The train sped with a whine across the flat, blustery landscape, under a sky frothy with winter clouds. A vibrant forest beyond an open field tossed a flock of sparrows at the sky. She calmed herself by watching the black, starkly drawn shadow of the train against the bright snow.
She thought about Irina, how she might be sitting in the smoking room of the chemistry institute, behind the Achievements in the National Economy pavilion, smoking a cigarette and getting ready for her next lecture. She thought about Zahar, who could see through her, and Mitka, who was good. A little kitten appeared in the corridor and looked at her beseechingly. She picked it up and held it and petted its rumpled fur. At the insane asylum, Mitka had said that socialism kills the body and capitalism kills the spirit but socialism the way we have it harms both the body and the spirit.
When Mitka was turning eighteen, she and Irina had the task of finding food to cook for his birthday party. They had started gathering ingredients back in November, and had managed to find all kinds of things, but Irina wasn’t satisfied. One morning they went out to hunt for groceries at six a.m. They rushed through the dry, freezing weather to the Yelisev shop, but they didn’t find anything there, not even baked bubliks. Angry, they hopped onto a freezing tram, and rode past the Boulevard and the snowy maples to the fragrant bread shop in Bronnaya. There they found a small loaf of good bread. They got on the trolleybus, which was so hot that they were soon covered in sweat, and trundled hopefully to Zachaczewski Lane. There was a grocery there where Irina had once found two cans of high-quality sardines. They didn’t find anything, though, not even pickles. They stood for a moment in the windy street, uncertain what to do, where to go. They walked with frozen toes, arm in arm, to Lenin Street, but the trip didn’t add any weight to their shopping bag. They jogged over to Timiryazev. There they found a bottle of cologne for Yuri, but nothing to eat. They swung by Chistiye Prudy on the bus, brought Yuri his cologne, and got six eggs from him. Why not go to the currency exchange shop? he asked. I don’t have any dollars, the girl whispered, we already blew all of it, plus my salary, at the beginning of autumn. Yuri yelled after them to go to the market, for God’s sake, although he knew that there was nothing there. On Sokolniki Street they found two big jars of borscht, put them under their arms and headed proudly to the tram stop on Tverskoy Boulevard, and Irina glanced at her watch and said that she should have been lecturing at the institute a long time ago. A country woman was shivering in front of the paper shop. The girl bought a handsome gladiolus from the woman and handed it to Irina, and just as they were about to leave, the woman whispered that she had two chickens in her bag. Were they interested? Of course! Irina said, and settled on a price. They ran to the nearest metro station. Irina took the blue line to the institute and the girl went home on the yellow with her bag of chickens. Zahar was home and she asked him to come in the kitchen and opened her bag and there they were, two sweet, fluttering brown chickens with rubber bands wrapped around their beaks. Zahar looked at them and said that with a few weeks of seed feed they would be ready to stew. They took the squawking chickens into the bathroom. She laid some of the laundry on the bottom of the tub as a cushion. The wooden towel rack served as a perch. They called the little one Plita and the big one Kipyatok. The day before Mitka’s party Zahar slaughtered the fattened chickens expertly in the bathroom and plucked them on the balcony. Then Irina taught her and Mitka how to cook chicken the Stalinist way.
A grey half moon sprinkled light over the snowy, silent, melancholy forest, keeping gleaming red Mars company. A little boy was singing to himself while he played with a whistle shaped like a rooster at the other end of the carriage’s corridor. When the nocturnal light of the moon dimmed and turned dirty, the girl returned to her compartment. She was hungry and tired.
The compartment smelled like Consul hair tonic, the kind you can buy at Party hotel kiosks. The man looked at her from the end of the trail of scent, shyly, it seemed.
‘Feeling better?’
A draughts board had appeared on the table, a little batteryless Blaupunkt travel radio with a little green cat’s-eye light, and a travel samovar, cheerfully bouncing and puffing steam. He had put loose tea in the enamel kettle and was pouring boiling water over it.
‘Sorry about that cunt comment. Devil got into me. Dark forces.’ He felt his temple proudly. There was a little mark there. Then he pointed at her boot, which he had placed in the middle of the floor. ‘You did the right thing. I deserved to have my arse kicked.’
She smiled.
‘Thank you, my girl. There are two kinds of anguish in life: when we want to and can’t, and when we can but we don’t want to.’
She got out her food, put it on the table, and started to eat. She offered some to him too, but he wasn’t hungry.
When she’d finished eating, she took Garshin’s The Scarlet Flower out from under her bottle of whisky and started to read. Mitka had given it to her and said that it showed how a sick mind worked. She was slowly reading the dog-eared, brown-paged book, printed in the previous century.
‘The attendants undressed him in spite of his desperate resistance. His disease had doubled his muscular strength, and he easily tore himself from the hands of several keepers, dashing them to the ground; at last, four of them got him down, and, taking him by the hands and feet, put him into the warm water. It seemed to him boiling, and through the frenzied brain flashed a fragmentary, incoherent thought of torture by scalding water and red-hot iron. Choking, and convulsively beating the water with hands and feet (as far as the firm hold of the keepers allowed), he shrieked out in strangled tones an incoherent speech, such as no one could imagine without hearing it.’
She put the book on the table. Oh, Mitka!
The man gently packed away his radio and threw himself on his bunk. The late, narrow moon hovered slack above the wild landscape.
‘The ice seems to be broken, my girl,’ he said lightly. ‘Now I can go to sleep. Life is easier when you’re asleep.’
She watched him as he puffed in his sleep. There was something about him. Maybe it was his cauliflower ears. His way of holding his knife. His flat, muscular stomach. She felt the glow in the west colour the universe purple for a moment and the stars ignite in the black sky one by one.
She thought about Mitka, his long eyelashes, his perfect toes, his inward smile. The day they ran through the freezing rain to the Armaments Museum and hid inside a tank and the museum guard found them after the place had closed. They ended up sitting up all night with him in the guard’s booth clinking champagne glasses. Mitka, whose door always had to be open, had gone to the mental hospital to avoid the army, deployment to Afghanistan.
The night had already chilled through the dark into a red dawn coming in through the window. The yellow moon swept up the last bright star to make way for the fiery sun, and slowly all of Siberia grew light. The man was in his blue tracksuit bottoms and white shirt, doing push-ups between the beds, his forehead sweaty, his eyes sleepy, his mouth dry and stinking, a thick stench in the room, an airless window, silent tea glasses on the table, quiet crumbs on the floor. A new day was before them, with its orange, frost-covered birches and pine groves where hidden animals roamed and fresh snow drifted over the plains, white, fluttering longjohn legs, limp penises, mitts and muffs and cuffs and flowered flannel nightgowns, shawls and wool socks and straggly toothbrushes.
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