She nodded gratefully. She sat on the hard bed and looked at the bouquet of mustard-yellow chrysanthemums jutting out of a low vase. Arisa sliced the lemon with a dull knife and began to speak in an agitated voice.
‘In January 1934 a railway official who was living in one of the cubicles in our commune died. The soup started boiling over before the body was even cold. My mother started a pitched battle over who would get the cubicle, and she wasn’t averse to pulling hair to get it. The fight was settled one ordinary day when a woman moved into the cubicle. My mother called her Judas, although our neighbour Nyuta said that this ex-human had once been an important person, the secretary to some Trotskyite bureaucrat. I liked the woman. I asked if I could go to visit her while my mother was at work. My mother strictly forbade it and gave me a good whack on the ear to back up her words. The woman’s name was Tamara Nikolayevna Berg. My father called her Mara, and he gave me permission to visit her when my mother wasn’t home. We lived that way for a couple of years, and whenever my mother called her an expendable person and a Judas, my father shushed her. Then one day the woman was gone. The door to her cubicle was nailed shut. It wasn’t until after my mother died that my father told me that my mother had made unfounded accusations against her and they came and took her away.’
Arisa gulped, was quiet a moment, and then spat in the corner angrily. ‘No one loves the truth.’
The girl got up and left without looking back. She felt anxious, but the feeling faded when she saw the man. She lay down on her bed and let her eyes fall closed.
She thought about Zahar, Irina’s father, a man of love and horror, as Mitka called him, a thin man well over eighty years old. The first time she met him he asked if a man his age should be sent to a camp for cosmopolitanism. Irina had told her that for Zahar the purge of ’37 came in 1934. That was when his oldest brother, who had been an official in the Comintern, disappeared.
The train stopped with a strange bark amid cracked asphalt. They had arrived in Suhbaatar, on the Mongolian side of the border. The girl went into the corridor and leaned on the railing. The carriage door opened and a gust of angry wind rushed in followed by a group of passport inspectors in blue uniforms and cute garrison caps who crowded into the carriage reeking of asphalt, followed by sombre border guards, and then the door closed. The border guards dragged the man out of the compartment into the corridor. He opened one eye, which immediately closed again. The back of his shirt was wet.
When another ritual inspection was over, one of the border guards handed the girl the sketchbook that had been confiscated on the Soviet side, an amused smile on his face. Shadows of train carriages crawled across the platform, a lonely yak walked past the window, against the orange glow of the gritty sheets of ice, and the Soviet Union was left behind, the mineral water vending machines (1 kopeck without syrup, 3 kopecks with), the minibus taxis, the girls in braids and black-and-white school dresses, the unknown land, its backwaters and deep basins, its cities built overnight, district centres, villages, bogs, wetlands, forested provinces, woods, wastes, clearcuts, its poorly retouched photos of Politburo members hung around a central plaza, curious people outside the restricted shops, communal saunas, city-centre department stores, street sweepers, snow shovellers, hotel doormen enjoying their bribes, flavourful vodka, dry Georgian champagne, and the feeling of safety on Soviet streets in the wee hours. The filling café food, slogans painted in white on a red background, queues at theatre ticket windows, ice-cream stands and juice cocktails, folk music, currency bar discos and rambunctious young people at one a.m. among dreary rows of suburban prefabs in the middle of a ruined landscape, are left behind. The Soviet Union is left behind, the Lenin statues and portraits, the watercolour paintings of deserted shores on a foam-flecked, stormy sea, the mechanics, oil workers, wretched men working on kolkhozes, miners, address and phone-number kiosks, the monuments to the Revolution, the dance pavilions in the parks, the old couples swaying to the beat of a mournful waltz with fur hats on their heads, the stair brooms, entryway brooms, cabin brooms, chamber brooms, cellar brooms, pavement brooms, barn brooms, stable brooms, bathroom brooms, front yard brooms, back yard brooms, garden brooms, well brooms, the old ladies wrapped in big, black cardigans with dusty leggings and threadbare slippers on their feet, lackadaisically swinging their wilted brooms. The casual aggressiveness in the trolleybuses and food shops, in kolkhoz cellars, in the dark corners of commune apartments, the gameness, the utopian spirit, the impracticality, the unwillingness to be independent, the self-sacrifice, resignation, constant complaining, legalised loafing, the passive citizenry, whose inventiveness has no bounds. A country where bad luck is interpreted as good luck, left behind. The clocks on the walls in the street lobbies of Moscow’s official buildings, telling the time, the cabinets of experts, the factory party committees, secret gambling dens, clandestine home concerts, art exhibits in artists’ studios, the local committees, sentry booths, blini booths, biscuit booths, patched roofs, houses collapsed under the snow, the millions of peasants who died of hunger, the city dwellers, the workers, the millions in prisons, the loyal citizens broken down by work camps and labour sites who died of cold, the denunciations, the Party tyranny, the choiceless elections, the election fraud, the grovelling and inordinate mendacity, the millions fallen in useless wars, the men, women and children executed at the edges of mass graves, the millions of Soviet citizens that the machine has abused, tortured, mistreated, neglected, trampled, cowed, humiliated, oppressed, terrorised, cheated, raised on violence, made to suffer, are all left behind. The Soviet Union, a tired, dirty country, is left behind, and the train plunges into nature, throbs across the sandy, desert landscape. Everything is in motion: snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people, thoughts.
She thinks about how she’s come to love that strange country, its subservient, anarchistic, obedient, rebellious, callous, inventive, patient, fatalistic, proud, all-knowing, hateful, sorrowful, joyful, hopeless, satisfied, submissive, loving, tough people, content with little. Could she love them both – Mitka and Irina? A boy and his mother.
The night speeds through the dark into dim morning. The morning breaks out in a new, lightless day. Snow rises from the ground up the tree trunks, a hawk perches on an orange cloud, looking down at the slithering worm of train.
When the confusion died down and the baggage handlers had settled back into their places, Arisa and Sonechka dragged the man into the compartment. Arisa cursed to herself. ‘The old goat’s as heavy as a gravestone.’
The man rattled and whimpered, an agonised look on his face. He straightened his back for a moment and stared at the girl, his gaze unwavering, then collapsed in a heap. His face was very old and tired. He looked at her again, sleepily, disdainfully.
‘Where’s my bottle of vodka? Give it to me!’
Arisa looked amused and said in a motherly voice, ‘Shut your trap and get your arse to sleep.’
The man sank into restless sleep. His shirt lay open and his sweaty, hairy chest glistened in the dim light of the very early spring morning.
14
A MELANCHOLY GREY MORNING LIGHT floated into the compartment and illuminated the man’s languid face. Gusts of wind buffeted the train. The empty tea glasses gazed at the sleeping man. The girl looked out of the window at an entirely new landscape. In the dim glow of the morning sun, beyond the musical staff of telegraph wires, she saw the first hundred-head herd of colourful horses, the thousands of greasy-tailed sheep with black spots on their foreheads, and she thought of that July day when she came back from her summer vacation in Finland and Mitka was at the station to meet her. She thought about how they had gone to the boarding house, run up the nine flights of stairs hand in hand, how the hallway had been filled knee-high with the fluffy heads of dandelions, how they’d run up and down the hallway like children, the dandelion fluff drifting in and out of the windows.