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.
7
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; hydroelectric 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.