Chapter Seventeen: Commuters’ Dream
The sun was up and Amalia was sleeping after staying up so late to grieve—and dance—with me after my mother’s death. I could hear her wheezing from down in the kitchen. I wouldn’t disturb her by going up the creaky stairs to my attic room. I’d go back to the motel. It was six forty-five in the morning. Mr. Suri would be tired but happy. It was most likely a busy night. Business picks up when it rains.
The people riding the bus at this hour, only seven in total, were mostly women who took care of the children and houses of people who went off to work in Hartford city center. We rode the bus as one that morning. All our energies propelled us through the streets of Berlin, Connecticut, to our places of employ. We were the workers of this dying city. It is dying; otherwise there would not be an underworld in which the Liberty Motel and the other short-stay establishments could survive.
My clothes were still damp from the rain of the night before. The sun was coming through the trees, but the massive dark clouds were moving overhead, and the wind had gone sharp and cold. The bus passed the same places I saw when I first moved here. Who could ever forget Pete’s-A-Place or the Glass Eye Emporium, which appeared to have closed its doors for good. The sign of a human eye with a blue neon iris was outside the store in a heap of discarded wooden cabinets, small round mirrors, and metal chairs with headrests. I wondered where their customers go now.
The road was slick and shiny, and the smell of rain and oil seeped into the bus as the wheels spun along. The woman sitting across from me was wearing a white uniform that was much too tight for her. Her ankles were swollen in light-colored panty hose, and she was knitting an infant-sized sock on three small needles out of multicolored yarn. Next to her was a young woman, with thin arms and long hands, who was sleeping with her head tilted slightly to the left. She reminded me of one of the cranes that nested in the grasses along the shores of the Gulf of Finland. The woman next to me still smelled fresh from her morning bath. The scent of peaches surrounded her. She had a large book open in her lap. I could see it was a textbook for nursing. She was reading about techniques for drawing blood.
“Ask the patient if they are right or left handed. Wrap the rubber tourniquet around the upper arm of the hand they use less frequently. Tap with two fingers on the top side of the elbow joint,” the instructions explained.
A shadow cast from the sun coming over our shoulders looked like a bird landing across the page where needle insertion was described. As I leaned my head back and looked up and out the window, I could see a cloud in the shape of a dog’s head. Its mouth was wide open, and it looked like the dog was howling at the fading moon. The seats in the bus were molded blue plastic, and the dry heat came up from behind my legs. My clothes had dried and no longer stuck to me. The bus driver was wearing a black kerchief tied around his head. He was sweating quite a lot and kept pulling out a bandana every few minutes to wipe his forehead and neck. The other seven people on the bus were silently staring into the middle aisle as if it were a bottomless canyon. My eyes felt tired and swollen from the crying and lack of sleep. I wondered if my sadness made me smell different. The woman with the book closed her eyes and started to sleep and lean against me. She must have been tired from working and studying and going to school. The book was slipping off her lap.
“Here, miss, your book.” I grabbed it before it fell to the floor.
She woke and said, “Oh, I must have fallen asleep. Thank you. I am very tired.”
“You are studying?”
“For nursing. It’s very hard.”
“You smell like peaches,” I said, hoping to make her feel more comfortable.
As I handed her back her book, she said, “Thank you, it’s my shower gel.”
“In Russia everyone goes to the local banyas. We love special smells, especially of flowers and fruit trees.”
“Banyas?”
Her straight brown hair was pulled back tightly in a ponytail, which exposed her high forehead. She was young but already had some fine lines surrounding the edges of her blue eyes.
“A bathhouse,” I told her.
“Men and women together?”
“No, separate. We use birch branches to take off the dead skin. It awakens the circulation and stimulates the spirits.”
“I use a loofah, and sometimes that’s a bit too rough.”
“I miss the banyas. Too bad there isn’t one here in Berlin.”
“Bathing with a bunch of other women—I don’t know if that would be considered a good time here. This is my stop, excuse me,” she said as she got up to stand by the back door.
“There is no other way to get as clean. In the heat and steam of the banya, you can feel your skin as a living, breathing part of you.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” she said as the door was about to open.
“Do svidaniya,” I said.
In Petersburg at the metro stop closest to my local banya, there was always a group of women singing in the tunnel during the busy commuting hours. People would toss money into a hat they placed by their feet. One of the women was well dressed; she probably worked in an office. Another was much older and walked with a cane. The third always wore a hodgepodge of ethnic clothing: a babushka scarf, an embroidered peasant shirt, and a batik wraparound skirt. She was the great harmonizer. Their voices resonated off the curved ceramic walls of the tunnel and made a river of sound flow under the canal. Strong, steady, and deep, the music was a caress when you walked by. When they had collected enough money, they would pack up and come to the banya for a steam and glasses of vodka. They would beat each other with the birch branches in the same rhythm as the folk songs in their repertoire. Everyone’s skin glistened from the repeated swipes with the softened branches foaming with eucalyptus soap. Every pore was stimulated. People here would benefit from such camaraderie and cleansing.
The bus driver kept wiping his brow. He looked agitated. Thinking about the banya soothed me, and I closed my eyes as a patch of sun coming through the clouds blinded me for a second or two. In the darkness I escaped this painful morning with a fitful dream.
“Garghhh…garghh…”
Strange noises from the bus driver.
“Excuse me sir, are you all right?” I asked.
His right arm had dropped to his side.
“Garghhh…garhh…”
He couldn’t speak; he was choking. He was turning around to look at me.
The bus was still moving. Everything else shifted to slow motion.
I saw the nursing student waiting at the rear door, and I saw myself sleeping. Suddenly, the driver slumped over the wheel, and jarred out of our early morning stupor, we all started clamoring over each other. Things started sliding and tipping over as the bus skidded. The world outside the bus streaked by as it spun and slid. The mist rising from the road turned into a belt of clouds around the bus. I saw the nursing student jump past me to the front of the bus. Suddenly everything stopped and there was silence. The rain had started to come down heavily again. I was on my hands and knees. The woman in the white uniform with the swollen ankles was clutching her knitting. The nursing student was under the feet of the driver holding down the brake.