"The writing on the wood"
Part 3 of my series based on my recurring dreams in which I'm on a strange journey through eastern europe
I believe it started out when I was moving into a new apartment with six or seven other roommates – L being one of them (for some reason, she keeps appearing in my dreams, probably because living with her was so stressful).
The other five roommates were all the cute Russian guys I follow on Instagram – the funny ringleader (Sasha); the tall handsome one with fucked up teeth, a wristband tattoo and a lip ring (Oleg); the short blonde with rounded shoulders (Maxim); the lanky one with glasses (Vlad); and the tall mousey brown-haired one with big, soulful eyes (Pasha).
We must have been living in a cold, eastern european city circa 2010 or earlier, when those cities still had a stale, outdated Soviet feel to them. Mainstream tourists didn’t venture there yet, and smartphones weren’t a thing; so it wasn’t unusual to write things down on paper out in the world, or to see attendants using typewriters in yellowing offices.
The flat we were sharing was bare and simple, like a students’ apartment, and we had just begun moving in. Someone had already scribbled words on the wood floor in crayon or pen or something, in a pinkish-red color – hardly before any furniture had been assembled or the rooms filled. All in caps, the words were illegible.
For obvious reasons, L was already causing problems as a roommate. We had originally attempted to reconcile, and even shook hands on it with her giving me a reassuring wink. But as it always turned out with her, the handshake was a front for her inevitable difficulties.
She pulled me aside to voice her distaste for the writing on the floor. It was cheap and immature, and whoever was doing it was ruining the wood like a child. I assured her I’d text the whole group and tell them that whoever had written on the wood had better not do it again; that they’d have to scrub it off themselves; that it was a nuisance to the other roommates – those roommates being L. She was adamant about the writing being removed, and specifically for me to be the one to send the text to the group, as if she were testing my loyalty already.
I went ahead with the plan, determined to keep the peace with L this time and make up for the mess in our past life. But the further I stepped away from her orbit toward the demanded task, and the more I got lost in the cold eastern european city – circular and un-ending like in a J.G. Ballard story – the less her influence had a hold on me. Still, out of guilt, I sent the text.
The boys were out at work. All of them, for some reason, were bus drivers and train conductors in the city, and I went out into the cold, dark night without much of a destination beyond finding them.
I came across Sasha’s train first. It was snowing, and the bus/train moved like a cold, heavy, slow bullet along the tracks of the outdoor platform. Sasha poked his head out of the conductor window when he saw me – with his beady shark eyes and bad haircut and black turtleneck.
The boys weren’t happy about the text. It had been Oleg who had written on the floor in a moment of impulsive creativity and manic energy, Sasha said. It was the first mark of many in a new apartment which was meant to represent all their collective talents and personalities, and serve as a place where they could be creative and unconventional, and stack the walls high with trinkets and cameras for their movies and unmatching furniture as they planned to, and write on the floors if they wanted to. A christening, if you will. They wouldn’t remove the writing, Sasha said, and L would have to deal. Either that, or she could well move out if she wanted to.
Knowing L, I knew she wouldn’t budge – but I guess I was hopeful, given our recent reconciliation. Maybe she’d relent, I thought, for the sake of that handshake we made to keep peace. Besides, deep down, I liked the pink-red writing on the floor. I liked that the boys wanted the same kind of home I did, one without restrictions, where we could be ourselves interdependently.
Sasha’s train gathered its passengers and left the station, but it wasn’t headed in the direction I needed. I remained on the platform, the snow swirling around the light of the lamp posts, the trees and the rest of the city plunged in darkness around me.
A train going in the other direction arrived at the platform; this was the one I needed to take. It was Vlad’s. He conversed with me briefly from his window as the passengers stepped over a large gap to climb aboard. Speaking quickly and frantically like he always did, as if he had just downed too much espresso – his eyes wide behind his large glasses and his nose shiny and eager – Vlad expressed to me the same stubborn disappointment that Sasha had. L's request would not do. She was already throwing a wrench into their home dynamic, he said, and they had just moved in. Either she’d have to move out, or… well, there wasn’t another option.
His train began to leave the station. I realized I should get on, or else I’d be waiting in the cold longer for the next one. I grabbed the handlebars on the doors of the entrance – these trains strangely resembled big steel cargo trains more than they did passenger ones – and I realized the gap between the step and the platform was too big. I’d have to jump and hope someone would grab me and pull me up.
Instead, a man inside saw me preparing to leap and gently pushed me back onto the platform. I wouldn’t be able to get on. The train glided away heavily, leaving me waiting on the platform again. I waited, looking into the darkness around me and wondering what it held.
Finally another train going in that direction arrived, after what could have been minutes or hours. The darkness and the snow was unchanging, and I had no idea what time it was; it could be the middle of the night for all I knew, and I was aimlessly riding trains with no goal beyond simply existing in the outside world, in the way I used to.
I rode that train further into the city center, and got off at a step where I could transfer to a bus going in the same exact direction I had just come from; the U-turns and aimless transport dredging up an old memory from Budapest, when I would ride the clanky old trams – seats and window frames peeling – to the end of the line for no reason, except maybe to leave no stone left unturned in seeing the world, even the forgotten, weedy parts at the end of train lines.
There were more people waiting at this bus stop, a sign I had made it closer to civilization and the center of the city. But the longer I waited, the more I felt myself running away from the inevitable: facing L's impenetrable anger and demands, and a refusal to move out. She’d mold the apartment into her own, and the boys would flit free one by one, like birds breaking away onto separate journeys, unstoppable. How did I get myself into this situation again? Had I been too forgiving to reconcile and hope she would acquiesce?
Pasha was a bus driver on this line. He arrived as the darkness was lifting slightly, and flickering city lights vaguely glimmered in the blue distance. Like the others, he leaned his head out the window to talk to me. I came up to him and my head fell back to meet his gaze above me.
Pasha was the gentlest of the five, with sad deep-set eyes and dark bags under them, and delicate features. But his eyes were the main draw. It was impossible to look into his face framed by the bus window – my head leaning back and everything reaching up – without his eyes swimming forward and pulling you in. As he spoke they almost floated in the snowy air on their own, brown-hazel and beautiful, his breath curling around them in the cold.
Pasha was just as upset as the others, except perhaps kinder. He couldn’t live with L. Deep down I knew I couldn’t either. A negotiation or a compromise as previously hoped would not be possible; the two parties remained stubbornly on two opposite sides of the line, and I was no longer in the middle. But I would be left behind.
Pasha’s bus began to leave the station, full of nightly youthful passengers who were now heading home as the dawn was a few hours away. But the feeling of looking up at Pasha’s eyes – a feeling of reaching up – hadn’t left me. I longed for that feeling.
The bus left and I was alone again. The wind picked up, and I knew I’d have to go back to the apartment on foot. I set off into the snow, truly without the comforts of the modern day of a digital map or cabs. But to my delight, I suddenly realized I was holding a parcel of papers and a notebook, and the paper on top was a note from Pasha.
In it, he had written gentle words of young love and naive excitement about experiencing the world. The note had reassured me, as if I was holding a paper that connected me to youth and my old self. I trudged through the snow holding the paper even as the snow seeped into my shoes, turning my feet wet and cold.
