Compartment No 6 (6 page)

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, redtrunked 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, tasselled hats shaded their open, innocent faces.

When the Pioneers had disappeared behind the schoolhouse, 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 sand-banks. 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 winter-killed 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.