The train braked and came to a stop. In a moment the engine gave a jerk and the train was mov-ing again. Another brake. Another stop. The engine dithered for a moment, whistled cheerfully, made up its mind, and moved. The wheels rang in momentary apology but soon the train was rattling ahead with purpose. The sun bounced up from beyond a field of snow, lit up the land and sky for a moment, then disappeared behind the boundless swampy landscape. The man examined the girl for a stingingly long time.
“So your spirit’s full of nothing but dreams? Well, go ahead and dream. Ivan the Fool fell asleep on the stove bench and had a moving dream about the stove and a table that filled itself with food, but this life that men wiser than me call a mere holding cell, is here and now. Death may come tomorrow and rip your balls off.”
His narrow face shone with self-satisfaction. He had a beautiful mouth, narrow lips and a small scar on his chin like Trotsky.
“Death can’t be nearly as bad as life.”
He closed his eyes and pressed his lips tightly together. Then he hummed.
“Don’t you fear death my girl, not as long as you’re alive, because when you’re alive it’s not here yet, and when you’re dead, it’s not here anymore.”
He hiccuped a little, shook his shoulders, and sat up straighter.
“I’d rather die than be afraid. If there’s anything you should be afraid of, it’s the Mongo-lians. They don’t even have names. They don’t do anything but eat, screw, sleep, and die. They have no morals of any kind. The human soul doesn’t mean a thing to them. But they do know how to destroy. You give a Mongolian a transistor radio and five minutes later you get back a pile of screws and wires and an empty case. Even though the Mongolians have treated us moral Russians terribly and crushed our spines, we’re still trying to help them. We’re bringing them up to the present. But they don’t understand anything. They screw their children and laugh right in our faces... Am I getting through to you? Look at the Soviet Union, a powerful country, and a great, old, very diverse population lives here. We’ve suffered through serfdom, the time of the tzars, and the revolution. We’ve built socialism and flown to the moon. What have you all done? Nothing! What do you have that’s better than us? Nothing!”
He smacked his fists on his knees and opened his mouth to say something, but was silent.
Next to the train, far above the wall of forest, an eagle glided by with a calf carcass in its claws. The cabin door fell open. The little lamps that glimmered yellowish along the edge of the floor buzzed; the corridor looked like an airport runway. The heating duct threw out a burning heat in the narrow space. The girl went into the corridor. There was a young couple there with a scrawny old woman the size of a child and a little girl in pigtails. The girl had a brown pioneer teddy bear under her arm and a clown doll in a tall hat that looked like a schizophrenic who’d been through a bad trip on her lap. The violet sun over a demure forest clearing slipped behind the snow-covered evergreens. In the dense depths of the forest little birds slept in their nests among the rocks, sinewy, white-coated hares in their burrows, and snoring bears in their hidden caves.
Arisa was making her rounds of the cabins and Sonechka, the younger car hostess in her over-sized uniform, followed after her. The girl tried to talk with Sonechka, but she was so shy that she turned her face away at once and disappeared after Arisa into the first cabin. It was an area restricted to the car staff where an angrily bubbling samovar as big as the wall steadily puffed and steamed day and night. The samovar held dozens of buckets of boiling water.
A paled sun revolved on the horizon. The dusky forest rose up muttering toward a cloud-embroidered, unsteady sky. The man appeared in the passageway, and the girl went into the cab-in, felt the rumble of the rails, and fell asleep.
When she woke up, he was looking at her with a very offended expression on his face. She smiled at him, thinking about how logical the whole thing was. She had left Moscow because now was the right time to realize her and Mitka’s shared dream of a train trip across Siberia, all the way to Mongolia. True, she was making the trip alone, but there was a simple reason for that.
The man had taken a worn deck of cards out of his bag and started to play solitaire.
“Georgians,” he said. “They’ve got legs like giraffes and they know how to sell them-selves to guys like me so well that you forget you paid for it. An Armenian’s history has beaten her down, made her a humble lesbian, a pleasant companion who won’t discipline her children. A Tatar only likes Tatars, a Chechen is a combination of an excellent baby machine and a drug dealer, the Dagestanis are small, thin, ugly, and smell of camphor and the foolishly proud Ukrainians are always plotting nationalist conspiracies in their horrible accents. You get to where you’re deaf to it. And then there’s the Balts. They cause all kinds of shit. It’s no secret. They’re too practical. They walk around with their mouths turned down, their eyes straight ahead.”
He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. The girl coughed wearily, but he didn’t take any notice of this indication of her thoughts.
“I’ve never screwed a Russian woman who was satisfied, not even for a minute. And this cock has pumped thousands of different colors of pussy.”
He stretched his thick hands out toward her. Long fingers grew from them, the fingernails flat and clean. They were horrible hands. His expression was at first one of nonchalance, then pure anger.
“But tell me, what’s someone like you doing on this train? Selling some cunt?”
The girl flinched, bleated miserably, grabbed her winter boot from under her bunk and threw it at him, then got up and went out into the corridor. The heel of the boot hit him right in the temple. Once outside, she calmed herself for a long time before going to Arisa to ask for a different cab-in.
Arisa listened to her request with her head to one side.
“We’ll see,” she said, in such an unhurried manner that the girl handed her a twenty-five ruble note.
Apparently Arisa didn’t feel it was a sufficient sum.
“It’s against our rules to change cabins. But perhaps I could do something to arrange it. It will be difficult, though.”
The girl slipped another bill of the same value into her hand – it was all she could part with.
Arisa glanced at the bill disdainfully.
“Getting around a rule like that is a tough job, in fact it’s dangerous for me personally. I could lose my position entirely or even end up in jail because of you. But perhaps it could be ar-ranged...”
The girl didn’t listen to the rest of what she had to say. She rushed back out into the corridor with a sob in her throat. She simply had to swallow her defeat and go back to the man, at least at night.
The train sped whining across the flat, floating landscape, under a sky frothy with winter clouds. The living forest beyond an open field tossed a flock of sparrows at the sky. She calmed herself by watching the black, starkly drawn shadow of the train on the bright snow.
She thought about Irina, how she might be sitting in the smoking room of the advanced chemis-try institute, behind the Achievements in the National Economy pavilion, smoking a cigarette and getting ready for her next lecture. She thought about Zahar, who could see through her, and Mitka, who was good. A little kitten appeared in the corridor and looked at her beseechingly. She picked it up and held it and petted its rumpled fur. At the insane asylum, Mitka had said that so-cialism kills the body and capitalism kills the spirit but socialism the way we have it harms both the body and the spirit.
When Mitka turned eighteen, she and Irina had the task of finding food to cook for his birthday party. They had started gathering ingredients back in March, and had managed to find all kinds of things, but Irina wasn’t satisfied. One morning they went out to hunt for groceries at six AM. They rushed through the dry, freezing weather to the Yelisev shop, but they didn’t find anything there, not even bagels. They hopped onto a freezing tram, angry, and rode past the Boulevard and the snowy maples to the fragrant bread shop in Bronnaya. There they found two small pieces of good bread. They got on the trolley, which was so hot that they were covered in sweat, and trun-dled hopefully to Zachaczewski Lane. There was a grocery there where Irina had once found two cans of high-quality sardines. They didn’t find anything, though, not even pickles. They stood for a moment in the windy street, uncertain what to do, where to go. They walked with frozen toes, arm in arm, to Lenin Street, but the trip didn’t add any weight to their shopping bag. They made a quick run over to Timiryazev. There they found a bottle of cologne for Yuri, but nothing to eat. They swung by Chistiye Prudy on the bus, brought Yuri his cologne, and got two eggs from him. Why not go to the currency exchange shop? he asked. I don’t have any dollars, the girl whis-pered, we already blew all of it, plus my stipend, at the beginning of autumn. Yuri yelled after them to go to the market, for God’s sake, although he knew that there was nothing there. On Sokolniki Street they found two big jars of borscht, put them under their arms and headed proud-ly to the tram stop on Tverskoy Boulevard, and Irina glanced at her watch and said that she should have been lecturing at the institute a long time ago. A country woman was shivering in front of the paper shop and she bought a handsome gladiolus from her and handed it to Irina, and just as they were about to leave, the woman whispered that she had two chickens in her bag. Were they interested? Of course! Irina said, and settled on a price. They ran to the nearest metro station. Irina took the blue line to the institute and the girl went home on the yellow with her bag full of chickens. Zahar was home and she asked him to come in the kitchen and opened her bag and there they were, two mouth-watering, fluttering brown chickens with rubber bands wrapped around their beaks. Zahar looked at them and said that with a few weeks of seed feed they would be ready to stew. They took the squawking chickens into the bathroom. She laid some of the laundry on the bottom of the tub as a cushion. The wooden towel rack served as a perch. They called the little one Plita and the big one Kipyatok. The day before Mitka’s party Zahar slaugh-tered the fattened chickens expertly in the bathroom and plucked them on the balcony. Then Irina taught her and Mitka how to cook chicken the Stalinist way.
A pale gray half moon chuckled above the snowy, silent, melancholy forest, keeping gleaming red Mars company. A little boy was singing to himself while he played with a painted whistle in the shape of a chicken at the other end of the train car corridor. When the nocturnal light of the moon dimmed and turned dirty, the girl returned to her cabin. She was hungry and tired.
The cabin smelled like Consul hair tonic, the kind you can buy at party hotel kiosks. The man looked at her from the end of the trail of scent, shy somehow.