Compartment No 6 (11 page)

IRKUTSK IS LEFT BEHIND
; a silent, icebound, springtime city. Irkutsk, the yellow tiles of the university library, the pink onion church, the parks and trees, the noisy, steamy communal saunas, the tired land, the park covered in rusty floodwaters, the classical music in the little loudspeaker at the gate of the park, the soft drifts of snow in courtyard gardens. Irkutsk is left behind as an approaching electric train sways on the next track, house after small, sturdy little house, the white window frames, the flowery shutters, the eaves with their whimsical carvings, the lonely nineteen-storey prefab buildings in the middle of fields, the early spring sunshine, the smoking chimneys, the man standing atop a woodpile – this is still Irkutsk – the Russian-blue station building and the jungly, impenetrable forest. The bogs, the stunted trees, the waste, the logging lines – this is no longer Irkutsk. BAM railway tracks swallowed by the swamp, a house collapsed under snow. A few bittersweet accordion notes with accompanying bells drift through the next compartment. The train plunges into nature, throbs across the snowy empty land. Everything is in motion: snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people, thoughts.

The train glided slowly along the lovely rough banks of Lake Baikal, across sudden cuts in the rock, through dozens of tunnels. An island with a bowed back rose up almost touching the shore, its lone tree a pine snag, a sea eagle in its crown watching the moving train. Baikal was as large as the sea, as broad as outer space. The girl imagined the ultramarine water full of hidden rocks, reefs, great islands, sunken vessels, drowned sailors, the bodies of extinct animals. Maybe fish. The ice had already shifted enough that broad cracks had appeared on the surface. She didn't see any Baikal seals. A sobbing wind blew from the north and stirred the dark water between the sheets of ice. Gnarled, melted old birches grew in every direction and covered the western sky with their branches. Round mounds of ice rose into the air around inlets sheltered by sparse beds of reeds. On one shore was an enormous factory complex, its thick chimneys pushing red clouds into the air. The name of the factory was written in letters the size of trucks on a boulder between two factory buildings: Voroshilov. She thought about Moscow, its cloudy November days, its cold March nights, the Moscow River whose shores she'd walked many times, its frothing waters and fish rotting among the rocks along the banks.

The man opened a bottle of vodka and poured two glasses.

‘Do you know what happened to Gagarin when he was orbiting the earth in his capsule? He realised that the earth is a little piece of shit in a great big universe and it could be destroyed at any moment. When he came back from space, he started drinking, even though he had access to every privilege: the cosmonauts' base grocery, the party bosses' sanatoriums, hospitals, Western medicines. Khrushchev even bought him a small plane to cheer him up! But then what happened? Gagarin flew up over the clouds searching for death. He didn't have to look long – he ran into a mountain and died. A toast to Yuri Gagarin, and to Belka and Strelka, the valiant cosmonaut dogs.'

On the northwest shore of the lake, almost touching the water, there was an onion-domed church that looked like a playhouse. Around the church were several arolla pines. Their limbs were swaying, dripping with sun-melted snow. A wind came up and the long, soft needles of the trees scratched at the tattered church walls. The girl imagined wild, restless stars peeking between the dense pine branches like fireflies once the heavy night descended. Two motorcycles with sidecars were crossing the ice. One sidecar was red and full of live chickens tethered together, the other was painted bright blue. Ice fishers crouched here and there. The train curved closer to the shoreline, its wheels screeching. The girl saw a small carousel buried in snow and children's climbing bars. The train wound slowly on, then whistled happily and hurried forward into a tunnel cut into the mountain. A quiet dusk descended over everything. The train rattled ahead lazily, then stopped altogether.

It stood in the dark tunnel for a couple of hours. The glaring rays of the compartment ceiling light etched into the vinyl floor. The girl could feel the man's breathing, the calm beating of his heart. He looked at her through heavy-lidded eyes.

‘Here's a case from real life, my little berry,' he said, lounging back on his bunk. ‘There was a fellow named Kolya who kicked it two days before he turned forty. We buried him in the new Moscow cemetery, right next to a beautiful girl named Anna Pavlovna Dorenko, who died young. A year passed and Ascension Day came. A magnetic wind was blowing from the north when I, Vova and Gafur decided to go say hello to our old friend at the cemetery. We took along a couple of bags of food and five bottles of vodka. Vova spread a tablecloth over the grave and Gafur put the food on it. We were offering Kolya some vodka and scattering a few Belomorkanal cigarettes on the grave when along came a sweet gaggle of girls and before the night was half over I was screwing one of those hefty little chickens. This chick was lying on top of the grave with her drumsticks spread and I was staring at Anna Pavlovna's pretty face painted on the headstone. Anna was looking back at me, smiling. For the first time in my life I thought that there might be something after death.'

The girl opened the compartment door a crack. A little girl with braided pigtails was playing in the corridor with a matryoshka doll. Soon the littlest doll, the one the carver hadn't bothered to carve completely and the painter hadn't painted properly, fell out of her hands and rolled down the corridor carpet towards the WC, whose door was open.

The man sat on his bunk in a colourful shirt and looked tiredly out the window. There was nothing to see but the stone wall of the tunnel, with the words
Baikal is being destroyed
painted on it in red letters.

‘Do you know what a Viennese quadrille is? It goes like this. They take fifty men out of a dungeon and they truck them to the place of execution. When they get there, they order them to line up. They let them count off, maybe by eights. In other words, every eighth man is shot, and the rest are trucked back to the dungeon to wait another night. But but but … the quadrille is the part before every eighth man is shot, when they make them all change places in line six times or more. First you're third, then you're fifth, then you're first, and on it goes.'

The train eased forward and out of the tunnel. The brightness of the spring day stabbed their eyes. Someone cheered. The shores of Baikal spread on either side.

‘Last year at this same time I was looking out of this same window watching a rescue helicopter trying to pick up some frozen fishermen from a drifting piece of ice. It's the same thing every spring. The fishermen sit on the ice, the ice starts to move, and they're left drifting on a raft. Some of them drown, some freeze to death, some are rescued. Why in the world do they rescue them? Nobody makes them go out there.'

The rails curved gradually landward. Low dark clouds started to move in from the east. Along the edge of a rolling field abutting the tracks an old willow grouse flapped its wings. Farther away lay a low tumbledown greenhouse with a
kolkhoz
barn beyond it. In front of the barn was a horse and a load of hay. Two women were busy on top of the hay, one young and one old. They were shoving tufts of hay through the loft window into the barn. A black blanket was folded over the horse's back and it was chomping the hay, calm and hearty. A sooty old kick sled poked out of a heap of snow. The girl could hear someone walking past the open compartment door saying that Lake Baikal cleans itself.

‘The Tatars have a custom of tying prisoners of war to dead soldiers,' the man said. ‘Leg to leg, belly to belly, face to face. That way the dead kill the living. You can achieve some things with good, but all things with evil. There's no point fighting evil. You can't get rid of it, no matter how much you talk about some god's goodness.'

The rails groaned through the green darkness. Lake Baikal was left far behind. The girl imagined the strange fishes that dwelt in its secret depths, the flocks of jellyfish floating like clouds deep under the water.

Suddenly the engine braked angrily. The train was approaching a station, stirring up a wind that grabbed the granular snow that had fallen overnight, tossing it in every direction. They stopped at Ulan Ude station.

She stepped lazily off the train onto the platform. Three cats were walking towards her. One had a broken tail, the second was sleek, with a curious smile, and the third had had its ears cut off, and staggered over the clean-swept platform like a drunk.

A raw northeast wind came carrying sharp balalaika notes. Silent, exhausted engines lay on the tracks. The man ran past wearing only his inside shirt, past the street sweeper, towards the station building. The milk-white, fast-falling sky started to throw cold, drizzling sleet on the wind-beaten ground. All of space was filled with a depressing bleakness.

When the man came back he had a jar of smetana and a shopping bag in one hand and a bouquet of chrysanthemums wrapped in a
Pravda
in the other. He handed her the flowers, winked, and bustled into the train. He had a bottle of vodka under each arm. A local commuter train twitched and buzzed as it moved to the neighbouring track. The crowd emerging from it puffed out a cloud of mingled smells of home. The wind grabbed the cloud and slammed it into her. She got on the train and went to her compartment. The man sat on his bunk with a serene expression and put the bottles down in the middle of the table.

‘Here's two bottles full of a booze they call vodka. My kind of country. Even though there's prohibition, they have their own provincial worries here in this valley. You can't order people around in the borderlands.'

He shifted his gentle gaze to her.

‘Did you know, Baba Yaga, that we are now in the capital of the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic? They have a strange, slurring language here and worship Buddha and Jesus at the same time.'

He pointed at her hair.

‘A fringe in front and undone at the back. Not terribly stylish.' He laughed, laid a fatherly hand over her hand, and gave it a squeeze.

‘We suit each other. The witch and Koschei the Deathless, the devil soul … There are more than a hundred ethnic groups in this country. If one of them, or two or three, are destroyed, it's a small matter. They herd reindeer in the north and make wine in Georgia. Here we have the northern tundra and endless forests. In the south are the steppes, in the southeast are deserts of sand, and in the Caucasus the mighty mountains, with the pass crawling between them. The wind sighs over the pass and carries big clouds with it. There are the beaches of the Crimea and the swamps of Belarus. There's dancing the trepak in birchbark shoes along the Volga, screaming Chechen circle games, the Yakuts' shaman drums, the Chukchis, the Ainus, the Samoyeds, the Koryaks with their reindeer, the Kalmuks with their sheep and the Cossacks with their sables, Tambovian ham, Volgan sterlet, Razan apples. What else … never mind. A Georgian once told me that the history of the Georgians and Armenians was longer and more beautiful than the Russians'. He said the Georgians were building churches and composing poetry when the Russians were still grunting and living in caves. That's a lie.'

The train gave a hoarse whistle and its wheels lurched into motion with a whoop. Arisa stood on the top step of the carriage holding the door frame with one hand and swinging a foot in the air.

‘All the far-flung peoples and their fine culture are blossoming like they never have before, although they ought to become Russians. All of these thousands of languages that are kept alive year after year when the Russian language would suffice. We Russians are an undemanding, resilient, patient bunch. We grant some space to others. But it can't go on like this forever.'

He took a needle and thread out of his bag and started to repair the bag handle. Between stitches he glanced at the loudspeaker, which was playing Beethoven's Seventh.

‘If it just had a little singing with it. That damned roaring grows hair in your ears.'

The sizeable city of Ulan Ude, with the world's largest head of Lenin in its central square, disappeared in the distance. The train rattled through snow-capped mountains and wild wastes of taiga buried in snow. Rows of black hills spread at the edge of the flat landscape. She thought about Mitka and the chicken wire in the corridor window at the mental hospital. According to the military doctor's diagnosis, Mitka was psychotic and was given antipsychotic medication. When a healthy person is forced to take that kind of medicine it can't be good for them. Mitka got really sick in the hospital, wasn't able to eat, his mental state pathetic.

A spoon tinkled in a tea glass. The man fussed with his vodka bottles between bouts of sewing, wiping them and examining the labels and checking to see if the corks were firmly in place. But he didn't open them. He just looked and admired.

‘Fellows like me, when we have to choose between two evils, we always take both.'

A little later he spread some celery stalks and garlic chives on the table and opened a jar of cold borscht. He handed the girl a gigantic spoon. He smacked his lips and sniffed, his big ears wiggling. At regular intervals he added a splash of boiling water and smetana to the soup. It tasted good. The scent of the celery stalks filled the compartment. He handed her a Pepsi.

‘Seems to me you ought to have at least one taste of home on this trip, my girl. This is Brezhnev's drink. That's why I don't drink it.'

The train arrived in Khabarovsk station in the middle of the night. The station sign was covered in a thick layer of snow, as were the tops of the railway carriages sleeping along the tracks. She hurried off the train. A burning night frost seized her face. The air was so brittle it was difficult to breathe. A few street lamps oozed the faintest yellowish light as they struggled to illuminate the station. The city was so full of thick night that she almost turned back.