2
WHEN SHE WARILY OPENED HER EYES, the first thing she saw was the man doing push-ups between the beds. A green glimmer of sunlight played over the lacquered walls of the compartment; the man wiped the sweat from his brow with a towel. Before she had time to sit up there was a knock at the door and Arisa, who had stuffed herself into her black uniform jacket, brought in two steaming glasses of tea, moist waffles, and four large cubes of Cuban sugar, and put them on the table. The man dug some kopecks out of his wallet, which was decorated with an embossed picture of Valentina Tereshkova in her space helmet.
When Arisa had left he grabbed his narrow-bladed knife from under the bed, picked up a sugar cube in his left hand, knocked the cube in two with the dull side of the blade, and handed the girl a steaming glass of tea and half a cube.
He gave a shy, melancholy smile, took out a bottle of vodka, opened it, and filled two blue shot glasses that he dug from the depths of his bag.
‘Our shared journey may be a long one, but my speech will be short. A toast to our meeting. A toast to the world’s only real power, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union will never die!’
He tossed the shot down his throat and bit off a juicy piece of onion. The girl lifted her glass to her lips, but didn’t drink.
He dried his lips on the edge of the tablecloth, smiling boyishly. The girl took a drink of tea. It was well-steeped, aromatic and strong. That’s when he noticed that she hadn’t drunk her vodka.
‘It’s sad to drink alone,’ he said.
She didn’t touch the glass. He stared at her with a look of disappointment on his face.
‘It’s hard to understand. But all right. I won’t make you, even though I’d like to.’
He was lost in thought, watching her from under his eyebrows. She didn’t like the expression on his face, so she took the small towel and her toothbrush and headed for the WC for her morning wash.
There was a queue reaching halfway down the corridor. The travellers were wearing their dressing gowns, pyjamas, tracksuits, a couple of men in nothing but white army longjohns.
More than an hour later she reached the front of the queue. It was her turn to grab the wet, sticky door handle. The WC was filthy and the stench was pungent. Pee and soap and wads of newspaper floated around on the floor. Not a drop of water came out of the tap. There were two paltry, sharp-cornered fragments of beige-brown soap broken from a larger bar, smelling of soda. One piece was covered in a rusty-brown slime. She stepped up onto the toilet so she wouldn’t wet the slippers she’d bought in Leningrad, and managed to dry-clean her teeth and face. The little window of the WC was open a crack. An abandoned, forgotten station was passing by.
The man loaded the table with black bread, canned horseradish, chunks of onion and tomato, mayonnaise, canned fish, and boiled eggs which he carefully peeled and sliced in two.
‘God doesn’t forget the well-fed, and vice versa. So help yourself.’
They ate for a long time, and when he’d put the remains of the breakfast back in his bag of food and wiped the breadcrumbs off the table onto the floor they enjoyed their tea, which had cooled now.
‘I had a dream about Petya last night. He and I were born the same year and we were in the same grade at school. Five and a half years together. School didn’t suit us – we had to go to work. I met the trucks at the market steps and when they arrived I threw the goods from the trucks into the warehouse. Petya hauled boards at a construction site. We lived in a boiler room. There was one window, you could see the pavement, people’s feet going by. That’s where we were living. Then one evening Petya didn’t come home from work. I took the trolley to the construction site the next day to ask about him and they said that he had been run over by a machine and killed. They said the machine had killed him. I asked what machine. One old guy pointed to a wretched little excavator. Said that it was the culprit. I took a sledgehammer and smashed it beyond repair. Since then I’ve been on my own.’
She glanced at him, deep in his thoughts, and thought about Mitka and an early morning in August. They’d been sitting on a concrete bench at the edge of Pushkin Square smoking pot, waiting for dawn, when a drunken gang of young people showed up and started to push and threaten them. They pushed past the group and hurried away, but one fat, bald-headed goon went after them and threatened to ‘knock the four-eyes’ brains out’. They were scared. They ran down the deserted street and a car appeared at the other end of the street and she was sure that it would have more skinheads in it. They went down a side street, cut across courtyards, and sprinted sweatily to their door.
‘The first time I was in south Siberia was at the beginning of the sixties. It was at the time of the monetary reforms. A rouble wasn’t worth anything, you couldn’t get food with good money, and they were asking fifty kopecks for a pint at the beer stand. I used to sit in the canteen on the site drinking some swill with Boris, Sasha and Muha the Dog. One day a work official came in, this felt-booted bumpkin, and said, Comrade, go to Sukhumi, in the Crimea, southern Siberia, they need crack workers out there. He shoved a piece of paper in my hand and disappeared like he was sucked under the floor. I went and told Vimma thanks for the pussy and see you later, my dear fat-assed bitch, and headed for the station and rode a rattly train across the wide open spaces of the Soviet Union. I ended up in Yalta instead of Sukhumi. They were building all kinds of little cabins, and when I told them I was a human machine, a Stakhanovite concrete hero, I got work immediately. It was the best summer of my life. I did nothing but lay around and whore. Girls who when you asked them if they were wet yet, they were, in about two minutes. Sometimes I went with one of them to the movies at the Construction Worker to see an adventure flick. Three Men in the Snow. Lost in the Ice. And what was that one I liked… Three Friends on the High Sea. Whenever I remember that summer my mouth waters. Life wasn’t tied down with good sense back then. But then came this last bitch. Katinka. Warbling, in her sugary voice, Let me wash your shirt. That’s when my life ended, nothing ahead of me but the dark, bumpy road of an alcoholic, sinking deeper all the time.’
An east wind sprinkled the white plain with lonely snowflakes, a pale glimmer flashed over the trees. He spat angrily over his left shoulder into a corner of the compartment.
‘I’m talking about the same Katinka who saw me off at the station yesterday. Her face was my doing. I came home drunk and then it started. Same mess every time. She started in with the same old argument. She didn’t know how to stop, so I slapped her once, then twice. If she’d just keep her mouth shut like a good girl, help a poor traveller take off his clothes, make a good supper. But she never learns. I try to explain, I even praise her. But she doesn’t listen, she just lays it on thicker, screaming about how men built this damned world just for themselves. That’s how a henpecked husband’s anger can build up, and then I slap her till she’s quiet. If she doesn’t shut up then I knock her a good one right in the mouth. It’s not easy for me – I don’t like hitting – but it always happens that way. I have a right to speak too, to be a human being in my own home, even if I’m not there very often.’