The Taste of Penny (2 page)

The soldier to my left comes to. He reaches across the aisle and puts his hand on Choika's stockinged knee. “Oh Caucasian beauty,” he says.

The babushkas bang their canes against the seats.

“Relax my friends,” the soldier says. He removes his hand from her knee and puts it on mine. Choika never looks away from the window.

“Do you know the game Submarine?” he asks me.

“I've heard,” I say. The game is very popular among students. I had heard of those in my cohort playing. But no one was inviting me.

From what I gather a kind of game master they call Captain locks a group of friends in a flat with several bottles of vodka and some pickles. They cannot bring watches, and all clocks are unplugged. The telephone and television are removed by the Captain and no cell phones are permitted. He locks them in the flat and goes about his life, taking the key. The players block the light from all the windows and drink, sleep, drink, sleep, eat pickles, drink, sleep, etc. They
are not allowed to peek out the window or stop drinking while they are awake. Two days later the Captain returns and lets them out.

He smiles at me. “We have been operating Submarine for ten days.”

“It's a long time,” I say.

“Our Captain—he forgot about us.”

With his hand still on my knee, the soldier falls asleep again.

“You are giving away so much,” the babushka whispers to Choika.

“Much or not much,” Choika says.

 

 

I play out this fantasy: Choika is one of the Black Widows from the article.

And it makes a lot of sense. Her eyes never flinch. Even when the bus slams into potholes, she stares steadily out the window. Her bag is not quite big enough for luggage yet larger than an ordinary purse, the perfect size to conceal a wad of nails and ball bearings. She is just old enough to have had a young husband who died recently in the war.

How would she know Lena then? That was the hole…Unless Lena's family, hard up for money like most Russian families, had become Chechen sympathizers purely out of financial necessity, taking in Black Widows, housing them, feeding them, taking care of them while plotting out the best, most populated, most unexpected routes. That was how they managed to buy that box with the keg in it where they sold dried squid and preservativi. I look around the bus. It's packed.

I kind of get-off on this idea. I can already imagine the cutline on the national news back home: Black Widow suicide bomber blows up bus outside of St. Petersburg, Russia. One American is among the dead.

My life reduced to that one line. I lean across the seat to Choika and whisper, “Your way is fraught with peril; your plight, an admirable one.”

She does not turn her head.

“Devil,” the babushka says, crunching on sunflower seeds. “Now you've got foreigners drooling.”

I disturb the soldier's hand from my knee and he jumps to his feet, wobbling slowly into the aisle and teetering to the back of the bus.

The driver, looking up at us from a rear-view mirror the size of an ironing board, yells at him. “Hey, jerk,” he says. “The bathroom is out of order.”

“I'll piss the floor then,” the soldier says.

The driver swings the bus onto the shoulder, knocking the soldier down. The brakes are still hissing and the driver is up, halfway down the aisle. The other soldier grabs his arm as he goes by.

“Reconsider any manly-man,” the other solider says.

“No,” the driver says, “nothing like that.” The soldier in the aisle crawls to his feet again and lights a cigarette. “Friends,” the driver says, “let me talk to you then, outside. Everybody, let's take a bathroom break.”

“Where are we supposed to go?” a woman shouts from the back. “Under some death cap?”

“Find a nice tree,” the driver says.

Choika stands up. I think,
detonation.

“I believe someone asked you kindly, sir,” she says.
“Where exactly are women supposed to go?”

“I believe someone answered, miss. There's some congenial trees in the area,” the driver says. “They're cleaner than most bathrooms. You have five minutes or we leave without you.”

“And what about ticks?” one of the babushkas says.

“Make sure you get their heads,” the driver says.

The babushkas break out some toilet paper and sell squares for two rubles each. Choika buys two. The passengers disperse into the forest. I hold it and eavesdrop. The soldiers and driver stand around a rock talking. There is a lot of nodding but I can't hear them. The soldiers deliberate between one another and say something back to the driver. Then they all shake hands and pee together on the rock.

I go towards what I think is Choika's tree. Another woman I don't recognize steps out and yells at me for sneaking up on her. I use her tree after she's gone and when I'm done Choika and the soldiers are back on the bus and the driver is beeping.

I take the small portion of the seat the soldiers leave me. The soldier who'd kept his hand on my knee holds out his hand, this time to shake. “Andre Andrevich,” he says. “Let me guess: Fritz?”

“American,” I say.

“Even better,” he says, scooting over to give me more room. “Share some beer with us.” He takes a warm bottle from his duffle bag and hands it to me. “The danger in playing Submarine is in the doors. Russian doors are the problem, but, well, let's say you don't have to worry about them when you have a responsible Captain. Our Captain was also interested in drinking. And one of the rules of Submarine—strictly enforced
by players—is that you cannot look out the window and you cannot know the time, and as a consequence you never know how long you've been playing.”

“You don't get light through the crevices?” I ask.

“You get, which is why you tape the curtains to the wall with electrical tape.”

The other soldier knocks on the window to get Choika's attention. She is like a statue, a perfect flesh statue with a birth control patch on her hip. The other soldier hunkers down in his seat to try and see up her skirt.

“You should be in Submarine for two days, but sometimes time goes slow and sometimes fast. We think it was the sixth day when we realized, perhaps time was going too slow.”

“It seems impossible to me, to mistake six days for two,” I say.

“Luckily, we had good amounts of vodka, and pickled garlic.”

He replaces my beer and takes the empty. He puts the empties on the floor and says, “Watch this.” He points at his watch. The babushkas set these newspaper hats full of sunflower seeds on the seat and pick up the empties. They drop them in plastic sacks and go back to eating their seeds. “Five seconds,” he says, “a new record.”

“You're throwing away money,” one of the babushkas says. “You could use a manicure, but you are not accurate.”

“You cannot hear through Russian doors,” Andre says. “We were shouting. We thought we would die there. We were pounding on the doors, but this is like a mouse running on a pipe. We were on the top floor, Vadim screaming for help out the windows. Everyone thought we were just drunk.”

“We were fucking drunk,” Vadim, the other soldier, says.

“When the Captain finally arrived he tried to tell us that it had only been two days. I told him, ‘Prepare to suffer' and he admitted that he had forgotten us, and he confessed—you will never believe this: He had been off playing Submarine himself. He was a player in two other games of Submarine before he remembered about us. Since he didn't shower, he didn't find the key in his pocket. He also lost our cell phones.”

I tell Andre my story about “barber” and “baba,” which he laughs at once I explain that in English a “barber” is someone who cuts hair. He elbows Vadim and tells him my story. He and Vadim crack up.

“Let me tell you,” Andre says, “
all
women are whores.”

“Watch your mouth,” one of the babushkas says.

“I've written an essay about this phenomenon,” I say to Andre. “It was awarded a very prestigious collegiate prize in the US.”

 

 

Choika sits like a statue. Her bag in her lap, her legs crossed official-like. She hardly jostles. I am more and more disappointed that she has not blown us all up. I contemplate peeing into an empty beer bottle. Instead I set the bottle on the floor and one of the babushkas snatches it.

The cops pull over our bus and the driver calls another bathroom break to deal with them. I am happy for the bathroom break, the first one off the bus. I whiz behind the wheel and climb back aboard before everyone else is even off. The cops and the driver are talking near the front of the bus, and I see the driver hand them some money.

Choika steps off the bus and walks around the cops
and the driver. I hurry back to my seat to watch her. She goes across the street and chooses a thin birch. She plants her feet in front of the tree, then squats, staring at her knees. I wonder if I'm becoming weird.

She stands again, tugging down the hem of her skirt. She doesn't even look when she steps onto the highway. She stands there in the middle of the asphalt. She lifts up one heel, wiping off the mud with toilet paper. Then she does the same to the other heel.

When she slides back into the seat, one of the babushkas holds out the paper hat of sunflower seeds to her and says, “Here, girl, you need to eat.”

“There's no place to wash hands,” Choika says.

The police come aboard, forcing their way to the back of the bus. They crowbar the locked bathroom door open and a tower of shoeboxes collapses on them. The driver breaks for it, but Andre and Vadim trounce him in the aisle.

“You bitches,” the driver says. “They were in on it,” he says to the police as they bend him over the seatback and cuff him. “They wanted free pairs. Size forty-three and forty-five. Check them.”

“A cunt to your mouth,” someone in back yells. “You unscrupulous shit-ass,” another.

Choika stands awkwardly, like she has to sneeze, and whips some kind of ball with wires out of her bag. She pushes something on it and hunches. She hunches again, like she's pushing in the top of a deflated volleyball with her thumbs.

“What is this?” one of the babushkas says.

I close my eyes.

When I open them again the aisle is a knot of perfectly unharmed screaming bodies.

“Move,” Andre says to me and I push out into the aisle.

The soldiers lunge across the seat, tackling Choika. A policeman pitches the bomb out the window. It lands in the street and rolls into the ditch.

As I'm swept off the bus, I'm thinking, Did she have that bomb before I thought it? “Did I do that?” I say out loud, and in English, but no one can hear me.

 

 

Once off the bus the soldiers yell furiously for us to get as far away from the bomb as possible. We are off the bus, dispersing into the woods, I more hesitantly than the group.

When the police stuff Choika into the back of the cop car I can see her knees are bleeding but she's not crying or shaking. She sits in the backseat staring out the window just like she'd stared out the bus window the whole ride, like nothing mattered.

The police and the soldiers crouch over the bomb. Andre tinkers with it and Vadim and the police back up.

“I never saw a Muslim dressed like that,” one of the babushkas says.

“She was masquerading as one of our girls,” the other says. “Sluts,” she says and dumps a little purse full of coins on the ground.

“What are you doing?” one babushka says.

“She gave me four rubles for the toilet paper.”

A little boy runs up and starts collecting the money. His mother yells at him to put it down and come back to her. When he does she hugs his head and says, “I wish we'd be there” or something like that—I don't understand the exact phrasing.

I approach the soldiers and the police. Andre is still fiddling with the bomb.

“I know her name,” I say.

The police turn around. Their faces twitch. They're really shaken up. “Who are you?” one of them asks.

“Foreigner,” Vadim says.

“I know her name,” I say. “I heard her say it.”

“It's crap,” Andre says, “total crap.” He leaves the bomb in the ditch. “What's her name?” Andre says.

“Choika,” I say.

“Choika,” one of the police says. He says it again louder and looking her way and she turns her head. I suddenly feel ashamed, like I gave her up.

“What is that?” Andre says. “Choika.”

“Chukchi?” Vadim says.

“Never heard of it,” Andre says.

“Friends,” the driver says. He's still in the handcuffs. “Feel free to retake your seat, friend,” the driver says to me.

I'm the first one back on the bus and one of Choika's gorgeous shoes is on the floor near my seat. There's a scrap of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of the heel.

The driver talks to the police and the soldiers as the other passengers reboard, absolutely silent. Even the chatty babushkas. They sit cramped together in the exact same spots they sat in before, leaving a wide space where Choika had been. A policeman unlocks the driver's handcuffs and he comes aboard. He goes back to the bathroom and selects two boxes, restacking those that had fallen. The door refuses to latch at first but eventually clicks. He hands the two boxes to the policemen. Then the soldiers and the driver reboard.

I point to the shoe on the ground.

“Don't touch it,” Andre says. “Forget about it.” He kicks
it under the seat and hands me a beer. From the first sip, I feel the pressure build in my bladder.