Compartment No 6 (5 page)

There was a heap of wooden boxes on the platform. The girl piled three of them together to climb up to the corridor window, took a cloth handkerchief out of her pocket, and wiped one of the panes clean.

When she'd cleaned the window she walked towards a station building veiled in dark red billowing mist. She went around the building and stopped at the south end. The station was ugly and dilapidated, the gutters were broken and pieces of the tin roof hung over the upper windows. The foundation was cracked in several places. The whole building slumped. Behind it she could see the glimmer of a dirty factory complex.

One of the tall oak doors was open and she followed a crippled crow into the station hall. The room was empty and spacious, the air damply cold and heavy, a skiff of fog floating above the quiet. Two white-toothed dogs dozed by the drinks stand; the smell of muffled talk and stale buns drifted from the coffee stall. A wandering photographer stopped her, showed her his Moskova 2 camera, and asked if she wanted a picture of herself. She didn't.

She stopped for a moment at the entrance to the buffet before going to the counter to order pickles and smetana. Twelve well-fed flies with glistening wings buzzed over the stained menus. Paper napkins blew from one table to the next. A leathery piece of meat, a watery gruel of macaroni casserole, and a cake decorated with pink icing roses stared at her from the glass case.

The station bell rang for the third time and the train rocked into motion. The oil town rose smouldering in the bright, frosty sunshine and hovered, all highrise rooftops gliding ever higher towards the lid of sky. The train sped past the freezing Soviet villages and housing areas. The limbo of unnamed towns was left behind. Pop music drifted from a distant compartment.

The marshy plain was left behind and a birch forest weighed down with snow filled the land. The train moved in jerks now. A long line of freight trains carrying oil and coal appeared in front of the engine.

Hours, minutes, seconds later the train picked up speed and the oil towns and surrounding oil wells and towers with their black flames receded into the distance. In spite of many signs of spring, it was still winter in Siberia. Here and there on sheltered south slopes melted by the sun jutted last year's grasses. The innocent smell of wood smoke drifted into the carriage. The train slowed its speed and was soon moving at a crawl. As it passed an abandoned warehouse the trail of smoke thickened. Small fires danced in the grass right next to the rail track, beyond them the flames reached greedily towards the turquoise Siberian sky. Next to the train, in the middle of the cloud of smoke, an old woman ran around in a panic, her head bare, without a coat. Not just the grass but also the railway sleepers were burning, and the ruins of an old building as well. The wind whipped a cloud of red sparks against the iron bulk of the train. The flames flared for a moment, handsome and strong, but the Siberian frost dampened them. A young mother crumpled by life lifted her child in her arms and pointed at the smoking building receding behind them.

‘Look, that's how granny's house burned down.'

The train skulked along for a considerable time before speeding up again. As darkness fell, the man came out of the compartment and stood next to the girl. Together they looked at the Irtysh River. The snow on the shores had shrunk; bare, snowless patches appeared among the drifts. At a narrow point in the current, in the middle of the channel, stood several immense concrete pillars. There had once been a bridge there, or else a bridge was being built and was abandoned. Far off on the horizon a power-plant town glimmered.

The man looked at the girl with a wary smile. ‘I'm sorry, my girl. The devil got into me again. Lucifer himself. I just have such an urge to fuck. Go back in so you don't catch cold. Let me know when I can come in. I still have hope. When Ivan the Terrible turned eighty, he took a sixteen-year-old wife.'

The girl smiled in token of a sort of dry understanding and went into the compartment. She took a bottle of nail polish remover out of her bag, emptied it into his vodka glass, and slumped onto her bunk. She liked the man's Gagarin smile. She fell asleep to that, hungry, with all her clothes on.

The man gazed wistfully at the muddy river, sawmills along its shores, open, empty land around it as far as the eye could see. Under the cover of the ice the river rushed and swirled, a roiling current. In the wee hours the girl awoke and kicked the compartment door so that it hung half open. The man stepped immediately inside, gulped the contents of his vodka glass, and went to sleep without saying a word.

A RUDDY LIGHT PRESSED BRAZENLY
in through the compartment window and divided the space. The man's bunk was left in shadow, the girl's in light. The man was fiddling with his nose. There was no sign whatsoever of the effect of the nail polish remover. Two tussell-feathered sparrows pecked at the corridor window.

‘Arisa was here screaming about the engine needing a rest. So they're giving it a rest. What do you think, my girl, shall we go out? Take a look at the vodka shops of Omsk?' the man asked with solid self-certainty. ‘Not on an empty stomach, though. First munch on a little something and then hit the streets. Hurrying can kill you. Remember that.'

The icy fog on the platform seized their breath so that they had to stand still for quite some time. Two hungry, nimble-footed dogs were barking on the platform. The station yard was filled with the bustle of work and the noise of travellers, screeching train engines, rattling luggage carts, clanging rails, curses, roars, and old women's uninhibited laughter. Among the stew of people a granny waving enormous mittens sold thick apple juice in large green bottles. The war in Afghanistan was accelerating and instead of food supplies the Soviet government was concentrating on arms production, and the girl hadn't been able to find anything but condensed milk, tinned fish, and random jars of mayonnaise in the Moscow groceries. There were nothing but problems everywhere. The toothpaste problem, the soap, sausage, butter, meat, and ever-present paper problem, even a doll problem. When she took a trip to Riga for the New Year, she found tomato juice and a three-litre jar of jam in an out-of-the-way food shop and nearly killed herself hauling them back to Moscow. She and Mitka enjoyed them until March. They had exchanged them for ballet and concert tickets, champagne, all kinds of things.

They got into a bus that was waiting in front of the station with a little parrot squawking on the dashboard. The bus sighed, bellowed, and puttered towards the town at walking pace. The man dozed off, the girl scratched a little hole in the frost on the window with her fingernails to let the light in. She watched a startled flock of cranes fly grandly along the shore of the Irtysh and disappear among the tall, green-balconied highrises. The factory chimneys looked like minarets.

The bus sagged and swayed and nearly toppled over as it dodged a group of oil workers crossing the road. Farther off beyond the city spread an endless stretch of ancient snow-covered pine forest.

The bus stopped with a yelp in front of the remains of Tara gate, the man woke up, and they hurriedly got out. Next to the gate was a low brick building with
Univermag
written on its side. A loudspeaker hung from a rusty, bent nail on one end of the shop. It dangled sadly in the winter wind, shreds of the pastorale from Tchaikovsky's
Queen of Spades
wafting around it.

In front of the shop entrance was a plain pine coffin lined with red silk. The edges of the coffin were decorated with black lace and on top of the lid was a bouquet of white and lemon-yellow carnations. Under the shop window was a snow-covered bench and on it lay a passed-out man with an accordion under his arm. They stopped at the coffin. The man took his hat off and made the sign of the cross. The shop door opened and a skinny old woman and four men with black crepe ribbons on the sleeves of their faded coats came out. The men picked up the white cloth sling, lifted the coffin off the ground and started walking towards the town centre. The funeral procession swayed down the slippery street, which was lined with a closely spaced row of electricity poles that looked like Orthodox crosses.

‘May his troubled heart rest in peace,' the man said.

He wiped his brow as the procession disappeared behind a delicate mosque decorated with blue mosaics.

‘When I was a young man I got sent to work on the peat bogs. There was one hard-fisted, low-browed fellow named Mishka. We made friends, if that's the right word for it. I never said a word to him, but we petted the same cat every evening … Then it happened that one spring night in the wee hours, Mishka died. Somebody put two iron nails through his head. I asked the boss if I could go with him on his final journey. Can't do it, the boss said, the rules don't allow it. I stood there and watched while they carried Mishka up the hill. The backside of the pure white horse was decorated with dried bits of shit as it pulled the old manure cart behind it. In the cart was a box made of planks, and in the box lay Mishka.'

The man and the girl stood there quietly for another moment before they walked into the grocery shop. Torn flowered oilcloth covered the little counter. On it were arranged tins of tea, tubes of lotion, vermicelli, cheap perfume, and belt buckles. There were bars across the low window. A red-handed cleaning lady slopped a wet, ragged mop.

‘Out. Can't you good-for-nothing arses see that we're cleaning here? Get out!'

Just as they were turning to leave, the shop assistant appeared from the back room, her enormous nose badly frozen.

‘I can hear you!'

The man cleared his throat. ‘No trouble here. Everything's peaceful.'

The shop assistant glanced at the cleaner and waved her hand.

‘Varvara Aleksandrovna Pelevina, you may leave. The floor is fine.'

‘My Ninka, may I have a couple of bottles of pepper vodka and a bunch of onions?' the man said.

‘I'm not your Ninka!'

‘Pepper vodka, my butter roll?'

‘There isn't any.'

‘But perhaps you have some … pepper vodka?'

‘There isn't any.'

‘How about a couple of mushroom pies and a bottle of mineral water?'

The shop assistant stared at him, surprised. Then she leered, swung her substantial rear end, and lifted a large bottle of clear liquor, a small bottle of Bear's Blood wine, a back-up bottle of Bulgarian swill, and a bunch of onions from behind the counter.

The man laughed, took out a few notes and a pile of kopecks, tossed them quickly into the little plate, picked up the bottles and the onions, gave the shop assistant a long look, flicked his tongue over his dry lower lip, and walked out of the shop with a bouncy step, and even a whistle. The girl remained in the shop for a moment, but soon left when the shop assistant gave her an angry look.

They walked to the bus stop. The wind increased and the rough sky spat out stinging, bitter snow that gathered its strength from somewhere far away on the tundra and froze the swaying spruce branches.

A bus stinking of rot eventually came, and they quickly got on. The driver was a bloated middle-aged woman, crammed into a fur-lined overcoat, who smelled strongly of onion liquor. The cold had spread through the bus and frozen over the windows. Layers of clouds rushed across the dark sky and sliced through each other, now just above the edge of the forest, now far up in the highest part of the sky.

They got off the bus at the station square. The wind blew a tattered black burlap sack around the statue of Lenin. They trudged tiredly to a ramshackle ice cream stand in a corner of the station with a sign on the door that read
Under refurbishment
.

The bar smelled of Lysol. Puddles of milk lolled over the beautifully tiled floor; the leaking milk cartons lay in the corner. The station was crammed with people. The man drank a glass of vodka, wolfed down a pie, and said he was going to get on the train.

The girl ordered a mayonnaise salad and a dish of ice cream topped with chocolate-covered plums and two kinds of biscuits.

The mayonnaise salad was just mayonnaise, the biscuits stuck out of the ice cream like stalks of hay. She looked at the asters on the windowsill, sad autumn flowers sitting tired in a vase without water. The lower sky covered itself in dark lumps of cloud, the higher part in sea-blue fluff. A tram swished heavily past.

She ate her ice cream unhurriedly. The biscuits she left on the edge of the plate.

The man rubbed his knees as she stepped into the compartment. A Tchaikovsky romance played from the beige plastic speakers.

Omsk is left behind. A closed city. Weary old, good old Omsk, sucked dry by the taiga, abandoned by youth. The prison where the young outlaw Dostoyevsky lay dying is left behind. The lifeless copy of a statue of Dostoyevsky in manhood is left behind. The city of Kolchak's White Guards is left behind. This is still Omsk: the lines outside the shoe shop, the tired land, the row of timber dachas faded grey. A lonely nineteen-storey building in the middle of a field, a five-hundred-kilometre oil pipeline, the yellow flames and black smoke from the oil rigs. Forest, groves of larch and birch, forest – these are no longer Omsk. A house collapsed under the snow. The train throbs across the snowy, empty land. Everything is in motion – snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people, thoughts.

THE GIRL LISTENED TO MUSIC
on her headphones and was on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street again. There, on the top floor of a green block of flats, was her and Mitka's secret place. Someone had painted a black cat on the wall of the ground-floor entrance and the stairwells were completely covered in quotes from Bulgakov's
The Master and Margarita.
How many times had she and Mitka walked up those narrow wooden stairs in the dark of night? Two steps were broken on the sixth floor, and if you didn't know about it you could fall straight to your death. But they knew about it, and they knew to be careful. On the highest landing, amid the stench of cat piss, was where she and Mitka had smoked their first joint together.

Her travelling companion bashfully changed his underwear. He wrapped the dirty items in an old copy of
Literaturnaya Gazeta
and put the bundle in his suitcase.

The passengers who had boarded at Omsk were standing in the corridor. Among them was a Red Army officer and his old, translucently thin housekeeper. His uniform coat fitted him well and his shoes shone, as did his bloated face. He stood in the passageway with his back straight, periodically clearing his throat in a dignified manner. The man stared at him from the door of the compartment.

‘The Soviet Union didn't have any officers in Lenin's day, just soldiers and commanders. You could only tell the difference between them up close, by the emblems on their collars. Those days are long behind us. Nowadays the lieutenants and captains sit together at one table and the majors and colonels at another. That grimacing mug has a thief's look about him. He's probably a pansy, eating away at the spine of the Soviet Union.'

The officer's ears turned red and he took several stiff strides to stand in front of the man, then grabbed him by the nose and squeezed so hard that the man slumped back to his bunk and sat down.

‘Hooligans will be thrown off the train at the next station,' the officer roared. ‘If you were a little younger, I'd send you to the devil's kitchen for some re-education.'

The man was taken off guard, surprised by the officer's swiftness. ‘I didn't …' he said, then he jumped up and threw a punch, but the officer dodged it and his fist struck the doorframe.

He spat angrily over his left shoulder into the corridor and hissed. The officer looked at him, sighed deeply, and left. Arisa came rushing into the corridor with the axe in her hand.

‘Pig! We don't spit on everything here! I'll wring you out till you piss your pants, Comrade Cast Iron Hero.'

She swung the axe so that the girl had to duck, then disappeared. The man watched her go with a look of relief.

The corridor emptied. The girl stood alone for a moment, then went back into the compartment. The man was sitting on the edge of his bed, still furious.

She didn't dare move. He calmed down little by little, burying his chin in a large hand and sighing.

‘I can't stand looking at roosters like that guy. Dressed up like a whore for the Party. Guys like that are the reason we still haven't beaten the Afghans. A pansy like that is worse than those fairy Afghan fighters. I've seen on the news how those mussulmans handle their guns out in the desert. They carry them like babies. And what do our Red Army officers do? They take their cue from that bunch of throwbacks and go around wiggling their arses. If guys like me were running the war the way it should be run, we would've beaten those phoney kings in the first attack. But no, they've got to fag it up. When I was in the army, the gays got a pole up their arse. A real soldier knows what to do with a weapon. You shoot the enemy. Not between the eyes – in the gut.'

The girl had only one thought: she hated him.

They passed crumbling houses gobbled up by their gardens, villages eaten by forest, cities swallowed by the mossy taiga. The train sped east, dark brown clouds covering the sky, when suddenly in the south a little crack of the bright blue of spring appeared through a rift in the clouds. The spring sky. The train sped east and everyone waited for morning. The girl thought of travelling in the hot train across dreaded Siberia, how someone might look at that train and long for Moscow, someone who wanted to be on that very train, someone who had escaped from a camp without a rifle, without food, with nothing but wet matches in his pocket, travelling on skis stolen from a guard, a rusted knife in his pocket, someone willing to kill, willing to suffer freezing and exhaustion, willing to throw himself at life.

The girl had waited the whole dark, dense, quiet night to reach Novosibirsk. She had waited for the safety of the metropolis, waited to be able to be alone for just a few hours. The dry, unrelenting cold of Siberia sliced at her face and made her breath catch. A tuft of hair peeping out from under her knit cap frosted over instantaneously, her eyelashes clumped, her lips froze together. She walked along the platform and listened to the snow squeaking and crunching under her feet, the railway tracks popping in the cold's grip. She watched the gentle glow of the intermittently buzzing light from the lampposts. When she came back, cold, into the corridor of the train she met Arisa.

‘Our beloved Victory engine with the red star on its forehead has given its all. If it doesn't get some time to cool down and rest, it will die, and that's not something any of us wants. We're going to let him take a breather, a few days' rest.'

The girl decided to go into town and reserve a hotel room. She could have a shower and some quiet time.

‘You can't go out alone,' the man said. ‘I won't let you. Novosibirsk will eat you alive. We'll go together. I'll take care of everything.'

Two hours later they were strolling towards the saffron-yellow-tinted sunrise and the centre of the frost-stiffened city. She felt the safety of the street under her feet. Snow banks as tall as a man grew on either side of the uneven pavement with paths trodden between them. They walked stiffly, gulping for air as they passed wastegrounds covered in snow, community gardens, a school, fences and garden gates crusted with snow, verandas with ice blossoms in their paned windows, a stocky woman wandering in a cloud of icy mist. There was so much snow in some places that the piles reached as far as the lights on the tops of the poles.

At the bus stop a cosily sleeping and abundantly steaming cluster of people stood waiting for the trolleybus in thin quilt jackets and steaming fur-trimmed hats with hefty felt boots on their feet. Golden-yellow light glimmered from the windows of a concrete highrise, the dogs in the courtyard howling like a pack of wolves. The wind blew open the coats of passers-by and tore apart the bittersweet song coming from the loose folds of an accordion. There was a barber's and hairdresser's on every corner. A wheelbarrow and pieces of rusty pipe jutted out from under piles of snow on a side street, a broken Czech sofa slouched on one corner covered in little drifts of windblown snow. They kept on walking, through an industrial city waking from an icy dream, crossed courtyards, and found the gloomiest queue in the universe among the chilling mist. They went to stand on a sheet of ice at the back of the line, the man first, the girl behind him. The front of the queue disappeared into the sooty, thick, frosty fog. A woman walked past and left an opening behind her in the mist. The people were steaming like horses. The man turned around quickly.

‘We stand here suffering for no reason and don't complain. They can do whatever they want to us and we take it all humbly.'

An old man with large grey eyes and a basket full of homemade pies yelled from somewhere behind them.

‘Jesus suffered, and commanded us to suffer. Deal with it.'

‘All we want is an easy life. Deal with that,' a young man with a drinker's red nose roared.

‘Not everybody can stand an easy life. Some destroy themselves,' the old man said tepidly, pulling the earflaps of his fur hat down tighter.

‘Pure ignorance,' the red-nosed one threw back.

‘Suffering is what gives life its flavour, thank God. Want and emptiness are good for you,' the old man grunted.

‘It's true that a person can get by on little, but without that little, you've got nothing,' the young man shouted.

‘Shithead. I won't discuss this with you,' the old man said with a sharp swing of his hand clad in a dogskin mitten.

‘It's just a joke, old man. No need to get all worked up about it. Think of your heart,' the girl's companion said soothingly, his voice cordial.

The old man walked up and gave him a long, critical look.

‘Listen here, comrade,' he said. ‘A simple life keeps the spirit wholesome.'

‘And suffering purifies,' the man answered, giving him a wink.

He bought a frozen watermelon, she bought a speckled frozen apple. They walked past a tattered phone booth where a woman with a yellow throat was speaking excitedly into the receiver. A man with red, bony ankles tapped a coin against the glass, trying to hurry her. There were deep cracks in the walls of the blocks of flats, snow-covered balconies that sagged and dripped, rows of doors hanging open, their handles stolen, an entrance filled with snow. Street lights buried in snow, extinguished, bent, broken. Electric power lines hanging in the air, open manholes, heaps of cables lying jumbled in the snowdrifts. And over it all shone an oversized sun in a clear blue sky. They made their way side by side to the dark fairgrounds. The paths had been ploughed, icy asphalt poked through the snow. They sat down on a snow-covered bench. The man took his folding knife out of his pocket, snapped open the sturdy blade, and cut up the melon.

‘Shall we go for a drive? There's always time, and always will be. I've got a master plan that will cost us a bottle of whisky. Have you got it with you? I have an acquaintance here, or rather a good friend, who can arrange things, but even in this country, not everything's free. You can wait here.'

The girl thought for a moment, dug a litre bottle of whisky out of her backpack, and handed it to him. He gave a satisfied whistle, popped the bottle into his breast pocket, and left. The girl sat on the bench shivering. Her cheeks glowed red and there were little drops of ice hanging from her nostril hairs. A crow, stiff in the morning frost, landed hard on the bench next to her. She offered it a piece of the frozen melon. The crow turned its head proudly away.

She had been fifteen when the train rattled through a Moscow neighbourhood in the early morning. She had watched from a window as the sun rose slowly from beyond the horizon over the red flags, stretching the shadows of the endless modular highrises to a surrealistic length. They were staying in the Hotel Leningradskaya on the edge of Komsomolets Square – her father, her big brother and herself. The ornate lobby of the hotel was bewildering. She had never seen such a fancy hotel, even in pictures. From the twenty-sixth floor there was a stunning view of the entire enormous city. They had full board, which meant that they could eat three times a day in the ornate hotel restaurant. She hated the black caviar, but was happy to listen to the gentle clunk of the abacus on the counter. They walked along Leningrad Prospect and watched the women street sweepers, something they'd never seen in Helsinki. In the evening they took a taxi to the Lenin Hills and looked down at her future seat of learning, the festively lit thirty-four storeys of the new Moscow University main building. Lit with floodlights, the monumental university complex and the red star on the sharp tower rising from the top of the main building looked like something borrowed from the
Thousand and One Nights
. On the second day, her father had showed her and her brother all that he had marvelled at in 1964, when he came to the Soviet Union for the first time. They walked around the functionalist Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square and admired the walls of the Kremlin. They rode the trolleybus to Uprising Square to marvel at the twenty-storey block of flats and to Smolensky Square to gape at the twenty-seven-storey office building, which their father said was a mixture of Kremlin and American skyscraper. They visited the graves of Gogol, Mayakovsky, Chekhov, and Ostrovsky at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

On the third day, her father took them to the Kosmos pavilion at the National Economic Achievement exhibition. It was a shrine to the Soviet cult of outer space: life-sized model spaceships and satellites, every sort of smaller space paraphernalia, and of course the most esteemed relic of all, the Soyuz space capsule, with a grandiose, Soviet-style flower arrangement in front of it. You weren't allowed to go inside it, but you were free to take as many photos as you liked. The pavilion was the best thing she'd ever seen in her life. She wrote in her diary that she wanted to move to Moscow as soon as she turned eighteen.

That evening they went to an Uzbek restaurant. An orchestra played Slavic songs and some people danced. At about midnight her drunken brother got into a fight with a West German tourist and someone called the militia, who came and took them both to jail until the tour guide came to bail her glum brother out for fifty dollars the next day. Before the restaurant had closed, her father had purchased a pretty Georgian whore, slipped away with her, and got hepatitis B as a souvenir. The girl had been left at the restaurant by herself. A fat waitress had called a taxi for her. She had cursed her whole family, including her mother, who had left them years ago and gone to northern Norway to work in a fish cannery. When her father got back in the morning he said that the whore tasted like milk and had a cunt as deep as sin. Moscow had been a stony fist, like in Mayakovsky's poem. She never recovered.

A mighty sun swallowed the black clouds and a sturdy but well-dented green Pobeda with bulging sides appeared at the edge of the park.

‘This way, my girl! Come here! Not those rusted-out kopecks – I'm here in this beauty,' the man called from the open window of the car.

The petrol-fumed warmth melted her frosty hair in a moment, but the floor of the car was cold. Her toes tingled. She took off her shoes and rubbed her frozen feet. The car smelled like burnt leather and old iron.