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.