The Bridge

The Perm region · Summer 2002 · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

In the summer of 2002 I nearly drowned in a river I could see across, and three days later the sky tried to finish the job. I was sixteen. Misha was sixteen and a half, which in those days he considered a decisive advantage. We had been best friends since the age of seven, when we discovered that we were both frightened of the same dog and both determined never to admit it.

That summer the country was coming back to life the way a man gets up after a long illness: carefully, one hand on the wall. In Perm a new supermarket had opened with automatic doors, and people walked in and out twice just to watch them work. Salaries arrived on the day they were promised, which our parents still reported to each other as news. Somebody's older brother had a mobile phone and took his calls on the balcony, slowly, so the neighbours could see. Nobody we knew was rich. But for the first time in years people were painting their fences, and two boys with nothing to do in July could feel that something was beginning, even if nobody could say what.

Misha's grandmother had a dacha on the far bank of a river two hours from the city by elektrichka. I had been there once before and remembered it as the place where time went to rest: a wooden house painted a green that had given up, a well, apple trees, a dog with one ear up and one ear down. From the city there was one sensible way in. You got off at the halt, walked forty minutes through the pines, crossed the bridge and were at Baba Nina's gate in time for lunch. The bridge was an old iron thing on concrete legs, built during some optimistic five-year plan, and it had carried tractors, weddings, funerals and drunks for forty years without complaint. There was another halt on the far side, but the trains stopped there twice a day, and only if the driver remembered.

We took a rucksack each: a change of clothes, a torch, and Misha's Discman with six CDs, which he valued above his own life and possibly above mine. We took no food. Nobody took food to Baba Nina; it would have been an insult, like bringing sand to the seaside. We got off the train at nine, walked through the pines, which smelt of resin and hot needles, and heard the river long before we saw it. Then we came out of the trees onto the bank and stopped.

The bridge was not there. That is to say, the beginning of it was there, the approach on our side and the first two legs, and the end of it was there, a small sad stub on the far bank. In between there was only water. It looked like a smile with the front teeth knocked out. A hand-painted sign said PASSAGE FORBIDDEN, which seemed unnecessary. The spring flood had taken it in April. Nobody had told Misha's family, because the only telephone in the village was at the shop and worked according to its mood, and mobile coverage in those years stopped roughly where the city did.

The river there was perhaps a hundred and fifty metres wide, the colour of strong tea, and moving faster than it looked. Above the willows on the other side I could see the tin roof of Baba Nina's house winking in the sun. The long way round meant walking back to the halt, a train to somewhere else, a bus that might or might not exist, and arriving tomorrow. There was no boat. Neither of us said it. That was the rule at sixteen: you did not propose the stupid thing, you simply started taking your shoes off and waited to see whether the other one laughed. I took my shoes off. I was half hoping he would laugh. Misha did not laugh. He took his shoes off too.

We wrapped everything in plastic bags, tied the rucksacks shut and went in holding them above our heads with one hand and swimming with the other. The first fifty metres were almost pleasant. The water was warm on top and cold underneath, as if the river had two opinions. Then we reached the middle, and the middle had a third.

The current took us sideways, not violently, just firmly, the way a large man moves you out of a doorway. The roof on the far bank began to slide away to the left. My arm was on fire. Something cold wrapped round my calf, weed or nothing, and I went under, and the river filled my mouth with a taste of iron and leaves. When I came up I looked for Misha and could not see him. For three or four seconds, which I can still count, the water behind me was empty, brown and perfectly calm. Then his head came up, much lower than it should have been, his face very serious, and above it, dry, held at the end of a straight white arm, the rucksack with the Discman. “Drop it!” I shouted, swallowing river. “Nyet,” said Misha, and kept swimming.

We came out two hundred metres downstream of where we had aimed, crawling through reeds and mud into a cow pasture, and lay on our backs breathing like old dogs. Baba Nina met us at the gate with a look that took in the bare feet, the wet hair and the river mud, and understood everything. She said one thing about it, then or ever: “Your mothers will not hear this from me. Eat.” We ate. For two days we picked apples, fixed nothing, lay in the hay and talked about girls we had not met yet and countries we would one day see.

On the third morning we did not go back to the river. We would take the slow train, Baba Nina decided, from the far halt, five kilometres across the fields. The morning was hot, heavy and very still, and the swallows flew so low they almost touched the grass. Halfway across, the sky turned. Over flat land it happens fast: a white haze, and then a wall of purple and black coming from the west with a grey curtain hanging beneath it. The wind came first, flattening the grass in long silver waves. Then the lightning. Misha, who was good at physics, counted out loud between the flash and the thunder. Seven. Then four. Then two. We were the tallest things in the field, and we both knew it.

Then the hail: peas, then cherries, bouncing off the track and stinging our ears. I had been frightened in the river, but the river was something I could fight. You cannot swim out of a sky. There was a lone birch at the edge of the field, and every instinct said run to it, and every physics lesson said don't. And there, in the middle of absolutely nothing, stood a bus stop: a concrete box with three walls, a bench and a faded mosaic of a cosmonaut, built for a route that had died years before. We ran. From Misha's rucksack, for reasons he has never explained, came a pink beach towel with a palm tree on it, and we sat under it on the bench like two old women at a funeral. The hail hammered the roof. The field turned white. Misha stopped counting. Then the whole world went violet, the thunder arrived at the same instant, not after, and I smelt something burning.

What did a bus stop with no bus finally offer two boys?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.