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.”
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.