A south wind sprinkled the white plain with lonely snowflakes, a pale glimmer flashed over the trees. He spit angrily over his left shoulder into a corner of the cabin.
“I’m talking about the same Katinka who saw us off at the station yesterday. That mug was my doing. I came home drunk and then it started. Same mess every time. She started in with the same old argument. When she wasn’t able to stop, I slapped her once, then twice. If she’d just keep her mouth shut like a good girl, help a poor traveler take off his winter clothes, make some supper. But she never learns. I try to explain, I even praise her. But she doesn’t listen, she just lays it on thicker, screams that men built this damned world just for themselves. That’s how a henpecked husband’s anger gets all piled up, and then I slap her till she’s quiet. If she doesn’t shut up then I knock her a good one right in the smacker. It’s not easy for me – I don’t like hit-ting – but it always happens that way. I have a right to speak, too, to be a human being in my own home, even if I’m not there very often.”
He laid careful stress on each word, dropping them one by one. The girl tried to close her ears.
“It’s depressing to have the same old fight in the middle of the night. It takes all the joy out of life. Last night the strong smell of her was rolling over me like a tank. Just the thought of her wreck of a pussy makes me want to puke my guts out.”
The train car gave a jerk, his arm jumped, a tear rose in the corner of his eye. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and closed his eyes, cleared his throat and sat up straight, filled his lungs with air and blew it out again.
“But there’s a limit to everything. I never hit Katinka out in the hall at the commune, or in the street, or at the agency. I only hit her in our own room, because otherwise the block watch or the militia would show up and I don’t like either one of them, especially the militia. The num-ber one rule is that the boy can’t see it – after all, it is his mother. He’s so big now that he has his own little gal to smack around. I don’t like that... Pound an old lady with a hammer and you turn her into gold, the old codgers taught me that when I was a young man. It’s advice I’ve followed. Maybe too much.”
The girl looked first at the floor, then at the frozen clouds at the edge of the sky. She’d never met a Russian man like this before. Or maybe she had, but she hadn’t wanted to remember it. No Russian man had ever spoken to her like this. Still, there was something familiar about him, his insolence, his way of drawing out his words, his smile, his tender, disdainful gaze.
“Katinka is a Russian woman, ruthless and just. She works, takes care of the house and kids, she can handle anything. I just think differently than she does. Take my old mother, for in-stance. We all lived next to each other in the same commune, and I thought it was a great thing – Katinka could cook for my old lady at the same time she cooked for herself and the boy, and keep a lookout, make sure that Ma’s life had some flavor to it. But it wasn’t that easy. For the whole twenty-three years that we’ve been married that bitch has been demanding that I throw my old lady out.”
The girl got up from the bed to go into the corridor, but he grabbed her tightly by the arm and pointed at the bunk.
“You’re going to hear this to the end.”
She tore herself free. He dashed at her and seized her by the wrist, firm but fatherly. She flopped down onto the foot of the bed.
He went back to his place, lifted a fingertip to his lips, and blew lightly, smiling obscenely.
“Something that’s always baffled me is how a suitor always loves his bride, but every husband hates his wife. As soon as the marriage license is signed the man turns into a clod and the woman turns into an old bag and their feelings start to gnaw away at both of them. The broad thinks that once they get some of the conveniences then everything will be alright. She thinks the answer is her own hot plate, a new housecoat, a floor vase, a kettle without any dents in it, a porcelain tea set. The fellow, on the other hand, thinks, man, if I could get myself a whore, I could stand that old bag a little better. But in spite of everything... Sometimes when I look real hard at Katinka, I feel like I want to say Katyusha, my silly little thing, my little fool.”
He gave a heavy sigh, reached for the pickle bag, got hold of a pickle, popped it in his mouth, and swallowed it whole accidentally.
“There’s no place for a man’s man. The dames would get by better without us. Nobody needs us, except another man. Right now I feel like drinking a toast to the energy, the toughness, the patience, the courage, the humor, the shrewdness, the deceitfulness and beauty of the Russian woman. It’s the dames that keep this country going.”
He slid his hand under his bunk and pulled out a Tchaikovsky chocolate bar. He opened it with his knife and offered some to the girl. He didn’t take a piece for himself, just put the bar down in the middle of the table. The chocolate was dark and tasted of naphtha. She thought of Irina, of how she would often sit under the reading lamp in her favorite armchair in the evening and read a book, how the yellow light from the lamp fell on the book’s pages, how Irina’s hands held the book, how her face looked...
“Women used to know how to keep quiet. Nowadays they got their traps open all the time. One of the bitches used to put out and smoke at the same time, while I was fucking her. I wanted to strangle her.”
A birch forest, weary with hard frosts and sharp winds, came into view. The naked trees drew graphic lines in the snow. The train sped by, the snow blew into the air and hung there pure and sparkling. Sometimes the window was filled with frozen, white forest, other times with blithe, blue, cloudless sky. The girl could hear the tones and rhythms of the man’s voice. His momen-tary passion quickly evaporated, replaced by a pinch of deep sadness.
He thought for a long time. His wet lips sometimes moved quickly, sometimes very slowly. His posture had fallen; he was sitting with his shoulders drooped. The girl took her drawing things out of her bag and started to draw.
He glanced at her, sighed a little, shrugged his shoulders lamely.
“Katinka. My own Katinka.”
Silence fell over the cabin. He put his head against the cold windowpane. She got up and went out.
Several passengers were standing in the corridor. A freight train was going past in the other di-rection, causing their train to rock. The little station building flashed like a turquoise dot in a vast universe. A splash of dirt had been thrown against the corridor window during the night and a pale light filtered through it. The birches grew sparse, the train quieted its speed, a rusted wreck of metal lay on the neighboring track, and soon the train was shooting into Kirov station. A sign along the track said that Moscow was about a thousand kilometers away.
The door of the car was open. She stood in the doorway. A few small snowflakes drifted in the still, dry, cold of the day. A decrepit local train twitched restlessly at the next platform like it was in the grip of a seizure. People pushed their way out of its innards and desperately gulped the fresh air. The station bell rang once, then twice. She had a glimpse of the black plastic bill of the conductor’s cap before Arisa came to close the door.
“What are you standing there for? Do you want to get off in Kirov? They’d horsewhip you here. Get back into your cabin! You don’t have a citizen’s passport, or even a permanent ad-dress. Stupid foreigners don’t understand anything, sticking their noses where they’re not want-ed! They foist all the unlucky ones on me. Do you even know who Kirov was?”
The girl tottered slowly back down the corridor of the moving train and looked at the swaying town outside the window. A pack of stray dogs was fighting in front of a baroque administration building and a young man was hitting them with a broken broomstick. She went to the car host-ess’s cabin to buy some tea. Arisa was sitting on the bed, all-powerful, looking at her pityingly. Georg Ots was singing in Russian on a small transistor radio.
“A person has to live,” Arisa said. “It’s the same for everyone. You either do it well or you do it poorly.”
She handed the girl two glasses of tea and three packets of cookies instead of two.
“You can handle anything, provided you have no choice. Now get back to you own cab-in!”
The man sat on his bed. He wore a plaid shirt open over his white button-up. Under the wrinkles of the white shirt peeped a sweaty, muscular belly. He picked up a small orange from the table and started to tear roughly at the peel. When he’d eaten the fruit he dug a disheveled newspaper out from under his bunk and blurted from behind it in an irritated tone:
“A person’s restless when they’re young. No patience. Always scurrying. Everything goes at its own pace. Time is just time.”
He wrinkled his brow and sighed.
“Like me for instance. You’re looking at an old duffer, a melancholy soul filled with a dull calm. A heart that doesn’t beat with feeling anymore, just out of sheer habit. No more pranks in him, not even any pain. Just boredom.”
The girl remembered her last night in Moscow, how she’d hurried from one place to another, dashed down the long stairway into the metro and taken the red line to the Lenin library, run across the tiled floor of the museum-like station, through the maze of corridors lined with bronze statues and up the steep escalators to the blue line, rode it past Arbat, got off at the church-like station decorated with mosaics whose name she couldn’t remember now, realized she’d forgotten her purse, which contained her train tickets and vouchers, and turned back the way she came, jumped off one metro train and onto another, gone through the stations where she’d transferred lines, and to her great amazement, found her purse at the Lenin library stop – it was waiting for her in the metro inspector’s window.