They got off the bus at the station square. The wind blew a tattered black burlap sack around the statue of Lenin. They trudged tiredly to a ramshackle ice cream stand in a corner of the station with a sign on the door that read Under refurbishment.
The bar smelled of Lysol. Puddles of milk lolled over the beautifully tiled floor; the leaking milk cartons lay in the corner. The station was crammed with people. The man drank a glass of vodka, wolfed down a pie, and said he was going to get on the train.
The girl ordered a mayonnaise salad and a dish of ice cream topped with chocolate-covered plums and two kinds of biscuits.
The mayonnaise salad was just mayonnaise, the biscuits stuck out of the ice cream like stalks of hay. She looked at the asters on the windowsill, sad autumn flowers sitting tired in a vase without water. The lower sky covered itself in dark lumps of cloud, the higher part in sea-blue fluff. A tram swished heavily past.
She ate her ice cream unhurriedly. The biscuits she left on the edge of the plate.
The man rubbed his knees as she stepped into the compartment. A Tchaikovsky romance played from the beige plastic speakers.
Omsk is left behind. A closed city. Weary old, good old Omsk, sucked dry by the taiga, abandoned by youth. The prison where the young outlaw Dostoyevsky lay dying is left behind. The lifeless copy of a statue of Dostoyevsky in manhood is left behind. The city of Kolchak’s White Guards is left behind. This is still Omsk: the lines outside the shoe shop, the tired land, the row of timber dachas faded grey. A lonely nineteen-storey building in the middle of a field, a five-hundred-kilometre oil pipeline, the yellow flames and black smoke from the oil rigs. Forest, groves of larch and birch, forest – these are no longer Omsk. A house collapsed under the snow. The train throbs across the snowy, empty land. Everything is in motion – snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people, thoughts.
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.