Compartment No. 6

7

THE MORNING LIGHT WOKE HER. The man handed her a glass of tea, put a large lump of sugar in his mouth and stirred his tea with the paper-light aluminium spoon, blowing on it for a long time before taking a slurp. She looked at the landscape outside the window for a moment. There was a little log cabin painted blue, sheltered by a lone rowan tree. In front of it stood an old man with an iron bar in his hand.

‘I belong to the world socialist camp. You don’t. Guys like me have been in all the camps: Pioneer camps, military camps, vacation camps, work camps. They sent me on a shovel crew when I was just a boy; I requisitioned a few cement mixers and carried them off with me. I knew very well that I’d get irons around my neck for it, but still… The worst part was before I got caught, waiting for it to happen. It was like being between Satan’s cogwheels. Then when the worst happens you just think, that’s life. You won’t die of hunger or dropsy. The thing I remember most about all of it is the revolting smell of rotten fish.’

The cold-dimmed dawn painted the ice on a snaking little stream golden yellow. A thick mist smoked among the thickets along the shore. The frosted limbs of the willows reached delicately towards the brightly tinted purple sky. A white-flanked deer ran out of the fog. Its little tail wagged.

‘My son is a born traitor. A boy ought to have heroes like the cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov or General Karbishev, the one the Nazis froze to death. But no. He has dreams of the Yazovists, wants to move to East Germany as soon as he can get enough dollars together from his stints as an errand boy to apply for a passport.’

The man seemed to collapse in a heap. A deep gloom settled over the train compartment.

‘I wouldn’t move to the other side if they paid me a thousand dollars. It’d be just like moving a bird from one cage to another. I love this country. America is a God-forsaken dump.’

The sun sat balanced atop the airy forest landscape. The gloom in the compartment dispersed.

‘At home in Moscow I read the newspaper out loud to Katinka and in Ulan Bator I read it to my workmates. Is it all right if I read? It’s a comfort to me. However slight.’

She nodded.

‘Pile-up on Moscow ring road – five dead and twenty injured; coal mine explosion in Ukraine – three hundred dead; oil rig failure in Chelyabinsk – fifteen hundred reindeer drowned in oil; funicular crumbles in Georgia – thirty-four people dead; another sunk submarine in the Arctic Ocean – seventy-one sailors dead; boiler explosion in an old folks’ home – one hundred and twenty-seven dead; radiator rupture in a kindergarten – forty-four children sprayed with boiling water; passenger boat sunk in the Black Sea – two hundred and six passengers drowned; chemical plant cancels work contract – an entire town wiped off the map; hydroelectric dam collapses in Karelia – thirteen villages underwater and seven hundred people drowned; if a power plant were to break down, a million people would die of radiation sickness.’

He paused and waited.

Straightened his back, turned the page, and took a breath.

‘Soviet pilots lost five cruise missiles on a test flight over Sahkalin Island. That’s what it actually says here.’

He flung the paper under his bed and examined the window frame for a long time.

‘I was in school, maybe in the sixth year. I had a classmate named Grigor Mityakovich Kozinichev. And then there was this talentless teacher, Yarek Koncharov Ust-Kut. Comrade Ust-Kut.’ He burst out laughing. ‘What kind of a name is that? We laughed about it even then. For some reason this Comrade Ust-Kut hated Grigor. Tormented him almost every day. Sent him to the front of the class, cuffed his ears and face, yelled at him, called him stupid. We’d think, Not again! And then he would do it again. But one day Grigor grabbed the pointer and swung it at Comrade Ust-Kut’s face, then threw it on the floor and ran out of the door. This caused quite an uproar. The janitor came in, the principal and the other teachers all agog. The stupid prick just had a little scratch next to his nose and the lesson continued. Then, just before the minute hand clicked to breaktime, the door opened and there stood Grigor Mityakovich Kozinichev in the doorway, and he had a real gun in his hand. He aimed it at Comrade Ust-Kut, and when the comrade realised what was happening, he started to squeal like a pig. Then Grigor shot him. The blood flowed and the creep died. Grigor could very well have shot me or any prick there who’d been bullying him the whole year. But no. He spared us. Back then I didn’t understand yet that the only kind of people you should kill are the ones who are afraid of death. Otherwise you’re just doing them a favour.’

The train crawled forward, as if asking pardon. The sun rose whole in the milk-white sky and lit up the pure white snow. It continued proud for several hours, then was covered by a black darkness for a moment. Siberia disappeared outside the window, then slipped back before anyone could even notice. A wall of forest grew, black and frightening, right next to the tracks. When it had finished, a broad view opened up as far as the river. On the open sea of snow were three houses with a smoke sauna in front of them gushing black smoke. Outside the sauna, surrounded by a cloud of steam, stood a fat naked woman, red and barefoot. The man offered the girl some Pushkin chocolate. It was dark and peppery.

He glanced out of the window and caught a glimpse of the woman.

‘Weak design, but well sewn together.’

The girl smudged and scribbled for a long time before she drew the Siberian village in its endless landscape. The man stared at her, his mouth slightly open.

‘This fellow named Kolya had a joke he used to tell: Guys like us in the army grow iron jaws, iron cheekbones, and an iron will. But the welds between them are such crap that when we get back to civilian life the whole contraption falls apart until the only thing that’ll help is a metre and a half of dirt.’

He broke into such a chuckle at this that he had to wipe his eyes with his sleeve. He knelt on the floor, picked the torn newspaper up from under his bunk, folded it neatly, and slipped it under his mattress.

‘This other fellow named Kolya whose hopes hadn’t come to fruition painted a red sign with white lettering that asked: What’s taking our happy future so long? He took the sign with him and stood on Red Square. He managed to stand there for about three minutes before the militia showed up and took him away. They slapped a twenty-six-year sentence on him, the same time our forefathers spent in the army. And he lost his citizenship rights for five years. What’s taking our happy future so long! Even the pigeons in Red Square laughed at that.’

A fire-red afternoon sun spread over the wind-whipped sky. Behind it dripped vast sheets of sleet. The girl rummaged in her knapsack, the man set the table for dinner. They ate slowly and silently, drinking well-steeped tea – black, Indian Elephant tea she’d bought at the foreign exchange shop. After the meal the man would have liked to talk but she wanted to be quiet. He took his knife out from under his pillow and started to scratch the back of his ear with it. She rested with her eyes closed. And that’s how they travelled that whole long twilit evening, each of them sleeping and waking in their own time. She was with Mitka in his room. A Jefferson Airplane song wobbled out from the little blue record player, Mitka flipped through an encyclopaedia from the early part of the century, she lounged on the bed and copied out ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Zahar was in the kitchen humming an old Russian romance and peeling potatoes, and Irina was talking very quietly with Julia in the living room.

The swampy landscape silently turned to flat, level land – broken ruins of foundations buried under Siberian snow, caved-in wells, nest boxes hanging from birch trunks, villages where the dead eyes of abandoned houses stared back at the train. A caterpillar-tracked truck extinguished in a pile of snow, a horse wading through a field, its back sagging like an old sofa, pulling a feed rack behind it with two buzzards balanced there instead of hay, stiff with cold, their legs tied together.

‘My friend, do you know what today is? It’s Cosmonautics Day. And that’s not all. Today is both Cosmonautics Day and the day that our great leader strode into heaven. The Fifth of April. All of us remember that it was the Fifth of April 1953… no wait, it was the Fifth of March… when Generalissimo Josif Vissarionovich Stalin’s valiant heart made such a fierce protest that only hours later the funerary machine roared into motion. Josif Vissarionovich, that great engineer on the train of history, was a man of such terrible and steely wisdom that he still terrifies. Let’s celebrate Stalin’s death, my girl, even if we are a month late.’

He started furiously rummaging in his bag, digging around and trying to calm himself.

‘It must be here somewhere, it must be. It’s a bottle of vodka, not a needle, and we’re not in a haystack.’

He didn’t find the bottle in his bag. It was under his mattress.

He splashed a generous shot into both tea glasses, pushed her glass in front of her, and lifted his own.

‘Let’s drink to cosmonautics.’

He filled his glass again.

‘Another toast, to the wonderful young woman in our compartment, and to all the other mummified women of Finland. To beauty.’

He filled his glass again and put an official Soviet look on his face.

‘This next toast is to that rabble-rouser, that great figure of world history, the Soviet Union’s great departed leader, the iron papa, the bank robber of Tblisi, the Georgian Jew and the king of the cut-throats, Josif Vissarionovich Stalin.’

He tipped his glass and emptied it, took a bite of black bread, and filled his glass again.

‘Let’s make another toast. Let’s raise our glasses again to the Man of Steel. Thank you Josif Vissarionovich Stalin for making the Soviet Union a strong industrial superpower, for sustaining hope for a better tomorrow and a gradual lessening of human suffering. With a stick in the eye for those who remember the past, and in both eyes for those who forget it… And a toast to General Zhokov, the king of Berlin. Without him the Nazis would have turned Moscow into a lit-up artificial lake and purged the earth of Slavs and other unhygienic peoples, including the Finns.’

He tipped his glass, emptied it, and splashed in one more dribble of vodka.

‘The Jews poured poison in the Great Leader’s mouth, and although I hate the Jews, I’ll raise a toast to them for that beautiful gesture.’

He drank his glass to the bottom and tossed a weightless grin at the window.

‘I remember very well the day that butcher and punisher of the peasants died. I was with Petya in the third year. In school number five. There was no number one or number four. School number one had caved in in the middle of the school day and they stopped building number four before it was finished. One morning when we got to school, our teacher, Valentina Zaitseva, said that the father of all the people was sick. That information didn’t really touch a child’s heart. The next morning the teacher told us that the Generalissimo was lying unconscious and the doctors said there was very little hope for him. So what? We went on playing. On the third morning she sobbed and said that Papa was dead. Some bright mind asked what he had died of. She answered that when a person holds onto life too fiercely his breathing will stop and he’ll die of suffocation… I walked home with Petya, our arms around each other’s necks, the factory whistles howling like ships in distress, some of the men on the street crying, others smiling. When I got home there was something odd about my grandfather, something naked and strange. I looked at him for a long time before I realised that the southern whiskers were missing from his fat upper lip. Now a new life begins, he said, and gave us some bubliks. He was a Party member and one of his favourite sayings was that during Stalin’s time this country was the most dangerous, unhealthy place in the world for a communist to live.’

He rubbed his chin for a moment. ‘There are thousands and thousands of truths. Every fellow has his own. How many times have I cursed this country, but where would I be without it? I love this country.’

The acrid smell of kerosene floated through the compartment. It came from the full vodka glass trembling on the table in rhythm to the rumble of the train. The girl pushed it aside. The man followed the jiggling glass with his eyes.

‘Foreigner, you offend me deeply when you don’t drink with me.’

He bit off a piece of pickle and stared at her with a cutting look in his eyes. She scowled at him and turned her gaze towards the floor.

‘My mother always gave me vodka when I was sick. I was used to the taste of vodka when I was still a baby. I don’t drink because I’m unhappy or because I want to be even more unhappy. I drink because the serpent inside me is shouting for more vodka.’

They sat in thought, not looking at each other. The girl thought about her father and the day she told him she was going to study in Moscow. He had looked at her for a long time with a frightened expression on his face, and then a tear had slid down his cheek. He got blind drunk, barricaded himself in his Lada, and insisted she let him take her to the station.

‘I’ve been sitting here thinking, I wonder if God is Russian. If he is, then that would mean Jesus was Russian, too, because he’s God’s son. And what about Mary? How do you count her? Maybe there weren’t really any Russians before Ivan the Terrible. But when he took up the sabre, heads started to roll. The people were displaced, exiled, destroyed. It’s God’s commandment, roared Uncle Ivan. He backed everything up with God, the fox. He even established the old-time KGB to take care of his purges. Then came Peter the Great who wanted to make us Europeans and built St Petersburg with slave labour. To please you Finns! He licked your arses. A pansy. After that came the German princess, Catherine the Great. That hag had a cunt as big as a wash tub, made Potemkin fuck her, ’cause she heard he was hung like an aubergine. There’s no triumph of reason in Russian history. And what about Nicholas the First? Gave every slob a couple of hundred lashes, and a thousand runs through the gauntlet just to be on the safe side. A lot of them didn’t live through that hell. We’ve always known the noble art of torture.’

He pressed his head against the cold glass of the window and shut his eyes. She thought for a moment that he’d fallen asleep, but he soon opened them again. A slash of orange sky flashed in the window. He looked at her tenderly.

‘It’s time, high time, Ivan the Terrible said, and gave the order to build the Trans-Siberian railway. Or was that Alexander the Second? Without this damned railway I could be lying around in Moscow with my honeybun in my arms. They made the railway like this to torture the poor. It could head straight to its destination in one go, but no, they have to take a piss at every godforsaken village and there are plenty of them in the Soviet countries. But on the other hand, what do I care? It could be worse. After all, we have plenty of time.’

He got up from the bed with a look of apathy on his face. He groaned, shyly put on some lighter clothes, did a couple of drunken calisthenics, sat down on the edge of the bed, and stared at the floor.

‘I work for the Mongols, bringing some good to a country where my people don’t live. It’s not snow that falls in Mongolia, it’s gravel. There are no thick forests there like we have, not a single mushroom or berry. Last year this thing happened on the job site that made every man there shit his pants. There was a comrade – let’s call him Kolya. He was a shithead, but one of us. And then a herd of those mongoloids came to the site and claimed that Kolya had knifed one of them. We told ’em, Get out of here, Russians don’t knife people. When we got to the site the next morning there was a wooden cross at the gate stuck into the ground the wrong way. That was neither here nor there, but on that cross hung Kolya, with his head hanging down. They had crucified him and poured hot tin down his throat. That’s the kind of friends those Mongols are. Their souls are as dirty as ours, though not as sorrowful.’

The train switched gears with a jerk and stopped as if it had hit a wall. They were in Achinsk. Arisa shouted that the train would be stopping for two hours. The man didn’t want to get off – the fresh air would just clear his head.

The girl jumped onto the platform and headed into a town dozing through its evening chores. She walked along the lifeless boulevard towards the town centre. A heavy sleet was falling. The city was dim and shapeless, damp, silver-grey, the white moon peeping out from a straggling carpet of curly clouds that hung over the colourful houses. She stopped to look in a delicatessen display window. It was like something by Rodchenko, the packages of vermicelli lunging for the sky like lightning. She felt something warm on her foot. A small stray dog was peeing on her shoe.

The dog looked at her with sweet button eyes and barked, revealing a gold tooth. It took a few steps, then stopped and stared at her. She could see that it wanted her to follow.

They walked along the deserted street. She couldn’t hear the sound of her own footsteps though the sleet was quickly changing to a snowfall that made its way lazily along Petrovskiy Boulevard, turned into a narrow side street, lost its strength as it reached a corner bread shop, and dried up. The cold tightened around her. The dog stopped and stood at a cellar window. The window opened and she heard a raspy voice.

‘How many?’

She thought for a moment.

‘You want two? Give Sharik three roubles.’

She took a banknote out of her pocket and, after a moment’s hesitation, handed it to the dog. The dog snapped the note up in its mouth and slipped quickly in through the window. A moment later two unlabelled liquor bottles and a quarter-rouble coin appeared on the windowsill. She picked them up, thanked the empty space, and walked along the clinking, snowy asphalt back to the train. When she got there, she handed the bottles to her startled companion.

He put the bottles into a special vodka compartment in his bag, humming, and went to sleep. When he’d slept off the worst of his blind drunk, he started to arrange some supper on the table.

After they’d enjoyed a long, lazy meal, he opened the compartment door.

‘Let the world in.’

He rubbed his temples and pinched his earlobes. Though she was tired, the girl worked on a sketch of the Siberian colonial town.

He wanted to see the drawing. He looked at it for a long time.

‘This is nothing,’ he said, tossing it back to her. ‘You don’t have any imagination, my girl. First you should draw a little river and then a pretty little bridge going over it. Over the bridge, on the other side of the river, you should draw a path that disappears into the tall grass, then a meadow beyond that, and then a forest. Along the edge of the forest you draw the glowing embers of a spent campfire. And last of all you streak the horizon with the last rays of sunset. That’s the kind of picture I could put up on the barracks wall.’