The old woman set the table with a bowl of buckwheat porridge, a pot of steaming fatty borscht, and in front of the man a glass dish of smetana and a handsome bottle of vodka. The girl drank tea, the old woman chai. The man wiped sweat from his brow, gobbling up the smetana and, belching with satisfaction, poured another glass of vodka.
‘Let’s drink to the women of the world. A toast to the wisdom of the old, the intelligence of the heart, and the beauty of the young, to your friendship, dear granny, and to the silver-sided gudgeon!’
After the toast, the man wolfed down some black bread he’d spread with mustard, salt and pepper. He filled his vodka glass and stood up for a moment.
‘Many a citizen has rushed ahead only to end up waiting in some awful place, so let’s not rush. Let’s enjoy each other’s warmth, enjoy this moment.’
When it was time to leave, the man fished a slim Chinese flashlight and twenty-five roubles out of his pocket and handed them to the old woman. She nodded, satisfied, and followed them to the door. The man and the girl stepped out of the steamy hot kitchen into a fresh, frosty morning that lashed their faces like a whip.
The man wrestled the wheel of the Pobeda with heavy hands. On a small straight stretch his head knocked against the steering wheel. The girl suggested that she drive.
Gradually the belly-down, snow-filled row by row of fields changed to the notched beam by beam of a village and the village to a slushy suburb, log houses and prefab highrises side by side. The gardens and potato patches of the log houses stretched as far as the city in one direction and back to the forests and fields in the other. Then the suburb changed street by street into the muddy built-up city of Novosibirsk.
Carp were hung to dry outside the highrise windows. Grey pigeons padded along the sills, back from their winter vacations.
The man gulped back his hangover, which the glasses of vodka hadn’t managed to displace. He was shaking all over, his adam’s apple shuddering.
‘If I could just have a drink from a pickle jar, everything would be all right. Soothe my heart.’
His face was red and he looked so grave that the girl couldn’t bear it and turned her head away.
He asked her to stop at a corner where a blue tanker truck was parked.
‘I’m feeling so awful that I have to stop here and get out.’
He jumped quickly out of the car, took an empty ten-litre can out of the trunk, and went to fill it from the truck container, which had the word KVAS painted in pretty black letters on its side. When he came back to the car with the can under his arm he was humming cheerfully.
‘Toothache.’
He sipped straight from the can, a hopeful look on his face. The sweet smell of kvas pervaded the whole car.
‘No more toothache.’
A Gagarin smile spread across his face.
‘When I fell in love with Katinka, I didn’t have a single kopeck. I’d been flat broke for months, but life still had flavour, and I had plenty of food, pussy and vodka. Then there Katinka was, at the bread-shop door, and I was so drunk that I asked her to come and see me. That’s when the trouble started. Now I was a fellow who had a lady visitor coming, or at least some sort of whore, a fellow who didn’t have any money for bubliks or tea or champagne. So I rolled up my sleeves and got humming. First I asked my next-door neighbour Kolya if he’d loan me five roubles. All he had was three and he needed them himself, he honked. I tripped over to the corner room, to Vovka’s place, maybe he had a rouble or two, but the old boozer was completely broke. I went downstairs to where Sergei lived and begged him for a fiver. I can give you a rouble, he said. So on I went, from door to door. Went through all my friends and enemies, and the next week I had a pile of it, twenty-six roubles and three kopecks. I could feel it all the way down to my cock. Katinka came worming her way in. I offered her champagne and I drank a few bottles of vodka. Everything was set. When it was time to go to bed, I kidded around, shy, undemanding. I got out the camp-bed and made myself a little nest, offered Katinka my bed. And then what happened? I stretched out, my head full of nothing but pussy, and Katinka grabs hold of my cock so hard the camp-bed went crashing. She glues her sweaty cunt to my dick and I let it go. And just as the whole thing’s almost over she coughs up something about marriage. There I am in an ecstasy of cunt, and I say, Why not?’
He rubbed a finger over his swollen lips.
‘That’s not what happened. But it could have.’
They found the crooked-nosed owner of the Pobeda from a phone number kiosk squeezed between two co-op kiosks. The old man was wrapped in a frayed cotton jacket and had arms so long that they reached to his knees. The two men spoke for a moment in murmurs, then he invited them to eat.
They walked shivering to a local communal cafeteria. A sign drooped from the door: THIS FACILITY IS CLOSED. They went inside.
A greasy smell drifted from the industrial-looking kitchen. The dining room was wide and high and its utilitarian furniture was functionally arranged. There were long tables in front of the windows with long benches along either side. They went to the end of the queue that had formed at the food counter. On the main wall of the dining room was a fair reproduction of Ilya Repin’s painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed. At the place on the painting where the angry letter is being written someone had used a ball-point pen to scrawl the words: To Stalin. A fan rattled against the back wall; under it was the carcass of a sofa covered in flowered oilcloth.
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!’