In the bus, a wool glove cleaned a wedge in the frost and two eyes peered out: probably the old lady with the string bag-Stepping around the back of it, I stayed out of the driver's sight. There was a porch on the front of the store, snow piled up on it, which was supported by heavy logs still covered with bark. A nail had been driven into one of these to hang a hurricane lamp, and the skis, snowshoes, and burlap sacks piled up around the door made me think of old steel engravings of "Life in the North."
I pushed the door open. At once, I was swallowed up in a cloud of tobacco smoke, dust, and coal-oil fumes, a fog so thick that I needed a moment to adjust my eyes to the murk. When I could see again, I realized I was in a low room — I almost felt I had to crouch — that was divided by a wooden counter. Behind this counter was a window, but one of its panes had been replaced by a square of cardboard, and the rest of it was so completely obstructed by various pots, pans, and other goods hanging from hooks along the back wall that it admitted almost no light. I stepped deeper into the room. There was a plank floor, spread with sawdust to stop the cold from seeping up, and the walls were bare boards. After I'd taken a couple of steps, a voice grunted, "It is after one now. The electricity has been turned off. So I regret that the store is now closed. Tonight, at six, we will open again. When they turn it back on."
Tracking down her voice, I was able to see her: a middle-aged woman, behind the counter and at the far end of it. In this dark corner of the room, she was lost in the shadow of a stovepipe, which stretched from an immense black space heater to a hole in the ceiling. Behind her were a series of shelves, empty except for a single bolt of dark cloth and a small Pyramid of tins. She was a big woman, tall and stout, her bulk being further increased by layers of sweaters and shawls. As s«e stood, regarding me, she hugged herself with her arms, though in fact the place seemed warm enough.
'Perhaps you could help me anyway," I said. "And… would you have any cigarettes?"
Only papirosi. Today, he didn't bring any more."
Perhaps "he" was the bus driver, for now I could hear the engine revving outside.
I said, "Papiwsi will be all right."
She reached under the counter. Papirosi are cardboard tubes with a little loose tobacco inside. Inhale too deeply and you get a mouthful; puff hard and you're likely to spray ash all over the room. Pinching off the end, I lit up. The woman eyed me — and despite the meagerness of her stock, she had a shopkeeper's eyes: they added me up and made change. "You are from Moscow," she said.
This was, in fact, a fair guess. The truth of my origins was so incredible that not even the keenest intuition would grasp it immediately. But she knew I wasn't from here, and she knew that something about me made her suspicious — and people from Moscow, tentatively, fitted that bill. I didn't argue. "That's right."
She smiled. "If you don't mind, I'll have a good look. We don't see many from there."
I smiled back. "You should see the back of my head. I have eyes there as well." Then I shrugged. "I'm from Moscow, but I was born in Pestovo… which you've never heard of, just as people there don't know Povonets. Still, it's a real place to be from."
A little shift in her posture indicated some sort of acceptance. She smiled. "So what do you want, Moscow Pestovo?"
"I'm looking for a man name Yuri Shastov. I want to know where he lives."
Her mouth tightened. She didn't like that; friends know where their friends live — and so anyone who asks isn't a friend. Russia is the country that invented "the knock on the door," and so even today the doors in older apartment buildings often don't have any numbers. I tried to seem casual. "I could ask up the street, but why make it official?"
"Why not? If it is…"
"No, no. It's not necessary. I have a message, from an old friend. He told me where to go — the road, near the burned-out factory. I walked up there, but no one had heard of him."
She hesitated, then made up her mind. She shrugged. "He's never lived there. Everyone knows… I suppose there's no harm… he rarely comes here anymore. He lives on the second road to the canal. You can recognize his house. There's a fancy roof over the well."
"He lives by himself? I understood…"
"An old woman looks after him."
"Ah, I see, then. Thank you."
She smiled. "It's no trouble… helping a man from Pes-tovo."
"But you've saved me a great deal of trouble — and in Pes-tovo I will tell everyone that they must help you when you come there."
She laughed then, and, indeed, the chances of her ever leaving this village were purely humorous. "The second road," she said as I turned away. "You'll have to walk to the end of the street."
I retreated through the gloom. Outside, the chill air misted my breath as I heaved a sigh of relief. But I'd done all right; rny strangeness had been defined for me, "the man from Mos-cow/Pestovo," and despite the awkwardness I'd felt, she'd found me convincing; at least she wouldn't run to the police. But this just bought time. At six, when the store opened again, the questions would start — she now had choice gossip to sell to her customers. Who would want to see Yuri Shastov, and come all the way here from Moscow to do it? Of course, I thought, there was one simple solution to that: get out of here before six o'clock rolled around.
I turned up the street. The sun was now trying to come out, and it had grown a bit warmer; the snow was turning sticky ^ cake. Following the storekeeper's directions, I kept straight on. As the houses petered out, the road swung inland, away from the lake. For a time there were tracks I could follow, but then these ran out, and I trudged on, the snow coming to the top of my boots. It was tough going; soon I was huffing hard and walking with my head down, and my nose began streaming. After a mile or so, the road ascended a little hill and I paused to rest at the top. I could see a fair distance. Behind me was the white plain of the lake. In front, a thin, sickly woods enclosed both sides of the road — small birches and pines that grew up from the stumps of old cuttings — but farther away the forest grew thicker. Still farther on, I could see that the woods thinned again, and I guessed that I was seeing the line of the canal. It was only when the storekeeper had mentioned this word that I'd remembered the peculiar significance of Povo-nets. From 1931 to 1933, more than 100,000 people had starved, frozen, or otherwise perished while constructing the Belomor Canal, linking the White Sea, between Murmansk and Archangel, to Lake Onega. This was its southern end. I was now walking parallel to the "Povonets staircase" of locks — in effect, an immense graveyard, and if the trees here grew poorly, it was because they were feeding on the bitterest bile. For an odd reason, this is one of Stalin's crimes that could never be covered up or forgotten. At the time the canal was built, a tremendous amount of propaganda was generated around the "great socialist triumph" — books by Gorky, celebratory cruises up the canal by Stalin and Kirov — and one aspect of this involved the creation of a brand of cigarettes called Belomorkanals, whose package features a picture of it. Russians are devoted to tobacco — it's one of the things I have. in common with them. You can tell them any number of lies, and rewrite their history… but tamper with their cigarettes? No regime would take such a chance. So even though the canal isn't used much anymore — it's too shallow for all but the smallest barges — the cigarettes persist, and might even be a bit less repellent than most Russian brands. I wondered if they were sold in the woman's shop, and, if they were, if anyone bought them.