Unseen. Mark Graham
morning for a city as large as Dnepropetrovsk. He walked along the long line of makeshift kiosks made of old cargo pallets covered with large canvas and plastic tarps. Some kiosk owners slept curled next to their sales-stands, wrapped tightly in blankets and Persian carpets. He imagined how busy they would soon become, full of smiles and desperate sales pitches. All of them running back and forth from train to train to make change.
A large cement slab stage separated train tracks, providing Martin ample room to pace and stroll. All the trains were painted solid blue, each with a long yellow stripe along the sides, matching the colors of the national flag. Most of the boxcars were newer, maybe ten to twenty years old. The older trains interested him more as he imagined early cold war drama around them. Never leaving sight of his train car, Martin counted the cars as he walked. His home was on the other side of the planet while here he was a stranger. He felt the sudden loneliness of that fact.
Jenny had urged—and he had planned to follow her suggestions—to take many pictures and make diary entries, interacting with as many locals as possible to deepen his travel experience. But his poor disposition concerning change and the stress of it was too much. Every time he thought to follow her recommendations, he simply did not have the energy. He was into day two of ten and had no more interest in anything than getting to day ten and ending the trip. To get back to the life he had neglected to reflect upon and appreciate. But at the same time, Martin knew he was wasting something good for himself, something lasting.
The question burned from his chest, “Why do I do what I don’t want to do? Why don’t I do what I want to do?”
The woman’s voice came over the speakers again. This time he associated the sound of it to a scene in Doctor Zhivago, adding another layer to his surreal experience. She mentioned the transit number for his train and he double-checked his ticket. One of the attendants of his train hung from the edge of the steps, waving him over.
It was accommodating to have their assistance in getting back to the right car quickly, but it annoyed him. He certainly didn’t need anyone’s help.
Berdyansk, Ukraine
Dima woke, like most every morning, to his spastic cat attacking his feet. He punted the cat off the bed and rolled himself upright, carefully setting his feet to the floor, wary of another ambush. He reached one hand behind him, habitually, to feel his wife at rest. The power had come back on in the middle of the night so the radio and TV competed for his attention as he moved through his second-floor one-room flat. On his way into the kitchen, he stopped to silence Lady Gaga and the Ukrainian version of the sitcom The Nanny. The room was divided by a wooden fold-out panel he had devised from lumber found near the complex dumpster. For this, as with all his ideas, he was inspired by a need. In this case the idea was prompted when his daughter became a teenager and needed her privacy. In recent years it also helped for when his brother-in-law would sometimes stop over, uninvited, to sleep off his vodka binges.
In the kitchen he parted the yellowed linen curtains and pulled open the windows. He had installed them to open inwards so they would stop banging against the steel bars attached to the window frame outside. Dima didn’t trust the city tap water except to water his wife’s plants along the windowsill. He watered them now, as he did every morning. He set down the watering cup and turned to the kitchen counter to plug in his sheet-metal electrolysis contraption, and poured the tap water into the attached filter. The white and yellow sediment that dropped to the container’s bottom always fascinated him. Dima broke open a packet of oatmeal and poured the clean water into a separate tin pot to boil. Warm oatmeal and a banana for breakfast. He sat at the table and waited, sipping on thick black Turkish coffee made from water saved from the day before.
He was almost happy this morning because he had gotten some guaranteed business. Looked like it would be a solid day’s worth of carting an American around town. They tipped better than anyone, but it was never in a haughty way like the way some of the Europeans did. Sometimes it was worse, though, because Americans often conveyed a kind of desperate compassion that reminded him he was in need.
His daughter was getting dressed for work at the kiosk on the boardwalk. The tourist season was about to hit and half of Kiev and Moscow would descend upon them. She walked into the kitchen and Dima forced his eyes to his bowl for as long as possible.
“It’s not supposed to be that hot today,” Dima croaked.
“Papa, please. These are normal clothes.”
“What clothes?”
“Papa!”
Dima inwardly berated himself again for the early years. The neglect, driving the trucks. Always gone. Food, the need of it always on his mind. Did whatever it took to get them the food, maybe some education. In the end his daughter was as skinny as a bamboo rod and probably had read three books in her life. He stared at his bowl with intense disdain. This is life. He left the bowl half-eaten and went to the room to get his jacket. On a hot day everyone would know why he wore a jacket. People need only to think he carried a knife or gun to keep him safe from unknown troubles. His wife was up now and came to the hall to thank him for boiling the water. She placed his prized cap on his head. For a moment they held each other’s gaze. When he was feeling lonely or worried he would indulge himself in that moment. And she was faithful to be present and engaged. She would burn a kind of truth, a peace from God, into him. His thoughts of her would come to him throughout the day. A memory, a word, or a laugh. Each moment fresh to him again until he returned home. It was not always that way but he was older now, and they needed each other for so much more now.
Dima distracted the insane cat with food in order to leave the apartment. At first, when his daughter had found the cat he had told her they could not keep it. He informed her that as a patriot, a man of the community, he mustn’t take ownership of the cat. And how Ukrainian neighborhoods pride themselves on how fat they can make their strays. But she so wanted to keep the cat and they took it in because he always held before himself all that he had never provided for her.
He left the apartment, locking both its interior and exterior steel doors. He walked the long damp concrete hall to the building entrance and down the broken steps to the army-green steel entryway. He unlocked both bolts on that door and stepped out to relock them. The morning light reminded him that he lived like a coal-miner. In a full circle before him were five other nine-story structures exactly like his. Falling apart, like his. He put on his sunglasses and lit a cigarette. He caught movement around the center courtyard of the complex. Boys carried on a football match, never disturbing the handful of sleeping homeless men scattered about on the grounds of mixed asphalt, concrete and dirt.
Dima took a moment to look back at his building remembering how this was not always so rundown. When the complex was new, in 1985, when he worked the factory job he earned in military service. The courtyard had clean-cut grass and the city provided free outdoor films every weekend. The playground was newly painted and filled with young, well-dressed children laughing in the swings, not with prostitutes flicking cigarettes and killing daylight boredom. He sighed, stomped out his own smoke, and buried it into the dirt while he reordered his mind for work. This is life.
The 1982 Volga was a solid metal box coated with a mix of faded yellow paint and sea-air rust, and always unlocked because no one messed with the taxis. Dima had taken a loan five years earlier to buy it off an army buddy who had stolen it from Kazakhstan. The loan officer in Kiev, who only had a first name, had printed off papers that magically made the deal legal.
It was Dima’s now, mostly, even if he had to keep a ‘roof’ on it by paying protection fees to the local police every month. And he was also, despite his efforts to avoid it, part of an unofficial union that might call on him to transport cargo at any time. Though that had only happened once, he hoped it never would again.
Dima switched the fuel line to the two natural gas tanks in his trunk. It hurt his passenger luggage space, but liquid fuel was expensive. Most