‘Khabarovsk is the world’s most beautiful border city. We have the greatest wonder of the twentieth century, the Khabarovsk Bridge. On the other side is China, which is a province of ours. If you like I can show you the bridge tomorrow. I can meet you in front of the hotel at noon. All right?’
The taxi’s green light flashed and the car disappeared into the impenetrable mist. She breathed in the big city night. It smelled familiar, like old charred iron and oven-fresh steel. The sky over the city was pitch black to the south, but in the east the dirty lights of the distant harbour blinked, and in the sky one red star twinkled.
She pounded for a long time on the door of the sixteen-storey hotel before a sleepy, grey-haired woman came with slippers on her feet to open it. The hotel lobby was very dimly lit. On the walls were side-by-side copies of Cezanne’s fruit and Vasnetsov’s warriors. She handed the woman her hotel voucher, filled out the stack of grubby forms, and climbed thirteen flights to her room because the lift wasn’t working.
The room was large and the bed was broad and clean. The radiator hissed like a steam iron. She turned on the tap in the bathtub. It angrily spat brown water. The city was deep in sleep.
The misty gloom of a frosty morning covered half of the yellow moon, a quick purple flashing in the eastern sky. From between her rustling sheets, she looked at the polyester, tobacco-smoke-scented shade of the reading lamp. She’d seen the same kind of lamp before but she couldn’t remember where. She pulled aside the stained curtains and let the morning in.
The sun hung over the opposite shore of the Amur River, in China. It poured its frozen rays towards the flat roofs of the highrises. In the middle of the river a shipping channel flowed; loose rafts of ice had been squeezed to pack ice during the night. A carmine red tram rattled far below with a loud clang.
The living sun started to move. It crawled from the open ice of the Amur and over the snowy rooftops of the awakening city. Tawny light, a funnelled current of small snowflakes, and the bustle of city-dwellers rushing to work drifted through the open vent window into the room. Unhurried people the size of ants half hidden by banks of snow strolled along the treeless boulevard with grocery bags, boxes of smoked fish, and jars of pickles. A chimney-sweep busied himself with an ancient piece of cable in the chimney of a green block of flats. A lustre of frost sparkled on the car roofs, horns grunted, engines whined, exhaust pipes scraped against the frozen asphalt, trolleybuses sparked, trams clunked from stop to stop.
She took a shower, dried her hair, dressed herself lazily, with voluptuous slowness, and went down to the hotel restaurant, where she was served lukewarm tea and good fatty fish.
The beaten-up, seemingly hand-built Moskvich was sputtering outside, waiting for her. The driver nodded complacently when he saw her. She stood in front of the hotel for a moment and listened to the poignant song of an accordion drifting from a distant street, a tune about love that’s never requited, and slid into the back seat. The Moskvich shot out into the snowy street with a cough. The sooty crud from the nearby factories emerged from beneath the pure, sun-melted snow.
The driver watched her in the rearview mirror. He was a weatherbeaten old man with a back bent by heavy labour, a creased face, and faded eyes. His thick eyebrows grew together and his sideburns met his beard. He had dressed his sparse hair with home brew and combed it neatly. He had looked quite different the night before. She didn’t even see a gold tooth now.
‘Are you a surveyor?’ he asked.
She didn’t say anything. He glanced at her in the mirror again.
‘A geologist, then? A foreign geologist from Moscow? I’ll drive you wherever you like, but first the news from Moscow, eh? How’s Red Square? Same as always? And the Moscow River? How many cars are there in Moscow?’
The Moskvich raced skidding past a dried-up, five-cornered fountain that a group of Chinese tourists was photographing. The sun-warmed crusty snow floated across the rooftops and fell crashing in great sheets onto the pavements. Beautiful Siberian people, strong and handsome, formed twisted queues in front of the food shops. The spring wind howled where the roads intersected.
The driver turned into a roundabout. On the right was a heap of bright watermelons, defying the slippery spring ground. On the left was a jumble of discarded wooden crates that looked like Mayakovsky’s staircase.
He dropped her off next to the bridge.
In spite of the bright sunlight, the bridge was lit with floodlights at the edge of the water, their unreal illumination causing a strange distortion in perspective. It was as if the bridge wriggled over the water. She looked over the bridge at the trucks crossing and the silhouettes of the buildings in the harbour. She stood in front of the bridge beams, far from the border guards’ booths.
A pallid blue sky shimmered over the river. The April morning wind whistled past and struck her face with a handful of grainy snow. She leaned against a beam and looked down at the river. Slush churned like something alive in the lead-grey water of the shipping channel and along the shore. A bright blue oil drum floated among it. The channel was crowded. Two Chinese icebreakers ploughed through the pack ice. Chinese, Korean and Russian cargo ships with their horns blaring, long barges, tugboats, dredgers, and ferries of various sizes slid through the icy slush. Brown splashes of water rose over the ice along the shore.
She walked to a bus stop. The snow smelled like spring. A woman walked past dolled up, her flowered skirt fluttering in the breeze. She was holding a small heron with stained feathers and one wing hanging limp.
The girl got on the bus, sat down behind the hiccuping driver and rode to Okhotsk, the city’s largest harbour.
She got off and walked along the shore, which was in places a mixture of ice and slushy mud. She spent a long time looking at a wrecked ship, rusted through, lying on its side, listened to the melancholy howl of the wind and the noisy clank of the harbour machinery. She soon came to a place where the waves on the shore were churning wildly, carrying off great blocks of ice and crashing them against the steep rocks. The surface of the water was rising visibly, and the ice with it. Two men were crouched on the shelf of rock, their small Yalta parked on the sand farther away. They had a campfire on the rocks, too, where they were roasting fish on sticks.
They gestured for her to come over. The winter sun had toasted both their faces brown and the fronts of their coats were covered in fish scales. One of them smelled of resin, the other of fortified wine. Both smelled of squalor.
‘A magnetic storm’s about to come up and take the ice with it. You shouldn’t be walking on the shore.’
They offered her some foul-smelling vodka and nice-tasting fish. The man who smelled of resin, who had unbelievably bad teeth, told her that the previous summer a toxic spill from China had killed almost all the fish.
‘We used to get pike, catfish, carp and ruffe out of this river. Now nothing. I keep fishing, because I always have. You can’t change a man’s nature.’
Disregarding his warnings, she continued strolling down the shore past a rusted boiler, old locks, an enormous buoy, a bicycle gear, a copper cylinder, a small motor, plugs, corks, broken vodka bottles, metal buckets with no bottoms, an oily enamel pot, plum weights, water pipes, steel pellets, a steering wheel from a tractor, bedsprings, and a metal sign rusted through that read TECHNOLOGICAL-SCIENTIFIC ORGANISATION OF INDUSTRIAL POWER ENGINE VIBRATOR RESEARCH. The lively early spring sunshine melted the ice from the shore. The wind sighed and the river smelled of rot. The odour of decayed wood, sodden sawdust, household trash, oil, naphtha, and the foamy residue left by the barges covered over the ineffable scent of the ice breaking up.