When I got married, everyone had assumed that the question of a domicile for me had been resolved. We had immediately given my deceased grandparents’ apartment to Vovka and her husband. My parents had once acquired a dacha plot outside the city, with a little house like the one that Nif-Nif the little pig built. My father kept trying to turn this hovel into a genuine house, but all in vain. A year later I presented my parents with my divorce and returned to my native hearth and home. From May to October my mother and father went away to the dacha, but we spent the winter together, and we were cramped…
But now I could hope to acquire a little pad of my own at last. The only catch was that my uncle had not left a will. And that entailed a whole heap of exhausting bureaucratic formalities.
According to law, if no claim to the inheritance was received within six months of the death, the apartment reverted to the city, and it had to be won back through the courts.
We contacted the state notary’s office for the area where my uncle lived and exchanged letters with the Russian consulate. There were no grounds for refusing us. In March we received a document stating that from 1 June my father, as a blood relative, would come into the inheritance. We only had to pay some outstanding fees or taxes.
The family council decided that I would go to arrange the business.
I was taking on the difficult task of selling my uncle’s apartment. It was anticipated that if a potential buyer were found, my father would come to help me and collect the proceeds, so that he could check everything and make sure we weren’t swindled.
We had serious discussions about the problem of moving the money across the border and even considered the possibility of transporting it in the urn with my uncle’s ashes. Mum immediately spoke up against such a sacrilegious conspiracy and said she had better come with my father, and then, with three of us in the same train compartment, we would get the money through safely. But in any case my father wanted to bury my uncle’s urn beside my grandfather’s and grandmother’s graves.
We had a letter of attorney drawn up, giving me the right to decide all the legal questions, and I packed for the journey, hoping to have the sale completed in a few short weeks and start patching up my leaky life.
The journey took almost three dreary days. I travelled in a third-class sleeper, so the ticket wasn’t all that expensive. A grey-haired woman who looked like a kindly schoolteacher timidly asked me to swap places with her. I gave up the lower bunk, and the grateful “teacher” plied me with home-made potato pies.
Perched opposite us was a red-cheeked maiden in the collective-farm style. She was travelling with a large bundle wrapped in check cloth, which wouldn’t fit under the seat. During the day the farm girl guarded it vigilantly and at night, just to be sure, she lowered her solid foot, still in its shoe, from the bunk and set it on the bundle.
A sharp-nosed little man, as frisky as a mouse, settled in above the maiden with a small plywood suitcase. The little man drank tea and told the maiden about his difficult lot in life, repeatedly intoning, “When you’re poor, you’re poor.” He had already managed to soften the female conductor’s heart and get a mattress for free, and every now and then he ran to fill up his glass with hot water, because he was carrying his own strong brew with him.
I tried to remain reticent and when the “kindly schoolteacher” asked: “Where are you going to?” I replied curtly: “To visit my uncle”—and then deftly stuck my nose in a book and didn’t allow myself to be drawn into conversation.
On the first night we crossed the border. About a dozen snorers had congregated in the carriage and so I slept badly; even covering my head with the pillow wasn’t much help.
In the morning the train got stuck at the small station of Zhelybino. My window was opposite a memorial plaque screwed to the peeling station walclass="underline" “Here died a valiant death Sergeant Stepan Yakovlevich Gusev, Private First Class Ivan Matveyevich Usikov, Privates Khamir Khafunovich Khazifov, Pavel Kuzmich Fyodorov and Husein Izmailovich Alikperov.” After an hour I had learned this list of the dead off by heart and then the train finally set off again. At midday we passed through Moscow.
It was hot in the carriage. I gazed interminably at the fleeting whirligig of the landscape. The sky blazed bright blue, little lakes glinted brilliantly. When a bird launched itself off a tree and flew into the grass, the wind carried it away, spinning it round like a scrap of paper. Hills of crushed stone sprang up, only to be replaced by sparse green forest with a clearing full of dandelions spreading through it like a hole. A pine forest began, with reddish-brown bogs stretching away behind it: the rotten trunks of birch trees stuck up out of the water. Then a spruce forest started and was broken off by a bridge. On the other side of the river a modern-looking village with three-storey prefabricated apartment blocks was fenced off by poplar trees. After that came an open field, overgrown with weeds, with a rusty goal frame for football and a spotted goat tethered to it.
Looking at the abandoned goal, for some reason I imagined a disaster: children were playing football, the ball flew off onto the rails and a child didn’t notice the train. In keeping with my sad thoughts a cemetery and a gingerbread church appeared.
Station platforms looking like airport landing strips hurtled by so fast that I didn’t have time to read the names. The district towns with their endearing, simple names followed one after another: Pozyrev, Lychevets. The stations there often had only two tracks. While we were standing, local pedlars slouched through the train, offering newspapers and magazines, beer and simple provisions— sunflower seeds, meat pasties, dried fish.
On the third day I was already sick and tired of travelling and was glad when we passed Kolontaysk in the morning. A few hours later the massive grey, watery expanse of the Urmut Reservoir appeared outside the window, followed by the smoking funnels of a nuclear power station, like chess pieces, and endless stretches of industrial plants, barracks-style buildings with walls of smoke-stained glass.
The old station building was like a high-domed church, and deep inside it faded Soviet frescoes depicted the Socialist happiness of the past.
After tumbling out onto the station platform the passengers were surrounded by taxi drivers clamouring insistently like gypsies to offer their motorized services. I asked the one who looked the least mercenary to me how I could get to Chkalov Street. The driver worked his lips a bit, figuring out the profit in his head, and named a price, but I still couldn’t tell if it was acceptable or not—I was confused by the difference between Russian roubles and Ukrainian hryvnias. In roubles it sounded more expensive.
I apologized, said I didn’t have much money and asked if he could tell me how to get there on public transport. The taxi driver hesitated for a moment before taking pity on me and showing the way. He waved his hand in the direction of a McDonald’s mast with a neon “M” on the top, which was visible beyond the roofs of the buildings.
Skirting round the buildings I saw a trolleybus-turning circle and a route-taxi stop. To be on the safe side I asked a cultured-looking old woman about the central market and she confirmed what the taxi driver had said, that it was five stops away. Then she asked me if I could remember which tree had come into leaf first this year: the alder or the birch? She explained, “If it was the birch, it will be a good, warm summer. But if the alder was first, we’ve had it, it’s going to be rainy and cold.”