by Rosa Liksom
They passed a road construction crew, swerving to avoid the machines, one of them a combination of a motorcycle and a plough, another looking like a combination of private sedan and excavator, only the steamroller looking like what it was. Hot tar boiled in large iron cauldrons, women dressed in blue cotton coats and carrying heavy stones glared angrily, men wielded long-handled shovels, cigarettes hanging from the sides of their mouths, the machines sputtering.
Beyond the construction crew were log houses. They formed a grey village at the top of a grey, slushy road. From behind the nearest house appeared a hundred-head flock of grey sheep herded by a weatherbeaten young man. He was sitting on the back of a skinny brown nag, waving a switch and cursing loudly enough to be heard from the car. Rotting sheaves of flax, rusted-through zinc buckets, broken axles, hardened sacks of fertiliser, torn birch-bark shoes and piles of rags, crazily leaning fences decorated with frost, and unconscious drunks with stray dogs peeing on them lay along the sides of the road. They parked the car in front of the general store and walked down a village lane trodden by thousands of feet. The cold stung their eyes, tears flowed down their cheeks and then froze. The man sat on an icy rock and wiped the sweat from his brow.
The girl walked to the top of a little hill behind a house. She touched the wall with her hand. It was cold but soft. A path had been shovelled from the porch to the gate, the ice chipped away around the well. At the well stood a hunched, teenaged boy with a wrinkled brow and a worn sheepskin cap balanced on his head. He watched her curiously, his mouth slightly open, his long arms hanging dumbly, his short legs apart.
‘Complex brigade leader,’ he said, pointing at himself with his mitten.
Soon a black horse appeared from the other side of the house pulling a red sledge. In the cart were two wooden tubs, but no driver. The boy with the wrinkled brow quickly filled them from the creaking, crackling communal well, grabbed the bridle, and took the freezing water to the farthest house.
The village houses looked at each other timidly. They were built in harmony with the surrounding nature, unpainted, melting completely into the uniform landscape. They had been built beam by beam, in uniform, rhythmic rows on either side of the village street, the fences built post by post. You could see all that, even though time had passed them by and soon nature would reconquer all of it. Where the village stood, the first few alders would grow, then the thicker, redtrunked pines, and in the end a forest of different trees. A chainsaw whined unevenly behind a shed, then sputtered and died. There was a sign fastened to the top part of the shed door: Kolkhoz Technological Depot. A pile of split wood stood tall next to the door and beyond it sat a crowd of boys. They had inherited too-big quilt jackets and suitcoats from their fathers, on their feet were felt boots, and they were passing around a bottle of moonshine. When it was empty, one of them slipped into the woodpile.
The man and the girl walked back to the shop. Two tractors were parked in the shop’s parking area. One of them had a cab built of rough boards with a windshield made of an old screened house window. The other had loose caterpillar tracks instead of wheels and a bicycle wheel where the steering wheel had been. The girl bought some oven-fresh cabbage rolls and a bottle of compote, the man a bottle of moonshine. They sat down on the steps of the shop next to a tousled white cat. Five lively little honey bees appeared from somewhere. They buzzed around the girl’s cabbage roll in the shrieking cold. When she waved them away, they flew off offended, except for one that tried to land on the branch of a rose bush and died before it touched down.
An orchestra came out from behind the shop. Sons and daughters of Siberia dressed in Pioneer uniforms marched in rhythm with a song and a little drum along the village road. The children’s puny bodies were covered in loose brown shirts blown by the cold wind. Their red Pioneer kerchiefs hung prettily against their brown shirts, and multicoloured, tasselled hats shaded their open, innocent faces.
When the Pioneers had disappeared behind the schoolhouse, the man and the girl went back to the car and continued their leisurely journey.
‘People used to think that God was nature, but nowadays you hear people say that God is the city. I’m in the latter camp. Some say that cities are cancerous cells. Bullshit! They say it’s just common sense that a dozen worms can’t eat off the same apple forever. There’s enough nature here to last forever. It’s free, it’ll go on forever. Our supply of people is inexhaustible. We’ll never run out of the masses. In the fifties, in the village of Suhoblinova, a machine-station brigadier once told me that freedom is open spaces you can walk through your whole life long, breathing the open air, filling your chest full of the breeze, feeling the endlessness of space over your head. Maybe it is. Maybe not.’
Between the hillsides wound the broad, ice-trapped, sunlit Ob River. Long, stiff, frosty grasses peeped out from between piles of snow on its banks to greet the travellers. The river wound faithfully beside them, sleeping under a thick crust of ice. They stopped often, merely out of curiosity or when the motor started to smoke.
They walked for a while on the mighty river’s frozen sand-banks. The cold dry reeds rustled coarsely. The sobbing north wind carried sharp, powdery snow. The man stopped to listen to the silence.
‘If some yellow-eyed wolves pop out from somewhere over there we should listen to them and answer, We’re doing fine, thank you, brothers.’
There was a small current in the water near the shore. Bits of ice floated in the swirl of water. Farther off, a boat covered in the snow’s deep winter dream and a birch bark hut were tumbled into the land’s embrace, hibernating. Two male capercaillies crouched side by side beyond a row of winter-killed rowan trees, a few crows glided across a sky promising snow. To the north of the birds, a strange black space opened up. The man wanted to go there, to the middle of the fields of snow gnawed by early spring mists. The wind whistled over the white expanse where verdant grass grew in summer. The sun blazed orange, like a glowing ember. The dazzling snow stung their eyes. Under its icy, knife-sharp crust the snow was so fluffy, dry and soft that they sank deep with each step, up to their knees, then their thighs, then their hips, and finally as high as their navels. As they came to a clearing there was less and less snow until it turned to a smear of clay that clung to their boots.
They soon reached their destination. It was a patch of asphalt, its surface warm. The naphtha scent of the tarmac smelled like the hot summer streets of Moscow. The man sized up the spot enthusiastically.
‘A space ship landed here. You can tell from the crater shape. There are landing sites like this all over Siberia, especially in Kolyma. There’s about a dozen stations here where scientists study UFOs and outer space.’
As they waded sweating through the deep snow back to the road, the throb of IL-14 engines roared overhead. Farther away, at the edge of the expanse of snow huddled a lone, grey, wooden house. A birch bark Ostyak yurt had been built in front of it. The girl wanted to go there.
‘The Ostyaks live like wild animals,’ he warned her. ‘They live poorly. Nothing works. They’re a rotten people. Crooked. Liars. Every geezer you meet’s named Ivan.’
They walked along a little snow path and into the drift-encircled yard. Dogs ran out to meet them, their tails wagging. The snow had been trodden away in front of the porch; they could stand there without sinking to their hips. The roof of the house was sagging, the chimney half collapsed. They stood in the brisk air as if waiting for the inhabitants to come out, then the girl climbed the rotted steps to the door and knocked. Nothing happened. They tried the door – it was unlocked. The man was turning to go back to the car when a fearless Ostyak woman with beautiful features appeared at the door and gestured something to the girl.
‘She’s deaf,’ the man said in a weary voice.
The girl gestured towards the skilfully built yurt and then pointed to her eyes. The Ostyak woman laughed silently and nodded. She put on a large pair of rubber boots and came out of the house to escort the girl to the yurt, s
miling shyly. The cold wind swept over the frozen dirt floor of the yurt. The quickening light of spring made its way in through the yurt’s open door. It served as a fishing shed. Rotting, crumbling net staves, fish traps woven from bast, a small rusted milk separator and a lidless box made of planed birch full of mouldy grain.
As the girl stepped back outside, the man pulled the car up next to the yurt.
‘A filthy bunch, arms half a metre long and bodies a metre, and shapeless,’ he snorted, turning the car back towards the highway. ‘That whore right there’d be in her element hunting rabbits. They all ought to be forced to be normal Russians, without sparing the torture, if that’s what it takes. What they need is a father’s iron hand!’
Silence pressed heavy on the car for a moment.
In the afternoon, when the disc of sun hung over the roofs of the highest houses, they reached the godforsaken town of Tomsk. The man drove up and down the unploughed, truck-rutted streets. The sun was fleeing purple into the far west, to the north the bashful, rose-red evening blush held still for a moment as a gritty yellow snow began to fall. The north wind battered the sides of the car. The man stopped in front of a beer house on the outskirts and left the engine running.
The girl stretched her legs in the back seat. The engine chugged and sputtered tiredly, sometimes screeching and lurching as if it were having a heart attack. The chassis shuddered, the springs squeaked. Exhaust seeped into the car and made her cough. She turned off the engine. Soon it was so cold in the car that she got out.
The door to the beer house was in constant use. An endless stream of thick-soled felt boots came and went.
When the man got back to the car reeking of yeast it was the wee hours of the morning.
‘I got caught up in talking with a kid in there. One of those Samoyeds from the Taimyr district. A genuine drinking spirit.’
The wind had changed to the south and had a spring-like tune. Clumps of snow slid from the roofs of the houses and thudded onto the shovelled pavements. The man passed out in the front passenger seat with a bottle of vodka in his hand. The girl turned the ignition key. The engine grumbled angrily and died. She turned it again – it howled for a moment. She imitated the man, coaxing the engine for a long time with gentle words, then turned the key again. It squawked pathetically, but didn’t die. She let it run, praising it at length before she gave it some petrol and somehow got it to move forward.
She drove Soviet style, with only the parking lights on as she moved through a city slashed with morning shimmer. A red Lada Combi stood empty at the edge of a bridge. The driver’s-side door hung open obscenely, the flickering tail-lights blinking at the sky. The night’s last stars trailed around the rising sun and the wind-knocked lampposts went out one by one. The girl looked at the pink blocks of flats, their narrow, loose-hanging storm windows dragged back and forth by the strong southern breeze.
The car bounced up and down over Tomsk’s narrow streets. She stopped at intersections and looked into street-corner mirrors that warped and broke up the peaceful cityscape. The man dozed, drooped, started awake, drank some more vodka and perked up. The girl looked for a hotel but didn’t find one. She finally parked at a bus stop. The man got out of the car and strode over to the queue of quietly waiting, sullen Soviet citizens.
‘Well, my girl, first go left, then veer straight ahead like a civilised person, and finally swing in just past that dust-covered, windowless industrial complex,’ he said when he got back to the car.
The factories, workshops, and warehouses of the industrial complex were half-buried in snow; only the branching rails of the complex’s own freight yard glimmered in the night. Behind it huddled a small, faded log house eaten by the earth. A yard light hung from a dangling wire, its bulb broken.
‘Here it is – our hotel. Stop the car. The old biddy who lives in this dump puts travellers up for the night.’
They walked lazily arm in arm up the steps. The murk of the winter morning floated around the cabin. Next to the door hung five broken latches; the door had no handle. The girl pried it open. They were greeted in the dark entryway by a buzzing electricity meter attached to the door frame. A balalaika as big as a wardrobe nestled in the corner.
The speciality hotel was run by a dried-up old woman wearing three wool coats and two long thick brightly coloured skirts. She had a wart on her cheek with a little spike growing out of it. She lived with her three adult working sons, all of them sleeping in the kitchen so that she could rent the other two rooms to travellers.
‘We need to get some sleep, granny dear,’ the man said, his voice drained of all energy.
‘What kind of talk is that? You’ll have plenty of time to sleep in your grave. First tea, then maybe some rest.’
A piece of worn vinyl lay over the sticky wood floor of the kitchen. The floorboards cracked and squeaked. The walls were slanted, with black electrical cords meandering across them like leeches. The colour portrait of Stalin in the icon niche hung crooked and under it was an old icon of Saint Nikolai. The shelves of the doorless pantry sagged with canned and dried foods. The space between the windowpanes was crammed full of perishable food. A large enamel tub sighed in the darkest corner of the kitchen, full of pickled cabbage flavoured with lingonberries. Just outside the window was what seemed to be a vegetable garden, sleeping under piles of ashes tossed among the snowdrifts.
The old woman offered them some cabbage soup, buckwheat porridge, tea, jam, and fish pies. She had a pretty, cracked, tea set. She polished the large spoons by spitting on each one and wiping it on her clean flowered apron. The girl dozed, lost in her own thoughts. The man wiped the sweat of the beginnings of a hangover from his brow. His head fell with a clunk onto the tabletop and he started to snore. The old woman set out a cabbage pie tasting strongly of caraway and poured the girl a second cup of tepid tea nearly indistinguishable from warm water. She drank it in small, wary sips.
‘When I was a little girl my father sold me for a bottle of vodka to a wrinkled old Russian man. The old geezer dragged me to this place, his house, and how I cried. As soon as he had a chance he knocked me up, but luckily he died before his son was born. So this house was left to his blind sister, me and the boy. The three of us lived quite well together. Then the blind girl died and it was just me and my son, until one mosquitoey summer day when a Samoyed walked in the door. He had beaten his old lady till she went crazy, now it was my turn. Soon enough I had another son. We lived well for a while. Just a little while.’
The old woman got up and popped over to a cupboard, took out a half-drunk bottle of vodka, and sloshed a shot into her teacup.
‘He was a keen hunter but he drank up all his money. The boys and I were living on the edge of starvation. One Easter he went out on some errand and never came back. His younger brother brought me the news about his death: he’d been in a drunken fight and got a knife in his belly. The brother stayed here to live. A good man. I had three daughters and they all died. Then this brother fell in the well there next to the house and drowned. I got on as a cleaner at the factory and my life was starting to work out. As an old woman I had another son. He’s out there on the river with his brothers.’
There was the sound of a mouse from behind the pantry.
‘I’m so contented living in my own house, even though I’ve hated this Russian dump all my life.’
She got up, fetched some hardbread from the pantry, arranged it prettily on a flowered porcelain plate, and set it in front of the girl.
‘The only thing I miss is the tundra.’
When the man woke up he snarled, ‘The old biddy’s talking pure nonsense, thinks she’s some Pushkin.’
The girl’s room was small, dark and dreary. The stink of ancient bedding had settled in to live there, an old Gobellin tapestry rasped against the mould-streaked wallpaper. A hot, glowing stove filled the room, but the corners of the outer walls were nevertheless covered with a thick frost and there was clear ice along the edges of the floor.
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She lay on the straw mattress between two clean starched sheets. The smooth coolness of the sheets soothed her. The sun rose silently and the stars vanished from the dusty blue sky. A mouse gnawed and scratched behind the wallpaper. She fell asleep.
She woke to a cat’s yawn. It had appeared next to her pillow and was staring at her without blinking. She stroked the old cat’s shining coat and listened to the crackle of the frost in the corners, the clatter of the samovar, the old woman’s clomping footsteps. For a moment she watched the dust float motionless against the light, then jumped out of bed in a panic and peeped out of the window into the frail morning. She’d slept through a whole day.
She picked up the cat. It opened its toothless mouth to mew, but didn’t manage to get any sound out. She felt a great sadness.
She’d met Mitka at a Melodiya shop when she was in her third year of studies. He was misshapen, a stooped, four-eyed thing with a shovel beard on his chin. He had thick, short, coal-black hair and eyes that blinked as if the light were a particular strain on them. They had gone to a juice bar, talked for many hours and agreed to meet again. Mitka had liked her ice-blue eyes and thoughtless laugh. Several weeks later he invited her to his apartment. His window looked out towards a small park. She had admired the smoky mist, the city wrapped in milky fog, the pink winter sky. Mitka said he’d just turned seventeen. He had a broad old iron bed with a hard horsehair mattress, a striped linen sheet, and a white duvet with clinking bone buttons. She stayed the night. Then came other nights, other days, all the same, filled with a bustle of light and shadow.