Compartment No 6 (3 page)

‘Everybody's lives should be equal,' Arisa said. ‘Either equally good or equally bad.'

She handed the girl two glasses of tea and three packets of biscuits instead of two.

‘People can handle anything, when they have no choice. Now get back to your own compartment!'

The man sat on his bed. He wore a plaid shirt open over his white longjohns. Under the wrinkles of the white shirt peeped a sweaty, muscular belly. He picked up a small orange from the table and started to tear roughly at the peel. When he'd eaten the fruit he dug a tattered newspaper from under his bunk and blurted from behind it in an irritated tone, ‘People are restless when they're young. No patience at all. Always rushing somewhere. Everything goes at its own pace. Time is just time.'

He wrinkled his brow and sighed.

‘Look at me. An old duffer, a melancholy soul filled with a dull calm. A heart that beats out of sheer habit, with no feeling in it any more. No more pranks in him, not even any pain. Just dreariness.'

The girl remembered her last night in Moscow, how she'd hurried from one place to another, dashed down the long stairway into the metro and taken the red line to Lenin Library, run across the tiled floor of the museum-like station, through the maze of corridors lined with bronze statues and up the steep escalators to the blue line, ridden it past Arbat, got off at the church-like station decorated with mosaics whose name she couldn't remember now, and realised as she stood under a concrete arch that she'd forgotten her bag, which contained her train tickets and vouchers, had turned back the way she came, jumped off one metro train and onto another, gone through the stations where she'd changed lines and, to her great amazement, found her bag at the Lenin Library stop – it was waiting for her in the middle of the metro inspector's window.

The train braked and came to a stop. A moment later the engine gave a jerk and the train was moving again. Another brake. Another stop. The engine dithered for a moment, whistled cheerfully, made up its mind, and moved. The wheels rang in momentary apology but soon the train was rattling ahead with purpose. The sun bounced up from beyond a field of snow, lit up the land and sky for a moment, then disappeared behind the boundless swampy landscape. The man examined the girl sharply.

‘So your soul's full of nothing but dreams? Well, go ahead and dream. Ivan the Fool falls asleep on the stove bench and dreams about a stove that moves and a table that fills itself with food, but this life that men wiser than me call a mere holding cell is here and now. Death may come tomorrow and grab you by the balls.'

His narrow face shone with self-satisfaction. He had a beautiful mouth, narrow lips and a small scar on his chin like Trotsky.

‘Death can't be any worse than life.' He closed his eyes and pressed his lips tightly together. Then he hummed. ‘Don't you fear death my girl, not as long as you're alive. If you're alive, then death's not here yet, and once you're dead, it's already gone.'

He hiccuped a little, shook his shoulders, and sat up straighter. ‘I'd rather die than be afraid. If there's anything you should be afraid of, it's the Mongolians. They don't even have names. They don't do anything but eat, screw, sleep, and die. They have no morals of any kind. The human soul doesn't mean a thing to them. But they do know how to destroy. Give a Mongolian a transistor radio and five minutes later he'll hand back a pile of screws and wires and an empty case. The Mongolians have treated us Russians terribly and crushed the moral backbones of the likes of us, and still we try to help them. Try to bring them up to the present. But they don't understand anything. They screw their children and laugh right in our faces … Am I getting through to you? Look, the Soviet Union is a powerful country, a great, old, very diverse people lives here. We've suffered through serfdom, the time of the tsars, and the revolution. We've built socialism and flown to the moon. What have you done? Nothing! What do you have that's better than us? Nothing!'

He smacked his palms on his knees and opened his mouth to say something, but was silent.

Next to the train, far above the wall of forest, an eagle glided by with a calf carcass in its claws. The compartment door fell open. The little lamps that glimmered yellowish along the edge of the floor buzzed; the corridor looked like an airport runway. The heating vent threw out a burning heat in the narrow space. The girl went into the corridor. There was a young couple there, with a wrinkled old woman the size of a child, and a little girl in pigtails. The girl had a brown Pioneer teddy bear under her arm and in her lap a clown doll in a tall hat that looked like a schizophrenic who'd been through a bad trip. A violet sun over a shy forest clearing slipped behind the snow-covered evergreens. In the dense depths of the forest slept little birds in nests among the rocks, sinewy, white-coated hares in their burrows, and snoring bears in their hidden caves.

Arisa was making her rounds of the compartments and Sonechka, the younger stewardess in her oversized uniform, followed after her. The girl tried to talk with Sonechka, but she was so shy that she turned her face away at once and disappeared after Arisa into the first compartment. It was an area restricted to the carriage staff where an angrily bubbling samovar as big as the wall steadily puffed and steamed day and night. The samovar held a bucket of boiling water.

The slackening sun revolved briefly on the horizon. The dusky forest rose up humming towards a frail, cloud-embroidered sky. The man appeared in the passageway, and the girl went into the compartment, felt the rumble of the rails, and fell asleep.

When she woke up, he was looking at her with a very offended expression on his face. She smiled at him, thinking about how logical the whole thing was. She had left Moscow because now was the right time to realise her and Mitka's shared dream of a train trip across Siberia, all the way to Mongolia. True, she was making the trip alone, but there was a reason for that.

The man had taken a worn deck of cards out of his bag and started to play solitaire.

‘Georgians,' he said. ‘They've got legs like giraffes and they know how to sell themselves to fellows like me so well that you forget you paid for it. History has beaten the Armenians down, made them all humble lesbians and nice guys who won't discipline their children. A Tatar only likes Tatars, a Chechen is a combination of an excellent baby machine and a drug dealer, the Dagestanis are small, thin, ugly, and smell of camphor, and the foolishly proud Ukrainians are always plotting nationalist conspiracies in their horrible accents. A Russian gets to where he's deaf to it. And then there's the Balts. Half-assed. They have no secrets. Too practical. Walking around with their mouths turned down, eyes straight ahead.'

He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. The girl coughed wearily, but he didn't take any notice of this indication of her thoughts.

‘I've never screwed a Russian woman who was satisfied, not even for a minute. And this cock has pumped thousands of different colours of pussy.'

He stretched his thick hands out towards her. Long fingers grew from them, the fingernails flat and clean. They were horrible hands. His expression was at first nonchalant, then plainly hostile.

‘But tell me, what's someone like you doing on this train? Selling some cunt?'

The girl flinched, let out a feeble squeak, grabbed her winter boot from under her bunk and threw it at him, then got up and went out into the corridor. The heel of the boot hit him right in the temple. Once outside, she calmed herself for a long time before going to Arisa to ask for a different compartment.

Arisa listened to her request with her head to one side.

‘We'll see,' she said, in such an unhurried manner that the girl handed her a twenty-five-rouble note.

Arisa apparently didn't feel it was a sufficient sum.

‘It's against the law to change compartments. But perhaps I could do something to arrange it. It will be difficult, though.'

The girl slipped another banknote of the same value into her hand – it was all she could part with.

Arisa glanced at the note disdainfully.

‘Getting around a rule like that is a tough job, in fact it's dangerous for me personally. I could lose my job or even end up in jail because of you. But perhaps it could be arranged …'

The girl didn't listen to the rest of what she had to say. She rushed back out into the corridor with a sob in her throat. She simply had to swallow her defeat and go back to the man, at least at night.

The train sped with a whine across the flat, blustery landscape, under a sky frothy with winter clouds. A vibrant forest beyond an open field tossed a flock of sparrows at the sky. She calmed herself by watching the black, starkly drawn shadow of the train against the bright snow.

She thought about Irina, how she might be sitting in the smoking room of the chemistry institute, behind the Achievements in the National Economy pavilion, smoking a cigarette and getting ready for her next lecture. She thought about Zahar, who could see through her, and Mitka, who was good. A little kitten appeared in the corridor and looked at her beseechingly. She picked it up and held it and petted its rumpled fur. At the insane asylum, Mitka had said that socialism kills the body and capitalism kills the spirit but socialism the way we have it harms both the body and the spirit.

When Mitka was turning eighteen, she and Irina had the task of finding food to cook for his birthday party. They had started gathering ingredients back in November, and had managed to find all kinds of things, but Irina wasn't satisfied. One morning they went out to hunt for groceries at six a.m. They rushed through the dry, freezing weather to the Yelisev shop, but they didn't find anything there, not even baked
bubliks
. Angry, they hopped onto a freezing tram, and rode past the Boulevard and the snowy maples to the fragrant bread shop in Bronnaya. There they found a small loaf of good bread. They got on the trolleybus, which was so hot that they were soon covered in sweat, and trundled hopefully to Zachaczewski Lane. There was a grocery there where Irina had once found two cans of high-quality sardines. They didn't find anything, though, not even pickles. They stood for a moment in the windy street, uncertain what to do, where to go. They walked with frozen toes, arm in arm, to Lenin Street, but the trip didn't add any weight to their shopping bag. They jogged over to Timiryazev. There they found a bottle of cologne for Yuri, but nothing to eat. They swung by Chistiye Prudy on the bus, brought Yuri his cologne, and got six eggs from him. Why not go to the currency exchange shop? he asked. I don't have any dollars, the girl whispered, we already blew all of it, plus my salary, at the beginning of autumn. Yuri yelled after them to go to the market, for God's sake, although he knew that there was nothing there. On Sokolniki Street they found two big jars of borscht, put them under their arms and headed proudly to the tram stop on Tverskoy Boulevard, and Irina glanced at her watch and said that she should have been lecturing at the institute a long time ago. A country woman was shivering in front of the paper shop. The girl bought a handsome gladiolus from the woman and handed it to Irina, and just as they were about to leave, the woman whispered that she had two chickens in her bag. Were they interested? Of course! Irina said, and settled on a price. They ran to the nearest metro station. Irina took the blue line to the institute and the girl went home on the yellow with her bag of chickens. Zahar was home and she asked him to come in the kitchen and opened her bag and there they were, two sweet, fluttering brown chickens with rubber bands wrapped around their beaks. Zahar looked at them and said that with a few weeks of seed feed they would be ready to stew. They took the squawking chickens into the bathroom. She laid some of the laundry on the bottom of the tub as a cushion. The wooden towel rack served as a perch. They called the little one Plita and the big one Kipyatok. The day before Mitka's party Zahar slaughtered the fattened chickens expertly in the bathroom and plucked them on the balcony. Then Irina taught her and Mitka how to cook chicken the Stalinist way.

A grey half moon sprinkled light over the snowy, silent, melancholy forest, keeping gleaming red Mars company. A little boy was singing to himself while he played with a whistle shaped like a rooster at the other end of the carriage's corridor. When the nocturnal light of the moon dimmed and turned dirty, the girl returned to her compartment. She was hungry and tired.

The compartment smelled like Consul hair tonic, the kind you can buy at Party hotel kiosks. The man looked at her from the end of the trail of scent, shyly, it seemed.

‘Feeling better?'

A draughts board had appeared on the table, a little batteryless Blaupunkt travel radio with a little green cat's-eye light, and a travel samovar, cheerfully bouncing and puffing steam. He had put loose tea in the enamel kettle and was pouring boiling water over it.

‘Sorry about that cunt comment. Devil got into me. Dark forces.' He felt his temple proudly. There was a little mark there. Then he pointed at her boot, which he had placed in the middle of the floor. ‘You did the right thing. I deserved to have my arse kicked.'

She smiled.

‘Thank you, my girl. There are two kinds of anguish in life: when we want to and can't, and when we can but we don't want to.'

She got out her food, put it on the table, and started to eat. She offered some to him too, but he wasn't hungry.

When she'd finished eating, she took Garshin's
The Scarlet Flower
out from under her bottle of whisky and started to read. Mitka had given it to her and said that it showed how a sick mind worked. She was slowly reading the dog-eared, brown-paged book, printed in the previous century.

‘The attendants undressed him in spite of his desperate resistance. His disease had doubled his muscular strength, and he easily tore himself from the hands of several keepers, dashing them to the ground; at last, four of them got him down, and, taking him by the hands and feet, put him into the warm water. It seemed to him boiling, and through the frenzied brain flashed a fragmentary, incoherent thought of torture by scalding water and red-hot iron. Choking, and convulsively beating the water with hands and feet (as far as the firm hold of the keepers allowed), he shrieked out in strangled tones an incoherent speech, such as no one could imagine without hearing it.'