By Emily - Peace Corps 2005

 

She couldn’t stand it any longer and so told them she was going and going alone. Through the mud and past the brewery she went from rock to rock. The river was surprisingly blue. The river whose name she still did not know. She had looked that place up in the guidebook before. Not only was it not there, even the road was not marked. Like it didn’t even exist. Did it?

Over rock and river, stick in hand, humming and bouncing all the way till the rocks met a wall and she had to turn back. Up over the bridge and onward again, along the wall where the rocks piled high with the river below. Then there was a high peak, a mountain, capped in rock. It was impressive with the sun and clouds passing across its face. She thought she would climb it one day, someday. And on.

There was so much trash. A pile of Lomisi bottles, copper in the grass. And old shoes. So many old shoes. Finally there it was, this building. Perhaps a factory, perhaps an old Soviet dormitory of sorts, all blown out just like Sarajevo she guessed, or Baghdad. It was spooky really, even at noon and she knew she could get in it because of the graffiti on the walls and the shit on the floors but she was not sure how. There was a concrete pillar leaning in, so she abandoned her stick and scrambled up. She had done it.

There amid the rubble she wandered examining the artwork. It looked almost prehistoric with the strange characters and rudimentary pictures of sex acts in blue and black chalk, or maybe crayon. And with the wind through the halls and glass underfoot and sharp drops at the edges it was like a dream because through the crumbling doorways and between the rusty staircase beams she saw the mountains and the shacks with laundry drying. And she thought it might not be safe not only because she was alone and isolated but also because whoever frequented that place had an explicit imagination. She imagined turning the corner and after a quiet struggle against the blue sky her throat being slit and sinking down, the blood dripping off the building’s high foundation into the grass below.

She left toward the river and climbing on still more large concrete blocks from some old Soviet outpost she happened upon the largest spider she had ever seen. It was there in the middle of its web, black and fearsome, yellow stripes and legs like needles. It was quiet there and she thought maybe no one had seen this spider before and maybe no one would see him again. And as she headed for the house she thought about that spider. And why he was there? And she almost thought that the existence of nature like that, nature for nature’s sake, unspoiled and unobserved, it all almost disproved God’s existence. Like the tree falling with no one to hear. What good was it?

She was not sure. But going back through town she kept hearing her name. In the throaty voice of adolescent boys. She wanted to run. North. Back to the building and past it. She would take her pen and paper, a loaf of bread and a big bottle of Lomisi and she would feast on it today when she got far enough and then live off berries and whatever the villagers could spare as she went up. Up north, up the mountain, over the Caucasus into Chechnya and out again across Russia to the place where the sea was always cold and the sky blue, but dark. That was how she imagined it. Maybe she would do it.

Ever more she wanted to drive a blade through the pages and the screens that kept her captive and pack her life in a bag and go. Strap it to her back. Those blue sneakers could carry her past Petersburg, she thought maybe. But what was this? They were killing the one thing they had, the beauty. She had no remedy. No advice. She could only shake her head and wonder if it was her fault, all of their faults. To ship in plastic bottles and not ship them out. To throw them by the river where this year you hardly noticed but in three, in ten? Oh to sit in that broken concrete monstrosity and just let it all go. Just forget that she was she and there was there and home was home. It was worse to know. It was! It always was. Like the hut in Africa was bad but they didn’t know it, she guessed. But here? Here they knew. They all knew. It was beamed in by satellite twenty-four hours a day or as long as the electricity held out.

And she sure knew. She knew she was giving up what felt like the prime of her life to be in that village and sit. And she knew what she had seen was so important. That building that day that spider the bottles and all of it but really she wasn’t sure if it was worth it. But what is? If I had never come I would still be there wishing and wondering. Now I am here wishing and wondering. I just need to go and wander till I am satisfied. Will I be satisfied?