Compartment No. 6

14

A MELANCHOLY GREY MORNING LIGHT floated into the compartment and illuminated the man’s languid face. Gusts of wind buffeted the train. The empty tea glasses gazed at the sleeping man. The girl looked out of the window at an entirely new landscape. In the dim glow of the morning sun, beyond the musical staff of telegraph wires, she saw the first hundred-head herd of colourful horses, the thousands of greasy-tailed sheep with black spots on their foreheads, and she thought of that July day when she came back from her summer vacation in Finland and Mitka was at the station to meet her. She thought about how they had gone to the boarding house, run up the nine flights of stairs hand in hand, how the hallway had been filled knee-high with the fluffy heads of dandelions, how they’d run up and down the hallway like children, the dandelion fluff drifting in and out of the windows.

The train slowed its speed at a spot where a village of yurts came right up to the tracks, and soon slid to a side track to make way for a long column of freight cars. She looked out of the grey window at the yurts. There were five of them, with a yard left in the middle. In the courtyard was a long-shafted wooden cart. Next to it stood a young woman in a traditional red Mongolian dress with a small child in her arms. She had a yellow-flowered scarf wound around her head. The woman glanced in the direction of the train; a little boy behind her struggled onto the back of a skinny-legged foal.

The man stirred in his bed. He tossed restlessly, as if trying to shake off unpleasant memories, then lay with his back to her. His back was covered in tattoos: in the centre the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus in her arms, on one shoulder a temple with one onion dome and a star.