Compartment No 6 (2 page)

WHEN SHE WARILY OPENED HER EYES
, the first thing she saw was the man doing push-ups between the beds. A green glimmer of sunlight played over the lacquered walls of the compartment; the man wiped the sweat from his brow with a towel. Before she had time to sit up there was a knock at the door and Arisa, who had stuffed herself into her black uniform jacket, brought in two steaming glasses of tea, moist waffles, and four large cubes of Cuban sugar, and put them on the table. The man dug some kopecks out of his wallet, which was decorated with an embossed picture of Valentina Tereshkova in her space helmet.

When Arisa had left he grabbed his narrow-bladed knife from under the bed, picked up a sugar cube in his left hand, knocked the cube in two with the dull side of the blade, and handed the girl a steaming glass of tea and half a cube.

He gave a shy, melancholy smile, took out a bottle of vodka, opened it, and filled two blue shot glasses that he dug from the depths of his bag.

‘Our shared journey may be a long one, but my speech will be short. A toast to our meeting. A toast to the world's only real power, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union will never die!'

He tossed the shot down his throat and bit off a juicy piece of onion. The girl lifted her glass to her lips, but didn't drink.

He dried his lips on the edge of the tablecloth, smiling boyishly. The girl took a drink of tea. It was well-steeped, aromatic and strong. That's when he noticed that she hadn't drunk her vodka.

‘It's sad to drink alone,' he said.

She didn't touch the glass. He stared at her with a look of disappointment on his face.

‘It's hard to understand. But all right. I won't make you, even though I'd like to.'

He was lost in thought, watching her from under his eyebrows. She didn't like the expression on his face, so she took the small towel and her toothbrush and headed for the WC for her morning wash.

There was a queue reaching halfway down the corridor. The travellers were wearing their dressing gowns, pyjamas, track-suits, a couple of men in nothing but white army longjohns.

More than an hour later she reached the front of the queue. It was her turn to grab the wet, sticky door handle. The WC was filthy and the stench was pungent. Pee and soap and wads of newspaper floated around on the floor. Not a drop of water came out of the tap. There were two paltry, sharp-cornered fragments of beige-brown soap broken from a larger bar, smelling of soda. One piece was covered in a rusty-brown slime. She stepped up onto the toilet so she wouldn't wet the slippers she'd bought in Leningrad, and managed to dry-clean her teeth and face. The little window of the WC was open a crack. An abandoned, forgotten station was passing by.

The man loaded the table with black bread, canned horseradish, chunks of onion and tomato, mayonnaise, canned fish, and boiled eggs which he carefully peeled and sliced in two.

‘God doesn't forget the well-fed, and vice versa. So help yourself.'

They ate for a long time, and when he'd put the remains of the breakfast back in his bag of food and wiped the breadcrumbs off the table onto the floor they enjoyed their tea, which had cooled now.

‘I had a dream about Petya last night. He and I were born the same year and we were in the same grade at school. Five and a half years together. School didn't suit us – we had to go to work. I met the trucks at the market steps and when they arrived I threw the goods from the trucks into the warehouse. Petya hauled boards at a construction site. We lived in a boiler room. There was one window, you could see the pavement, people's feet going by. That's where we were living. Then one evening Petya didn't come home from work. I took the trolley to the construction site the next day to ask about him and they said that he had been run over by a machine and killed. They said the machine had killed him. I asked what machine. One old guy pointed to a wretched little excavator. Said that it was the culprit. I took a sledgehammer and smashed it beyond repair. Since then I've been on my own.'

She glanced at him, deep in his thoughts, and thought about Mitka and an early morning in August. They'd been sitting on a concrete bench at the edge of Pushkin Square smoking pot, waiting for dawn, when a drunken gang of young people showed up and started to push and threaten them. They pushed past the group and hurried away, but one fat, bald-headed goon went after them and threatened to ‘knock the four-eyes' brains out'. They were scared. They ran down the deserted street and a car appeared at the other end of the street and she was sure that it would have more skinheads in it. They went down a side street, cut across courtyards, and sprinted sweatily to their door.

‘The first time I was in south Siberia was at the beginning of the sixties. It was at the time of the monetary reforms. A rouble wasn't worth anything, you couldn't get food with good money, and they were asking fifty kopecks for a pint at the beer stand. I used to sit in the canteen on the site drinking some swill with Boris, Sasha and Muha the Dog. One day a work official came in, this felt-booted bumpkin, and said, Comrade, go to Sukhumi, in the Crimea, southern Siberia, they need crack workers out there. He shoved a piece of paper in my hand and disappeared like he was sucked under the floor. I went and told Vimma thanks for the pussy and see you later, my dear fat-assed bitch, and headed for the station and rode a rattly train across the wide open spaces of the Soviet Union. I ended up in Yalta instead of Sukhumi. They were building all kinds of little cabins, and when I told them I was a human machine, a Stakhanovite concrete hero, I got work immediately. It was the best summer of my life. I did nothing but lay around and whore. Girls who when you asked them if they were wet yet, they were, in about two minutes. Sometimes I went with one of them to the movies at the Construction Worker to see an adventure flick.
Three Men in the Snow. Lost in the Ice
. And what was that one I liked …
Three Friends on the High Sea
. Whenever I remember that summer my mouth waters. Life wasn't tied down with good sense back then. But then came this last bitch. Katinka. Warbling, in her sugary voice, Let me wash your shirt. That's when my life ended, nothing ahead of me but the dark, bumpy road of an alcoholic, sinking deeper all the time.'

An east wind sprinkled the white plain with lonely snowflakes, a pale glimmer flashed over the trees. He spat angrily over his left shoulder into a corner of the compartment.

‘I'm talking about the same Katinka who saw me off at the station yesterday. Her face was my doing. I came home drunk and then it started. Same mess every time. She started in with the same old argument. She didn't know how to stop, so I slapped her once, then twice. If she'd just keep her mouth shut like a good girl, help a poor traveller take off his clothes, make a good supper. But she never learns. I try to explain, I even praise her. But she doesn't listen, she just lays it on thicker, screaming about how men built this damned world just for themselves. That's how a henpecked husband's anger can build up, and then I slap her till she's quiet. If she doesn't shut up then I knock her a good one right in the mouth. It's not easy for me – I don't like hitting – but it always happens that way. I have a right to speak too, to be a human being in my own home, even if I'm not there very often.'

He laid careful stress on each word, dropping them one by one. The girl tried to close her ears.

‘It's depressing to have the same old fight in the middle of the night. It takes all the joy out of life. Last night there was a strong whiff of her rolling over me like a tank in my dreams. Just the thought of her wreck of a pussy makes me want to puke my guts out.'

The train gave a lurch, his hand jerked, and a tear rose in the corner of his eye. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and closed his eyes, cleared his throat and sat up straight, filled his lungs with air and blew it out again.

‘But there's a limit to everything. I never hit Katinka out in the hall of the communal apartment, or in the street, or at the office. I only hit her in our own room, because otherwise the block watch or the militia would show up and I don't like either one of them, especially the militia. The number one rule is to not let the boy see it – after all, it is his mother. He's so big now that he has his own little woman to smack around. I don't like that … Beat your wife with a hammer and you turn her into gold, that's what the old guys told me when I was a young man. It's advice I've followed. Maybe too much.'

The girl looked first at the floor, then at a frozen cloud at the edge of the sky. She'd never met a Russian man like this before. Or maybe she had, but she hadn't wanted to remember it. No Russian man had ever spoken to her like this. Still, there was something familiar about him, his insolence, his way of drawing out his words, his smile, his tender, disdainful gaze.

‘Katinka is a Russian woman, ruthless and just. She works, takes care of the home and kids, she can handle anything. I just think differently than she does. Take my old mother, for instance. We all live next to each other in the same communal apartment, and I think it's a great thing – Katinka can cook for the old lady at the same time she cooks for herself and the boy, and keep a lookout, make sure Ma's life has some flavour to it. But it isn't that easy. For all the twenty-three years we've been married that bitch has been demanding that I throw my old mother out.'

The girl got up from the bed to go into the corridor, but he grabbed her tightly by the arm and pointed at the bunk.

‘You're going to hear this to the end.'

She tore herself free. He dashed at her and seized her by the wrist, firm but fatherly. She slumped down on the foot of the bed.

He went back to his place, lifted a fingertip to his lips, and blew, smiling obscenely.

‘Something that's always baffled me is how every suitor loves his bride, but every husband hates his wife. As soon as the marriage licence is signed the man turns into a clod and the woman turns into an old bag and discontent starts to gnaw away at both of them. The broad thinks that once they get some of the creature comforts then everything will be all right. She thinks the answer is her own hotplate, a new dressing gown, a floor vase, a kettle without any dents in it, a china tea set. The fellow, on the other hand, thinks, man, if I could get myself a whore, I could stand that old bag a little better. But in spite of everything … Sometimes when I look real hard at Katinka, I feel like I want to say, Katyushka, my silly little thing, my little fool.'

He gave a heavy sigh, reached for the pickle bag, got hold of a pickle, popped it in his mouth, and accidentally swallowed it whole.

‘Us men have nowhere to go. The dames would get by better without us. Nobody needs us, except another man. Right now I feel like drinking a toast to the energy, the toughness, the patience, the courage, the humour, the shrewdness, the deceitfulness and beauty of the Russian woman. It's the dames that keep this country going.'

He slid his hand under his bunk and pulled out a Tchaikovsky chocolate bar. He opened the wrapper with his knife and offered some to the girl. He didn't take a piece for himself, just put the bar down in the middle of the table. The chocolate was dark and tasted of naphtha. She thought of Irina, of how she would often sit under the reading lamp in her favourite armchair in the evening and read a book, how the yellow light from the lamp fell on the book's pages, how Irina's hands held the book, how her face …

‘Women used to know how to keep quiet. Nowadays they got their traps open all the time. One of the bitches used to put out and smoke at the same time, while I was fucking her. I wanted to strangle her.'

A birch forest, weary with hard frosts and sharp winds, came into view. The naked trees drew graphic lines in the snow. The train sped by, the snow blew into the air and hung there pure and sparkling. Sometimes the window was filled with frozen white forest, other times with blithe, blue, cloudless sky. The girl could hear the tones and rhythms of the man's voice. His momentary passion quickly evaporated, replaced by a hint of deep sadness.

He thought for a long time. His wet lips moved, now quickly, now very slowly. His posture had fallen; he was sitting with his shoulders drooped. The girl took her drawing things out of her bag and started to draw.

He glanced at her, sighed a little, shrugged his shoulders lamely.

‘Katinka. My own Katinka.'

Silence fell over the compartment. He put his head against the cold windowpane. She got up and went out.

Several passengers were standing in the corridor. A freight train was going past in the other direction, causing their train to rock. The little station building flashed like a turquoise dot in a vast universe. A splash of dirt had been thrown against the corridor window during the night, and a pale light filtered through it. The birches grew sparse, the train quieted its speed, a rusted wreck of metal lay on the neighbouring track, and soon the train was shooting into Kirov station. A sign along the track said that Moscow was about a thousand kilometres away.

The door of the carriage was open. She stood in the doorway. A few small snowflakes drifted in the still, dry cold of the day. A decrepit local train twitched restlessly at the next platform as if it was in the grip of a seizure. People pushed their way out of its innards, desperately gulping the fresh air. The station bell rang once, then twice. She had a glimpse of the black plastic peak of the guard's cap before Arisa came to close the door.

‘What are you standing there for? Do you want to get off in Kirov? They'd horsewhip you here. Get back into your compartment! You don't have a citizen's passport, or an address here. Stupid foreigners don't understand anything, sticking their noses where they're not wanted! They foist all the unlucky ones on me. Do you even know who Kirov was?'

The girl tottered slowly back down the corridor of the moving train and looked at the swaying town outside the window. A pack of stray dogs were fighting in front of a baroque administration building and a young man was hitting them with a broken broomstick. She went to the stewardess's compartment to buy some tea. Arisa sat on the bed, all-powerful, and looked at her pityingly. Georg Ots was singing in Russian on a small transistor radio.