«Name is Hamlet. Please, joinme at table, yes.»
The table was a structure of overturned plank crates in the corner of the car. They sat on matching overturned crates. With a stately gesture Hamlet produced, out of a large box, a huge ripe tomato, followed by a pimply cucumber, some greens, and some sort of flowery root. He lovingly set all these things on a plate and carefully sliced them. Alex and Orest looked on as if hypnotized. For a finale he took out a bottle ofbrandy, looked it over delightedly from all sides, raising it slightly overhead, uncorked it and poured a little into each glass.
«We don't drink,» Alex hastily mentioned.
«What do you mean, 'don't drink'?!» Hamlet flew into a rage. «Cognac like this, yes? Even if they are calling it 'brandy' now, it is primo stuff! Yes?!»
«Alright, alright,» said Alex, getting embarrassed. She took the glass, put it to her lips. «Mmm, what a wonderful flavor! Really, very nice, mmm…»
Hamlet calmed down and handed a glass to Orest.
Someone unexpectedly stirred in the corner, someone lying on a straw mattress. The figure rose with a wheeze. A boy. He grew shy and hid himself behind Hamlet, who drew him out for a look.
«My youngest. He is Hamlet, too. I brought him with me. To show him Russia. What if he never gets another chance, yes.»
«Do you like Russia?» lisped Orest.
«No,» the boy shot back, unperturbed. «Dirty.»
Hamlet smoothed the child's hair.
«But the people are kind.»
Outside, someone frenziedly banged on the car paneling; some «kind soul» clamored:
«'Ey, ya foreign piece'a crap, hand over the vodka!»
Hamlet gloomily sighed:
«There is no vodka, yes.»
And he quietly added:
«All along the rail line, the alcoholics know that if the car has 'Glass hauler' written on it, it must be carrying liquor, yes.»
«You shouldn't have a sign, then,» Alex suggested.
«If I do not, when the train cars are being sorted they will let this one slide down from the hillock at top speed, like all the others — everything will be smashed. But with the sign they will take care and lower me with a locomotive, yes.»
«Open up, ya turd, I'm dyin' out here!» someone beat on the door as before.
«Just a minute,» said Orest, and, after leading Mollie to the door, opened it a crack. The dog stuck its head in the opening and growled, but this didn't frighten the caller, who had already squeezed himself halfway into the car.
«What do you open up for, yes?» frowned Hamlet and, resigned to his fate, carried a brandy bottle over to the exit. The glaucousnosed customer held out some cash in his trembling hands. Hamlet counted the money by sight, took it and gave up the bottle. Like one blessed with a great bounty, the man stumbled out at once. His retreating steps crackled on the gravel.
«But how are you going to settle up your accounts later on?» asked Alex.
«Write it off as breakage,» Hamlet nodded to some crates of bottle fragments. «Already in Yerevan they were pinching, yes.»
The cars shook, somewhere far away the engine pipe whistled, and the train set off. The boy sat by the open door. The grown-ups ate at table.
«Where are you headed?» Hamlet raised his glass, inviting the others to clink.
«Along ways yet,» clinked Orest. Alex nodded with a sigh and joined in with her glass.
Hamlet went off to smoke by the door, while Alex started to doze off. Her head fell, awkwardly dangling to the side. Orest discreetly embraced the girl and soon fell asleep, too.
«Communist Future!» the silence shattered.
«Whaffor?!» cried out Alex, startled, half awake.
«The station,» smiled Hamlet. «Capitalist Prospects.»
«Yeah?» Alex settled down, and elbowed Orest. «Wake up! You don't wanna sleep through capitalism!»
Orest, his eyes at a loss, scrunched up his face into a frown:
«Aw, shoot! Here I thought this whole disaster was just a dream.»
«Here is the hillock,» announced Hamlet. «They sort the cars along this slope, yes.»
Alex and Orest went up to the door. The train had stopped on an incline. The rails stretched out far below, and there branched out into a myriad of shoots. At the summit the train was being split up into separate cars, which were then pushed downhill by a rammer-locomotive. The cars would gather speed and, split up by automated switchers, rush on along different lines, where they slid into new train formations. Past the railway switch they were caught by the shoers — always drunk but quite sharp — who brandished long poles with hooks used to pick up pieces of braking shoes strewn along the lines, and wedge them in under the wheels of madly rushing trains to arrest their speed. The shoers dashed here and there in a frenzy — the cars were flying towards them, like kernels in a popcorn popper — but all the same, from time to time, they'd let one marked «propane-butane» slip past: a tank of highly explosive fuel, illegal to let slide down the hill. They watched its course with interest, to see if it would blow up on impact with the other cars.
«Glass hauler!» Hamlet yelled to those uncoupling the train cars. «Do not let us slide down the hill! It is written right there, yes! I am carrying Armenian brandy!»
The uncouplers looked at him in irritation. One angrily growled:
«I was starting to move up the waiting list for an apartment, and they wound up giving it to one'a you refugees… Give 'im a good shove, Sergei, like ya really mean it!»
And the rammer-engine, building up speed, slammed into the train car. Sparks splattered out from under the wheels, the bottles started jingling — the car shot down the hill like a missile. The shoers thought it best not even to try bothering with this car, which streaked by with knock-you-off-your-feet velocity. One of the shoers, standing too close to the rails, even lost his cap.
The initial blow sent everyone tumbling inside the car. Crates rained down to the floor, bottles shattered, their precious contents flowed in a river. The car smashed into another train sitting on the rails, producing a ghastly quake; it lurched back, took aim, did it again. Everything that had survived the first collision was destroyed in the second. The car came to a stop. Mollie was the first to come to; whimpering, she worked her way to the exit and jumped out. Alex and Orest groaned, helping each other scramble out from under the crates. Some glass had sliced into the palm of Orest's hand; he was sucking on the wound. Hamlet raised up his son, who was trembling and weeping noiselessly, from the floor, himself sobbing: «We survived Spitak, a horrible earthquake… Just to make it this far, to Communist Future and its Capitalist Prospects…»
«Forgive us, goodbye,» Alex babbled, too low to be heard. Orest tugged on her and nodded at the door.
They jumped out and walked off, hanging their heads. Mollie, sporting a limp, trudged along after them.
«What line're the circus cars on?» Alex sullenly addressed a worker they met along the way.
«It left already,» he noted, indifferently. «For Zaschekino.»
«I give up,» said Alex, sitting on a rail. Orest dropped down next to her.
«There's a train taking off soon from the first line, get on over there,» advised the laborer.
The circus folk mechanically stood up and started shuffling off like automatons, in no particular direction.
«Not that way!» yelled the worker and waved them onto the opposite path. «Thataway!»
Robot-like, the circus performers spun round and set off along the indicated course.
A train ready for departure stood on the first line. The brake sleeves between the car couplings hissed like snakes, venting air.
«I don't see a car we could get in,» noted Alex.