by Rosa Liksom
THE GIRL LISTENED TO MUSIC on her headphones and was on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street again. There, on the top floor of a green block of flats, was her and Mitka’s secret place. Someone had painted a black cat on the wall of the ground-floor entrance and the stairwells were completely covered in quotes from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. How many times had she and Mitka walked up those narrow wooden stairs in the dark of night? Two steps were broken on the sixth floor, and if you didn’t know about it you could fall straight to your death. But they knew about it, and they knew to be careful. On the highest landing, amid the stench of cat piss, was where she and Mitka had smoked their first joint together.
Her travelling companion bashfully changed his underwear. He wrapped the dirty items in an old copy of Literaturnaya Gazeta and put the bundle in his suitcase.
The passengers who had boarded at Omsk were standing in the corridor. Among them was a Red Army officer and his old, translucently thin housekeeper. His uniform coat fitted him well and his shoes shone, as did his bloated face. He stood in the passageway with his back straight, periodically clearing his throat in a dignified manner. The man stared at him from the door of the compartment.
‘The Soviet Union didn’t have any officers in Lenin’s day, just soldiers and commanders. You could only tell the difference between them up close, by the emblems on their collars. Those days are long behind us. Nowadays the lieutenants and captains sit together at one table and the majors and colonels at another. That grimacing mug has a thief’s look about him. He’s probably a pansy, eating away at the spine of the Soviet Union.’
The officer’s ears turned red and he took several stiff strides to stand in front of the man, then grabbed him by the nose and squeezed so hard that the man slumped back to his bunk and sat down.
‘Hooligans will be thrown off the train at the next station,’ the officer roared. ‘If you were a little younger, I’d send you to the devil’s kitchen for some re-education.’
The man was taken off guard, surprised by the officer’s swiftness. ‘I didn’t …’ he said, then he jumped up and threw a punch, but the officer dodged it and his fist struck the doorframe.
He spat angrily over his left shoulder into the corridor and hissed. The officer looked at him, sighed deeply, and left. Arisa came rushing into the corridor with the axe in her hand.
‘Pig! We don’t spit on everything here! I’ll wring you out till you piss your pants, Comrade Cast Iron Hero.’
She swung the axe so that the girl had to duck, then disappeared. The man watched her go with a look of relief.
The corridor emptied. The girl stood alone for a moment, then went back into the compartment. The man was sitting on the edge of his bed, still furious.
She didn’t dare move. He calmed down little by little, burying his chin in a large hand and sighing.
‘I can’t stand looking at roosters like that guy. Dressed up like a whore for the Party. Guys like that are the reason we still haven’t beaten the Afghans. A pansy like that is worse than those fairy Afghan fighters. I’ve seen on the news how those mussulmans handle their guns out in the desert. They carry them like babies. And what do our Red Army officers do? They take their cue from that bunch of throwbacks and go around wiggling their arses. If guys like me were running the war the way it should be run, we would’ve beaten those phoney kings in the first attack. But no, they’ve got to fag it up. When I was in the army, the gays got a pole up their arse. A real soldier knows what to do with a weapon. You shoot the enemy. Not between the eyes – in the gut.’
The girl had only one thought: she hated him.
They passed crumbling houses gobbled up by their gardens, villages eaten by forest, cities swallowed by the mossy taiga. The train sped east, dark brown clouds covering the sky, when suddenly in the south a little crack of the bright blue of spring appeared through a rift in the clouds. The spring sky. The train sped east and everyone waited for morning. The girl thought of travelling in the hot train across dreaded Siberia, how someone might look at that train and long for Moscow, someone who wanted to be on that very train, someone who had escaped from a camp without a rifle, without food, with nothing but wet matches in his pocket, travelling on skis stolen from a guard, a rusted knife in his pocket, someone willing to kill, willing to suffer freezing and exhaustion, willing to throw himself at life.
The girl had waited the whole dark, dense, quiet night to reach Novosibirsk. She had waited for the safety of the metropolis, waited to be able to be alone for just a few hours. The dry, unrelenting cold of Siberia sliced at her face and made her breath catch. A tuft of hair peeping out from under her knit cap frosted over instantaneously, her eyelashes clumped, her lips froze together. She walked along the platform and listened to the snow squeaking and crunching under her feet, the railway tracks popping in the cold’s grip. She watched the gentle glow of the intermittently buzzing light from the lampposts. When she came back, cold, into the corridor of the train she met Arisa.
‘Our beloved Victory engine with the red star on its forehead has given its all. If it doesn’t get some time to cool down and rest, it will die, and that’s not something any of us wants. We’re going to let him take a breather, a few days’ rest.’
The girl decided to go into town and reserve a hotel room. She could have a shower and some quiet time.
‘You can’t go out alone,’ the man said. ‘I won’t let you. Novosibirsk will eat you alive. We’ll go together. I’ll take care of everything.’
Two hours later they were strolling towards the saffron-yellow-tinted sunrise and the centre of the frost-stiffened city. She felt the safety of the street under her feet. Snow banks as tall as a man grew on either side of the uneven pavement with paths trodden between them. They walked stiffly, gulping for air as they passed wastegrounds covered in snow, community gardens, a school, fences and garden gates crusted with snow, verandas with ice blossoms in their paned windows, a stocky woman wandering in a cloud of icy mist. There was so much snow in some places that the piles reached as far as the lights on the tops of the poles.
At the bus stop a cosily sleeping and abundantly steaming cluster of people stood waiting for the trolleybus in thin quilt jackets and steaming fur-trimmed hats with hefty felt boots on their feet. Golden-yellow light glimmered from the windows of a concrete highrise, the dogs in the courtyard howling like a pack of wolves. The wind blew open the coats of passers-by and tore apart the bittersweet song coming from the loose folds of an accordion. There was a barber’s and hairdresser’s on every corner. A wheelbarrow and pieces of rusty pipe jutted out from under piles of snow on a side street, a broken Czech sofa slouched on one corner covered in little drifts of windblown snow. They kept on walking, through an industrial city waking from an icy dream, crossed courtyards, and found the gloomiest queue in the universe among the chilling mist. They went to stand on a sheet of ice at the back of the line, the man first, the girl behind him. The front of the queue disappeared into the sooty, thick, frosty fog. A woman walked past and left an opening behind her in the mist. The people were steaming like horses. The man turned around quickly.
‘We stand here suffering for no reason and don’t complain. They can do whatever they want to us and we take it all humbly.’
An old man with large grey eyes and a basket full of homemade pies yelled from somewhere behind them.
‘Jesus suffered, and commanded us to suffer. Deal with it.’
‘All we want is an easy life. Deal with that,’ a young man with a drinker’s red nose roared.
‘Not everybody can stand an easy life. Some destroy themselves,’ the old man said tepidly, pulling the earflaps of his fur hat down tighter.
‘Pure ignorance,’ the red-nosed one threw back.
‘Suffering is what gives life its flavour, thank God. Want and emptiness are good for you,’ the old man grunted.
‘It’s true that a person can get by on little, but without that little, you’ve got nothing,’ the young man shouted
.
‘Shithead. I won’t discuss this with you,’ the old man said with a sharp swing of his hand clad in a dogskin mitten.
‘It’s just a joke, old man. No need to get all worked up about it. Think of your heart,’ the girl’s companion said soothingly, his voice cordial.
The old man walked up and gave him a long, critical look.
‘Listen here, comrade,’ he said. ‘A simple life keeps the spirit wholesome.’
‘And suffering purifies,’ the man answered, giving him a wink.
He bought a frozen watermelon, she bought a speckled frozen apple. They walked past a tattered phone booth where a woman with a yellow throat was speaking excitedly into the receiver. A man with red, bony ankles tapped a coin against the glass, trying to hurry her. There were deep cracks in the walls of the blocks of flats, snow-covered balconies that sagged and dripped, rows of doors hanging open, their handles stolen, an entrance filled with snow. Street lights buried in snow, extinguished, bent, broken. Electric power lines hanging in the air, open manholes, heaps of cables lying jumbled in the snowdrifts. And over it all shone an oversized sun in a clear blue sky. They made their way side by side to the dark fairgrounds. The paths had been ploughed, icy asphalt poked through the snow. They sat down on a snow-covered bench. The man took his folding knife out of his pocket, snapped open the sturdy blade, and cut up the melon.
‘Shall we go for a drive? There’s always time, and always will be. I’ve got a master plan that will cost us a bottle of whisky. Have you got it with you? I have an acquaintance here, or rather a good friend, who can arrange things, but even in this country, not everything’s free. You can wait here.’
The girl thought for a moment, dug a litre bottle of whisky out of her backpack, and handed it to him. He gave a satisfied whistle, popped the bottle into his breast pocket, and left. The girl sat on the bench shivering. Her cheeks glowed red and there were little drops of ice hanging from her nostril hairs. A crow, stiff in the morning frost, landed hard on the bench next to her. She offered it a piece of the frozen melon. The crow turned its head proudly away.
She had been fifteen when the train rattled through a Moscow neighbourhood in the early morning. She had watched from a window as the sun rose slowly from beyond the horizon over the red flags, stretching the shadows of the endless modular highrises to a surrealistic length. They were staying in the Hotel Leningradskaya on the edge of Komsomolets Square – her father, her big brother and herself. The ornate lobby of the hotel was bewildering. She had never seen such a fancy hotel, even in pictures. From the twenty-sixth floor there was a stunning view of the entire enormous city. They had full board, which meant that they could eat three times a day in the ornate hotel restaurant. She hated the black caviar, but was happy to listen to the gentle clunk of the abacus on the counter. They walked along Leningrad Prospect and watched the women street sweepers, something they’d never seen in Helsinki. In the evening they took a taxi to the Lenin Hills and looked down at her future seat of learning, the festively lit thirty-four storeys of the new Moscow University main building. Lit with floodlights, the monumental university complex and the red star on the sharp tower rising from the top of the main building looked like something borrowed from the Thousand and One Nights. On the second day, her father had showed her and her brother all that he had marvelled at in 1964, when he came to the Soviet Union for the first time. They walked around the functionalist Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square and admired the walls of the Kremlin. They rode the trolleybus to Uprising Square to marvel at the twenty-storey block of flats and to Smolensky Square to gape at the twenty-seven-storey office building, which their father said was a mixture of Kremlin and American skyscraper. They visited the graves of Gogol, Mayakovsky, Chekhov, and Ostrovsky at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
On the third day, her father took them to the Kosmos pavilion at the National Economic Achievement exhibition. It was a shrine to the Soviet cult of outer space: life-sized model spaceships and satellites, every sort of smaller space paraphernalia, and of course the most esteemed relic of all, the Soyuz space capsule, with a grandiose, Soviet-style flower arrangement in front of it. You weren’t allowed to go inside it, but you were free to take as many photos as you liked. The pavilion was the best thing she’d ever seen in her life. She wrote in her diary that she wanted to move to Moscow as soon as she turned eighteen.
That evening they went to an Uzbek restaurant. An orchestra played Slavic songs and some people danced. At about midnight her drunken brother got into a fight with a West German tourist and someone called the militia, who came and took them both to jail until the tour guide came to bail her glum brother out for fifty dollars the next day. Before the restaurant had closed, her father had purchased a pretty Georgian whore, slipped away with her, and got hepatitis B as a souvenir. The girl had been left at the restaurant by herself. A fat waitress had called a taxi for her. She had cursed her whole family, including her mother, who had left them years ago and gone to northern Norway to work in a fish cannery. When her father got back in the morning he said that the whore tasted like milk and had a cunt as deep as sin. Moscow had been a stony fist, like in Mayakovsky’s poem. She never recovered.
A mighty sun swallowed the black clouds and a sturdy but well-dented green Pobeda with bulging sides appeared at the edge of the park.
‘This way, my girl! Come here! Not those rusted-out kopecks – I’m here in this beauty,’ the man called from the open window of the car.
The petrol-fumed warmth melted her frosty hair in a moment, but the floor of the car was cold. Her toes tingled. She took off her shoes and rubbed her frozen feet. The car smelled like burnt leather and old iron.
The man pressed the accelerator to the floor and the Pobeda dove into a side street strewn with chunks of ice. The sun-yellowed, snow-covered trees in the park looked after them in alarm.
The car zigzagged at reckless speeds through the frozen city towards the road out of the city, past checkpoints and men armed with machine guns, and into the bright countryside. The icy noise of the city, the soot-blackened highrises and slabs of smoke rising straight towards outer space were left behind. A row of white-trunked young birches stood on either side of the road. Bristling crows’ nests grew in their branches. Fire hydrants and women wrapped in thick woollen scarves appeared at the southern ends of houses hidden by three-metre snow banks. Soon the hydrants gave way to creaking wells covered in thick ice. The man drove along the slushy, meandering, winter-rutted road as fast as the hefty car could carry them.
The car was soon bouncing along the factory-blackened Tomsk road. Snow swirled and the bridges rumbled. The transistor radio played Solovyov-Sedoy’s Unforgettable Evening in the front seat, the man chain-smoked mahorkkas and took big swigs from a long moonshine bottle.
Here and there among the unbroken wall of trees trapped in banks of ice lay fields ploughed and abandoned under heavy drifts of snow. Alongside one field stood two Ladas with their front ends crumpled. The drivers were nowhere to be seen, but there was frozen blood on the ground. Something sorrowful hovered over the many bends in the road.
In the middle of a little grove of pines a frail old church jutted up unexpectedly, like a flowering shrub in the direst Siberian winter. It defied all architectural logic, looking as if its surprising proportions were derived from a toy, growing uncontrollably in every direction. Above the entrance was a sign that read Club.
The girl looked out of the icy, windblown rear window at Russia’s wild beauty. A sparkling, violet-yellow cloud of snow covered the entire landscape as they passed, sometimes forming a wake of snow and flakes of ice that trailed behind them like a veil. A frosty field of thistles glittered and gazed darkly from the edge of the forest. Far off on the horizon a pink powdery smoke drifted, thick clouds broke up and flapped like a child’s sheets in the sky.
That afternoon they passed the district capital, a pond, a kolkhoz farm, and a birch grove, then descended into a valley, where the sun had defeated the
Siberian cold and the winding road turned slushy for a moment. The man slapped his black-mittened hands on the steering wheel. A concrete culvert was lying in the middle of the road. He hit the brakes hard and barely managed to avoid it.
‘Good God, what yokels! Crooked noses, stuff falling off the backs of their trucks. Nobody pays attention to anything. They’re too excited about their new tractor.’
Suddenly the sun at the edge of the grove shuddered and dived behind a greenish cloud. A moment later the first tin-heavy rain splattered against the windshield. The car had no wipers – all they could see was the stiff rain – and the man had to stop and pull over. The congealed raindrops battered the roadway into a porridge of slush. The frost-heaved road trickled through the valley like a lazy river. A one-winged crow was falling through rainbow-flaming sky.
Soon the fierce, pattering sleet and the rainbow vanished, a great green mist snaked among straight-trunked groves and gloomy swathes of forest, the sun rising bright beyond it, and a hard frost struck. The uneven road froze in an instant into crags of ice and the Pobeda bounced over it like a ping-pong ball. Beyond the hard, treeless, freezing taiga were cold, snow-buried villages, steaming kolkhozes, smoking government farms where mountains made entirely of black bread grew next to the barns.
As the ice-ravaged road ended, a highway trodden flat by earth-moving machinery lay spread before them. The man hit the accelerator, then immediately braked, then accelerated again. The sun brightened the whole landscape and leapt at the next curve to light the edge of another cloud. Soon it was peeping out from behind the stiff, snow-wrapped trees. Along the edge of the road a motorcycle was half-buried in snow. The red sledge behind it was filled with snow-covered logs. The Pobeda swerved from one pothole to another, was stuck spinning its wheels for a moment on the icy shoulder, then sprang forward a few metres. The man ground the car’s tortured clutch, the girl jiggled in the back seat. She was with Mitka in a sleepy museum, in the last row of a movie theatre, in the bustle of the street, in a swaying commuter train, between creaking rail carriages, staring down a skyscraper’s lift shaft, on the banks of the Moscow River where trucks whined over the multi-lane shore road, at a corner table in a cocktail bar, always looking for a new place to be ‘their’ place. The snow-draped evergreens changed to low-growing birch. One ray of light emerged from the frozen branches, then another, and a few kilometres later a brawny sun lit up the snowy expanse.