‘The Tatars have a custom of tying prisoners of war to dead soldiers,’ the man said. ‘Leg to leg, belly to belly, face to face. That way the dead kill the living. You can achieve some things with good, but all things with evil. There’s no point fighting evil. You can’t get rid of it, no matter how much you talk about some god’s goodness.’
The rails groaned through the green darkness. Lake Baikal was left far behind. The girl imagined the strange fishes that dwelt in its secret depths, the flocks of jellyfish floating like clouds deep under the water.
Suddenly the engine braked angrily. The train was approaching a station, stirring up a wind that grabbed the granular snow that had fallen overnight, tossing it in every direction. They stopped at Ulan Ude station.
She stepped lazily off the train onto the platform. Three cats were walking towards her. One had a broken tail, the second was sleek, with a curious smile, and the third had had its ears cut off, and staggered over the clean-swept platform like a drunk.
A raw northeast wind came carrying sharp balalaika notes. Silent, exhausted engines lay on the tracks. The man ran past wearing only his inside shirt, past the street sweeper, towards the station building. The milk-white, fast-falling sky started to throw cold, drizzling sleet on the wind-beaten ground. All of space was filled with a depressing bleakness.
When the man came back he had a jar of smetana and a shopping bag in one hand and a bouquet of chrysanthemums wrapped in a Pravda in the other. He handed her the flowers, winked, and bustled into the train. He had a bottle of vodka under each arm. A local commuter train twitched and buzzed as it moved to the neighbouring track. The crowd emerging from it puffed out a cloud of mingled smells of home. The wind grabbed the cloud and slammed it into her. She got on the train and went to her compartment. The man sat on his bunk with a serene expression and put the bottles down in the middle of the table.
‘Here’s two bottles full of a booze they call vodka. My kind of country. Even though there’s prohibition, they have their own provincial worries here in this valley. You can’t order people around in the borderlands.’
He shifted his gentle gaze to her.
‘Did you know, Baba Yaga, that we are now in the capital of the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic? They have a strange, slurring language here and worship Buddha and Jesus at the same time.’
He pointed at her hair.
‘A fringe in front and undone at the back. Not terribly stylish.’ He laughed, laid a fatherly hand over her hand, and gave it a squeeze.
‘We suit each other. The witch and Koschei the Deathless, the devil soul… There are more than a hundred ethnic groups in this country. If one of them, or two or three, are destroyed, it’s a small matter. They herd reindeer in the north and make wine in Georgia. Here we have the northern tundra and endless forests. In the south are the steppes, in the southeast are deserts of sand, and in the Caucasus the mighty mountains, with the pass crawling between them. The wind sighs over the pass and carries big clouds with it. There are the beaches of the Crimea and the swamps of Belarus. There’s dancing the trepak in birchbark shoes along the Volga, screaming Chechen circle games, the Yakuts’ shaman drums, the Chukchis, the Ainus, the Samoyeds, the Koryaks with their reindeer, the Kalmuks with their sheep and the Cossacks with their sables, Tambovian ham, Volgan sterlet, Razan apples. What else… never mind. A Georgian once told me that the history of the Georgians and Armenians was longer and more beautiful than the Russians’. He said the Georgians were building churches and composing poetry when the Russians were still grunting and living in caves. That’s a lie.’
The train gave a hoarse whistle and its wheels lurched into motion with a whoop. Arisa stood on the top step of the carriage holding the door frame with one hand and swinging a foot in the air.
‘All the far-flung peoples and their fine culture are blossoming like they never have before, although they ought to become Russians. All of these thousands of languages that are kept alive year after year when the Russian language would suffice. We Russians are an undemanding, resilient, patient bunch. We grant some space to others. But it can’t go on like this forever.’
He took a needle and thread out of his bag and started to repair the bag handle. Between stitches he glanced at the loudspeaker, which was playing Beethoven’s Seventh.
‘If it just had a little singing with it. That damned roaring grows hair in your ears.’
The sizeable city of Ulan Ude, with the world’s largest head of Lenin in its central square, disappeared in the distance. The train rattled through snow-capped mountains and wild wastes of taiga buried in snow. Rows of black hills spread at the edge of the flat landscape. She thought about Mitka and the chicken wire in the corridor window at the mental hospital. According to the military doctor’s diagnosis, Mitka was psychotic and was given antipsychotic medication. When a healthy person is forced to take that kind of medicine it can’t be good for them. Mitka got really sick in the hospital, wasn’t able to eat, his mental state pathetic.
A spoon tinkled in a tea glass. The man fussed with his vodka bottles between bouts of sewing, wiping them and examining the labels and checking to see if the corks were firmly in place. But he didn’t open them. He just looked and admired.
‘Fellows like me, when we have to choose between two evils, we always take both.’
A little later he spread some celery stalks and garlic chives on the table and opened a jar of cold borscht. He handed the girl a gigantic spoon. He smacked his lips and sniffed, his big ears wiggling. At regular intervals he added a splash of boiling water and smetana to the soup. It tasted good. The scent of the celery stalks filled the compartment. He handed her a Pepsi.
‘Seems to me you ought to have at least one taste of home on this trip, my girl. This is Brezhnev’s drink. That’s why I don’t drink it.’
The train arrived in Khabarovsk station in the middle of the night. The station sign was covered in a thick layer of snow, as were the tops of the railway carriages sleeping along the tracks. She hurried off the train. A burning night frost seized her face. The air was so brittle it was difficult to breathe. A few street lamps oozed the faintest yellowish light as they struggled to illuminate the station. The city was so full of thick night that she almost turned back.
She pushed herself forward and walked with squeaking steps into the station. There were no people there. The ticket windows were closed and the trinket kiosks sulked empty in the darkness.
She walked across the station hall, past a kiosk that sold plastic pens and journals. A fat cat came to meet her. It looked at her with curiosity, waved its tail, leapt over a mound of snow carried in on travellers’ shoes, and disappeared behind a newspaper stand. In front of the main doors was a large puddle from earlier in the day chilled by the night, a skiff of ice gleaming on its surface.
Along the edge of the railway square were two black Volgas with feminine smiles and elk-hood ornaments, one Moskvich, a little red Yalta, and a poison-green Pobeda. The engines were running, the drivers chatting in a circle. The square was filled with dense exhaust. She approached the men warily and asked if any of them could drive her to the Hotel Progress. The men erupted in laughter. A black-whiskered man with a flashing gold tooth grabbed her knapsack and directed her to the Moskvich.
He turned on the radio and for a moment Galina Vishnevskaya filled the car with Tatiana’s letter aria. The gearbox complained and the engine roared, drowning out the aria. Spring slush frozen by nighttime cold shone in the light of a half moon. The driver turned to look at her.