I pulled out one of the stakes, perched on the edge of the hole, and armed with it, like a boathook, I snatched the scarf off the wire and tried to push the dead man back under the ice. If he’d floated here from Drunk Harbor, the current might carry the drowned man farther, toward Krestovsky Island, and the cops could fish him out there, at the Chernaya River. The scarf unwound and was left hanging on the wire net, but the body bumped into the icy edges and floated meekly onward, trailing light hair, like wet yarn. He was wearing an expensive jacket, which meant whoever’d thrown him into the water wasn’t a thief, a local showdown most likely, the Lakhtas against the Olginos. That was how I was going to float if I fell into my former companions’ hands, only I didn’t have a scarf and had nothing to snag, I’d float off leaving nothing behind.
I didn’t feel like collecting water in that hole, so on my way I filled the pot with dirty snow and put it on the stove, which heated up amazingly fast. I’d picked up a piece of wood before climbing aboard, used it to replace the iron rod keeping the hatch from slamming shut, and stuck the rod under the folding cot because somehow my quarters didn’t seem quite as peaceful to me as they had the night before. My breakfast of cheese, smelly after sitting overnight, and stale bread didn’t exactly thrill me, so I decided to try the conductor’s joint, which turned out to be so strong I didn’t wake up until dusk, and then not on my own but because someone was tugging at my shoulder.
Half-asleep but snapping to, I pushed the uninvited guest away, dropped my feet from the cot, rummaged on the floor for my rod, and only then unglued my eyes and took a good look at the guy, who seemed large and saggy in the dim light leaking through the open hatch.
“Why’d you do that?” the person said in a reedy eunuch voice. “Are you shitfaced? Put down the stick, Luka, or you’ll kill me by accident.”
“I won’t kill you,” I said when I was fully awake. “Where the fuck did you come from?”
“Have a drink?” The person reached for something, making me jump up, but just pulled out a bottle of vodka, waving it in peace and hiding it away again.
“Why don’t you come out and we’ll talk on deck?”
The person wheezed and climbed up clumsily, and his coat was too long so the hem kept catching on the narrow, corrugated steps. When he reached the top of the stairs, the stranger swiveled around, gathered up his hem, and sat at the edge of the hatch, placing his feet firmly on the last step. Now I could see his eyes—long and a little puffy. His hair was gathered under a wide fur hat, but by now I’d realized he was a woman and relaxed. After I’d climbed two steps I caught her smell, sharp, lemony, a little like the furniture polish my Latvian used. Polishing furniture and combing her hair, those were the two things she could do from morning till night, humming her monotonous “Kas to teica, tas meloja.”
“My feet got soaked getting here—what did you do with the logs? Use them up for heat? I have to dry my boots now!” My visitor swung her feet in front of my face, leaned over, took a good look, and gasped.
“Holy moley! Who are you, muzhik? And where’s Luka?”
“Gone. I live here now,” I said cautiously, holding onto her boot tops so I could pull the woman down in case she had a mind to do something foolish like slam the hatch. But the beggar’s girlfriend never even thought to be nervous, she just went silent briefly, then got out her lighter and shined it in her face.
“Let me in and get warm. I’m pretty. I can’t go back to Primorsky with wet feet. I’ve got a bottle!” She pulled her present out of her shirt and licked her lips. Her mouth was conspicuous, with bright turned-out lips, a working mouth.
“I’ve got my own bottle.” I hopped back into the hold, signaling for her to come down. “Be sure you close the hatch carefully, you’ve got to slip that branch in there.”
“I know,” she responded gaily. “It’s not my first time. Are you going to be here now instead of Luka? That bastard didn’t say a word to me. He and I agreed on noon, but I got held up at the datsan, they had Sagaalgan there at dawn and fed everyone pot cheese and sour cream and afterward my girlfriend and I stayed to clean up. I even put on my nice dress and got all dirty with ashes!”
“Why do you go to the datsan? Are you a Buryat or something?” I tossed some twigs in the stove, the fire came up and started hissing, and the woman laughed and began undressing. The smell of lemon polish got noticeably stronger. She disrobed silently and efficiently, shaking out her hair—she turned out to have quite a lot of hair, a whole heap of it, I can’t imagine how she tucked it all under her cap. The Buryat turned out to be naked under her dress, no underwear, the ashen fur on her pubis reminded me of a crow’s nest. Tossing her rags on the other cot, she climbed under the quilted blanket and crooked her finger at me.
“Let’s do it quick, Luka, climb on in, I missed you. It’s putting out so much heat I don’t feel the cold!”
“Woman, have you gone blind or something? I told you, he’s left, gone.”
“That means you’ll be Luka now.” She pulled the blanket down so I could get a glimpse of her breasts, which looked like two cantaloupes, and her taut belly with a tattoo, but there wasn’t enough light and I couldn’t make out the drawing. “Come here. The other one, the one before, he had another name too, only I didn’t ask.”
The cantaloupes, when squeezed, turned out to be overripe, and the Buryat’s uncombed hair kept getting in my mouth, making me spit. The woman was at least forty, and she creaked and tossed and turned like a millstone—two days before I would’ve thrown something like that out of my bed, but now I couldn’t be choosy. Not only that, she had nothing against smoking a joint and even showed me how to make a pipe if I ran out of cigs but had a ballpoint pen. Toward morning, having smoked up all the grass, I told the Buryat about the dead man in the hole, and right then, at last, she surprised me.
“You mean you left him floating?” She got up with a jerk and sat down at the foot of the cot we’d fallen off long before; we were now lying on our spread coats. “Drag him out and bury him! Luka used to do that—did you see the ash crosses on shore? That’s where he did it.”
“Go to hell.” All of a sudden I felt cold and I got up to bring in firewood from the galley. “Am I your local gravedigger? He’s clearly been floating a long time, this corpse. Where do they come from, Drunk Harbor or something?”
“I don’t know where,” my guest said sullenly. “I know it’s often. You have to bury them.”
She stood up and started collecting her rags, muttering something under her breath. I got dressed too, took my heat-warped boots off the stove, and struggled to pull them on. We climbed on deck and the wind off the gulf struck us in the face. The snow slurry hanging in the air was so solid that at first I took it for snatches of fog that obscured the shoreline, but it plastered my face and hair, and very quickly I was having a hard time breathing.
The Buryat wouldn’t go down by the pipe, she climbed over the railing near the radio cabin, sat on the edge of the boat, lowered her feet to the guardrail, swiveled around familiarly, stood on a tire, and hopped down to the ice, holding onto the line. I followed her, trying to repeat her movements, but the hem of my coat caught on a rusty plate and I went flying, the ice cracking underneath me. The blow killed my buzz immediately: I felt as naked as a dog, my coat was soaked, and my back under it was instantly covered in gooseflesh. The woman was walking so fast that by the time I got up and shook myself off she was already at the hole and standing there, bent over the wire net, from a distance resembling a fisherman in her stupid fur hat.