Several passengers were standing in the corridor. A freight train was going past in the other di-rection, causing their train to rock. The little station building flashed like a turquoise dot in a vast universe. A splash of dirt had been thrown against the corridor window during the night and a pale light filtered through it. The birches grew sparse, the train quieted its speed, a rusted wreck of metal lay on the neighboring track, and soon the train was shooting into Kirov station. A sign along the track said that Moscow was about a thousand kilometers away.
The door of the car was open. She stood in the doorway. A few small snowflakes drifted in the still, dry, cold of the day. A decrepit local train twitched restlessly at the next platform like it was in the grip of a seizure. People pushed their way out of its innards and desperately gulped the fresh air. The station bell rang once, then twice. She had a glimpse of the black plastic bill of the conductor’s cap before Arisa came to close the door.
“What are you standing there for? Do you want to get off in Kirov? They’d horsewhip you here. Get back into your cabin! You don’t have a citizen’s passport, or even a permanent ad-dress. Stupid foreigners don’t understand anything, sticking their noses where they’re not want-ed! They foist all the unlucky ones on me. Do you even know who Kirov was?”
The girl tottered slowly back down the corridor of the moving train and looked at the swaying town outside the window. A pack of stray dogs was fighting in front of a baroque administration building and a young man was hitting them with a broken broomstick. She went to the car host-ess’s cabin to buy some tea. Arisa was sitting on the bed, all-powerful, looking at her pityingly. Georg Ots was singing in Russian on a small transistor radio.
“A person has to live,” Arisa said. “It’s the same for everyone. You either do it well or you do it poorly.”
She handed the girl two glasses of tea and three packets of cookies instead of two.
“You can handle anything, provided you have no choice. Now get back to you own cab-in!”
The man sat on his bed. He wore a plaid shirt open over his white button-up. Under the wrinkles of the white shirt peeped a sweaty, muscular belly. He picked up a small orange from the table and started to tear roughly at the peel. When he’d eaten the fruit he dug a disheveled newspaper out from under his bunk and blurted from behind it in an irritated tone:
“A person’s restless when they’re young. No patience. Always scurrying. Everything goes at its own pace. Time is just time.”
He wrinkled his brow and sighed.
“Like me for instance. You’re looking at an old duffer, a melancholy soul filled with a dull calm. A heart that doesn’t beat with feeling anymore, just out of sheer habit. No more pranks in him, not even any pain. Just boredom.”
The girl remembered her last night in Moscow, how she’d hurried from one place to another, dashed down the long stairway into the metro and taken the red line to the Lenin library, run across the tiled floor of the museum-like station, through the maze of corridors lined with bronze statues and up the steep escalators to the blue line, rode it past Arbat, got off at the church-like station decorated with mosaics whose name she couldn’t remember now, realized she’d forgotten her purse, which contained her train tickets and vouchers, and turned back the way she came, jumped off one metro train and onto another, gone through the stations where she’d transferred lines, and to her great amazement, found her purse at the Lenin library stop – it was waiting for her in the metro inspector’s window.
The train braked and came to a stop. In a moment the engine gave a jerk and the train was mov-ing again. Another brake. Another stop. The engine dithered for a moment, whistled cheerfully, made up its mind, and moved. The wheels rang in momentary apology but soon the train was rattling ahead with purpose. The sun bounced up from beyond a field of snow, lit up the land and sky for a moment, then disappeared behind the boundless swampy landscape. The man examined the girl for a stingingly long time.
“So your spirit’s full of nothing but dreams? Well, go ahead and dream. Ivan the Fool fell asleep on the stove bench and had a moving dream about the stove and a table that filled itself with food, but this life that men wiser than me call a mere holding cell, is here and now. Death may come tomorrow and rip your balls off.”
His narrow face shone with self-satisfaction. He had a beautiful mouth, narrow lips and a small scar on his chin like Trotsky.
“Death can’t be nearly as bad as life.”
He closed his eyes and pressed his lips tightly together. Then he hummed.
“Don’t you fear death my girl, not as long as you’re alive, because when you’re alive it’s not here yet, and when you’re dead, it’s not here anymore.”
He hiccuped a little, shook his shoulders, and sat up straighter.
“I’d rather die than be afraid. If there’s anything you should be afraid of, it’s the Mongo-lians. They don’t even have names. They don’t do anything but eat, screw, sleep, and die. They have no morals of any kind. The human soul doesn’t mean a thing to them. But they do know how to destroy. You give a Mongolian a transistor radio and five minutes later you get back a pile of screws and wires and an empty case. Even though the Mongolians have treated us moral Russians terribly and crushed our spines, we’re still trying to help them. We’re bringing them up to the present. But they don’t understand anything. They screw their children and laugh right in our faces... Am I getting through to you? Look at the Soviet Union, a powerful country, and a great, old, very diverse population lives here. We’ve suffered through serfdom, the time of the tzars, and the revolution. We’ve built socialism and flown to the moon. What have you all done? Nothing! What do you have that’s better than us? Nothing!”
He smacked his fists on his knees and opened his mouth to say something, but was silent.
Next to the train, far above the wall of forest, an eagle glided by with a calf carcass in its claws. The cabin door fell open. The little lamps that glimmered yellowish along the edge of the floor buzzed; the corridor looked like an airport runway. The heating duct threw out a burning heat in the narrow space. The girl went into the corridor. There was a young couple there with a scrawny old woman the size of a child and a little girl in pigtails. The girl had a brown pioneer teddy bear under her arm and a clown doll in a tall hat that looked like a schizophrenic who’d been through a bad trip on her lap. The violet sun over a demure forest clearing slipped behind the snow-covered evergreens. In the dense depths of the forest little birds slept in their nests among the rocks, sinewy, white-coated hares in their burrows, and snoring bears in their hidden caves.
Arisa was making her rounds of the cabins and Sonechka, the younger car hostess in her over-sized uniform, followed after her. The girl tried to talk with Sonechka, but she was so shy that she turned her face away at once and disappeared after Arisa into the first cabin. It was an area restricted to the car staff where an angrily bubbling samovar as big as the wall steadily puffed and steamed day and night. The samovar held dozens of buckets of boiling water.
A paled sun revolved on the horizon. The dusky forest rose up muttering toward a cloud-embroidered, unsteady sky. The man appeared in the passageway, and the girl went into the cab-in, felt the rumble of the rails, and fell asleep.
When she woke up, he was looking at her with a very offended expression on his face. She smiled at him, thinking about how logical the whole thing was. She had left Moscow because now was the right time to realize her and Mitka’s shared dream of a train trip across Siberia, all the way to Mongolia. True, she was making the trip alone, but there was a simple reason for that.
The man had taken a worn deck of cards out of his bag and started to play solitaire.
“Georgians,” he said. “They’ve got legs like giraffes and they know how to sell them-selves to guys like me so well that you forget you paid for it. An Armenian’s history has beaten her down, made her a humble lesbian, a pleasant companion who won’t discipline her children. A Tatar only likes Tatars, a Chechen is a combination of an excellent baby machine and a drug dealer, the Dagestanis are small, thin, ugly, and smell of camphor and the foolishly proud Ukrainians are always plotting nationalist conspiracies in their horrible accents. You get to where you’re deaf to it. And then there’s the Balts. They cause all kinds of shit. It’s no secret. They’re too practical. They walk around with their mouths turned down, their eyes straight ahead.”
He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. The girl coughed wearily, but he didn’t take any notice of this indication of her thoughts.
“I’ve never screwed a Russian woman who was satisfied, not even for a minute. And this cock has pumped thousands of different colors of pussy.”
He stretched his thick hands out toward her. Long fingers grew from them, the fingernails flat and clean. They were horrible hands. His expression was at first one of nonchalance, then pure anger.
“But tell me, what’s someone like you doing on this train? Selling some cunt?”
The girl flinched, bleated miserably, grabbed her winter boot from under her bunk and threw it at him, then got up and went out into the corridor. The heel of the boot hit him right in the temple. Once outside, she calmed herself for a long time before going to Arisa to ask for a different cab-in.
Arisa listened to her request with her head to one side.
“We’ll see,” she said, in such an unhurried manner that the girl handed her a twenty-five ruble note.
Apparently Arisa didn’t feel it was a sufficient sum.
“It’s against our rules to change cabins. But perhaps I could do something to arrange it. It will be difficult, though.”
The girl slipped another bill of the same value into her hand – it was all she could part with.
Arisa glanced at the bill disdainfully.
“Getting around a rule like that is a tough job, in fact it’s dangerous for me personally. I could lose my position entirely or even end up in jail because of you. But perhaps it could be ar-ranged...”
The girl didn’t listen to the rest of what she had to say. She rushed back out into the corridor with a sob in her throat. She simply had to swallow her defeat and go back to the man, at least at night.
The train sped whining across the flat, floating landscape, under a sky frothy with winter clouds. The living forest beyond an open field tossed a flock of sparrows at the sky. She calmed herself by watching the black, starkly drawn shadow of the train on the bright snow.