The Blind Leading the Blind

Two blind men with canes were waiting to cross the zebra stripe that bisects the busy street. They flailed their canes about, feeling for cars, trees, people, and snow banks. A man with an acne-scarred face and an off-kilter beanie hat held close to his friend in a dark leather jacket with sheep-skin lining. They both gazed absently at some undeterminable point in space, concentrating on the sounds around them. As it swung about, one of the canes nearly hit a young girl in the face. She recoiled and stared at the men as if they had done something quite unseemly. Standing at the crosswalk, I put my hands on their shoulders, applying a bit of pressure— telling them to wait. They could hear the cars going past, but could not gauge the distance between them. When a small lull in the traffic came I helped them across the street.
We made it to the other side, though the two men had been hesitant to cross since they could still hear the engines and the sound of the tires rolling over the snow. A driver had stopped to let pedestrians go, but they couldn’t see that and I didn’t know how to explain it in Russian. One of the men asked me “can we cross?” “Da,” I said.
I left them in the park, assuming they were capable of feeling their way through. It was a pathetic sight watching them step into filthy unseen puddles and stagger into piles of melting slush. The melting icicles drip down onto the sidewalk now that the thaw has begun. The blind men may have thought it was raining.
A big tree grows through the middle of the sidewalk, and the two blind men stopped short in front of it, feeling it with their canes. What was this obstacle in front of them? Not a person because it doesn’t grunt or squeal when the cane hits it. Not alive because it doesn’t jump out of the way. The muffled thwack as the cane hits probably suggested that it was a tree, or perhaps a signpost.
They stepped to the right to pass but the man with the acne-scarred face found himself reeling in deep snow. They stepped back, together. In front of the tree again they felt around for the presence of empty space with their canes, drawing a mental map with this intimate cartography. After a few seconds of surveying and plotting, the two men decided to make a pass on the left side. They made it.
Physical disability in this country is incapacitating. There is very little support for invalids or the disabled, neither social nor infrastructural. This leaves many of them as beggars. The other day a man with a horribly disfigured face stood at the bottom of the stairs in the metro with a sign that read, “Help me please.” One of his eyes had severe discoloration, a striking opalescent white where there should have been coffee colored iris. His lips were frozen into a scowl, an expression of agony, disfigured by some nerve damage or maybe a stroke. I dropped a few loose bills into his bag. I wasn’t sure whether he registered it or not.
A young gypsy-faced girl hobbled down the length of the trains on crutches, stopping every few feet to recite some spiel in Ukrainian. Her legs were twisted, as if by rickets, into grotesque contortions and paralyzed in a living rigor mortis. She would have been delicate and pretty in another life.
Grizzled geriatrics stand in the corners with mittened hands or cardboard coffee cups extended to collect change. Some of them mutter prayers under their breath. They seem absent, chewed by dementia maybe.
People help most of the time. On every pass there is always someone who drops a few Kopecks or a few Griven into the collection bags, cups, or hands- equivalent to about $0.50. Is it enough to live? Not by a standard that we know.
I watched the two blind men for a while after I left them in the park. The sympathetic impulse to shepherd them through the thicket of cigarette-and-beer kiosks and snowed under ornamental landscaping left me pinned to the spot pondering the moral implications. Surely, I thought, they wouldn’t be strolling about if they weren’t confident in their navigational capabilities. Would it be patronizing to stand behind them and lead them along by the shoulders? Ultimately, I decided against it.
As I turned the corner to the Zoloti Vorota metro entrance, I saw them walk to a dead end, a park bench placed against a snow mound. They could not walk through the park, but had to hug the perimeter in a trajectory of right angles, using the landscaped border as a guide. They would soon come up against the steps, covered in ice and snow and treacherous whether one is blind or not. Would there be someone to help them make their way down the stairs? They held one another close, whipping their canes around like a pair of feelers, tugging left to avoid trees. The blind leading the blind.
Alongside the beauty of this country there is a foulness that emerges unexpectedly from time to time to sting you. Beautiful girls in fur and delicate hosiery juxtaposed against the maimed men huddling in the entrance to the metro for warmth. Young men in the middle of the day sliding along the walls for support, a liter of cheap vodka vandalizing kidney and liver, stripping them of cognizance, and perpetuating the demographic trend of 60-year male life expectancy. The latest model Porsche Cayenne speeding past the crosswalk where two blind men wait to cross the street.

Pickle

I bought a pickle in the metro station on my way home today. The pizza I had at lunch had been small and I inadvertently paid about double what I owed, so by mid afternoon I was feeling rather foolish and rather hungry. The pickle only cost $0.15 and was much more satisfying. I bit off the end of it with my front teeth and crunched it with my molars. The vinegar so acidic it must have eaten away the thinnest outer layer of cells on my tongue.
Wearing the customary face of total indifference, verging on a misanthropic scowl, I passed the little card table where this woman was selling homemade produce. She had a type of sauerkraut and a tray full cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and meat. The pickles were in the center of the table. They were swimming in a milky bath of acid in a clear plastic drawer that would have been better suited for storing old pay-stubs and tax returns.
Next to her was a younger girl selling currants in big glass jars that she had sat on the dirty stone floors. People had been tracking filth through this corridor all day. The grey slush sticks in the tread of boots and melts in the relative warmth of the underground passage. Muddy slop covers the whole floor, and puddles form if the workers don’t squeegee it every few minutes. The granite blocks that pave the floor are completely for this climate. Rain and melted snow makes them impossibly slick. How many hips are broken on the steps leading down to the corridor, I can only guess.
These sellers had pitched their little stands just in time for the rush hour swarms that would come rushing out of the station. Maybe a few would stop to buy something. Men without wives to cook for them; wives without time to cook; young professionals who left the village and miss folksy fare. However, most of the horde would just flow past with blinders on.
There is a word in Russian to describe a traffic jam of people. They say tolpa, which is distinct from the word for a traffic jam of cars (probka). As nearly everyone relies on public transportation in this part of the world, the congestion can be horrendous. Like tens of thousands of bees in an immense underground hive adorned with icons in the style of socialist realism, they undulate and oscillate moving to and from the exits. A screeching drone fills the subterranean metro chamber as the train rolls in. A great mass of souls files out of the newly arrived train, and another mass squeezes itself in. Everyone rushes for the escalators.
The metro station is a hub for economic life. Semi-permanent vendor stalls cram together both underground in the station and up on the street. Each stall tries to corner some market. There is a stall for meat, a stall for central-Asian bread, for candy, for school supplies, tea and coffee, DVDs, and one for slippers. Sometimes old women sit at card tables and sell individual cigarettes for 20 kopek, or around $0.04. There are newspaper stands, where I buy my Komsomolskaya Pravda, and snack stands where I buy my pretzels.
I had passed by the woman selling pickles. My stomach felt sorely empty. I hesitated and then stopped, interrupting the flow of the mass behind me. I made an about-face and went back to the little woman, all wrapped up in a thick coat and a fluffy knit hat. I asked her how much her pickles were.
“Fifteen Hriven per kilo,” she said.
“How much for one?” I asked. She thought for a moment. People usually buy in bulk here, and I understand why. Often times I will go to the store and they will have none of the products that I want to buy. When they are stocked it is exciting and I feel the strong urge to buy their whole inventory and bring it home to store in my own little cache.
“One Hriven,” she said. She put a plastic bag over her hand, fished one of the pickles out of the acid bath and handed it to me. I paid her the money and munched on my pickle as I climbed the stairs out onto the street.