Compartment Number 6

“Feeling better?”
An oak plank had appeared on the table, as had a little batteryless Blaupunkt travel radio with a little green cat’s eye light and a puffing travel samovar. He had put loose tea in the enamel kettle and was pouring boiling water over it.
“Sorry about that cunt comment. Devil got into me. Dark forces.”
He felt his temple proudly. There was a little mark there. Then he pointed at her boot, which he had placed in the middle of the floor.
“You did the right thing. I deserved to have my ass kicked.”
She smiled.
“Thank you, my girl. There are two causes of anguish in life: when we want to and can’t, and when we can but we don’t want to.”
She got out her food, put it on the table, and started to eat. She offered some to him, too, but he wasn’t hungry.
When she’d finished eating, she took Garshin’s The Red Flower out from under her bottle of scotch and started to read. Mitka had given it to her and said that it showed how a sick mind worked. She was slowly reading the dog-eared, brown-paged book, printed in the previous centu-ry. “The patient was stripped, in spite of his frenzied resistance. With strength increased by his illness, he easily wrenched himself away from the several hands of his wardens, causing them to fall to the floor, until finally four of the men held him down and, restraining his arms and legs, lowered him into a warm tub. It looked to him like boiling water, and in his insane head there flashed the incoherent, disconnected thought that it was a form of torture performed with boiling water and a hot iron. Thrashing in the water and struggling convulsively with both arms and legs, which the attendants continued to hold fast, he roared a choking, incoherent stream of speech that, if one had not heard it, one would be incapable of imagining.”
She put the book on the table. Oh, Mitka!
The man gently packed away his radio and threw himself on his bunk. The late, narrow moon hovered slack above the wild landscape.
“The ice seems to be broken, my girl,” he said lightly. “Now I can go to sleep. Life is easier when you’re asleep.”
She watched him as he puffed in his sleep. There was something about him. Maybe it was his cauliflower ears. His way of holding his knife. His flat, muscular stomach. She felt the glow in the west color the universe purple for a moment and the stars ignite in the black sky one by one.
She thought about Mitka, his long eyelashes, his perfect toes, his inward smile. The day they ran through the freezing rain to the Armaments Museum and hid inside a tank and the museum guard found them after the place had closed. They ended up sitting up all night with him in the guard’s booth clinking champagne glasses. Mitka, whose door had always been open, had gone to the mental hospital to avoid the army, deployment to Afghanistan.
The night had already chilled the dark through into a red dawn the was coming in through win-dow. The yellow moon swept up the last bright star to make way for the fiery sun. and slowly all of Siberia grew light. The man was in his sweat pants and white shirt, lifting weights between the beds, his eyes sleepy, his mouth dry and stinking, a thick stench in the room, an airless window, silent tea glasses on the table, quiet crumbs on the floor. A new day was before them, with its orange, frost-covered birches and pine groves where hidden animals roamed and fresh snow drifted over the plains, its white, fluttering longjohn legs, flaccid penises, mitts and muffs and broad, flowered flannel nightgowns, wool socks and shawls and straggly toothbrushes.
The night rushed through the dark to the dim of morning, a dogged line at the shrine of the WC, a dry wash among the puddles of pee, sputum, shame, sheepish looks, shadows of steaming tea glasses in the windows, large, flat cubes of sugar, paper-thin aluminum spoons, black bread, Vio-la cheese, sliced tomatoes and onion, roasted baby chicks, canned horseradish, hard-boiled eggs, salt pickles, mayonnaise, tinned fish, and canned peas from Moldavia.
The darkness broke out in a new day, the snow rose from the ground right up the tree trunks, the silence faded in the topmost branches, a hawk sat on the haunch of a turquoise cloud and looked down at the slithering train.