Trans-Siberian Express (10 page)

“Well, I heard from the old man today,” Bulgakov said. “He was positively buoyant. Haven’t heard him in such good spirits for years. He’s invited me down in a couple of weeks. Says his flu is clearing up.”

He smeared a gob of caviar on a sliver of toast and stuffed it into his mouth. “Oh, yes,” he said, his mouth still full, “he wants you to tour the Far Eastern bases.” Grivetsky felt his stomach tighten. “Look things over. Wants it to be low-key. No boat rocking. Just a hard look.

“Did he give any special reason?” Grivetsky asked casually.

“He said he’d talk to us in a couple of weeks about some ideas he was having. After you get back.”

“I’d better make arrangements immediately.”

“Oh, yes—he said you should take the train.”

“The train?”

“He wants to emphasize the low-key. And between you and me, Maxim Sergeyevich, I think he wants to telescope the message that his illness is not as bad as all that. He didn’t say that, but I know how his mind works.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Grivetsky said. “I hate trains. I’ll be bored to death.”

And now it was only the first night, and already he was climbing the walls. He was sorry that he had arranged for a private compartment. It was nerve-wracking, the isolation, the loneliness. He opened the door of his compartment. Its smallness was making him claustrophobic, and yet he could not abide all those staring eyes poking into the room as people moved along the passageway. One strange waddling man was particularly offensive, walking up and down like some wounded homeless dog.

Poking his head out of the door, he looked down the passageway in either direction, then stepped out, a bottle of vodka tucked under his jacket and held in place by the crook of his arm. He passed through the soft-class carriage, through the darkened restaurant car. The little man in charge sat in a corner going over his accounts. Grivetsky glared at the man and, without stopping, passed through the darkened car, through the freezing vestibule to the hard sections.

The carriage door slid heavily behind him, in a great crashing sound that carried with it a message of finality. Here in the hard class the scent of less-privileged humanity hung in the air like the smell of rotting fish. Clothes dangled from ropes strung out along the ceiling. Young soldiers sprawled on hard bunks in their underwear, playing cards or sipping from open bottles of wine. In the din of voices and train sounds, Grivetsky could pick out the heavy snores of those who managed to sleep regularly amid the confusion. But despite the general disarray, he sensed the camaraderie, a kind of happy infectious resignation, which made an adventure out of the discomfort.

A crowd had gathered in one of the compartments, spilling over into the passageway. He stood on his toes to peer over the heads of the spectators. He could see men leaning precariously from the upper bunks, while others literally hung by their arms from the mesh of the baggage racks. The center of their attention was two men, sitting opposite each other on the hard bunks. One was an old, unkempt man with a patch over one eye and deep ridges in his forehead. His opponent was a heavyset man with a pushed-in hog’s face. They were playing chess, oblivious to the crowd that milled around them.

“He is an old champion and he has already beaten all comers,” a little man whispered to the general. “It’s two rubles a game.”

“He makes his living that way,” another man snickered. “All he does is ride the Trans-Siberian. He never sleeps, plays day and night.” The man looked at his watch. “This is only the beginning.”

Grivetsky watched the game, holding tightly to the vodka in the crook of his arm. The old man was expressionless, hardly blinking his one good eye as he studied the board, while the other man’s lips moved with the tension of mental exertion. Grivetsky felt his agitation subside, as he insinuated himself into the little crowd.

The spectators were deep in sympathetic concentration, as the sweating, hog-faced challenger opened his clenched fist and placed a finger lightly on his knight. No, you fool, Grivetsky shouted within himself, knowing that others in the room were feeling the same frustration at the man’s denseness. Almost in defiance of their unspoken commands, he moved the knight, exposing the king. It was all over in a moment, a swift move of the bishop and the king had no escape route. Grivetsky counted the moves. Eight!

“Are you ready for another opponent, Father?” Grivetsky boomed, pulling out the vodka bottle and passing it over to the old man. The crowd made way and Grivetsky sat himself on the bunk opposite.

“I am always ready,” the old man said quietly, removing the cork of the vodka bottle with his teeth and taking a swallow without moving his one good eye from Grivetsky’s face. But the general had already begun to lose himself in concentration, studying the chessboard, calculating the old man’s previous moves. He felt completely calm now, back in his element, the anticipation of the game drawing his mind together, focusing his concentration on the abstractions of move and counter-move. He took the vodka bottle from the old man, drank deeply and began to set up his pieces.

TANIA
Revekka Romoran lay on the lower bunk in her compartment. As she massaged her feet, she calculated the amount of work she would bestow on her assistant, to keep the old thick-headed crone out of her hair for most of the night. Tania decided to have her clean and polish the samovar, reload the coal fires, polish the brass window protectors in the corridor, vacuum the drapes and carpeting, clean the toilets, and polish both the windows and the interior paneling.

The old woman’s body odor lingered in the compartment. Tania got up with a sigh. She knew she would have to spray the room, although the medicinal stench of the spray was equally unpleasant. Cleanliness was a key ingredient to her peace of mind, not only because it was important in her work, but because it had beeen ingrained in her from childhood. “Wash, Tania. Brush, Tania. Scrub, Tania.” Her mother had been a chambermaid in a Leningrad hotel, and Tania never forgot her railing against the sloppiness of the guests, their disgusting slovenly habits, which not only increased her work load but filled her with everlasting contempt.

“They use the towels as toilet paper, then they drop them all over the carpets. You can’t imagine their disgusting habits.”

Tania was even more obsessed than her mother had been. She was particularly sensitive to smells, and could differentiate the odors of a person’s mouth, armpits and crotch. Sniffing at an unmade bed, she could form an opinion of its occupant’s character from both the odor and the way in which the sheets had been ruffled. She evaluated her passengers according to how they treated their compartment, and she had formed an unfavorable opinion of humanity from her ten years as a sleeping-car attendant, a Petrovina, on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Naturally, as befitted her profession, all her judgments were private. This was her 415th run from Moscow to Vladivostok as Petrovina in soft class. The train, she knew, had become her real home, her life. It was no accident that she had won no fewer than five medals for zealousness and industry. Vacations on the Black Sea at the huge railroad workers’ resort were boring. Worst of all, she could not sleep in stationary beds and she always returned to her little compartment with the joy of a homecoming. For Tania, life began as the great wheels rolled and bounced over the square joints of the rails.

She had never married. How could one in such transient circumstances? Not that sex was unavailable to the train attendants. When she had started her career on the railroad at the age of twenty-one, the older women had warned her.

“It’s the vibrations,” she had been told. “It makes them sexy. And the drinking and boredom unhinges them. But be careful. You never know who might be an inspector.”

There were, of course, all sorts of horror stories about attendants who had been caught with men, or raped by drunks, or mauled by peasant soldiers, who copulated like pigs in a barnyard. But she prided herself on her ability to fend those types off. There were times, though, when a man’s advances somehow coincided with her own desires. She remembered Colonel Patushkin vividly, a tall, spare man, wearing an immaculate uniform with shiny insignia and red epaulets. He had walked toward her on the platform, his lips fixed in a confident half-smile. She was surprised at her own interest, since she was used to seeing Russian military officers on their way to some base in Siberia. There was a special aura about him, she decided, feeling a kind of electricity as she shook his hand.

“I am Colonel Patushkin,” he said, his warm deep-blue eyes looking into hers. She looked up at him dumbfounded, suddenly losing track of time and place and the demands of her other passengers. It occurred to her after he had been shown to his compartment, that he might have mistaken her attitude for rudeness. Determined to correct that impression, she found herself giving the colonel special attention. When he and his fellow officer left their compartment for the restaurant carriage, she rushed in with a mind to tidying up, dusting the curtains, rubbing the brass fittings to a pretty shine, fluffing up the bedclothes, cleaning the ashtrays and vacuuming the rug. Instead, she found herself fingering the colonel’s pressed and brushed uniform, putting the material to her nose and smelling deeply, wondering at the uncommonly clean masculine smell.

During the first two days of the journey she could barely get the colonel out of her mind. One night she burst in as he emerged from the adjoining washroom, a towel in a perfect arc around his neck and his curly black hair still damp from combing. Once, toward evening, she had come in quietly with a glass of tea and had seen him in his underwear, white neatly starched shorts and soft ribbed undershirt. He was alone in the compartment, standing with his back toward her, and she let her eyes wash over him, taking in his tall smooth body, and across the center of him the neat white underwear.

Later she realized that it had been reckless of her, especially since she was sure he had seen her reflection in the darkened window. When he had finally turned, taking the tea glass from her, she imagined that his eyes had lingered over her face longer than usual.

“Thank you, Tania,” he said, and she imagined that he returned her admiration. Later, lying in her upper bunk, her mind was assailed by a jumble of uncommon thoughts and images, involving the colonel and his deliciously white body. She imagined that her hands were his and performed acts upon herself that made her breath come in short gasps and filled her body with wonderfully exquisite feelings.

During most of the next day, she used every possible subterfuge to enter his compartment, providing him and his companion with an excess of service. She was certain, too, that he was being extra attentive to her actions, watching her coolly as he sat in the one easy chair, his long legs crossed, a book open on his lap, his shirt collar open at his white throat. She was taking particular care about her appearance and her clothes and, when the train stopped briefly at Novosibirsk, she dashed into a station store to buy a lipstick. Later, she coated her lips lightly with it and smeared some into the skin over her cheeks. Then, admiring herself in the mirror, she brushed her chestnut hair, pinning it up with particular care.

The senior attendant, a large chunky woman with a brooding expression, rarely talked to her, except to bark an order or smirk when something had not been done to her satisfaction. But seeing Tania so freshly turned out caught her attention.

“What are you painting yourself up for?” she hissed. “Got some man giving you the eye?”

“Of course not,” Tania had replied, blushing.

“Better watch out,” the senior hissed.

Tania knew she was under surveillance now, but could not help herself. She worked harder too, approaching her chores with remarkable zeal to prove to her superior that she was only interested in improving her job performance. It was only when the senior attendant had gone off to eat or sleep that she moved closer to the colonel’s compartment, keeping close to the door, like a starved puppy, peering in to catch his eye.

As the journey had progressed, she began to feel the pressure of time. In just twenty-four hours they would arrive at Chita and the colonel would depart. She began to grow anxious, wondering how she could possibly cope with the farewell, as if they had been lovers for years. The fact was, as she later remembered, they had exchanged no more than a few polite words, she of inquiry, he of casual response, mostly “Yes, thank yous” or “No, thank yous.”

But she was now certain that somehow she had gained his attention. She entered the compartment while the other soldier was in the restaurant car and began tidying the upper bunk. She was quite conscious of her own movements, stretching upward to puff pillows and smooth the linen dust cover. It was then that he stood up and, politely waiting for her to descend, touched her shoulder, and spoke the only complete sentence that she was ever to remember.

“You are a remarkably dedicated comrade,” he said. She felt the weight of his hand on her shoulder and, blushing deeply, she placed a hand over his. Then, overcome by the gesture, she had run out of the compartment and rushed into her own, to douse her face with cool water. Luckily, the senior attendant was stretched on the lower bunk, her face to the wall, and she was snoring noisily as usual.

Later, when the train stopped at the Irkutsk station, Tania stood beside the car breathing gulps of fresh air and feeling the impending sadness of the colonel’s imminent departure. Chita was next. A bright moon hung in the distance, unreachable and mysterious, like her relationship with the handsome dark man. Her melancholy was intense. It was only after she had climbed up onto the metal step again that she felt her depression ease, for she saw in the window the face of the colonel, who had apparently been watching her.

When the train began to move again, she waited near the samovar, watching the doors close, and some of the passengers, including the colonel’s companion, walked unsteadily toward the restaurant carriage. When the passageway was empty, she poured out a glassful of tea and placed it in the filigreed container, then, watching it shake in her hands, opened the door of the colonel’s compartment.