The man said he was going to see if the dining car was open, and quickly returned.
‘Nothing fucking there except an old slut with an arse like a cement mixer.’
His cheeks twitched with anger. He had a disappointed look on his face, with a hint of depression behind it. They sat all day in silence, until the purple light of night. Then he opened a bottle, poured a glass down his throat, and said in a hoarse voice:
‘I love vodka, like all of my kind. Once I get going I can drink seven bottles a day. I always drink to the bottom of the bottle. Then Katinka comes with a broom in her hand to fetch me home. A week later I’m a decent man again and I go out and drink on the construction site. In addition to all the drinking I do on the job, I seem able to achieve minimum results in maximum time. If I don’t have vodka I throw a fit.’
The girl was tired. She would have liked to sleep.
‘How do they drink where you come from? You probably live Baltic style. The men revolve around the bottle, the women around the men, and the children around the women. It’s the bottle makes everything go round. It’s the opposite here. We turn the bottle, it doesn’t turn us.’
She looked at him. She didn’t seem impressed. His face turned stony and he looked at her sternly. ‘I ain’t interested in your opinions. You’re just shitwater to me.’
They sat quietly. The girl swallowed.
‘Forgive an idiot, my girl,’ he said with genuine regret in his voice.
She turned to look out of the window. The silent moonlit Yenisei River drifted by. It split Krasnoyarsk in two. Ice fishers, gulls and crows sat on the frozen crust of the river; barges and tugboats lolled on shore, embedded in ice. Dim, distant stars seemed to sleep on its surface.
When the river was left behind, the girl went into the corridor. A hint of spring wind drifted through the train; you could smell it even through the window. A light, silent snow was falling, flakes drifting in great tufts onto the frozen ground. Without warning the train braked sharply, the wheels rumbled, the carriages lurched, soft snow came whirling up from the railbed, and a woman somewhere screamed. The girl hit her head on the window frame and it started to bleed. Arisa shouted from the the end of the passageway in a low, grating voice: ‘Citizens, we are in Taishet. From here the distance to Moscow is four thousand five hundred and fifteen kilometres and it is five hours later than Moscow time.’
The girl went back to the compartment, holding her head. The man was picking up shards of a tea glass from the floor.
He washed the cut on her forehead with vodka, blew her hair away from the wound, and put the bandage she handed him over it. The dirty air of the compartment made her feel sick. She picked up his empty water can and hurried out. The air outside was sharp and smelled of kerosene. The moon escaped behind a red cloud. She circled around the engine. On the next track was an engine that had breathed its last, lying on its side. She hurried past it and found the window of her own compartment. She set the can on the ground, put one foot on it, and wiped the window clean with a dirty sock. When she had finished she went back to the platform and boarded the train again.
The man was in a deep sleep, wheezing like a barrel of moonshine. The girl fell asleep, and when she woke to a new morning she ate breakfast quickly. The man woke up a couple of hours later. His hand moved, then one finger, then one eye. His tongue licked at his lips. A twitch. A stretch. He jumped up lazily, put on a tracksuit, did his calisthenics, and prepared himself a large meal.
They sat until evening. She drew, listened to music, ate, drew again. He dozed, played endless hands of solitaire, and dozed again.
After a lazy silence that lasted from noon to dinnertime, the man suggested that they go to the dining car for something to eat.
‘You should eat in the dining car at least once on the Siberian railway. That’s what it’s for, and it’s even open.’
The girl put on a brown wool dress that she’d not yet worn even once. The man took off his tracksuit and pulled on some polyester pants and a short-sleeved white shirt, took a round mirror out of his bag and set it in the middle of the table, and spent a long time carefully combing his coarse thick hair.
The dining car was full. Travellers were using their elbows to get a seat for themselves. The man rudely shoved his way to a white-clothed table where a feisty-looking couple were just finishing their meal. The man’s beard was a carefully groomed square, the woman’s grew freely. On every table rested a crystal vase full of short pink plastic carnations. The man and the couple started an odd, jumpy conversation that included something about Petrovka… Chipok… Zamoskvorestye… Varvarka… Solyanoi Dvor… Trubnaya… Kuznetsky Most.
The girl closed her ears to the noise, traced the broad windows with her eyes, and thought about a summer morning at the lake. A tired waiter arrived at the table.
‘Be so good as to bring the young lady a bottle of Senator and a bottle of vodka for me, and a plate of vobla.’
‘There isn’t any vodka,’ the waiter said sourly.
‘Why is that?’
‘Prohibition.’
‘Rules are made to be broken,’ the man said hopefully.
‘There isn’t any vodka,’ the waiter said gruffly. ‘Is that so hard to understand, comrade?’
‘Bring me a bottle of cognac, then. Cognac will do nicely.’
When he’d got his plate of vobla and his cognac he took a long swig, grinned, and bit off some of the dry fish.
‘Now we can order some food,’ he said.
The waiter looked at him wearily.
‘A bowl of selyanka to start with. For the main dish fifteen blinis, shashlik, some boiled tea sausage, salad, and a bottle of cognac.’
Instead of shashlik they got some dry chicken legs and instead of salad some potatoes fried in margarine. The man poured himself a glass of cognac, blew on the top of the bottle as if it were foamy, and said that in Brezhnev’s day two hundred and fifty grams of vodka was considered a single serving.
The girl glanced at the whiskered woman and listened to her square-bearded husband for a moment.
‘In my case the war only lasted five years and we all knew what to aim at, but our marriage has lasted twenty-nine years and I never know what direction an attack’s going to come from…’
The girl soothed herself. What you don’t remember ceases to exist. Maybe it never did exist.
Her travelling companion filled the square-bearded man’s glass and slapped him on the back. Then he said it was time they went back to their compartment. He grabbed the rest of the cognac on the way out.
‘I don’t need a reason to drink, but I never drink alone. We Russians always booze in groups. It’s more fun that way. A man has to suffer, so a man has to drink. Like I’m doing now.’
He took out the bottle of moonshine she’d given him and set it in the middle of the table. He stared at it for a long time with a vexed look on his face.
‘And you, my girl, force me to drink alone.’
He wiped the side of the bottle, set it next to the half-full bottle of cognac, and looked at her with slack curiosity.
‘I lived entirely without money from 1961 to 1964. I didn’t have a fraction of a kopeck, but I still lived. That’s possible here. You can always suck on grass roots or pick the snails off trees, and you can always find vodka. A pig will always find a wallow, as we like to say. It’s harder in the winter. You suck on pine cones and gnaw at tree bark. The nice thing about vodka is that it doesn’t freeze even in the bitterest cold.’