Compartment No. 6

6

THE GIRL LISTENED TO MUSIC on her headphones and was on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street again. There, on the top floor of a green block of flats, was her and Mitka’s secret place. Someone had painted a black cat on the wall of the ground-floor entrance and the stairwells were completely covered in quotes from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. How many times had she and Mitka walked up those narrow wooden stairs in the dark of night? Two steps were broken on the sixth floor, and if you didn’t know about it you could fall straight to your death. But they knew about it, and they knew to be careful. On the highest landing, amid the stench of cat piss, was where she and Mitka had smoked their first joint together.

Her travelling companion bashfully changed his underwear. He wrapped the dirty items in an old copy of Literaturnaya Gazeta and put the bundle in his suitcase.

The passengers who had boarded at Omsk were standing in the corridor. Among them was a Red Army officer and his old, translucently thin housekeeper. His uniform coat fitted him well and his shoes shone, as did his bloated face. He stood in the passageway with his back straight, periodically clearing his throat in a dignified manner. The man stared at him from the door of the compartment.

‘The Soviet Union didn’t have any officers in Lenin’s day, just soldiers and commanders. You could only tell the difference between them up close, by the emblems on their collars. Those days are long behind us. Nowadays the lieutenants and captains sit together at one table and the majors and colonels at another. That grimacing mug has a thief’s look about him. He’s probably a pansy, eating away at the spine of the Soviet Union.’

The officer’s ears turned red and he took several stiff strides to stand in front of the man, then grabbed him by the nose and squeezed so hard that the man slumped back to his bunk and sat down.

‘Hooligans will be thrown off the train at the next station,’ the officer roared. ‘If you were a little younger, I’d send you to the devil’s kitchen for some re-education.’

The man was taken off guard, surprised by the officer’s swiftness. ‘I didn’t…’ he said, then he jumped up and threw a punch, but the officer dodged it and his fist struck the doorframe.

He spat angrily over his left shoulder into the corridor and hissed. The officer looked at him, sighed deeply, and left. Arisa came rushing into the corridor with the axe in her hand.

‘Pig! We don’t spit on everything here! I’ll wring you out till you piss your pants, Comrade Cast Iron Hero.’

She swung the axe so that the girl had to duck, then disappeared. The man watched her go with a look of relief.

The corridor emptied. The girl stood alone for a moment, then went back into the compartment. The man was sitting on the edge of his bed, still furious.

She didn’t dare move. He calmed down little by little, burying his chin in a large hand and sighing.

‘I can’t stand looking at roosters like that guy. Dressed up like a whore for the Party. Guys like that are the reason we still haven’t beaten the Afghans. A pansy like that is worse than those fairy Afghan fighters. I’ve seen on the news how those mussulmans handle their guns out in the desert. They carry them like babies. And what do our Red Army officers do? They take their cue from that bunch of throwbacks and go around wiggling their arses. If guys like me were running the war the way it should be run, we would’ve beaten those phoney kings in the first attack. But no, they’ve got to fag it up. When I was in the army, the gays got a pole up their arse. A real soldier knows what to do with a weapon. You shoot the enemy. Not between the eyes – in the gut.’

The girl had only one thought: she hated him.

They passed crumbling houses gobbled up by their gardens, villages eaten by forest, cities swallowed by the mossy taiga. The train sped east, dark brown clouds covering the sky, when suddenly in the south a little crack of the bright blue of spring appeared through a rift in the clouds. The spring sky. The train sped east and everyone waited for morning. The girl thought of travelling in the hot train across dreaded Siberia, how someone might look at that train and long for Moscow, someone who wanted to be on that very train, someone who had escaped from a camp without a rifle, without food, with nothing but wet matches in his pocket, travelling on skis stolen from a guard, a rusted knife in his pocket, someone willing to kill, willing to suffer freezing and exhaustion, willing to throw himself at life.

The girl had waited the whole dark, dense, quiet night to reach Novosibirsk. She had waited for the safety of the metropolis, waited to be able to be alone for just a few hours. The dry, unrelenting cold of Siberia sliced at her face and made her breath catch. A tuft of hair peeping out from under her knit cap frosted over instantaneously, her eyelashes clumped, her lips froze together. She walked along the platform and listened to the snow squeaking and crunching under her feet, the railway tracks popping in the cold’s grip. She watched the gentle glow of the intermittently buzzing light from the lampposts. When she came back, cold, into the corridor of the train she met Arisa.

‘Our beloved Victory engine with the red star on its forehead has given its all. If it doesn’t get some time to cool down and rest, it will die, and that’s not something any of us wants. We’re going to let him take a breather, a few days’ rest.’

The girl decided to go into town and reserve a hotel room. She could have a shower and some quiet time.

‘You can’t go out alone,’ the man said. ‘I won’t let you. Novosibirsk will eat you alive. We’ll go together. I’ll take care of everything.’

Two hours later they were strolling towards the saffron-yellow-tinted sunrise and the centre of the frost-stiffened city. She felt the safety of the street under her feet. Snow banks as tall as a man grew on either side of the uneven pavement with paths trodden between them. They walked stiffly, gulping for air as they passed wastegrounds covered in snow, community gardens, a school, fences and garden gates crusted with snow, verandas with ice blossoms in their paned windows, a stocky woman wandering in a cloud of icy mist. There was so much snow in some places that the piles reached as far as the lights on the tops of the poles.

At the bus stop a cosily sleeping and abundantly steaming cluster of people stood waiting for the trolleybus in thin quilt jackets and steaming fur-trimmed hats with hefty felt boots on their feet. Golden-yellow light glimmered from the windows of a concrete highrise, the dogs in the courtyard howling like a pack of wolves. The wind blew open the coats of passers-by and tore apart the bittersweet song coming from the loose folds of an accordion. There was a barber’s and hairdresser’s on every corner. A wheelbarrow and pieces of rusty pipe jutted out from under piles of snow on a side street, a broken Czech sofa slouched on one corner covered in little drifts of windblown snow. They kept on walking, through an industrial city waking from an icy dream, crossed courtyards, and found the gloomiest queue in the universe among the chilling mist. They went to stand on a sheet of ice at the back of the line, the man first, the girl behind him. The front of the queue disappeared into the sooty, thick, frosty fog. A woman walked past and left an opening behind her in the mist. The people were steaming like horses. The man turned around quickly.

‘We stand here suffering for no reason and don’t complain. They can do whatever they want to us and we take it all humbly.’

An old man with large grey eyes and a basket full of homemade pies yelled from somewhere behind them.

‘Jesus suffered, and commanded us to suffer. Deal with it.’

‘All we want is an easy life. Deal with that,’ a young man with a drinker’s red nose roared.

‘Not everybody can stand an easy life. Some destroy themselves,’ the old man said tepidly, pulling the earflaps of his fur hat down tighter.

‘Pure ignorance,’ the red-nosed one threw back.

‘Suffering is what gives life its flavour, thank God. Want and emptiness are good for you,’ the old man grunted.

‘It’s true that a person can get by on little, but without that little, you’ve got nothing,’ the young man shouted.

‘Shithead. I won’t discuss this with you,’ the old man said with a sharp swing of his hand clad in a dogskin mitten.

‘It’s just a joke, old man. No need to get all worked up about it. Think of your heart,’ the girl’s companion said soothingly, his voice cordial.

The old man walked up and gave him a long, critical look.

‘Listen here, comrade,’ he said. ‘A simple life keeps the spirit wholesome.’

‘And suffering purifies,’ the man answered, giving him a wink.

He bought a frozen watermelon, she bought a speckled frozen apple. They walked past a tattered phone booth where a woman with a yellow throat was speaking excitedly into the receiver. A man with red, bony ankles tapped a coin against the glass, trying to hurry her. There were deep cracks in the walls of the blocks of flats, snow-covered balconies that sagged and dripped, rows of doors hanging open, their handles stolen, an entrance filled with snow. Street lights buried in snow, extinguished, bent, broken. Electric power lines hanging in the air, open manholes, heaps of cables lying jumbled in the snowdrifts. And over it all shone an oversized sun in a clear blue sky. They made their way side by side to the dark fairgrounds. The paths had been ploughed, icy asphalt poked through the snow. They sat down on a snow-covered bench. The man took his folding knife out of his pocket, snapped open the sturdy blade, and cut up the melon.

‘Shall we go for a drive? There’s always time, and always will be. I’ve got a master plan that will cost us a bottle of whisky. Have you got it with you? I have an acquaintance here, or rather a good friend, who can arrange things, but even in this country, not everything’s free. You can wait here.’

The girl thought for a moment, dug a litre bottle of whisky out of her backpack, and handed it to him. He gave a satisfied whistle, popped the bottle into his breast pocket, and left. The girl sat on the bench shivering. Her cheeks glowed red and there were little drops of ice hanging from her nostril hairs. A crow, stiff in the morning frost, landed hard on the bench next to her. She offered it a piece of the frozen melon. The crow turned its head proudly away.

She had been fifteen when the train rattled through a Moscow neighbourhood in the early morning. She had watched from a window as the sun rose slowly from beyond the horizon over the red flags, stretching the shadows of the endless modular highrises to a surrealistic length. They were staying in the Hotel Leningradskaya on the edge of Komsomolets Square – her father, her big brother and herself. The ornate lobby of the hotel was bewildering. She had never seen such a fancy hotel, even in pictures. From the twenty-sixth floor there was a stunning view of the entire enormous city. They had full board, which meant that they could eat three times a day in the ornate hotel restaurant. She hated the black caviar, but was happy to listen to the gentle clunk of the abacus on the counter. They walked along Leningrad Prospect and watched the women street sweepers, something they’d never seen in Helsinki. In the evening they took a taxi to the Lenin Hills and looked down at her future seat of learning, the festively lit thirty-four storeys of the new Moscow University main building. Lit with floodlights, the monumental university complex and the red star on the sharp tower rising from the top of the main building looked like something borrowed from the Thousand and One Nights. On the second day, her father had showed her and her brother all that he had marvelled at in 1964, when he came to the Soviet Union for the first time. They walked around the functionalist Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square and admired the walls of the Kremlin. They rode the trolleybus to Uprising Square to marvel at the twenty-storey block of flats and to Smolensky Square to gape at the twenty-seven-storey office building, which their father said was a mixture of Kremlin and American skyscraper. They visited the graves of Gogol, Mayakovsky, Chekhov, and Ostrovsky at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

On the third day, her father took them to the Kosmos pavilion at the National Economic Achievement exhibition. It was a shrine to the Soviet cult of outer space: life-sized model spaceships and satellites, every sort of smaller space paraphernalia, and of course the most esteemed relic of all, the Soyuz space capsule, with a grandiose, Soviet-style flower arrangement in front of it. You weren’t allowed to go inside it, but you were free to take as many photos as you liked. The pavilion was the best thing she’d ever seen in her life. She wrote in her diary that she wanted to move to Moscow as soon as she turned eighteen.

That evening they went to an Uzbek restaurant. An orchestra played Slavic songs and some people danced. At about midnight her drunken brother got into a fight with a West German tourist and someone called the militia, who came and took them both to jail until the tour guide came to bail her glum brother out for fifty dollars the next day. Before the restaurant had closed, her father had purchased a pretty Georgian whore, slipped away with her, and got hepatitis B as a souvenir. The girl had been left at the restaurant by herself. A fat waitress had called a taxi for her. She had cursed her whole family, including her mother, who had left them years ago and gone to northern Norway to work in a fish cannery. When her father got back in the morning he said that the whore tasted like milk and had a cunt as deep as sin. Moscow had been a stony fist, like in Mayakovsky’s poem. She never recovered.

A mighty sun swallowed the black clouds and a sturdy but well-dented green Pobeda with bulging sides appeared at the edge of the park.

‘This way, my girl! Come here! Not those rusted-out kopecks – I’m here in this beauty,’ the man called from the open window of the car.

The petrol-fumed warmth melted her frosty hair in a moment, but the floor of the car was cold. Her toes tingled. She took off her shoes and rubbed her frozen feet. The car smelled like burnt leather and old iron.

The man pressed the accelerator to the floor and the Pobeda dove into a side street strewn with chunks of ice. The sun-yellowed, snow-covered trees in the park looked after them in alarm.

The car zigzagged at reckless speeds through the frozen city towards the road out of the city, past checkpoints and men armed with machine guns, and into the bright countryside. The icy noise of the city, the soot-blackened highrises and slabs of smoke rising straight towards outer space were left behind. A row of white-trunked young birches stood on either side of the road. Bristling crows’ nests grew in their branches. Fire hydrants and women wrapped in thick woollen scarves appeared at the southern ends of houses hidden by three-metre snow banks. Soon the hydrants gave way to creaking wells covered in thick ice. The man drove along the slushy, meandering, winter-rutted road as fast as the hefty car could carry them.

The car was soon bouncing along the factory-blackened Tomsk road. Snow swirled and the bridges rumbled. The transistor radio played Solovyov-Sedoy’s Unforgettable Evening in the front seat, the man chain-smoked mahorkkas and took big swigs from a long moonshine bottle.

Here and there among the unbroken wall of trees trapped in banks of ice lay fields ploughed and abandoned under heavy drifts of snow. Alongside one field stood two Ladas with their front ends crumpled. The drivers were nowhere to be seen, but there was frozen blood on the ground. Something sorrowful hovered over the many bends in the road.

In the middle of a little grove of pines a frail old church jutted up unexpectedly, like a flowering shrub in the direst Siberian winter. It defied all architectural logic, looking as if its surprising proportions were derived from a toy, growing uncontrollably in every direction. Above the entrance was a sign that read Club.

The girl looked out of the icy, windblown rear window at Russia’s wild beauty. A sparkling, violet-yellow cloud of snow covered the entire landscape as they passed, sometimes forming a wake of snow and flakes of ice that trailed behind them like a veil. A frosty field of thistles glittered and gazed darkly from the edge of the forest. Far off on the horizon a pink powdery smoke drifted, thick clouds broke up and flapped like a child’s sheets in the sky.

That afternoon they passed the district capital, a pond, a kolkhoz farm, and a birch grove, then descended into a valley, where the sun had defeated the Siberian cold and the winding road turned slushy for a moment. The man slapped his black-mittened hands on the steering wheel. A concrete culvert was lying in the middle of the road. He hit the brakes hard and barely managed to avoid it.

‘Good God, what yokels! Crooked noses, stuff falling off the backs of their trucks. Nobody pays attention to anything. They’re too excited about their new tractor.’

Suddenly the sun at the edge of the grove shuddered and dived behind a greenish cloud. A moment later the first tin-heavy rain splattered against the windshield. The car had no wipers – all they could see was the stiff rain – and the man had to stop and pull over. The congealed raindrops battered the roadway into a porridge of slush. The frost-heaved road trickled through the valley like a lazy river. A one-winged crow was falling through rainbow-flaming sky.

Soon the fierce, pattering sleet and the rainbow vanished, a great green mist snaked among straight-trunked groves and gloomy swathes of forest, the sun rising bright beyond it, and a hard frost struck. The uneven road froze in an instant into crags of ice and the Pobeda bounced over it like a ping-pong ball. Beyond the hard, treeless, freezing taiga were cold, snow-buried villages, steaming kolkhozes, smoking government farms where mountains made entirely of black bread grew next to the barns.

As the ice-ravaged road ended, a highway trodden flat by earth-moving machinery lay spread before them. The man hit the accelerator, then immediately braked, then accelerated again. The sun brightened the whole landscape and leapt at the next curve to light the edge of another cloud. Soon it was peeping out from behind the stiff, snow-wrapped trees. Along the edge of the road a motorcycle was half-buried in snow. The red sledge behind it was filled with snow-covered logs. The Pobeda swerved from one pothole to another, was stuck spinning its wheels for a moment on the icy shoulder, then sprang forward a few metres. The man ground the car’s tortured clutch, the girl jiggled in the back seat. She was with Mitka in a sleepy museum, in the last row of a movie theatre, in the bustle of the street, in a swaying commuter train, between creaking rail carriages, staring down a skyscraper’s lift shaft, on the banks of the Moscow River where trucks whined over the multi-lane shore road, at a corner table in a cocktail bar, always looking for a new place to be ‘their’ place. The snow-draped evergreens changed to low-growing birch. One ray of light emerged from the frozen branches, then another, and a few kilometres later a brawny sun lit up the snowy expanse.

They passed a road construction crew, swerving to avoid the machines, one of them a combination of a motorcycle and a plough, another looking like a combination of private sedan and excavator, only the steamroller looking like what it was. Hot tar boiled in large iron cauldrons, women dressed in blue cotton coats and carrying heavy stones glared angrily, men wielded long-handled shovels, cigarettes hanging from the sides of their mouths, the machines sputtering.

Beyond the construction crew were log houses. They formed a grey village at the top of a grey, slushy road. From behind the nearest house appeared a hundred-head flock of grey sheep herded by a weatherbeaten young man. He was sitting on the back of a skinny brown nag, waving a switch and cursing loudly enough to be heard from the car. Rotting sheaves of flax, rusted-through zinc buckets, broken axles, hardened sacks of fertiliser, torn birch-bark shoes and piles of rags, crazily leaning fences decorated with frost, and unconscious drunks with stray dogs peeing on them lay along the sides of the road. They parked the car in front of the general store and walked down a village lane trodden by thousands of feet. The cold stung their eyes, tears flowed down their cheeks and then froze. The man sat on an icy rock and wiped the sweat from his brow.

The girl walked to the top of a little hill behind a house. She touched the wall with her hand. It was cold but soft. A path had been shovelled from the porch to the gate, the ice chipped away around the well. At the well stood a hunched, teenaged boy with a wrinkled brow and a worn sheepskin cap balanced on his head. He watched her curiously, his mouth slightly open, his long arms hanging dumbly, his short legs apart.

‘Complex brigade leader,’ he said, pointing at himself with his mitten.

Soon a black horse appeared from the other side of the house pulling a red sledge. In the cart were two wooden tubs, but no driver. The boy with the wrinkled brow quickly filled them from the creaking, crackling communal well, grabbed the bridle, and took the freezing water to the farthest house.

The village houses looked at each other timidly. They were built in harmony with the surrounding nature, unpainted, melting completely into the uniform landscape. They had been built beam by beam, in uniform, rhythmic rows on either side of the village street, the fences built post by post. You could see all that, even though time had passed them by and soon nature would reconquer all of it. Where the village stood, the first few alders would grow, then the thicker, red-trunked pines, and in the end a forest of different trees. A chainsaw whined unevenly behind a shed, then sputtered and died. There was a sign fastened to the top part of the shed door: Kolkhoz Technological Depot. A pile of split wood stood tall next to the door and beyond it sat a crowd of boys. They had inherited too-big quilt jackets and suitcoats from their fathers, on their feet were felt boots, and they were passing around a bottle of moonshine. When it was empty, one of them slipped into the woodpile.

The man and the girl walked back to the shop. Two tractors were parked in the shop’s parking area. One of them had a cab built of rough boards with a windshield made of an old screened house window. The other had loose caterpillar tracks instead of wheels and a bicycle wheel where the steering wheel had been. The girl bought some oven-fresh cabbage rolls and a bottle of compote, the man a bottle of moonshine. They sat down on the steps of the shop next to a tousled white cat. Five lively little honey bees appeared from somewhere. They buzzed around the girl’s cabbage roll in the shrieking cold. When she waved them away, they flew off offended, except for one that tried to land on the branch of a rose bush and died before it touched down.

An orchestra came out from behind the shop. Sons and daughters of Siberia dressed in Pioneer uniforms marched in rhythm with a song and a little drum along the village road. The children’s puny bodies were covered in loose brown shirts blown by the cold wind. Their red Pioneer kerchiefs hung prettily against their brown shirts, and multicoloured, tas-selled hats shaded their open, innocent faces.

When the Pioneers had disappeared behind the school-house, the man and the girl went back to the car and continued their leisurely journey.

‘People used to think that God was nature, but nowadays you hear people say that God is the city. I’m in the latter camp. Some say that cities are cancerous cells. Bullshit! They say it’s just common sense that a dozen worms can’t eat off the same apple forever. There’s enough nature here to last forever. It’s free, it’ll go on forever. Our supply of people is inexhaustible. We’ll never run out of the masses. In the fifties, in the village of Suhoblinova, a machine-station brigadier once told me that freedom is open spaces you can walk through your whole life long, breathing the open air, filling your chest full of the breeze, feeling the endlessness of space over your head. Maybe it is. Maybe not.’

Between the hillsides wound the broad, ice-trapped, sunlit Ob River. Long, stiff, frosty grasses peeped out from between piles of snow on its banks to greet the travellers. The river wound faithfully beside them, sleeping under a thick crust of ice. They stopped often, merely out of curiosity or when the motor started to smoke.

They walked for a while on the mighty river’s frozen sandbanks. The cold dry reeds rustled coarsely. The sobbing north wind carried sharp, powdery snow. The man stopped to listen to the silence.

‘If some yellow-eyed wolves pop out from somewhere over there we should listen to them and answer, We’re doing fine, thank you, brothers.’

There was a small current in the water near the shore. Bits of ice floated in the swirl of water. Farther off, a boat covered in the snow’s deep winter dream and a birch bark hut were tumbled into the land’s embrace, hibernating. Two male capercaillies crouched side by side beyond a row of winterkilled rowan trees, a few crows glided across a sky promising snow. To the north of the birds, a strange black space opened up. The man wanted to go there, to the middle of the fields of snow gnawed by early spring mists. The wind whistled over the white expanse where verdant grass grew in summer. The sun blazed orange, like a glowing ember. The dazzling snow stung their eyes. Under its icy, knife-sharp crust the snow was so fluffy, dry and soft that they sank deep with each step, up to their knees, then their thighs, then their hips, and finally as high as their navels. As they came to a clearing there was less and less snow until it turned to a smear of clay that clung to their boots.

They soon reached their destination. It was a patch of asphalt, its surface warm. The naphtha scent of the tarmac smelled like the hot summer streets of Moscow. The man sized up the spot enthusiastically.

‘A space ship landed here. You can tell from the crater shape. There are landing sites like this all over Siberia, especially in Kolyma. There’s about a dozen stations here where scientists study UFOs and outer space.’

As they waded sweating through the deep snow back to the road, the throb of IL-14 engines roared overhead. Farther away, at the edge of the expanse of snow huddled a lone, grey, wooden house. A birch bark Ostyak yurt had been built in front of it. The girl wanted to go there.

‘The Ostyaks live like wild animals,’ he warned her. ‘They live poorly. Nothing works. They’re a rotten people. Crooked. Liars. Every geezer you meet’s named Ivan.’

They walked along a little snow path and into the drift-encircled yard. Dogs ran out to meet them, their tails wagging. The snow had been trodden away in front of the porch; they could stand there without sinking to their hips. The roof of the house was sagging, the chimney half collapsed. They stood in the brisk air as if waiting for the inhabitants to come out, then the girl climbed the rotted steps to the door and knocked. Nothing happened. They tried the door – it was unlocked. The man was turning to go back to the car when a fearless Ostyak woman with beautiful features appeared at the door and gestured something to the girl.

‘She’s deaf,’ the man said in a weary voice.

The girl gestured towards the skilfully built yurt and then pointed to her eyes. The Ostyak woman laughed silently and nodded. She put on a large pair of rubber boots and came out of the house to escort the girl to the yurt, smiling shyly. The cold wind swept over the frozen dirt floor of the yurt. The quickening light of spring made its way in through the yurt’s open door. It served as a fishing shed. Rotting, crumbling net staves, fish traps woven from bast, a small rusted milk separator and a lidless box made of planed birch full of mouldy grain.

As the girl stepped back outside, the man pulled the car up next to the yurt.

‘A filthy bunch, arms half a metre long and bodies a metre, and shapeless,’ he snorted, turning the car back towards the highway. ‘That whore right there’d be in her element hunting rabbits. They all ought to be forced to be normal Russians, without sparing the torture, if that’s what it takes. What they need is a father’s iron hand!’

Silence pressed heavy on the car for a moment.

In the afternoon, when the disc of sun hung over the roofs of the highest houses, they reached the godforsaken town of Tomsk. The man drove up and down the unploughed, truck-rutted streets. The sun was fleeing purple into the far west, to the north the bashful, rose-red evening blush held still for a moment as a gritty yellow snow began to fall. The north wind battered the sides of the car. The man stopped in front of a beer house on the outskirts and left the engine running.

The girl stretched her legs in the back seat. The engine chugged and sputtered tiredly, sometimes screeching and lurching as if it were having a heart attack. The chassis shuddered, the springs squeaked. Exhaust seeped into the car and made her cough. She turned off the engine. Soon it was so cold in the car that she got out.

The door to the beer house was in constant use. An endless stream of thick-soled felt boots came and went.

When the man got back to the car reeking of yeast it was the wee hours of the morning.

‘I got caught up in talking with a kid in there. One of those Samoyeds from the Taimyr district. A genuine drinking spirit.’

The wind had changed to the south and had a spring-like tune. Clumps of snow slid from the roofs of the houses and thudded onto the shovelled pavements. The man passed out in the front passenger seat with a bottle of vodka in his hand. The girl turned the ignition key. The engine grumbled angrily and died. She turned it again – it howled for a moment. She imitated the man, coaxing the engine for a long time with gentle words, then turned the key again. It squawked pathetically, but didn’t die. She let it run, praising it at length before she gave it some petrol and somehow got it to move forward.

She drove Soviet style, with only the parking lights on as she moved through a city slashed with morning shimmer. A red Lada Combi stood empty at the edge of a bridge. The driver’s-side door hung open obscenely, the flickering tail-lights blinking at the sky. The night’s last stars trailed around the rising sun and the wind-knocked lampposts went out one by one. The girl looked at the pink blocks of flats, their narrow, loose-hanging storm windows dragged back and forth by the strong southern breeze.

The car bounced up and down over Tomsk’s narrow streets. She stopped at intersections and looked into street-corner mirrors that warped and broke up the peaceful cityscape. The man dozed, drooped, started awake, drank some more vodka and perked up. The girl looked for a hotel but didn’t find one. She finally parked at a bus stop. The man got out of the car and strode over to the queue of quietly waiting, sullen Soviet citizens.

‘Well, my girl, first go left, then veer straight ahead like a civilised person, and finally swing in just past that dust-covered, windowless industrial complex,’ he said when he got back to the car.

The factories, workshops, and warehouses of the industrial complex were half-buried in snow; only the branching rails of the complex’s own freight yard glimmered in the night. Behind it huddled a small, faded log house eaten by the earth. A yard light hung from a dangling wire, its bulb broken.

‘Here it is – our hotel. Stop the car. The old biddy who lives in this dump puts travellers up for the night.’

They walked lazily arm in arm up the steps. The murk of the winter morning floated around the cabin. Next to the door hung five broken latches; the door had no handle. The girl pried it open. They were greeted in the dark entryway by a buzzing electricity meter attached to the door frame. A balalaika as big as a wardrobe nestled in the corner.

The speciality hotel was run by a dried-up old woman wearing three wool coats and two long thick brightly coloured skirts. She had a wart on her cheek with a little spike growing out of it. She lived with her three adult working sons, all of them sleeping in the kitchen so that she could rent the other two rooms to travellers.

‘We need to get some sleep, granny dear,’ the man said, his voice drained of all energy.

‘What kind of talk is that? You’ll have plenty of time to sleep in your grave. First tea, then maybe some rest.’

A piece of worn vinyl lay over the sticky wood floor of the kitchen. The floorboards cracked and squeaked. The walls were slanted, with black electrical cords meandering across them like leeches. The colour portrait of Stalin in the icon niche hung crooked and under it was an old icon of Saint Nikolai. The shelves of the doorless pantry sagged with canned and dried foods. The space between the windowpanes was crammed full of perishable food. A large enamel tub sighed in the darkest corner of the kitchen, full of pickled cabbage flavoured with lingonberries. Just outside the window was what seemed to be a vegetable garden, sleeping under piles of ashes tossed among the snowdrifts.

The old woman offered them some cabbage soup, buckwheat porridge, tea, jam, and fish pies. She had a pretty, cracked, tea set. She polished the large spoons by spitting on each one and wiping it on her clean flowered apron. The girl dozed, lost in her own thoughts. The man wiped the sweat of the beginnings of a hangover from his brow. His head fell with a clunk onto the tabletop and he started to snore. The old woman set out a cabbage pie tasting strongly of caraway and poured the girl a second cup of tepid tea nearly indistinguishable from warm water. She drank it in small, wary sips.

‘When I was a little girl my father sold me for a bottle of vodka to a wrinkled old Russian man. The old geezer dragged me to this place, his house, and how I cried. As soon as he had a chance he knocked me up, but luckily he died before his son was born. So this house was left to his blind sister, me and the boy. The three of us lived quite well together. Then the blind girl died and it was just me and my son, until one mosquitoey summer day when a Samoyed walked in the door. He had beaten his old lady till she went crazy, now it was my turn. Soon enough I had another son. We lived well for a while. Just a little while.’

The old woman got up and popped over to a cupboard, took out a half-drunk bottle of vodka, and sloshed a shot into her teacup.

‘He was a keen hunter but he drank up all his money. The boys and I were living on the edge of starvation. One Easter he went out on some errand and never came back. His younger brother brought me the news about his death: he’d been in a drunken fight and got a knife in his belly. The brother stayed here to live. A good man. I had three daughters and they all died. Then this brother fell in the well there next to the house and drowned. I got on as a cleaner at the factory and my life was starting to work out. As an old woman I had another son. He’s out there on the river with his brothers.’

There was the sound of a mouse from behind the pantry.

‘I’m so contented living in my own house, even though I’ve hated this Russian dump all my life.’

She got up, fetched some hardbread from the pantry, arranged it prettily on a flowered porcelain plate, and set it in front of the girl.

‘The only thing I miss is the tundra.’

When the man woke up he snarled, ‘The old biddy’s talking pure nonsense, thinks she’s some Pushkin.’

The girl’s room was small, dark and dreary. The stink of ancient bedding had settled in to live there, an old Gobellin tapestry rasped against the mould-streaked wallpaper. A hot, glowing stove filled the room, but the corners of the outer walls were nevertheless covered with a thick frost and there was clear ice along the edges of the floor.

She lay on the straw mattress between two clean starched sheets. The smooth coolness of the sheets soothed her. The sun rose silently and the stars vanished from the dusty blue sky. A mouse gnawed and scratched behind the wallpaper. She fell asleep.

She woke to a cat’s yawn. It had appeared next to her pillow and was staring at her without blinking. She stroked the old cat’s shining coat and listened to the crackle of the frost in the corners, the clatter of the samovar, the old woman’s clomping footsteps. For a moment she watched the dust float motionless against the light, then jumped out of bed in a panic and peeped out of the window into the frail morning. She’d slept through a whole day.

She picked up the cat. It opened its toothless mouth to mew, but didn’t manage to get any sound out. She felt a great sadness.

She’d met Mitka at a Melodiya shop when she was in her third year of studies. He was misshapen, a stooped, four-eyed thing with a shovel beard on his chin. He had thick, short, coal-black hair and eyes that blinked as if the light were a particular strain on them. They had gone to a juice bar, talked for many hours and agreed to meet again. Mitka had liked her ice-blue eyes and thoughtless laugh. Several weeks later he invited her to his apartment. His window looked out towards a small park. She had admired the smoky mist, the city wrapped in milky fog, the pink winter sky. Mitka said he’d just turned seventeen. He had a broad old iron bed with a hard horsehair mattress, a striped linen sheet, and a white duvet with clinking bone buttons. She stayed the night. Then came other nights, other days, all the same, filled with a bustle of light and shadow.

The old woman set the table with a bowl of buckwheat porridge, a pot of steaming fatty borscht, and in front of the man a glass dish of smetana and a handsome bottle of vodka. The girl drank tea, the old woman chai. The man wiped sweat from his brow, gobbling up the smetana and, belching with satisfaction, poured another glass of vodka.

‘Let’s drink to the women of the world. A toast to the wisdom of the old, the intelligence of the heart, and the beauty of the young, to your friendship, dear granny, and to the silver-sided gudgeon!’

After the toast, the man wolfed down some black bread he’d spread with mustard, salt and pepper. He filled his vodka glass and stood up for a moment.

‘Many a citizen has rushed ahead only to end up waiting in some awful place, so let’s not rush. Let’s enjoy each other’s warmth, enjoy this moment.’

When it was time to leave, the man fished a slim Chinese flashlight and twenty-five roubles out of his pocket and handed them to the old woman. She nodded, satisfied, and followed them to the door. The man and the girl stepped out of the steamy hot kitchen into a fresh, frosty morning that lashed their faces like a whip.

The man wrestled the wheel of the Pobeda with heavy hands. On a small straight stretch his head knocked against the steering wheel. The girl suggested that she drive.

Gradually the belly-down, snow-filled row by row of fields changed to the notched beam by beam of a village and the village to a slushy suburb, log houses and prefab highrises side by side. The gardens and potato patches of the log houses stretched as far as the city in one direction and back to the forests and fields in the other. Then the suburb changed street by street into the muddy built-up city of Novosibirsk.

Carp were hung to dry outside the highrise windows. Grey pigeons padded along the sills, back from their winter vacations.

The man gulped back his hangover, which the glasses of vodka hadn’t managed to displace. He was shaking all over, his adam’s apple shuddering.

‘If I could just have a drink from a pickle jar, everything would be all right. Soothe my heart.’

His face was red and he looked so grave that the girl couldn’t bear it and turned her head away.

He asked her to stop at a corner where a blue tanker truck was parked.

‘I’m feeling so awful that I have to stop here and get out.’

He jumped quickly out of the car, took an empty ten-litre can out of the trunk, and went to fill it from the truck container, which had the word KVAS painted in pretty black letters on its side. When he came back to the car with the can under his arm he was humming cheerfully.

‘Toothache.’

He sipped straight from the can, a hopeful look on his face. The sweet smell of kvas pervaded the whole car.

‘No more toothache.’

A Gagarin smile spread across his face.

‘When I fell in love with Katinka, I didn’t have a single kopeck. I’d been flat broke for months, but life still had flavour, and I had plenty of food, pussy and vodka. Then there Katinka was, at the bread-shop door, and I was so drunk that I asked her to come and see me. That’s when the trouble started. Now I was a fellow who had a lady visitor coming, or at least some sort of whore, a fellow who didn’t have any money for bubliks or tea or champagne. So I rolled up my sleeves and got humming. First I asked my next-door neighbour Kolya if he’d loan me five roubles. All he had was three and he needed them himself, he honked. I tripped over to the corner room, to Vovka’s place, maybe he had a rouble or two, but the old boozer was completely broke. I went downstairs to where Sergei lived and begged him for a fiver. I can give you a rouble, he said. So on I went, from door to door. Went through all my friends and enemies, and the next week I had a pile of it, twenty-six roubles and three kopecks. I could feel it all the way down to my cock. Katinka came worming her way in. I offered her champagne and I drank a few bottles of vodka. Everything was set. When it was time to go to bed, I kidded around, shy, undemanding. I got out the camp-bed and made myself a little nest, offered Katinka my bed. And then what happened? I stretched out, my head full of nothing but pussy, and Katinka grabs hold of my cock so hard the camp-bed went crashing. She glues her sweaty cunt to my dick and I let it go. And just as the whole thing’s almost over she coughs up something about marriage. There I am in an ecstasy of cunt, and I say, Why not?’

He rubbed a finger over his swollen lips.

‘That’s not what happened. But it could have.’

They found the crooked-nosed owner of the Pobeda from a phone number kiosk squeezed between two co-op kiosks. The old man was wrapped in a frayed cotton jacket and had arms so long that they reached to his knees. The two men spoke for a moment in murmurs, then he invited them to eat.

They walked shivering to a local communal cafeteria. A sign drooped from the door: THIS FACILITY IS CLOSED. They went inside.

A greasy smell drifted from the industrial-looking kitchen. The dining room was wide and high and its utilitarian furniture was functionally arranged. There were long tables in front of the windows with long benches along either side. They went to the end of the queue that had formed at the food counter. On the main wall of the dining room was a fair reproduction of Ilya Repin’s painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed. At the place on the painting where the angry letter is being written someone had used a ball-point pen to scrawl the words: To Stalin. A fan rattled against the back wall; under it was the carcass of a sofa covered in flowered oilcloth.

The girl chose a glass of thick tomato juice and garlic herring from the case and black bread from the counter. She scooped out a bowl of thin peasant stew with sharp bits of bone floating in it from a large pot, carried it to a table on a slimy tray, sat down and tasted the herring, but it was so heavily salted that she left it uneaten. The man slurped his soup with elaborate relish, the crooked-nosed man ate his buckwheat porridge and beets unobtrusively. When they’d finished eating, the crooked-nosed man scratched his bald head doubtfully.

‘As our district professional council representative used to say in times like this, when a gypsy dreams about a pudding, he doesn’t have a spoon, so he goes to bed with a spoon in his hand, and then the pudding’s gone.’

The girl’s travelling companion gave a bored sigh.

‘By which he only meant that history dictates that happiness will eventually come to us either way.’

Her companion spat lazily on the floor.

‘Women are afraid of snakes, Finns are afraid of Russians, Russians are afraid of Jews, and Jews…’

Her companion pressed his lips together scornfully, got up from the table, and walked calmly out of the cafeteria with a slight bounce in his step.

‘That fellow’s a fast talker. A born flesh peddler,’ the crooked-nosed man said, startled and frightened. Then he gave a long, resigned sigh. ‘If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have given him my car.’

The girl handed twenty-five of her companion’s roubles to the crooked-nosed man. He nodded gratefully and quickly slipped the banknotes into the pocket of his quilt jacket. She got up and hurried out.

The light from a CCCP sign perched on the roof of a government building on the main street sliced through the darkness of the night. The man and the girl trudged to the station, gloomy and exhausted. It wasn’t until she heard the whistle of the engines and saw the station yard with its old engines lying forever dead that her mood lightened. The familiar train, the sight of the familiar snouts of stray dogs the size of foals with their tangled coats cheered the man up as well. They stopped at the platform and listened to the train of the tsars snuffling contentedly on its tracks. As they stepped into the compartment the man whistled and sang, ‘Oh Russian land! Forget your lost glory, your flag torn… How does it go again?… Never mind!’

He watched her movements. He had a broad, malicious grin on his face.

‘Thinking about what just happened? That was a rotten-lunged unscrupulous Jewish magpie. I won’t sit at the same table with a Jew because the Jews killed the Virgin Mary.’

His words made her heart knock in her chest. She counted in her mind: one, two, three… nine… twelve… until she calmed herself. The engine gave a howl and the train jerked into motion.

The plastic speakers start to play Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and Novosibirsk is left behind. The noise of suburbs under construction, the smooth, sunny sky. Novosibirsk, the stench of rotting steel pushing in through the open compartment windows, left behind. The faint scent of pale carnations, the sturdy aroma of garlic and the acrid stink of the sweat of forced labour, left behind. Novosibirsk, mechanics, miners, industrial city of lost dreams watched over by sooty, modern, weather-maimed suburbs, the squalid carcasses of thousands of prefab buildings are left behind. The creaking gates, the lights of blind factories sweating in forty-below weather, the corpses of tortured cats near the hotel, the felt boots and brown wool trousers, the consumer cooperatives, the exhausted land, Novosibirsk is left behind. And the industrial area changes to a suburb eaten away by air pollution. Light, bright light, and the suburb changes to something else, light, darkness, a goods train rushing past, long as the sleepless night, and light, the light of a bright Siberian sky, and housing schemes, suburbs, housing schemes, in ever-thicker clusters – this is still Novosibirsk. Trucks on an unmade road, a horse and a hayrack, the Siberian taiga with a red mist hovering over it. The forest rushing wildly past, solitary, a nineteen-storey building surrounded by ravaged fields under drifts of snow. Cascading forest. This is no longer Novosibirsk. A hill, a valley, a thicket. The train shoots towards the unknown tundra and Novosibirsk collapses in a heap of stones in the distance. The train dives into nature, throbs across the snowy, empty land.