Compartment No. 6

15

BY EIGHT O’CLOCK the train was spitting out its passengers at Ulan Bator’s Soviet-style railway station. Gritty sleet, mud and snow pattered the train window. She was trying to wake the man. A Mongolian tour guide was standing in the compartment doorway – a small, slimly built, beautiful, tense, indignant man.

‘Are you going into Ulan Bator? Do you have a room reserved in the Intourist Hotel? Why are you still on the train? Gather your things and come with me.’

To effect this, he picked up the girl’s suitcase and started to leave. The man was still snoring in his bed.

She followed him into the station hall. It was filled with a floating, dreamy silence. An unwelcoming stickiness on the stone floor adhered to the soles of her shoes. Half-rotted food scraps, wrappers, gobs of spit, and dog and bird shit lay all around; the sharp stench seeped into her skin.

They walked to the taxi stand on the parade side of the station. There wasn’t a single car there. The tour guide glanced at his Russian wristwatch with irritation and stared fixedly in the direction of the city. The slow sideways drift of snow turned to sleet – gritty, tattered sheets of ice that dropped into the slush like stones. Everything looked grey, limp, drained somehow, a muddy smell of wet earth hovering everywhere.

A taxi arrived, a small metal deer on its hood. The tour guide sat in the front seat and she sat in the spacious rear of the car. The driver was a fat middle-aged man. He was wearing a Russian-style winter overcoat, an extinguished fifth-class Belomorkanal papirosa hanging from his lips, his face scarred and pitted. The car smelled of petrol and old mutton fat.

The road looked like the ones she remembered from the countryside in her childhood. Mud and mire, pothole upon pothole. Whenever they came to a large puddle in the road the driver pressed the accelerator and slammed straight through it, splashing the mud up in an arc onto the people passing by on foot and on various animal conveyances.

It was just a few kilometres from the station to the hotel but the trip took an hour. Every acceleration was followed by a sharp slam on the brakes and another stretch of crawling along at ten kilometres an hour. Now and then the driver came to a complete stop, got out of the car, opened the hood, swore, and took a black steel can out of the trunk, apparently water to pour into the radiator.

The hotel was like any other hotel for Westerners in any other nameless Soviet city. There was a service counter in the lobby, a small, round table next to the high windows, and a sofa for three covered in plastic. Bricks, a cement mixer, bags of plaster, and boards lay in the middle of the floor. Grey construction dust floated over everything.

The tour guide and the receptionist took care of the paperwork while she waited. Finally, the guide asked her to follow him. They climbed the stairs to the top floor. He opened the heavy, pitifully groaning door, and a vast, Soviet-remodelled suite opened before her. A wonderful view of the whole city, all the way to the Gobi Desert, with a spring storm screaming over its sandy hills, was spread outside the window. There were two rooms in the suite. In the living room there was a simple, stylish sofa set, perhaps designed in East Germany, solidly built chairs with Krakow labels on the armrests, and Russian vases on the tables. A large bed filled the bedroom. On the wall facing the bed was a bold reproduction of Repin’s painting of Ivan the Terrible after he killed his son. Madness shone in Ivan’s eyes; the son looked like a children’s Bible picture of Jesus.

The bathroom was spacious, a yellowish fluorescent light sputtered on the ceiling. There was a full-length bathtub, but the plug had been torn off. The shower worked – refreshing cold water came from both taps.

She looked out of the living-room window at the city for a long time. On the left were two thirteen-storey buildings, on the right, a neighbourhood of yurts, and between them a strange conglomeration that reminded her of a Wild West town. Slanted light from the haggard red sun warmed the armchair.

Thoughts galloped through her mind in a tedious circle. The day ended with a frightening sunset, creeping into evening, moonlight illuminating the yards of the yurt villages. The view of the wide sea of desert simmering on the horizon was beautiful, deserted, bleak. She wrapped herself in the down quilt. She thought about Moscow, the last picnic of the autumn with Irina in the English park, where they’d found a garden bench with yellow maple leaves stuck to its wet surface and Irina had called it the Turgenev bench.

The city started to twinkle with faint lights. The lights encroached on a creeping dusk fading into the black of night. A depressing icy darkness squeezed the city small, soundless. She decided she would call the number Irina had given her tomorrow.

A little after eight o’clock someone knocked discreetly on her door. She opened the door and the tour guide was standing there. They went to breakfast together. She ate a Soviet breakfast, he a Mongolian one, which consisted of tea with milk, biscuits that smelled like lamb, and balls of cornmeal. It felt good to sit across from another person. She told him that she’d come to Ulan Bator to see the petroglyphs along the road leading south from the city. He gave her a stern look.

‘Westerners aren’t allowed to leave the city.’

She offered him some dollars.

‘You come here and act like money can buy you anything you want. Our sacred places are not for sale. I’ve written up an official schedule for you. We can visit the sights of Ulan Bator together and learn about the history of the country. We’ll be staying within the city boundary. I’m responsible for your activities.’

He put the dollars in his pocket.

Outside was springlike and warm; the sky was covered in a thick layer of clouds, but the air was still, and no rain was falling. They went to the history museum, the guide always two steps ahead of her. She walked over the slippery waxed museum floor in felt slippers. The guide moved from one glass case to another and spoke in a rote, monotonous tone. In the middle of one verse he raised his voice.

‘The Mongolian Empire formed the foundation for the blossoming of the Soviet Union today. They are greatly in our debt. We Mongols conquered Russia in 1242 and Mongol rule lasted two hundred and forty years. We created a working central government in Russia, and well-organised military and tax-collection systems. We built all of the Russian governing institutions that are still operating in the Soviet Union today. We created a bureaucracy whose task was to serve the government, not the people. We broke the back of Russian morality so fundamentally that they still haven’t recovered. We drove an atmosphere of mistrust into the Russians’ thick skulls. We taught Ivan the Terrible, and he taught Stalin, that the role of the individual is to submit to the group. If an individual makes a mistake, the whole group responds. It’s the world’s most effective means of governance. Before the reign of the Mongols the Russians didn’t even know how to celebrate, they just drunkenly wallowed in pig shit. They learned from us how to enjoy life. The only things Russians invented were unending laziness, cunning, and blatant deceit. The tax structure required a group of Chinese census takers and tax professionals whose efficiency and expertise were already well known at that time. Since Russia was an unsettled and sparsely inhabited country, we decided to use an indirect governing model. In this system, the Russian nobility collected the taxes for the Mongolian khans – they served as our stooges. Later, the high nobility of the Grand Duchy of Moscow appropriated all of our principles and methods of governance without alteration. We rescued Russia from an insidious invasion of Western culture.’

At lunchtime they walked single file to the hotel and after the meal they went back to the history museum. At dinnertime they returned to the hotel again and went to the restaurant, sat across from each other at a table, and didn’t speak. After the three courses of dinner, the guide stood up. ‘The doors of the hotel close at eight o’clock. After that no one can get in or out. Please follow our rules. For your own good. It would be wise to remember that our laws have no concept of rape.’

At the corner near the hotel a skittish dog with a sticky coat looked at her with frightened eyes. Her mood was becoming more and more desolate. The coldness of the surrounding land, the miserable, damp winds and desert nights were getting under her skin. People shivered with cold. There were two Soviet-style shops across the street, one a delicatessen, the other a stationer’s. There was a loudspeaker next to the door of the delicatessen, spewing out a Soviet hit. Shelves nearly empty stared out of the display window. In front of the shop was a cooler filled with a frozen brick of fish and two plastic bags of milk.

In addition to paper products the stationer’s also sold Russian black bread, pies filled with lamb, vinegared pickles, and sculpin in tomato sauce.

There was a post office behind the stationer’s. On the wall of the post office was a map with the migration routes of sheep marked on it. She wrote a few postcards and bought an extra strip of stamps depicting Mongolian industry.

She dodged the puddles of slush, careening wrecks of chubby old Soviet cars held together with screws, and horses pulling disintegrating carts on the main street. A flock of children dressed in colourful winter clothes played in the courtyard of a three-storey building. The lid of a dustbin was torn off and garbage overflowed onto the dirty ice of the yard. Behind the dustbin she caught a glimpse of the lacerated carcass of a young horse.

She returned to the hotel. She thought about her compartment companion, what he had said about the Mongols… how can a nation with such a great history have withered so?

She looked for the number Irina had given her. She called from the hotel telephone for an hour before she got through. A soft, friendly male voice answered. When she’d given him greetings from Irina and explained who she was and why she was in town, he burst into uncontrollable laughter. She eventually got him to agree to come to the hotel with a friend the next day after dark.

She sat on the sofa again. The late light of a feeble sun shimmered heavy over the roofs of the yurts. She turned on the radio, which was tuned to a Russian-language channel. News, reviews, reports on the national elections, and a little Stravinsky.

The following evening at six o’clock, just as arranged, there was a knock on her door. Two tall, giggling men in their thirties stood in the hallway. They sat down shyly on the sofa. She offered them some Black Label whisky. They emptied their glasses in one swallow, she refilled the glasses, and they did it again. They made a promise to show her the real Ulan Bator and the real Mongolia.

At eight o’clock there was a stern knock at the door. Before she had time to get up, the door opened and three sturdy men walked in. Her guests’ faces turned suddenly yellow and all five men were gone in an instant. Their steps echoed in the empty hallway. She realised what had just happened and who the three strangers were. She lost all strength in her legs; she felt cold and weak. She tried to go to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come. She remembered a January Moscow night.

She and Mitka were standing in front of the Red October metro station cursing because they’d missed the last train. They’d spent a long evening at Arkady’s place, a lot of wine and cigarettes. They were cold and had been trying to stop passing cars. Finally a blue Lada stopped. Behind the wheel sat a small dark hairy man who said he would take them home. On the way he asked Mitka if he would like to buy some quality cloud. Soon they were far from home, in some seedy suburb. She and Mitka followed the man into an unfurnished flat. There were a couple of dirty mattresses on the floor, cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles. Mitka made the deal, and just as they were leaving the driver grabbed an axe from behind the door and swung it at Mitka, knocking him unconscious. She didn’t have a chance to scream before the man had grabbed her by the neck and was squeezing so hard she couldn’t breathe. The man was drinking heavily, and in the wee hours he passed out and Mitka was able to drag himself, covered in blood, into the hallway to call for help.

The girl opened her eyes. There was no sound but the quick beat of her heart and the two-note tick of the clock. She snatched up the clock and put it in her suitcase. She lay awake waiting for sleep to come and free her from herself and her fears. The Mongolian sky was filled with stars; they were bright and near, lighting up the blackness of the sky like summer lightning, but she couldn’t see them from under the covers. The hotel was quiet. Ulan Bator was quiet. The silence of the universe was so deep that all she could hear was the hum in her ears. Terror came and went; sometimes she was filled with fear, then anger, and then something else, something she had to let go of, and finally nothing but a great regret. The darkness pressed down on her head so hard that it turned transparent. Finally the harsh night began to lose its meaning and gradually made way for the weak glimmer of morning.

She sat impatiently on a sofa in the hotel lobby waiting for the guide. She wanted to talk to someone about everything that had happened the evening before. She heard a strange groan from the direction of the elevator, and when she turned to look, she saw the same three security service workers. They were dragging her guests, beaten unconscious, bruised beyond recognition, across the lobby towards a Lada that waited outside. Blood and dirt smeared over the construction dust on the marble floor. One of the security men glared at her, another grimaced, the third didn’t even look at her. The hotel receptionist continued flipping through papers behind the desk and didn’t see anything.

When the yellow Lada had disappeared into the bright Mongolian morning, a Mongol granny wrapped in a big black woollen coat and carrying a Latvian tin bucket came up from the basement, cleaned the floor, and went back downstairs.

At breakfast she told the guide about her guests and how they were taken away and what she had just seen.

When she had finished, the guide smiled drily and said he didn’t want to hear about the matter again.

They spent a silent day at the natural history museum.

The next morning she walked behind her guide through the city and thought about Irina, but Irina seemed to have slipped into the distance somewhere. When they passed the state telephone office she told the guide she wanted to call Moscow. He tried to prevent her, but she went inside and ordered ten minutes on the phone, in a panic. They waited there for six hours, the guide staring at the floor angrily, before the operator announced that Irina wasn’t answering. Of course she wasn’t – Irina and Mitka were still in the south.

Late that night a fierce wind blew up. It tore at the tin roof of the hotel and sent oil barrels tumbling down the ice-covered streets. The hotel shook in the buffeting wind, creaked, cracked, felt like it would come falling down. The girl was cold. The windstorm was followed by a blizzard of gritty snow from the desert that whipped straight at the hotel windows and melted against the warm panes of glass. She imagined it turning the screws in the window frames, the bolts falling out, nails breaking in two, the cement crumbling, the whole building tilting and collapsing in a heap of sand.

In the morning she told the receptionist that she was sick and didn’t need her guide, planned to spend the day in her room resting.

She stood at the window. The indifferent sun moved past from east to west. As evening fell, the sun dropped behind the yurt village and a drear, heavy darkness settled over the city, day changed to evening, evening to night. She watched a satellite that looked like the moon shining hysterically bright over the roofs of the yurts. She missed Moscow and its summer poplars.

She decided to go out and look for the man. She couldn’t think of anything else to do. The night was bright and cold. She left at a run, glancing behind her as she ran, the green beam of a floodlight throwing itself over the hotel, the grey clouds shuttling their way north. She jumped onto the first bus and rode it out of the city. Lanterns from distant yurt villages flickered in the darkness. The bus passed a group of colourless people walking next to the road, swaying randomly. Some of them had sacks on their backs, some had their arms full of packages and other burdens. The bus veered towards a new building site where half-finished Soviet-style highrises languished. The buildings stood with their bellies open in the middle of the torn-up, ravaged ground. Scaffolding rose up on every side – beams, stairways, floors, canopies, hallways, bridges. Faint lights from a village of builders’ barracks greeted the coming night. An old truck and a battered bulldozer lay collapsed outside the fence. Ruddy rings of lampposts drew trembling ellipses on the black sky, the scaffolds lit with the yellow illumination of evening.

She walked along a half-built road. The ruts left by the trucks were filled with watery sludge. Swinging lanterns clinked against metal wires at the gate to the guards’ barracks, where a Komsomolets excavator stood out at the front like a guard dog, a one-legged Lapp chickadee hopping along its roof. She knocked on the barracks door for a long time before the sleepy watchman came to open it. Stuffy heat wafted out of the barracks onto her face. The watchman asked in a stern voice what she wanted. He looked at her with his head to one side and smiled.

‘I’ve always wondered what young women like you see in that old phoney. The more lost the cause the more interesting it is. You women have no sense of self-preservation. Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov is staying over there in the barracks, but you can’t go there. Give me your number. He’ll call you if he wants to.’

She handed him the hotel address and her room number.

‘Don’t forget – I warned you.’

She went back to the hotel, past the nauseating stench of poisoned yurt slums, through the red dark of night, the dismal, frozen silence. All the stars of Orion shone straight down on her, and the snowy moon rose slowly into the sky from behind a concrete wall. Much later a deaf dawn appeared in the east and lit up the low-hanging clouds. A few flakes of snow drifted onto her fevered face.

Before she fell asleep she listened to the progress of the waking morning. She thought about Siberia’s frosty, spent forests, spread like a wall along the edge of a sea of fields. She thought of the blizzarded, stiff-frozen borderlands, where herds of reindeer wandered aimlessly, lazily looking for food, the impenetrable wilderness, puny hills, uninhabited provinces, snowstorms, swarms of mosquitoes, and autumn’s still, misty damp wrapping itself around a little village.

He didn’t call.

The next day she went with the tour guide to Suhbaatar’s mausoleum, Bogd Khan’s winter palace, and the Lenin statue. When they ran out of sights, she tried one more time. She reminded the guide about the petroglyphs. He laughed with amusement and she understood that there was no point in bringing it up again. She looked out of the grey hotel window at the quiet clouds crawling unhurried to the east.

When Mitka came home after eight months of psychiatric treatment, she sensed that he had guessed everything. Irina had arranged through her office for herself and Mitka to stay in a citizens’ sanatorium in the Crimea. The purpose was for them to rest, and if his reason returned to its former sharpness, everything would be just as it was before. Irina had prepared her for this, for the fact that it might be as if nothing had happened while he was away.

Mornings crawled into days, days into evenings, deep nights filled the earth and sky, as long as the life to come, filled with a hum, with the hiss of radiators, the cold dryness of sheets, the dry rustle of gritty snowfall. She paced around her room, looked out of the window at the sleeping city, the greasy, struggling wind sinking into the darkness of the city. She gazed at the nights, the stars coming out so large and pale she could have touched them. She waited for the mornings, the stars twinkling uncertainly for a moment and disappearing. She watched the slow rise and set of the desperate sun, the momentary light of falling stars, and cursed herself. She was tired and empty. Far away from everything. Even herself.

Gradually, she accepted her solitude and stopped waiting for him to call. She began to bear the continual anxiety, the growing pressure, the pain in her chest, a little better. She learned to listen a little more calmly to her own tense breathing and the restless beat of her overwrought heart devouring her blood.

One evening he came. He smelled of mare’s milk kumis and mutton fat. She sobbed. As they stepped outside, a rock-hard, heavy southwest wind shoved them along, carrying them towards a yurt suburb. He took hold of her shoulder and pulled her next to him, fatherly. She told him what had happened. She was crying, but the wind from beyond the yurts dried her tears so quickly that he didn’t see them. He listened to her without interrupting, and when she came to the end of the story, he burst into boisterous laughter.

‘You really are stupid. I’ve never met a broad like you, and I’ve come across all kinds. Don’t worry. It’ll all work out.’

He swallowed his laughter. He scratched the back of his head and snarled. ‘I wonder what those guys had been up to, for God to punish them like that? The law here barely recognises manslaughter, fines you about as much as the price of a bottle of black-market vodka. They must be quite the rascals, eh?’

They walked on in silence. A gust of air blasted around a corner, she swallowed it and coughed.

‘When things don’t get better, they get worse, and it’s a short road from bad to good. Don’t worry, my girl, a bit of bad luck can suddenly change to a bit of good. Those bums got what they asked for. No normal Mongolian man goes to a hotel to meet a Western tourist – it’s like suicide.’

He looked at her pityingly.

‘I once had a whore here who I really liked a lot. She had a six-year-old son who always gave me a murderous stare. When I was screwing her I was always afraid he could come up behind me and put a Finnish pen through my skull. I bought him a set of building blocks from Moscow, the kind you can use to build all of Red Square, with the church and Lenin’s mausoleum. When I gave it to him, he threw it in the corner and stared at me like he could have killed me. But when I went to get some pussy later on, the whore told me to look under the bed. There was Red Square in all its glory, handsome as Beria’s dick.’

She jumped over a pile of horse manure in front of a drinks machine and laughed. There was a snowy amusement park behind a low warehouse where a tired old ferris wheel moped, stiff with cold. He took off, running towards the park. She watched as he slipped through the hanging half-open door of the leaning, abandoned booth and, as if by magic, the light bulbs strung around the park flickered on in faint tatters of light and the ferris wheel creaked into motion, first rattling slowly, then growing faster with a steady whine. She looked first at the man, then at the ferris wheel, then at the outlandish city with its wind-licked, blackened, discarded remains of yurts, strewn over a wasteland. The melting snow smelled like spring. A puddle of greasy black liquid spread from an oil barrel thrown into a snow drift. She thought about Moscow, Malaya Nikitskaya, where she and Irina once walked, the yellow lights gliding through the autumn fog.

The darkness thickened to a blue mist over the amusement park. He walked her back to the hotel. They could see from a distance a gigantic puddle of oily sludge, a cold red circle of moon shining on its surface. Little children were playing at the edge of the puddle, although it was night. A girl barely four years old, her legs swollen, was gathering oil in a broken bottle. A boy younger than her was wading in the puddle, shoeless, splashing it on himself.

The hotel was locked. The two of them stood with their backs to the wind and waited. The faint light of the moon shone on the puddles of slush, an indifferent wind whistled around the building. A sullen functionary eventually came and opened the door. The man followed her to the desk in the lobby and handed her a twenty-five-rouble note. She smiled bashfully back at him. He winked at her and left.

The girl climbed the stairs to her room and collapsed happily onto the sofa. She fell asleep with all her clothes on, at peace, thinking of nothing.