We decided to keep to the track and trudge on west. At this stage we hadn’t decided whether or not we would stop the next train.
It was too cold to snow, but our quilted jackets kept us warm enough. For the first ten minutes we kept looking behind as if expecting a train, but soon we trudged on, the act of stepping over the railroad ties punishing our calf muscles.
We found it comforting to hold each other’s gloved hand as we walked. It was perhaps about midnight when we stopped and built ourselves a windbreak from the lower branches of young fir trees. Then with another capful of vodka each, we settled down to sleep.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Carole turned up the radio in the sitting room until it blared through the apartment. Tom Yates, already dressed for the cold outside, his briefcase in his hand, frowned irritably. The turned-up radio meant she had something important to say. He took off his fur hat which was already intolerably hot in the apartment.
“What is it?” he asked her.
“I won’t be back tonight, Tom. I thought I should tell you.”
He stood before her. Sweat was already beading his forehead.
“Change your mind, Carole,” he said, “and I could change mine.”
She reached out and squeezed his arm within the thick material of the coat. “No, Tom. I won’t be back tonight.”
He nodded and pushed the fur hat on his head. “In that case I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
When he left she turned down the radio and went to the hall closet selecting the shabby coat and fur hat she wore for her visits to the market. Her market bag was already packed in the bedroom, the green oilcloth sides cracked with wear.
At eleven-thirty she stood with a group of Muscovites on the platform at Pavelets Station. In her worn cloth coat and carrying the battered shopping bag she merged easily with the Russian women returning to the country after an early morning shopping foray to the capital.
The train was shunted into the station barely a half-hour late and the peasants and a few skiers with their short Russian skis strapped to their backs pushed and scrambled their way aboard. In a crowded compartment Carole found herself pressed into the corner of the wooden slat seat. Her companions, women mostly in their fifties and sixties, their heads bound with cloth scarves after their rabbit fur hats were removed, settled down to crack hard-boiled eggs and gossip about their morning in Moscow.
There were two young soldiers in the compartment, too, and the women offered them eggs and bread and asked them about their villages. After a while one of the women produced a liter and it was passed around, emptying at what Carole considered an astonishing rate. She herself had refused, but the young soldiers happily accepted.
“And where have you boys been serving?” the most garrulous of the women asked.
“Here and there, Grandma,” one of the boys answered. “Here, there and everywhere.”
“Not so much of the Grandma,” the woman said. “I’m still young enough to take care of you two lads,” and cackling she pulled open her cardigans and a print dress.
The soldier blushed uncomfortably.
“So where have you been, my lads? Our taxes pay you, we’ve a right to know. Out east? Defending us against the little slant-eyed men?”
“South,” the other soldier said.
“Oh, they don’t like us there either, do they? My husband said years ago that the Georgian girls wouldn’t look at a Russian soldier. And if they did, their elder brothers would give them a good beating for it.”
“That’s right,” the first soldier grunted.
“Anyway, so now you’re home to chase the girls for a week or two,” and she burst into a bawdy village song, kicking her fat brown legs, bare above the cloth boots, out in front of the soldiers.
At the town of Podolsk, Carole left the train. She walked down the platform and out into the semicircular concrete entrance hall, decorated only by the town’s crossed pickax coat of arms. Among crowds stumbling toward the Tula train with their roped-up cardboard suitcases, Letsukov was shouldering his way toward her.
With his arms round her she felt the ungainly bulk of her old coat and the three sweaters she wore underneath.
“What happened to my smart American girlfriend?” he whispered in English in her ear.
They caught a bus in the station yard and trundled for half an hour through factory suburbs, past a nineteenth-century Singer sewing machine plant until the country suddenly stretched and rolled before them. The road now was straight and narrow, the cleared middle section running between great banks of snow. At small isolated crossroads the peasants descended lugging their inevitable heavy bags. Presumably from there they walked to their distant villages.
It was already late afternoon and on their left the sun was glowering fiercely below low purple cloud. Across the great snow-covered hillsides the last rays gilded the whiteness and threw into deep shadow the rare footprints of man or horse along the edges of the woods.
At a crossroad as deserted as the others they left the bus. The low green vehicle vomited diesel fumes and ice chips from under its wheel chains as it skidded away.
“Have you ever used Russian skis?” Letsukov asked her.
“No.”
“Then you’ll learn. Sit down there.”
“In the snow?”
“In the snow.”
He dug into the snowbank beside her and pulled out two pairs of short skis. While she lay back against the drift he fixed them to her boots.
“Try them,” he said, beginning to tie on his own skis. “It’s a walking movement, sliding each foot forward.”
She tried a few cautious steps, lifting the skis from the snow each time. “Just how far do we have to go like this?”
He stood beside her. “You keep your ski flat on the snow,” he instructed, “then slide it forward…”
“You still didn’t say how far.”
“Not more than three miles, I promise.”
Night fell quickly. She found she soon got into the rhythm as she moved along beside him down the country track. No vehicle had passed this way since the last fall of snow. Perhaps not since the first fall in early November.
In the moonlight their breath steamed into the cold air and disappeared in the darkness. Once or twice on the way they saw a light glimmering up on the hillside from an isolated woodcutter’s hut. And once they heard, in a leafless copse beside the track, the furious grunting of a wild boar. It was a Russia she had only seen from a warm car or through the misted glass of a train window. For the first time she smelled the intense cold cleanliness of the air and heard the cries of nameless predators in the night.
After about an hour, when her calf muscles were just beginning to signal defeat, they turned onto an even narrower track through mixed woods of pine and bleak oak. Here the snow was thicker and they struggled forward, hand in hand, climbing thick drifts in the middle of the forest track, sliding down the other side.
After perhaps another twenty minutes, he slowed down, breathing heavily from a particularly sharp climb. “All this and you haven’t complained once.”
She stopped, her skis crossed like a pigeon-toed teenager. “I’ve never felt less like complaining in my life,” she said.
With his arm round her shoulder they turned a bend in the track and approached a clutch of wooden farm huts with lights shining brightly in the windows of the main izba.