‘This fellow named Kolya had a joke he used to telclass="underline" Guys like us in the army grow iron jaws, iron cheekbones, and an iron will. But the welds between them are such crap that when we get back to civilian life the whole contraption falls apart until the only thing that’ll help is a metre and a half of dirt.’
He broke into such a chuckle at this that he had to wipe his eyes with his sleeve. He knelt on the floor, picked the torn newspaper up from under his bunk, folded it neatly, and slipped it under his mattress.
‘This other fellow named Kolya whose hopes hadn’t come to fruition painted a red sign with white lettering that asked: What’s taking our happy future so long? He took the sign with him and stood on Red Square. He managed to stand there for about three minutes before the militia showed up and took him away. They slapped a twenty-six-year sentence on him, the same time our forefathers spent in the army. And he lost his citizenship rights for five years. What’s taking our happy future so long! Even the pigeons in Red Square laughed at that.’
A fire-red afternoon sun spread over the wind-whipped sky. Behind it dripped vast sheets of sleet. The girl rummaged in her knapsack, the man set the table for dinner. They ate slowly and silently, drinking well-steeped tea – black, Indian Elephant tea she’d bought at the foreign exchange shop. After the meal the man would have liked to talk but she wanted to be quiet. He took his knife out from under his pillow and started to scratch the back of his ear with it. She rested with her eyes closed. And that’s how they travelled that whole long twilit evening, each of them sleeping and waking in their own time. She was with Mitka in his room. A Jefferson Airplane song wobbled out from the little blue record player, Mitka flipped through an encyclopaedia from the early part of the century, she lounged on the bed and copied out ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Zahar was in the kitchen humming an old Russian romance and peeling potatoes, and Irina was talking very quietly with Julia in the living room.
The swampy landscape silently turned to flat, level land – broken ruins of foundations buried under Siberian snow, caved-in wells, nest boxes hanging from birch trunks, villages where the dead eyes of abandoned houses stared back at the train. A caterpillar-tracked truck extinguished in a pile of snow, a horse wading through a field, its back sagging like an old sofa, pulling a feed rack behind it with two buzzards balanced there instead of hay, stiff with cold, their legs tied together.
‘My friend, do you know what today is? It’s Cosmonautics Day. And that’s not all. Today is both Cosmonautics Day and the day that our great leader strode into heaven. The Fifth of April. All of us remember that it was the Fifth of April 1953… no wait, it was the Fifth of March… when Generalissimo Josif Vissarionovich Stalin’s valiant heart made such a fierce protest that only hours later the funerary machine roared into motion. Josif Vissarionovich, that great engineer on the train of history, was a man of such terrible and steely wisdom that he still terrifies. Let’s celebrate Stalin’s death, my girl, even if we are a month late.’
He started furiously rummaging in his bag, digging around and trying to calm himself.
‘It must be here somewhere, it must be. It’s a bottle of vodka, not a needle, and we’re not in a haystack.’
He didn’t find the bottle in his bag. It was under his mattress.
He splashed a generous shot into both tea glasses, pushed her glass in front of her, and lifted his own.
‘Let’s drink to cosmonautics.’
He filled his glass again.
‘Another toast, to the wonderful young woman in our compartment, and to all the other mummified women of Finland. To beauty.’
He filled his glass again and put an official Soviet look on his face.
‘This next toast is to that rabble-rouser, that great figure of world history, the Soviet Union’s great departed leader, the iron papa, the bank robber of Tblisi, the Georgian Jew and the king of the cut-throats, Josif Vissarionovich Stalin.’
He tipped his glass and emptied it, took a bite of black bread, and filled his glass again.
‘Let’s make another toast. Let’s raise our glasses again to the Man of Steel. Thank you Josif Vissarionovich Stalin for making the Soviet Union a strong industrial superpower, for sustaining hope for a better tomorrow and a gradual lessening of human suffering. With a stick in the eye for those who remember the past, and in both eyes for those who forget it… And a toast to General Zhokov, the king of Berlin. Without him the Nazis would have turned Moscow into a lit-up artificial lake and purged the earth of Slavs and other unhygienic peoples, including the Finns.’
He tipped his glass, emptied it, and splashed in one more dribble of vodka.
‘The Jews poured poison in the Great Leader’s mouth, and although I hate the Jews, I’ll raise a toast to them for that beautiful gesture.’
He drank his glass to the bottom and tossed a weightless grin at the window.
‘I remember very well the day that butcher and punisher of the peasants died. I was with Petya in the third year. In school number five. There was no number one or number four. School number one had caved in in the middle of the school day and they stopped building number four before it was finished. One morning when we got to school, our teacher, Valentina Zaitseva, said that the father of all the people was sick. That information didn’t really touch a child’s heart. The next morning the teacher told us that the Generalissimo was lying unconscious and the doctors said there was very little hope for him. So what? We went on playing. On the third morning she sobbed and said that Papa was dead. Some bright mind asked what he had died of. She answered that when a person holds onto life too fiercely his breathing will stop and he’ll die of suffocation… I walked home with Petya, our arms around each other’s necks, the factory whistles howling like ships in distress, some of the men on the street crying, others smiling. When I got home there was something odd about my grandfather, something naked and strange. I looked at him for a long time before I realised that the southern whiskers were missing from his fat upper lip. Now a new life begins, he said, and gave us some bubliks. He was a Party member and one of his favourite sayings was that during Stalin’s time this country was the most dangerous, unhealthy place in the world for a communist to live.’
He rubbed his chin for a moment. ‘There are thousands and thousands of truths. Every fellow has his own. How many times have I cursed this country, but where would I be without it? I love this country.’
The acrid smell of kerosene floated through the compartment. It came from the full vodka glass trembling on the table in rhythm to the rumble of the train. The girl pushed it aside. The man followed the jiggling glass with his eyes.
‘Foreigner, you offend me deeply when you don’t drink with me.’
He bit off a piece of pickle and stared at her with a cutting look in his eyes. She scowled at him and turned her gaze towards the floor.
‘My mother always gave me vodka when I was sick. I was used to the taste of vodka when I was still a baby. I don’t drink because I’m unhappy or because I want to be even more unhappy. I drink because the serpent inside me is shouting for more vodka.’
They sat in thought, not looking at each other. The girl thought about her father and the day she told him she was going to study in Moscow. He had looked at her for a long time with a frightened expression on his face, and then a tear had slid down his cheek. He got blind drunk, barricaded himself in his Lada, and insisted she let him take her to the station.
‘I’ve been sitting here thinking, I wonder if God is Russian. If he is, then that would mean Jesus was Russian, too, because he’s God’s son. And what about Mary? How do you count her? Maybe there weren’t really any Russians before Ivan the Terrible. But when he took up the sabre, heads started to roll. The people were displaced, exiled, destroyed. It’s God’s commandment, roared Uncle Ivan. He backed everything up with God, the fox. He even established the old-time KGB to take care of his purges. Then came Peter the Great who wanted to make us Europeans and built St Petersburg with slave labour. To please you Finns! He licked your arses. A pansy. After that came the German princess, Catherine the Great. That hag had a cunt as big as a wash tub, made Potemkin fuck her, ’cause she heard he was hung like an aubergine. There’s no triumph of reason in Russian history. And what about Nicholas the First? Gave every slob a couple of hundred lashes, and a thousand runs through the gauntlet just to be on the safe side. A lot of them didn’t live through that hell. We’ve always known the noble art of torture.’