Babylon and Other Stories by Alix Ohlin

Author:Alix Ohlin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-12-09T22:00:00+00:00

In Moscow, she walked alone to the Kremlin, drifting past its spiky towers and tiers of gold domes. Among the crowds she could hear the drone of tour guides reciting historical facts in English and French. This was ten years later. Her husband, Ross, worked for a pharmaceutical company in Chicago and was allowed to bring Maxine on this business trip. The Russians were in dire need of pharmaceuticals, he said, they needed new drugs for the new Russia, and he was busy with them from morning to night. Maxine had wanted badly to come along—never having traveled much—but now that she was here, on her own, she felt listless and cold and had to fight the urge to stay in the hotel room with her work. She was in graduate school, and school was the only place she seemed to feel at home. To get herself out of the hotel she began to treat the trip as a type of class and pored over the guidebook, learning to decipher a few of the signs, memorizing random architectural details. Each day she assigned herself sights to see: museums and palaces and armories, grand old buildings with vaulted ceilings and gilded paintings and firearms.

She bought a set of nesting dolls for her mother—the outermost shell a stocky, dark-haired peasant girl, the innermost a baby so small that she could squeeze it in her palm—then walked out into Red Square. Russians strode quickly past her, their faces set, carrying plastic shopping bags. Back home, in Chicago, she had read about food lines, poverty, and political chaos, but there were few signs of this, at least in the places within walking range of the hotel. She had an uneasy feeling that things were being concealed, were beyond her reach, whether because of the country or her own failing, she wasn't sure.

She shivered in her light coat and crossed her arms over her chest. With a slightly guilty feeling she retreated to the hotel room and ordered soup and coffee from room service. She opened her guidebook to the map of Moscow, then flipped to the map of Russia. She tried to remember the name of Yuri's town, far in the north, but had forgotten it. Only Bat would remember the name. He lived in Oregon now, where he operated his own business, a company that sold hemp products through the mail. Despite their parents' fears, Bat seemed to have turned out all right; he was kind of a hippie, maybe, but he supported himself and had a small house in the woods.

Maxine stood in the chilly hotel room and looked out the window. Traffic blared below her. She and her brother hardly ever spoke, and he rarely went home to visit. She thought of his face when she and Yuri came home from the Caverns that day. He was sitting in front of the TV, drinking a Coke, and they sat down next to him, close together on the couch. Bat started to say something, but then, looking at them, stopped.

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