Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

Or whatever — but I’d felt somewhat pixilated from the moment I stepped off the plane in St. Petersburg. The international airport there’s no better than an American bus station, small, dingy, bleak, with that strange lassitude that seems almost the opposite of travel, as if no one’s really going anywhere. Somebody was supposed to meet me, and I lingered around this dreary green lobby, reading and rereading the placards people were holding up, but none of the signs had my name written on it. It occurred to me I might call the woman who was supposed to pick me up. In my pocket I had just a crumpled dollar. I talked to one woman in a glass booth who couldn’t tell me how to use the phone, and another, obviously distressed woman, also in a glass booth — the information booth — who was hiding beneath a shelf and would not raise her head up and talk to anyone, let alone explain to me how to use the phone. I kept walking over to the wall where the telephone was mounted and staring at it. It looked exactly like a phone but it might as well have been a confounding objet d’art. I went outside and sat. The air was gritty with particulate matter, dust blown in from the barren fields surrounding the runways. It was hard to tell if the airport was under construction or being dismantled. Pieces of metal sheathing flapped in the wind, and the fences meant to cordon the work areas were falling down. A sign gave “apologies for the inconveniences connected with terminal reconstruction.” Back inside I found yet another woman in yet another glass booth who sold phone cards. Eventually, outside, I managed to make a phone work and I called my contact, who said she was so sorry, she thought I was arriving tomorrow, but for roughly 1,500 rubles I could easily catch a cab to the Moscow Hotel.

More than money what I needed was rest, at the very least to quell the misgivings I had been having about my role as a writer. On the transatlantic leg of the flight I had sketched out a bunch of alternatives: I mulled over writing in the urgent voice of a liberal reformer, or expressing a stoic world-weariness, or getting riled up and angry in an exposé, or working toward a generous-spirited puff piece. These were all stories I thought about telling. And then on the plane from Frankfurt to St. Petersburg I was fated to sit beside a couple from Cleveland who were coming to Russia to adopt an eight-year-old girl. The girl, they told me, had been abandoned by her family, which the man attributed to the shift from a “communistic to a capitalistic society.” He said this quite emphatically. In fact he was an emphatic person the way other people are tenors or baritones, and because I had the window seat and felt trapped I began to get buggy. Everything he said stuck to my skin. He asked a lot of questions that were aggressive and blunt and designed to elicit or provoke simple yes or no answers. It wasn’t a conversation; he was just beating the air like a rug, hoping to knock all the doubt and ambiguity out of it. I kept wondering — strangely — if he was an avocat ; I mean I wondered if he was a lawyer, using the French word in my head. All three hours of the flight I felt like I’d been locked away in an interrogation room.

His wife seemed kind and sweet and obsequious, with a soft chin that marred her real chance at beauty. Every time I looked at her face I felt lost. She had that bright-eyed, very dull niceness well-meaning people often have that strikes you as full of shit until you realize there’s nothing behind it. It’s real. She was nice. When she asked about my business in Russia I was totally incoherent, and once her husband, the avocat, sniffed me out, he really started hammering the air with questions. Now I was on trial. I became almost spastically inarticulate and confused and couldn’t describe what I was doing in a satisfactory narrative style. By the time we landed, my business had become a shame to me, a fault of mine; I was guilty. They, on the other hand, had a story whose somewhat gooey mucilage was goodness, this couple from Cleveland. I’d just read about this very thing on the plane from Chicago to Frankfurt, poring over a learned article on attachment disorders and the developing mind — my sister thought it might be relevant in observing orphans — in which the author talked about some guy named Grice and his four maxims of discourse:

1. Quality: be truthful and have evidence for what you say.

2. Quantity: be succinct.

3. Relation: be relevant or perspicacious, presenting what has to be said so that it is plainly understood.

4. Manner: be clear and orderly.

It was with a feeling of relief, then, that I made it out of St. Petersburg, five hours by two-lane road, to Svirstroy. At the orphanage, bare-limbed birch trees lined the driveway leading to the front door. Snow was still on the ground, patches of snow drifted into the protecting shade of pine trees, even though at this time of year, in May, the sun wasn’t setting until after eleven o’clock at night.

Within an hour of my arrival a couple different kids, independently, asked when I was leaving. It seemed a strange question, out of sequence, but the defining fact of these kids’ lives, I would realize, is the transience of adults. A lovely, soulfully sweet girl named Tonia told me her history in epochal blocks marked by the passage of adults, like a dry account of royal succession. Up till seven she lived with her mother and father, from eight to nine she lived with either friends or her aunt, from nine to eleven she lived with her grandmother, who died of stomach cancer on August 19, 1995—the way Tonia mentioned the exact date seemed salient in a life lived largely without celebrated days. Anyway, deep down there must have been huge anxiety about departures, and the question, I came to understand, was meant to allay a real fear about the fragility of adult relations. What the kids wanted to know was how much of their interest they should invest in me, another ghostly passing adult — in other words, what’s the rate of return on caring?

A boy named Kosta bluntly told me I wasn’t staying long enough to write anything, and when I asked how long he thought I needed, he said three months, a year. He wasn’t being cutting or cruel or defensive, just thinking about and weighing the world, his world, after all. One afternoon I went to the village and bought hot dogs and bread, ketchup and mustard, pop and cookies, and about fifteen of us lit a big bonfire on the banks of the river and had a picnic. By the way, none of these kids goldbrick or grouse when it comes to work. They have chores at the orphanage, and when it came time to gather wood for our fire, suddenly and without a second prompting it was madness — they hopped to, hauling branches and logs and sticks and armloads of dry grass, and we had our fire blazed up in minutes. But after we’d eaten and were lazing around, watching big ships haul raw logs upriver, a beautiful boy, Maxim, smiled and said, “That was good food, but it’s over. Write it down. Write it down in the magazine.” The comment stuck with me. Like everyone I tend to think things that last have greater value than passing moments, and on some level, too, I was probably condescending to the kids. I thought I was treating them to something they’d not soon forget. On both counts Maxim, in a frank, simple, cynical way, was putting things in perspective for me — his perspective.

The orphanage was built originally as housing for pilots in training, and for several years after World War II it held German and Hungarian prisoners, some of whom, across an open field, are buried and memorialized in a grove of trees. A couple years ago some old people came, the kids told me, and cried. This seemed to mystify them, how people would remember each other, and especially the dead, over such a vast stretch of time. You imagine, of course, that the prisoners buried behind the orphanage perhaps left orphans themselves, and that these old people, on a final pilgrimage, might well have been visiting their fathers. The kids’ comments captured a certain — I won’t say blockage — but a dreamy remove from a reality that would be fairly pedestrian for most people. It would not be the last time I noticed this sort of loose drift in their associations, an ellipsis in the mind that helped them slide over rough terrain in their history.