Separate Kingdoms (P.S.)

Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Read Free Page B

Book: Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Read Free
Author: Valerie Laken
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about her American dentist.
    “Is there another door in here?”
    “What?” The man shuffled around a little and came back to Anton’s side. “No. Just the one.”
    The dripping faucet echoed against the walls and floor around him. Anton felt his face beginning to twitch.
    “Well, what’s the problem, son?”
    There was nowhere he could go.
    “I need a toilet.”
    “Oh, I see. Right.” He took Anton’s arm again and turned him around, but in turning the old man slipped on the wet tile and began to go down. “Oi!” He clutched at Anton’s torso with both arms, pressing Anton’s head into his hot, damp chest. They wavered a moment, flailing, but did not go down. They stood upright on the tile floor, trembling, without so much as a bumped elbow to knock the thrill out of their bones.
    All of his numbers were gone, flown from his head. All his bearings, all his points of reference. He didn’t even know where the door was. He wasn’t going to get to the kiosk alone, or to the train or Drezna or anywhere. He was a little boy clutching at an old man in a stinking threadbare suit in the basement reek of Kurskii Vokzal, with his mother worrying at the door. And he was not sick at all, though the stench was enough to turn anyone’s stomach, and Oleg was home in the field pulling weeds and dreaming of his girls without so much as a thought for Anton or the money he’d given him.
    “Well, are you going in or not?” the man said, pressing Anton’s hand against the gritty door of the stall.
    He stood in his tight pants with his hand on the metal door. “Go to hell,” Anton murmured. From behind them came the click of dress shoes and then the sound of someone urinating.
    “Pardon?”
    “You heard me,” Anton whispered.
    “This is how you treat an old man?”
    “Go to hell.”
    This time the man slapped him. Not on the face, like his mother did on rare occasion. On the behind. He spanked him.
    The tears came now; there was no chance of stopping them. “Pervert,” Anton hissed in one last attempt at manliness. “Get your hands off me.”
    “What’s going on here?” the dress-shoes man at the urinal said.
    “Kids. Kids today don’t know how to behave.”
    “Stop touching me!” Anton cried. “Don’t touch me.” The old man removed his hand and took a step back, and now Anton was alone against the door of the stall, sinking down. He crouched low on the wet, filthy floor, and the tears came. He sucked at the air in unsteady patches. There was no one anywhere, not even the foreigners, who could fix this.
    “Dorogoi moi,” his mother’s voice came rushing in. She crouched down on the floor and folded him in her arms.
    “What have you done?” she hissed at the old man.
    “He’s crazy,” the old man said.
    “I just found them like this,” said the man who had been at the urinal.
    And then the room seemed to clear out and get quiet, and she rocked him there on the floor against her chest, back and forth. She let him erupt in her arms without asking questions. She stroked his hair and the back of his neck and said, “That’s all right, druzhok. That’s all right.”
    “I don’t want to go to Dr. Nicholson’s.”
    “You’re sick. It’s all right.” She stroked his back. “You’re not feeling well.”
    In time it subsided and Anton was left feeling hollow, his nose wet, his voice deep and thick with mucous.
    “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “How about that?”
    “Let’s go, let’s go. I want to go home.”
    So they wiped themselves off and she straightened his clothes. They stood very upright and walked together out of the men’s room in the basement of the station, and whether anybody was watching them he did not know, but he knew that his mother had been a great beauty in her day and that she carried herself very nicely, always in top form, and she was thin now and supple at his side, and he was proud to be with her. They walked an even forty steps straight ahead this way, as

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