She drove Soviet style, with only the parking lights on as she moved through a city slashed with morning shimmer. A red Lada Combi stood empty at the edge of a bridge. The driver’s-side door hung open obscenely, the flickering tail-lights blinking at the sky. The night’s last stars trailed around the rising sun and the wind-knocked lampposts went out one by one. The girl looked at the pink blocks of flats, their narrow, loose-hanging storm windows dragged back and forth by the strong southern breeze.
The car bounced up and down over Tomsk’s narrow streets. She stopped at intersections and looked into street-corner mirrors that warped and broke up the peaceful cityscape. The man dozed, drooped, started awake, drank some more vodka and perked up. The girl looked for a hotel but didn’t find one. She finally parked at a bus stop. The man got out of the car and strode over to the queue of quietly waiting, sullen Soviet citizens.
‘Well, my girl, first go left, then veer straight ahead like a civilised person, and finally swing in just past that dust-covered, windowless industrial complex,’ he said when he got back to the car.
The factories, workshops, and warehouses of the industrial complex were half-buried in snow; only the branching rails of the complex’s own freight yard glimmered in the night. Behind it huddled a small, faded log house eaten by the earth. A yard light hung from a dangling wire, its bulb broken.
‘Here it is – our hotel. Stop the car. The old biddy who lives in this dump puts travellers up for the night.’
They walked lazily arm in arm up the steps. The murk of the winter morning floated around the cabin. Next to the door hung five broken latches; the door had no handle. The girl pried it open. They were greeted in the dark entryway by a buzzing electricity meter attached to the door frame. A balalaika as big as a wardrobe nestled in the corner.
The speciality hotel was run by a dried-up old woman wearing three wool coats and two long thick brightly coloured skirts. She had a wart on her cheek with a little spike growing out of it. She lived with her three adult working sons, all of them sleeping in the kitchen so that she could rent the other two rooms to travellers.
‘We need to get some sleep, granny dear,’ the man said, his voice drained of all energy.
‘What kind of talk is that? You’ll have plenty of time to sleep in your grave. First tea, then maybe some rest.’
A piece of worn vinyl lay over the sticky wood floor of the kitchen. The floorboards cracked and squeaked. The walls were slanted, with black electrical cords meandering across them like leeches. The colour portrait of Stalin in the icon niche hung crooked and under it was an old icon of Saint Nikolai. The shelves of the doorless pantry sagged with canned and dried foods. The space between the windowpanes was crammed full of perishable food. A large enamel tub sighed in the darkest corner of the kitchen, full of pickled cabbage flavoured with lingonberries. Just outside the window was what seemed to be a vegetable garden, sleeping under piles of ashes tossed among the snowdrifts.
The old woman offered them some cabbage soup, buckwheat porridge, tea, jam, and fish pies. She had a pretty, cracked, tea set. She polished the large spoons by spitting on each one and wiping it on her clean flowered apron. The girl dozed, lost in her own thoughts. The man wiped the sweat of the beginnings of a hangover from his brow. His head fell with a clunk onto the tabletop and he started to snore. The old woman set out a cabbage pie tasting strongly of caraway and poured the girl a second cup of tepid tea nearly indistinguishable from warm water. She drank it in small, wary sips.
‘When I was a little girl my father sold me for a bottle of vodka to a wrinkled old Russian man. The old geezer dragged me to this place, his house, and how I cried. As soon as he had a chance he knocked me up, but luckily he died before his son was born. So this house was left to his blind sister, me and the boy. The three of us lived quite well together. Then the blind girl died and it was just me and my son, until one mosquitoey summer day when a Samoyed walked in the door. He had beaten his old lady till she went crazy, now it was my turn. Soon enough I had another son. We lived well for a while. Just a little while.’
The old woman got up and popped over to a cupboard, took out a half-drunk bottle of vodka, and sloshed a shot into her teacup.
‘He was a keen hunter but he drank up all his money. The boys and I were living on the edge of starvation. One Easter he went out on some errand and never came back. His younger brother brought me the news about his death: he’d been in a drunken fight and got a knife in his belly. The brother stayed here to live. A good man. I had three daughters and they all died. Then this brother fell in the well there next to the house and drowned. I got on as a cleaner at the factory and my life was starting to work out. As an old woman I had another son. He’s out there on the river with his brothers.’
There was the sound of a mouse from behind the pantry.
‘I’m so contented living in my own house, even though I’ve hated this Russian dump all my life.’
She got up, fetched some hardbread from the pantry, arranged it prettily on a flowered porcelain plate, and set it in front of the girl.
‘The only thing I miss is the tundra.’
When the man woke up he snarled, ‘The old biddy’s talking pure nonsense, thinks she’s some Pushkin.’
The girl’s room was small, dark and dreary. The stink of ancient bedding had settled in to live there, an old Gobellin tapestry rasped against the mould-streaked wallpaper. A hot, glowing stove filled the room, but the corners of the outer walls were nevertheless covered with a thick frost and there was clear ice along the edges of the floor.
She lay on the straw mattress between two clean starched sheets. The smooth coolness of the sheets soothed her. The sun rose silently and the stars vanished from the dusty blue sky. A mouse gnawed and scratched behind the wallpaper. She fell asleep.
She woke to a cat’s yawn. It had appeared next to her pillow and was staring at her without blinking. She stroked the old cat’s shining coat and listened to the crackle of the frost in the corners, the clatter of the samovar, the old woman’s clomping footsteps. For a moment she watched the dust float motionless against the light, then jumped out of bed in a panic and peeped out of the window into the frail morning. She’d slept through a whole day.
She picked up the cat. It opened its toothless mouth to mew, but didn’t manage to get any sound out. She felt a great sadness.
She’d met Mitka at a Melodiya shop when she was in her third year of studies. He was misshapen, a stooped, four-eyed thing with a shovel beard on his chin. He had thick, short, coal-black hair and eyes that blinked as if the light were a particular strain on them. They had gone to a juice bar, talked for many hours and agreed to meet again. Mitka had liked her ice-blue eyes and thoughtless laugh. Several weeks later he invited her to his apartment. His window looked out towards a small park. She had admired the smoky mist, the city wrapped in milky fog, the pink winter sky. Mitka said he’d just turned seventeen. He had a broad old iron bed with a hard horsehair mattress, a striped linen sheet, and a white duvet with clinking bone buttons. She stayed the night. Then came other nights, other days, all the same, filled with a bustle of light and shadow.