A stocky old car hostess appeared in the cabin doorway in uniform and handed each of them clean sheets and a towel.
“No spitting on the floor. The passageway is cleaned twice a day. Your passports, please.”
Having received their passports, she left with a sneer on her face. The man nodded after her.
“That old bag Arisa has militia powers. She keeps the drunks and whores in line. It’s best not to mess with her. She’s the god of heat on the train. Keep that in mind.”
He took a folded knife with a black handle out of his pocket, removed the safety, and pressed a button. There was a ringing of metal as the steel blade clicked and sprang neatly out of the han-dle. He put the knife carefully on the table and dug a large chunk of Rossiskaya cheese, an entire loaf of black bread, a bottle of kefir and a jar of smetana out of his bag. Last he brought out a bag of pickles dripping salt water and started to pop them in his mouth with one hand while he de-voured the black bread with the other. When he’d finished eating, he reached into the bag and took out a wool sock with a glass bottle of warm tea inside it. He looked at the girl for a long time. His eyes showed reluctance at first, then a greedy curiosity, and finally some degree of ac-ceptance.
“I’m Steel Ironavich,” he said. “Metal man and general laborer to the princes of Moscow. Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov is my name. You can call me Vadim. Would you like some tea? It has vitamins, so it’s good for you to drink a cup or two. I was thinking for a moment that they’d given this old codger a stiff sentence and put me in the same cage with an Estonian. There’s a difference between the Finlyandskaya respublika and the Sovietskaya Estonskaya respublika. Estonian’s are hook-nosed German Nazis, but Finns are basically made from the same clay as we are. Finlandiya is a little potato way up north. You people are no trouble. All the world’s north-ern people are one tribe, a northern pride holds them together. By the way, Miss, you’re the first Finn I’ve ever seen. But I’ve heard a lot about them. You Finns have prohibition.”
He poured her a glass of black tea. She tasted it warily. He savored a small sip of his tea, then got up and made up his bed. He undressed modestly, taking off his outermost clothes, his thick black trousers with their narrow leather belt, his light jacket sewn from coarse fabric, and his white shirt, and folded them neatly at the end of the bed. He pulled on striped, sky-blue pajamas and crept in between the starched sheets. Soon his cracked heels and toes twisted from poor shoes and neglect emerged from under the blanket.
“Good night,” he said with a bland look on his face, almost whispering, and fell immedi-ately asleep.
The girl was awake a long time. The tea glasses and their shadows moved around the dim cabin without lighting on anything. She had wanted to get away from Moscow because she needed a separation, needed her own life, but now she was already yearning to go back. She thought about Mitka, Mitka’s mother Irina, Irina’s father Zahar, and herself, how they were all doing. She thought about their temporarily shared home, which was empty now. Even the cats, Miss Dirt and Tom Trash, were gone. The engine whistled, the rails screeched, the rattling train pounded metallically, the man snored quietly all night long. The sound reminded her of her father and she felt safe. Finally, in the wee hours, as the shadows began to dwindle, she fell into a frothy, white dream.
When she opened her eyes warily the first thing she saw was the man lifting weights between the beds. A green glimmer of sunlight played over the lacquered walls of the cabin; the man wiped the sweat from his brow with a towel. Before she had time to sit up there was a knock at the door and Arisa, who had stuffed herself into her black uniform jacket, brought in two steaming glasses of tea, moist waffles, and four large sugar cubes, and put them on the table. The man dug some kopeks out of his wallet, which was decorated with an embossed picture of Valentina Tereshko-va in her space helmet.
When Arisa had left he grabbed his narrow-bladed knife from under the bed, picked up a sugar cube in his left hand, knocked the cube in two with the dull side of the blade, and handed her a steaming glass of tea and half a cube.
He gave a shy and melancholy smile, took out a bottle of vodka, opened it and filled two blue shot glasses that he dug from the depths of his bag.
“Our shared journey may be a long one, but my speech will be short. A toast to our meet-ing. A toast to the world’s only real power, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union will never die!”
He tossed the shot down his throat and bit off a juicy piece of onion. The girl lifted the glass to her lips, but didn’t drink.
He dried his lips on the edge of the table cloth, smiling boyishly. The girl took a drink of tea. It was well-steeped, aromatic and strong. That’s when he noticed that she hadn’t drunk her vodka.
“It’s sad to drink alone.”
She didn’t touch the glass. He stared at her with a look of disappointment on his face.
“It’s hard to understand. But alright. I won’t make you, even though I feel like it.”
He was lost in thought, watching her from under his eyebrows. She didn’t like the expression on his face, so she took the small towel and her toothbrush and headed for the WC for her morning wash-up.
There was a line reaching halfway down the corridor. The travelers were wearing their bath-robes, pajamas, sweat suits, there were even a couple of men in nothing but white army longjohns.
Half an hour later she reached the front of the line. It was her turn to grab the wet, sticky door handle. The WC hadn’t been cleaned and the stench was pungent. Pee and soap and wads of newspaper floated around on the floor. Not a drop of water came out of the tap. There were two paltry, sharp-cornered fragments of beige-brown soap broken from a larger bar, smelling of soda. One piece was covered in rust-brown slime. She stepped up onto the toilet so she wouldn’t wet the slippers she’d bought in Leningrad, and managed to dry clean her teeth and face. The little window of the WC was open a crack. An abandoned, forgotten station was passing by.
The man loaded the table with black bread, canned horseradish, chunks of onion and tomato, mayonnaise, canned fish, and boiled eggs which he carefully peeled and sliced in two.
“God never forgets the blessed, and vice versa. So help yourself.”
They ate for a long time, and when he’d put the breakfast back in his bag of food and wiped the bread crumbs off the table into his hand they enjoyed their tea, which had cooled.
“I had a dream about Petya last night. He and I were born the same year and we were in the same grade at school. Five and a half years together. School didn’t suit us – we had to go to work. I waited for the trucks at the market steps and when they arrived I threw the goods off the platform into the backs of the trucks. Petya hauled boards at a construction site. We lived in a boiler room. There was one window, you could see the sidewalk, people’s feet going by. That’s where we lived. Then one evening Petya didn’t come home from work. I took the trolley to the work site the next day to ask about him and they said that he had been run over by a machine and killed. A machine had killed him. I asked what machine. One old guy pointed to a little broken-down excavator. Said that was the culprit. I took a sledgehammer and smashed it beyond repair. Since then I’ve been on my own.”
She glanced at him, deep in his thoughts, and thought about Mitka and an early morning in Au-gust. They’d been sitting on a concrete bench at the edge of Pushkin Square blowing clouds of smoke, waiting for dawn, when a drunken gang of young people showed up and started to push and threaten them. They made their way out of the group and hurried away, but one bald-headed goon went after them and threatened to “knock the four-eyes’ brains out”. They were scared. They ran across the square toward the street, but a car appeared at the end of the street and she was sure that it would have skinheads in it, too. They ran down a side street, cut across a court-yard, and sprinted sweatily to their door.
“The first time I ended up in South Siberia was at the beginning of the sixties. It was at the time of the monetary reforms. A ruble wasn’t worth anything, you couldn’t get food with good money, and they were asking fifty kopeks for a pint at the beer stands. Around that time I was sitting in the canteen on a work site and shoveling in some slop with Boris, Sasha, and Muha Dog. A work official came in, this felt-booted bumpkin, and said comrade, go to Sukhumi, in the Crimea, southern Siberia, they need workers who can swing a hammer. He shoved a piece of pa-per in my hand and disappeared like he was sucked under the floor. I went and told Vimma thanks for the pussy and see you later, sweet old fat-assed bitch, and headed for the station and rode a rattly train across the wide open spaces of the Soviet Union. I ended up in Yalta instead of Sukhumi. They were building all kinds of little cabins, and when I told them I was a human ma-chine, a concrete hero from Stahanov, I got work immediately. It was the best summer of my life. I did nothing but hammer and whore. If you’re wondering if it was humid there – you’d be wet through in about two minutes. Sometimes I went to the movies at the Construction Worker with some broad, watched adventure flicks. Three Men in the Snow. Lost in the Ice. And what was that one I liked... Three Friends on the High Sea. Whenever I remember that summer my mouth waters. You didn’t fetter your life with reason back then. But then came this last bitch. Katinka. She warbled in her sugary voice, let me wash your shirt. That’s when my life ended and I had nothing ahead of me but sinking deeper into a pit of alcohol and endless wandering.”