After a grating screech of the train’s brakes, the Perm station slid across the window. The girl glanced at the man who was bleating in his sleep, moaning, trembling, muttering to himself.
She heard Arisa’s voice in the corridor. ‘There’s nothing in this town but drunken soldiers.’
The girl watched the wind wrestle with the disintegrating carcass of a cardboard box wandering the empty rails. A flat-looking dog the size of a calf lapped brown water from a hole in the ice that covered a puddle of sludge. Soon the engine whistled shrilly and the train picked up speed. Perm, the last city before the Urals, was left behind. Rimsky-Korsakov’s bitterly jaunty song ‘Pesnya Varyazhskogo Gostya’ chirped from the loudspeakers. The view from the window was sometimes obscured by passing trains, sometimes fences, warehouses, large buildings, buildings under construction or demolition, light, darkness, barracks, fences, power lines, an endless crisscross of wires, scrap metal, ravaged landscape, light, darkness, wild nature, an old train engine passing. Perm was left behind. The man slept peacefully in his bed, a soft expression on his face. The girl read Garshin’s The Scarlet Flower:
‘He left the door-step. Glancing round, but not seeing the keeper, who was behind him, he stepped across the bed and stretched out his hand to the blossom, but could not make up his mind to pick it. He felt a burning and pricking sensation, first in the outstretched hand, then through all his body, as though some strong current of a force unknown to him flowed from the red petals and penetrated through his whole frame. He drew nearer and touched the blossom with his hand, but he fancied that it defended itself by throwing out a poisonous, deadly vapour.’
She didn’t feel anxious any more. She thought about Mitka’s description of the mental hospital – a place where even the crazy are in danger of going crazy. She liked the book’s sick main character so much she would have liked to read more about him, his strange, twisted world. Mitka’s world. She thought about the mental hospital in the book and the hospital where Mitka was. Had anything changed in a hundred years? Perhaps there was a little less water on the floor of Mitka’s room than there was in the patient’s room in the book. How long would it take for things to change here? Could time really change anything?
The Ural mountains glimmered far off, low and insignificant. They weren’t impressive. The range remained slightly ahead, then a sign flashed by at a stop with an arrow pointing west that said ‘Europe’ and one pointing east that said ‘Asia’. A few hours later the mountains started very slowly to recede behind them.
The girl slept, and awoke when the man waved something under her nose. His knife? She opened her eyes, alarmed.
‘You’ll grow too much, little one, if you sleep so long. Your arse will get fat. Watch out.’
He looked at her with playful sternness for a moment and put the paper carnation back in the vase.
Burning clouds dashed across the southern sky, headed north. A lukewarm sun fought its way through the tops of the tallest spruce trees. Old birches decorated in a fluff of frost like blooming bird cherries graced a derelict garden. She sat up in bed with her eyes closed. Concentrated. Lifted both hands to the top of her chest near her throat and tried to calm her breathing.
After a moment she opened her eyes and looked for her headphones. She looked at the man. He opened his mouth without looking at her.
‘It often happens that I think I’m going to do one thing and I do another. As a young man, when I was screwing Vimma, I thought I’d never give up that pussy. But then what happened? I played cards with the boys and lost everything, even my coat and my leather belt. When there was nothing else left, I bet Vimma. I lost. And Vimma disappeared like a bunny in a magician’s hat, and I never saw her again.’
He poured water into the samovar and turned it on, measured a small spoonful of tea into the enamel pot. Then they just waited for the water to boil, the tea to steep, to pour it into the glasses.
‘If we were lice, or maybe bedbugs, I’d be the kind of bedbug that hunkers down and doesn’t move and stares at something that nobody else can see. You, on the other hand, would dash around until you died from exhaustion. But if we were cockroaches, we’d hook up with our own crowd straight off. They take good care of each other, help each other out at every turn. We’d take responsibility for everything that happened between us. What is a crowd? It’s a partnership, a gang. It always sticks together. The cockroaches are right. For good or ill.’
The train braked softly as it approached Sverdlovsky. Lights and shadows slid peacefully past. The soft, frozen winter dusk beckoned along the side streets of the town, its parks and squares. A local train squeaked on the next track. A wave of people arriving from the suburbs flooded into the small station from an arriving train, a full moon reflected orange from drifts of snow yellowed with dogs’ piss. The stars in the sky were like a vast array of portals to another reality, the same stars as in Moscow, but different.
The train rocked and accelerated. It was soon speeding forward, and all the villages that had sprung up east of the city long ago were left far behind. The man tossed and turned in his bed with his clothes on. The girl put her headphones over her ears and closed her eyes. The music carried her to autumn in Moscow, the grey-bearded doorman raking dry autumn leaves, the light from the university hallway, the fresh-painted smell of the handrail, the simple beauty of the office coat rack.
As a perfect, velvet-black night opened up outside the window, the man finally undressed bashfully, slid between the covers, and turned his back to her, not even wishing her goodnight. She was tired, but couldn’t sleep. She lay awake, staring at Russia’s deep darkness until finally, when night was nearly morning, she pulled her head into a hood of blanket and fell into restless dreams.
In the morning she stopped in to see the carriage staff. Arisa was cleaning the entrance and Sonechka was sitting alone in the compartment with her back towards the door. The girl ordered two teas and some bubliks. Sonechka nodded, but didn’t turn to look at her. As she was leaving, Arisa backed out of the entrance carrying a bucket made of Latvian tin.
‘Kirov was a great leader in Leningrad who was stabbed in the back by Stalin. First they slaughter their enemies together with their allies, then the allies together with their friends, then their friends. They draw lots for the rest. No one is innocent. A person is always dissatisfied with something, and it’s always discovered. The guilty party is always found, and his offence, too, within a day of his arrest. Remember that.’
The girl returned to her compartment, lay down, and pretended to sleep. She thought of the three years she’d studied in Moscow. Her first year had been spent in a tight-knit crowd of Finnish students that had dispersed when Maria went back to Finland and Anna went to Kiev. Then she made friends with Franz. Franz was a West Berlin philosophy student who idolised Ulrike Meinhoff and had a habit of pursing his lips contemptuously when he disagreed about something. One day Franz quit his studies and returned to West Berlin. So she was left alone and took the opportunity to get to know Mitka.
A few versts later the man awakened with a jolt and sat up without opening his eyes. His greasy hair was pasted to his head.
There was a sharp, crisp knock on the door. ‘Here’s your tea, comrades,’ Arisa said in a dry, cross voice.
The girl quickly grabbed some coins from her small coin purse and paid her. The man looked at her in wonder.
‘I’ll take care of the tea. Is that clear?’