Compartment No. 6

9

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.