Compartment No. 6

17

THEY STOOD FOR A MOMENT in front of the hotel, the two men smoking farewell cigarettes. The man looked at her sharply with his bright eyes, peering from under his brows in the eastern manner, a serious yet boyish look of excitement on his face.

‘We’re going out goating, going to get a smell of life and death,’ he said, waving a hand faintly at her as he went.

The girl sat in her dark room until morning. She thought about Mitka, about the time they were on their way back from Irina’s friend’s dacha. They’d sat in a crowded electric train that smelled of want and apathy. She’d leaned against Mitka’s shoulder and felt motion, the motion of everything around her and the motion inside her. She’d fallen asleep and Mitka had woken her at Moscow station, asked her to name an eighteen-digit number. She said a number and it took only a moment for him to name its fifth root. He practised logarithms with great enthusiasm, the numbers sometimes growing so large in his head that they gave him a fever.

Not until the east was painted in blue light and the stars yellowed to mandarin behind a veil of clouds did the first tears streak down her cheeks.

The tour guide was waiting for her at the restaurant door at breakfast. They ate in silence. The guide looked at her nonchalantly and suggested that she spend her last day in Ulan Bator on her own – he had a German tourist coming.

All day long, a silent snow fell. A gentle wind swept the snow into the potholes to cover the frozen, muddy water.

All that was grey and dull had disappeared. She stepped into a café. Amid the everyday stench and the smell of roasted mutton a primus stove whistled, children wrestled in the slush on the floor, a schoolboy caught the light on the windowsill in a piece of mirror, and she drank a cup of tea with goat’s milk.

In the evening she went back to the hotel, packed her few things, put her airline tickets on the bedside table, and focused on breathing. A pleasant gloom searched its way towards her, then reached her. A dim orange star dangling in a crescent moon. The pair of them couldn’t quite light up the sleeping town. The stars had fallen frozen into the red sand of the Gobi Desert. Only Venus twinkled in the sky, bright and blazing. The last snowflakes drifted to the ground. She was ready to meet her life, its happiness and unhappiness.

She was ready to go back to Moscow! To Moscow!