Compartment No. 6

10

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. Two-metre 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.