Free Love Is Never Past Tense... by Janna Yeshanova

What if the pickup had not been there?
    But if Serge remained on the platform, and watched the train leave, everything would be different. How? Nobody knows how. Different, that’s all. Nevertheless, they lodged in the train car together, across from each other. The train squeaked with all its wheels and it rolled them into a life full of riddles, many of which the old man could not solve in the years that followed.
     
    ***
     
    The train was a suburban type with bench seats. There were not many passengers sitting there. At once, you could smell kielbasa, boiled eggs, fresh cucumbers and other food. To fill your stomach while on the road is a ritual action impossible to remove. Like before travel time, everybody was painfully starved.
    For Serge and Janna, though, no supplies existed, and contrary to their custom of eating, they expected a forced three-hour fast. As if to spite them, a well-fed man sitting beside them tried to fill his chubby boy with cutlets. 23 The boy shook his head side-to-side like a brat, and the man, not getting upset, placed the next piece into his own mouth. Janna and Serge had no strength to observe this procedure for long, so they went to the end of the train car. Wheels were tapping out kilometers. Serge leaned against a shaking wall and smoked. Janna stood opposite. Her face was concentrated, and her brow was furrowed. She looked very adult, and to Serge communication with this woman seemed ridiculous. What forces prompted him to go with her now? Far from places he had known and held dear, and in the end, far from his favorite sea. He goes to strangers, with another stranger, in effect, a strange woman. “Who is she to me? Who is she in at all?” thought Serge, glancing at his sputnik. Janna slowly lifted her eyelashes. Her sight was tired, but not full of pity. It belonged to a woman used to exhaustion, struggling and winning. To tell the truth, at that moment, Serge did not yet understand this. He followed his natural instinct instead, not being able to separate from his object of desire. He was ruled by unsatisfied passion. He did not look any further at the impending night. How could he know that Janna already separated from him, and looked into the far future?
    They returned to their seats and asked the big man for his copy of Ogoniok . 24 He gladly gave them the magazine, mainly because he did not know what to do with it. Janna found a long article about Delacroix and started to read aloud. Serge listened. But her voice hardly reached through the noise of the moving train. So as not to lose the idea, he began to read it himself, and successfully reached the end of the article, but still did not comprehend the entire plot. Janna understood it, and began to explain conscientiously to Serge that Delacroix represented a chapter of the Romantic movement in painting. Popularity came to him in 1822, when he exhibited the large painting Barque of Dante at a Parisian salon. He was the master of the color scale and influenced Renoir and Van Gogh … Serge listened, but only understood one thing: that to become infatuated with art, it is necessary to try to absorb art into yourself. To feel it, not in the mind, but in the heart. But this can’t be done on a train.
    He played along by dropping general phrases, and then dipped into vast demagogy about how your profession influences the formation of your worldview. Janna said that there are certain important things, and not to know about them is simply impossible, no matter what a person is engaged in. Serge felt reproached, became isolated, and went the rest of the way in silence. He tried to justify his ignorance somehow, but unfortunately, could not.
     
    ***
     
    Around ten o’clock in the evening the electric train brakes began to squeal in the capital of Moldavia.
    The weather was excellent. Warm evening air filled the lungs, and the smell of summer was striking the nostrils. People tumbled out of the station, dragging backpacks and suitcases