Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Read Free

grabbed his arm so that her bag banged hard against his thigh. When they reached the steps the woman called out, “Hold still for a minute, thugs, we’ve got a blind boy here.”
    “There’s the step. There you go. There’s another one, little guy.” She held tightly to his arm on the platform until his mother arrived. “Thank you.”
    Anton blinked his eyes against the insult of this woman’s hand on his arm. But the air of the open station yard felt cool on his skin and contained a hundred unfamiliar smells.
    “This city,” his mother said. “I don’t see how people can stand it. Let’s go.”
    They walked arm in arm up the platform toward the noise of the station buildings. Women in heels clicked erratically around them, people brushed past them and overcame them from behind, and all the while the trains were coming and going with the ding dong dong of the departure announcements.
    “Where to now?”
    “We’ll go down to the metro station and take it through the center, then transfer down to Profsoyuznaya,” she said.
    “Is it far?”
    “We have plenty of time. Hold still. Let me wipe your face.”
    “What direction are we going now?”
    “This is”—she stopped walking a moment and turned around a little—“I think this is south.”
    “That’s south,” a man next to them said.
    “Oh. We’re going east right now, dear.”
    They walked on toward the station buildings, and the sound from the loudspeakers got louder. There was the smell of shashlik grills already being fired up to the right where the cafés and kiosks must be. Some men brushed past them smelling of fish and stale alcohol. They were speaking a strange, jumbled language.
    Anton inhaled and gathered his courage, then squeezed his mother’s arm. “I’d like to buy a magazine,” he said.
    “What?”
    “For Oleg. Oleg wants a certain…he wants a car magazine.”
    “A car magazine? What for?”
    “I don’t know. He likes them.”
    “Car magazines. What will it be next?” She stopped and pulled him out of the line of traffic. He could feel her body leaning in different directions, looking for the right kiosk. Then she led him a few steps to their right, which Anton figured must be south. They were up against the cool metal of a kiosk now; it was still damp from the morning. A man leaned in over Anton’s shoulder and said, “ Komsomolets ,” then shifted to reach for his paper. Anton’s mother pulled him to the side again.
    “What kind of car magazine?”
    “Do they have a lot of magazines? Is it a well-stocked kiosk?”
    “They’re all well stocked nowadays. What they wouldn’t sell you. Which one do you want? They have Avtomobil from May and July, and two foreign ones—that one has a lovely purple car. Very strange.”
    Anton paused.
    “Well? What do you think he’d like?”
    “I think…I think he has those already. I think it’s supposed to have a truck. Something with a truck.”
    His mother asked the woman through the window about trucks. They didn’t have any truck magazines.
    “But they have lots of magazines?”
    “Yes. Do you want a different one?”
    He could be grown-up like Oleg. They could be equal.
    “Do you have to go to the bathroom, Mama?”
    “Anton, stop this. What is this about?”
    “I…I—” A mechanical female voice interrupted him through the speakers over his head, announcing the departure of the next train to Kursk. Anton felt as though he were being swallowed up by her voice, by the vibrating speakers everywhere, by the crush of strangers poking in at him through the void before his eyes. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.
    “You have to go to the bathroom.” Her words came out slowly, but Anton could hear the frustration welling in them. She pulled him toward her by both shoulders and snapped her words into his face. “Anton. This isn’t funny.”
    He’d had enough too. “I know.”
    “Well, you’ll have to wait till Dr. Nicholson’s. We’re not going in