Sticking close to the trucks, I cut through the western edge of the city. Soon we rejoined the highway. There was more traffic now, and although the snow was letting up, enough had fallen for some drifting to start. I cut back my speed; the next fifty kilometers, to Kondopoga, took almost an hour. Shortly afterward, around nine-thirty, the trucks turned away, down a side road. But now I had no need of a guide; the road led only one way, due north. It was the single track through an almost trackless waste. To my right was the pure-white desolation of the lake; on my left, endless fir and pine forest, the thick purple boughs of the trees pressed low by the fresh white snow. With only an occasional glimpse of a railway line for company, I kept on, beating the miles into submission. Finally I won total victory. Medvezhegorsk, with twenty thousand people or so, was the last sizable spot on the line, and then came Pindushi, a small village perched on a long, icy bay jutting in from the lake. After that, the road swung inland through bush, scrub, cut-over land. I rumbled over a bridge. Two or three kilometers went by, then the road narrowed, snowbanks pinching in, and finally I could see a scattering of dark buildings along the rocky shore of the white, limitless lake. There was no sign — like myself, the place was anonymous — but I knew this was Povonets, home of the man who'd inherited Harry Brightman's strange fortune.
I eased back on the gas. All at once, I felt very tired. I'd come a long way; I only hoped that this was the end of the line.
19
A few streets of rutted ice and mud… gray log buildings and metal shacks… black smoke oozing out of stovepipe chimneys… This was Povonets. And a million other Russian villages.
If there were any cars at all in this place, people would know them by sight and a strange one would attract immediate attention; so I took the first turnoff I came to. It was a cul-de-sac. The gray, spiky trunks of dead pine trees pressed tight to both sides of the road, and at the end of it stood the burned-out shell of a cinder-block building. The roof had fallen in, and the top edges of the walls were blackened with soot. There was obviously no one there now, and it might have been abandoned for years.
When the snow deepened, I stopped the car and got out, the sound of the door closing behind me hanging in the cold air. I didn't move. The trees and the snow seemed to go on forever, stretching out under the endless gray sky. It was very quiet. The wind worked softly, smoothing out the fresh snow, and the stiff dead branches of the pines shook in the woods; but the only man-made sound was the faint drone of a plane, a brown speck, over the lake. It made me think of Halifax; there'd been a plane overhead as I made my way up Grainger's lane. And sometimes, crouched on that knoll in New Hampshire, I'd hear a plane droning by.
I waited till it disappeared before I headed back toward the main road. I walked in the ruts the car had made, my body leaning forward with the effort and my pant legs chafing together. It was irrational, but inside the car I'd felt a certain sense of security. Now that was gone, and I was feeling nervous as hell. At the road, I glanced behind me. The car was hidden by a little bend, though its tracks were obvious enough. In front of me, the road sloped sharply downhill, hedged in on both sides by these same mournful pines. To my right, partially screened by the trees, I could see the lake and the village away in the distance. The lake was a pristine white tablecloth; the village, dribbles from coffee cups: three or four thousand people, a few hundred dwellings. Squinting against the glare of the hazy sky, I could see that some of the dribbles were sufficiently regular to make up a street, and in front of one of them— metaphor breaking down — an idling bus was sending up a purplish plume of exhaust.
I took a breath and started ahead, walking in the deep, hard tracks the bus must have made on its way in.
The road wound down the side of the hill, and after a moment the village disappeared from my view. I walked along, still nervous. But I knew if I tried to be "cautious," or play it too safe, I'd just seem more suspicious. And I had to show myself sometime. There was no other choice. To find Shastov, I would have to speak with someone; in fact, I'd have to pass as a Russian. I knew I could manage this up to a point — but only up to a point. For all practical purposes, I speak the language flawlessly; in Moscow, I'm sometimes taken as a Leningrader, and in Leningrad as a Muscovite, but no one ever thinks I'm not a Russian. But I had no papers — one inquisitive militsia and I was finished — and my clothes were all wrong. That's what worried me most. The boots might just make it (though Russians spend a lot of time studying boots), but the coat was hopeless; it was too light, and too snazzy. Only its peculiar bulky shape, the result of the other clothes still packed into the lining, was even vaguely Russian. But that wasn't much camouflage. I was a stranger, I wasn't properly dressed, and I was surrounded by some of the more suspicious people on this earth — Russian peasants — so I was going to be noticed. All I could do was reach Shastov as fast as I could, then get out before people began asking serious questions.
Now, at the foot of the hill, the road leveled out; for three-quarters of a mile, it ran through a low, humped landscape of black rocks, bluish-gray snow, the streaky shadows of trees. A few huts crouched among the boulders, a boy watched me pass from a hillside, but the only adult I saw was an old woman, with a huge black apron wrapped around her middle, who studied me from her front yard. Then, quite suddenly, the ground flattened out entirely, and I found myself at the end of the town's "main" street.
It was short and dark, like a mouth of bad teeth: low, shabby buildings pressing together, then a gap. Some of the buildings were log izbas, but there were also frame structures and one large, boxlike dormitory coated with peeling stucco. Bare wooden stairways zigzagged up the sides of these structures, and stretching from behind one of them I could see a clothesline, with four gray sheets, frozen stiff" as sections of plywood, creaking in the wind. The snow was deep, piled up against the foundations of these buildings, and was smudged gray with cinders and ash. There were no sidewalks, but narrow, slushy trails, like chicken tracks, crisscrossed the street. It could have been an old refugee camp; all the buildings had been erected as temporary structures, but people had been living in them as long as anyone could remember. Or perhaps it had now been evacuated, for there was an air of total abandonment, and the only sound I could hear — the whine of a saw — seemed to enhance this. I sniffed the air. There was a smell of vinegar. After a moment, the saw, with a diminishing, wobbling sound, came to a stop.
I lit a cigarette. I was unsure what to do. But at last, almost reassuring, a woman emerged from a door and set off, away from me, down one of the tracks: dressed all in black, she was carrying an avoshka string bag that gave her an odd, canted progression. She disappeared between two of the houses. But almost immediately a man emerged from the flat-roofed, cement-block building further down the street — probably the liquor store — and gave me a look. Yes, I'd definitely caught his eye; I was now officially the stranger in town… I stood for a time, undecided. Beyond the liquor store was a two-story brick building with a corrugated-iron roof — a splendid structure for Povonets, so presumably a government office. I could ask for Shastov there, but that entailed obvious risks. I decided not to chance it. Instead, following in the path of the old woman, I walked up the street and then turned. Up ahead, the bus I'd seen from the car was still chugging away, its exhaust spreading a sooty fan over the snow. It was parked in front of a dark, squat structure, probably the village store. Almost certainly, they'd know where Shastov lived, though asking would also create its own risks. But I had to start somewhere. Tossing my cigarette aside, I followed the track I was on till it merged with another, then crossed the street.