‘This way, my girl! Come here! Not those rusted-out kopecks – I’m here in this beauty,’ the man called from the open window of the car.
The petrol-fumed warmth melted her frosty hair in a moment, but the floor of the car was cold. Her toes tingled. She took off her shoes and rubbed her frozen feet. The car smelled like burnt leather and old iron.
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, red-trunked 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.