Trans-Siberian Express (18 page)

She had just begun polishing the handrail below the window when the buzzer sounded from General Grivetsky’s compartment. Feeling the beat of her heart accelerate, she lightly tapped on his door. The lock snapped back and the door swung open.

“Yes, sir?” she asked.

The general was wearing a silk robe and red slippers, and his hair, still damp from his bath, was neatly combed. He reminded her so much of Colonel Patushkin, her Colonel Patushkin.

The general let her into the compartment, then resumed his seat, crossing his legs and picking up his cigar. It occurred to Tania that his bunk needed tidying, so she began to smooth the sheets and tuck them tightly around the edges of the mattress.

“When you finish there I’d like some tea,” he said, taking a long drag on his cigar and blowing smoke toward the ceiling.

“Of course, sir,” she said.

She felt his presence, his closeness, and she was relieved that he had returned to his compartment, to her care.

The morning she had discovered that the general had not slept in his bunk, she had become frightened, wondering if he had left the train. His clothes were still there, but that only increased her anxiety. People who disappeared often left belongings behind.

But then, one of the attendants in the hard section told her about the chess marathon going on in her carriage. From her description of the players, Tania recognized the general, and was elated to know he was safe.

Later that day, seized by a wild, mischievous urge, she let herself into his compartment and snapped the lock shut from the inside. She had sprayed the room earlier, but she could still detect the delicious aroma of his cigar smoke and, closing her eyes, she recalled her first sight of him. She touched the chair and sat down on it herself, imagining that she could still feel his warmth along the back and seat. Then, seeing the garment bags, she unzipped one and removed the crisp uniform, holding it up in front of her, marveling at the polish of the buttons and its wonderfully clean smell. She hung it on a hook and watched it for a few moments, picturing the general dressing himself in it, feeling a surge of pleasure at the image. Then she jumped up suddenly. The chess game might be ending at any moment.

She started to replace the uniform in the garment bag, discovering in the process that the bag was actually inside out. Shaking her head, she reversed the bag, enjoying the idea that she was bringing some domestic order to the general’s life. Then she had quietly let herself out of the compartment.

She knew the general’s eyes were on her now as she tidied the place, then moved out to the samovar. She dared to imagine that there was a bond between them, forged at Sverdlovsk. She could still feel the strength and warmth of his hand as they had dashed together to reach the train. Moments like that brought closeness, she told herself, and she poured a glass of tea, set some cookies and sugar on a little plate and returned to the compartment.

“Thank you, Tania,” the general said, his eyes level with hers as she bent to put the tea beside him on the table.

“If there is anything, anything at all, sir,” she paused, “it will be my pleasure.”

“Thank you, Tania,” the general said again, sipping the hot tea cautiously. She wondered if her words had delivered the message of her feelings. What is he thinking? she wondered. Can he sense what I feel?

In the passageway she continued to polish the window rail, moving in the direction of the samovar. When she had finished, she put the rag in a bucket, mentally calculating that she had finished tidying all compartment interiors except for the Trubetskois’ and the Ginzburgs’. She knocked on the door of the Jewish couple’s compartment. She heard shuffling about inside and imagined that someone was breathing just beyond the steel door. “Can I help you?” she called.

“Go away,” a man’s voice said.

She shrugged and obeyed, wondering whether she should ask the doctor about the woman’s health. It was, after all, the duty of the train attendant to know what was going on among her passengers. She started toward the doctor’s compartment, then hesitated. She knew what was going on inside. It was impossible to hide. Clues were everywhere: the blotches of stiffness on the sheets and blankets, the odd angle at which the mattress lay on the bunk, the familiar odors and, of course, the embarrassed glances, the change in routine. The doctor and the blonde lady had not left their compartment once during the entire second day. They hadn’t even ordered tea.

She looked at her wristwatch, set, as always, on Moscow time. They would be in Novosibirsk in two hours. Perhaps that would be the moment to make inquiries of the doctor. She decided to work on the toilet, and began washing out the inside of the bowl. She stopped to light a cigarette. Smoking was against the rules, so she closed the door, leaving it open just a crack so she could keep an eye on the passageway.

After a few minutes she heard the familiar click of a compartment door. Through the tiny opening she could see a flash of flowered material. It paused in her field of vision, rustled, then moved. She pushed the door open a bit more, watching as Mrs. Valentinov stood for a moment in the passageway, hesitating. Suddenly the red-haired man emerged from the compartment next door, silently crept up behind, and grabbed her around the waist, putting a hand over her mouth. In a moment the two disappeared into his compartment.

Tania sucked in her breath, sorry that she had seen anything. Somewhere along the line she might be asked to tell what she had seen and her future, even her life, might depend on the reliability of her information. They might even test her. She noted the time, the exact moment; fixed the train exactly; made note of her own movements. She was even careful to observe the condition of the toilet and the angle at which she had seen the woman. Then she went back to her own compartment, slamming the door loud enough to wake the old crone who lay asleep on her bunk. The old woman’s snoring sputtered to a halt. Her eyes flickered open.

“Is it time?” she whispered hoarsely.

“No.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“No. It is only seven o’clock.”

Then Tania began to run the water, soaping her hands and rubbing them clean. Satisfied that she had established her whereabouts with a witness, she went to the door and peered out cautiously in either direction. The stocky man with the funny walk had pulled out a spring seat again and was staring blankly into the cloudless night. As she returned to the toilet to finish her work, Tania wondered whether Mrs. Valentinov had returned to her compartment, but knew that if she had not, she would not do so as long as the stocky man was still in the passageway.

After finishing up in the toilet, Tania started toward the samovar again, but as she passed the doctor’s compartment, he opened the door and looked out in either direction. It had been about an hour since Mrs. Valentinov had disappeared.

“May I help you, Doctor?” she volunteered quickly, sensing that Mrs. Valentinov had not yet returned.

“No, thank you,” the doctor said. His hair was tousled, as if he had just awakened. He seemed preoccupied.

“Have you looked in again on Mrs. Ginzburg?”

“Huh?” He seemed confused.

“The woman in the end compartment.”

In spite of his preoccupation, Alex’s mind turned to what she was saying. She could see his concentration gather.

“You mean they did not get off at Omsk?”

“No.”

“That woman needs hospitalization.”

“Mr. Ginzburg hasn’t been out of his compartment. He has not even let me in to tidy up.”

“You think there is some problem?” He ran his fingers through his tousled hair.

“Yes, I do.” She hoped this new subject would take his mind off Mrs. Valentinov’s whereabouts. The doctor looked tentatively up and down the passageway again. The funny squat man shifted restlessly in the spring seat, a brief frown of pain clouding his face. If only I could get him to move, she thought.

“I suppose I should look in,” the doctor said, ducking back into the compartment and emerging again with his medical kit.

Tania led the way down the passage, stopping at the Ginzburg compartment and knocking softly. She knew there would be no answer. Looking at the doctor, she shrugged and knocked again, this time with more force.

“Harder,” the doctor said.

She knocked harder.

“Go away,” a voice said from inside.

“It’s the doctor,” Tania said.

“Everything is fine. Please go away.”

The doctor moved closer to the door. “Has her fever gone down?” he asked.

“Yes,” the voice said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I think you had better let me take a look,” the doctor said gently.

“Please go away,” Ginzburg said, but a note of hesitation had crept into his voice.

“Can you open the compartment from the outside?” the doctor asked.

“I have a master key,” Tania replied.

“Really, there is no need,” the voice in the compartment pleaded.

“Please, Mr. Ginzburg,” the doctor said, “if you value your wife’s life, I would suggest you open the door.”

There was a long pause. Ginzburg was moving about in the compartment. Finally, the snap lock clicked and the compartment door was opened. The doctor pushed it with his fingers and it gave way at his touch. Tania followed in behind him.

Ginzburg was unshaven and his face lookd thinner. His eyes seemed to have sunk into their sockets. He stood aside and, sitting down in the chair, put his face in his hands. Mrs. Ginzburg was lying in the upper bunk, her eyes glazed. The doctor put his hand on her forehead.

“She’s burning up,” he said. “I told you that she needed hospitalization.”

“She wouldn’t go,” Ginzburg said, removing his hands from his face.

The doctor took his stethoscope from his kit and began to warm it in his hands. Then, undoing the woman’s robe, he listened to her chest.

“It is much worse,” he said.

“She wouldn’t go,” the man repeated, distraught.

“That is absurd. You have no choice.”

“I thought perhaps in Birobidjan—” he began.

“No,” the woman said weakly from the upper bunk, trying to sit up. “I want to go back to Moscow.”

“Of course,” the doctor said gently. “But first you must get well.”

“I must go back to Moscow.”

The doctor turned to Ginzburg. “You must make arrangements at the next stop,” he told him.

Tania edged backward and opened the compartment door, glancing into the passageway. With a sigh of relief, she saw that it was empty. The funny squat man had disappeared.

“What is the next stop?” the doctor asked.

“There is a small country stop in about an hour,” Tania answered. “Then comes Novosibirsk.”

“Fine. I’m told they have good medical facilities there. It should not be difficult to make arrangements.”

“For Jews everything is difficult,” Ginzburg moaned.

“I am not Jewish,” the sick woman said with sudden strength.

“You must be still,” the doctor said, patting her thin arm.

“I am not Jewish,” the woman repeated.

“Please, Vera,” Ginzburg pleaded.

“I’m sure it won’t be as difficult as you assume,” the doctor said.

“How could you know, Doctor?” Ginzburg said, his lips tightening.

“Do I have your word?” the doctor said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder.

Ginzburg lowered his head.

“Do I have your word?” the doctor repeated.

The man nodded. The doctor looked up again at the sick woman. Tears were running down her cheeks.

“You must rest,” he said. With that, he snapped the kit shut and left the compartment.

Tania followed him. “Will she die?” she asked.

“She is very bad.”

The doctor paused at the door of his compartment.

“You have not seen Mrs. Valentinov?”

Tania walked away, pretending not to hear. The doctor lingered a moment longer, then let himself into his compartment.

DAYS
and nights had begun to blur in Alex’s mind, his rhythm shattered by this remarkable passion. Like Jonah in the whale, he was trapped in an environment totally foreign to his experience. He knew that the train was moving relentlessly forward, over a bouncing ribbon of steel, through the endless taiga, over bridges of concrete and stone and wood, through the blackness of tunnels. He knew there was movement, but he could not feel it. What he felt was an intensity that shattered his sense of time and space, a heat generated within himself and focused, like a single magnified dot of fire, on the body and soul of Anna Petrovna.

In her embrace he had reached the outer bounds of tenderness and passion. He felt the danger, too, but he dismissed it from his thoughts. Hardly anything mattered except the “now” of this consuming wonder. It was not uncommon to feel most alive on the threshold of death, a condition he might be sharing with Dimitrov. It did not matter to him how Anna Petrovna fit into Dimitrov’s equation. All that was merely their other lives, and now they had passed through a dark tunnel to the white light of the other side.

“It is beyond my understanding,” he admitted as they half-lay, half-sat crosswise across the lower bunk, their bare legs stretched across the carpet.

He looked out the window deep into the taiga, wishing that it would be more endless than it was, that the world would suddenly stop on its axis.

“All my life,” he said, feeling the need to plumb his own depth, “all my life, I have considered known quantities. I have used my curiosity, the scientific method, but I have never been up against a mystery like this before. This sudden attraction between us—I can’t explain it; I can’t even examine it. My old habit of curiosity seems useless, even wrong, in the face of this.”

“Never lose your curiosity,” Anna Petrovna said drowsily. “It will destroy your work.”

“I have been up against mysteries before.”

“Oh?”

“But of the blood only. Why, for example, does the white corpuscle suddenly develop odd tendencies? It is an enigma within an enigma.”

“If you lose your curiosity, you won’t care why the white corpuscle behaves as it does. You will just accept it. And that would be a terrible catastrophe for the future of the human race.”