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foreigners' eyes, a small devoted band—"Shrunken," laments Alyosha, "but no more than everything else in the economy"— remains, to steal nightly to one of the stations.)
At the fortress-like doors of the Leningrad Station, a policeman stands watch from within his tent of a sheepskin greatcoat, turning away (one important measure of a new drive to cut hooliganism and crime by controlling the waiting rooms' vagrant population) everyone without a train ticket valid for tomorrow. His face purplish with cold and ill temper, the officer observes the traditions of his service by snarling, "That's prohibited!" at anything that moves. While Alyosha waits—my face is more innocent than his, he insists—I sidle up to the law's bulk and initiate a conversation by commenting sympathetically about night duty in this weather. Soon he is telling me about his two-year-old daughter, the same flatulent face radiating fatherly love and sentimental humor. Even with this bellowing bully, the standard stratagem of establishing personal contact quickly transforms his public surliness into an open-hearted comradeship that has him sharing his misery with you, as he would his last ruble for a bottle if he could. Happy to have met "friends," grinning at his new pack of Camels, he opens the door for us, hinting a warning about plainclothesmen in the waiting room.
In the murkiness of the hall itself, however, detectives-—if they are in fact there—cannot be distinguished from the rest of the depot-of-the-homeless assemblage. Foul-smelling peasants are asleep on the benches, faces cradled by their dusty bundles— which are also tied to their wrists to prevent theft. Impassive, submissive, ragged to their bones, they have been waiting days for a place on a train. Lacking friends to take them in and contacts among hotel personnel, less disheveled provincial town-dwellers too have settled in for the night. At the decrepit snack counter, a red-faced woman is dispensing the last of the pasty bologna together with a liquid called coffee. A child sighs in its sleep, another sucks noisily at a fierce-looking gypsy. Picking our way among this sampling of mostly non-Muscovite masses, we are transported back fifty years.
But the lure of vagabond adventure hangs in the air. Long rail journeys, as Koestler noticed, are Russia's social equivalent of transatlantic boat crossings. Dots of light and life in the roadless.
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oceanic land mass, trains are therefore the setting for much "shipboard" Hterature of strangers exposing secrets. And stations are only marginally less rich in dramatic possibilities. The time-machine holds a promise of unusual tales.
The female pickings themselves, our excuse for coming, are slimmer than average this evening. A handful of tawdry prostitutes with drunken gazes, cheeks smeared in lipstick and a layer of Vaseline—to simulate the Russian maiden's healthy flush. Certain disease. A sprinkling of teen-age saplings who would obviously be happier barefoot in their villages, together with several less bucolic provincial lasses—students waiting for telegrams with fare money—whose sleep we haven't the heart to disturb. Peasant wives too dumpy to merit this, even were their men not snoring on their boots. . . . Our choice—although it seems that she, not we, have made it—is a thirtyish woman whose eyes have been following us hopefully while the rest of her remained slumped on a bench in the far corner.
"Hello, may we trouble you for a moment?"
"Please don't look at me like that. You must think I'm used to this, that I make a practice of using waiting rooms."
Her clothes are soiled and she needs—and craves—a bath. But back in the apartment, when Alyosha runs one for her with a heap of East German salts, she demurs. Are we laughing at her? Taking her for what she's not?
Locking the door, she remains in the bathroom almost an hour. After she has eaten and arranged her underwear on the radiator to dry, we make love—with half the passion and twice the conversation customary with railway recruits. Recalling old photographs of Colette, her rounded shoulders and globular bottom confirm that she is a survivor of an earlier era. Ample thighs resting, quiet joy on lips, Aksyona gives herself as if this were a respite between migraines. When she tells her story, we understand why.
Her mother was a survivor of a noble family destroyed by Revolution, Civil War and purges; her father, a Kiev baritone who recorded surging war songs, and whose need for drink, as colossal as his size, kept the family near starvation despite his handsome earnings. Aksyona was seven when her self-sacrificing mother died of cancer and her father, after stupendous bouts
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with vodka, disappeared in grief and rage, bearing away the last of his wife's heirlooms. The upbringing of the bewildered child was taken over by a sister who had turned sixteen and supported them both, largely on bread and drippings, by leaving school for a job in a shoe factory. For reasons of her own, the sister refused to ask for police help in tracing her father, or for a kopek of state aid.
When Aksyona herself was sixteen, an elderly aunt wrote from out of the blue that their father was working on a collective farm north of Kazan. From that city, the daughters took a bus to the end of the line and thumbed a ride on the back of a truck. Falling out at a bend, the elder sister hit her head on a rock, suffered massive hemorrhaging and died, blood streaming from her mouth. The truck continued to the farm, but the former leading baritone, now a senile handyman with a speech impediment, did not recognize his younger daughter. After a shivering hour with him, she returned to Kiev alone.
And remained alone so long that she accepted spinsterhood and reclusion; she seemed made for school teaching. But after a dozen years of solitude she fell in love with a sixteen-year-old pupil in one of her classes. Their after-school trysts took place in her room—the same one, with the piano still smashed by her father's hand and cupboards peddled for his drink, where she had lived as a child. The strange, devoted couple were married when he was seventeen. Well before this, she had been disqualified from teaching.
When sexual drive subsided, shared comfort as pariahs held them together against callous attempts to pry them apart by police. Party supervisors and scandalized social workers. They lived carefully and quietly on the youth's salary as an apprentice librarian until a week ago, when he left her for a homosexual editor in Leningrad. In numb despair, she boarded a train for Moscow, not knowing what she was seeking there to save her. But the capital was frighteningly puzzling; she found herself bewildered by questions of why buses ran on streets and trains on tracks. From the Kiev Station where she arrived, she ventured out only to others, staying one night in each to avoid suspicion. When we met in the Leningrad Station, she had twenty-one kopeks in her handbag and nothing in her stomach for three days
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except scraps from a kindly counterwoman at one of the buffets.
Aksyona recounts her searing misfortunes as if they belong to a distant past. She has a grip on herself now, she asserts. Her strange marriage could not reasonably have lasted much longer; she's still young enough to start a new, realistic life. Meeting us has broken her enervating depression.