The man bustled over his samovar. He moved it around unnecessarily, opened the lid and checked several times to make sure the cord was plugged tight into the wall. The sun smoked beyond the rail yard, the universe hummed. He boiled some water, dumped in a mighty portion of the large whole tea leaves he’d bought, and waited. Ten minutes later the tea had sunk to the bottom of the pot. He poured the nearly black tea into his own glass, put in a whole sugar cube like an iceberg, and took three small sips. Then he handed the glass to the girl. She tasted it. It was strong and mellow. He wanted the glass back, slurped at it three times, and handed it to her again.
‘My grandfather was sent to a prison camp in 1931. He was a true thief and kept the secret of the seven seals till the day he died. My father lived the life of a wanderer too, had no possessions but his poor handwriting. He lived in a world where the tavern is your church, the work camp is your monastery, and drinking is the highest form of endeavour. He got nabbed for an honest robbery and murder, and Lucifer’s net closed around him. He ended up in a KGB cellar, then they tossed him into a three-star work camp in 1935, the same year Stalin announced that the life of the Soviet people was happier now. A three-star camp. In other words, a good one. He got sentenced to forty-five years. In those days life in a work camp may have been safer and more bearable for somebody poor and hungry than life in a big city. The old man wasn’t afraid of being sentenced to labour because he was used to even worse. In 1941 Stalin was in deep shit. The Nazis were thirty kilometres from Red Square and their reconnaissance planes were already over Stalingrad. Then the Generalissimo, panicked as he was, decided to finally free any criminal in the work camps who would pledge to go to the front to defend his homeland. Go to the front and you’ll be forgiven and after the war you’ll be a free man. My old man took the bait and they freed him, like tens of thousands of others. All those killers, thieves and other crooks crammed onto prison trains and were carried to the front. It was on that trip, on one leg of the journey, that my father saw my virgin mother, who was in a great hurry to get herself pregnant before every last man was sent to the war, and had a screw when she got the chance, naturally. My old man survived the war, but after the war all those criminals who managed to stay alive on the front were thrown right back into the work camps. The only thing different was that the camps were full of Lithuanians now. That’s where he died, from fever and diarrhoea.’
He licked his dry lips and looked at the girl pityingly. ‘It’s fun to tell you stories, my girl, because you don’t understand a thing. My mother birthed herself a new man.’
He got up and expertly executed fifty-three push-ups. His legs were beautifully muscular and he had strong, firm buttocks.
‘Life prescribes strict rules for all of us. You’ll understand someday. Or maybe not. I was in a Pioneer camp in 1948, right after the war. The boys in the sixth section got to swim in the clear waters of Lake Komsomol. This lake was unusual because the soft sand on the bottom had sudden drop-offs, and there were some of the boys of course who thought it was funny to push the ones who couldn’t swim into the cold, deep water. Little Pioneers like me swam in pond number six. It was a muddy little Pioneer pond with water that was cloudy and too warm. One day when we were splashing in it we heard a terrible boom. It came from really close by. Somebody yelled for help and we saw that there was a great fuss on the shore. We ran right over, of course, to see what it was all about. A tight, noisy circle of people had formed on the sand. I tried to get through it so I could see what was happening, but the older boys shoved me away. Then the gorilla of a camp director came and pushed his way into the middle of the action and in the fracas I managed to slip inside the circle. And what did I see? Jura was lying there, with one leg missing. He was just trembling, no sound coming out of his mouth. The director ordered us to disperse. Someone ran to get the camp truck and another director came with some bandages. The gorilla gave Jura some vodka and used it to rinse off the stump of his leg too. Then the truck came and took him away. The next day nobody said a word about it. The boys had found a mine on the bottom of the lake and thrown it on the shore, where Jura, their little whipping boy, was building a sandcastle. Thanks, Comrade Stalin, for the happy childhood!’
Pallid light poured from the sky. The girl decided to go into town alone. The man stayed on the train to rest. He too wanted to be alone.
10
SHE LISTENED TO THE BIRDS’ spring silence, the swish of melting snow on roofs, the patter of the dripping drain spouts, the little streams trickling across wet courtyards, the sad peeping of a sparrow on a snowy rowan branch. Two-metre icicles grew from the eaves of a warped-walled highrise. There were a few parked cars along the roads, some covered in a soft blanket of fresh fallen snow, others coated in a matte finish of thick frost. A working woman sat at the bus stop with loaves of bread piled in her lap.
In the afternoon the girl sat in a cocktail bar called Great October. The place was full of students arriving and leaving, puffs of frost coming in through the door. She tried a milk cocktail made popular by Premier Kosygin that had spread from the Baltic across the Soviet Union. It was cold and sweet. She glanced at the rusted padlock on the refrigerator door and thought about Moscow, its damp courtyards, the swampy smell of the apartments, the stairwells full of different kinds of doorbells. She had gone to study at Helsinki University as soon as she finished her matriculation exam and she and her friends Maria and Anna had started applying for graduate study positions in Moscow. It took a lot of arranging. Maria and Anna moved into the conservatory dorms, she into the student house at the Teknikum. She had shared a small hot room with a Dane named Lene. Lene studied geology and she studied archaeology.
From her earliest years of study she had dreamed of how she would follow in the footsteps of Sakari Pälsi, G. J. Ramstedt, and Kai Donner, seek out the same holy sites where those scholars had been. When her thesis was nearly finished she started to fill out requests and applications and gather authorisations, endorsements, and letters of recommendation from Helsinki and Moscow. All her efforts were in vain; those regions were closed to foreigners. Finally Mitka suggested they go together by train to Mongolia, crawling across Siberia in the process. She refused at first, but later got excited at the prospect of reading the petroglyphs found near Ulan Bator by Ramstedt and described by Pälsi.
Then everything went awry.
A cool, late afternoon light pressed against the snowy streets and the gates of the low houses built in the reign of Catharine the Great. There was a carefully stacked pile of firewood in the courtyard of a lovely old house. The fence around the hotel leaned steeply, the windows were filled with ice flowers. She was sitting in the lobby with its sumptuous bouquet of paper flowers. The atmosphere was Oblomovian, the snow of winter still falling. To the right of the reception desk was a hand-coloured photograph bordered in mourning of a sturdy woman wearing two medals on her chest.
The girl waited at least an hour before the young receptionist came sailing out of the back room wearing a muskrat hat, her lips roughly painted red. An elegantly sour cloud of eau de cologne spread around her. She didn’t look at the girl, just paced back and forth as if she were in a hurry. When the girl managed to hand her the hotel voucher the receptionist went into the back room again and stayed there for another hour or two.