RIGA CENTRAL STATION, 1988

RIGA CENTRAL STATION, 1988

by Kat Mulligan

It’s as good a time as any to wait, comrade, isn’t it, with the sunset as bright and sticky as a fruit over the train tracks, well, at least that’s how my daughter put it as a child when we walked down Alberta Street in the evenings, her hand in mine, so small I had to lean down a bit, yes, my daughter who married well and now lives in France—or is it Spain—and we won’t get any younger under Gorbachev’s eye, now will we, not even that daughter of mine, all grown up and a wonder on the piano, and that’s why we’re here today I suppose, in line for the cologne machine and catching each other’s sicknesses from the nozzle, haha, that’s the comradeship painted on posters around town, and I hope for all our sakes that at least a few of us get a buzz, even if I won’t trade any kopecks to ensure it, no, not even for you, comrade, though I like your general demeanor and are you a student?—oh, literature, yes, even Eisenstein can agree on the power of the word, but if you have your books and wits about you then what are you doing waiting to guzzle alcohol from the cologne dispenser with the rest of us old sops, jamming your coins into the slot when you could be using them to treat a pretty young nurse-in-training to an ice cream, you know, since the lines for ice cream are at least worth waiting in and a kiss is sweeter than a hundred binges, a thousand and one even, and we’re not getting any younger since Khrushchev made a drinker’s life as nauseating as a Stalinite hangover, all his clean breath and cracking down, all our secrets hanging out like hyena tongues, betraying ourselves to our instincts, you are aware, I’m sure, how bad it can be and how to let your toothpaste dry on your toast to get at the ethanol without poisoning yourself in the process, or boiling a month’s worth of tea down for hours until it’s an afternoon’s worth of intoxicating sludge, see, we are all virtuosic behind the curtain, all shadow puppets, see, maybe you’ve partaken in a few three way deals, even at your young and—repeat after me—evaporating age, maybe you have a few friends studying their astrophysics or mathematics—or better yet, strangers—who will go three ways on a bottle of Stolichnaya and tell you their life stories in the park or squatting above the frozen pavement, not totally unlike our present situation, my boy, alcohol wrenching our shyness away, a true act of comradeship, and if that’s true why prohibit it, ah, well, I never did have a shot at the Supreme Soviet, nor the new Soviet man for that matter, ha, but it’s nice to wait, isn’t it, with the bright and sticky sky overhead and a line that snakes down the platform, disturbing the patrons, all of us but them united in our hankering, and I’m old and not getting any younger and my wife, sweet Inese, is in no hurry to grow bored of me, but there’s one taste you can never get enough of and that’s the taste of life, which sends the taste for alcohol down to earth as its henchman, and I know you taste it too, and you’ll forgive a blathering old man his stories, won’t you, when some people have so many kopecks to spare and the line bows down to them, prostrate and unmoving

Kat Mulligan is a Krakow-based writer. She was one of the editors of the "Narratives of Budapest" book and now, for the first time, contributes to Panel as a writer.