He wrinkled his brow and sighed.
‘Look at me. An old duffer, a melancholy soul filled with a dull calm. A heart that beats out of sheer habit, with no feeling in it any more. No more pranks in him, not even any pain. Just dreariness.’
The girl remembered her last night in Moscow, how she’d hurried from one place to another, dashed down the long stairway into the metro and taken the red line to Lenin Library, run across the tiled floor of the museum-like station, through the maze of corridors lined with bronze statues and up the steep escalators to the blue line, ridden it past Arbat, got off at the church-like station decorated with mosaics whose name she couldn’t remember now, and realised as she stood under a concrete arch that she’d forgotten her bag, which contained her train tickets and vouchers, had turned back the way she came, jumped off one metro train and onto another, gone through the stations where she’d changed lines and, to her great amazement, found her bag at the Lenin Library stop – it was waiting for her in the middle of the metro inspector’s window.
The train braked and came to a stop. A moment later the engine gave a jerk and the train was moving again. Another brake. Another stop. The engine dithered for a moment, whistled cheerfully, made up its mind, and moved. The wheels rang in momentary apology but soon the train was rattling ahead with purpose. The sun bounced up from beyond a field of snow, lit up the land and sky for a moment, then disappeared behind the boundless swampy landscape. The man examined the girl sharply.
‘So your soul’s full of nothing but dreams? Well, go ahead and dream. Ivan the Fool falls asleep on the stove bench and dreams about a stove that moves and a table that fills itself with food, but this life that men wiser than me call a mere holding cell is here and now. Death may come tomorrow and grab you by the balls.’
His narrow face shone with self-satisfaction. He had a beautiful mouth, narrow lips and a small scar on his chin like Trotsky.
‘Death can’t be any worse than life.’ He closed his eyes and pressed his lips tightly together. Then he hummed. ‘Don’t you fear death my girl, not as long as you’re alive. If you’re alive, then death’s not here yet, and once you’re dead, it’s already gone.’
He hiccuped a little, shook his shoulders, and sat up straighter. ‘I’d rather die than be afraid. If there’s anything you should be afraid of, it’s the Mongolians. They don’t even have names. They don’t do anything but eat, screw, sleep, and die. They have no morals of any kind. The human soul doesn’t mean a thing to them. But they do know how to destroy. Give a Mongolian a transistor radio and five minutes later he’ll hand back a pile of screws and wires and an empty case. The Mongolians have treated us Russians terribly and crushed the moral backbones of the likes of us, and still we try to help them. Try to bring them up to the present. But they don’t understand anything. They screw their children and laugh right in our faces… Am I getting through to you? Look, the Soviet Union is a powerful country, a great, old, very diverse people lives here. We’ve suffered through serfdom, the time of the tsars, and the revolution. We’ve built socialism and flown to the moon. What have you done? Nothing! What do you have that’s better than us? Nothing!’
He smacked his palms on his knees and opened his mouth to say something, but was silent.
Next to the train, far above the wall of forest, an eagle glided by with a calf carcass in its claws. The compartment door fell open. The little lamps that glimmered yellowish along the edge of the floor buzzed; the corridor looked like an airport runway. The heating vent threw out a burning heat in the narrow space. The girl went into the corridor. There was a young couple there, with a wrinkled old woman the size of a child, and a little girl in pigtails. The girl had a brown Pioneer teddy bear under her arm and in her lap a clown doll in a tall hat that looked like a schizophrenic who’d been through a bad trip. A violet sun over a shy forest clearing slipped behind the snow-covered evergreens. In the dense depths of the forest slept little birds in nests among the rocks, sinewy, white-coated hares in their burrows, and snoring bears in their hidden caves.
Arisa was making her rounds of the compartments and Sonechka, the younger stewardess in her oversized uniform, followed after her. The girl tried to talk with Sonechka, but she was so shy that she turned her face away at once and disappeared after Arisa into the first compartment. It was an area restricted to the carriage staff where an angrily bubbling samovar as big as the wall steadily puffed and steamed day and night. The samovar held a bucket of boiling water.
The slackening sun revolved briefly on the horizon. The dusky forest rose up humming towards a frail, cloud-embroidered sky. The man appeared in the passageway, and the girl went into the compartment, felt the rumble of the rails, and fell asleep.
When she woke up, he was looking at her with a very offended expression on his face. She smiled at him, thinking about how logical the whole thing was. She had left Moscow because now was the right time to realise her and Mitka’s shared dream of a train trip across Siberia, all the way to Mongolia. True, she was making the trip alone, but there was a reason for that.
The man had taken a worn deck of cards out of his bag and started to play solitaire.
‘Georgians,’ he said. ‘They’ve got legs like giraffes and they know how to sell themselves to fellows like me so well that you forget you paid for it. History has beaten the Armenians down, made them all humble lesbians and nice guys who won’t discipline their children. A Tatar only likes Tatars, a Chechen is a combination of an excellent baby machine and a drug dealer, the Dagestanis are small, thin, ugly, and smell of camphor, and the foolishly proud Ukrainians are always plotting nationalist conspiracies in their horrible accents. A Russian gets to where he’s deaf to it. And then there’s the Balts. Half-assed. They have no secrets. Too practical. Walking around with their mouths turned down, eyes straight ahead.’
He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. The girl coughed wearily, but he didn’t take any notice of this indication of her thoughts.
‘I’ve never screwed a Russian woman who was satisfied, not even for a minute. And this cock has pumped thousands of different colours of pussy.’
He stretched his thick hands out towards her. Long fingers grew from them, the fingernails flat and clean. They were horrible hands. His expression was at first nonchalant, then plainly hostile.
‘But tell me, what’s someone like you doing on this train? Selling some cunt?’
The girl flinched, let out a feeble squeak, grabbed her winter boot from under her bunk and threw it at him, then got up and went out into the corridor. The heel of the boot hit him right in the temple. Once outside, she calmed herself for a long time before going to Arisa to ask for a different compartment.
Arisa listened to her request with her head to one side.
‘We’ll see,’ she said, in such an unhurried manner that the girl handed her a twenty-five-rouble note.
Arisa apparently didn’t feel it was a sufficient sum.
‘It’s against the law to change compartments. But perhaps I could do something to arrange it. It will be difficult, though.’
The girl slipped another banknote of the same value into her hand – it was all she could part with.
Arisa glanced at the note disdainfully.
‘Getting around a rule like that is a tough job, in fact it’s dangerous for me personally. I could lose my job or even end up in jail because of you. But perhaps it could be arranged…’
The girl didn’t listen to the rest of what she had to say. She rushed back out into the corridor with a sob in her throat. She simply had to swallow her defeat and go back to the man, at least at night.