Moscow hunkered down into a dry, frozen March evening, protecting itself from the touch of an icy sun setting red. The girl boarded the last sleeping car at the tail end of the train, found her cabin – cabin number six – and took a deep breath. There were four bunks, the higher two at-tached to the wall above. There was a small table between the beds with a white tablecloth and a plastic vase of faded pink paper carnations. The shelf at the head of the beds was full of large, clumsily-tied parcels. She shoved the unprepossessing old suitcase that Zahar had given her into the metal storage space under the hard, narrow bunk and threw her small backpack on the bed. When the station bell rang for the first time she went to stand at the window in the passageway. She breathed in the smell of the train – iron, coal dust, smells left by dozens of cities and thou-sands of people. Travelers and the people with them pushed past her, lugging bags and packages. She touched the cold window and looked at the platform. This train would take her to villages of exiles, across the open and closed cities of Siberia to the capitol of Mongolia, Ulan Bator.
When the station bell rang the second time she saw a muscular, cauliflower-eared man in a black workingman’s overcoat and a white ermine hat with a dark-haired woman and her shy teenage son. The woman and boy said goodbye to the man and walked arm in arm back toward the sta-tion. The man stared at the ground, turned his back to the icy wind, pinched a Balemorka, lifted it to his lips and lit it, smoked greedily for a moment, stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of his shoe, and stood there, shivering. When the station bell rang for the third time, he jumped on the train. The girl watched him walk toward the back of the car with swinging steps and hoped he wasn’t coming to her cabin. She hoped in vain.
After a moment’s hesitation she went into the cabin and sat on her own bunk across from the man, who radiated cold. Both were silent. The man stared mutely at the girl, the girl at the paper carnations. As the train jerked into motion Shostakovich’s eighth string quartet burst forth in a loud, plastic voice in the cabin and passageway.
And so the Moscow winter, the steel-blue city warmed by the evening sun, was left behind. Moscow – the city lights and the noise of traffic, the circle dance of churches, the teenage boy and the beautiful dark-haired woman with one side of her face swollen – were all left behind. The sparse neon signs against a morose, pitch-black sky, the ruby stars on the towers of the Kremlin, the waxed bodies of the good Lenin and the bad Stalin, and Mitka, were left behind. Red Square and the Lenin Mausoleum, the revolving door and iron railings of the Gum depart-ment store, the Intourist international hotel with its currency exchanges and cleaning closets, where dark caterers to a secret fascination supplied the suites with western make-up, perfume, and electric razors, were left behind. Irina, the statue of Pushkin, the ring roads and bypasses, Stalin’s thoroughfares, the western-style, multi-lane Novy Arbat, the Yaroslav highway and the rows of dachas embellished with carved wooden flourishes, the weary, overworked country, slipping away, was left behind. An empty freight train a hundred meters long zoomed by outside the window. This was still Moscow: a mass of nineteen-story minimalist buildings in the middle of a mud pit, faint, glimmering lights trembling in their icy windows, a construction site – half-finished high-rises with gaping holes in their walls. Soon they, too would be silhouettes in the distance. This wasn’t Moscow anymore: a house collapsed under the snow, a wild, swaying pine forest frozen over with frost, a clearing covered in drifts, a mist of hairgrass under piles of snow, darkness, a lone log house in a white clearing, an unkempt apple tree in the yard, a mixed forest in frozen snow, the plank fence of a villa, a fallen-down wooden barn. An unknown Russia fro-zen in ice opened up ahead, the train sped onward, clear stars shining against a tired sky, and rushed into nature, into a darkness that pressed against a cloudy, starless sky. Everything was moving: snow, water, air, trees, clouds wind, cities, villages, people, and ideas. The train raced across a snowy land.
The girl could hear the man’s heavy, peaceful breathing. He was looking at his hands; they were large and strong. Switch lanterns teemed over the surface of the ground below. Sometimes the view was blocked by train cars standing on the tracks, sometimes Russia’s night darkness spread outside the window, here and there a faintly lit house flashed by. The man looked up, gave the girl a long, piercing once-over, and said with relief:
“So it’s just the two of us. The shining rails carrying us to God’s refrigerator.”
© Rosa Liksom 2011