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.
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.