Compartment No. 6

16

A HALF MOON STILL HUNG over the yurts despite the concentrated sunlight. Small white clouds scuttled briskly across the lid of sky. Columns of trucks rumbled towards construction sites, shaking the window of her room, horses whinnied and flicked away the burning rays of sun with their long thick tails, old men in lambskin coats puffed cigarettes on the main street in front of the department store, women hurried by carrying milk pails.

When she went down to the lobby, the man handed her a budding cyclamen and kissed her three times on the cheeks.

‘Is this the fellow that’s been bothering you?’

He pointed disdainfully at the tour guide. When she nodded, he took the man aside. A moment later the guide left without looking back, angry and humiliated, but well paid.

‘We won’t have any more trouble from that louse,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Walking around in rags, but still full of himself.’

A shiny old Volga was waiting for them outside behind a buzzing telegraph pole, its thin, goateed driver dangling an extinguished cigarette in a short amber holder.

‘This here’s Gafur, soldier of the Golden Horde and my friend at the construction site. A real Tatar. Not one of these Swabian Protestants. Do you know what kind of fellows these Tatars are? They gave Hitler a gilded saddle as a present, and to repay them Stalin killed the whole nation, millions of them. Gafur’s the only one left alive.’

Gafur laughed. The man got in the front beside him, the girl in the back. The car smelled of sweat and dandruff.

‘Complete dashboard with frame-suspended pedals, four on the column, and built-in radio. And best of all, with very little money you get lots of little extra annoyances.’

Gafur started the engine with a quick sharp movement of his hand, stomped on the accelerator so hard that the back wheels skidded in the slippery slush, and edged the nose of the car out of the driveway, revving it for all it was worth. The retreating road was covered in a thick layer of dust mixed with sand and snow. Gafur said he’d been with his Tatyana for fifteen years and successfully driven her from Alma Ata to Mongolia.

Now and then the car bounced over to the right side of the road, then the left. Oncoming trucks rushed by on one side or the other. Gafur suddenly slammed on the brakes, causing the man to hit his head on the windshield, then immediately floored the accelerator so that the girl was slammed against the back headrest. The man pointed towards the Golden Mountains on the horizon, brightly painted with sunshine. They glowed red in some places, white in others.

‘Let’s head for the mountains. Some country air and nature will do us good. I’ll sell you to some horse herder who’ll screw your brains out and make you the best goat milker in Mongolia.’

Here and there trucks idled with steaming water shooting out of them. There were sheep and goats of different colours everywhere. A caravan of camels with full loads undulated in the distance. One of the camels had a gigantic antenna contraption on its back. The Volga lurched and coughed as it roared along, the radio rasping. The black-spotted sun shed its hot rays through the rear window; the girl let her cheek press up against the cool glass.

She came awake with a hard knock. The car had stopped in the middle of a clear-running river. Gafur cursed and the man laughed.

The two men took off their shoes, socks, and trousers, and asked her to get behind the wheel while the engine continued to knock, wheeze and sputter. They got behind the car and pushed. She wrenched the transmission into first, gently lifted her foot from the clutch, and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The men shivered in the ice-cold water all the way across the river. Luckily the water was shallow, only knee-deep. She got to the other side and got out of the car.

‘I’ll tame you yet, you whore,’ Gafur hissed, hopping back in and furiously seizing the steering wheel.

The man looked at Gafur and wrinkled his brow. Gafur punched the car straight into second gear, stomped vehemently on the accelerator, and cranked the wheel farther than was reasonable. The Volga flung itself from the slippery bank onto level ground. Feodor Challiapin sang from the hefty vacuum-tube radio built into the dashboard.

The road ascended into the mountains. The Volga jerked its way up the steep, narrow route. The fiery red sun hung at the edge of the snow-covered sandy steppe and started to set; a pink mist hovered low over the desert. Owls appeared, loitering in the middle of the road and flapping into flight just as the Volga was about to crush them. Sometimes the car stopped and the girl got behind the wheel as the men pushed. Sometimes they stopped along the road to let the engine cool.

It was a steep climb and the car’s strong but simple engine couldn’t go more than a few metres at a time. The girl and the man walked alongside the car. She took very careful sips of the thin mountain air. A melancholy night lit by a hazy blue moon loomed far beyond the mountains and spread peacefully around them. At midnight the Volga started to whine, then to howl.

‘Squealing like a sow,’ Gafur growled in a wounded voice, just as the engine died completely.

He opened the hood. The large-celled radiator leered at him from its loose corner to the left of the engine, hot as fire, the coolant grid hanging sadly, almost touching the ground. The two men stared at the engine for a long time, but neither of them touched it.

Gafur gazed in disbelief at the engine, then at the man. The man sat down on a large stone, watched a hawk gliding above them along the restless bird’s trail of the Milky Way crackling atop the nearest mountain. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, calmly blowing smoke.

‘I once got so mad at Katinka that I took a sledgehammer to her washing machine. Katinka gathered her things and she and her boy took off to her mother’s house in Leningrad. They would have stayed there, too, but I went and got them three months later. A man can’t get along without a woman. Even if he can find some pussy, he’ll still need somebody to make the soup.’

He lifted a hand to his temple and looked like a cockroach sitting there.

The waxing moon hovered over the mountainside; the landscape of sand mixed with snow spread deathlike, tranquil, silent.

They gently rolled the car to the side of the road and Gafur stroked its sickly chassis. He was humming contentedly – apparently he and the Volga had made up. The man slumped into the back seat and pulled his cap over his eyes. The girl leaned against an enormous boulder. The fat moon and glaring stars lit up the roadside, and the cold, naked rocks pressed in at either side of the mountain road. A pale mist snaked through the ravines and a few yaks huddled in the valley, while over the mountains an opaque, tired sky billowed, covered in snowclouds.

The girl touched the surface of the boulder with her hand and felt a gouge cut in it. She looked at it more closely. The headlights of a swaying truck went past, brushing over the stone. There were deer, goats, and other animals in various poses painted on its surface. She waited for the flash of lights from the next truck. She moved her fingers slowly over the surface of the rock. There were marks carved around the animals. Tree signs, Uigur signs, runes. She laid her cheek against the boulder and kissed it, and tears ran down her cheeks.

Gafur appeared beside her. He took a Kazbek out of his pocket and started to smoke. Unfriendly mud splashed in the puddles as half-ton trucks splattered with mire and battered by rocks and potholes roared and rattled past in an almost continuous line, leaving ruts in the soft roadway. They were like ravines in the slippery, overflowing mud. The girl stroked the rock surreptitiously. Gafur smoked his cigarette and threw the stub on the ground.

‘It was a warm summer morning in Kazan. I was sitting on the bench behind our building smoking some hash. I watched clouds shaped like grand pianos flitting across the brilliant sky and I thought, soon I’ll be flying above them. Then I heard a horrible boom and a pressure wave slammed me all the way to the back of the yard. When I lifted my head a few hours later I saw that the whole building had collapsed. Grey dust and smoke covered everything, and when I looked at the sky I saw a black starlit August night.’

She listened, as she had become used to doing.

‘I’m a free man. I live in the here and now. I focus on what I like, and let everything else alone. I watch from the sidelines and live like the animals do. That’s the way I am. So if the young lady is in the mood for a shot of heroin made from first-class, professionally cultivated Afghan opium, uncle’s got some in his pocket.’

A plump, poison-green cloud sailed alone across the sky. Soon it had settled in front of the moon and smothered its gleaming light. The girl felt the glow of the petroglyph under her hand. Gafur took a spoon and a small bag of white powder out of his pocket, prepared his fix, lifted his wide-cut trouser-leg and jabbed the needle somewhere into his shin, with an apparently practised aim.

‘Now the goodness is pumping into every vein and brain cell,’ he whispered languidly.

A new star appeared in the sky, a meteor fell, beams of starlight splashed across the pitch-blackness, the planets glowed. She brushed her fingers against the distant past once more and felt the power of life within her. They walked to the car. The air was opaque now, like a thin glue. She got in the back seat, the man moved to the front, and Gafur got behind the wheel. Watery mud flew into the windshield. White sleet fell from the sky and soon it had covered the smudges of dirt, then the whole windshield. They were freezing in the cold car but the man soon drew forth a large green bottle. It was filled with spiked kumis. He pulled a long baguette and three dirty glasses from under the front seat.

‘These formerly fierce horsemen were the toughest working men in Khabarovsk and Novosibirsk a couple of decades ago, way ahead of us Russians. Things are different now. Gafur sits tight on his needle, ready to sell the blood out of his veins if need be to get his next dose. And so, dear comrades, my beloved homeland grows more beautiful year after year, but never blossoms. Winter’s gone; summer’s here; let us lift our glasses to friendship, with or without the needle.’

As soon as a little light penetrated the muddy windshield, the girl snapped awake from her stupor. She carefully opened the creaking door and eased out of the car. A gentle whirlwind brushed her sleepy face and brought with it the earthy smell of early spring. High in the sky a white dinosaur bounded brightly.

Gafur poured oil into the engine, hoping it would forgive him and love him again. The car pinged good-naturedly and started up. Bright rays of early morning sunshine cut across the sky. The man put on his sunglasses. Gafur kept squeezing the steering wheel nervously, although he’d already had his morning fix, and accelerated the Volga. The car leapt onto the road.

The full sun threw its first rays over the numb and sleeping sandy steppe. Soon it billowed yellow and made the snow-streaked mountains sparkle gold. Sunbeams moved along the mountainsides, the steep narrow road, and the ice-hard drifts glittering with powdery snow. For a moment everything stopped, then the sleepy sky exploded. Hail the size of ping-pong balls came zinging down.

Three yurts flitted into view from beyond a curve in the twisting road. They stood on a broad low place near a river. Snakes of smoke wriggled from them towards the pulsating sky. Everywhere she looked lay the bodies of frozen dead animals. A Mongolian ass swollen like a ball, the pecked eyes of yaks, hundreds of carcasses of spotted sheep and delicate goats. The winter’s storms had hardened the snow.

‘Golod i holod,’ the man grunted mournfully. ‘We’re here, my girl! More than three kilometres up. A secret, stinking little world. Don’t piss in running water around here. If you do, you’ll die.’

Gafur drove the car behind a yurt and turned off the engine. The village children formed a circle around the Volga. They stared at the girl in disbelief, afraid.

She watched a lone scrap of red fabric as the wind blew it up the mountainside. It got stuck briefly on a pine branch, then on a sharp piece of stone, dived into a sheltered hollow for a moment, then continued its journey up to the uninhabited and unexplored rocky, rugged heights. Frightened, halfwild, restlessly twitching Gobi horses snorted beside one of the yurts. They had small heads, narrow ears and graceful legs, and halters of braided leather on short ropes tied loosely to a clothesline. Thus tied they could move like dogs leashed to a cable. A full-grown tundra falcon was perched on a wooden rail next to the door of the yurt. One of its legs was tied to the rail with a strip of reindeer hide.

Boulders mounded with snow rose high on either side of the village. The golden heights of the mountains were close; the air smelled of pungent herbs, water babbled in the stream. In the distance behind the yurts a herd of horses wandered. One of the horses was so white that it nearly disappeared as it galloped over the snowy pasture. Beyond the horses a flock of goats lounged in the mellow sunshine.

The girl’s head hurt; she didn’t feel well. The man gave her a pill. A few brisk, curious women came out of a yurt, a man with a slack yellow face, black-browed eyes, and green spots on his forehead appeared from behind it. He greeted the men with familiarity. He didn’t greet the girl, just looked at her for a long time. A little later he gestured towards the yurt – the women were to bring her inside to rest.

‘Don’t step on the threshold when you go in. If you do, they’ll chop your head off,’ the man said, cracking his knuckles.

The women walked in front of her and opened the door. It was painted red and squeaked pathetically. She stepped inside warily. In the middle of the yurt a small fire smoked on the bare ground, a young woman and an old woman bustling around it. When they noticed her through the curtain of smoke they motioned for her to sit near the fire. The older woman handed her a bowl of white tea.

Soon the young woman spread a flowered mattress on the floor – the guest bed. The older woman laid a neatly folded cotton quilt over it and placed a large cushion at one end. They gave her a thick lambskin for a blanket. She looked at the flowered fabric covering the walls, the skilfully made, bright-coloured rugs on the floor, the hand-painted dishes and little cloth dolls hanging from the ceiling and lying on top of a blue Chinese cabinet, and soon fell asleep.

She woke to the hideous shriek of a song thrush. She watched from her mattress as Gafur and the people of the yurt gnawed at mutton, without greed or any great gusto, and gulped down kumis. She was careful not to step on the threshold when she went outside. The gentle silence of the night greeted her. The seething sun had set behind the Golden Mountains and the sky gradually was lit with a thousand dry, restless stars. They swept across the blue space, the Milky Way zigzagging fitfully above the mountains, galaxies hissing over the village of yurts. She sat down on a stone, touched its cold surface. The stone was silent. She watched the song thrush torment the tethered falcon.

In the morning her eyes hurt again. Her head was splitting; there was an unbearable cosmic roar in her ears. Her shoulders slumped, her head hung limply.

The bright icy sun didn’t ask forgiveness. In the summer, that same sun dried up the raindrops before they could reach the earth. A stinging icy wind flowed from the north, dragging a mountain crow and a tattered burlap sack with it. Frost laid down by the night’s freeze grew from the ground up the walls of the yurt. Thin black trails of smoke floated sleepily through the air.

The girl stood still. From the east a piercing brightness came, in the west a thick grey gelatinous fog swirled, and in the north, at the northern edge of the sky, hung a blood-red comet. It looked like an old 1930s decal glued to a paper sky stained with dark-blue ink. She marvelled at a flock of cranes that stepped in a phalanx along the level ground, pecking up dead grasshoppers from the autumn before. She saw five black long-haired bulls. They were scraping the ice with their hooves to find the grass beneath. She heard the goats bleating and strolled towards a grove of frosty, sad-hanging branches. The women were milking the goats.

Gafur appeared out of nowhere, lively, enjoying his fix, capering over the hard-frozen snow in his dandy’s pointy-toed shoes, and followed a Mongolian man to where the horses were. They took the harnesses of two restive horses and led them out in front of the yurt. They were on their way to look for a half-tamed flock of sheep that had disappeared during the night.

She walked to the edge of the bubbling river. From there she could see the wooden fence of the corral, which was empty now. A small mongrel dog followed her. White steam rose from its mouth. It stopped to watch her, thought for a moment, stared at her with bitter green eyes, then crept up to where she stood, laid its snout against her knee, sighed deeply, and continued on its way. Farther up the mountain a thick-furred camel swayed, pulling a flimsy long-shafted cart behind it. The man saw the girl. He walked over to her.

‘You can’t see farther than your nose, no matter how you try. But remember, even at the darkest moments, beyond the dead horizon, there’s always life. When Mishka left, I envied him. He got away and I stayed behind. But now…’

He smelled like warm sweat. The strong sunlight reflected from the frozen mountainside where powdered snow had fallen during the night. A light, melancholy feeling floated like a low cloud over the pure landscape. He scratched the back of his head thoughtfully. The sky glowed with spring light.

‘Do you know why people live longer than other animals do? It’s because animals live by their instincts, and they don’t make mistakes. We people, on the other hand, rely on reason, and we screw up all the time. We spend half our lives messing things up, half realising the stupid mistakes we’ve made, and the rest of the time trying to fix whatever we can. We need all the years we live for all that rigamarole. I was born in 1941. My father, whom I didn’t get to choose, begat me on his way from the work camp to the front. My mother is a mean, bitter woman. She hated my father for travelling in a prison carriage to get to a soup kettle in Siberia, leaving her to be trampled by the war and starve. I knew everything about life when I was five, and I spent the next forty years trying to understand it.’

He picked up a handful of rocks and started to toss them into the water. She could see his hands growing hard.

‘I often wonder at how I’ve managed to stay alive. When I was young I was crazy with fear, then I learned to overcome fear. I studied judo and five years later I was a black belt. After that I wasn’t afraid. I’m ready to die at any time. I still get goosebumps when I go home to Moscow and hear my mother breathing in the next room. I despise my mother; sometimes I feel sorry for her. A person who’s always right is a blind, deaf murderer. But you wouldn’t understand that, and you don’t have to. As long as you’re here.’

He stopped speaking and a smothered silence settled around them. He took his knife out of his boot, sprang its sharp blade open, and felt it with a finger, its brightly polished surface. Disappointment lay deep in his half-closed eyes.

‘I didn’t have a family, or relationships. That thread broke before I was born, and why wake the ghosts of the past? The cart of the past only leads to the rubbish dump.’ He held the knife out to her. ‘This is my father’s cross, a Siberian knife. I don’t know all he did with it, but I stabbed Vimma with this knife. One good-for-nothing killing another.’

He touched his cheek with the blade. ‘It’s yours now.’

She took the knife. It was heavy. The black handle was made of bone and had a silver Orthodox cross inlaid in it. She felt the power of the knife, and the trip up to this point, with all its light and shadow, flooded through her. Its joys, sorrows, hope, hopelessness, hate and, perhaps, love. Then she looked him in the eye and said, as Job said: ‘For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come to me, Vadim Nikolayevich.’

He touched her hand tenderly, took a pack of papirosas out of his pocket, and lit one. She snapped the blade open and looked at the man’s hands. She looked at the heavy sharp knife. How many people had been killed with it?

She dug in her pocket, took out a twenty-five-rouble note, and handed it to him. He took the note, smiling faintly, and folded it into his pocket. The thick snow squeaked under his heavy leather shoes. Tatters of large light snowflakes drifted from the sky.

When he left, the children came. They admired and begged for everything she had on: a ring, a necklace, buttons, a belt, hairpins, her scarf. She handed her necklace to the oldest boy. He looked at it for a moment, threw it on the ground, and started to beg for her shoes. Black-tailed squirrels followed after the children. They jumped onto her shoulders and head; one tried to nibble at her face. The children swarmed around her and sicced the squirrels on her. One small boy had a stick in his hand and he tried to poke her with it. When she screamed loudly he dashed away, but he soon came back and continued to poke her. She grabbed the stick from his hand and broke it in two. The boy started to bawl, the squirrels disappeared, and the other children laughed.

She went walking along the shore of the river. The children followed her every step; one of them was throwing small stones at her. The women watched the children and chuckled proudly. The girl put her hand in her pocket and felt the knife; she didn’t think about the children or the women.

The sleepy sky darkened quickly and a strong wind from the mountains threw down a brief shower of grainy snow. Then the wind calmed and the peace of a spring night settled over everything.

Dusk hung lightly over the village as the Mongolian man and Gafur returned from the mountain with the flock of sheep. The Mongolian slaughtered one large sheep, let it bleed from the neck into a red plastic bucket, and handed the bucket to the old woman. She disappeared with it into a yurt.

The Mongolian man flayed the sheep and he and Gafur cut up the meat. Meanwhile the women lit a fire on a stove in the yard. When the meat was cut up, the man put the pieces in the bloody sheepskin, and he and Gafur dragged the bundle over to the stove.

The man opened the stove lid. It was full of hot rocks. He picked up a pair of tongs, lifted the stones one by one off the stove, and put them inside the sheepskin. Then he and Gafur hung the whole thing over the fire to burn the wool from the skin.

An hour later they opened the skin and lifted the cooked meat into a metal dish. A cold wind was rising from the northwest.

The girl went into the yurt to warm herself. The man was sitting at a low table, relaxed, twirling a teaspoon in a glass. She rubbed her hands together over the open fire.

‘It’ll be May soon, my girl,’ he said. ‘I like April, but I hate May in Siberia. The wind starts to blow from rotten places, and it brings horrible blizzards with it. It feels obscene and disgusting.’

The limp sun melted from the sky and the moon rose. They sat on the floor of the yurt, each of them in their place. The man handed the host a hand auger, marmalade, a jar of pickles, and a pile of newspapers as a gift, and for the hostess some Polish perfume and amber beads. In return he received fifteen fresh marmot skins. They ate the good mutton in the warmth of the yurt and raised their glasses. Gafur filled a water pipe with marijuana grown in Astrahan and some neftyanka made from Khazakstani hemp, strong and oily. The men smoked – it wasn’t offered to the women.

It was quiet. A young woman poured kumis into mugs.

As evening fell, Gafur and the man got up to leave. They made their long goodbyes to the old man and the women, gave out a few more gifts, and finally went outside. She followed them. Gusty winds tossed fine icy snow through the air. There was a turquoise ring around the grey moon.

The travellers got into the car, the men in front, the girl in the back as before. The car started, huffing and banging. A flock of children ran after it, throwing stones.

The whirling snowstorm and dark of early evening gradually aged into night over the ancient mountains, and made the girl’s thoughts return to Moscow. She thought about those Moscow mornings when thick fog covered both shores of the Moscow River, how the fresh, ice-cold water trickled through the fog, the metro trains full of people, country people getting their enormous bags stuck in the metro doors, confused by the escalators, pushing and crowding and dashing around, the mass of passengers drifting from one tunnel to the next. She forgot everything else for a moment. A sandstorm from the north lashed lazily at the windshield.

They got back to the city after midnight.