Compartment No 6 (10 page)

THE RAILS TANGLED
, the train rocked wildly, then a screech of brakes like glass scraping against sheet metal. The train stopped in Siberia's capital, at Irkutsk station. It spent two days there.

The yellow-ochre, white-cornered station building stood barren in its accustomed spot. In front of it the stationmaster stood, stock still, watching the train arrive. The girl turned over on her side and was assaulted by disconnected memories and impressions, people she hadn't seen in ten years. When she woke up she was wet with sweat.

The man looked at her compassionately and it felt good to her.

‘Another person's soul is a dark chasm,' he said quietly. ‘But let the soul be. Let's go hunting. Hunting for food!'

She dressed quickly, he slowly, with a sort of dignity. He put on an old greenish suit coat, buttoned it tightly, combed his hair back like a dandy. Last, he pulled his shoes out from under his bunk. They were some kind of fur-lined, sturdily made army boots with split tops and hard-edged heels.

They were met on the platform by a mild spring chill, silent snowflakes, and an old dog with a large femur dangling from its mouth, its tail wagging.

It was warm and dry inside the station. Glum travellers loitered in the corners, drifters sat on wooden benches in heavy winter clothes. A quiet hum of talk trickled from the people on the benches. At one end of the station was a café with a round window in the far wall, the winter light pressing through it like raindrops into the samovar-steamed air.

They came out through a low side door. They found the vendors next to the wall of the station among the frost-heaved pavement. The man greeted the old women with a wave of his hand but chose to approach an old man with a brimless cap on his head. The codger's table was covered in dried mushrooms. The man chatted with him for a moment and then handed him a set of socket wrenches made in China. The older man examined them for a long time before he reached under the table and took out a few cured Baikal salmon and a box of grilled whitefish.

Next they went to the table of a woman in a black scarf. Behind her was a smoking rotisserie of pure white, poorly plucked chicken carcasses. All she was selling was three eggs.

The man counted out a pile of one-, two- and three-kopeck coins into her hand.

They lurked among the vendors a little longer. There was a familiar smell, a combination of garlic, vodka, and sweat. The man bought some tea grown in Irkutsk, sour milk tarts, pretzels and sugared
bubliks,
the girl bought biscuits from Tula, Gold Label biscuits, and
pryanikis.

They went over the footbridge. The airy early spring sun tinged the powdery new-fallen snow with pink, and Irkutsk seemed like a whole city in miniature made of marzipan. The air was sharp and thin; the man was panting. A flock of sparrows flew over their heads, their wings whistling. The man and the girl stood quietly for a long time. By the permanently closed back door of the station a pile of waste was covered in bright white powdery snow where a couple of dozen filthy stray cats capered about. A well-fed owl perched on a rotting cross of wood left on the rubbish heap and followed their movements closely. They walked to the kiosks. The snow glittered on the kiosk roofs and around the bottoms of the lampposts. The girl took off her cap and let her hair fall over her shoulders. She joined the long, cheery queue formed between two railings for the tobacco stand and the man joined the talkative and argumentative queue for newspapers. He bought a
Pravda
and a
Literaturnaya Gazeta.
With the change he bought a piece of rock-hard Lolek chewing gum, made in the DDR. After lengthy negotiations, the girl managed to purchase a pack of Primas and some Baikal
papirosas
. The vendor refused to sell her any Belomorkanals for some reason, although there was a whole shelf full of them. When she gave the Primas to the man he turned them over in his hand for a moment, looking at the spacecraft on the package.

‘Baikals smell like dog piss. Primas taste like horse shit and Brezhnev. Belomorkanals, on the other hand, smell like the real Papa Stalin.'

They walked along the station platform back towards their compartment. A few light spring snowflakes mixed with the smell of smoke in the air. The girl looked up and let the snow fall on her face. The man stared back at the kiosks.

‘I've never seen a Georgian standing in a queue before. Now I've seen everything.'

They were just finishing cleaning the train carriage. The carriage staff had taken out the carpets; Sonechka vacuumed the canvas-covered floor and Arisa cleaned the WC and wiped the doorknobs and corridor railing with a wet black cloth. The man and the girl slipped into the compartment once Arisa and Sonechka had put the carpet back in place. They spread some of their purchases on the table and started preparing breakfast together.

The man bustled over his samovar. He moved it around unnecessarily, opened the lid and checked several times to make sure the cord was plugged tight into the wall. The sun smoked beyond the rail yard, the universe hummed. He boiled some water, dumped in a mighty portion of the large whole tea leaves he'd bought, and waited. Ten minutes later the tea had sunk to the bottom of the pot. He poured the nearly black tea into his own glass, put in a whole sugar cube like an iceberg, and took three small sips. Then he handed the glass to the girl. She tasted it. It was strong and mellow. He wanted the glass back, slurped at it three times, and handed it to her again.

‘My grandfather was sent to a prison camp in 1931. He was a true thief and kept the secret of the seven seals till the day he died. My father lived the life of a wanderer too, had no possessions but his poor handwriting. He lived in a world where the tavern is your church, the work camp is your monastery, and drinking is the highest form of endeavour. He got nabbed for an honest robbery and murder, and Lucifer's net closed around him. He ended up in a KGB cellar, then they tossed him into a three-star work camp in 1935, the same year Stalin announced that the life of the Soviet people was happier now. A three-star camp. In other words, a good one. He got sentenced to forty-five years. In those days life in a work camp may have been safer and more bearable for somebody poor and hungry than life in a big city. The old man wasn't afraid of being sentenced to labour because he was used to even worse. In 1941 Stalin was in deep shit. The Nazis were thirty kilometres from Red Square and their reconnaissance planes were already over Stalingrad. Then the Generalissimo, panicked as he was, decided to finally free any criminal in the work camps who would pledge to go to the front to defend his homeland. Go to the front and you'll be forgiven and after the war you'll be a free man. My old man took the bait and they freed him, like tens of thousands of others. All those killers, thieves and other crooks crammed onto prison trains and were carried to the front. It was on that trip, on one leg of the journey, that my father saw my virgin mother, who was in a great hurry to get herself pregnant before every last man was sent to the war, and had a screw when she got the chance, naturally. My old man survived the war, but after the war all those criminals who managed to stay alive on the front were thrown right back into the work camps. The only thing different was that the camps were full of Lithuanians now. That's where he died, from fever and diarrhoea.'

He licked his dry lips and looked at the girl pityingly. ‘It's fun to tell you stories, my girl, because you don't understand a thing. My mother birthed herself a new man.'

He got up and expertly executed fifty-three push-ups. His legs were beautifully muscular and he had strong, firm buttocks.

‘Life prescribes strict rules for all of us. You'll understand someday. Or maybe not. I was in a Pioneer camp in 1948, right after the war. The boys in the sixth section got to swim in the clear waters of Lake Komsomol. This lake was unusual because the soft sand on the bottom had sudden drop-offs, and there were some of the boys of course who thought it was funny to push the ones who couldn't swim into the cold, deep water. Little Pioneers like me swam in pond number six. It was a muddy little Pioneer pond with water that was cloudy and too warm. One day when we were splashing in it we heard a terrible boom. It came from really close by. Somebody yelled for help and we saw that there was a great fuss on the shore. We ran right over, of course, to see what it was all about. A tight, noisy circle of people had formed on the sand. I tried to get through it so I could see what was happening, but the older boys shoved me away. Then the gorilla of a camp director came and pushed his way into the middle of the action and in the fracas I managed to slip inside the circle. And what did I see? Jura was lying there, with one leg missing. He was just trembling, no sound coming out of his mouth. The director ordered us to disperse. Someone ran to get the camp truck and another director came with some bandages. The gorilla gave Jura some vodka and used it to rinse off the stump of his leg too. Then the truck came and took him away. The next day nobody said a word about it. The boys had found a mine on the bottom of the lake and thrown it on the shore, where Jura, their little whipping boy, was building a sandcastle. Thanks, Comrade Stalin, for the happy childhood!'

Pallid light poured from the sky. The girl decided to go into town alone. The man stayed on the train to rest. He too wanted to be alone.

SHE LISTENED TO THE BIRDS
' spring silence, the swish of melting snow on roofs, the patter of the dripping drain spouts, the little streams trickling across wet courtyards, the sad peeping of a sparrow on a snowy rowan branch. Twometre icicles grew from the eaves of a warped-walled highrise. There were a few parked cars along the roads, some covered in a soft blanket of fresh fallen snow, others coated in a matte finish of thick frost. A working woman sat at the bus stop with loaves of bread piled in her lap.

In the afternoon the girl sat in a cocktail bar called Great October. The place was full of students arriving and leaving, puffs of frost coming in through the door. She tried a milk cocktail made popular by Premier Kosygin that had spread from the Baltic across the Soviet Union. It was cold and sweet. She glanced at the rusted padlock on the refrigerator door and thought about Moscow, its damp courtyards, the swampy smell of the apartments, the stairwells full of different kinds of doorbells. She had gone to study at Helsinki University as soon as she finished her matriculation exam and she and her friends Maria and Anna had started applying for graduate study positions in Moscow. It took a lot of arranging. Maria and Anna moved into the conservatory dorms, she into the student house at the Teknikum. She had shared a small hot room with a Dane named Lene. Lene studied geology and she studied archaeology.

From her earliest years of study she had dreamed of how she would follow in the footsteps of Sakari Pälsi, G. J. Ramstedt, and Kai Donner, seek out the same holy sites where those scholars had been. When her thesis was nearly finished she started to fill out requests and applications and gather authorisations, endorsements, and letters of recommendation from Helsinki and Moscow. All her efforts were in vain; those regions were closed to foreigners. Finally Mitka suggested they go together by train to Mongolia, crawling across Siberia in the process. She refused at first, but later got excited at the prospect of reading the petroglyphs found near Ulan Bator by Ramstedt and described by Pälsi.

Then everything went awry.

A cool, late afternoon light pressed against the snowy streets and the gates of the low houses built in the reign of Catharine the Great. There was a carefully stacked pile of firewood in the courtyard of a lovely old house. The fence around the hotel leaned steeply, the windows were filled with ice flowers. She was sitting in the lobby with its sumptuous bouquet of paper flowers. The atmosphere was Oblomovian, the snow of winter still falling. To the right of the reception desk was a hand-coloured photograph bordered in mourning of a sturdy woman wearing two medals on her chest.

The girl waited at least an hour before the young receptionist came sailing out of the back room wearing a muskrat hat, her lips roughly painted red. An elegantly sour cloud of eau de cologne spread around her. She didn't look at the girl, just paced back and forth as if she were in a hurry. When the girl managed to hand her the hotel voucher the receptionist went into the back room again and stayed there for another hour or two.

Her room was on the third floor. The hallway was stuffed with broken furniture and wooden crates, a beautiful redwood sofa sitting among the junk. On the wall was a print of Repin's Volga boatmen. An old floor monitor sat at a small table asleep.

The room was hot and cramped. The girl opened the small ventilation window. A spring wind came whirling into the room, grabbed hold of the light yellow curtains and fanned them. The window opened out onto an adjoining park.

There were pure white starched sheets on the bed, and bedbug spray in a corner of the bathroom. She got undressed and slid into the clean bed. She watched the little plastic satellite swinging between the curtains and fell asleep to the heavy hum of the gas boiler.

When she woke up she moved the bed in front of the window, pushed the curtains out of the way, and lay down. In the centre of the park below was a path surfaced in red sand. Farther off was a little frozen pool, its surface bright and smooth. There was no snow on top of the ice – the winds of April had blown it away. A bronze fish swam stiffly in the middle of the pool; perhaps, in the summer, water sprayed from its mouth. Waxwings twittered shrilly in the branches of the maple trees, waved their yellow-tipped tails, flicked their crests, and flew off now and then to follow the trolleybuses and trams into town. They flew up to the sky and watched the life of the city from there, then returned to the maple branches and the back of the rain-spattered park bench.

After noon, a loudspeaker wired to the gatepost of the park started playing Claude Debussy's
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faun.
Soon old men started to arrive at the park to click dominoes. Then the old women appeared. Each of them put her own cloth on a bench and sat down.

The girl ate lunch in the hotel dining room: borscht, smetana and black bread. She looked at the hundred-light chandelier that hung from the dining-room ceiling, defying all artistic conventions. The waiter, who had a large mouth and small eyes, asked her if she'd like to exchange any money or sell any Western goods.

After lunch she walked through the mild weather to Victory Park and was startled by the metal clang of the tram wobbling past beyond the hedgerow. A black rat appeared beside her. It was sick, and thus not afraid of people. When she stopped, the rat stopped. She felt lonely.

She thought about Irina's earrings, her tailored skirt, her eyes, with a gaze you couldn't be sure of. It had been easy to be with Irina. Even the silence had a lightness. Irina accepted her and allowed her into her family, and when Mitka was shut up in the hospital, she and Irina had spent a lot of time together.

Irina had taken her to the monastery town of Zagorsk, whose church clock's insane, fifteen-tone jangle had rung in her head for a week after their visit; to Pasternak's dacha in Predelkino with its garden full of crushed eggshells painted different colours; to Konstantin Simonov's veranda, to Arseni Tarkovsky's grave, where they ate pumpkin seeds; and to the Vaganskoya Cemetery to look at the mound covered in flowers at Vladimir Vysotsky's grave. Irina read aloud to her from Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam's poems and encouraged her to read Turgenev, Lermontov, Bunin, Leskov, Platonov, Ilf and Petrov, and Trifonov.

They got to know each other better and gradually fell in love.

The girl bent down to look at the rat. It was dead. Its soul had abandoned its sick body. She sensed that Irina was thinking about her.

She turned onto a path that took her to a black grove filled with chill mist. Hidden within it was a statue of Pushkin covered in something that looked like seaweed; a handful of rifle shell casings lay among the shards of broken vodka bottles that covered the ground beneath it.

She wandered into an open part of the park where the mist had faded and the air was translucent. Rachmaninov piano music played and the old men clicked their dominoes and the old ladies whispered among themselves on the benches. A light thaw slipped into the park and grew gradually into a warm spring day. An east wind blew the clouds hurriedly west. Somewhere in the distance roosters who'd lost their sense of time crowed. The snow that was everywhere melted into little streams. The girl found an empty bench. She fell asleep in the heat of the sunlight and started awake when a tremendous rushing sound invaded deep into her sleep. A surge of brown water was coming towards her from the other side of the park. The old men and women were gone, but the piano music was still playing. A lame horse was approaching along the path. It stopped when she dashed past it.

She ran to the hotel and straight to the third floor. She looked out of her window and saw water rising at tremendous speed, quickly covering half the park.

She ran back down to the lobby and rapped loudly on the reception desk. The receptionist with the fur hat emerged from the distant back room. The girl asked why so much water was suddenly rising. The clerk explained that the temperature had risen quickly overnight and the ice on the Angara had broken free. She said it was all perfectly normal and that it would recede by the next morning, or the next week, unless it rose higher.

The girl stood there astonished and at the same time relieved. She heard the receptionist talking to someone in the back room.

‘Pavel Ivanovich. The one who's the district inspector for cultural affairs.'

‘Forty-something? Kind of a wreck?'

‘That's the one.'

‘The fellow who likes to have three spoons of dill water every day before breakfast?'

‘That's him. He told Zoya, and Zoya told me …'

In the afternoon the water had disappeared from the park completely and taken all the snow with it, leaving no trace but the dirty ice and steaming, muddy ground.

It was evening. A carmine red tram cut along the edge of the boulevard. The black trees in the park stared at her gloomily, but she paid no attention to them. She was looking higher up, at the stars as they rattled like ice cubes in a green sky, and at the moon radiating its frozen light. The tall buildings nestled in the cold, gleaming along either side of the icy road. The street lights came on with a quiet hiss. They spilled a rattling bluish light for a long time, until the colour turned purplish red.

She turned on a black-and-white television that stood on a table in a corner of the room. It was showing an ad for the Soviet Union.

She thought about Mitka and felt sorry for him. But what if the Crimean rest and treatment healed him? What would she do then? What about Irina? The whole thing worried her so that she started to soothe herself with memories: the times she and Mitka had listened to records on the cute little poison-green record player, sipped tea and champagne, played various board games thousands of times, laughed, rolling and shrieking with delight. They had known how to enjoy life, but then the evening turned to night, summer to autumn, and Mitka had to go to the loony bin.

From the big window in the lobby you could see the eaves, icicles hanging from them like a row of swords ready to slice in two the head of any random passer-by. A longhaired black cat slept on top of a lamppost that spewed bright yellow light. When she told the receptionist that she was going to continue her journey the woman asked her to wait a moment and went into the back room. When she returned she had a cream-coloured plastic model of the Kremlin tower in her hand.

‘This is for you, Miss. A little memento of Irkutsk.'

When she stepped into the compartment the man was sitting on his bunk wearing long army underwear, filing his toenails.

She handed him the stack of newspapers she'd bought, which smelled of petrol. He said the train wasn't leaving until morning. She wasn't alarmed at this news.

She sat on her bunk for a long time and smiled. She watched him. He had a tired, cloudy look in his eyes, but that felt homely to her.

Clouds sailed across the darkening sky, colliding with each other. Eventually the night poured heavy and peaceful over the train.

The weightless, quiet morning light of early spring awoke her long before the station bell rang for the third time, the engine gave a heavy sigh, and the train rocked into motion.