by Rosa Liksom
A grey half moon sprinkled light over the snowy, silent, melancholy forest, keeping gleaming red Mars company. A little boy was singing to himself while he played with a whistle shaped like a rooster at the other end of the carriage’s corridor. When the nocturnal light of the moon dimmed and turned dirty, the girl returned to her compartment. She was hungry and tired.
The compartment 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, shyly, it seemed.
‘Feeling better?’
A draughts board had appeared on the table, a little batteryless Blaupunkt travel radio with a little green cat’s-eye light, and a travel samovar, cheerfully bouncing and puffing steam. He had put loose tea in the enamel kettle and was pouring boiling water over it.
‘Sorry about that cunt comment. Devil got into me. Dark forces.’ He felt his temple proudly. There was a little mark there. Then he pointed at her boot, which he had placed in the middle of the floor. ‘You did the right thing. I deserved to have my arse kicked.’
She smiled.
‘Thank you, my girl. There are two kinds of anguish in life: when we want to and can’t, and when we can but we don’t want to.’
She got out her food, put it on the table, and started to eat. She offered some to him too, but he wasn’t hungry.
When she’d finished eating, she took Garshin’s The Scarlet Flower out from under her bottle of whisky and started to read. Mitka had given it to her and said that it showed how a sick mind worked. She was slowly reading the dog-eared, brown-paged book, printed in the previous century.
‘The attendants undressed him in spite of his desperate resistance. His disease had doubled his muscular strength, and he easily tore himself from the hands of several keepers, dashing them to the ground; at last, four of them got him down, and, taking him by the hands and feet, put him into the warm water. It seemed to him boiling, and through the frenzied brain flashed a fragmentary, incoherent thought of torture by scalding water and red-hot iron. Choking, and convulsively beating the water with hands and feet (as far as the firm hold of the keepers allowed), he shrieked out in strangled tones an incoherent speech, such as no one could imagine without hearing it.’
She put the book on the table. Oh, Mitka!
The man gently packed away his radio and threw himself on his bunk. The late, narrow moon hovered slack above the wild landscape.
‘The ice seems to be broken, my girl,’ he said lightly. ‘Now I can go to sleep. Life is easier when you’re asleep.’
She watched him as he puffed in his sleep. There was something about him. Maybe it was his cauliflower ears. His way of holding his knife. His flat, muscular stomach. She felt the glow in the west colour the universe purple for a moment and the stars ignite in the black sky one by one.
She thought about Mitka, his long eyelashes, his perfect toes, his inward smile. The day they ran through the freezing rain to the Armaments Museum and hid inside a tank and the museum guard found them after the place had closed. They ended up sitting up all night with him in the guard’s booth clinking champagne glasses. Mitka, whose door always had to be open, had gone to the mental hospital to avoid the army, deployment to Afghanistan.
The night had already chilled through the dark into a red dawn coming in through the window. The yellow moon swept up the last bright star to make way for the fiery sun, and slowly all of Siberia grew light. The man was in his blue tracksuit bottoms and white shirt, doing push-ups between the beds, his forehead sweaty, his eyes sleepy, his mouth dry and stinking, a thick stench in the room, an airless window, silent tea glasses on the table, quiet crumbs on the floor. A new day was before them, with its orange, frost-covered birches and pine groves where hidden animals roamed and fresh snow drifted over the plains, white, fluttering longjohn legs, limp penises, mitts and muffs and cuffs and flowered flannel nightgowns, shawls and wool socks and straggly toothbrushes.
THE NIGHT SPEEDS THROUGH THE DARK into dim morning, a dogged queue at the shrine of the WC, a dry wash among the puddles of pee, sputum, shame, sheepish looks, shadows of steaming tea glasses in the windows, large, flat cubes of Cuban sugar, paper-light aluminium spoons, black bread, Viola cheese, sliced tomatoes and onion, the roasted torso of a young chicken, canned horseradish, hard-boiled eggs, salt pickles, mayonnaise, tinned fish, and canned peas from Moldavia.
The darkness breaks out in a new day, snow rising from the ground up the tree trunks, the silence fading in their upper branches, a hawk perched on a turquoise cloud, looking down at the slithering worm of train.
Quiet spread orange over the snowy taiga. The man sat on the edge of his bunk, placed teacups on the table, and waited impatiently for the girl to look at him.
‘Once, in Moscow, there was a father, a mother, and a son. On 65 Kropotkin Street, in a little room behind a communal kitchen, in a home where locks couldn’t protect them. This family was quite ordinary, the mother working behind the counter in a bread shop, the father drinking on a construction site, but a true Stakhanovite nonetheless. Late one evening, when he thought the boy was asleep, the man said to his wife, It’s the boy or me. The wife whispered back in a sweet voice, Wait another month and he’ll be gone.’
He wiped his nose with his palm and swallowed.
‘In the morning the boy said his goodbyes to his one-eyed dog and pulled the door shut behind him. By nightfall he had joined a gang of other runaways and started living on the streets of Moscow. These street children slept wherever and whenever they could, in a heap like puppies, together with the deformed and the crippled, the thieves, whores, mental patients and hunchbacks. Nobody missed them, but they, too, wanted to live. The less bread they had, the more misery they had, the greater their desire to live became. They knew no fear because they were so young that they didn’t yet know the value of life. They didn’t know themselves and they didn’t know the world. This boy grew up on the streets. He grew up to be a shaggy, iron-belted Soviet Citizen who pissed pure vodka.’
He poured steeped tea into both glasses and added hot water from the samovar to get it to the right strength.
‘Tell me, do you know why a rainbow never forms behind the back of the person looking at it?’
There was a thud, a knock, and then the train braked furiously. The rails trembled, the carriages swayed, the snow on the roadbed flew into the air. The train jerked along with the brakes screeching for some distance. Boxes toppled off the shelves and the tea glasses smashed against the wall of the compartment. A woman screamed, children cried, someone ran down the corridor with heavy steps.
Arisa’s calming voice could be heard. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s normal. Citizens, please stay in your compartments. There’s nothing to see here.’
The man opened the door a crack. The passageway was filled with the curious. The girl looked out of the window and saw only forest smothered in snow. The man went into the corridor and she followed him. The door to the next carriage was open, the people crowding off the train, some bareheaded, some wearing slippers. The man shoved his way through the people and jumped into the snow among the staring, clamorous crowd. The girl remained standing in the crush on the top step of the carriage doorway. She could see drops of blood dripping into the pure white of the snow a short distance ahead. Her gaze followed a tree trunk up towards the sky. Among the pine branches hung an elk’s bloody leg.
‘The animal’s suffering. We have to finish it,’ Arisa sputtered. ‘Bring the axe, quick!’
The axe swung in Arisa’s hand as she waded towards the engine. The three-legged elk was breathing quickly, terror glittering in its eyes. Arisa lifted the axe and struck its sharp blade into the middle of the elk’s head. The blade sank into its skull, but it didn’t die.
Shaking his head, the man strode over to the twisting, bellowing animal, grabbed his jackknife from the side of his boot, snapped the blade open, and stuck it into the elk’s jugular vein. Blood sprayed in an arc and landed in the
snow, then it was very silent for a moment.
‘The journey continues!’ Arisa shouted sharply, shooing the passengers back onto the train.
On the train, the man wiped his knife on his bootleg, folded it closed, slid his hand up his side, looking for his trouser pocket, and slowly, with a slight smile, slipped the knife in. The girl waited for the train to roll into motion.
‘Once we were on a trip to Pskov to renovate a convent. We were sitting in third class, drinking. The train was rattling quietly onward across snowy nature, just like now. In the middle of this game I felt the carriage shudder. Then it started to lean and the old ladies started screaming. I looked out of the window and saw shards of railway sleepers fly by and the snow on the ground getting closer and closer. One sharp turn and the ground under the train embankment filled the window, and then the carriage was on its side in the snow. I thought I’d died and everybody else had too. But it was nothing, just a few bloodied heads, crawling out from any exit we could find. Some genius who needed the iron had stolen a stretch of the rails. We walked along the tracks for three days before we saw the towers of Pskov Kremlin. We got there, put on a couple of new roofs, and in the spring when the rails had been replaced and the guilty party found and executed, we took the same train back to Moscow.’
The girl dug her headphones out of her bag, flopped onto her bunk, closed her eyes, and listened to music. She fell asleep, switched from Louis Armstrong to Dusty Springfield, and fell asleep again.
THE TRAIN HAD SPED through the Udmurt Republic, and now was dragging limply past the Balezino station. The man rubbed his chin. The girl was listening to the choked puff of the small air vent and drawing. The morning stared sternly at them. The man opened up a draughts board and set out the pieces. The girl chose black.
They played three games, of which she won two. He congratulated her with a fierce squeeze of her hand.
The white sun rose high and hearty above the snowy woodland. Smoky clouds rushed to the centre of the sky looking for a resting place. The man and the girl sat silently. They sat in their own thoughts for a day or two.
It had been a sunny turquoise summer day. When Irina’s girlfriend Julia left, the girl went into Irina’s bedroom and looked down at Bakunin Street. People were walking in their spring coats. The girl even saw a couple of stylishly cut, flowered summer dresses. Just as she was about to look away, she noticed three men under the old maple trees. Something strange was going on among them – quick movements, lurches, swinging motions, sudden slumps. Then she saw a red blood stain on one thin man’s white shirt. One of the other men ran away. She saw him throw a knife down in a driveway. One stabbed man fell to the ground, another rolled on the pavement holding his stomach. There was a truck in front of the bakery. Five workers were lounging on the back of the truck. They ran after the stabber, got hold of him, and knocked him down. All five of them started to hit and kick him. Soon there were dozens of people around him, mostly women, beating him with handbags and gigantic sweet potatoes. The girl’s gaze shifted to the stabbed men. They were both lying motionless. No one was interested in them. A militia car arrived and the crowd around the stabber reluctantly dispersed. Blood poured out of the beaten man’s mouth and ears; his head had swollen to the size of a watermelon; one of his legs was bent in an unnatural position. There were two militiamen. They dragged the horrifying pile of flesh over to their Lada and then straightened their backs as if they were pondering how to cram the dying killer into the little car. When one of them grabbed him to shove him into the back seat, he wrenched himself free and hopped on one foot, vomiting blood, and got into the car.
After a grating screech of the train’s brakes, the Perm station slid across the window. The girl glanced at the man who was bleating in his sleep, moaning, trembling, muttering to himself.
She heard Arisa’s voice in the corridor. ‘There’s nothing in this town but drunken soldiers.’
The girl watched the wind wrestle with the disintegrating carcass of a cardboard box wandering the empty rails. A flat-looking dog the size of a calf lapped brown water from a hole in the ice that covered a puddle of sludge. Soon the engine whistled shrilly and the train picked up speed. Perm, the last city before the Urals, was left behind. Rimsky-Korsakov’s bitterly jaunty song ‘Pesnya Varyazhskogo Gostya’ chirped from the loudspeakers. The view from the window was sometimes obscured by passing trains, sometimes fences, warehouses, large buildings, buildings under construction or demolition, light, darkness, barracks, fences, power lines, an endless crisscross of wires, scrap metal, ravaged landscape, light, darkness, wild nature, an old train engine passing. Perm was left behind. The man slept peacefully in his bed, a soft expression on his face. The girl read Garshin’s The Scarlet Flower:
‘He left the door-step. Glancing round, but not seeing the keeper, who was behind him, he stepped across the bed and stretched out his hand to the blossom, but could not make up his mind to pick it. He felt a burning and pricking sensation, first in the outstretched hand, then through all his body, as though some strong current of a force unknown to him flowed from the red petals and penetrated through his whole frame. He drew nearer and touched the blossom with his hand, but he fancied that it defended itself by throwing out a poisonous, deadly vapour.’
She didn’t feel anxious any more. She thought about Mitka’s description of the mental hospital – a place where even the crazy are in danger of going crazy. She liked the book’s sick main character so much she would have liked to read more about him, his strange, twisted world. Mitka’s world. She thought about the mental hospital in the book and the hospital where Mitka was. Had anything changed in a hundred years? Perhaps there was a little less water on the floor of Mitka’s room than there was in the patient’s room in the book. How long would it take for things to change here? Could time really change anything?
The Ural mountains glimmered far off, low and insignificant. They weren’t impressive. The range remained slightly ahead, then a sign flashed by at a stop with an arrow pointing west that said ‘Europe’ and one pointing east that said ‘Asia’. A few hours later the mountains started very slowly to recede behind them.
The girl slept, and awoke when the man waved something under her nose. His knife? She opened her eyes, alarmed.
‘You’ll grow too much, little one, if you sleep so long. Your arse will get fat. Watch out.’
He looked at her with playful sternness for a moment and put the paper carnation back in the vase.
Burning clouds dashed across the southern sky, headed north. A lukewarm sun fought its way through the tops of the tallest spruce trees. Old birches decorated in a fluff of frost like blooming bird cherries graced a derelict garden. She sat up in bed with her eyes closed. Concentrated. Lifted both hands to the top of her chest near her throat and tried to calm her breathing.
After a moment she opened her eyes and looked for her headphones. She looked at the man. He opened his mouth without looking at her.
‘It often happens that I think I’m going to do one thing and I do another. As a young man, when I was screwing Vimma, I thought I’d never give up that pussy. But then what happened? I played cards with the boys and lost everything, even my coat and my leather belt. When there was nothing else left, I bet Vimma. I lost. And Vimma disappeared like a bunny in a magician’s hat, and I never saw her again.’
He poured water into the samovar and turned it on, measured a small spoonful of tea into the enamel pot. Then they just waited for the water to boil, the tea to steep, to pour it into the glasses.
‘If we were lice, or maybe bedbugs, I’d be the kind of bedbug that hunkers down and doesn’t move and stares at something that nobody else can see. You, on the other hand, would dash around until you died from exhaustion. But if we were cockroaches, we’d hook up with our own crowd straight off. They take good care of each other, help each other out at every turn. We’d take responsibility for everything that happened between us. What is a crowd? It’s a partnership, a gang. It
always sticks together. The cockroaches are right. For good or ill.’
The train braked softly as it approached Sverdlovsky. Lights and shadows slid peacefully past. The soft, frozen winter dusk beckoned along the side streets of the town, its parks and squares. A local train squeaked on the next track. A wave of people arriving from the suburbs flooded into the small station from an arriving train, a full moon reflected orange from drifts of snow yellowed with dogs’ piss. The stars in the sky were like a vast array of portals to another reality, the same stars as in Moscow, but different.
The train rocked and accelerated. It was soon speeding forward, and all the villages that had sprung up east of the city long ago were left far behind. The man tossed and turned in his bed with his clothes on. The girl put her headphones over her ears and closed her eyes. The music carried her to autumn in Moscow, the grey-bearded doorman raking dry autumn leaves, the light from the university hallway, the fresh-painted smell of the handrail, the simple beauty of the office coat rack.
As a perfect, velvet-black night opened up outside the window, the man finally undressed bashfully, slid between the covers, and turned his back to her, not even wishing her good-night. She was tired, but couldn’t sleep. She lay awake, staring at Russia’s deep darkness until finally, when night was nearly morning, she pulled her head into a hood of blanket and fell into restless dreams.
In the morning she stopped in to see the carriage staff. Arisa was cleaning the entrance and Sonechka was sitting alone in the compartment with her back towards the door. The girl ordered two teas and some bubliks. Sonechka nodded, but didn’t turn to look at her. As she was leaving, Arisa backed out of the entrance carrying a bucket made of Latvian tin.
‘Kirov was a great leader in Leningrad who was stabbed in the back by Stalin. First they slaughter their enemies together with their allies, then the allies together with their friends, then their friends. They draw lots for the rest. No one is innocent. A person is always dissatisfied with something, and it’s always discovered. The guilty party is always found, and his offence, too, within a day of his arrest. Remember that.’