Compartment No 6 (8 page)

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.

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; hydro-electric 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.'