale seek-and-destroy operation, but thankfully my friends managed to escape from the hunt. Instead of rushing to the nearest train station, where they certainly would have been identified, Gleb led his company in the opposite direction — to the woods. They made a detour through the rough lands, reached the preceding train station, jumped on the carriage, and returned home a day earlier than planned. It was a hard walk. Their footwear wasn’t particularly suitable for rocky trails, so towards the end, their feet were beaten up and looked awful. For the last couple of miles, the boys had to carry the girls, but Redhead… She had to walk all way down and suffered like nobody else. Again, it was my shame.
They returned home safe but not that sound, and lay low for a while. I don’t know how, but my father got wind that the company had returned. Gleb coughed up, as he had no choice, and then, all hell broke loose.
Nobody had known in which direction I had gone and what my destination had been. I hadn’t told Gleb or anyone. The territory of my disappearance had been huge. They might have needed a whole army of men and probably the air support to run a rescue operation in that maze of hills and ridges, overgrown with trees. My parents, and not only them, were sure that I was doomed traveling alone through the woods. When I entered the apartment, they were speaking to a senior officer who had the authority to launch a wide-range search and was considering doing so. As they say, I arrived just in time.
My parents didn’t talk to me for a while. They were angry — angry as never before. I tried to stay out of their sight, which was a bit difficult in our small apartment. Anyway, I still had my room and my books. In the next two months, I had to finish school and pass the final exams. Then, in another two months, I had my entry exams to the university. With all that in mind, my forced solitude came in as a very handy thing. I spent all my time sitting alone at home, cramming for both exams. I didn’t mind the privileges, and they weren’t that big: My reputation was tarnished in a very bad way. My parents had never let me down, ever. Who was I after that mess? “A liar” — the word buzzed in my head day and night, like a nasty spell.
My friends, afraid of my parents’ anger, didn’t call me. My cunning plan turned into my dishonor. In a matter of days, my heroic voyage faded out of my memory. All I had left of it were just some calluses and a short travel report, written down in the small block note.
I sat hunched over my books, still feeling bad about the fact that I had caused my parents so much distress and trouble. On the other hand, I knew they would never have had let me go on an adventure by myself. I had wanted to prove that I was a strong guy one could rely on, but in the end, I had come out almost as a scumbag.
However, I did complete my mission. I covered about fifty miles in three days going through pretty rough terrain, not counting the stretch I had covered on the bike. I had no problems with my health, except the aforementioned blisters. I had lost about ten pounds of weight, but I had never gotten lost on my way. I had made a lot of foolish mistakes, but they were my mistakes. One could buy everything in this world except health, love, and experience. So, my journey wasn’t a total failure.
Sometime later, I made up with Gleb. I asked for his forgiveness, but he felt guilty too, as it hadn’t been a good idea to kick that hornet nest of felons. After all, I returned home on time. They didn’t. So, we were almost even.
I tried to call Redhead a few times, but it always was her father or mother or a cat or a fish or something else. She didn’t look for my company anymore. One day Gleb piped up and told me that she had gotten a new admirer, a taxi driver, who was ten years older than her. Gleb said, she called that guy “my steady man.” I fairly deserved that reproach, but… a thirty-year-old taxi driver? It was a downgrade for a girl like Redhead. Although… didn’t she know better? Strange thing, in our small city, I never saw her again, or the other two girls either.
Gleb, by the way, was busy with entry exams too, but his ambitions stretched far beyond mine. He was planning to go to the Moscow State University, which for us Soviet kids was a kind of Princeton and Harvard rolled into one. You couldn’t go there without being a genius or having a fair amount of “vitamin P”, where “P” goes for “Protection”. But Gleb was a cool guy, and his dad could find the in’s and out’s in any place. Over time, I lost contact with him. After a while, I heard that Gleb had graduated from the university with the highest honors and had gotten a promising position in the high-level bureaucracy. He would come down from Moscow to visit his parents every year, so we randomly met a few times. We didn’t have common topics to talk about anymore, so we stayed on the safe ground of discussing our memories, including, of course, our big and silly adventure.
Sergey had no ambitious academic plans at all. He caught onto the forthcoming wave of economic change and opened one of the biggest commercial stores in the city. His parents helped him, just a bit, with a couple of millions. He surfed on that wave quite successfully and soon became one of the richest men in the region, although the money didn’t make him happy. But that’s a different story.
Soon, however, all our troubles were dwarfed by the sequence of events that happened to our vanishing country, which could be described by an old Chinese curse: “May you live in times of change!”
But only with time did I realize that the curse was actually a blessing.
© 1995–2025 Alexander Daretsky. All rights reserved.