She went walking along the shore of the river. The children followed her every step; one of them was throwing small stones at her. The women watched the children and chuckled proudly. The girl put her hand in her pocket and felt the knife; she didn’t think about the children or the women.
The sleepy sky darkened quickly and a strong wind from the mountains threw down a brief shower of grainy snow. Then the wind calmed and the peace of a spring night settled over everything.
Dusk hung lightly over the village as the Mongolian man and Gafur returned from the mountain with the flock of sheep. The Mongolian slaughtered one large sheep, let it bleed from the neck into a red plastic bucket, and handed the bucket to the old woman. She disappeared with it into a yurt.
The Mongolian man flayed the sheep and he and Gafur cut up the meat. Meanwhile the women lit a fire on a stove in the yard. When the meat was cut up, the man put the pieces in the bloody sheepskin, and he and Gafur dragged the bundle over to the stove.
The man opened the stove lid. It was full of hot rocks. He picked up a pair of tongs, lifted the stones one by one off the stove, and put them inside the sheepskin. Then he and Gafur hung the whole thing over the fire to burn the wool from the skin.
An hour later they opened the skin and lifted the cooked meat into a metal dish. A cold wind was rising from the northwest.
The girl went into the yurt to warm herself. The man was sitting at a low table, relaxed, twirling a teaspoon in a glass. She rubbed her hands together over the open fire.
‘It’ll be May soon, my girl,’ he said. ‘I like April, but I hate May in Siberia. The wind starts to blow from rotten places, and it brings horrible blizzards with it. It feels obscene and disgusting.’
The limp sun melted from the sky and the moon rose. They sat on the floor of the yurt, each of them in their place. The man handed the host a hand auger, marmalade, a jar of pickles, and a pile of newspapers as a gift, and for the hostess some Polish perfume and amber beads. In return he received fifteen fresh marmot skins. They ate the good mutton in the warmth of the yurt and raised their glasses. Gafur filled a water pipe with marijuana grown in Astrahan and some neftyanka made from Khazakstani hemp, strong and oily. The men smoked – it wasn’t offered to the women.
It was quiet. A young woman poured kumis into mugs.
As evening fell, Gafur and the man got up to leave. They made their long goodbyes to the old man and the women, gave out a few more gifts, and finally went outside. She followed them. Gusty winds tossed fine icy snow through the air. There was a turquoise ring around the grey moon.
The travellers got into the car, the men in front, the girl in the back as before. The car started, huffing and banging. A flock of children ran after it, throwing stones.
The whirling snowstorm and dark of early evening gradually aged into night over the ancient mountains, and made the girl’s thoughts return to Moscow. She thought about those Moscow mornings when thick fog covered both shores of the Moscow River, how the fresh, ice-cold water trickled through the fog, the metro trains full of people, country people getting their enormous bags stuck in the metro doors, confused by the escalators, pushing and crowding and dashing around, the mass of passengers drifting from one tunnel to the next. She forgot everything else for a moment. A sandstorm from the north lashed lazily at the windshield.
They got back to the city after midnight.
17
THEY STOOD FOR A MOMENT in front of the hotel, the two men smoking farewell cigarettes. The man looked at her sharply with his bright eyes, peering from under his brows in the eastern manner, a serious yet boyish look of excitement on his face.
‘We’re going out goating, going to get a smell of life and death,’ he said, waving a hand faintly at her as he went.
The girl sat in her dark room until morning. She thought about Mitka, about the time they were on their way back from Irina’s friend’s dacha. They’d sat in a crowded electric train that smelled of want and apathy. She’d leaned against Mitka’s shoulder and felt motion, the motion of everything around her and the motion inside her. She’d fallen asleep and Mitka had woken her at Moscow station, asked her to name an eighteen-digit number. She said a number and it took only a moment for him to name its fifth root. He practised logarithms with great enthusiasm, the numbers sometimes growing so large in his head that they gave him a fever.
Not until the east was painted in blue light and the stars yellowed to mandarin behind a veil of clouds did the first tears streak down her cheeks.
The tour guide was waiting for her at the restaurant door at breakfast. They ate in silence. The guide looked at her nonchalantly and suggested that she spend her last day in Ulan Bator on her own – he had a German tourist coming.
All day long, a silent snow fell. A gentle wind swept the snow into the potholes to cover the frozen, muddy water.
All that was grey and dull had disappeared. She stepped into a café. Amid the everyday stench and the smell of roasted mutton a primus stove whistled, children wrestled in the slush on the floor, a schoolboy caught the light on the windowsill in a piece of mirror, and she drank a cup of tea with goat’s milk.
In the evening she went back to the hotel, packed her few things, put her airline tickets on the bedside table, and focused on breathing. A pleasant gloom searched its way towards her, then reached her. A dim orange star dangling in a crescent moon. The pair of them couldn’t quite light up the sleeping town. The stars had fallen frozen into the red sand of the Gobi Desert. Only Venus twinkled in the sky, bright and blazing. The last snowflakes drifted to the ground. She was ready to meet her life, its happiness and unhappiness.
She was ready to go back to Moscow! To Moscow!
THANKS
Riikka Ala-Harja, Jonni Aromaa, Mihail Berg, Jelena Bonner, Vladimir Dudintsev, Viktor Erofeyev, Venedikt Erofeyev, J. K. Ihalainen, Ilf and Petrov, Anne Kaihua, Risto Kautto, Mihail Lermontov, Nikolai Leskov, Sari Lindstén, Jukka Mallinen, Nadežda Mandelstam, Pekka Mustonen, Vladimir Nabokov, Eila Niaska, Teija Oikkonen, Sofi Oksanen, Outi Parikka, Konstantin Paustovsky, Viktor Pelevin, Paula Pesonen, Pekka Pesonen, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Andrei Platonov, Yevgeni Popov, Nina Sadur, Varlam Salamov, Esa Seppänen, Vasili Shukshin, Konstantin Simonov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Vladimir Sorokin, Marina Tarkovskaya, Andrei Tarkovsky, Tatyana Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy, Artemi Troitski, Yury Trifonov, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Turgenev, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Jarmo Valtanen, Galina Vishnevskaya, Marina Vlady, Sergei Yesenin, Mihail Zoshchenko, and many others
About the Author and the Translator
ROSA LIKSOM was born in a village of eight houses in Lapland, Finland, where her parents were reindeer breeders and farmers. She spent her youth traveling Europe, living as a squatter and in communes. She won the Finlandia Prize in 2011 for Compartment No. 6, which has been translated into thirteen languages. Liksom paints, makes films, and writes in Helsinki.
LOLA ROGERS has translated Finnish novels by Riikka Pulkkinen and Sofi Oksanen, among others. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
Also by Rosa Liksom in English