Free Boy on the Bridge by Natalie Standiford Page B

over, Olga,” he said, softly but firmly. “I don’t have room to hold the guitar.”
    Olga stormed out of the room. The bathroom door slammed.
    Alyosha stretched out his arm and began to strum for real.
    “I didn’t know you played the guitar,” Laura said.
    “There is so much you don’t know about me.” He smiled enigmatically.
    “Hey — there’s a lot you don’t know about her, too,” Karen put in a little too forcefully. The vodka made her louder than usual. “Did you know Laura has a black belt in karate?”
    “What?” Laura said.
    “Is that true?” Grisha asked.
    “No, it’s not true,” Laura told him.
    “I’m just trying to buff up your image,” Karen said.
    “You don’t need to do that,” Alyosha said. “Her image is nice enough already.”
    Laura turned toward him, surprised but pleased. She pressed her arm against his. He pressed back. All the vodka warmth seemed to concentrate in that arm.
    Olga returned from the bathroom and took her seat next to Roma as if nothing had happened. Alyosha launched into the first chords of a song everyone but Karen and Laura seemed to know. Soon all the Russians were singing an old folk song. Laura managed to catch a few phrases: “It’s evening, I couldn’t sleep … I tossed and turned, I had a dream … someone interpreted my dream and said … you will lose your wild head.”
    “That is beautiful,” she said when it was finished.
    “It’s called ‘Stenka Razin’s Dream.’ ” Alyosha sang it again slowly, while Grisha explained the words as best he could in English. Stenka Razin was kind of a Cossack Robin Hood, who dreamed that his horse bucked and danced and went wild underneath him. A colonel told him that the dream foretold his death. “You will lose your wild, untamed head,” he predicted. Then an evil wind blew from the east and knocked Stenka’s hat off his wild, untamed head.
    “Guess who I saw the other day, Lyosha,” Olga said. “Speaking of wild and untamed. Tanya.”
    That name again — Olga seemed to love to bring up Tanya. Alyosha looked down, nodding, and Roma, Vova, and Grisha stopped clapping and joking. An inch of space suddenly materialized between Laura’s shoulder and Alyosha’s.
    “Well, how is she?” Roma asked. “You didn’t tell me this before.”
    “I didn’t speak to her,” Olga said. “I saw her come out of the Hotel Astoria and get into a car. She glanced at me but didn’t say hello. I know she saw me but she pretended she didn’t see me. Why would she do that?”
    Alyosha plucked distractedly at one string of his guitar.
    “Who’s Tanya?” Laura asked.
    “An old friend of Alyosha’s,” Roma said.
    “An old girlfriend,” Olga corrected.
    “Oh.” Laura glanced at Karen.
    “Here’s a picture of her.” Olga got up and rummaged through some of Alyosha’s paintings until she found a portrait of a beautiful blue-eyed blonde with bare shoulders.
    “Olga, put that away.” Alyosha thrust the guitar into Roma’s hands and snatched the painting from Olga. Too late, though: Laura had already seen it. The blonde was the same girl she’d seen in a nude painting earlier. So that was Tanya.
    Roma strummed the chords of a Beatles song. “Let’s sing something the American girls know.”
    Alyosha set the painting down, facing the wall. He was scowling. A triumphant smile played on Olga’s lips.
    If she’s trying to make me jealous, it’s not working , Laura said to herself. But it was working a little bit.
    “Come on, girls, sing!” Grisha keened out “And I Love Her” in a nasal Russian accent. Laura and Karen belted it out along with him. It felt good to sing in English, to know the words.
    Next, Roma started strumming a song that was eerily familiar to Laura. She wasn’t sure at first what it was, but she knew she knew it in some deep, unconscious way, the way you know songs that you’ve heard on the radio or in the supermarket your whole life without ever really listening to