‘Pull your dress up,’ he said.
She threw him a baleful look, began to hoist the hem of the dress then stopped.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m not wearing anything under my slip.’
‘For God’s sake! Take it off, then. I’ll wait outside.’
She looked at the urine slopping across the floor with the rocking of the train. ‘In here? It’ll get soaked.’
There was a knock on the door and he reached for the handle, holding it closed.
‘Is everything in order?’ the provodnik asked through the door.
‘A moment, please,’ Paul called. ‘Quickly,’ he hissed at Sofya. ‘Take it off. I’ll close my eyes.’
The provodnik rapped on the door again. ‘Who is in there?’
Paul leaned his weight against the door. ‘Come on,’ he whispered urgently.
‘You’ll have to do it,’ she said. She moved towards him, unbuttoning the top of the dress and pulling the neck out with her fingers.
‘Turn around then,’ he said and reached over her shoulder and down the front of her dress, his fingers brushing her throat.
‘It’s lower,’ Sofya said, her neck colouring.
Paul felt her collarbone and then the small swell of her breasts. He tried to feel for the letter without seeming gratuitous about it. His fingers brushed against a nipple and she shivered. He touched the top of the envelope and pushed his hand deeper, accidentally cupping her left breast in his hand as he did so.
‘What are you doing?’ Sofya hissed.
The door pushed in behind him and he stumbled, almost knocking Sofya over. He still had his hand down her dress as they turned towards the outraged face of the provodnik.
‘What is going on?’
Sofya blushed scarlet and Paul withdrew his hand, pulling the letter with it.
‘Degenerates!’ the provodnik shouted. ‘Get out. Get out! Get of here.’
Sofya rushed past her, mortification masking her face. Paul hurried after her, avoiding the provodnik’s eyes.
Back in her seat Sofya refused to look at him. She turned her head to the window and stared into the blackness beyond.
Paul sat next to her. His hand was shaking. Something had happened to him — to them — in the lavatory. He kept staring at his hand, the one he had put down Sofya’s dress.
34
In the early hours the train stopped at a small station and the peasant woman gathered her belongings. She stood over them, lit by the dim carriage light and smiled down at the sleeping Sofya before hoisting her chicken under her arm and waddling off. At some point Sofya had turned from the window and put her head on Paul’s shoulder. Numb and stiff from sitting in the same position, he remained still, not wanting to disturb her. He was hungry but the station lay in darkness and there were no peddlers on the platform selling food. After a while the train began to move again and he supposed he must have dropped off to sleep because the next time he opened his eyes the first light of dawn was streaking the sky. The sun came up and he judged their direction to be north-east. Beside him Sofya stirred, looked at him sleepily as if for a moment not quite sure who he was, then averted her eyes.
‘Did you sleep?’ he asked.
‘A little,’ she mumbled.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Do you have anything?’
‘No.’
‘Then why ask?’ She looked across the aisle.
‘She got off,’ Paul said. He put a hand on her arm. ‘What happened—’
‘Do not speak of it,’ she said.
‘I did not mean…’
Sofya’s eyes flashed and he stopped.
She rummaged in her bag and pulled out the piece of bread he had brought her from the restaurant the day before.
‘Here,’ she said, passing him the bread and taking a wilted piece of cucumber and a twist of paper from the bag. She broke the cucumber in half and opened the paper to reveal a little mound of salt.
‘An offering?’
‘You remember? Bread and salt?’ She dipped her cucumber into the salt and bit the hard bread, chewing it less than daintily. ‘The traditional welcome for travellers?’ she said through a mouth full of bread and cucumber. She held the twist of paper out to him. ‘Don’t you remember when we used to go to our estate?’
‘On the Sea of Azov,’ he said.
‘It always sounded so romantic. The Sea of Azov.’
He supposed so. He had never thought much about it before.
‘All the servants would stand in line when we arrived and offer us bread and salt in welcome. Remember?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘Oh, Pasha,’ she suddenly said, ‘they burnt it. The house, they burned it to the ground. Why did they do that? What has happened? What did we do to deserve this?’
Paul munched his cucumber and chewed at the stale bread. He could have given her the ideological reasons, austere and arid as they were; justifications for violent action as he had heard them quoted by his mother’s circle of bourgeois leftists. Or he might even have repeated the political mantras of class hostility he had learned from Jacobs during the interminable hours they had spent together in the shell-hole — language he now knew had its roots more often in envy and jealousy than in any reasonable demand for social equality. But none of that dealt with individuals. None of that could explain or excuse what it must feel like to stand amid the ashes of your own house, or to have your home expropriated simply because fate had dictated you were the unwitting recipient of an unequal share of the product of an unjust system.
So he could say nothing to her to explain what had happened. And who was he to do so anyway? She knew more about the situation and the arguments than he did. What she was looking for was appeasement, something that might mollify the feeling of injustice she felt. Telling her that injustice was what the vast majority had always suffered was not good enough. Besides, what was Sofya other that one small person unfairly injured by an unstoppable cataclysm? If he looked out of the train window he would see dozens more at every stop. And really, was what had happened to her any less fair than what had happened to the downtrodden under the autocracy? He didn’t suppose so. But then neither did the one excuse the other.
He took her hand, half-expecting her to pull away. But she didn’t. She sighed and gazed out at the never-ending land that stretched to a seemingly limitless horizon. What were they in the infinity that was Russia? Two souls lost in its vast expanse. From that perspective what did they, or any of their fellow passengers come to that, really matter?
It was late in the morning when the train pulled into the station at Alatúir. They had been travelling for more than twenty-four hours and he was tired and hungry and numb from the hard seating. And it would be still another ten hours to Kazan, had the train been going that far. They would have to get off before that, sometime in the afternoon before they reached the front. At Sviyázhsk, Valentine had said. But it was still some eight hours away.
They climbed down from the train. Valentine was standing on the platform and walked towards them. Behind him, troops were spilling out of the front carriages.
‘Sofya Ivanovna,’ he said offering a mock bow. ‘I hardly expected to see you again so soon.’
‘Or at all?’ she asked tartly. ‘Am I still to call you Olyen this far from Petersburg, or are you known as something else in this region?’