Compartment No 6 (7 page)

In the afternoon, when the disc of sun hung over the roofs of the highest houses, they reached the godforsaken town of Tomsk. The man drove up and down the unploughed, truck-rutted streets. The sun was fleeing purple into the far west, to the north the bashful, rose-red evening blush held still for a moment as a gritty yellow snow began to fall. The north wind battered the sides of the car. The man stopped in front of a beer house on the outskirts and left the engine running.

The girl stretched her legs in the back seat. The engine chugged and sputtered tiredly, sometimes screeching and lurching as if it were having a heart attack. The chassis shuddered, the springs squeaked. Exhaust seeped into the car and made her cough. She turned off the engine. Soon it was so cold in the car that she got out.

The door to the beer house was in constant use. An endless stream of thick-soled felt boots came and went.

When the man got back to the car reeking of yeast it was the wee hours of the morning.

‘I got caught up in talking with a kid in there. One of those Samoyeds from the Taimyr district. A genuine drinking spirit.'

The wind had changed to the south and had a spring-like tune. Clumps of snow slid from the roofs of the houses and thudded onto the shovelled pavements. The man passed out in the front passenger seat with a bottle of vodka in his hand. The girl turned the ignition key. The engine grumbled angrily and died. She turned it again – it howled for a moment. She imitated the man, coaxing the engine for a long time with gentle words, then turned the key again. It squawked pathetically, but didn't die. She let it run, praising it at length before she gave it some petrol and somehow got it to move forward.

She drove Soviet style, with only the parking lights on as she moved through a city slashed with morning shimmer. A red Lada Combi stood empty at the edge of a bridge. The driver's-side door hung open obscenely, the flickering tail-lights blinking at the sky. The night's last stars trailed around the rising sun and the wind-knocked lampposts went out one by one. The girl looked at the pink blocks of flats, their narrow, loose-hanging storm windows dragged back and forth by the strong southern breeze.

The car bounced up and down over Tomsk's narrow streets. She stopped at intersections and looked into street-corner mirrors that warped and broke up the peaceful cityscape. The man dozed, drooped, started awake, drank some more vodka and perked up. The girl looked for a hotel but didn't find one. She finally parked at a bus stop. The man got out of the car and strode over to the queue of quietly waiting, sullen Soviet citizens.

‘Well, my girl, first go left, then veer straight ahead like a civilised person, and finally swing in just past that dust-covered, windowless industrial complex,' he said when he got back to the car.

The factories, workshops, and warehouses of the industrial complex were half-buried in snow; only the branching rails of the complex's own freight yard glimmered in the night. Behind it huddled a small, faded log house eaten by the earth. A yard light hung from a dangling wire, its bulb broken.

‘Here it is – our hotel. Stop the car. The old biddy who lives in this dump puts travellers up for the night.'

They walked lazily arm in arm up the steps. The murk of the winter morning floated around the cabin. Next to the door hung five broken latches; the door had no handle. The girl pried it open. They were greeted in the dark entryway by a buzzing electricity meter attached to the door frame. A balalaika as big as a wardrobe nestled in the corner.

The speciality hotel was run by a dried-up old woman wearing three wool coats and two long thick brightly coloured skirts. She had a wart on her cheek with a little spike growing out of it. She lived with her three adult working sons, all of them sleeping in the kitchen so that she could rent the other two rooms to travellers.

‘We need to get some sleep, granny dear,' the man said, his voice drained of all energy.

‘What kind of talk is that? You'll have plenty of time to sleep in your grave. First tea, then maybe some rest.'

A piece of worn vinyl lay over the sticky wood floor of the kitchen. The floorboards cracked and squeaked. The walls were slanted, with black electrical cords meandering across them like leeches. The colour portrait of Stalin in the icon niche hung crooked and under it was an old icon of Saint Nikolai. The shelves of the doorless pantry sagged with canned and dried foods. The space between the windowpanes was crammed full of perishable food. A large enamel tub sighed in the darkest corner of the kitchen, full of pickled cabbage flavoured with lingonberries. Just outside the window was what seemed to be a vegetable garden, sleeping under piles of ashes tossed among the snowdrifts.

The old woman offered them some cabbage soup, buckwheat porridge, tea, jam, and fish pies. She had a pretty, cracked, tea set. She polished the large spoons by spitting on each one and wiping it on her clean flowered apron. The girl dozed, lost in her own thoughts. The man wiped the sweat of the beginnings of a hangover from his brow. His head fell with a clunk onto the tabletop and he started to snore. The old woman set out a cabbage pie tasting strongly of caraway and poured the girl a second cup of tepid tea nearly indistinguishable from warm water. She drank it in small, wary sips.

‘When I was a little girl my father sold me for a bottle of vodka to a wrinkled old Russian man. The old geezer dragged me to this place, his house, and how I cried. As soon as he had a chance he knocked me up, but luckily he died before his son was born. So this house was left to his blind sister, me and the boy. The three of us lived quite well together. Then the blind girl died and it was just me and my son, until one mosquitoey summer day when a Samoyed walked in the door. He had beaten his old lady till she went crazy, now it was my turn. Soon enough I had another son. We lived well for a while. Just a little while.'

The old woman got up and popped over to a cupboard, took out a half-drunk bottle of vodka, and sloshed a shot into her teacup.

‘He was a keen hunter but he drank up all his money. The boys and I were living on the edge of starvation. One Easter he went out on some errand and never came back. His younger brother brought me the news about his death: he'd been in a drunken fight and got a knife in his belly. The brother stayed here to live. A good man. I had three daughters and they all died. Then this brother fell in the well there next to the house and drowned. I got on as a cleaner at the factory and my life was starting to work out. As an old woman I had another son. He's out there on the river with his brothers.'

There was the sound of a mouse from behind the pantry.

‘I'm so contented living in my own house, even though I've hated this Russian dump all my life.'

She got up, fetched some hardbread from the pantry, arranged it prettily on a flowered porcelain plate, and set it in front of the girl.

‘The only thing I miss is the tundra.'

When the man woke up he snarled, ‘The old biddy's talking pure nonsense, thinks she's some Pushkin.'

The girl's room was small, dark and dreary. The stink of ancient bedding had settled in to live there, an old Gobellin tapestry rasped against the mould-streaked wallpaper. A hot, glowing stove filled the room, but the corners of the outer walls were nevertheless covered with a thick frost and there was clear ice along the edges of the floor.

She lay on the straw mattress between two clean starched sheets. The smooth coolness of the sheets soothed her. The sun rose silently and the stars vanished from the dusty blue sky. A mouse gnawed and scratched behind the wallpaper. She fell asleep.

She woke to a cat's yawn. It had appeared next to her pillow and was staring at her without blinking. She stroked the old cat's shining coat and listened to the crackle of the frost in the corners, the clatter of the samovar, the old woman's clomping footsteps. For a moment she watched the dust float motionless against the light, then jumped out of bed in a panic and peeped out of the window into the frail morning. She'd slept through a whole day.

She picked up the cat. It opened its toothless mouth to mew, but didn't manage to get any sound out. She felt a great sadness.

She'd met Mitka at a Melodiya shop when she was in her third year of studies. He was misshapen, a stooped, four-eyed thing with a shovel beard on his chin. He had thick, short, coal-black hair and eyes that blinked as if the light were a particular strain on them. They had gone to a juice bar, talked for many hours and agreed to meet again. Mitka had liked her ice-blue eyes and thoughtless laugh. Several weeks later he invited her to his apartment. His window looked out towards a small park. She had admired the smoky mist, the city wrapped in milky fog, the pink winter sky. Mitka said he'd just turned seventeen. He had a broad old iron bed with a hard horsehair mattress, a striped linen sheet, and a white duvet with clinking bone buttons. She stayed the night. Then came other nights, other days, all the same, filled with a bustle of light and shadow.

The old woman set the table with a bowl of buckwheat porridge, a pot of steaming fatty borscht, and in front of the man a glass dish of smetana and a handsome bottle of vodka. The girl drank tea, the old woman chai. The man wiped sweat from his brow, gobbling up the smetana and, belching with satisfaction, poured another glass of vodka.

‘Let's drink to the women of the world. A toast to the wisdom of the old, the intelligence of the heart, and the beauty of the young, to your friendship, dear granny, and to the silver-sided gudgeon!'

After the toast, the man wolfed down some black bread he'd spread with mustard, salt and pepper. He filled his vodka glass and stood up for a moment.

‘Many a citizen has rushed ahead only to end up waiting in some awful place, so let's not rush. Let's enjoy each other's warmth, enjoy this moment.'

When it was time to leave, the man fished a slim Chinese flashlight and twenty-five roubles out of his pocket and handed them to the old woman. She nodded, satisfied, and followed them to the door. The man and the girl stepped out of the steamy hot kitchen into a fresh, frosty morning that lashed their faces like a whip.

The man wrestled the wheel of the Pobeda with heavy hands. On a small straight stretch his head knocked against the steering wheel. The girl suggested that she drive.

Gradually the belly-down, snow-filled row by row of fields changed to the notched beam by beam of a village and the village to a slushy suburb, log houses and prefab highrises side by side. The gardens and potato patches of the log houses stretched as far as the city in one direction and back to the forests and fields in the other. Then the suburb changed street by street into the muddy built-up city of Novosibirsk.

Carp were hung to dry outside the highrise windows. Grey pigeons padded along the sills, back from their winter vacations.

The man gulped back his hangover, which the glasses of vodka hadn't managed to displace. He was shaking all over, his adam's apple shuddering.

‘If I could just have a drink from a pickle jar, everything would be all right. Soothe my heart.'

His face was red and he looked so grave that the girl couldn't bear it and turned her head away.

He asked her to stop at a corner where a blue tanker truck was parked.

‘I'm feeling so awful that I have to stop here and get out.'

He jumped quickly out of the car, took an empty ten-litre can out of the trunk, and went to fill it from the truck container, which had the word KVAS painted in pretty black letters on its side. When he came back to the car with the can under his arm he was humming cheerfully.

‘Toothache.'

He sipped straight from the can, a hopeful look on his face. The sweet smell of kvas pervaded the whole car.

‘No more toothache.'

A Gagarin smile spread across his face.

‘When I fell in love with Katinka, I didn't have a single kopeck. I'd been flat broke for months, but life still had flavour, and I had plenty of food, pussy and vodka. Then there Katinka was, at the bread-shop door, and I was so drunk that I asked her to come and see me. That's when the trouble started. Now I was a fellow who had a lady visitor coming, or at least some sort of whore, a fellow who didn't have any money for
bubliks
or tea or champagne. So I rolled up my sleeves and got humming. First I asked my next-door neighbour Kolya if he'd loan me five roubles. All he had was three and he needed them himself, he honked. I tripped over to the corner room, to Vovka's place, maybe he had a rouble or two, but the old boozer was completely broke. I went downstairs to where Sergei lived and begged him for a fiver. I can give you a rouble, he said. So on I went, from door to door. Went through all my friends and enemies, and the next week I had a pile of it, twenty-six roubles and three kopecks. I could feel it all the way down to my cock. Katinka came worming her way in. I offered her champagne and I drank a few bottles of vodka. Everything was set. When it was time to go to bed, I kidded around, shy, undemanding. I got out the camp-bed and made myself a little nest, offered Katinka my bed. And then what happened? I stretched out, my head full of nothing but pussy, and Katinka grabs hold of my cock so hard the camp-bed went crashing. She glues her sweaty cunt to my dick and I let it go. And just as the whole thing's almost over she coughs up something about marriage. There I am in an ecstasy of cunt, and I say, Why not?'

He rubbed a finger over his swollen lips.

‘That's not what happened. But it could have.'

They found the crooked-nosed owner of the Pobeda from a phone number kiosk squeezed between two co-op kiosks. The old man was wrapped in a frayed cotton jacket and had arms so long that they reached to his knees. The two men spoke for a moment in murmurs, then he invited them to eat.

They walked shivering to a local communal cafeteria. A sign drooped from the door:
THIS FACILITY IS CLOSED
. They went inside.

A greasy smell drifted from the industrial-looking kitchen. The dining room was wide and high and its utilitarian furniture was functionally arranged. There were long tables in front of the windows with long benches along either side. They went to the end of the queue that had formed at the food counter. On the main wall of the dining room was a fair reproduction of Ilya Repin's painting
Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed.
At the place on the painting where the angry letter is being written someone had used a ball-point pen to scrawl the words:
To Stalin
. A fan rattled against the back wall; under it was the carcass of a sofa covered in flowered oilcloth.