by Rosa Liksom
The girl returned to her compartment, lay down, and pretended to sleep. She thought of the three years she’d studied in Moscow. Her first year had been spent in a tight-knit crowd of Finnish students that had dispersed when Maria went back to Finland and Anna went to Kiev. Then she made friends with Franz. Franz was a West Berlin philosophy student who idolised Ulrike Meinhoff and had a habit of pursing his lips contemptuously when he disagreed about something. One day Franz quit his studies and returned to West Berlin. So she was left alone and took the opportunity to get to know Mitka.
A few versts later the man awakened with a jolt and sat up without opening his eyes. His greasy hair was pasted to his head.
There was a sharp, crisp knock on the door. ‘Here’s your tea, comrades,’ Arisa said in a dry, cross voice.
The girl quickly grabbed some coins from her small coin purse and paid her. The man looked at her in wonder.
‘I’ll take care of the tea. Is that clear?’
The girl nodded, abashed. Snowy hillocks like clouds grew beyond the drab evergreens on their side of the train. The last hills of the Urals.
‘Don’t fret, my girl. Everyone wants to feel needed. I understand, but there are certain rules in life that every citizen has to follow. You’re here as my guest.’
He groped under his pillow for a cigarette and lit it. He opened the compartment door and stood leaning in the doorway.
‘Life just vanished in a strange red mist. There’s nothing left of it. Or maybe a little piece of it. Maybe a little piece of life at the bottom of your pocket.’
He smoked his cigarette with one eye closed.
‘Whenever I go home to Moscow after being away for a long time, everything looks sad. And when I leave with my suitcase full of darned socks and pressed underwear, I think that I’ll never come back again, that this is the last time. I always go back. When I’m home I’m as bored as a prisoner on death row, but I tell Katinka that everything’s fine. A person can’t live without deceiving himself.’
Arisa dashed out of her compartment with a broomstick in her hand.
‘Smoking here? Three-rouble fine! Right here in my hand, you old goat.’
He handed her a bill indifferently.
‘Think you can buy yourself privileges, you fool? It’s not that easy. I ought to drown you in the latrine. You disgust me.’
He brushed his hair away with his hand and slapped Arisa on the backside. Arisa disappeared without looking back. He sat down on his bunk.
‘Katinka can sure salt a cucumber. I’ve knocked her up sixteen times and she’s had fifteen abortions.’
The girl gave him a dark look and let her tea glass fall over onto the table. The hot tea splashed on his bare toes. He grunted, flashed her a questioning look, and started whistling a lively soldiers’ march with a satisfied sound, curling his red toes to the rhythm.
‘Do you know, my girl, what the difference is between screwing and mating? Screwing is a fun, cheerful activity, while mating is a heavy, joyless task. So how about some screwing?’
He licked his lower lip. The girl’s breathing was full of long pauses.
‘Katinka’s turned mouldy; that’s why our life in Moscow is nothing but a dry fuck.’
He scratched the back of his neck with his left hand, then with his right, then put both hands on his chin and looked at her with mawkish helplessness. The grim mood in the compartment made for a tight squeeze. The girl looked at his hands. They were tough and demanding.
‘If you don’t want anything else, what about in the mouth? I’m just so damned tired of hiding in the corner and jerking off.’
The girl wiped her lips dry with the back of her hand.
‘Or if that’s no good, just one in the cheek would be all right. Strictly no hands. Georgian style.’
He unfastened his belt. ‘You’re not exactly a honey-pot, but you’ll do. Same kind of bitch as all the rest. But that’s all right. Twat comes with, arse is extra!’
Her eyes burned with unshed tears, which she tried to get rid of with a cough. He looked at her now and a worried expression came over his face.
‘Are you catching a cold? I’ll make you some medicine. Get some vodka, add some pepper and a dash of honey. That’ll kill a flu.’
He started looking for his vodka bottle. The girl yanked open the compartment door and left.
A frozen marsh of delicate, snowy grasses bloomed in the train window. The landscape continued hour after hour almost the same, but constantly changing with the light. A blue thicket and a snowbank flashed across the frozen plain. A wavering line of men in grey-blue quilted jackets and trousers walked along the ridge of a snowbank with pickaxes in their hands.
Dark, smoking clouds appeared in the sky, soon covering the shimmer of the sun completely, and an oppressive dimness fell over the icy landscape. The train braked and slowed. A three-legged dog hobbled along the flat gravel roadbed trailing a thin trickle of blood. The train arrived in Tyumen station.
‘The train will stop for an hour or two,’ Arisa shouted. ‘In other words, as long as it likes.’
There was a heap of wooden boxes on the platform. The girl piled three of them together to climb up to the corridor window, took a cloth handkerchief out of her pocket, and wiped one of the panes clean.
When she’d cleaned the window she walked towards a station building veiled in dark red billowing mist. She went around the building and stopped at the south end. The station was ugly and dilapidated, the gutters were broken and pieces of the tin roof hung over the upper windows. The foundation was cracked in several places. The whole building slumped. Behind it she could see the glimmer of a dirty factory complex.
One of the tall oak doors was open and she followed a crippled crow into the station hall. The room was empty and spacious, the air damply cold and heavy, a skiff of fog floating above the quiet. Two white-toothed dogs dozed by the drinks stand; the smell of muffled talk and stale buns drifted from the coffee stall. A wandering photographer stopped her, showed her his Moskova 2 camera, and asked if she wanted a picture of herself. She didn’t.
She stopped for a moment at the entrance to the buffet before going to the counter to order pickles and smetana. Twelve well-fed flies with glistening wings buzzed over the stained menus. Paper napkins blew from one table to the next. A leathery piece of meat, a watery gruel of macaroni casserole, and a cake decorated with pink icing roses stared at her from the glass case.
The station bell rang for the third time and the train rocked into motion. The oil town rose smouldering in the bright, frosty sunshine and hovered, all highrise rooftops gliding ever higher towards the lid of sky. The train sped past the freezing Soviet villages and housing areas. The limbo of unnamed towns was left behind. Pop music drifted from a distant compartment.
The marshy plain was left behind and a birch forest weighed down with snow filled the land. The train moved in jerks now. A long line of freight trains carrying oil and coal appeared in front of the engine.
Hours, minutes, seconds later the train picked up speed and the oil towns and surrounding oil wells and towers with their black flames receded into the distance. In spite of many signs of spring, it was still winter in Siberia. Here and there on sheltered south slopes melted by the sun jutted last year’s grasses. The innocent smell of wood smoke drifted into the carriage. The train slowed its speed and was soon moving at a crawl. As it passed an abandoned warehouse the trail of smoke thickened. Small fires danced in the grass right next to the rail track, beyond them the flames reached greedily towards the turquoise Siberian sky. Next to the train, in the middle of the cloud of smoke, an old woman ran around in a panic, her head bare, without a coat. Not just the grass but also the railway sleepers were burning, and the ruins of an old building as well. The wind whipped a cloud of red sparks against the iron bulk of the train. The flames flared for a moment, handsome and strong, but the Siberian frost dampened them. A young mother crumpled by life lifted her child in her arms and pointed at the
smoking building receding behind them.
‘Look, that’s how granny’s house burned down.’
The train skulked along for a considerable time before speeding up again. As darkness fell, the man came out of the compartment and stood next to the girl. Together they looked at the Irtysh River. The snow on the shores had shrunk; bare, snowless patches appeared among the drifts. At a narrow point in the current, in the middle of the channel, stood several immense concrete pillars. There had once been a bridge there, or else a bridge was being built and was abandoned. Far off on the horizon a power-plant town glimmered.
The man looked at the girl with a wary smile. ‘I’m sorry, my girl. The devil got into me again. Lucifer himself. I just have such an urge to fuck. Go back in so you don’t catch cold. Let me know when I can come in. I still have hope. When Ivan the Terrible turned eighty, he took a sixteen-year-old wife.’
The girl smiled in token of a sort of dry understanding and went into the compartment. She took a bottle of nail polish remover out of her bag, emptied it into his vodka glass, and slumped onto her bunk. She liked the man’s Gagarin smile. She fell asleep to that, hungry, with all her clothes on.
The man gazed wistfully at the muddy river, sawmills along its shores, open, empty land around it as far as the eye could see. Under the cover of the ice the river rushed and swirled, a roiling current. In the wee hours the girl awoke and kicked the compartment door so that it hung half open. The man stepped immediately inside, gulped the contents of his vodka glass, and went to sleep without saying a word.
A RUDDY LIGHT PRESSED BRAZENLY in through the compartment window and divided the space. The man’s bunk was left in shadow, the girl’s in light. The man was fiddling with his nose. There was no sign whatsoever of the effect of the nail polish remover. Two tussell-feathered sparrows pecked at the corridor window.
‘Arisa was here screaming about the engine needing a rest. So they’re giving it a rest. What do you think, my girl, shall we go out? Take a look at the vodka shops of Omsk?’ the man asked with solid self-certainty. ‘Not on an empty stomach, though. First munch on a little something and then hit the streets. Hurrying can kill you. Remember that.’
The icy fog on the platform seized their breath so that they had to stand still for quite some time. Two hungry, nimble-footed dogs were barking on the platform. The station yard was filled with the bustle of work and the noise of travellers, screeching train engines, rattling luggage carts, clanging rails, curses, roars, and old women’s uninhibited laughter. Among the stew of people a granny waving enormous mittens sold thick apple juice in large green bottles. The war in Afghanistan was accelerating and instead of food supplies the Soviet government was concentrating on arms production, and the girl hadn’t been able to find anything but condensed milk, tinned fish, and random jars of mayonnaise in the Moscow groceries. There were nothing but problems everywhere. The toothpaste problem, the soap, sausage, butter, meat, and ever-present paper problem, even a doll problem. When she took a trip to Riga for the New Year, she found tomato juice and a three-litre jar of jam in an out-of-the-way food shop and nearly killed herself hauling them back to Moscow. She and Mitka enjoyed them until March. They had exchanged them for ballet and concert tickets, champagne, all kinds of things.
They got into a bus that was waiting in front of the station with a little parrot squawking on the dashboard. The bus sighed, bellowed, and puttered towards the town at walking pace. The man dozed off, the girl scratched a little hole in the frost on the window with her fingernails to let the light in. She watched a startled flock of cranes fly grandly along the shore of the Irtysh and disappear among the tall, green-balconied highrises. The factory chimneys looked like minarets.
The bus sagged and swayed and nearly toppled over as it dodged a group of oil workers crossing the road. Farther off beyond the city spread an endless stretch of ancient snow-covered pine forest.
The bus stopped with a yelp in front of the remains of Tara gate, the man woke up, and they hurriedly got out. Next to the gate was a low brick building with Univermag written on its side. A loudspeaker hung from a rusty, bent nail on one end of the shop. It dangled sadly in the winter wind, shreds of the pastorale from Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades wafting around it.
In front of the shop entrance was a plain pine coffin lined with red silk. The edges of the coffin were decorated with black lace and on top of the lid was a bouquet of white and lemon-yellow carnations. Under the shop window was a snow-covered bench and on it lay a passed-out man with an accordion under his arm. They stopped at the coffin. The man took his hat off and made the sign of the cross. The shop door opened and a skinny old woman and four men with black crepe ribbons on the sleeves of their faded coats came out. The men picked up the white cloth sling, lifted the coffin off the ground and started walking towards the town centre. The funeral procession swayed down the slippery street, which was lined with a closely spaced row of electricity poles that looked like Orthodox crosses.
‘May his troubled heart rest in peace,’ the man said.
He wiped his brow as the procession disappeared behind a delicate mosque decorated with blue mosaics.
‘When I was a young man I got sent to work on the peat bogs. There was one hard-fisted, low-browed fellow named Mishka. We made friends, if that’s the right word for it. I never said a word to him, but we petted the same cat every evening … Then it happened that one spring night in the wee hours, Mishka died. Somebody put two iron nails through his head. I asked the boss if I could go with him on his final journey. Can’t do it, the boss said, the rules don’t allow it. I stood there and watched while they carried Mishka up the hill. The backside of the pure white horse was decorated with dried bits of shit as it pulled the old manure cart behind it. In the cart was a box made of planks, and in the box lay Mishka.’
The man and the girl stood there quietly for another moment before they walked into the grocery shop. Torn flowered oilcloth covered the little counter. On it were arranged tins of tea, tubes of lotion, vermicelli, cheap perfume, and belt buckles. There were bars across the low window. A red-handed cleaning lady slopped a wet, ragged mop.
‘Out. Can’t you good-for-nothing arses see that we’re cleaning here? Get out!’
Just as they were turning to leave, the shop assistant appeared from the back room, her enormous nose badly frozen.
‘I can hear you!’
The man cleared his throat. ‘No trouble here. Everything’s peaceful.’
The shop assistant glanced at the cleaner and waved her hand.
‘Varvara Aleksandrovna Pelevina, you may leave. The floor is fine.’
‘My Ninka, may I have a couple of bottles of pepper vodka and a bunch of onions?’ the man said.
‘I’m not your Ninka!’
‘Pepper vodka, my butter roll?’
‘There isn’t any.’
‘But perhaps you have some … pepper vodka?’
‘There isn’t any.’
‘How about a couple of mushroom pies and a bottle of mineral water?’
The shop assistant stared at him, surprised. Then she leered, swung her substantial rear end, and lifted a large bottle of clear liquor, a small bottle of Bear’s Blood wine, a back-up bottle of Bulgarian swill, and a bunch of onions from behind the counter.
The man laughed, took out a few notes and a pile of kopecks, tossed them quickly into the little plate, picked up the bottles and the onions, gave the shop assistant a long look, flicked his tongue over his dry lower lip, and walked out of the shop with a bouncy step, and even a whistle. The girl remained in the shop for a moment, but soon left when the shop assistant gave her an angry look.
They walked to the bus stop. The wind increased and the rough sky spat out stinging, bitter snow that gathered its strength from somewhere far away on the tundra and froze the swaying spruce branches.
A bus stinking of rot eventually came, and they quickly got on. The driver was a bloated middle-aged woman, crammed into a fur-lin
ed overcoat, who smelled strongly of onion liquor. The cold had spread through the bus and frozen over the windows. Layers of clouds rushed across the dark sky and sliced through each other, now just above the edge of the forest, now far up in the highest part of the sky.
They got off the bus at the station square. The wind blew a tattered black burlap sack around the statue of Lenin. They trudged tiredly to a ramshackle ice cream stand in a corner of the station with a sign on the door that read Under refurbishment.
The bar smelled of Lysol. Puddles of milk lolled over the beautifully tiled floor; the leaking milk cartons lay in the corner. The station was crammed with people. The man drank a glass of vodka, wolfed down a pie, and said he was going to get on the train.
The girl ordered a mayonnaise salad and a dish of ice cream topped with chocolate-covered plums and two kinds of biscuits.
The mayonnaise salad was just mayonnaise, the biscuits stuck out of the ice cream like stalks of hay. She looked at the asters on the windowsill, sad autumn flowers sitting tired in a vase without water. The lower sky covered itself in dark lumps of cloud, the higher part in sea-blue fluff. A tram swished heavily past.
She ate her ice cream unhurriedly. The biscuits she left on the edge of the plate.
The man rubbed his knees as she stepped into the compartment. A Tchaikovsky romance played from the beige plastic speakers.
Omsk is left behind. A closed city. Weary old, good old Omsk, sucked dry by the taiga, abandoned by youth. The prison where the young outlaw Dostoyevsky lay dying is left behind. The lifeless copy of a statue of Dostoyevsky in manhood is left behind. The city of Kolchak’s White Guards is left behind. This is still Omsk: the lines outside the shoe shop, the tired land, the row of timber dachas faded grey. A lonely nineteen-storey building in the middle of a field, a five-hundred-kilometre oil pipeline, the yellow flames and black smoke from the oil rigs. Forest, groves of larch and birch, forest – these are no longer Omsk. A house collapsed under the snow. The train throbs across the snowy, empty land. Everything is in motion – snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people, thoughts.