Compartment No. 6

11

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.

She pushed herself forward and walked with squeaking steps into the station. There were no people there. The ticket windows were closed and the trinket kiosks sulked empty in the darkness.

She walked across the station hall, past a kiosk that sold plastic pens and journals. A fat cat came to meet her. It looked at her with curiosity, waved its tail, leapt over a mound of snow carried in on travellers’ shoes, and disappeared behind a newspaper stand. In front of the main doors was a large puddle from earlier in the day chilled by the night, a skiff of ice gleaming on its surface.

Along the edge of the railway square were two black Volgas with feminine smiles and elk-hood ornaments, one Moskvich, a little red Yalta, and a poison-green Pobeda. The engines were running, the drivers chatting in a circle. The square was filled with dense exhaust. She approached the men warily and asked if any of them could drive her to the Hotel Progress. The men erupted in laughter. A black-whiskered man with a flashing gold tooth grabbed her knapsack and directed her to the Moskvich.

He turned on the radio and for a moment Galina Vishnevskaya filled the car with Tatiana’s letter aria. The gearbox complained and the engine roared, drowning out the aria. Spring slush frozen by nighttime cold shone in the light of a half moon. The driver turned to look at her.

‘Khabarovsk is the world’s most beautiful border city. We have the greatest wonder of the twentieth century, the Khabarovsk Bridge. On the other side is China, which is a province of ours. If you like I can show you the bridge tomorrow. I can meet you in front of the hotel at noon. All right?’

The taxi’s green light flashed and the car disappeared into the impenetrable mist. She breathed in the big city night. It smelled familiar, like old charred iron and oven-fresh steel. The sky over the city was pitch black to the south, but in the east the dirty lights of the distant harbour blinked, and in the sky one red star twinkled.

She pounded for a long time on the door of the sixteen-storey hotel before a sleepy, grey-haired woman came with slippers on her feet to open it. The hotel lobby was very dimly lit. On the walls were side-by-side copies of Cezanne’s fruit and Vasnetsov’s warriors. She handed the woman her hotel voucher, filled out the stack of grubby forms, and climbed thirteen flights to her room because the lift wasn’t working.

The room was large and the bed was broad and clean. The radiator hissed like a steam iron. She turned on the tap in the bathtub. It angrily spat brown water. The city was deep in sleep.

The misty gloom of a frosty morning covered half of the yellow moon, a quick purple flashing in the eastern sky. From between her rustling sheets, she looked at the polyester, tobacco-smoke-scented shade of the reading lamp. She’d seen the same kind of lamp before but she couldn’t remember where. She pulled aside the stained curtains and let the morning in.

The sun hung over the opposite shore of the Amur River, in China. It poured its frozen rays towards the flat roofs of the highrises. In the middle of the river a shipping channel flowed; loose rafts of ice had been squeezed to pack ice during the night. A carmine red tram rattled far below with a loud clang.

The living sun started to move. It crawled from the open ice of the Amur and over the snowy rooftops of the awakening city. Tawny light, a funnelled current of small snowflakes, and the bustle of city-dwellers rushing to work drifted through the open vent window into the room. Unhurried people the size of ants half hidden by banks of snow strolled along the treeless boulevard with grocery bags, boxes of smoked fish, and jars of pickles. A chimney-sweep busied himself with an ancient piece of cable in the chimney of a green block of flats. A lustre of frost sparkled on the car roofs, horns grunted, engines whined, exhaust pipes scraped against the frozen asphalt, trolleybuses sparked, trams clunked from stop to stop.

She took a shower, dried her hair, dressed herself lazily, with voluptuous slowness, and went down to the hotel restaurant, where she was served lukewarm tea and good fatty fish.

The beaten-up, seemingly hand-built Moskvich was sputtering outside, waiting for her. The driver nodded complacently when he saw her. She stood in front of the hotel for a moment and listened to the poignant song of an accordion drifting from a distant street, a tune about love that’s never requited, and slid into the back seat. The Moskvich shot out into the snowy street with a cough. The sooty crud from the nearby factories emerged from beneath the pure, sun-melted snow.

The driver watched her in the rearview mirror. He was a weatherbeaten old man with a back bent by heavy labour, a creased face, and faded eyes. His thick eyebrows grew together and his sideburns met his beard. He had dressed his sparse hair with home brew and combed it neatly. He had looked quite different the night before. She didn’t even see a gold tooth now.

‘Are you a surveyor?’ he asked.

She didn’t say anything. He glanced at her in the mirror again.

‘A geologist, then? A foreign geologist from Moscow? I’ll drive you wherever you like, but first the news from Moscow, eh? How’s Red Square? Same as always? And the Moscow River? How many cars are there in Moscow?’

The Moskvich raced skidding past a dried-up, five-cornered fountain that a group of Chinese tourists was photographing. The sun-warmed crusty snow floated across the rooftops and fell crashing in great sheets onto the pavements. Beautiful Siberian people, strong and handsome, formed twisted queues in front of the food shops. The spring wind howled where the roads intersected.

The driver turned into a roundabout. On the right was a heap of bright watermelons, defying the slippery spring ground. On the left was a jumble of discarded wooden crates that looked like Mayakovsky’s staircase.

He dropped her off next to the bridge.

In spite of the bright sunlight, the bridge was lit with floodlights at the edge of the water, their unreal illumination causing a strange distortion in perspective. It was as if the bridge wriggled over the water. She looked over the bridge at the trucks crossing and the silhouettes of the buildings in the harbour. She stood in front of the bridge beams, far from the border guards’ booths.

A pallid blue sky shimmered over the river. The April morning wind whistled past and struck her face with a handful of grainy snow. She leaned against a beam and looked down at the river. Slush churned like something alive in the lead-grey water of the shipping channel and along the shore. A bright blue oil drum floated among it. The channel was crowded. Two Chinese icebreakers ploughed through the pack ice. Chinese, Korean and Russian cargo ships with their horns blaring, long barges, tugboats, dredgers, and ferries of various sizes slid through the icy slush. Brown splashes of water rose over the ice along the shore.

She walked to a bus stop. The snow smelled like spring. A woman walked past dolled up, her flowered skirt fluttering in the breeze. She was holding a small heron with stained feathers and one wing hanging limp.

The girl got on the bus, sat down behind the hiccuping driver and rode to Okhotsk, the city’s largest harbour.

She got off and walked along the shore, which was in places a mixture of ice and slushy mud. She spent a long time looking at a wrecked ship, rusted through, lying on its side, listened to the melancholy howl of the wind and the noisy clank of the harbour machinery. She soon came to a place where the waves on the shore were churning wildly, carrying off great blocks of ice and crashing them against the steep rocks. The surface of the water was rising visibly, and the ice with it. Two men were crouched on the shelf of rock, their small Yalta parked on the sand farther away. They had a campfire on the rocks, too, where they were roasting fish on sticks.

They gestured for her to come over. The winter sun had toasted both their faces brown and the fronts of their coats were covered in fish scales. One of them smelled of resin, the other of fortified wine. Both smelled of squalor.

‘A magnetic storm’s about to come up and take the ice with it. You shouldn’t be walking on the shore.’

They offered her some foul-smelling vodka and nice-tasting fish. The man who smelled of resin, who had unbelievably bad teeth, told her that the previous summer a toxic spill from China had killed almost all the fish.

‘We used to get pike, catfish, carp and ruffe out of this river. Now nothing. I keep fishing, because I always have. You can’t change a man’s nature.’

Disregarding his warnings, she continued strolling down the shore past a rusted boiler, old locks, an enormous buoy, a bicycle gear, a copper cylinder, a small motor, plugs, corks, broken vodka bottles, metal buckets with no bottoms, an oily enamel pot, plum weights, water pipes, steel pellets, a steering wheel from a tractor, bedsprings, and a metal sign rusted through that read TECHNOLOGICAL-SCIENTIFIC ORGANISATION OF INDUSTRIAL POWER ENGINE VIBRATOR RESEARCH. The lively early spring sunshine melted the ice from the shore. The wind sighed and the river smelled of rot. The odour of decayed wood, sodden sawdust, household trash, oil, naphtha, and the foamy residue left by the barges covered over the ineffable scent of the ice breaking up.

In shady spots there was still some pure, powdery spring snow, where marsh birds were happily pecking at holes in the river ice with their slippery beaks. Someone had painted in white on one of the rocks: Down with Yermak, Down with Stalin-Hitlers. The mysterious wind tore at the sides of a small barge caught among the pack ice, and a thin puff of blue smoke rose from the battered chimneys of the spruce-walled harbour buildings.

She climbed up the bank. A vast flock of a thousand wild geese was gliding just over her head. The muddy masses of water flowing from farther upstream lifted the rafts of ice higher and higher. The rumbling grew louder. Then the last of the surface ice crumbled into great chunks that hurled themselves over each other and climbed crashing up the shore. Nothing could stop the power of the ice. It could crush the shore, the docks, the buildings. She climbed up onto a boulder. There was a heart carved into it with ‘Valentina + Volodya 14.8.1937’ written inside.

She climbed higher and saw a little park a short distance away. There was a trodden path leading to it. She went and sat down to rest for a moment on a bench. The tranquil clouds looking down from the pale sky smelled like spring. She listened to the sound of the far-off Okhotsk Sea and looked at the half-built modern blocks of flats that seemed to press themselves quietly into the earth. A military band appeared from behind an arolla pine. They advanced towards the park’s small fountain with stiff steps, wearing black cloaks and billed hats of black fur. There was a post in front of the snow-filled fountain with a tin-shaded lamp on top that rattled loudly in the river breeze. The band tuned their wind-chilled instruments, the conductor’s baton fluttered, and a light military march rang in the air.

As evening fell, needles of ice began to fall. She wandered some more in the city. The glaring red, dying sunlight lingered over the bumpy streets. As she walked farther from the city centre the streets became narrower and more rundown, meandering capriciously, then turning straight and clear. She missed Moscow and the Arbat, where the narrow streets zigzagged delightfully. The fitful east wind started to turn into a snowstorm. It ripped at the clouds and cleared the sky. She headed back to the middle of town.

She went straight to the hotel restaurant. There were three signs on the restaurant door: CLOSED, CLOSED FOR DINNER, CLOSED FOR INVENTORY. The restaurant was full. She stepped inside. In addition to local diners there were a few Chinese salesmen, a couple of Koreans, and a few Japanese hotel guests sitting in the dining room. A pear-shaped waitress showed her to a table by the window where a thin woman with a shaggy fur hat and a lively face was sitting. The two of them looked sometimes at the other diners, sometimes at each other. The woman took a pretty packet of cigarettes out of her Yugoslavian purse and smoked one in a yellow amber cigarette holder. Her wrists were delicate and graceful.

The girl ordered millet porridge, sauerkraut and cutlets, peas steeped in vodka, leeks, and scrambled eggs with sliced tomatoes.

‘Is everything all right in your bathroom?’ the woman asked. ‘I can’t sleep because the gas boiler clanks and whistles all night. I’m not used to that kind of noise. I’ve been on the taiga for fifteen months and this city life gets on my nerves.’

She smiled, straightened her hat, and took out another cigarette. ‘We’ve been looking for oil for months in the far north. We didn’t find any this time.’

She lit the cigarette and looked at its glowing tip for a long time. ‘If we do find oil, they’ll bulldoze the village and put an oil rig in its place. Shoot the dogs, since they won’t be needed any more. The people in the village will be shipped somewhere else – the next village, which could be three hundred kilometres away. There are no roads, of course.’

She blew smoke gently towards the single pink carnation sitting primly in its long-necked vase.

‘This time we ended up having to leave empty-handed. All that’s left is a village ravaged by jeeps, tractors and earthmovers. That’s their gain, our loss. Now I’m flying to Moscow to rest. I have three months’ holiday. I’ll go walking down Mira Prospekt with my deadbeat friends and sit in cafés talking clever nonsense. After three months off, I’ll be perfectly glad to come back here. I like it here. Don’t you?’

She looked at the girl and tilted her head slightly. ‘I’m not married, because I like being around people. I think like Chekhov: if you love solitude, get married.’

There were at least ten waitresses at the counter. At one end sat a bloated cashier; the young men waiting to unload their trucks were making her laugh with their talk. A stiff-backed doorman was chatting with the old woman supervisor. She sat erect behind her little table, wrapped in a shawl knitted from thick angora, sharpening her pencil. On the table was a green plastic telephone and a brown calendar. Some aged cleaners sat in a corner of the entryway with tin buckets at their feet and enormous black rags in their hands. The bussers had taken over one table, the coat check had fallen asleep in his squeaky chair among the heavy winter coats.

An orchestra dressed in matching dark suits appeared on the restaurant stage. The bassist was Chinese; the drummer looked Korean. The first notes of ‘Moscow Lights’ drifted over the tobacco-smoke-softened dance floor.

A fashionable young Japanese man asked the woman to dance. The pair moved slowly over the parquet floor, which was lit by a plastic crystal chandelier that reached in every direction. The joys and sorrows of the city, falling asleep in the night damp, condensed beneath it.

Outside, the snowflakes gathered in a freezing whirlwind; a statue of Lenin blithely waving his hand peered in at the restaurant window. The woman said her goodbyes and left with the Japanese man into the bowels of the hotel.

The girl left the restaurant. The cloudless, starless, faded sky kept her company in the quiet, dream-sunken city. She peeped into a beer house on a side street. A puff of sour tobacco smoke blew over her face. She hesitated a moment, then went in, curious. Two peasants lay passed out on the slushy floor. She ordered a mug of beer, but got a purplish, bad-tasting ale. She put the mug down and left.

The dense, deserted night gathered around her. The city was inhabited only by the night wind, a hiss of snow. She passed the statue of Khabarov holding a miserable spruce sapling, walked along a boulevard lined with deciduous trees, and looked at the marvellous ornamental carvings on the stone houses. At every crossroads, she chose the smaller street. The houses were dark, with a faint yellow light glowing in just a few of the windows.

Irina had kissed her for the first time in the Lenin Mausoleum. It had happened so quickly and gently that the young soldiers on guard didn’t notice. Or if they did, they didn’t believe their eyes. When they got back home, Mitka greeted her and his mother with a crooked smile on his face. She had to wait a long time for the second kiss, but once it happened, there was no turning back. It happened at the same time that Mitka was lying in restraints in a lunatic asylum. And then the day came when Mitka was set free. It was a day of great happiness, but she and Irina knew that the worst was yet to come for the three of them.

After she’d walked far enough to the south and to the north, she decided to take the tram back to the hotel.

There was a large department store in the middle of the town. A dirty yellow pile of snow loomed next to it, and in front of the entrance spread a puddle of mud the size of a small pond that the customers carefully skirted. A stately gull stood in the middle of the puddle. She climbed to the top of the high, slippery staircase and bought a little bottle of Red Moscow perfume and two chocolate bars. One had a picture of Pushkin on the label, the other a smiling little girl in a babushka. As she finally walked to the station with hurried steps, a wild red star fell behind a rose bush covered in evening frost, the street lights silently went out, and she was surrounded by a growing Asian darkness. She could hear the far-off whistle of the train and see the tracks gleaming in the dusk. A local train crawled up beside her and a flood of workers emerged from within, brushing past her on both sides.

She hurried in the cold to the half-opened door and into the station. The oily floor shone. Drops of light from the crystal chandeliers twinkled in the puddles on the floor. There, under the arched ceiling of the station, she met the man. He smelled of sauerkraut, vodka, onion soup, and the pharmacy. His presence calmed her fearful mood.

‘You’ve probably noticed by now that all the cities and villages are alike. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But let’s go get a bite of vermicelli and chicken broth. We’ll be on our way to the land of the Mongols soon.’